 |
| A missionary depiction of native peoples. |
Much
of the ‘horror’ in Lovecraft rather depends on being a prig, and on the
prurience of prigs. Brought up in a household of late-nineteenth century
‘genteel’ women, along with his equally antique Grandfather, Lovecraft took up
the language of anthropological popularization and Christian-missionary
potboilers (get it?). When he wanted to frighten with a cult ritual he
described it as ‘unspeakable’ or ‘abhorrent’. These were often literary
code-words for sexually embarrassing details, or even simply for the terrible
moral shock of realizing that other people worshipped gods that were not one’s
own.
However,
this has the happy effect of leading readers of Lovecraft to fill in the blanks
with our own imaginations. In this the Victorian mind had no shortage of
scandalous material. Modern writers, in attempting to capture HPL’s flavor,
have occasionally resorted to graphic depiction. It is seldom as effective as
Lovecraft’s indefinite adjectives. However the modern bar for ‘shocking’ is set
so high in comparison to HPL’s day that his writing style describes weird
events in a way that is, to moderns, more intriguing than repulsive. Those of
us who have found what society forbids to often be where the good lies may be
actively drawn to an effort to figure out just what the Yuggoth he was beating around the bush about.
Once
again, I want to go back to Lovecrafts’ stories. While I will finally arrive at
discussing modern attempts at real occultism in the Mythos mental setting I
want to begin by detailing the original material. I’m afraid that’s how this
giant series happened – I want to review modern HPL occultism, but need to get
the context straight for the reader and, of course, for myself.
Lovecraft
never ‘studied’ the occult, certainly never practiced, but it is plain that he
read various popular books on the subject. The list seems to include The Witch-cult In Western Europe by
Margaret Murray; The Book of Ceremonial
Magic, By AE Waite (a surname Lovecraft included in his writing, good
Anglo-American thing that it is); The
Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, by Scott Elliott, and various other
Theosophical material. The Book of Dzyan, Madame Blavatsky’s
own fake pre-human scripture, becomes one of the madness-inducing forbidden
books of the Cthulhu Mythos – one of the few direct lifts from
real-world
occultism. Interestingly Lovecraft never seems to have gotten the names of the
classic European grimoires into his head. One never reads of the Clavicles of
Solomon, or of dreaded Honorius’ forbidden book.
 |
| A popular Solomonic talisman |
The
details of ritual magic were not as easy to locate in HPL’s time as they are
today and, unlike cult activity, they were not the regular topic of newspaper
articles. Lovecraft had no interest in occultism as such, and never made the
effort to locate the obscure materials. On the other hand he considered himself
an ‘Antiquarian’, and anything in suggestive Latin caught his eye. He plainly did
read the accounts of the witch trials and various witch-hunters’ manuals, such
as Saducismus Triumphatus and
Daemonolatreia, appear in his mixtures of real and fictional
scholarship. From these he clearly gathered ideas such as intercourse with
monstrous devils, pacts with demons, and the witch’s familiar. His personal
image of magic was also shaped by the Arabian Nights and, of course, by his own
reading in the previous generation of gothic writers, such as Arthur Machen and
Algernon Blackwood. If HPL has a source for western ceremonial magic I think it
is mainly in his imitation of that generation, several of whom had personal
contact with the Golden Dawn.
Lovecraft’s
ritual depictions do owe more to sensational press and popular literature than
to occult teachings. For instance we never see examples of the sort of basic
spellcraft that is the majority of the working mage’s art. HPL was concerned
with cosmic things. Opening gates between dimensions, ancient Pagan cults,
commerce with monsters – these interested him; love-spells, not so much.
 |
| Books of sorcery confiscated in modern Iran |
Let
us look at some traditional occult intentions and methods in HPL’s stories.
• Summoning, and
Illicit Worship
The
central occult gimmick of Mythos stories is the congress between humans and
various non-human species. This is certainly the idea that has most directly
influenced modern occultism, but HPL’s direct depictions of it are sketchy at
best.
In
Lovecraft’s writing the beings summoned by sorcerers are not, for the most
part, ‘spirits’. They are not (generally) immaterial beings forming
vaguely-perceptible bodies out of smoke or wind or fire. Much more commonly
they are material beings dwelling secretly on the Earth, while the Great Old
Ones are transdimensional aliens whose forms are not determined by the laws of
this cosmos.
