The Seal of R'lyeh, after me. This is available on various gee-gaws in my Cafe Press store. |
I’m going to take some time to write up my understanding of the mythos, and of its impact on modern occultism. Once begun, this has turned into rather a big job. Thus, I will present it as a series, probably the next couple of Fridays. Other stuff is in the works as well, dear readers, but hold tight for some squiggly horror…
Today is the anniversary of the death of Howard Philips Lovecraft. Read here for a no BS edit of his biography. Do I need to explain the so-called Cthulhu Mythos first? “The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.” Start here and follow some links for more. It is possibly the most widely-developed fictional horror setting ever. Being as cool as it is, it has also affected/infected occultism.
Part 1: Lovecraft
the Man & the Writer
A pretty good pic of the Old Gentleman of Providence, with tentacles. |
Later in
his short life, HPL’s continuing interest in developments in science was
reflected in his tales, as he employed the discovery of the new planet Pluto,
the astounding findings of archeology in the 1920s and the strange ideas of
quantum mechanics as horror gimmicks. Lovecraft’s unique notion (in his day)
was to marry those themes with the forms of traditional horror and occultism.
HPL was certainly the first to propose that the diagrams and angles of
‘magical’ figures reflect mathematical equations that allow travel between
worlds.
There aren't many pics of HPL smiling. |
HPL
found the usual monsters of horror – vampires, werewolves and ghosts – to be
used-up and worthless. He attempted to find new symbols, and began inventing
the names of a pantheon of demon-gods. In this he initially imitated writers
before him, especially Lord Dunsany. From other influences he gathered the notion of lurking races
of non-humans in and on the earth, and especially of horrific interbreeding
between humans and those races. To this he and his co-conspirators (or
co-jokesters, they would more likely have said) added a series of strange and
forbidden books. A Lovecraftian story often contains a phase in which research
and compilation of data leads to unsettling insights and revelations. Lovecraft
and the lads would list their fictional titles alongside Murray, Wallis-Budge
and Cotton Mather, again producing the illusion of multiple sources.
Lovecraft
wrote about what frightened him, and his feelings were shaped by an upbringing
among an impoverished household of former New England gentlefolk. He was raised
with a horror of and disdain for immigrants and a concern for ‘breeding’. He developed
a fear of the sea (and distaste for seafood) and spent his youth in fear of
encroaching madness and disease. Thus the core Lovecraftian horror is the
protagonist who finds himself slowly degenerating into madness and deformity as
a result either of an unavoidable family lineage or of personal involvement in
unwise experiments.
Through
most of his writing career Lovecraft employed the devices of traditional
witchcraft, alchemy and occultism, attempting to display what ‘really’ lurked
beneath the silly masks of God and the devil – something much more strange and
terrible. He included the old witchcraft-lore days of Roodmas, Walpurgisnacht
etc., and after he
learned a little by reading Waite’s ceremonial magic book and some Blavatsky we
start to find reflections of B’s cosmic history and slightly better
descriptions of occult rites and works.
Though, to be fair, much of HPL’s horror draws on classic Christian ideas. His Gods and demons (often called the Great Old Ones or, by fans, the GOO) often ‘tempt’humans through the sending of dreams and visions, and ‘forbidden knowledge’ was as central to HPL’s stuff as to the Catholic book-lists. Of course Lovecraft’s concepts of damnation wouldn’t be limited to roasting on an aeonic barbecue –no, he imagined immortal life as a hideous monster, or trapped as a disembodied brain.
Though, to be fair, much of HPL’s horror draws on classic Christian ideas. His Gods and demons (often called the Great Old Ones or, by fans, the GOO) often ‘tempt’humans through the sending of dreams and visions, and ‘forbidden knowledge’ was as central to HPL’s stuff as to the Catholic book-lists. Of course Lovecraft’s concepts of damnation wouldn’t be limited to roasting on an aeonic barbecue –no, he imagined immortal life as a hideous monster, or trapped as a disembodied brain.
It’s far from clear in the tales just what a sorcerer in HPL’s fantasy worlds might hope to achieve for themselves. Some of them were obviously just coerced, made to go through the motions of summoning some Outsider. Others were seduced, either by a lover or by some other temptation, including plain old gold. The existence of active cults that perpetuate the secret worship of the Great Old Ones is generally hinted at, though we see only glimpses of such things usually through a specific villain who lures a hapless protagonist to doom. There are almost no examples of a Lovecraftian magician successfully benefitting from working with the GOO, and those few (such as old Ephraim Waite, the unseen actor in The Thing On the Doorstep) do so by creating a trail of destruction and horror. Mostly, those who dabble in Cthulhu Mythos occultism, in HPL’s stories, end up messy-dead, raving in an asylum or carted away from human life and death into some condition that might have inspired the idea of Hell (or even Heaven, depending…) in the unimaginative.
To understand
the basics of HPL’s influence on occultism one need read only a few of his
tales, perhaps: The Call of Cthulhu (1926), The Dunwich Horror (1928), The
Dreams in the Witch House (1932), and The Thing On the Doorstep (1933).
For a
little more depth read Lovecraft’s novels: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
(1927) and At the Mountains of Madness.
