by Erik Davis
from
TechGnosis Website
recovered through
WayBackMachine Website
A truncated form of
this piece appeared in Gnosis, Fall, 1995:
In this book it
is spoken of... Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres,
Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It
is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain
things certain results follow.
—Aleister
Crowley
Consumed by cancer in
1937 at the age of 46, the last scion of a faded aristocratic New
England family, the horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one
of America's most curious literary legacies. The bulk of his short
stories appeared in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the
supernatural. But within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought
dark fantasy screaming into the 20th century, taking the genre,
almost literally, into a new dimension.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycle of
stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Named for a tentacled alien
monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in the sunken city of R'lyeh, the Mythos encompasses the cosmic career of a variety of
gruesome extraterrestrial entities that include Yog-Sothoth,
Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiot god Azathoth, who sprawls at the
center of Ultimate Chaos,
"encircled by his
flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by
the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless
paws."[1]
Lurking on the margins
of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of Outer Gods and
Great
Old Ones are now attempting to invade our world through science and
dream and horrid rites.
As a marginally popular writer working in the literary equivalent of
the gutter, Lovecraft received no serious attention during his
lifetime. But while most 1930s pulp fiction is nearly unreadable
today, Lovecraft continues to attract attention. In France and
Japan, his tales of cosmic fungi, degenerate cults and seriously bad
dreams are recognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise his
radical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opus A Thousand
Plateaus.[2]
On Anglo-American turf,
a passionate cabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies
and Crypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research. Meanwhile
both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craft stories that
elaborate the Cthulhu Mythos. There's even a Lovecraft
convention—the NecronomiCon, named for the most famous of his
forbidden grimoires. Like the gnostic science fiction writer Philip
K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft is the epitome of a cult author.
The word "fan" comes from fanaticus, an ancient term for a temple
devotee, and Lovecraft fans exhibit the unflagging devotion,
fetishism and sectarian debates that have characterized popular
religious cults throughout the ages. But Lovecraft's "cult" status
has a curiously literal dimension.
Many magicians and
occultists have taken up his Mythos as source material for their
practice. Drawn from the darker regions of the esoteric
counterculture—Thelema and Satanism and Chaos magic—these Lovecraftian mages actively seek to generate the terrifying and
atavistic encounters that Lovecraft's protagonists stumble into
compulsively, blindly or against their will.
Secondary occult sources for Lovecraftian magic include three
different "fake" editions of
the Necronomicon, a few rites included
in Anton LaVey's
The Satanic Rituals, and a number of works by the
loopy British Thelemite Kenneth Grant.
Besides Grant's Typhonian
O.T.O. and the Temple of Set's Order of the Trapezoid, magical sects
that tap the Cthulhu current have included the Esoteric Order of
Dagon, the Bate Cabal, Michael Bertiaux's Lovecraftian Coven, and a
Starry Wisdom group in Florida, named after the nineteenth-century
sect featured in Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark."
Solo chaos mages fill
out the ranks, cobbling together Lovecraftian arcana on the Internet
or freely sampling the Mythos in their chthonic, open-ended (anti-)
workings.
This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact that
Lovecraft himself was a "mechanistic materialist" philosophically
opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind. Accounting for this
discrepancy is only one of many curious problems raised by the
apparent power of Lovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp
visions "work"? What constitutes the "authentic" occult? How does
magic relate to the tension between fact and fable?
As I hope to show,
Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and
coherent "reading" set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft's own
texts, a set of thematic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies
which constitute what I call Lovecraft's Magick Realism.
Magical realism already denotes a strain of Latin American
fiction—exemplified by Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and
Isabel Allende—in which a fantastic dreamlike logic melds seamlessly and
delightfully with the rhythms of the everyday. Lovecraft's Magick
Realism is far more dark and convulsive, as ancient and amoral
forces violently puncture the realistic surface of his tales.
Lovecraft constructs and then collapses a number of intense
polarities—between realism and fantasy, book and dream, reason and
its chaotic Other.
By playing out these
tensions in his writing, Lovecraft also reflects the transformations
that darkside occultism has undergone as it confronts modernity in
such forms as psychology, quantum physics, and the existential
groundlessness of being. And by embedding all this in an
intertextual Mythos of profound depth, he draws the reader into the
chaos that lies "between the worlds" of magick and reality.
A Pulp Poe
Written mostly in the 1920s and '30s, Lovecraft's work builds a
somewhat rickety bridge between the florid decadence of fin de si`ecle fantasy and the more "rational" demands of the new century's
science fiction. His early writing is gaudy Gothic pastiche, but in
his mature Chtulhu tales, Lovecraft adopts a pseudodocumentary style
that utilizes the language of journalism, scholarship, and science
to construct a realistic and measured prose voice which then
explodes into feverish, adjectival horror.
Some find Lovecraft's
intensity atrocious—not everyone can enjoy a writer capable of
comparing a strange light to "a glutted swarm of corpse-fed
fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh."[3]
But in terms of horror, Lovecraft delivers. His protagonist is
usually a reclusive bookish type, a scholar or artist who is or is
known to the first-person narrator. Stumbling onto odd coincidences
or beset with strange dreams, his intellectual curiosity drives him
to pore through forbidden books or local folklore, his empirical
turn of mind blinding him to the nightmarish scenario that the
reader can see slowly building up around him. When the Mythos
finally breaks through, it often shatters him, even though the
invasion is generally more cognitive than physical.
