Cthulhu Mythos Occultism 2 - The Old Man's Library

Part 3: The Old Man’s Library 

Chronologically the next big intrusion of HPL’s ideas into the real world was the publication of two books bearing the now-famous name of Necronomicon.

First let me mention a third book of that title, the collection of biomechanical horror art of Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger. Giger’s reverence for HPL shows through in his disturbing themes of vanishing humanity and repurposed flesh, but there is little real occult content in his powerful work. Nevertheless his work has been imitated by many would-be-scary occultists. We can also note in passing the science-fiction-fandom hoax perpetrated by L. Sprague DeCamp and others, in which twenty or so pages of phony mid-eastern script are repeated, a few dozen times, published as the ‘Duriac’ manuscript of Al Azif.

The Necronomicon was devised by HPL as a prop for his tales. Lovecraft would build realism in his tales by mixing details of real-world scholarship and events with descriptions of the fantastic elements of his fictional universe. So his protagonists might find a library that contains Cotton Mather, Eliphas Levi and Margaret Murray, but also fictional authors such as Von Junst and Prinn. Other writers of the Lovecraft literary circle played along, and they freely employed one another’s inventions, giving a cross-over that added to the illusion of reality. De Vermis Mysteriis, the Cultes Des Ghoules, the ungrammatical  Unaussprechlichen Culten were created by Robert Bloch (who later authored Psycho) and Robert Howard (Conan). The image of the ancient book of dangerous lore is central to the mythos stereotype.

None of these secondary mythos titles has ever had a serious treatment in occult writing. There are various internet files floating around, mere tens of pages long, that amount to nothing of value either to occultism or to the mythos. In truth none of the secondary works have much development in the stories, usually serving as mere props.

The Necronomicon was the centerpiece of this prop-set. Lovecraft had grown up a precocious reader, with the library of his prosperous grandfather. The Arabian Nights was his delight, and he describes himself at six, draped in a curtain-cape and towel-turban, sweeping through the house proclaiming himself ‘Abdul Al Hazred’, a name derived from one of his family names, ‘Hazard’.

He would later use that name for his fictional author, the mad Yemeni poet Abdul AlHazred, who wandered the remnant of the ancient world in the days of the rise of the Prophet. The collection of tales, secrets and lore alHazred composed was first called ‘Al Azif’, an Arabic term referring to the nocturnal noises of insects, or demons. Lovecraft composed a short history essay later, in an effort to collect his random mentions of the prop. He describes its translation into Greek, it’s banning by the Church, underground survival into Latin translation and finally into English by the famous (and very historical) wizard Dr. John Dee. HPL’s tying of his book to Dr Dee may have done more than anything else to keep the Necronomicon a buzzword in English-speaking occultism.

Lovecraft’s description of the nature and contents of the Necronomicon changed as his writing progressed. The origin of the name has been much discussed. It seems obvious to me that Lovecraft based it on the names of several ancient books, most notably the Astronomicon of Marcus Manilius. Lovecraft had been an avid amateur astronomer from his youth and was surely acquainted with the star-lore poem from ancient Rome. While the title would most plainly be translated as 'Book of the Dead' this fact should not lead the reader to assume that the Necronomicon is related in any way to the Egyptian or Tibetan texts intended to guide the souls of the newly dead through the afterlife. It was a cool word that HPL said may have come to him in a dream, grown from his reading in the lore of the classical world.

Excellent Hound artifact by
Jason McKittrick

Early descriptions of the Necronomicon make it a sort of gothic-horror Herodotus, a description of the thousand wonders of the world, with a special emphasis on the vilest cults, most ancient demons and most forgotten histories. The first appearance of the Necronomicon in print is in the short tale “The Hound”. In it, the two tomb robbers have just found the fateful item:

Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.

The story goes that when Lovecraft was writing his New York story “The Horror At Red Hook”, in 1925, he realized that he hadn’t the slightest idea what an occult incantation might sound like. He was forced to resort to the Encyclopedia Britannica and used a well-known invocation of Hecate. Noting his ignorance, he asked his friends for references, and they pointed him toward both Blavatsky and to Waite’s 1913 Book of Ceremonial Magic. Lovecraft’s discovery of the grimoires brought about an immediate change in his description of the Necronomicon. It now includes instruction in magic, geometrical figures, and powerful incantations. In 1928, in The Dunwich Horror, the family of cultists is seeking to find a better copy than their own tattered manuscript, so that they can learn the proper incantation to open the gates to their interdimensional god.

