“This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations…”

– William S. Burroughs (Cities of the Red Night, 1981)

Part 3 of 5 in a series on Lovecraft and magic.

The fictional book Nameless Cults by the German occultist Von Junzt first appeared in Robert E. Howard’s tales “Children of the Night” (Weird Tales, April/May 1931) and “The Black Stone” (WT, November 1931). August Derleth later gave this book the creepy sounding German name Unaussprechlichen Kulten and H.P. Lovecraft used it in several stories as well. In addition to Nameless Cults, the authors of the Lovecraft Circle wove several other grimoires or guides to magic into their stories. The Lovecraft Circle is a group of authors that foremost included HPL, Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as up-and-comer Robert Bloch who later authored Psycho. They exchanged letters with Lovecraft regularly and engaged in a form of early fan fiction, referring to things from each other’s writing in their own works. Although shared glosses of fictional magic tomes don’t appear in all their tales, they still tend to be a defining feature. Others include Bloch’s De Vermis Mysteriis, Smith’s Book of Eibon or Liber Ivonis, and most famously, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. 

The use of fictional grimoires like Nameless Cults in stories by multiple authors with references to real books, like Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, lends them a strange sense of realism, as though they really exist. The Necronomicon has become the classic example of a grimoire in weird pulp fiction, inspiring publications by Simon and others claiming to be the real Necronomicon, as well as the Evil Dead films starring Bruce Campbell and their spinoff, the Ash vs. Evil Dead TV series from Starz.

Howard was prolific and wrote in nearly every genre in his short career. As you’ll see, Nameless Cults was an interesting way of tying his sword & sorcery tales to his weird horror stories.

Like so many other things, Lovecraft said he first encountered the Necronomicon in a dream and translated the title as “the image of the law of the dead,” which is a good summation of a grimoire. Historical grimoires are replete with demonized versions of the gods of dead civilizations, with procedures for dealing effectively, if not always safely, with these spirits according to the rules or laws governing those interactions. One example is the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar who, by way of Ashtoreth and Astarte, has become Astaroth in the annals of black magic. If mine is a reasonable interpretation of Lovecraft’s translation of the title it probably applies to all grimoires. Real or fictional, all are, in a sense, images of the law of the dead like the Necronomicon. In addition to fictional grimoires, in Manly Wade Wellman’s stories of Silver John, John carries and reads from a real Pennsylvania Dutch book of magic, the Long Lost Friend. This book is still used by Hoodoos and others today.

Nameless cults get their guidebook

Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults is first introduced in The Black Stone (Weird Tales, April/May 1931). Also known as the Black Book, Nameless Cults is said to have been published in 1839 just before the author died in “a grisly and mysterious fashion” from a “hounding doom.” Historically, black book is a common term for a grimoire. For instance, the Swedish term svartebok (black book) is an alternative term for grimoire, and the Danish equivalent is sortebog. Another common name for these works is Cyprianus, “a book attributed to the patron saint of occultists and necromancers,” St. Cyprian (Gårdbäck 2015: 17). Nameless Cults is said to be a popular book with collectors, with only a few copies of the original heavy black-bound volume remaining throughout the world. Many owners are reputed to have destroyed their copies upon learning the fate of its author.

Howard provides an interesting but brief biographical passage on Von Junzt, who is said to have:

…spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt dared put in print arouses uneasy speculations as to what it was that he dared not tell.

– Howard (1931a)

This is remarkably close to what real occultists have frequently done. For reference, grimoire translator/commentator Joseph Peterson maintains an online trove of historic grimoires, The Esoteric Archives. Another is Stephen Skinner, whose 40+ published books include Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, the Archidoxes of Magic by Paracelsus, several books by famed occultists Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley that have become collector’s items themselves, and a leather bound edition of True & Faithful Relation of what passed between Dr John Dee…and some Spirits about the Elizabethan mage John Dee (Skinner n.d.). Dee’s magical gear for conjuring angels like those in the book of Enoch is preserved in the British museum.

The hermeneutic circle

Like Von Junzt, historically authors of magic books have often been members of “secret” societies like the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis (now less secret or occulted and easily found on the internet and social media) whose members practice ceremonial magic. It’s also common for grimoires to hide the nature and meaning of some of their contents with “blinds,” deliberate deceptions that may appear obvious to experienced practitioners who are in the know. Of course, sometimes the authors of grimoires were just sloppy and published books full of errors, but other times seeming mistakes are intentional.

