Image source: Immunity to Madness, Raphael, 1503.

It’s not so much that the Cultists wouldn’t be willing to spread the Madness even at the cost of their own sanity and lives–although I think it’s partly like that. As we’ll be reminded later in this chapter, not every Cultist is equally committed to death for all. A minority are most likely in it for the power that it gives them over everyone else but not eager to pay the price for that power. As Adrian Bott put it, “‘I never thought leopards would eat my face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating Faces party.”

But Brother Tom’s concerns here are more practical. Make yourself a Madness suicide bomber and you cause no more than a single outbreak, but get immunity and you can cause four or more before you get put down. It’s his own immunity, and therefore his ability to test the effects, that has made modern Cultism the level of threat it is.