So how cool does that sound? If you’re a geek like me, as I know so many of you are, you just Want One Of Those!

Of course LaVey had already come close. The decision to produce the paperback of his Satanic Bible 1969 as a clean black book with a tasteful sigil of Baphomet on the cover gave it the feel of a cult book. That resonated immediately with Lovecraftian stuff, even before the second volume, The Satanic Rituals 1972, which contained an attempt at a Lovecraftian ritual drama. LaVey certainly appreciated the Mythos aesthetic. Even his decision to appropriate the Enochian Keys has always seemed to me an effort to import the sort of inhuman speech used in the stories by Mythos Cultists. Laey’s interest in the mythos led to later occult effort by the Temple of Set, to  which we’ll be getting  in time.

Two commercial publications called Necronomicon appeared in the late 1970s, within a year of one another. Though I had watched the overblown promotions for the  other version in contemporary occult prublications, the first to appear at my local bookstore was the so-called Hay Necronomicon, published in 1978. It is plainly a hoax and makes little effort to be anything else. It was an effort that included novelist and occult journalist Colin Wilson along with occultist Robert Turner. The publication includes a fun essay by a fictional professor, a bewildering ‘explanation’ of how the text was allegedly deciphered from one of Dr Dee’s coded manuscripts, and some tens of pages of Necronomicon text. The text does a reasonable job of generating some of the atmosphere of Lovecraft, but makes no real effort to provide a workable occult system.

• Simon’s Book

The most significant single publication in Cthulhu occultism is certainly the other Necronomicon to be published at that time. The Necronomicon published bySchlangekraft Publishing in 1977 was an effort by members of the New York magical scene, centered at Herman Slater’s witchcraft shop The Magical Child. The story has been told in some detail elsewhere, but the book was published with the editor’s name given as ‘Simon’, and the book is often called the ‘Simon Necronomicon’.



I think this is actually the second edition
cover. The first was more plain, like the
current big hardback.

A stranger book than the plain literary joke of the Hay effort, the Simon Necronomicon claims to be a translation of a manuscript stolen from eastern European libraries in the mid-seventies and transmitted to NYC by those who hoped to sell it. Not knowing what they had it wound up in the hands of occultists, and was translated, edited and published. No slight evidence for any of this has ever been produced, though the still-pseudonymous Simon has published a detailed apologia for it as the book “Dead Names”. It remains a typical Lovecraftian backstory attached to what is fairly plainly a piece of modern work.

The book purports to be a grimoire of a system of magic based on the gods and myths of ancient Babylon and Sumeria. No such survival occurs in historic magical literature, but setting the book’s system in the oldest literate records of magic is intended to give the feel of antiquity that Lovecraft sought. It also allows the authors to draw parallels between Lovecraft’s fictional mythos and a historical system that does have some similarity to HPL's ideas.

The core notions of the Cthulhu Mythos were initially based on Lovecraft’s early reading into ancient mythology and history. He combines a hint of fallen angel with a large scoop of forgotten and forbidden gods. He invents a prehistory for earth that involves various waves of invading super-beings, ruled by even-superer-beings who may or may not be material in any ordinary way. In the modern-day 1920s settings of his tales the Great Old Ones are sleeping, or locked away from the waking world to some degree. This is described as the result of changes in cosmic conditions- the “stars are not right” and so the Old Ones “cannot live”. Several tales include a theme of mortal mages picking the lock or jostling the sleeping elbow of these great powers, usually resulting in messy death for many. The sleep of the Old Ones doesn’t mean that their cults, agents and monstrous servitor races aren’t still lively, of course.

The basics of HPL’s tales were reinterpreted (many say misinterpreted) by his primary inheritor, August Derleth. Derleth both collected Lovecraft’s writings into the first hardback volumes and wrote a large body of pastiche fiction, extending the Mythos in his own direction. In Derleth’s hand the GOO became more plainly parties in a cosmic war. They are the ‘evil’ side, opposed by various forces of light and order. In Derleth’s Mythos the GOO have been imprisoned by the deliberate effort of their opponents, defeated in battle and cast down.It is that version of the Mythos that is imitated in the Simon Necronomicon.