In such blinds, knowledge or instructions for spell work is often broken up throughout a volume and can only be recovered and used through careful study or (sometimes paid) instruction from the author. This among other things led the philosopher Paul Ricouer to advance the concept of the “hermeneutic circle,” or the manner in which certain books or forms of discourse, like oracles, can be understood only in reference to their parts, and the parts only by reference to the whole (Mantzavinos 2016). No individual piece of information is very useful until the full work is familiar to the user, and the information within grimoires is intentionally occulted by their authors. Ricouer’s hermeneutic circle has become useful to anthropologists in studying foreign cultures whose concepts may not be readily translated into English, and make the best sense only after careful study of the native language and the experience of living and working in the culture. Remarkably, in this way books of magic have provided a way of understanding culture and even how humans understand one another.

Nevertheless, Von Junzt is said to have come to a bad end “with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat.” After this untimely finish, his colleague Alexis Ladeau died under similarly mysterious circumstances, burning the remaining fragments of Von Junzt’s writing to ashes and then slitting his own throat (Howard 1931a).

Later in the “The Black Stone,” the story’s narrator muses in shock over the “Keys to Outer Doors” that are hinted at in Nameless Cults, keys to a terrible past and perhaps equally frightening spheres of the present. It’s unclear where Howard drew inspiration for this but it’s likely to have been an available account of historical grimoires, possibly of the works of John Dee, who with his colleague Edward Kelly recorded the Keys to Aethyrs. Aethyrs are the domains of the angels Dee described. While they are angels, they are not all sweetness and light.

Pictish legacy

In the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales, Howard brought Nameless Cults into a second story, “Children of the Night,” which reveals that the Black Book is replete with lore concerning the cult of the Dark Man that survives from the days of one of Howard’s signature sword and sorcery characters, the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn. Early in the tale, themes related to the hermeneutic circle surface in a conversation between two scholars about Von Junzt and his corpus:

“Not he alone used hidden meanings,” answered Conrad. “If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled onto cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt’s hints of ‘a city in the waste’? What do you think of Flecker’s line:

‘Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose / But with no scarlet to her leaf—and from whose heart no perfume flows.’

“Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.”

– Howard 1931b

The secret alluded to is the continued underground existence of the cult as well as its celebrants, the Picts, who are a trope for “the Other” in Howard’s tales, sometimes heroically in the stories of Bran Mak Morn and Kull, other times in a more diabolical light in the Conan stories and “Children of the Night,” which recounts:

…the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who rules the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man—the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran’s people—a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.

– Howard 1931b

Von Junzt is also notably able to work with the Necronomicon, an example of how the Lovecraft Circle authors assembled what came to be known as “the Cthulhu Mythos” in a round robin fashion not unlike the “exquisite corpse” of surrealists such as Andre Breton and Marchel Duchamp (Breton 1948). By referring to elements of each others’ writing, Howard to Lovecraft, Lovecraft to Howard, etc., they built a fictional world that needed all of its parts to fully function. The stories of Howard, Lovecraft, et al. are entertaining in themselves, but more so when readers step into this hermeneutic circle and enjoy them together, and the authors’ written correspondence to one another shows how much they enjoyed doing it. Both Bran Mak Morn and Nameless Cults appeared before Howard’s best loved character, Conan the Cimmerian, first saw print in 1932. Could his fictional explorations of bringing back another barbarian character from the mists of prehistory through present day magicians have yielded such fruit? It’s fun to speculate but we’ll probably never know.

Sources

Breton, Andre (1948), Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation, exhibition catalogue, La Dragonne, Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris (October 7–30).

De Plancy, Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin (1818), Dictionnaire infernal, accessed 6 September 2019: https://books.google.com/books?id=RtM0AAAAMAAJ&dq=intitle%3ADictionnaire%20intitle%3Ainfernal&lr&num=100&as_brr=1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hohman, George (1820), Pow Wows; or, Long Lost Friend. Reading, PA.

Howard, Robert E. (1931a), “Children of the Night.” First published in Weird Tales, April/May 1931, accessed 6 September 2019: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607961h.html

Howard, Robert E. (1931b), “The Black Stone.” First published in Weird Tales, November 1931, accessed 6 September 2019: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601711.txt

Simon (1978), Necronomicon. Avon Books.

Mantzavinos, C. (2016), Hermeneutics, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 6 September 2019: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#HermCirc

Part 2 of 5 in a series on Lovecraft and magic.