One
of the ways Lovecraftian sorcerers work is to make contact with the secret
races of monsters that share the world with humankind. In Shadow Over Innsmouth
we see Deep Ones summoned to the surface of the sea from their secret city
beneath the Atlantic. This is one of the places where HPL mentions
Walpurgisnacht and Hallowe’en. Old Captain Marsh rows out to Devil’s Reef,
drops some cult objects from the ‘Indies’ into the water while ‘howling
incantations’, and up come the fishmen.
The
same tale tells of the establishment of regular worship of the Deep One’s
undersea gods – probably ‘Father Dagon and Mother Hydra’ in the town of
Innsmouth. The cult sets up house in a former masonic temple but we see no
depiction of their rituals. Hints in the tale might lead us to imagine a new
England meeting house, which can only lead to imagining what the sermons might
have been like. Particularly horrifying if one finds that one of the best parts
of cult life is the lack of homilies in ritual.
The
Dunwich Horror provides what amounts to the iconic examples of Lovecraftian
summoning rituals and cult activity. The tale describes the Whateley family of
the Dunwich Mass district. We hear little of the ‘two centuries of Whateleys’
before him, but find the patriarch of the family – called ‘Wizard Whateley’ by
the neighborhood - having inherited a collection of tattered occult tomes, and
maintaining the cult of the Great Old Ones.
In
this HPL lifts several images from his occult reading. Throughout the story
events occur on the traditional dates of the ‘Witches sabbath’ – Halloween and
Walpurgisnacht, of course, but in Dunwich also on Candlemas and Lamas. The cult
meets on ‘sentinel hill’, a strange remnant of standing stones atop a round New
England hilltop.
The
passages from the diary of Wilbur Whateley (the youngster being raised inside
the cult) give us the most complete look that we have into the mind of a
worshipper of the Outer Gods.
“Today learned
the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from
the hill and not from the air.”
Here
we see an example of HPL’s lack of occult understanding. “Sabaoth’ is a Hebrew
divine name, frquestly used in medieval magic. Lovecraft mistakes it for an
antique spelling of ‘sabbath’. That aside, the Whateleys are plainly
trafficking with more than one kind of entity, those who answer both from ‘the
hills’ and from ‘the air’.
“Grandfather
kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at
the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off,
if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it.”
Here
Lovecraft may be imitating eastern ritual styles. He implies a repetitious
incantation like the mantras of Indic sorcery. The spell described produces
visions of the secret lairs of the Old Ones, the placement at the poles again
suggesting the HPL had been doing his occult reading.
• Temple and
Shrine
Mythos
magic takes the form of religion and ,later, of science. Depictions of ritual
spaces are plainly religious – circles of stones, Groves built around monoliths
and fire-pits, converted churches. When we see a solitary magician’s temple, in
Charles Dexter Ward, it is a monumental construction of arches and pits, with “a circle of pillars grouped like the
monoliths of Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in
the centre; …”
 |
| Old J Curwen and occult items by J McKittrick |
In
“Dreams” we see hints of the rites of the witch Keziah Mason. She works in an
outdoor temple on a river island, but keeps an attic workroom in the town. That
room contains what turn out to be a small altar and kneeler. Once again HPL’s
understanding of ritual is more New England than grimoire. We see a ‘magic
circle’ in Charles Dexter Ward, but not in either Witch House or Dunwich.
Lovecraft doesn’t seem to have integrated the idea, though he does suggest
occult notae in the forms of Keziah Mason’s interdimensional gates.
The
advice seems to be to go monumental – to find, especially, the ruins of a
forgotten race or to raise a ritual space worthy of one. Keziah’s Outdoor
temple was a ring of stones on an ‘ill-regarded island’ in the Miskatonic
river. The Whateley cult worked ritual atop Sentinel Hill, in a ring of stones.
Joseph Curwen’s temple was cathedral in scale.
Another
example of this principle can be seen in The Haunter of the Dark. Here, once
again, we see a common American church transformed into a cult temple. Set in
the heart of Providence itself, the shunned building house the Starry Wisdom
sect – a name that has echoed through modern occultism.