Tiamat as depicted in later Babylon. She's a girl.

The Simon Nec ( as I must abbreviate…) is based on the core mythology of Babylon. Most notably the story called the Enuma Elish describes how the primal monsters of the universe desired to end the ceaseless noise and activity of life, and were defeated by the heroes of the young Gods, who established the order in which the world lives. Along the way humanity is invented as slaves for the Gods.

The Enuma Elish, and in fact the entire civilization of Sumer and its inheritors was new in HPL’s day. It was a part of the round of modern scientific discovery that always provided his themes. The world was being revealed to Europeans as far older than the Rome that had been understood as ‘ancient’, and a history of humanity stretching far enough back to topple facile biblical history was itself a major theme of HPL’s mythos.

Here is a point upon which I wish to be very clear. The Simon Nec's equation of the beings and ideas of the Cthulhu Mythos with the religion of ancient Sumer is just a modern pose. Lovecraft did not draw his gods and demons from any specific occult or mythic tradition, and was not attempting to display any specific cosmology. He wrote his stories using a loose notebook of themes and ideas, stealing from Egypt, Babylon, the Classical world and even from Native American lore when he could find something to latch onto. Once in a while he would make some effort to bind it all together, but none of that was ever done seriously or systematically.

The Simon Nec takes the Enuma Elish and other bits and pieces of Sumerian and Babylonian lore, edits them to have a vague resemblance to the Cthulhu Mythos, and uses them to pretend to be an 8th century AD grimoire retaining the half-remembered ancient lore of the lost cults. However the rites presented are mainly meant to be worked by a solitary magician, not a group.

The book begins with a sequence of planetary-magic rituals, centered on seven Gates which the magician must pass in order to gain the knowledge and alliances of that planetary sphere. Each of the classical planets are associated with Sumerian gods, and a sigil is provided for each. Each is then given a Gate sigil – a fairly complex depiction of a doorway which is to be drawn on the ground. The rites are worked and the magician expects to meet the spirit guardian of the gate and be given a personal Word to serve as the password of the Gate. These rites empower the magician for the rest of the system, and short support chapters give details of the rites of the Gates.

Real Sumerian divine fella, but you can see why fans
might get confused. Those are rays of fire, not tentacles...

In this we see a theme plainly present in Mythos stories – the opening of gates between the mortal world and the world of ancient powers. It is, however fair to say that the majority of the Simon book has no ‘Typhonian’ or ‘Satanic’ context. The flavor text hints at the existence of cults of Tiamat worshippers, but no instructions are such a thing are provided. Considerable space is given to spells and charms for the destruction of such cultists. (Those must never have been translated by Lovecraft’s protagonists, because very little efficacious magic against the GOO is usually available.) It is a plain work of invocation of cosmic divine powers, for the good of the magician and his folk. Certainly it would all have been demonic to and forbidden by either the Muslim or Byzantine authorities, and it is from such legalities that the idea of ‘forbidden books’arises. However in a modern context the central ritual magic system of the Simon Nec is far from transgressive or unorthodox.

It is typical of ancient magic that after the aid of divine powers has been acquired that aid is used to gain control of more dangerous spirits who actually do the work in the world. These latter are often called ‘demons’, but their moral qualities vary widely. In the Simon Nec the  grimoiric ‘phone-book’ of spirits is filled with the Fifty Names of Marduk. I’m uncertain of the scholastic provenance of those (Most of the book hits maybe 70% on scholastic resemblance to historical sources) but as a Pagan looking for quires of daemons to summon via Pagan gods, this is rather a good job. Once again, no effort is made to make these fifty spirits particularly fearsome, though there are plenty with powers of attack and destruction. They generally run the usual gamut of magical intentions, from wealth to love to attack and defense.

The Fifty Names of Marduk have been a successful contribution to modern occult practice. A separate publication, The Necronomicon Spellbook, offers a simple technique for using the seals and spirits without having accomplished the Gatewalking. While the original book doesn’t seem to permit this, the subsequent secondary grimoires was surely written by the same people, so we can consider it ‘orthodox’. In any case the Fifty Names have gotten legs among spellcasters and people working with ‘results magic’ as the fashion has it today.