There has been wide interest in H.P. Lovecraft’s thoughts about life beyond this mortal coil, the paranormal, and experience beyond everyday bodily existence since Kenneth Grant’s The Magical Revival (Muller, 1972), associated writing like a piece on Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley in Lovecraft Studies (Barry Leon Bender, “Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft: The Occult Connection,” April 1985), and more recently, in Peter Levenda’s The Dark Lord (Ibis Press, 2013) as well as John L. Steadman’s H.P. Lovecraft & the Black Magickal Tradition (Red Wheel/Weiser, 2015). And let’s not forget Simon’s Necronomicon (Avon 1977), attributed by some to Peter Levenda and by others to the late self-styled magus James Wasserman.

The funny thing is that Lovecraft identified himself as a mechanistic materialist. This differs from his friend, fellow Weird Tales pulp author, and fellow Lovecraft Circle member, Robert E. Howard. Without being credulous, Howard was perhaps a little more broad minded on the subject. I’ll explore this by comparing Howard’s own words in letters to contemporary weird pulp author and Lovecraft friend, Clark Ashton Smith, as well as some of Steadman’s comments on HPL in his recent book that are perhaps applicable to Howard. (The same could be said about Smith, I’m more familiar with Howard, so I’ll focus on him.)

One of the wonderful things about Howard is his creation of a detailed fictional world as the backdrop for several of his most popular characters, stretching from pre-cataclysmic times before the oceans drank Atlantis, to the Hyborian Age, and the pseudo-historical Roman Age of Bran Mak Morn. What intrigued me as a young reader was the historicity of the fictional worlds of Howard (and Lovecraft), which I later learned was influenced by metaphysical writing of the day associated with Theosophy.

In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith from July 22, 1933, Howard made his famous statement that in writing Conan, “He almost seems to write himself” (“Letters to Clark Ashton Smith,” Conan Grimoire, de Camp and Scithers, eds., Mirage Press, 1972). He elaborates on this in a letter from December 14, 1933:

I’m rather of the opinion myself that wide-spread myths and legends are based on some fact, although the fact may be distorted out of all recognition in the telling. While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present—or even the future—work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. …I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred…the character took complete possession of my mind… I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the fact remains. …[T]he time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write of him convincingly at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away… (Ibid., pp. 15-17)

In a subsequent undated letter, he responds further to Smith about this:

I agree with you that little is actually known about the sources of human motivation. I wonder if, in a thousand years or [so], people wouldn’t regard present day psychologists as we regard the alchemists of the middle ages… it certainly does seem that certain individuals occasionally get in contact with forces outside themselves… Maybe that’s what’s meant by getting “in tune with the infinite.” (Ibid., p. 22)

These are some fascinating comments for me, since my interest in these topics was first whetted by reading the fiction of these authors without benefit of their personal thoughts. On psychologists it’s hard to say exactly whom he’s referring to, but I wonder if it’s not Jung. To put this in context, REH and CAS are bantering back and forth about another author named Lumley, and in his last comment, one wonders if he is speaking only figuratively, or as well read as he was, was possibly alluding to Pythagorean concepts of the relationship between sound and spirit. On his view of mythology, it’s hard not to think of Medieval Norse saga author Snorre Sturluson and his euhemeristic approach to the Norse myths that presumed they originated from actual events and personages. Intriguingly, Howard almost always characterizes magic in rather negative terms as opposed to the clean spirit of the barbarian and his dependence on his own brawn, cunning, and steel. This is similar to A.H. Smith’s 1932 translation of “Ynglinga Saga,” in which Snorre writes:

Odin knew and practiced that craft which brought most power and which was called seid (witchcraft)… But in promoting this sorcery, lack of manliness followed so much that men seemed to be without shame in dealing with it… (Heimskringla, W. Heffer & Sons, Ltd., 1932, p. 5)

Good lord! I can’t think of a place where Howard emasculates magic in this negative way like Snorre, but there is certainly a racist and orientalist component in connection his countries of Stygia and Khitai, which team with sorcery.

Although not credited to Howard by Steadman, Howard of course contributed the concept of a book similar to the Necronomicon, Von Juntz’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten (mentioned by Steadman on p. 72), which was introduced by REH in “The Black Stone” and was later used by Lovecraft in “The Dreams in the Witch House.” This round-robin use of concepts from each other’s work was how the Cthulhu mythos took shape amongst the writers of the Lovecraft Circle, including Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, and Robert Bloch.

