Pickman's Model

Regular readers will know that I'm an HP Lovecraft Hobbyist. Since my boyhood I have read the ongoing tales of the Necronomicon and the Great Old Ones, and the lesser-known monsters that began with the work of the Old Gent of Providence.

A couple of years ago I took a shot at narrating some of HPL's stories. This is my fave, based on one of my very favorite stories. I've set it up with thematic slides and some audio effects. It runs about 35 minutes. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Cthulhu Occultism, Pt 6 – Bad Advice; Three Steps to a Cultist Future.

Let me be frank. I don’t think it’s worth doing to try to make occult systems out of fictional paradigms. Lovecraft, Tolkein, Pratchett, Rice, whoever; no single author or even group of authors can construct stories with the depth and resonance of mythic tales that have been signaled down the line through thousands of human nervous systems. Thus I find the notion of creating seriously-intended occult systems from those authors essentially ludicrous, in the original sense. It is a game, a joke, an amusement – not to be done (or taken) seriously.

That being said, I do love games. In fact I enjoy Lovecraft games, including table-top role-play, board and card games. I’ve already turned my hand to producing a fake Lovecraftian grimoire. Called the “Dwale of Afagddu”, it purports to be a conflation of medieval Welsh lore with mythos sorcery, and it was a fun project. Designing a grimoire is easy when it doesn't have to mean anything.

Buy me!

In the experiments given therein I employ dream-induction, fear-stimulus and outdoor environments to seek the atmosphere of Lovecraftian magic. At the time that I wrote the material (late 90s, as I recall) I approached it piecemeal, with little effort at theory or internal consistency. To continue that sort of fun a little, I’ll try to distill what I see as core ideas in a career in Lovecraftian occultism. If you want to become one of the Hopefully Uneaten Elite, it’s as easy as one-two-three.

1: The Preparation of the Operator

The Lovecraftian sorcerer is often born into the cult, but equally often must discover their connection, behind the mask of the ‘normal’ family and life. By whatever means, the protagonist… er, magician must discover that there is a Secret Truth behind the veil of common opinion and industrial science.

That truth is frightening. Or is it? HPL lived at the end of the end of the age of consensual mythic faith in the Biblical narratives. Science and archeology were battering away at the older models, and even more modern science was battering away at 19^th century scientism and the doctrine of material progress. It is in the cracks in the belief system of the magician that the Great Old Ones make their presence felt.

There are two classic approaches to this problem in spirituality. The more common assumes that the human is basically living an animal life, following greed and lust and sloth as they please. It attempts to break through habits of daily survival by opening the mind and heart to empathy, widening he perspective from the personal to the communal, and opening to some symbol of ‘the Light’, usually understood as doctrinally-correct moral goodness.

The second method assumes that the adult human is a programmed social robot It sees us proceeding through our days with a set of ideas and opinions that provide acceptable ‘truth’ without being at all the whole truth, and often being simply false. It presents the Secret Wisdom to the common mind, and expects the containment jug of our inner certainty to break, spilling us out into unknown potentials.

It is the latter that Lovecraft exploits for his horror. His protagonists are usually either academics or artists. In artists we see a natural tendency to see past the norm, to allow imagination to be influenced by the thought-currents of the GOO. Academics usually find their way through discovery of facts, and the fitting of those facts together into a true picture of frightening reality.

So the Mythos wizard candidate is in a process of disintegration and reintegration (hopefully) from the outset. There’s plenty of occult mechanism out there for this process. Most commonly used by modern attempts at  occult Yog-Sothothery is antinomianism. The laws and moral strictures of society are thrown off, and the mind made soft and easily constrained through shock and horror. We see this in the great swampland sabbat in Call of Cthulhu. Old Castro recites the cult’s particular flavor of pie-in-the-sky:

“That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great 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 the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.”

In a society such as HPL’s, where a woman’s insistence on personal liberty could result in shock treatment or hysterectomy; where homosexuals were imprisoned and inter-racial sexuality resulted in sanctioned murder such teachings were, quite literally, madness.