By endlessly playing out a shared collection of images and tropes,
genres like weird fiction also generate a collective resonance that
can seem both "archetypal" and cliched. Though Lovecraft broke with
classic fantasy, he gave his Mythos density and depth by building a
shared world to house his disparate tales.
The Mythos stories all
share a liminal map that weaves fictional places like Arkham,
Dunwich, and Miskatonic University into the New England landscape;
they also refer to a common body of entities and forbidden books. A
relatively common feature in fantasy fiction, these metafictional
techniques create the sense that Lovecraft's Mythos lies beyond each
individual tales, hovering in a dimension halfway between fantasy
and the real.
Lovecraft did not just tell tales—he built a world. It's no accident
that one of the more successful role-playing games to follow in the
heels of Dungeons & Dragons takes place in "Lovecraft Country." Most
role-playing adventure games build their worlds inside highly
codified "mythic" spaces of the collective imagination (heroic
fantasy, cyberpunk, vampire Paris, Arthur's Britain).
The game Call of Cthulhu
takes place in Lovecraft's 1920s America, where players become
"investigators" who track down dark rumors or heinous occult crimes
that gradually open up the reality of the monsters. Call of Cthulhu
is an unusually dark game; the best investigators can do is to
retain sanity and stave off the monsters' eventual apocalyptic
triumph. In many ways Call of Cthulhu "works" because of the
considerable density of Lovecraft's original Mythos, a density which
the game itself also contributes to.
Lovecraft himself "collectivized" and deepened his Mythos by
encouraging his friends to write stories that take place within it.
Writers like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard, and a young
Robert
Bloch complied. After Lovecraft's death, August Derleth carried on
this tradition with great devotion, and today, dozens continue to
write Lovecraftian tales.
With some notable exceptions, most of these writers mangle the Myth,
often by detailing horrors the master wisely left shrouded in
ambiguous gloom.[4] The exact delineations of Lovecraft's cosmic
cast and timeline remain murky even after a great deal of
close-reading and cross-referencing. But in the hands of the
Catholic Derleth, the extraterrestrial Great Old Ones become
elemental demons defeated by the "good" Elder Gods.
Forcing Lovecraft's
cosmic and fundamentally amoral pantheon into a traditional
religious framework, Derleth committed an error at once imaginative
and interpretive. For despite the diabolical aura of his creatures,
Lovecraft generates much of his power by stepping beyond good and
evil.
The Horror of
Reason
For the most part Lovecraft abandoned the supernatural and religious
underpinnings of the classic supernatural tale, turning instead
looked towards science to provide frameworks for horror. Calling
Lovecraft the "Copernicus of the horror tale," the fantasy writer
Fritz Leiber Jr. wrote that Lovecraft was the first fantasist who,
"firmly attached the
emotion of spectral dread to such concepts as outer space, the
rim of the cosmos, alien beings, unsuspected dimensions, and the
conceivable universes lying outside our own spacetime
continuum."[5]
As Lovecraft himself put
it in a letter,
"The time has come when the normal revolt against
time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible
with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images
forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and
measurable universe."[6]
For Lovecraft, it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters,
but reason with its eyes agog. By fusing cutting-edge science with
archaic material, Lovecraft creates a twisted materialism in which
scientific "progress" returns us to the atavistic abyss, and
hard-nosed research revives the factual basis of forgotten and
discarded myths.
Hence Lovecraft's
obsession with archeology; the digs which unearth alien artifacts
and bizarrely angled cities are simultaneously historical and
imaginal. In 1930 story "The Whisperer in Darkness,"
Lovecraft
identifies the planet Yuggoth (from which the fungoid Mi-Go launch
their clandestine invasions of Earth) with the newly-discovered
planet called Pluto. To the 1930 reader—probably the kind of person
who would thrill to popular accounts of C.W. Thompson's discovery of
the ninth planet that very year—this factual reference "opens up"
Lovecraft's fiction into a real world that is itself opening up to
the limitless cosmos.
Lovecraft's most self-conscious, if somewhat strained, fusion of
occult folklore and weird science occurs in the 1932 story "The
Dreams of the Witch-House." The demonic characters that the
folklorist Walter Gilman first glimpses in his nightmares are stock ghoulies: the evil witch crone Keziah Mason, her familiar spirit
Brown Jenkin, and a "Black Man" who is perhaps Lovecraft's most
unambiguously Satanic figure.
These figures eventually
invade the real space of Gilman's curiously angled room. But Gilman
is also a student of quantum physics, Riemann spaces and
non-Euclidian mathematics, and his dreams are almost psychedelic
manifestations of his abstract knowledge. Within these "abysses
whose material and gravitational properties...he could not even
begin to explain," an "indescribably angled" realm of "titan prisms,
labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings," Gilman
keeps encountering a small polyhedron and a mass of "prolately
spheroidal bubbles."
By the end of the tale
that he realizes that these are none other than Keziah and her
familiar spirit, classic demonic cliches translated into the most
alien dimension of speculative science: hyperspace.
These days, one finds the motif of hyperspace in science fiction,
pop cosmology, computer interface design, channelled UFO prophecies,
and the postmodern shamanism of today's high-octane psychedelic
travellers—all discourses that feed contemporary chaos magic. The
term itself was probably coined by the science fiction writer John
W. Campbell Jr. in 1931, though its origins as a concept lie in
nineteenth-century mathematical explorations of the fourth
dimension.