In attributing occult significance to Lovecraft’s writing, Steadman follows in the footsteps of Aleister Crowley’s personal secretary and self-styled acolyte Kenneth Grant. The fastest way to get at Grant’s claims of a connection between Lovecraft and Crowley is through the list of correspondences between the Crowley’s Book of the Law and the Cthulhu mythos in The Magical Revival (pp. 115-116). I’ll discuss these questionable parallels in a future post.

In a sense, Grant argued the weird pulp author and the magus were impacted by sinister forces in the same fashion sensitive artists were assailed by Cthulhu’s awakening at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu.” Peter Levenda has taken this a step further arguing for a correspondence in the dates of key events in Crowley’s life and in the plot of CoC. A healthy dose of skepticism is in order, but it’s still fun to consider. Read Levenda’s recent novel The Lovecraft Code for a further dose!

Lovecraft himself would have vehemently denied and scoffed at such claims. Howard would certainly not have jumped on the Grant-Steadman-Levenda bandwagon, although I expect he might have been a bit more politic or empathetic than HPL, along the lines of his comments to Smith. (Frankly, watching him interviewed on YouTube, at times Levenda himself seems to be fighting back a smile with tongue planted firmly in cheek.)

REH was certainly curious about these matters, and reading between the lines of his stories provides tantalizing glimpses of possible tips of the hat here and there to mythological concepts. In “The Tower of the Elephant,” the elephantine alien co-star of the story, Yag-Kosha, is reminiscent of Ganesha, the glorious and benevolent Opener of the Way in the Hindu pantheon.

In the tale, Conan enters the Elephant Tower of the sorceror Yara hoping to steal a famed jewel known as the Heart of the Elephant. Like usual, Conan stumbles on a sorcerous mess, but recognizing their common enemy in Yara, Yag-Kosha gives Conan a way to escape the tower while also having his revenge on Yara who has tortured him as a prisoner in the tower. First, Conan is to skewer Yag-Kosha through the heart, soak the gem in his blood, and deliver it to Yara: “Then get you away from the tower quickly; fear not, your way shall be made clear” (emphasis mine). Well, considering similarities with Ganesha, of course it would be! The full text of the story is available from Project Gutenberg:http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600831h.html

If this blog piqued your interest or you even liked it, please consider subscribing or leaving a comment. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu R’lyeh fhtagn! 

An earlier version appeared in REHupa (journal of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association), December 2016.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

Alhazred (Al Azif)

Let the secrets of the ages be revealed. The publication of the Necronomicon may well be a landmark in the liberation of the human spirit.

William S. Burroughs

This series of blogs is based on a talk given for the Minnesota Left Hand Path Community at Magus Books in Minneapolis. Many thanks to the LHP Community and Magus. Speaking of LHP, If you don’t already subscribe, check out Jezebel Pride’s blog. I highly recommend it. She is a tireless advocate of the LHP and her blog is inspiring. I also highly recommend Magus Books, the premiere occult book and supply store in Minneapolis. This blog is part 1 of 5.

Satan’s Little Book Club hosted a discussion of Simon’s Necronomicon at Magus Books in Minneapolis. This was the first occult book I owned and has a fascinating introduction that draws parallels between the dark entities and elements of Lovecraft’s fiction, and the most notorious and beloved magician of the last century, Aleister Crowley. Following that I gave a talk on a subject that’s fascinated me since childhood – H.P. Lovecraft and magic. Fiction corresponding with magical practice in the physical world makes it seem real. Magical practice in the physical world corresponding with fiction enhances it with the spice and imagery of fiction. Both are true even if there is no concrete connection.

Simon wasn’t the first to propose a Lovecraft-Crowley connection. A few years earlier Kenneth Grant did the same in The Magical Revival. Grant had been Crowley’s secretary at the end of his life. Necronomicon was simply a more commercially successful book.

He was also a close friend of contemporary wizard, Austin Osman Spare. The Magical Revival had a central role in reintroducing the world to AOS and by doing so, jump starting the Chaos Magic movement. There’s an odd history there – Grant professed leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) while Chaos Magic was a move away from existing institutions like the Golden Dawn, the OTO, and Wicca.

I’m not going to dive deeply into that here but it’s worth mentioning just so I don’t give the impression that Grant was an advocate or leader in the development of CM. Nor is Grant (now deceased) accepted by all as a former head of the OTO. But he was (and still is) interesting. According to Alan Moore, Grant was “a schoolboy gone berserk on brimstone aftershave,” which is a colorful and somewhat endearing epitaph you may agree with before I’m done. People will forgive you for being wrong, but not for failing to be interesting.