Step One – Go A Little Mad.

2: Study and Conjuration

The usual response of a Lovecraftian acolyte to their sudden understanding that the world is not what it seems is to proceed right down the metaphorical stairs into the demon-haunted crypt in their psychological bathrobe. The unshakable aesthetic and intellectual pull of the new knowledge leads our student to plow through the material at hand. In the stories this phase may involve association with an existing cult group, or may happen purely by research in books and manuscripts.

This often allows some agent or presence of the GOO to get a hook into the target’s – er, student’s psyche. This usually results in either an obsessive pursuit of ritual actions - assembling the right stuff and finding the right words, etc – or a round of dreaming and dissociative psychological incidents. The would-be magician ought to aim or hope for the former – those led by the latter seldom end up in charge of their fates.

This phase is marked by withdrawal and hermitage. The student’s conversational habits may become unusual, their public interactions unpredictable. Common life may be neglected for hours of study of strange tomes, and construction of unusual implements and structures. Associations and friendships may alter - especially helpful is to discover a sexual partner who can further initiate one into the cult. While it is best if this is a human partner (survivability rate-wise) occasionally non-human lovers may be available. Dietary restrictions may apply.

This phase may result in a special moment of contact between the magician’s self-up-until-then and the object of the work.  Again in some cases the contact is with non-human races, but Yog Sothoth is the being most commonly conjured by Mythos witches and wizards, with Nyarlathotep his messenger and Azathoth the incomprehensible sovereign behind them. Those were the Gods of whom Great Cthulhu was priest, but perhaps I say too much… Once again those who actually become mythos mages achieve this phase consciously – many achieve it involuntarily, in the tales.

Step Two – Make a Deal with Alien Powers

3: Machinations

The scale of this varies in the tale, depending on the type of madness that afflicts the protagonist, and the ambition of the particular Alien Demon-God involved. Some tales reveal large-scale, world-remaking plans, while other cultists seem to desire only to rule their own little slice of the world, or become lunchroom attendants for their patrons.

In “The Terrible Old Man”, a small story in the Mythos scale, we might see what a 'successful’ Lovecraftian mage looks like.

“He is, in truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple.”

This local wizard has collected spirits (dodging spoilers for once) with whom he could speak, “addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis”. He has a reliable supply of gold, a sea-port house, and ample means of self-defense.

­We see that some Mythos wizards do achieve a sort of success. Obed Marsh establishes his cult in Innsmouth and lives to a very ripe old age among his cultists. Ephraim Waite (if that is the original entity involved) successfully passes on from body to body. Randolph Carter becomes a king in the Dreamlands. Keziah Mason achieves interdimensional immortality. Even old Wizard Whateley lived until his end with his family around him. If one is willing to take the first two steps, there can be a variety of third options open. Lovecraft relied on an element of moral horror, since all these feats were accomplished through murder, violation of corpses, unusual sexuality and breeding, and with the aid of monsters.


Really the rest is just rinse and repeat. Mythos Wizards bring various intentions to their work – extended lifespans, wealth, and personal influence are shown in the tales. Some cultists seem to have joined the efforts by the GOO to unlock Those Old Locks, and restore earth to the Old Ones. One cannot tell, in the stories, whether these cultists have merely been coerced by contact with alien minds, or have personally become convinced that the return of the GOO would be some kind of good or benefit to them.

Step 3: Try to Take Over the World.

The astute occultist reader will notice a certain resemblance of this three-fold plot-sequence to the real psychological stages of the student of  magic. In our materialist culture to develop an ear for the spirits is to go a little mad, and immersion in unusual projects and parent-puzzling activities is as common  now as it was for Charles Dexter Ward. While few real-world occultists attempt to allow their patrons to rule the world, many attempt to gain personal rulership of their lives, and extension of consciousness into strange and challenging worlds.