In many ways, however, Lovecraft was the concept's first
mythographer. From the perspective of hyperspace, our normal,
three-dimensional spaces are exhausted and insufficient constructs.
But our incapacity to vividly imagine this new dimension in humanist
terms creates a crisis of representation, a crisis which for
Lovecraft calls up our most ancient fears of the unknown.
"All the objects...were
totally beyond description or even comprehension," Lovecraft writes
of Gilman's seething nightmare before paradoxically proceeding to
describe these horrible objects. In his descriptions, Lovecraft
emphasizes the incommensurability of this space through almost non-sensical
juxtapositions like "obscene angles" or "wrong" geometry, a
rhetorical technique that one Chaos magician calls "Semiotic
Angularity."
Lovecraft has a habit of labeling his horrors "indescribable,"
"nameless, "unseen," "unutterable," "unknown" and "formless." Though
superficially weak, this move can also be seen a kind of macabre via
negativa. Like the apophatic oppositions of negative theologians
like Pseudo-Dionysus or St. John of the Cross, Lovecraft marks the
limits of language, limits which paradoxically point to the Beyond.
For the mystics, this ultimate is the ineffable One,
Pseudo-Dionysus' "superluminous gloom" or the Ain Soph of the
Kabbalists. But there is no unity in Lovecraft's Beyond. It is the
omnivorous Outside, the screaming multiplicity of cosmic hyperspace
opened up by reason.
For Lovecraft, scientific materialism is the ultimate Faustian
bargain, not because it hands us Promethean technology (a man for
the eighteenth century, Lovecraft had no interest in gadgetry), but
because it leads us beyond the horizon of what our minds can
withstand.
"The most merciful
thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the mind to
correlate all its contents," goes the famous opening line of "Call
of Cthulhu."
By correlating those
contexts, empiricism opens up "terrifying vistas of reality"—what
Lovecraft elsewhere calls "the blind cosmos [that] grinds aimlessly
on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing
again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the
minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness".
Lovecraft gave this existentialist dread an imaginative voice, what
he called "cosmic alienage". For Fritz Leiber, the "monstrous
nuclear chaos" of Azathoth, Lovecraft's supreme entity, symbolizes
"the purposeless, mindless, yet all-powerful universe of
materialistic belief." But this symbolism isn't the whole story,
for, as DMT voyagers know, hyperspace is haunted.
The entities that erupt
from Lovecraft's inhuman realms seem to suggest that in a blind
mechanistic cosmos, the most alien thing is sentience itself.
Peering outward through the cracks of domesticated "human"
consciousness, a compassionless materialist like Lovecraft could
only react with horror, for reason must cower before the most raw
and atavistic dream-dragons of the psyche.
Modern humans usually suppress, ignore or constrain these forces
lurking in our lizard brain. Mythically, these forces take the form
of demons imprisoned under the angelic yokes of altruism, morality,
and intellect. Yet if one does not believe in any ultimate universal
purpose, then these primal forces are the most attuned with the
cosmos precisely because they are amoral and inhuman.
In "The Dunwich Horror",
Henry Wheeler overhears a monstrous moan from a diabolical rite and
asks,
"from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or
obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articular thunder-croakings
drawn?"
The Outside is within.
Chaos Culture
Lovecraft's fiction expresses a "future primitivism" that finds its
most intense esoteric expression in Chaos magic, an eclectic
contemporary style of darkside occultism that draws from Thelema,
Satanism, Austin Osman Spare, and Eastern metaphysics to construct a
thoroughly postmodern magic.
For today's Chaos mages, there is no "tradition". The symbols and
myths of countless sects, orders, and faiths, are constructs, useful
fictions, "games." That magic works has nothing to do with its truth
claims and everything to do with the will and experience of the
magician. Recognizing the distinct possibility that we may be adrift
in a meaningless mechanical cosmos within which human will and
imagination are vaguely comic flukes (the "cosmic indifferentism"
Lovecraft himself professed), the mage accepts his groundlessness,
embracing the chaotic self-creating void that is himself.
As we find with Lovecraft's fictional cults and grimoires, chaos
magicians refuse the hierarchical, symbolic and monotheist biases of
traditional esotericism. Like most Chaos magicians, the British
occultist Peter Carroll gravitates towards the Black, not because he
desires a simple Satanic inversion of Christianity but because he
seeks the amoral and shamanic core of magical experience—a core that Lovecraft conjures up with his orgies of drums, guttural chants, and
screeching horns.
At the same time, Chaos
mages like Carroll also plumb the weird science of quantum physics,
complexity theory and electronic Prometheanism. Some darkside
magicians become consumed by the atavistic forces they unleash or
addicted to the dark costume of the Satanic anti-hero.
But the most
sophisticated adopt a balanced mode of gnostic existentialism that
calls all constructs into question while refusing the cold comforts
of skeptical reason or suicidal nihilism, a pragmatic and empirical
shamanism that resonates as much with Lovecraft's hard-headed
materialism as with his horrors.
The first occultist to really engage these notions is
Aleister
Crowley, who shattered the received vessels of occult tradition
while creatively extending the dark dream of magic into the
twentieth century. With his outlandish image, trickster texts, and
his famous
Law of Thelema ("Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of
the law"), Crowley called into question the esoteric certainties of
"true" revelation and lineage, and was the first magus to give
occult antinomionism a decidedly Nietzschean twist.[7]
Unfettered, this occult will to power can easily degenerate into a
heartless elitism, and the fascist and racist dimensions of both
twentieth-century occultism and Lovecraft himself should not be
forgotten. But this self-engendering will is more exuberantly
expressed as a will to Art. In many ways, the fin de siecle
occultism that exploded during Crowley's time was an essentially
esthetic esotericism.