A lot of people these days are more interested in Cthulhu plush dolls and pseudo Necronomicons than the man who conceived them. The presentation gave me a chance to talk about H. P. Lovecraft himself, magic in his fiction, and the reputed parallels between the work of HPL and Crowley. I wrapped things up with some of what’s new with Lovecraft even though he’s been dead since 1936, particularly the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows. These include everything from Cthulhu cultists dealing Aklo letters to muggles like street drugs, to the sex lives of the Deep Ones and bondage gear from Y’ha nthlei. Their most recent collaboration, Providence, is a history of the 20th and early 21st century that culminates in the horrifying end of it all. Apocalypse has never been so fun.

I began with Lovecraft’s bio. I’m not going to recount that now, there are plenty of sources including Wikipedia. However, it’s also worth noting that the concept of a Cthulhu Mythos is not technically Lovecraft’s but something August Derleth imposed on Lovecraft’s body of work after his death. HPL’s writing included avid correspondence with fellow authors like the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard, and the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch. These pen pals, collectively known as the Lovecraft Circle, played a game in which they drew elements from each other’s writing into their own stories, like the Necronomicon and Cthulhu. Besides Derleth, you could say that’s how the Cthulhu Mythos took root and grew.

I’ll cover the Lovecraft Circle and the hermeneutic circle they developed with the Cthulhu Mythos in the future, including parallels between the Lovecraft Circle’s fictional black books and historical books of magic, as well as the lore that surrounds them.

Although he’s now recognized worldwide as a great American author, Lovecraft was virtually unknown during his lifetime. He also shares the strange honor with other talented Americans – like comedian Jerry Lewis – of being venerated by French intellectuals. Lovecraft’s pulp horror fiction is a topic in the work of philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri in their celebrated book A Thousand Plateaus.

In a future installments I’ll dive further into occultists’ fixation with Lovecraft, the Necronomicon, and other delights. TTFN

Sources

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota.

Grant. Kenneth (1972), The Magical Revival. Muller.

Heavy Metal, October 1978.

Moore, Alan, and Jacen Burrows (2003), The Courtyard. Avatar Press.

Moore, Alan, and Jacen Burrows (2010-2011), Neonomicon. Avatar Press.

Moore, Alan, and Jacen Burrows (2015-2017), Providence. Avatar Press.

Simon (1977), Necronomicon. Avon.

Part 4 of 5 in a series on the magic of Lovecraft.

Aliens and Their Gifts

Who uses the Necronomicon and other Lovecraftian grimoires like Robert E. Howard’s Nameless Cults? The beings of the Cthulhu Mythos have human servants. Cthulhu is worshipped by cults of Greenland Eskimo, Voodoo practitioners in Louisiana, and South Sea Islanders. Racism and xenophobia, see? They can receive small favors from these interactions but are not really favored by the Great Old Ones. In the end, everyone gets burned and receives no lasting benefit from the exchange.

Lovecraft’s works describe several aliens worshiped by humans as gods, who either don’t care about humans or are actively hostile to mankind. (Governments and orgs stealing alien tech, take note.) Several of his stories have an ancient aliens theme, and describe mythic human origins in contrast to those in the creation stories of religions we know about. At the Mountains of Madness proposes that humankind was created as a slave race by the Old Ones and evolved from abandoned scientific experiments. Main characters in his stories are usually educated men, atheists who cite scientific and rational evidence to support their non-faith and are shocked to the limits of sanity by the discovery of aliens and the secret history of earth.

My favorite magician from these stories is Wilbur Whately in “The Dunwich Horror.” Sounds innocent enough, right? A country bumpkin from a rural New England town filled with dilapidated colonial structures and a dark legacy that includes a Precolumbian stone circle with human remains. He goes to Miskatonic University library to consult the Necronomicon and though he begs them for it, he can’t borrow the book like he wants to.

The story was adapted to film in 1970.

What Wilbur really needs the Necronomicon for is to control his brother. Cattle and people disappear at an alarming rate around Dunwich. No one knows why, but it turns out brother is on the loose and hungry.

Wilbur is very unusual – eight feet tall, looks goaty, walked and talked before he was one year old, and was full grown before leaving grade school. When he makes a final desperate try at stealing the Neconomicon he’s stopped and killed by guard dogs. They go berserk, tear him apart, and as his clothes are torn away his true form is revealed. In fact, he and his brother are the half-human sons of the Great Old One Yog-Sothoth, only his brother took after daddy more than Wilbur.