The
church is decades abandoned when we see it, dusty, but left untouched by the
fearfully superstitious neighbors. The investigator finds a library of Mythos
books, a meeting room not much different from any New England church, and a
more private ritual chamber on a floor above:
 |
| St. John's church, Providence, model for the Starry Wisdom church. |
In the centre of
the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four feet in
height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely
incised, and wholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal
box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its
interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped
or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in
a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while
behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images
of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the
cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island.
Again
even in an urban, indoor environment the sought-for atmosphere is of looming
giants and monumental powers.
• The Sabbath
Lovecraft
adopted the notion of the Witch’s Sabbat from medieval folklore. His cultists
attend group rituals held on the famous Sabbat dates – especially
Walpurgisnacht (the Night of April 30th).
These rites are characterized by wild behavior, violence, murder and the
interaction of humans with non-human races. All of these motifs are plainly
taken from the medieval fantasy of the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’
“They from the
air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth,
and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the
angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr.”
Here
we see that strange goal of the cult, to “clear off the Earth”. Elsewhere in the same story we have the
longest quote from the Necronomicon in all of HPL’s writing. It tells us that
the earth once belonged to the GOO, and that they expect it to belong to them
again. Young Wilbur muses:
“I wonder how I
shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He
that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of
outside to work on.”
In
“The Thing On the Doorstep’ (which we’ll see again…) the Waite family attends
secret festivals in the “wilds of Main”, which Lovecraft associates with the
“Chesuncook witch-cult”. Unfortunately we never see this cult in any detail,
but the gatherings involve mind-bending contacts with the old Ones and their
spawn.
We
are able to peer a little into the cultists’ world in the very early Mythos
tale “The Festival’. A descendant
of a cultist family returns to his crumbling new England seaport town of
Kingsport to attend the traditional Yuletide gathering. He is led on what seems
a series of hallucinatory journeys into alien sights and finally a strange
underground ritual.
“…that unhallowed Erebus of titan
toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a
semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and
fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise
beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. … adore the
sick pillar of
flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the
viscous vegetation … something amorphously squatted far away from the light,
piping noisomely on a flute; ... But what frightened me most was that flaming
column; … casting no shadows as healthy flame should,...”
 |
| The Sabbat is a busy place... looks like the line gets long. |
The
tale ends with one of the few long quotes Lovecraft writes for the
Necronomicon:
"The
nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming
of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground
where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held
by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no
wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For
it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of
corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to
vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where
earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to
crawl."
There
is one other direct depiction of Cthulhu-cult ritual, in “The Call of Cthulhu”. A Louisiana
police inspector and his raiders approach a bayou ritual setting. This was a
common enough chessy-horror trope in HPL’s day, but in his hands it goes in a
strange direction.
“Animal
fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by
howls and squawking ecstacies... Now and then … would rise in sing-song chant
that hideous phrase or ritual:
"Ph'nglui
mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
“
“On this now
leaped and twisted a horde of human abnormality ... Void of clothing, this
hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous
ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in
the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height;
on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven
statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with
the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred
bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle
that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, … between the ring of bodies
and the ring of fire.”
Unfortunately
for those hoping to find workable occultism in HPL’s work this is as close as
we come to depiction of cult ritual. There are no examples of individual
rituals for summoning the Great Old Ones. However, that changes a little when
we get to the business of summoning the Dead.
• Necromancy,
and the prolongation of life
In
“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” we find bits of
ritual magic mixed with alchemical tropes. We meet the colonial-era alchemist
Joseph Curwen, newly arrived in Providence “from Salem”, and his descendant the
eponymous Ward. Curwen was known as a seeker of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, but
also feared for “certain sounds which they insisted came from the Curwen place
in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained howlings…”. Despite
his unsavory reputation Curwen marries among the Providence gentry.
We see one of HPL’s classic book-lists in Curwen’s library: “Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition,
the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber Investigationis, and Artephius's Key of
Wisdom all were there; with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of
Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetsner's edition,
Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius's De
Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were
represented in profusion, and Mr.
Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a
fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in
truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” Of course
every one of the books (or at least authors)
apart from the ol’ Nec is quite findable by the diligent bibliophile.
In
time we discover that Curwen has been trying to perfect a means of raising the
Dead by rendering their corpses into ‘essential saltes’. These physical essences
can then produce restored bodies through the application of proper ritual. The
sorcerer begins importing the stolen corpses of ancient magicians seeking to
learn ever-greater secrets. His activities at last draw the ire of the town,
and he is harried out of his house. His underground dens and laboratories are
discovered but not destroyed, only to be rediscovered by Curwen’s descendant
Ward.