A good number of the
nineteenth-century magicians who inspire us today are the great
poets, painters, and writers of Symbolism and decadent Romanticism,
many of them dabblers or adepts in Satanism, Rosicrucianism, and
hermetic societies. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was
infused with artistic pretensions, and Golden Dawn member and
fantasy writer Arthur Machen was one of Lovecraft's strongest
influences.
But it was Austin Osman Spare who most decisively dissolved the
boundary between artistic and magical life. Though working
independently of the Surrealists, Spare also based his art on the
dark and autonomous eruptions of "subconscious" material, though in
a more overtly theurgic context.[8] Today's
Chaos magicians are
heavily influenced by Spare, and their Lovecraftian rites express
this simultaneously creative and nihilistic dissolution.
And as postmodern spawn
of role-playing games, computers, and pop culture, they celebrate
the fact that Lovecraft's secrets are scraped from the barrel of
pulp fiction.
Proof in the
Pudding
In a message cross-posted to the Internet newsgroups alt.necromicon
[sic] and alt.satanism, Parker Ryan listed a wide variety of magical
techniques described by Lovecraft, including entheogens, glossalalia,
and shamanic drumming. Insisting that his post was "not a satirical
article," Ryan then described specific Lovecraftian rites he had
developed, including this "Rite of Cthulhu":
A)
Chanting. The use of the "Cthulhu chant" to create a
concentrative or meditative state of consciousness that
forms the basis of much later magickal work.
B) Dream work. Specific techniques of
controlled dreaming that are used to establish contact with
Cthulhu.
C) Abandonment. Specific techniques to free
oneself from culturally conditioned reality tunnels.
Ryan goes on to say that
he's experimented with most of his rites "with fairly good success."
In coming to terms with the "real magic" embedded in Lovecraft, one
quickly encounters a fundamental irony: the cold skepticism of
Lovecraft himself. In his letters, Lovecraft poked fun at his own
tales, claiming he wrote them for cash and playfully naming his
friends after his monsters. While such attitudes in no way diminish
the imaginative power of Lovecraft's tales—which, as always, lie
outside the control and intention of their author—they do pose a
problem for the working occultist seeking to establish Lovecraft's
magical authority.
The most obvious, and least interesting, answer is to find authentic
magic in Lovecraft's biography. Lovecraft's father was a traveling
salesman who died in a madhouse when Lovecraft was eight, and vague
rumors that he was an initiate in some Masonic order or other were
exploited in the Necronomicon cobbled together by George Hay, Colin
Wilson, and Robert Turner.
Others have tried to
track Lovecraft's occult know-how, especially his familiarity with
Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. In an Internet document
relating the history of the "real" Necronomicon, Colin Low argues
that Crowley befriended Sonia Greene in New York a few years before
the woman married Lovecraft. As proof of Crowley's indirect
influence on Lovecraft, Low sites this intriguing passage from "The Call of Cthulhu":
That cult would never die until the stars came right again and the
secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His
subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to
know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free
and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown
aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then
the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill
and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a
holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
Low claims this passage is a mangled reflection of Crowley's
teachings on the new Aeon and the The Book of the Law. In an article
in Societé, Robert North also states that Lovecraft referred to "A.C."
in a letter, and that Crowley was mentioned in Leonard Cline's
The
Dark Chamber, a novel Lovecraft discussed in his Supernatural Horror
in Literature.
But so what? Lovecraft was a fanatical and imaginative reader, and
many such folks are drawn to the semiotic exotica of esoteric lore
regardless of any beliefs in or experiences of the paranormal. From
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and elsewhere, it's clear that
Lovecraft knew the basic outlines of the occult. But these
influences pale next to Vathek, Poe, or Lord Dunsany.
Desperate to assimilate Lovecraft into a "tradition", some
occultists enter into dubious explanations of mystical influence by
disincarnate beings. North gives this Invisible College idea a
shamanic twist, asserting that prehistoric Atlantian tribes who
survived the flood exercised telepathic influence on people like
John Dee, Blavatsky, and Lovecraft.
But none of these
Lovecraft hierophants can match the delirious splendor of
Kenneth
Grant. In The Magical Revival, Grant points out more curious
similarities between Lovecraft and Crowley: both refer to "Great Old
Ones" and "Cold Wastes" (of Kadath and Hadith, respectively); the
entity "Yog-Sothoth" rhymes with "Set-Thoth," and Al Azif: The Book
of the Arab resembles Crowley's Al vel Legis: The Book of the Law.
In Nightside of Eden,
Grant maps Lovecraft's pantheon onto a darkside Tree of Life,
comparing the mangled "iridescent globes" that occasionally pop up
in Lovecraft's tales with the shattered sefirot known as the Qlipoth.
Grant concludes that Lovecraft had "direct and conscious experience
of the inner planes,"[9] the same zones Crowley prowled, and that Lovecraft "disguised" his occult experiences as fiction.
Like many latter-day Lovecraftians, Grant commits the error of
literalizing a purposefully nebulous myth. A subtler and more
satisfying version of this argument is the notion that Lovecraft had
direct unconscious experiences of the inner planes, experiences
which his quotidian mind rejected but which found their way into his
writings nonetheless. For Lovecraft was blessed with a vivid and
nightmarish dream life, and drew the substance of a number of his
tales from beyond the wall of sleep.