In most of Lovecraft’s stories the main characters are not directly involved in magic, but stumble on it by accident and to their great regret. In “The Dunwich Horror” the truth is pieced together by a scientist witnessing the events. Lovecraft’s stories are mysteries in which the bigger pattern of what’s going on is gradually put together by the narrator from shreds and patches of odd occurrences, some of which at first seem absurd and unreal. Then as the story progresses, the shocking truth is revealed. This is part of what makes his stories so satisfying.

Mad Human Magicians

The experience of the Great Old Ones drives the humans that worship or work with them crazy. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a novelette about a more standard human magician than Wilbur Whately that was partially adapted into the film The Dark Palace with Vincent Price. Ward is observed by the story’s main character undergoing a transformation as he engages secretly in necromancy with the Necronomicon and other books. He can be heard screaming barbarous names behind the barred door to his lab. As the tale progresses he acts stranger and stranger. When it’s almost too late it becomes apparent that he’s possessed by an ancestor he brought back through necromantic rites and scientific experiments to restore the bodies of the dead, a black magician from the days of the Salem witch trials with a stronger will than his. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.

We can see some American themes in these tales that strike a deep chord with readers. One is a fear of change while at the same time pursuing radical change. Ward’s use of radical occult technologies is not only successful, it inhabits him and changes him into something abhorrent to those around him.

The Deep Ones

The most prominent non-humans in Lovecraft’s writing are the Deep Ones, half-human/half-fish who are featured in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and are smarter and stronger than humans. In addition to Cthulhu who was first featured in published ritual in by Michael Aquino as a contribution to The Satanic Rituals, the Deep Ones have made it directly into modern magic including Michael Bertiaux’s Vodun Gnostic Workbook. They have a close relationship with the god Dagon and other watery creatures like mother Hydra and Great Cthulhu, who’s accidentally awakened by sailors when seismic activity brings his tomb ito the surface from the ocean floor in “The Call of Cthulhu,” and is described as

[A] mountain [who] walked or stumbled… It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway…. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years, Great Cthulhu was loose again and ravening for delight.

-Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

Although set in Spain, the film Dagon captures “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” pretty well. In the 19^th century when the Massachusetts fishing village of Innsmouth fell on hard times, Captain Obed Marsh returns from the South Pacific proposing to accept a group of furtive South Sea Islanders into the community to help. They taught him how to find all the fish they need, but even better, how to locate and receive treasure, enough to open a gold refinery in Innsmouth. Part of the deal is they must intermarry with them, and later they learn they will undergo a change late in life into Deep Ones. Not everyone likes this and those that protest too loudly are eventually done away with.

Deep Ones can access secret places in the ocean deep and live virtually forever. By speaking with elders of their kind they can learn virtually anything and know the secret history of the planet.

That only scratches the surface…

This series will be concluded in Part 5, Lovecraft and Crowley

It’s been said that Tarot cards can be related to mythical characters and vignettes. I’m going to do that with the martial figure of Lancelot du Lac, one that’s resonated with me since I was young, both with Minor Arcana and Majors VII, VIII and IX.

I’ll do this with the most widely used deck, Pamela Coleman-Smith’s. I prefer calling it Coleman-Smith’s deck and not Rider-Waite as it’s often referred to because she designed it and kept it out of copyright, one of the single most helpful acts anyone did for esoteric exploration of the self in the past century. Her heirs could have made fuck tons of cash and prevented the publication of other decks. The woman was a saint – or devil, take your pick. However, as many are aware there are different decks and configurations (switch VIII Strength/Lust for XI Justice/Adjustment, etc.). If you prefer another, please suspend judgement for the present discussion.

Right now my favorite card is II of Pentacles. This card is about being able to handle anything that comes your way, cheerfully, without hesitation. I’ve heard it described as the card of Lancelot in the Arthur cycle, this would be his approach as a skilled warrior. My apologies for gendered language, I know many women who are fearless warriors, possibly more of them than men, and this is certainly open to non-binary perspectives as well.

A long-time favorite of mine is VII The Chariot, one reason being it aligns with my Sun in Cancer – see the armor/shell? 🙂 This card also potentially embodies Lancelot but less artfully and with problems. Do we really need such force? Maybe this card doesn’t require that interpretation, The Chariot moves along at will with sphinxes unharnessed but still… There’s a reason VIII Strength follows it, and that The Chariot is not Strength even though it’s among the strongest looking Major Arcana. The 2 of Pentacles gets around the possibly overbearing, ungraceful aspects of the armored warlord, effortlessly pirouetting about the toughest obstacles, a hot coffee in hand, not losing a drop.