The Gods defeat Tiamat

Following The Gates and the Fifty Names, the content of the last sections becomes darker. The author’s edit of the Babylonian mythic poem Enuma Elish is presented, telling the story of the casting down of the powers of Elder Chaos by the gods of human order. To the traditional material is added various Cthulhu Mythos prop language, none of it supportable by scholarship, as well as material from the much later Chaldean Oracles. Since the pretended history of the book makes it an eighth-century, half-remembered remnant of forgotten cults this is understandable, though it hasn’t really very much to do with Lovecraft’s ideas.

It is obvious to me that all this owes at least as much to Kenneth Grant as to HP Lovecraft. Grant became focused on the idea of an archaic cult of a Dragon-Mother, drawing on theories of ancient matriarchy as well as relatively recently translated Sumerian material. He drew the parallel between that material and Lovecraft’s notions of pre-human races and gods. The mythic pastiche in the Simon Nec is just the plain manifestation of the hints in Grant’s work. To be fair, the Sumerian material was very new in HPL’s times, and may well have attracted his attention, though I don’t think he mentions it specifically.

A final short chapter provides a skeletal body of lore about actual demons and monsters of the system. The Urilia Text (the meaningless name is an effort to evoke ‘The R’lyeh Text’ one of the mythos books) describes the rudiments of a ritual of summoning. I think that all the incantations and small rites called for in this outline are available in the book, but they are scattered. A short list of ancient plague demons and monsters is then given. Here the authors are free to let their Lovecraftian imaginations run a little more free. Nasty smelly demons mix with vague hints of even stranger things, and twisted reflections of the names of Lovecraftian spirits and beings are invented. In general the tone remains one of summoning for practical goals, and no ‘worship’ of these monsters is proposed.



Pazuzu, a plague demon
who turns up in
the Simon Necronomicon

The Simon Necronomicon is certainly the most successful document of Lovecraftian occultism. The Gate Walking techniques have garnered considerable attention, and the Fifty Names as re-worked in the Necronomicon Spellbook get wide distribution. Perhaps most importantly the book has set a number of earnestmodern occultists on the road to Babylon and Sumer. Much more attention is being paid to real scholastic sources, the leftover weirdness of the taint of Lovecraft still providing a cool frisson.

Personally, I have always said that if ‘Simon’ had chosen to call his book something else then it might have been taken even more seriously as the pastiche or reconstruction it attempts to be. The link with Lovecraft, however, has surely sold more books, including the hilarious drugstore paperback Necronomicon that should have heralded the end of our puny civilization…

Sorry…

Lovecraft certainly didn’t mean for the Mythos to be particularly about Babylon or Sumer, and the Simon Necronomicon is only barely about the Cthulhu Mythos. It will remain influential in popular occultism for the foreseeable future.

Next time back to Lovecraft himself, and a look at the Nameless Cults of the Mythos

On to part 3...

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week: The Dwale

Some years ago I crafted a fake Lovecraftian Grimoire called the Dwale of Avagddu, writing the content and creating a big fake-evil book. The book was made easily enough, by composing the pages, having the book hot-glue-strip bound at a neighborhood print-shop, aging the pages and then pasting all into a case ripped from a full-size sketch-book and sculpted with paper clay. My kinda pointless fun...

I'm very pleased that the Manager over at the Propnomicon blog (who I recently added to my blog roll over on the right hand side of your screen) likes the item enough to post the photos I sent.

Thanks!

Necronomicons Aplenty

A Review of the Donald Tyson Necronomicon Material

Thanks to the work of occultist Donald Tyson in recent years, there is a much longer list of items with ‘Necronomicon’ branded across them than previously. Unlike several of the previous efforts, Tyson’s items are not presented as hoaxes, or provided with spooky back-stories about vanished manuscripts or forgotten traditions. Instead Tyson plainly says that he has taken the forms and tropes of HP Lovecraft’s fictional mythos and used them both to write new occult fiction and in an effort to create usable occult methods. At least, that’s where he has ended up. The earlier efforts in the series are much more plainly horror tales, using real occult history and ideas to present images of the kind of ‘forbidden rites’ that HPL only hints at.