In this sense Lovecraft's magickal authority is nothing more or less
than the authority of dream. But what kind of dream tales are these?
A Freudian could have a field day with Lovecraft's fecund, squishy
sea monsters, and a Jungian analyst might recognize the liniments of
the proverbial shadow. But Lovecraft's Shadow is so inky it swallows
the standard archetypes of the collective unconscious like a black
hole.
If we see the archetypal
world not as a static storehouse of timeless godforms but as a
constantly mutating carnival of figures, then the seething
extraterrestrial monsters that Lovecraft glimpsed in the chaos of
hyperspace are not so much archaic figures of heredity than the
avatars of a new psychological and mythic aeon. At the very least,
it would seem that things are getting mighty out of hand beyond the
magic circle of the ordered daylight mind.
In an intriguing Internet document devoted to
the Necronomicon,
Tyagi Nagasiva places Lovecraft's potent dreamtales within the
terma
tradition found in the Nyingma branch of Tibetan Buddhism [10]. Termas were "pre-mature" writings hidden by Buddhist sages for
centuries until the time was ripe, at which point religious
visionaries would divine their physical hiding places through omens
or dreams.
But some termas were
revealed entirely in dreams, often couched in otherworldly Dakini
scripts. An old Indian revisionary tactic (the second-century
Nagarjuna was said to have discovered his Mahayana masterpieces in
the serpent realm of the nagas), the terma game resolves the
religious problem of how to alter a tradition without disrupting
traditional authority. The famous
Tibetan Book of the Dead is a terma, and so, perhaps, is the
Necronomicon.
Of course, for Chaos magicians, reality can coherently present
itself through any number of self-sustaining but mutually
contradictory symbolic paradigms (or "reality tunnels," in Robert
Anton Wilson's memorable phrase). Nothing is true and everything is
permitted. By emphasizing the self-fulfilling nature of all reality
claims, this postmodern perspective creatively erodes the
distinction between legitimate esoteric transmission and total
fiction.
This bias toward the experimental is found in Anton LaVey's Satanic
Rituals, which includes the first overtly Lovecraftian rituals to
see print. In presenting "Die Elektrischen Vorspiele" (which
LaVey
based on a Lovecraftian tale by Frank Belknap Long), the "Ceremony
of the Angles," and "The Call to Cthulhu" (the latter two penned by
Michael Aquino), LaVey does claim that Lovecraft "clearly...had been
influenced by very real sources."[11]
But in holding that
Satanic magic allows you to "objectively enter into a subjective
state," LaVey more emphatically emphasizes the ritual power of
fantasy—a radical subjectivity which explains his irreverence
towards occult source material, whether Lovecraft or Masonry.
In naming his Order of
the Trapezoid after the "Shining Trapezohedron" found in Lovecraft's
"The Haunter of the Dark"—a black, oddly-angled extraterrestrial
crystal used to communicate with the Old Ones—LaVey emphasized that
fictions can channel magical forces regardless of their historical
authenticity.
In his two rituals, Michael Aquino expresses the subjective power of
"meaningless" language by creating a "Yuggothic" tongue similar to
that heard in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Whisperer in
the Dark." Such guttural utterances help to shut down the rational
mind (try chanting "P'garn'h v'glyzz" for a couple of hours), a
notion elaborated by Kenneth Grant in his notion of the Cult of
Barbarous Names.
After leaving
the Church
of Satan to form the more serious
Temple of Set in 1975, Aquino
eventually reformed the Order of the Trapezoid into the practical
magic wing of the Setian philosophy. For Stephen R. Flowers, current
Grand Master of the order, the substance of Lovecraftian magic is
precisely an overwhelming subjectivity that flies in the face of
objective law.
"The Old Ones are
the objective manifestations... of the subjective universe which
is what is trying to 'break through' the merely rational
mind-set of modern humanity."[12]
For Flowers, such
invocations are ultimately apocalyptic, hastening a transition into
a chaotic aeon in which the Old Ones reveal themselves as future
reflections of the Black Magician ("There are no more Nightmares for
us," he wrote me).
This desire to rebel against the tyranny of reason and its ordered
objective universe is one of the underlying goals of Chaos magic.
Many would applaud the sentiment expressed by Albert Wilmarth in
Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness":
"To shake off the
maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural
law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the
nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and ultimate—surely
such a things was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and
sanity!"[13]
In his electronically
circulated text "Kathulu Majik: Luvkrafting the Roles of Modern
Uccultizm," Tyagi Nagasiva writes that most Western magic is
ossified and dualistic, heavily weighted towards the forces of
order, hierarchy, moralizing, and structured language.
"Without the
destabilizing force of Kaos, we would stagnate intellectually,
psychologically and otherwise... Kathulu provides a necessary
instability to combat the stolid and fixed methods of the
structured 'Ordurs'... One may become balanced through exposure
to Kathulu"
(Tyagi's "mis-spellings"
show the influence of Genesis P. Orridge's Temple of Psychick
Youth).
Haramullah criticizes
black magicians who simply reverse "Ordur" with "Kaos," rather than
bringing this underlying polarity into balance (a dualistic error he
also finds in Lovecraft). Showing strong Taoist and Buddhist
influences, Haramullah calls instead for a "Midul Path" that
magically navigates between structure and disintegration, will and
void.