We see that Curwen is part of a network of wizards, several of which are
interested in his efforts. We see correspondence between them, one example of
which includes what may be Lovecraft’s most influential quote in modern magic: “I say to you againe, doe not call up Any
that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up
Somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask
of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande more
than you.”
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen a variant of this quoted as if it
came from an actual occult source, I’d have a pile of nickels.
Curwen
and his associates are depicted as participating in the New England witch cult
that we have seen before. They convoke and attend the sabbat and participate
together in their alchemical experiments. Alongside chemistry they discuss
their ritual work.
One
of the few descriptions of a solitary Mythos ritual is worth quoting at length.
It seems to be the closest we get to the rite by which the ‘saltes’ are made to
rise into form. It mixes traditional occult language with Lovecraft’s invented
barbarous words:
“…young
Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same
time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire
house … This had been going on for two hours … when over all the neighbourhood
a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in…. overshadowed by the odour which
instantly followed it; … there came a very perceptible flash like that of
lightning, … and then was heard the voice … an archaic and forgotten language:
'DIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS.'
…
Charles was chanting again now … syllables that sounded like 'Yi nash Yog Sothoth
he lgeb throdag' - ending in a 'Yah!' whose maniacal force mounted in an
ear-splitting crescendo.”
HPL seems to
have enjoyed the notion of barbarous languages, and sounds barely
reproducible by mortals. In this tale we find a two-fold incantation in what
is often called R’lyehan. The first charm
is called ‘Dragon’s Head’ and the second ‘Dragon’s Tail’, after the
two astrological symbols.
|
The
first brings form out of the saltes, and the second destroys that form. This entire section is certainly the most
overt display of solitary Mythos ritual material in the entire canon.
This theme in CoCDW conceals what HPL clearly means to be the greater horror –
the efforts by Mythos sorcerers to prolong their own life at the expense of
that of another.
HPL’s fascination with the prolongation of life begins with his first published
story, written as a teenager, The Alchemist. In that tale
we see a noble family cursed by an ‘alchemist’. It ends with the revelation
that the alchemist himself has haunted the family, living by his potion-granted
immortality.
“'Fool!' he shrieked, 'Can you not guess
my secret? ... Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? … I
tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my
revenge, for I am Charles Le Sorcier!'”
We
have looked at The Thing On the Doorstep previously. In it the sorcerer Ephraim
Waite prolongs his life by inhabiting the bodies of his descendants, and then
of others as required. Unfortunately we see little of the specifics of that
process. The young husband is taken into the Mythos witch-cult by Ephraim’s
daughter. We hear that the ‘wizard’ (as HPL often says) “…found it in the
Necronomicon - the formula. I don't dare tell you the page yet, but when I do
you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on,
on, on - body to body to body - he means never to die.”
We
learn a little more of that formula in Charles Dexter Ward. There we see the
sorcerer Curwen preparing for “ye Way of
get'g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up
YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao
in ye ------. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye
Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire,
and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's
Eue; and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.
And of ye Seede
of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what he seekes.”
Curwen intends to send an enchantment into the future, to cause a descendant to
restore him to life.
• Oneiromancy,
and the Exploration of Other Worlds
One
of the core goals of occult story and practice is the vision of other worlds,
and even the ability to travel to them. Lovecraft mines this vein in some
detail.
 |
| A really excellent Dreamlands map. |
A
series of Lovecraft’s early stories is set in the Dreamlands, a semi-real
locale metaphysically adjacent to our world. Those with skill at dreaming may
find the Gate of Deeper Slumber and enter into a realm very like the fantasy
realms of the popular stories of Lovecraft’s day. Strange cities with names
like Ulthar and Sarnoth teem with thieves, artisans and magicians. Human
dreamers come and go, but some remain, even passing from life in our world to
life in that other place. In this we see one of the few happy outcomes HPL imagined
for his characters.
The
Dreamlands also contain nightmares including various of the Great Old Ones,
such as Nyarlathotep and Azathoth. The Night-Gaunts dwell there, and ghouls
cross between the tunnels of the Dreamworld and those beneath our own graveyards
and charnel houses.