Donald Tyson is a thoughtful and experienced occultist. He is producing valuable scholastic work in his editions of Agrippa, and his pop magic titles are often unique and interesting, firmly founded on classic magical art. He has also shown a real streak of interest in the macabre, in his publication of the remarkable oddity ‘Liber Lilith’. One would hope to see some interesting and useful occult weirdness in Tyson’s take on Yog-Sothothery. Does he succeed? Sort of.
There are five items in Tyson’s Mythos material:
• Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred
This was the first, and still my favorite, of the lot. The whole idea of ‘the Llewellyn Necronomicon’ was just too funny in the first place, but seeing Tyson’s name on it gave me some hope. In this case I wasn’t disappointed.

Lovecraft’s description of the Necronomicon changed over the course of his tales. His original imagining seems to have placed it as a kind of combination of a book of wonder-tales (if dark and evil wonder-tales) a la the Arabian Nights, and a travelogue and description account rather like Herodotus. In this case the difference between Alhazred (Lovecraft’s fictitious author) and Herodotus is that the Mad Arab finds the Hideous Reality behind the apparent myths and customs of mortals – the material that becomes the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. Later, as Lovecraft investigated a little actual occultism, the descriptions started to resemble the medieval grimoires. Most of the fakes and hoaxes called the Necronomicon have focused on the grimoire version, providing lists of gods and spirits, texts of rites and conjurings, etc.

Tyson’s Necronomicon harks back to the earlier version. He opens with a straight narrative, presented as Abdul Alhazred’s account of his youth, his fate and his subsequent wanderings across the early-medieval middle eastern world. He plainly and directly uses Mythos names and descriptions, referring directly to Leng, R’lyeh, Yuggoth, Cthulhu etc. He ases the Middle Eastern settings well, introducing the ‘ghuls’ as combined Arabic and Lovecraftian beings, and taking us beneath the pyramids for some tasty sorcery. Throughout the text are sprinkled bits of arcane lore and ritual, sigils, signs and incantations, including Tyson’s take on just what an Elder Sign might be.

Tyson also begins as he intends to continue, presenting the core of the cults of the Great Old Ones as a kind of anti-cosmic Gnosticism. In this interpretation, the GOO represent the return of the universe (or the ‘world’) to its pre-manifest state, an end to suffering and joy, to filth and pomp. This is scary (cosmic-aly horrific, in fact) to ‘normal’ awareness, which can only perceive the destruction of the body and the mind. The cosmic devourers come to return all to the stomach of eternity… spooky, kids…

This has been covered in a very sophisticated way by biblical scholar and leader of the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts Robert M. Price, and by author Richard L Tierny. (Do read Drums of Chaos, for the best depiction of Jesus as Wilbur Whateley ever…). In my opinion Tyson manages nothing so interesting. He will spend the next books developing this theme, to, I’m sorry to say, little effect.
However I did enjoy the atmosphere and imagination of this book. Tyson does have a feel for Lovecraft, and for the nasty end of sorcery. I found myself experiencing several real chills through his images and ideas. For this and for its clear difference from any other Necronomicon pastiche, I give this volume pretty high marks.
• Alhazred: Author of the Necronomicon
This book is an expansion of elements of the narrative in the Necronomicon. Unlike that book, which pretends to be Lovecraft’s famous book, this is plainly a novel. As far as I can tell it is material that Tyson found himself inspired to write having completed his first book in the series. In general there’s simply too much of it, and not enough plot. There are various attempts at ‘wonder stories’ and horror vignettes, but it just doesn’t succeed half as well as the first book, which is half as long.
• The Necronomicon Tarot