"The idea that one
may progress linearly along the MP [Midul Path] is mistaken. One
becomes, one does not progress. One attunes, one does not forge.
One allows, one does not make."
In the Cincinatti
Journal of Ceremonial Magic, the anonymous author of "Return of the
Elder Gods" presents an evolutionary reason for Mythos magic. The
author accepts the scenario of an approaching world crisis brought
on by the invasion of the Elder Gods, Qlipothic transdimensional
entities who ruled protohumanity until they were banished by "the
agent of the Intelligence," a Promethean figure who set humanity on
its current course of evolution.
We remain connected to
these Elder Gods through the "Forgotten Ones," the atavistic forces
of hunger, sex, and violence that linger in the subterranean levels
of our being. Only by magically "reabsorbing" the Forgotten Ones and
using the subsequent energy to bootstrap higher consciousness can we
keep the portal sealed against the return of the Elder Gods.
Though Lovecraft's name
is never mentioned in the article, he is ever present, a skeptical
materialist dreaming the dragons awake.
Writing the
Dream...
Within the Mythos tales, one finds two dimensions—the normal human
world and the infested Outside—and it's the ontological tension
between them that powers Lovecraft's magick realism. Though Cthulhu
and friends have material aspects, their reality is most horrible
for what it says about the way the universe is. As the Lovecraft
scholar Joshi notes, Lovecraft's narrators frequently go mad "not
through any physical violence at the hands of supernatural entities
but through the mere realization of the the existence of such a race
of gods and beings."
Faced with "realms whose
mere existence stuns the brain," they experience severe cognitive
dissonance—precisely the sorts of disorienting rupture sought by
Chaos magicians.[14]
The role-playing game Call of Cthulhu wonderfully expresses the
violence of this Lovecraftian paradigm shift. In adventure games
like Dungeons & Dragons, one of your character's most significant
measures is its hit points—a number which determines the amount of
physical punishment your character can take before it gets injured
or dies. Call of Cthulhu replaces this physical characteristic with
the psychic category of Sanity.
Face-to-face encounters
with Yog-Sothoth or the insects from Shaggai knock points off your
Sanity, but so does your discovery of more information about the
Mythos—the more you find out from books or starcharts, the more
likely you are to wind up in the Arkham Asylum. Magic also comes
with an ironic price, one that Lovecraftian magicians might well pay
heed to. If you use any of the binding spells from De Vermis
Mysteriis or the Pnakotic Manuscripts, you necessarily learn more
about the Mythos and thereby lose more sanity.[15]
Lovecraft's scholarly heroes also investigate the Mythos as much
through reading and thinking as through movements through physical
space, and this psychological exploration draws the mind of the
reader directly into the loop. Usually, readers suspect the dark
truth of the Mythos while the narrator still clings to a quotidian
attitude—a technique that subtly forces the reader to identify with
the Outside rather than with the conventional worldview of the
protagonist.
Magically, the blindness
of Lovecraft's heroes corresponds to a crucial element of occult
theory developed by Austin Osman Spare: that magic occurs over and
against the conscious mind, that ordinary thinking must be silenced,
distracted, or thoroughly deranged for the chthonic will to express
itself.[16]
In order to invade our plane, Lovecraft's entities need a portal, an
interface between the worlds, and Lovecraft emphasizes two: books
and dreams. In "Dreams of the Witch-House," "The Shadow out of Time"
and "The Shadow over Innsmouth," dreams infect their hosts with a
virulence that resembles the more overt psychic possessions that
occur in "The Haunter in the Dark" and The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward. Like the monsters themselves, Lovecraft's dreams are
autonomous forces breaking through from Outside and engendering
their own reality.
But these dreams also conjure up a more literal "outside": the
strange dream life of Lovecraft himself, a life that (as the
informed fan knows) directly inspired some of the tales[17]. By
seeding his texts with his own nightmares, Lovecraft creates a
autobiographical homology between himself and his protagonists. The
stories themselves start to dream, which means that the reader too
lies right in the path of the infection.
Lovecraft reproduces himself in his tales in a number of ways—the
first-person protagonists reflect aspects of his own reclusive and
bookish lifestyle; the epistolary form of the "The Whisperer in
Darkness" echoes his own commitment to regular correspondence;
character names are lifted from friends; and the New England
landscape is his own.
This psychic
self-reflection partially explains why Lovecraft fans usually become
fascinated with the man himself, a gaunt and solitary recluse who
socialized through the mail, yearned for the eighteenth century, and
adopted the crabby outlook and mannerisms of an old man. Lovecraft's
life, and certainly his voluminous personal correspondence, form
part of his myth.
Lovecraft thus solidifies his virtual reality by adding
autobiographical elements to his shared world of creatures, books
and maps. He also constructs a documentary texture by thickening his
tales with manuscripts, newspaper clippings, scholarly citations,
diary entries, letters, and bibliographies that list fake books
alongside real classics.
All this produces the
sense that "outside" each individual tale lies a meta-fictional
world that hovers on the edge of our own, a world that, like the
monsters themselves, is constantly trying to break through and
actualize itself. And thanks to Mythos storytellers, role-playing
games, and dark-side magicians, it has.
...and
Dreaming the Book
In "The Shadow out of Time," Lovecraft makes explicit one of the
fantastic equations that drives his Magick Realism: the equivalence
of dreams and books. For five years, the narrator, an economics
professor named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, is taken over by a
mysterious "secondary personality."