Perhaps this is why Lovecraft remains so interesting and inciting to experimental occultists. Not only does he grasp the aesthetic feel of medieval sorcery and ancient demon-cults (in fact he helped to invent it in modern horror) but he seems to grasp with an artist’s feel the process of learning occult skills. Perhaps it was his life-long fascination with the ever-more-wondrous apocalypses of the science of his day.  Lovecraft himself seems to have longed to peer behind the veil of common reality, seemed to realize that the common conceptual position of the people of his time was ripe to be broken like an egg. The secret knowledge that Lovecraft sought was scientific, but he knew that even that had been ‘forbidden’ not too many centuries before. The unveiling of the hidden – of the occult – part of the world was Lovecraft’s delight, and the delight of the Mythos sorcerers of his tales, if not of their hapless descendents.

This brings my theoretical examination of occult themes in Lovecraft’s writing to a close. I hope these reflections (which have been great fun to write), will be of some use to occultists drawn to HPL’s themes and characters. Going forward I may take a look at the premise that HPL’s monsters and fictional deities might have some legitimate correspondence with world mythic systems, and attempt to deconstruct Lovecraft  Qabala. However next I will list and review what I know of the modern literature of Lovecraftian occultism. There are a number of texts, of various qualities. We’ll see how long it takes.

I assume that my personal opinion on the value of attempting a Lovecraftian occult practice is clear. In general I see little value in attempts to build practices on *any* fictional symbol-system. Lovecraft’s system has no more connection to traditional magic and occultism than does the Buffyverse or Middle Earth. If I were choosing a fictional paradigm for my magic, and despite my life-long love for horror and dark-sorcery literature, I would not choose a Lovecraftian one, nor advise anyone whose goal is wholeness and happiness to do so.

Fun stuff, though.

Next time I launch, at last, a review of modern occult literature that attempts to use Lovecraft's material. It's not all bad ; ).

Please Don’t Read Aloud; Cthulhu Occultism Part 5: Ritual and Magic in Lovecraft

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

A popular Solomonic talisman

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.

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

The Sabbat is a busy place...
looks like the line gets long.

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 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!

on to Pt 6

Cthulhu Occultism Pt 3: What's A Nameless Cult When It's Home?

So, this 'essay' on HPL and the occult is taking a long time. I'm over ten thousand words with no signs of stopping. Rather than delay posts here, I"m going to post one installment under this topic monthly or so, and do other stuff as well. Other stuff in the pipe. This series *will* end up with a fairly comprehensive review of modern Cthulhu Occultism publications etc, but that's still a while off. Hope you enjoy this. I am certainly enjoying writing it, so if you don't enjoy it, you can feel good for me : ).

A central horror gimmick of the Cthulhu Mythos is often the survival of the worship of dangerous and eldritch beings as outlaw cults. These cults may be limited to human worshippers but often come to include members of the several non-human races which also serve the GOO. Some stories are mere bad luck in which a hapless protagonist meets an indescribable horror. The tales that influence the occult world are those about the conscious use of Mythos magic and/or science I want to spend some time in this article examining the places where Lovecraft’s stories actually meet traditional occult practices.

However it is perhaps equally important to examine a pop-cultural source of HPL’s ideas. One remarkable bit of history is what might be called America’s first ‘Satanic Panic’. Many readers will remember the Satanic Panic of the late 20^th century. Beginning in the late 1980s, media and some law-enforcement groups became convinced by the propaganda of conservative Christians who claimed that underground cults of Satanists were regularly sacrificing babies, housepets and grown-ups in a regular cycle of ritual worship of their demon-gods. As clichéd and unlikely as this seems, the media was busy selling the notion, from occasional trumped-up news stories to a wave of horror entertainment. Simon’s book was an occasional player in all that, but not as common as old Anton’s.

The whole business was the usual sort of mob-fear, Fighting The Evil Enemy sort of nonsense, supported by occasional fake witnesses. The counseling community became complicit. Many progressive, feminist therapists bought into the now-discredited notion of ‘repressed memory’ and used half-baked hypnotic techniques to support their assumption that sexual abuse was as common as hugging in patriarchal homes. Many young people were led to generate ‘memories’ of abuse, which wounded families and produced occasional Police flurries.