In “Dreams In The Witch House” we find a crossover between dream travel and
material journeying. Young Walter Gilman rents the old witch’s room, and so
comes to her attention. He discovers her papers and notes, and is astonished
that the angles and calculations of her occult diagrams express certain ideas
in non-Euclidian geometry. Soon his dreams begin to produce physical
souveniers, and it becomes clear that the strange witch’s diagrams are in fact
gates that allow material travel into other worlds. The line between
interplanetary wonders, inter-dimensional danger and big Black Men of the
Sabbat becomes quite indistinct, as befits a tale about dreams.
Finally,
in Lovecraft’s last published tale, “The Whisperer In Darkness” we return to
the notion of backwoods cultists preserving forgotten ways. However here Lovecraft
is turning more and more toward a science fiction model, and the strange,
unearthly beings with whom the human cultists make pact are in fact quite
material aliens, using at least partially material science.
“Whisperer”
is the most overt combination of science fiction and occult adventure tropes in
Lovecraft’s writing. The rustics of Vermont are actually worshipping the
material aliens called, confusingly, the Old Ones. In exchange the aliens give
them stories and visions of the interstellar heavens, and occasionally provide
real experiences of them. The method used to produce those experiences is more
surgical than sorcerous.
“This
material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard
from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarized, it
hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the
remoter hills...”
The glimpses of ritual depicted are merely snippets
of liturgical repetition, chanted group-ritual phrases.
• Talismans and
Eldritch Images.
Lovecraft
grew up in the golden age of archeological discovery. Every month some strange
new eidolon from the ancient world appeared, revealing a facet of cults
previously unknown. Religions from the east had arrived in North America,
bringing enlivened idols and talismans more exotic than the scapulars of the
Roman Church.
Lovecraft
begins using this trope immediately in his writing, in “The Hound”. The two
grave-robbing adventurers discover a sorcerer’s talisman, and off we go. In
“The Terrible Old Man” we are shown hints of a necromantic practice by which
spirits are trapped in bottles, each containing a pendulum which the spirit can
swing to tap the side of the bottle, allowing a degree of communication. This
is one of HPL’s creepier occult gimmicks, one worthy of imitation, if not of
actual performance.
 |
| More McKittrick The Coffer of old Cap'n Marsh |
In
Call of Cthulhu, again, we find special talismans that are thrown into the sea
to summon the Deep Ones to make deals. Even the presence of an inspired image
of Cthulhu, unconsecrated by any ritual, participates in the scary power of the
Old One. In general images of the Old Ones are perilously close to presences of
the Old Ones, an attitude that Lovecraft could as easily have gotten from the
anti-Catholic superstitions of Protestant Christianity as from any occult
source.
The
crowning example of a Mythos talisman might be the Shining Trapezohedron, from
the ‘Haunter of the Dark’ series that HPL wrote along with the young Robert
Bloch. In that tale the young writer “Robert Blake” returns to his providence
home and sets up in a garret with a marvelous window-view of the city that HPL
so loved. He becomes fascinated with a dark old church and, researching its
history, discovers it to be the site of dark cult activity in recent times.
Visiting the ruined church he discovers a typical trove of mythos books, and a
stone talisman called the “Shining Trapezohedron”, which summons the central
monster of the tale. The cult and talisman are connected the the GOO
Nyarlathotep, though in one of his inhuman manifestations. This Mythos prop
seems to have caught the imagination of Anton Lavey, who made his ‘Satanic’
altar a trapezoid. This in turn inspired various other neo-Satanist symbolism,
and the ‘trapezoid’, which has no traditional occult connotation, is a common
Satanic image. Undoubtedly it is too complex to build a trapezohedron out of
plywood.
Lovecraft’s
depiction of the business of occultism is based primarily on newspaper sensationalism and horror clichés, buttressed by readings in medieval
superstition and a small amount of reading in real occult and magical material.
Mythos magic is plainly religious in form, involving offerings to and praise of
mighty entities, and the use of their powers and minions. Some of these
religionists seem to be mere cultists, seduced by the wild orgies and intense
experiences, others are in the mold of wizards, real seekers after the secrets
of the world. The former tend to be mere food-stockpiles. The latter sometimes
obtain power for a time, but usually end up in some state that Lovecraft’s
materialist metaphysic intends to be a tortured Hell.
 |
| And blessings of the season! |
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