After recovering his
original identity, Peaslee is beset by powerful dreams in which he
finds himself in a strange city, inhabiting a huge
tentacle-sprouting conical body, writing down the history of modern
Western world in a book. In the climax of the tale, Peaslee journeys
to the Australian desert to explore ancient ruins buried beneath the
sands. There he discovers a book written in English, in his own
handwriting: the very same volume he had produced inside his
monstrous dream body.
Though we learn very little of their contents, Lovecraft's
diabolical grimoires are so infectious that even glancing at their
ominous sigils proves dangerous. As with their dreams, these texts
obsess Lovecraft's bookish protagonists to the point that the
volumes, in Christopher Frayling's phrase, "vampirize the reader."
Their titles alone are
magic spells, the hallucinatory incantations of an eccentric
antiquarian: the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Ilarnet Papyri, the
R'lyeh Text, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. Lovecraft's friends
contributed De Vermis Mysteriis and von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen
Kulten, and Lovecraft named the author of his Cultes Des Goules, the
Comte d'Erlette, after his young fan August Derleth.
Hovering over all these
grim tomes is the "dreaded" and "forbidden" Necronomicon, a book of
blasphemous invocations to speed the return of the Old Ones.
Lovecraft's supreme intertextual fetish, the Necronomicon stands as
one of the few mythical books in literature that have absorbed so
much imaginative attention that they've entered published reality.
If books owe their life not to their individual contents but to the
larger intertextual webwork of reference and citation within which
they are woven, than the dread Necronomicon clearly has a life of
its own. Besides literary studies, the Necronomicon has generated
numerous pseudo-scholarly analyses, including significant appendixes
in the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana and Lovecraft's own "History of the
Necronomicon."
A number of FAQs can be
found on the Internet, where a mild flame war periodically erupts
between magicians, horror fans, and mythology experts over the
reality of the book. The undead entity referred to in the
Necronomicon's famous couplet—"That is not dead which can eternal
lie,/And with strange eons even death may die"—may be nothing more
or less than the the text itself, always lurking in the margins as
we read the real.
Lovecraft's brief "History" was apparently inspired by the first
Necronomicon hoax: a review of an edition of the dreaded tome
submitted to Massachusetts' Branford Review in 1934.[18] Decades
later, index cards for the book started popping up in university
library catalogs.
It's perhaps the principle expression of Lovecraft's Magick Realism
that all these ghostly references would finally manifest the book
itself. In 1973, a small-press edition of Al Azif (the
Necronomicon's Arabic name) appeared, consisting of eight pages of
simulated Syrian script repeated 24 times. Four years later, the
Satanists at New York's Magickal Childe published a Necronomicon by
Simon, a grab bag that contains far more Sumerian myth than
Lovecraft (though portions were "purposely left out" for the "safety
of the reader").
George Hay's
Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names, also a child of the '70s, is
the most complex, intriguing, and Lovecraftian of the lot. In the
spirit of the master's pseudoscholarship, Hay nests the fabulated
invocations of Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu amongst a set of analytic,
literary and historical essays.
Though magicians with strong imaginations have claimed that even the
Simon book works wonders, the pseudohistories of the various
Necronomicons are far more compelling than the texts themselves.
Lovecraft himself provided the bare bones: the text was penned in
730 A.D by a poet, the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and named after the
nocturnal sounds of insects. It was subsequently translated by
Theodorus Philetas into Greek, by Olaus Wormius into Latin, and by
John Dee into English.
Lovecraft lists various
libraries and private collections where fragments of the volume
reside, and gives us a knowing wink by noting that the fantasy
writer R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the monstrous and
suppressed book found in his novel The King in Yellow from rumors of
the Necronomicon (Lovecraft himself claimed to have gotten his
inspiration from Chambers).
All of the Necronomicon's subsequent pseudohistories weave the book
in and out of actual occult history, with John Dee playing a
particularly conspicuous role. According to Colin Wilson, the
version of the text published in the Hay Necronomicon was encrypted
in Dee's Enochian cipher-text Liber Logoaeth. Colin Low's
Necronomicon FAQ claims that Dee discovered the book at the court of
King Rudolph II's court in Prague, and that is was under its
influence that Dee and his scryer Edward Kelly achieved their most
powerful astral encounters.
Never published, Dee's
translation became part of celebrated collection of Elias Ashmole
housed at the British Library. Here Crowley read it, freely cobbling
passages for The Book of the Law, and ultimately passing on some of
its contents indirectly to Lovecraft through Sophia Greene.
Crowley's role in Low's tale is appropriate, for Crowley certainly
knew the magical power of hoax and history.
For the history of the occult is a confabulation, its lies wedded to
its genealogies, its "timeless" truths fabricated by revisionists,
madmen, and geniuses, its esoteric traditions a constantly shifting
conspiracy of influences. The Necronomicon is not the first fiction
to generate real magical activity within this potent twilight zone
between philology and fantasy.
To take an example from an earlier era, the anonymous Rosicrucian
manifestos that first appeared in the early 1600s claimed to issue
from a secret brotherhood of Christian Hermeticists who finally
deemed it time to come above ground. Many readers immediately wanted
to join up, though it is unlikely that such a group existed at the
time.