Here in Ohio I recall, back in the late 1980s, the county sheriffs over in the North-west corner of the state digging up a couple of fields on a tip that they would be filled with the corpses of sacrifices. Toledo had a deserved reputation as a source of witchery in Ohio, but it was modern witchery – no baby sacrifices. The blustering sheriffs and their backhoes found not a dolly for their trouble. That was, in general, how the whole wave of panic ended. Serious police investigations produced no evidence of generational Satanist cults, no caches of bodies or bones were ever discovered, no kidnappings or disappearances were found relating to claims of Satanic cult activity. (We’ll leave aside Scientology and/or folks like the Krishnas – they aren’t part of ‘the occult’.) The FBI closed its investigation on ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ in 1992, concluding that nothing had ever been going on. 

What surprised me in my reading is that this had happened before, beginning back in the very decade central to HPL’s career. In the 1920s the new theories of Margaret Murray pointed at the idea that ancient religions had survived in secret into relativley modern times, preserving their atavistic rites and practices, including human sacrifice and ‘unspeakable’ sexual rites. (Lovecraft wrote in the vocabulary of missionary jungle adventures, in which the unclad dances and fertility symbols of traditional religions were ‘unspeakable’ or ‘abhorrent’.)

It is possible that the times actually saw a rise in criminal cult activity, (The KKK was rising, for instance) and real occultism, in the form of Thelema and possibly proto-neo-witchcraft was thriving, but one could say the same, and draw the same conclusions looking at selected newspapers from the 1980s. More likely the Satanic Panic of the 1920s and 30s was a literary and ideological spasm. If so it is fair to say that HPL played a role in it.

It must just be that cults are scary. Stories of dangerous conspiracies of magically-powered beings go back into the mists of history, long before Christianity reframed them into God and Satan. Criminal conspiracy is scary in itself, implying that paranoiac notion that nearly anyone could be an agent of evil. Ally human malefactors with non-material beings who can strike in secret, or with powerful material monsters with their own resources and abilities, and you begin to get a sense of what whole villages may have felt like under the spell of medieval anti-witch preaching. You also get a sense of what a Lovecraftian protagonist comes to feel as he realizes that he Knows Too Much, and has come to the attention of Certain Others.

So we can locate Lovecraft’s horror writing firmly in the headlines and cultural fears of his time. He needn’t have drawn on sources more arcane than New England newspapers to have a head filled with satanic cults and human sacrifices. Of course HPL was bored to waking death by Satan, Jesus, etc. To him the authors of the Bible, the grimoires, even AlHazred himself were primitive screw-heads unable to separate the realities of the multi-dimensional cosmos from their cultural tales and symbols. His characters might begin with such notions in their heads, or they might develop some mythic explanation for the strange phenomena they begin to experience. In the end it is always some manifest power capable of material destruction (at least) that they meet at in the deep places hidden behind myth.

We’ve covered the forbidden books with which the cultists transmit their ideas. Now let’s have a look at Lovecraft’s ideas of nameless and unwholesome cults. While the monsters of popular gothic fiction were discarded by Lovecraft (he never wrote a vampire, or werewolf) he was fascinated by the notion of human contact with non-human intelligence. He drew freely upon the European witch hunts, and the lore of medieval witch hysterics, mentioning various books of church demonology in his book-lists. In the same way he remained interested in the lore of Other races of beings, both material and dwelling on the edges of the real. We’ll deal with those below.

From the very first depictions of the Necronomicon HPL’s horror involved the unwilling or unprepared contact between the human mind and alien or daemonic intelligences. The temptation is to refer to these beings as ‘demonic’; they are seldom pretty, often hungry for human flesh or minds, and either relatively or vastly more powerful than the humans they deal with. However Lovecraft always depicted them as outside of any human notions of good and evil. The material races had material motives – sex, cheap labor and food. The Great Old Ones had no agenda that could be comprehended or co-opted by humans. They would answer human calls, made the right way, but could seldom be effectively compelled according to the magician’s will. Cultists who hoped to gain some personal good were almost always disappointed.

