2017-10-21, 04:49 PM
Continuing this Skeptiko thread:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/on...from.3921/
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The Magick of H.P. Lovecraft
https://techgnosis.com/h-p-lovecraft/
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/on...from.3921/
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The Magick of H.P. Lovecraft
https://techgnosis.com/h-p-lovecraft/
Quote:The first explicitly occult appropriation of Lovecraft’s fiction can be traced to the British magician Kenneth Grant, one of the most vivid and controversial figures to emerge from the Thelemic current begun by Aleister Crowley, and the renegade head of the New Isis Lodge and the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis. Writing for Man, Myth and Magic in 1970, and two years later in his book The Magical Revival, Grant argued that, through his remarkable dream life, Lovecraft was linked to actual traditions of ancient and contemporary magic; in this view, The Necronomicon is a “real” book tucked away in the akashic records that Lovecraft’s waking mind was too hidebound and timid to accept. Grant was particularly keen on lining up curious similarities between names and other elements of Thelemic and Lovecraftian lore, like Yog-Sothoth and Crowley’s Sut-Thoth. In all this, Grant’s own degree of irony or diabolic playfulness is, as ever, hard to assess. Given his florid imagination and parsimonious use of scholarship, Grant’s texts—which include ruminations on Bela Lugosi—already scramble the borderlines between occult originality and fiction.
The year 1972 also saw the publication of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals, a companion text to the Church of Satan leader’s popular The Satanic Bible. The book includes two Lovecraftian rites written by LaVey’s deputy Michael Aquino, the “Ceremony of the Angles” and “The Call to Cthulhu.” In his introduction, Aquino legitimizes the occult appropriation of Lovecraft along much less supernaturalist lines than Grant, emphasizing instead Lovecraft’s own amoral philosophy and the subjective, archetypal, and possibly prophetic power of fantasy. This argument accorded with the language of “psychodrama” that LaVey himself offered as non-supernatural explanations for the transformative power of blasphemous ritual. As a pragmatic corollary to this constructionist view, Aquino developed a meaningless ritual language for his rituals, a “Yuggothic tongue” based on the alien speech Lovecraft provides in “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in the Dark.” The efficacy of such guttural and semantically empty speech is also described by Grant in his discussion of the Cult of Barbarous Names.
Within the Church of Satan, LaVey founded an informal “Order of the Trapezoid” whose name was inspired in part by Lovecraft’s story “The Haunter of the Dark,” which features a “shining trapezohedron” used by an extinct cult called the Church of Starry Wisdom. The Order of the Trapezoid would later become the supreme executive body of Aquino’s Church of Set, where the Lovecraftian current was interpreted in part as a force of apocalyptic subjectivity. Other notable Lovecraftian orders over the decades have included the Lovecraftian Coven, founded by Michael Bertiaux, a practitioner of “Gnostic Voudon;” Cincinatti’s Bate Cabal; and The Esoteric Order of Dagon, a Thelema- and Typhonian-inspired sect founded by Steven Greenwood, who in the 1960s became magically identified with Lovecraft’s fictional hero Randolph Carter. Lovecraftian magic has also became an important, almost signal leitmotif for chaos magicians, whose “postmodern” (and largely left-hand) approach to the contingency of traditional occult systems is resonantly affirmed by the adaptation of a fictional and profoundly anti-humanist cosmology that has the additional feature of being concocted by a philosophical nihilist.
Quote:Regardless of such strategies, the occult appropriation of Lovecraft can be traced in part to the intertextual and metafictional dynamics of the texts themselves. The central theme that Lovecraft critic Donald Burleson identifies as “oneiric objectivism” is itself the central vehicle for occultist legitimization; from this perspective, occultists impose a second-order level of objective dreaming to the textual circuit that Lovecraft himself established between his actual dreams and his fictional worlds. Occultists could certainly be accused of turning Lovecraft the writer into something he’s not and would moreover abhor. The irony, however, is that this supernaturalist overwriting of the author’s materialism is itself inscribed in Lovecraft’s fiction, which—unlike the detective fiction it occasionally resembles—usually encourages the reader to piece together the horrifying cosmic scenario long before the bookish and blinkered protagonists put the pieces together. In a larger sense, occultists might simply be seen as culture makers who have, like thousands of writers, accepted Lovecraft’s invitation to play the game of imaginatively co-creating the Mythos. In the occultist version of the game, however, players risk the element of verisimilitude that Lovecraft himself saw was a key element of the “hoax.” And like the empty networks of referentiality that undergird the substance of occult literature, such games may have a life of their own.