Tyson is a learned occultist, and while he has never written extensively on the tarot, he certainly knows his way around. In this deck he applies recent tarot motifs to the Mythos, with mixed results.
The kit is pretty nice. Sturdy box that holds the items well, deck, book and weird-ish veil bag. As usual, Llewellyn’s art and production standards are high.
However I wasn’t satisfied by the art itself. It’s certainly well-executed, with full-color paintings for each card.
In general I think the art has a rushed feel to it, with less detail than one might hope for. The frames and backs of the cards have some nice, detailed work – too bad they didn’t give the artist time for the same in the images themselves. As it is, the art in general isn’t as good as a good Mythos card-game card. In fact I was most reminded of the illustrations in a role-playing manual, which disappointed me. A Mythos tarot is a chance to show the Lovecraftian figures in a hieratic, occulty mode, and that’s lost entirely here.
As you might expect, I agree with some of Tyson’s attributions of the mythos figures to the trumps, and disagree with others. In order to get 22 images, Tyson draws on the quasi-Egyptian-Babylonian setting of his Necronomicon, and specific new monsters/gods from those books. So we find Bast and Amun, and the Beast of Babylon. Some trumps become chances for some pretty cool Mythos illos – such as the Lovers as a marriage between a Deep One and his human bride, or Strength as a battle between a flying crinoid Elder Thing and a rebellious shoggoth. Others simply fail to achieve any hint of Lovecraftian cosmic scariness, like Azathoth as a fat lumpy flute-player for the Fool. Some images are incomprehensible without the context of the earlier book, such as the ‘Well of the Seraph’ for the Hanged Man. Of course some exposition is provided in the hefty book that comes in the set.

Allow me to just be annoyed at Cthulhu as ‘the Devil’, and that without even a nod to the form of the original card. The Dreaming One could have looked cool squatting like Baphomet, one arm up, one down, with a deep one and a human chained at his feet. But no…

The suit cards are arranged to tell a Mythos type tale as they proceed. Wands are a tale of ill-fated Atlantean commerce with the Deep Ones. Cups are an Egyptian tale of love and the gods. Swords tell a Middle-Eastern tale of violence and plotting, and Disks display sorcerers and magicians in a tale of necromancy (along with Tyson’s version of the Elder Sign). These are all moderately successful, and produce images that mostly support the traditional interpretations of the cards.

All in all this is a nice piece of occult Lovecraftiana. As a tarot deck, I think it’s too off-kilter to be of much use for divination, and just wouldn’t do meditations or other occult work with these symbols. Like the whole series apart from the first book, I think it fails to be either spooky or disturbing enough to capture Lovecraft’s essence, but Mythos fans will enjoy some of it.

• The Grimoire of the NecronomiconThe series began with two plainly fictional treatments. The tarot then crosses between fictional work and traditional occultism. Here Tyson undertakes a book of formal ritual based on Mythos tropes.

We talked about the Mythos as Gnosticism, and here we see it fully employed. The introduction proclaims, in the voice of Tyson’s Mythos cultist, “…the great work of the Old Ones (is) the cleansing of this world that will alone restore her purity, and allow her elevation back to her former high estate, from which she fell into this pit, where she is ceaselessly defiled by life.” This is, to me, just the sort of scary-weird idea that informs some kinds of world spirituality. In the hands of some systems, like the aghoris of India, it gets pretty spooky indeed. Unfortunately Tyson then runs, it seems, up against Llewellyn’s editorial policies. He simply can’t recommend the eating of hallucinogenic spiders or the use of corpses in worship and magic in a Llewellyn practical book, and is forced to fall back into much more prosaic symbols.

Like several occultists before him, Tyson attempts to fit the Great Old Ones (affectionately called the GOO) into the pattern of the seven classical planets. This is how he arranges it:
Azathoth: Sun
Nyarlathotep: Mercury
Yig: Saturn
Shub-Nigurath: Venus
Cthulhu: Mars
Dagon (and Hydra): Moon
Yog-Sothoth: This should leave Jupiter for ol’ Yog, but the text mentions Caput and Cauda Draconis, along with the sun, again. However in the later rites given for the days of the week Yog-Sothoth is worked on Thursday, so that’s clearly what the author meant.

One of Tyson’s nicer innovations is the notion of the Twelve Idiot Gods who dance around Azathoth who, in his madness, has become the demiurge. These he attributes to the zodiacal signs, providing names and sigils allowing them to be summoned for practical magical work.

In fact sigils and arcane glyphs are provided for all the GOO and other beings. For these Tyson uses the glyph system that he teaches in his book “Familiar Spirits”. Each English letter is represented by a simple geometric form, and the letters of the spirit’s name are then arranged to create glyphs and sigils. This all works pretty well, although the very straight-line art used in the text robs the glyphs of any sense of creepiness.