Often an initial contact with one of these alien minds was enough to short-circuit the free will of the protagonist. Lovecraftian horror often depicts the conscious mind of the victim, puzzled and frightened, as the mounting influence of some entity leads them into a creepy finish. It is actually less frequent for this to arise from willed occult or cult activity than from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even being from the wrong family.

Lovecraft begins depicting cults of the Great Old Ones as early as 1923, in “The Festival”, putting him quite in time with the sensational news stories of his day. In that surreal, dream-like narrative he depicts the worship of the Old Ones in a tiny New England seaport town. This was in keeping with the 1920s stereotype of degenerate backwoods Satanism. It is also the first time that HPL depicts the Necronomicon as a kind of scripture or holy book, rather than simply a scholastic oddity.

Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and … suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an inner world- a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and wasled by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean… Fainting and gasping, I looked at 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; …

However the next cult tale, “The Horror at Red Hook”  moves the action to New York City, with the degeneracy moved from Lovecraft’s favorite anglo hillbillies to the teeming masses of Mediterranean immigrants that filled his New York living experience.  Lovecraft’s New York City year, and the year following his return to Providence, were the most creative and productive of his short career.  Many of the most influential uses of the construct mythos appeared in stories of that time. It also marks the most ‘occult’ period of his writing, before it began to turn toward a more science-fiction avenue.

The paradigmatic tale of the Cthulhu Mythos is “The Call of Cthulhu”. In this long and complex tale Lovecraft lays out several of the central mythos notions. The protagonist receives a bundle of scholastic materials from his uncle, who has recently been killed under obscure circumstances. The story then unfolds as the young man investigates each of his uncle’s files in turn.

In ‘Call’ we discover one of the primary ways in which the imprisoned or unloving deities of the mythos reach out to mortals. Great Cthulhu, the minor Old One who lies dead in his prison-tomb beneath the sea, still dreams, and his dreams send waves of images, ideas and impulses into the mortal world. These images inspire weird artists like Lovecraft and his circle to produce sculpture, poetry, painting and, undoubtedly, ritual. In less refined subjects the impulse-waves of the Dreaming God produce crime and violence, and encourage savagery in those already involved in the cult.

As is often discussed in Lovecraft studies, the Old Gent held traditional New England views about race, especially early in his career. While maturity moderated his views he still employed traditional stereotypes when describing a Louisiana cult that mingled ‘voodoo’ with the worship of Cthulhu.
“In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. 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, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.”
‘Call of Cthulhu’ depicts the tentacles of the cults of the Great Old Ones as penetrating every corner of the human world. What is not carried by secret inheritance or initiatory lineage is re-kindled by the direct psychic impulse of the Old Ones themselves. In this way the cult is never merely theological, not about ‘belief’. The cults of Cthulhu happen to their worshippers, not by them.

My personal favorite occult-Lovecraft tale is The Dunwich Horror. In this ripped-from-the-headlines thriller an isolated family of cultists is busy pursuing their goal of bringing the Great Old Ones back into the world. They have a little land in the hills of Massachusetts, and have maintained a fingerhold grip on literacy in English, Latin and Greek, that allow them to utilize the family collection of moldering books, including an incomplete and damaged copy of the Necronomicon. The family Magus succeeds in certain unwholesome works, to no particular benefit. ‘Dunwich’ is one of the few HPL tales in which occult power is successfully used against the GOO, though luck seems to have played a role in the outcome of the tale as well. We will return to Dunwich in other categories here, but in any case the Whateley cult makes a direct pact with one of the Old Ones, the enigmatic but apparently-horny Yog-Sothoth.

