What is Terrain Vague?
Terrain Vague is the writing blog of Dan Whitworth, featuring fiction, essays, reviews and other vagaries. Ask for it by name.
What the heck is “Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur”?
It’s Latin. Its meaning, roughly, is: “The world wishes to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” It is generally ascribed to the Roman satirist Petronius. More recently, an obscure American author by the name of James Branch Cabell liked to throw around the first part (“Mundus vult decipi”) as a key part of his lifelong campaign to prove just how cynical he was. Nowadays, nobody remembers him except for me and Michael Swanwick.
Nice header. Where’s it from?
It’s a detail from an illustration by Frank C. Papé, which can be seen here.