Another conceivably Lancelot-ian card is IX The Hermit, the knight living in quiet and forlorn contemplation, forever faithful both to Guinevere’s unrequited love and the friend he would have to betray to realize it. Let’s not go there. Yeah, I read a lot of this stuff growing up. Notice how this went from VII to VIII to IX? A meaningful sequence.

Finally, II of Pentacles reminds me of the Japanese concept of fudoshin, tirelessly keeping your center, remaining grounded but in a light, not stolid, way, relaxed but alert in the face of adversity. Like a sailor on treacherous waters, dodging shoals and sea monsters while never losing control. This is a concept I learned if not mastered practicing Aikido, how we want to face attack and similar situations. None of us (to my knowledge) does this perfectly, yet we have moments of grace when we’re beaming happiness and are unscathed no matter what gets thrown at us. And when we do lose our cool, it’s an opportunity to analyze the situation, figure out where we turned right when we needs to go left, and try again. Realizing something went wrong and comparing it with the ideal, without self-judgement, is the way back to the path.

The angel lighted next to him and sat. There was uncomfortable silence, like old friends who didn’t know what to say. The angel turned to him and spoke. “Fool!”

He didn’t know what they meant but it struck him to the core. He felt guilty and wanted to do something. Angel talk is is like that.

It took him a long time to understand. Others were wise, protecting the guilty out of fairness or love. He was willing to be a fool and speak out. Take your pick, the harm of men or the wrath of God. Men will destroy a community out of ego, God will destroy a town because men placed it in the path of a fire or flood. Bam. Town gone.

Women and men love even those who leave ruined lives behind them. But it won’t stop a flood.

Prophecy is a troublesome gift. The fool dreamt of someone who wouldn’t get out of the way. Then he met her. She was so sad and resigned he wanted to shout, but he restrained himself. What little he said was sometimes taken with gratitude, other times just tolerance, and once even rage. Out of wisdom and love.

It didn’t change a thing. The fire was still coming.

The fool dreamt of a man pleased with his ego and the hurt he caused, striking a flint over dry brush, hunched over, laughing. He thought he knew that man but now realized he really didn’t. Over weeks and months he proved to be as bad as the dream. It didn’t help to warn anyone. He tried being silent. He tried being snarky, thinking it would entertain people and maybe then they’d listen. No, the hunched man was loved by all and everything was fine. He, the, fool, was to blame.

As time passed he quietly did things to bring the man’s harmful actions to light. Mostly no one saw a thing. There were more dreams and the coming fire. The hunched man even accused the fool of lighting fires. Maybe in a way his words did, but beyond that it was just a lie to deceive the town and charges were dismissed. The fool could say very little without getting in trouble and could only nudge people out of the way very slowly. If he said more he was rebuffed. If he gave in to the urge to shout about his dreams of conflagration, he was slammed. And how could you blame them? There was no fire yet.

He couldn’t warn those he loved. He could nudge, and wait. Nudge, and wait. Nudge, and wait. He felt the heat rise and the flames draw closer. And no one else saw a thing. When he thought too much about it he was irresponsible and his work suffered. He waited in silence. Nudged, and waited. Nudged, and waited, etc., etc.

He still felt guilty. Still he was a fool. He dreamt of a prophetess and told her “I love you.” “What does that matter?,” she snarled. After all the love he saw poured on the hunched man, this was something he could understand.

In the quiet he gradually changed. He was not so foolish anymore. A tiger changes its stripes and many miss it but it’s obvious for those who can see. At times he felt very good. Sometimes he dreamt deliverance was at hand, and maybe it was. He would forget about the heat, the flames, and the flood. Then he’d dream the woman was in the the path and panic. When he awoke he would say something to anyone that still bothered to listen. It was no use, they just shouted and threw things at him.

One wise woman could understand. She thought the waiting and nudging was going well, then she saw him speak up. “Oh God, you are such a fool,” she said.

Finally he made a choice. He would stay there too, close to what was coming. Although he wanted to spring, he would quietly nudge and wait, but less than before. Sometimes he’d just sit and do nothing at all. This was the plan.

After a while he could see that the woman he dreamt of and the rest were nearly out of the way. Then she got up and walked back to the path of the coming fire. He wanted to run to her, shout and push her out of the way, but it only seemed to hurt her. The wise woman saw him and could see what he was thinking of doing. She shook her head and sighed. “Goddamn, you really are a fool,” she said.

Then he had a new dream. It told him, “Keep your sword to the lion side, and trust.”