It is in ‘Dunwich’ that we get the clearest glimpse into the mind of an offspring of a mythos cultist. We are shown a page of Wilbur Whateley’s diary:

“Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not 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. 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. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. 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.

The tale in which Lovecraft makes the most direct use of the ‘pact with the devil’ motif is “Dreams in the Witch House.”   In that tale our protagonist moves into a crumbling rooming house in Lovecraft’s fictional town of Arkham, which was once the home of famous mythos witch Keziah Mason. Mason never appears as a speaking character in the tale, but becomes a psychopomp who leads the hero through the visions and dreams of the title. Along the way the hero is enticed, and eventually summoned, to come to an alien sort of witches’ Sabbath, and there to sign his name in the Black Book of Pacts. The story makes it clear that this is part of the witch-cult, a shadowy New England version of a mythos cult that participates in older European images of diabolism and Satanic worship. 

Nevertheless the witches conjure by the names of the GOO, with the central place of horror occupied by Lovecraft’s ‘demon sultan’ Azathoth. This figure is based on Lovecraft’s Lord Dunsany period, and is always left undefined and chaotic, surrounded by an eternal revel of toads and demons. In joining this revel, the human witches participate in the usual newspaper evils – child-sacrifice, sexual unconventionality and forbidden worship. The Black Man of the European witches’ Sabbath also appears, one of the masks of the Great Old One called Nyarlathotep. Finally we meet one of Lovecraft’s spookiest small inventions, the little demon that serves the witch as a familiar. ‘Brown Jenkin’ is a rat with the face and hands of a human, recalling one of the core ideas of the European witch-hunts.

We see Lovecraft’s witch-cult again in the story “The Thing On the Doorstep”. Here we find another family lineage of cultists, the Waites. Set once again in ‘witch-haunted Arkham’, the tale centers on a student at Lovecraft’s fictitious Miskatonic University. A young poet meets the daughter of this family, and becomes entangled in the cult, eventually calling upon the story’s protagonist for rescue.
“I had to save myself - I had to, Dan! She'd have got me for good at Hallowmass - they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched things. She'd have got me for good…  I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I've been in it up to my neck, but that's the end. Today I'd burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic... My brain! My brain! God, Dan - it's tugging - from beyond - knocking - clawing - that she-devil - even now - Ephraim - Kamog! Kamog! - The pit of the shoggoths - Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!...  The flame - the flame - beyond body, beyond life - in the earth - oh, God!"

The New England cults of the Great Old Ones lead us to another Lovecraftian tale. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” concerns the importation of a Cult of ocean demons from the South Pacific to New England via a greedy whaling captain and his crew.

“Wal, Sir, Obed he 'larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about - an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. lt seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return… Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed was'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice every year - May-Eve an' Hallawe'en - reg'lar as cud be… Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? … Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons - fellers as used to he sailors - wear them queer robes an' cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?"

The cult that becomes the town religion of Innsmouth Mass is centered around the local fraternal order, The Esoteric Order of Dagon. This name continues to recur in modern occultism, as well as Lovecraft fandom used by various groups at various times. The several families of Innsmouth turn up in various Lovecraftian tales, usually still keeping their cult, or exploring even stranger and less wholesome avenues of secret knowledge. The Innsmouth tale is essentially more a biological horror than a spiritual one, yet it provides one of the few examples of public, organized worship of the GOO.

Another is found in “The Haunter of the Dark” This late tale (one of HPL’s last) tells of an occult writer and historian’s investigation of an obscure Providence sect in the 1870s. Lovecraft draws on his knowledge of Providence to recast an abandoned Catholic church on the side of the hill as the Starry Wisdom Church:

“There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that the Italian priest warned everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood…

There had been a bad sect there in the old days- an outlaw sect that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it.”

We never see any of the Starry Wisdom’s ritual, but we learn that they made pact with the Great old One called Nyarlathotep, and we watch the results of modern meddling with their remains. The tale suggests that mythos cults occasionally make it onto the street-corners.