Tyson makes an effort to make the ritual system seem unique. The temple is a seven-station circle, with each planet and GOO arranges with a ‘standing stone’ and its ritual symbol. The oddest part are seven metal ‘keys’ – simple geometric shapes made of iron or brass that are struck on the stones to produce invocatory tones. The book goes so far as to propose the form and structure of a magical “Order of the Old Ones” no doubt in an attempt to capture some of the ‘strange cults’ element of the Mythos.

The actual ritual work, after plenty of build-up, is pretty slight. There is a seven-day round of rites to invoke and offer to the GOO. There is also rather an odd section giving advice for working with each of the Old Ones. Amusingly, Tyson claims to provide the Long Chant, the invocation to open the Gates of Yog-Sothoth which was sought by Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror”. He has constructed an Enochian incantation with content based on his Gnostic ideas that might be sufficiently spooky given a nicely established atmosphere.

The Grimoire of the Necronomicon just doesn’t have the requisite atmosphere to be very interesting in a Cthulhu Mythos context. I can only hope that the spiritual ideas in it don’t get traction among occultists, since I find the ‘darkly shining world’ to be much more holy and interesting than some imagined pleroma. If these books ever get a re-edit, it would be cool to see the first volume bound together with this one, creating a Necronomicon that covers all the Lovecraftian bases.

• The Gates of the Necronomicon: A Workbook of MagicIn the process of doing all this Lovecraftian writing, we must assume that Tyson read a lot of HPL, and a lot about HPL. In this volume he dumps his files, providing lists and descriptions of Mythos gods and monsters, human characters, earthly places and fictional/mythic locales. Each category gets a pretty detailed treatment, and Tyson has plainly both read extensively and thought geekishly deeply about each one. All of this is set into a vague ritual and symbolic format of thirteen gates into an unnamed and suggestive Arabian city. Each gate is provided with a stellar correspondence, sigils and key symbols, but they only seem to open up into this cyclopedia of Cthulhu Mythos lore.

In my opinion this book has zero value to those working on a Mythos occultism. Fans of the mythos may find Tyson’s insights and descriptions useful, but the job has been done better, in my opinion, by Dan Harms.

So that’s the list. Does any of this amount to a serious contribution to occultism or Mythos literature? Maybe. The first volume is really a nice attempt to capture a certain atmosphere, but later books have a knock-off feel to them. The good news is that Tyson hasn’t stopped writing good pop occultism as well as doing useful occult scholarship .
Personally, I hope he gets HPL out of his system, and produces more of the sort of evocative occult horror of his Liber Lilith.

As a final preachment, I’d encourage even the geekiest fanboy occultist (and it doesn’t get much geekier than me…) not to waste their time with Cthulhu occultism. First of all, Chaos Magic doctrines aside, fiction is simply not the same thing as myth, and the two cannot be effectively interchanged, except for the most short-term and shallow goals. Secondly, while occultists can try their best to make something mystical and Gnostic out of HPL’s ideas (and they are his ideas, fictions invented by one man’s (or at most a few people’s) imagination) the system was never made coherent by lovecraft or his imitators. In fact there was a general agreement that it shouldn't be made coherent, but rather left indeterminate and vague. Thus, efforts to make it clear enough to actually do magic with are generally doomed to fail at capturing the Lovecraftian atmosphere. I suggest finding a real Mythos, and leaving Cthulhu and his lot in the land of entertainment, along with Tolkein's elves.

The Dunwich Horror Remake

Amazingly, the new Dunwich Horror flick, with Jeff Combs as Wilbur Whateley and Dean Stockwell as Henry Armitage is not only out, but it's premiering on the Syfy Channel this Sunday at 7pm!! "A new adaptation of the classic Lovecraft tale is set in Louisiana and tells the story of several scholars headed by Henry Armitage who discover the secret to destroying mysterious, other-worldly beings that threaten humankind. Jeff plays Wilbur Whateley, part of a strange, inbred family who with the help of the dreaded tome, The Necronomicon, helps unleash these beings on to the world."

This won't be perfect - it looks like the Necronomicon is the Simon book, and I doubt there's enough special effects money to do Wilbur's brother justice. Still, it's my single fave HPL tale, so I'm excited to see a new version.

