Third Fear

Awe

Old English eġe, influenced during Middle English by forms from the Old Norse cognate agi.

From Germanic *agiz-, from Proto-Indo-European *agh- (“‘to be depressed, afraid’”).

Cognate with Old Norse agi (Swedish aga), Ancient Greek ἄχος (“‘pain’”).

From Old English eġe n., m.
   1. fear, terror

OR

An Anglian variant of eaġe, ēġe n. (plural ēġan)
   1. eye

(The fear you see with you eye? “A dark light that falls from no star and emanates such sadness,” —Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.)

Terrohorror

Is the fear, impossibly to describe directly, that the universe is mad, is an illusion that is not beautiful or unified (in the mind of some benevolence, whose mind is, partially, our own),
but chaotically, meaninglessly.

Terrohorror is the fear of gnostic madness.

Gnostic means hidden secrets about the origin, nature, and ultimate purpose of the world.

Madness means there is a purpose, but it’s an insane one.

This idea is called maltheism.

The early Christians included many sects called Gnostics, who believed there is a totally awesome benevolent God,
but we can’t get to It.  It didn’t make this world.

The archon, the evil god of this world, is what we pray to.  So praying is stupid.  Good deeds are irrelevant.

What matters is contacting the true beyond-god God. It’s more or less complicated, depending on sect, on the apocryphal text you’re reading.

It’s also not really an idea that most of us can consciously hold in our heads.  Try it:

Despite the fact you are alive, despite your mom, dad, love, etc., despite whiskey and kittens and all the other awesomeness that is life, life is somehow a joke, a bad joke.

This is different than existentialism or nihilism, which presume there’s no answer to the meaning of life.

In maltheism, there is an answer, you just won’t like it.

Let’s situate terrohorror in terms of what we’ve already talked about.

Terror and horror are opposites:  The one is paper, covering over rock, preventing it from… sparkling, or whatever rock is supposed to do.  The other is rock, stabbing up through the enveloping/suffocating paper, killing its killer in a brilliant autumnal cannibalism.

Terrohorror is opposite of both terror and horror:  Like a stick of dynamite that blows up both rock and paper, terrohorror prevents both true anticipation—because time and forwardness and being are all mad dreams of a mad god, illusions—and realization—because pain suppose a subject separate from its object to feel pain, and a world/plane in/on which the pain-pained dynamic dynamic plays out, a plane negated by the ultimate mad-gnostic revelation—the Truth is out there, and it looks like Cthulhu, a bag of eyes, tentacles, a time vampire, a void…

…He reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely failed, and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:
      “The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods… . There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging… . Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!”
      And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:
      “The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth! … Look away! … Go back! … Do not see! … Do not see! … The vengeance of the infinite abysses … That cursed, that damnable pit … Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!”

—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Other Gods,” 1921.

The “Third Fear”—not simply fear of the unknown but fear of the unknowable—that there are hidden, maltheistic truths, and that to “know” or try to “know” these truths would drive you mad—the life/death, pleasure/pain axes would vanish, becoming relative points on an infinite and meaningless grid of possiblity (Azathatoh as grid).  ”Thoth,” the Kemet god of writing, as writing, A→Z, α→Ω, fear of madness, loss of grounding—loss of identity, even as “an organism, “alive,” loss of ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain—loss of category.

The first two (literary) fears are cataphatic—you can do them.
The third fear is apophatic—you can only do around it.
You can never say it, for saying it spoils it.

Lovecraft, in fact, doesn’t just talk around terrohorror; he blinds us with a storm of words—a hail of purple, often boring prose.  It’s a trick.  He uses a storm of the other fears, using them cheaply, sending them kamikaze to blind the reader,
thus revealing the third fear.  These lesser fears fall away.
We are not afraid of zombies; they don’t exist.

We are not afraid of lost Antarctic gehennopoli; we will not visit them.

But what if…

What if God was not absent, but mad?

What if our scientific achievements were helping us reach not ultimate peace and clarity, but an essential chaos, an un-science, a permanent and basic anti-peace?

Isn’t this in some way what we feel is going on?

Lovecraft embodies the double maxim:

“Hell is the modern world” (Nietzsche’s stupefyingly obvious announcement) and

“Hell is other people” (Sartres’s excuse for not hanging out).

Had he been a happier person, he would have written florid, bizarrely structured prose about orcs and elves, and he would be fondly remembered today.

Instead, he stuck to his ignorant guns and invented genres.

Dash Snow took innumerable devil-may-care, punk images that show a real terror, a real anticipation of… nothing.

A terror with no horror to justify it.

Terror pur sang, terror for terror’s sake.

This world is it, and this world sucks, the hell gas station seems to say.  It’s so simple.

It anticipates the worst while, in itself, being nothing, a curled-up little ball of meaning.

It is terrifying.