But this hoax focused
esoteric desire and inspired an explosion of "real" Rosicrucian
groups. Though one of the two suspected authors of the manifestos,
Johann Valentin Andreae, never came clean, he made veiled references
to Rosicrucianism as an "ingenius game which a masked person might
like to play upon the literary scene, especially in an age
infatuated with everything unusual."[19]
Like the
Rosicrucian
manifestos or Blavatsky's
Book of Dzyan, Lovecraft's
Necronomicon is
the occult equivalent of Orson Welles' radio broadcast of the "War
of the Worlds." As Lovecraft himself wrote,
"No weird story can
truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and
verisimilitude of an actual hoax."[20]
In Foucault's Pendulum,
Umberto Eco suggests that esoteric truth is
perhaps nothing more than a semiotic conspiracy theory born of an
endlessly rehashed and self-referential literature—the intertextual
fabric Lovecraft understood so well. For those who need to ground
their profound states of consciousness in objective correlatives,
this is a damning indictment of "tradition."
But as Chaos magicians
remind us, magic is nothing more than subjective experience
interacting with an internally consistent matrix of signs and
affects. In the absence of orthodoxy, all we have is the dynamic
tantra of text and perception, of reading and dream. These days the
Great Work may be nothing more or less than this "ingenius game,"
fabricating itself without closure or rest, weaving itself out of
the resplendent void where Azathoth writhes on his Mandelbrot
throne.
References
[1] "The Haunter of
the Dark," The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of
Horror and the Macabre (New York: Ballantine, 1963), p. 220.
[2]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press).
"The anomalous
is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects,
it has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor
specific or significant characteristics. Human tenderness is
as foreign to it as human classifications. Lovecraft applies
the term 'Outsider' to this thing or entity, the Thing which
arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet
multiple, 'teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading
like an infectious disease, his nameless horror.'"
(244-5)
"What we are
saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a
pack...It is at this point that the human being encounters
the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination
for the pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the
outside? Or is the multiplicity that fascinates us already
related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? In one of his
masterpieces, H.P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph
Carter, who feels his 'self' reel and who experiences a fear
worse than that of annihilation: 'Carters of form both human
and nonhuman, vertebrate and invertebrate .... etc'"
(240)
[3] Ibid., p. 202
[4]One notable exception to this is The Starry Wisdom, D.M.
Mitchell's recent British collection of Mythos tales and art
that bristles with experimental and chthonic magick (London:
Creation Books, 1994). Contributors range from J.G. Ballard and
William S. Burroughs to Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, two of
today's most intelligent comic book writers. Though the bios
make no mention of the fact, a number of the contributors,
including Don Webb, are solid occultists. On the other hand, the
author of one of the more perverse tales is Robert M. Price, a
New Testament scholar and pastor of the First Baptist Church of
Montclair, New Jersey.
[5] Fritz Leiber, Jr., "A Literary Copernicus," in S.T. Joshi,
et., H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 51.
[6] S.T. Joshi, H.P. Lovecraft (Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmbat
House, 1982), p. 58.
[7] He was also the first modern occultist to anticipate
Lovecraft by trafficking with explicitly extraterrestrial
entities.
[8] See Nadia Choucha's Surrealism and the Occult (Vermont:
Destiny Books, 1991), pp. 51-74.
[9] Colin Wilson, "Introduction," in George Hay, ed., The
Necronomicon: The book of Dead Names (London: Corgi, 1978), p.
35.
[10] The Necronomicon FAQ Version 2.0, written and compiled by
Kendrick Kerwin Chua (kchua@unf6.cis.unf.edu), May 1994.
[11] Anton LaVey, The Satanic Rituals (New York: Avon, 1972).
[12] Private email correspondence.
[13] "The Whisperer in Darkness," op. cit Best of..., p. 162.
[14] Joshi, p.32.
[15] The imaginative production of a role-playing game's
"virtual reality" is not dissimilar to ceremonial magic. RPGs
consist of a defined space and time; random dicethrows; source
books; a game system that organizes numbers, rules and
characteristics; and, most importantly, the active imagination
of the players. Organized magical rituals follow a superficially
similar scheme: a coherent and graded system carves out a
performative space and time wherein divinatory randomness, data
from occult cookbooks, and symbolic networks of numbers and
signs come to life within the active imagination of the mage, a
"playful" imagination that calls forth--and even becomes--the
autonomous "characters" of the gods.
From ancient ritualistic board games to the Golden Dawn's
Enochian Chess, games have been vehicles for magic and
divination. Recently Chaosium, the publisher of Call of Cthulhu,
has cemented the connection with Nephilim, the first explicitly
occult role-playing game. You play one the Nephilim, a race of
magical beings who battle secret societies and must take over
living human hosts in their quest for enlightenment. Already
banned in some stores, Nephilim artfully and systematically
melds deep and genuine esoteric arcana (kabbalah, alchemy,
astrology) with an original variant of the occult conspiracy
theory of history.
[16] Following the logic of the Freudian slip, Spare workings
such as sigil magic must be "forgotten" in order for their
encoded intention to "break through" into reality.
[17] August Derleth collected Lovecraft's letters about his
dreams in Dreams and Fantasies (Suak City, Wis.: Arkham House,
1962).
[18] op. cit, Chua.
[19] Quoted in Roland Edighoffer,"Rosicrucianism," in Antoine
Faivre and Jacob Needleman, eds., Modern Esoteric Spirituality
(New York: Crossroads, 1992), p. 198.
[20] Quoted in S.T. Joshi, "Afterword," in H.P.Lovecraft, The
History of the Necronomicon (West Warmick, R.I.: Necronomicon
Press, 1980), p.9.
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