Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys

There would appear to be little doubt that in the period right before the Final Cataclysm, a noticable percentage of the human population sought refuge in archaic and, all too often, bloodily chaotic religions and attempted to invoke the dark, ancient gods of their savage ancestors. As with so much of this era's human history, the truth is lost in the destruction, and all that remains is speculation and debate. The most popular theory, although never thoroughly borne out by the surviving evidence, is that the flock to the gods was a simple, latter-day crowd madness, most probably a panic reaction to the situation being created by the metaphysicians. Another school of thought argues that, sensing the imminent Final Cataclysm, large numbers of human beings retreated into a snarling atavism. The ironic part of this debate is that by far the majority of the contemporary accounts suggest that these ancient deities were present entities somehow loosed on the Damaged World. Even Yeovil himself, normally the most rationally secular of observers, at one point in The Trouble with Titans appears to imply that the forces that would ultimately produce catastrophe gave material life to these arcane fantasy figments and made it possible for them to stalk reality as a prelude to the eventual and absolute terror. Even in these singularly confusing times this idea seems far too fanciful to be anything but the momentary aberration of a great mind.

— Pressdra Vishearia