How did this happen and me almost miss it?!? Only my diligent monitoring of the program guide on my dvr prevented a tragic miss on this one. I had blogged this early this year, but I was still expected 2010 release date. Weird to have it going direct to TV, but nice to have it coming out on my birthday : ).

Hope it doesn't suck...

Bloody Good Fun

Well, I haven't finished anything actually relevant for this blog, what with life, summer and all, but one reason I haven't was our trip across two counties to see Evil Dead - the Musical. Yes, that's right. A two-act hi-bleedin'-larious homage to Sam Raimi's classic horror-comedies. And I mean bleedin'. My totally good-sport wife and I were rained upon with the spurting blood of the various dismemberments, gun-shots and staggering headless and armless corpses. Fortunately we were wearing our handy $7 splatter-zone t-shirts, which we may never wash.

If you're as out of touch with pop culture as I know some of you are, you may have missed the 1981 classic blood-and-demon fest of The Evil Dead. Sam Raimi's first success (decades before Spiderman) was a pretty serious frightener, though you could see Raimi's sense of comic timing already working. It was also the premier film of Bruce Campbell, one of my favorite almost-a-leading-man actors. (See him old and grizzled in the cool spy TV thing Burn Notice).

In ED, five college-age friends head up to an old cabin in the woods for a weekend of booze and sex. There they discover that an Old Professor has found the Necronomicon and has awakened some Kandarian Demons. Hijinx ensue. If that sounds hackneyed just realize that Raimi did it first - lots of fanboys had their fist hearing of 'Necronomicon' in these flicks.

Evil Dead was made on a shoestring and made some money, which Raimi used to make Evil Dead 2 - a much more overt comedy, with Bruce Campbell in the first and still best Fight With Your Own Hand scene. The third flick (don't ask me how, just now) becomes a medieval fantasy, with Bruce's character, Ash, forced to brave the Army of Darkness to secure the Necronomicon.

The three movies are mashed up into the mere excuse of a plot in the musical comedy. The events of the first film are followed pretty closely, and some of the best stuff from the second film gets used. The third film mainly gives us some of the choice lines of Ash dialogue... "This is my boomstick!" But the story is really just an excuse for the musical numbers. It's all singing, all dancing as the kids and various other characters either become demons themselves or madly kill and dismember demons. The few remaining living people must save the world from the dancing demon revue, and of course they do, reciting the ancient Sumerian incantation after the climactic dance in which the demons reverence the Necronomicon in various popstar drag.

This little evening of theater had 400 performances in Canada, and has already had it's Cleveland run extended. Presented at the Beck Center, in Lakewood, we were in the Studio Theater, with about 120 seats. Good use was made of the little stage, with curtains to take us into the woods, etc, and the interior set of the cabin was nicely tricked out with special effects. All the singing voices were top-notch. I had gotten the soundtrack from the bigger Canadian production some time ago, and this local cast (with just one equity actor, as Ash) did the material nicely.

But it's the script and lyrics that keep the laughs coming. It's a cheek-buster, and even people who aren't geeked-out on the original movies will find plenty to laugh at. Totally profane, as well. Ash finds several occasions to exclaim 'fuckwaffle!'. If this comes near you, you should go out of your way to see it. A fine excuse to watch the flicks again first, too...

The Dunwich Horror - new film!

I'm all a-flutter over discovering that Lovecraft's story "The Dunwich Horror" (one of my very faves) is being remade as a movie! This version stars long-time HPL interpreter Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator, From Beyond, so much more...) as Wilbur Whately, as he searches for the Necronomicon so that he can bring the Old Ones through and clear off the earth, bark-bark, woof-woof...

The first flick of the DH was done by Roger Corman for TV, back in the day, and was pretty good for what it was. As another blogger has said the whole movie was worth seeing Sandra Dee writhing half-naked as Dean Stockwell chants to Yog Sothoth over her. Also very cool naked cultists, especially for 1968 on TV. Stockwell gets a part in the new movie as well.

No telling what they'll fiddle in the story, at least not yet. The story pretty much demands a look at the Necronomicon and some amount of ritual magic, so it'll have that going for it.
Here's a link to the first trailer:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7qasi_dunwich-horror-trailer_shortfilms