While the wild revels of the witch-cult interested Lovecraft he was always fascinated with the figure of the self-driven investigator into the secrets of nature and of un-nature. The solitary magus in his secret laboratory gets the full treatment in the novella “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” We’ll return to this tale when we discuss necromancy in Lovecraft. For now let’s point out that the solitary wizard at the center of Lovecraft’s tale of colonial sorcery, Joseph Curwen, is part of a network of occult practitioners who serve the Old Ones even as they seek their personal goals. In Curwen’s correspondence with his co-conspirators we encounter a turn of phrase which has become something of a by-word in modern occult circles.

I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe what was told to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of ------, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. 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.

In this tale we don’t see cult activity so much as a network of individual practitioners, however they salute one another in the names of the GOO and are clearly involved in some way in cult activity.

In Lovecraft’s horror cosmos, magic is accomplished almost entirely with the aid of various interdimensional beings, from cosmic impersonalities and ruling daemon-gods to more local spirits and monsters, to fully intelligent non-human races who share the earth with humans and who also worship the Old Ones. Cult activity is a process of contacting these unhuman beings, gaining their aid (or surrendering one’s will to theirs) and then either working one’s will in the world or slowly dissolving into the Other existence.

While Lovecraft made every effort to dress his cult activity in exotic clothes, creating totally unique deities, monsters and props, he drew on standard thriller tropes for his notions of ritual activity. Circles, chants, sigils, arcane languages and alphabets, and sexual deviance all are recast in mythos terms. In this way HPL achieves a verisimilitude for his hints at Cthulhu Mythos occultism that makes it ripe for imitation. However we are never shown any fully-depicted ritual or practice.

We can cobble together some sense of what the cultists of the Great Old Ones thought that they were doing. Contact with the hidden realities of existence – the true beings lurking behind the masks of common religion, mythology and even science – produces unique mental states. Human minds are turned away from common things, directed toward cosmic mysteries that render merely human society negligible, laughable and even contemptible. 

The unwilling recruit in Dreams In The Witch House feels his gaze magnetized to the heavens – his eyes following certain star-clusters across the sky even when they are invisible in daylight. This is surely a metaphor for the sense of cosmic wonder that lies within all of Lovecraft’s horror. To enter into the secret knowledge of the Old Ones is to learn the secrets of reality – which have the most likely effect, in Lovecraft’s equally pessimistic horror, of driving mortals mad.

Mythos cultists are invariably insane, to some degree or kind. Contact with alien minds leads to alienation, and retreats to lonely basements, woodland redoubts and slum-hidden studios is the norm. Sometimes an alpha type will rise to lead a public outreach, sometimes a family patriarch or matriarch will forge pacts that determine the fate of generations. The question of what they hope to gain remains.

The GOO seem to have one clear agenda – to return and rule where they have ruled in the past. The question for the human cultist is whether and how they will be allowed to exist in the New Order that the Return will bring. Walter Gilman is offered the kind of immortal, interdimensional existence that the witch Keziah seems to have, and his rejection of it leads to his common death instead. The sailors of old Ephraim Waite’s ship became rich for a while, and watched strange things happen to their children. Some of them will survive Dagon’s rise. 

As always we see most clearly into the mind of a cultist through the diaries of young Wilbur Whateley, last mortal scion of that line of hillbilly wizards:

“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.”

Wilbur hopes to shed, at last, his semblance of humanity and dwell among the horrific wonders of the rule of the Great Old Ones.

If I were to summarize the ‘hope’ that the cult of the GOO offers it would be that. The Return is inevitable – the stars will turn again, the bonds will be broken, the sleepers will wake. The only choices that humans have are to struggle to postpone that Return until after their deaths, to be cattle for the shepherds when the Return comes, or to join with the monsters, hoping to shed merely mortal form and law for a new form, and a new law, under the Court of Azathoth.

Fhtagn, dude… but not forever.

Next time we’ll approach from another angle and have a look at just what Cthulhu Mythos ritual and magic looks like.

On to Part 4