Now as
to timeline, HPL was publishing in the 1920s and 30s in the US, with reprints
into the 1950s in the UK. The first hardback collection of his stories appeared
in 1939 from the tiny specialty publisher Arkham House. It is clear that HPL’s
work influenced mid-20th century British occultism, perhaps especially the
developing mind of Kenneth Grant. Born at the beginning of HPL’s writing
career, Grant was among the first modern occultists to explore a possible
approach to real occultism through Lovecraft’s ideas.
Part 2: Kenneth
Grant and Those Outside
Kenneth Grant as drawn by AO Spare |
Several
things converged in the late 70s and early 80s to put some fire under the
Cthulhu Mythos pot. First, Kenneth Grant made his case that HPL was a prophet
unaware. Lovecraft was a life-long scientistic atheist, who consciously
invented his gods, demons, books and other tropes with an eye to being as
terrifying as he could devise. He readily involved his friends in the game,
using their little additions and allowing them to expand on his own ideas.
Lovecraft was not a neurotic dreamer, particularly. He traveled as much as his
meager budget would allow, had friends all over the country and participated in
life in an ordinary way. He was never lucky in love, but that doesn’t qualify
one for eldritch prophethood. In order to cast HPL as the Voice of the Old Ones
Grant argues that HPL must have been manifesting the contents of unadmitted
dreams and visions, whispered to him by his hidden inspirations. Grant tries to
show these as similar to Crowley’s new-aeon crew, and produced a fairly lame
set of correspondences to try to demonstrate it. Even I, already a fanboy,
already a junior occultist was unconvinced by Grant’s Cthulhu Cabala.
Since I’ll
end this series with book reviews, I’ll digress for a quick discussion of Grant
in general. I dug him, early on, having been pointed toward him by Robert Anton
Wilson’s writing. It was timely as hell for me in 1978, and Grant’s
wide-ranging sources helped to point the movement at everything from Voudou to
Tantra to Lovecraft. (I’d already been reading the first and last – Grant
pointed me at Tantra) The problem is that Grant was no better a scholar than
most of the other occult innovators of his day, and perhaps more credulous than
some.
Grant’s
‘Typhonian’ mythology is based on the work of Gerald Massey a nineteenth-century speculator about Egypt whose writings are now utterly
discarded by scholarship. He does seem to be a source of the persistent,
annoying attempts to parallel Jesus with the Egyptian god Horus, despite their
lack of real correspondence. In any case the notion of a matrifocal Typhonian
Egypt before the known pantheons is as ‘fluffy’ as the Triple Goddess. Grant
was rather better informed on other topics, his tantric informant having panned
out pretty well as the evidence has been parsed. He involved himself with
Michael Bertiaux’s ultra-weirdo Voodoo take-off, but certainly helped to point
many Thelemites and occultists toward real Voudou as well, helping to feed the
current meeting of ATR with western traditions. Nevertheless his central
notions of ‘Typhonian’ mythography and the ancient history of world Paganism
are as thoroughly discredited as Margaret Murray.
Grant
certainly understood Lovecraft’s aesthetic, in my opinion, and made growing
efforts over his literary career to write like HPL. In his sixth book, ‘Hecate’s
Fountain’ extravagant claims of materialized tentacular horror mix with the
real characters of the British occult scene. That was the book that made me
stop taking Grant’s occultism even a little seriously. It remained entertaining.
One
successful merging of Lovecraft’s images with those of historic occultism is in
the notion of the Forbidden Book. Containing magic, and the strange and mighty
beings that empower it, in a book has been an archetype of occultism since
humankind learned to transmit data with marks. HPL was a bibliophile himself,
and made the Strange Book in the Attic (or tomb) a constant lurking presence in
his tales. Grant merges that idea not only with the western history of
grimoires and other books proscribed by the church, but also with a Tibetan
tradition. In Tibetan lore a ‘terma’ is a scripture that has been ‘hidden’ by
its author, whether a mortal sage in ages past or a spirit being. The text is
then ‘discovered’ in vision and meditation by a modern sage, and a new
scripture appears, with some of the stamp of ancientry upon it.
Grant
proposed viewing Lovecraft’s Necronomicon in just that way. He wrote of a dream
grimoire that might contain every sort of magic, etc. My own opinion is that
this is one of the few places where Lovecraftian ideas might mesh with occult
ideas without doing too much damage to either. That’s not to say I care much
for the results of various attempts. We’ll talk next about the Forbidden Books
of Yog-Sothothery.
3 comments:
You might be interested in this...
Peter Lavenda of the "Simon" necronomicon has a new book out:
The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic
Link below:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0892542071/ref=s9_newr_bw_d0_g14_ir01?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-4&pf_rd_r=0137E8ED630F49D1A75F&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1401488422&pf_rd_i=283155
Pre-ordered and waiting. I'm gonna go ahead and write my notions before I read it...
I scored a full set of HPL paperbacks off a head stall at Phun City free concert at Worthing, in 1970 was it? Never heard of him before but fell instantly into the "angles" visions, and the old-time New England background. Of course, the R'lyeh universe with the pyramid-shaped denizens rang many bells too. Great blog, mate
signed, another IanC
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