He didn’t know what it meant but it struck him to the core. Dreams are like that…

words by me, image is detail from Icarus by Barry Windsor Smith

Know thyself.

– Delphic maxim

There’s a reason the saying “Know thyself” is associated with ancient mysteries. Of course, it was an inscription displayed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But it’s also advice with profound implications for magic.

It may be a gross simplification, but magic encourages us to plan and execute, whether as spooky action at a distance or in deciding to lift your hand to scratch your itchy nose. The latter may be a little too simplistic, but at some level both are magical acts.

This is what much of living in the physical world is about. But it can be taken to extremes with quickly diminishing returns. Know thyself is guidance, maybe even a simple algorithm, for doing it the right way.

The False Coin of Our Own Dreams

At times, too much planning can rob us of the ability to live in the moment and cheats us out of being present for what our precious and limited lives offer us (at least in the present existence). It’s why people enjoy meditation and activities, like gardening, that get us out in the world while slowing down and clarifying our thoughts. Over planning can be a symptom of not knowing yourself and what you would find truly fulfilling. Instead, we can fall into the pit (abyss?) of throwing our energy into a plan or task we don’t really want.

We may think we want something because it looks appealing, and mistake it for our heart’s desire. The classic example is money – it’s not money we want (unless you’re a coin collector) but what we think it can buy. We can become tied to what Graeber (2001, paraphrasing Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert 1972 [1904]) called “the false coin of our own dreams.”

Not being satisfied, we may then try to get more and more of the substitute, or attempt to re-enact a memory of something that never really was to begin with. Seven of Cups. Endlessly trying to scratch an itch that isn’t there and seeking more and more opportunities to do it. Meanwhile, life continues to tick by.

I’m not saying don’t stop and smell the roses, feast at life’s banquet, or try things out to see if they’re for you or even to make someone else happy for a while. Go for it. But beware of the person or spirit that encourages you to break your own cup, leaving you endlessly seeking to fulfill a desire that isn’t there. This is the path of the hungry ghost, the anti-life equation of consumer society.

Pursuing the “false coin” seems to be the root of addiction. It doesn’t help that exhausting ourselves through whatever that may be (drugs, gambling, battling some imagined adversary, etc.) can bring temporary relief, while the next day we may feel compelled to do it all over again. And the cycle continues.

A Cautionary Tale

A while ago I knew a person who was afraid someone else would do something they didn’t like. Instead of talking to them about it, they acted on their suspicions and began trying to manipulate that person to make them think they wanted something they didn’t. Initially, their target didn’t know what was up, only that something felt off. They found out much later when it was too late to help the one targeting them.

I don’t want to reveal too many details and hurt anyone involved, but this person collected information, used magic and poor man’s NLP, planned, etc. for several months. They did it to unethical extremes with murder in their heart.

About seven months later when it was clear things were never going to go their way they went ballistic on the person they were trying to influence. It impacted many people and just barely missed having the kind of visibility that would have fucked things up for everyone involved.

They mistook their fear for reality, and became dedicated to changing it or preventing it from happening. It never needed to happen and was a miserable failure.

In a way this kind of dedication is impressive. Wow. And in a funny way probably flattering to the person they had a beef with.

On the other hand, wow > wtf. What a waste of time and effort on an imagined problem their actions were never going to solve.

The person who carried out these tortuous twists and turns was quite experienced and initiated in a few kinds of magic, but it didn’t matter. As it turned out, the person they had the problem with was always ready to listen, at least when they stopped lobbing grenades. Some of what they did was potentially life threatening so now that’s not likely to happen. Instead, thousands of needlessly burnt calories later, there have been many repercussions for them, not only in this situation but a number of others.

They lacked clarity about what was going on, didn’t know what they really wanted. In a word, they overcompensated. If there weren’t better examples of what to do, someone might ask why bother trying to do magic at all? It wasn’t going to fix a thing.

What was needed was to “know thyself,” to know they were pursuing an illusion and to redirect their own actions. They could have simply talked things out, dispelled their fears, and had a much better time. What they got instead was a lost friendship, other damaged friendships, and more besides.

And as for the person they were gunning for, well, even though they were in many ways less experienced, what made a difference is they knew themself better (my neutral pronouns are painfully awkward, I know). When the dust settled, they just kept going. When some residual shit was lobbed, they kept going. They just kept going.

Does not matter. Need not be.

Sources

Graeber, David R. (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-312-24044-8.

Mauss, Marcel [with Henri Hubert] (1972 [1904]). A General Theory of Magic. Routledge & Kegan Paul.