Whispers from The Ghooric Zone

Breaking News: H.P. Lovecraft invented 2012!

2012-02-08T20:37:00.003Z

Its official! As regular readers of the Fortean Times are probably aware, a boffin over at the University of Kansas (and one of those pesky anthropologists to boot) has proven categorically that H.P. Lovecraft invented 2012. Blimey! Almost as controversial as Jeremy Clarkson's claim that Isembard Kingdom Brunel built the world!

Sensationalism - and Clarkson's vulgarly unreconstructed colonialist rhetoric (at least we know what he spends with his time thinking about when not advocating the shooting of rioters and their families) - aside, the latest edition of FT includes an interesting article by anthropologist/archaeologist John Hoopes of the University of Texas exploring the origins of 2012 apocalypticism, the blame of which is in part laid at Lovecraft's door. The crux of the matter lies, it seems, in the fact that Mayanist archaeologist Michael Coe(who inadvertantly helped foster the 2012 myth) is also a massive Lovecraft fan. To this Hoopes adds that Lovecraft's work also contributed elements of cyclical catastrophism to the mix.

I'm initially sceptical that these two points together demonstrate a significant influence upon 2012 mythology on the part of HPL. Indeed, a problem I've regularly encountered in my own research is the plausibility of establishing anything even vaguely resembling a causal link (except where explicitly stated, as in the works of Kenneth Grant) between the literature of the weird and and contemporary oc/culture. Added to which, apocalyptic themes are not uniquely Lovecraftian, but have manifested historically in a number of contexts (Norman Cohn's Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come offers a good historical overview of the matter). I suspect that both homegrown Christian millenarianism and Theosophical recensions of Hindu temporal mythographies (as Hoopes himself recognises) have as much to do with 2012 as does Lovecraft. In addition to which, genuine Lovecraftian elements seem to be absent from much of the 2012 apocalypticism I've been aware of (mainly that of the vapid type spawned from the smug, self-gratified maws of New Age white-lighters...).

In this interview from August 2011, Hoopes elaborates somewhat, and mentions he is working on a book on the matter which I await with eager anticipation. Even if a causal link between Lovecraft and 2012 is questionable, I have no doubt that Hoopes' book will prove a significant contribution to the growing literature demonstrating the wide cultural influence of H.P.L. who, perhaps moreso than Brunel, could truely be said to have invented the modern world.

Apologies, by the way, for the long leave of absence. In the post Xmas doldrums, we at the Ghooric Zone have been drifting listlessly through strange realms of black horror - a matter to be rectified as normal service is (hopefully) resumed...

'Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light?'

2011-11-12T16:54:00.002Z

Not exactly breaking news, but it seems that Lovecraft may have been right after all. As alluded to in the above quote from The Whisperer in Darkness, the boffins over at CERN have apparently detected particles which seem to transgress Einstein's law of special relativity and can travel at FTL speeds.

Dunwich Horror Live

2011-11-11T17:34:00.007Z

A somewhat belated return to posting (not taking into account Hallowe'en shenannigans), largely due to a busy work schedule these past five weeks. For your delectation and amusement, I offer a short review (of sorts) of the production of The Dunwich Horror recently performed at the Courtyard Theatre in London as part of the recent London Horror Festival:

Latter day Lovecraftians have opined the demise of Del Toro’s current attempts to bring At the Mountains of Madness to the silver screen. After reading this interview, I’m almost relieved, as Del Toro’s vision of what the movie would ultimately become seemed so blurred as to be in serious danger of loosing sight of the key themes of the original tale. Instead of ponderous exploration of human insignificance in the face of deep geological time and cosmic infinity (which made the tale so distinctly Lovecraftian and, in my opinion, one of the finest exemplars of the HPL's cosmicism), it seems that Del Toro may have presented us with another bloated Hollywood A-lister CGI monsterfest.

On a more positive note, a couple of weeks back I had the opportunity to see a performance of Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror at the Courtyard Theatre in London. I’m pleased to say I was really impressed by this, and, while the show has come to the end of its current run as part of the London Horror Festival, if you have the chance to see it at another locale, I would strongly recommend taking the opportunity to do so.

Where this particular production succeeded (perhaps in contrast to my fears of what Del Toro’s At The Mountains of Madness might have become) was in its retention of the richness of Lovecraft’s language. During the performance I attended this was achieved not by offering a dramatised rendition of the plot, but by theatricalising a slightly abridged reading of the story. A point, I felt, which was effectively emphasised in the paucity of the set dressing (although the actors appeared in period clothing).

Indeed, it is the very fact that it is Lovecraft's use of language rather than plot which stands at the centre of his tales which leads me to ponder the possibility that any attempt to effectively translate Lovecraft’s vision onto the screen may ultimately prove futile . Undoubtedly some works of literary fiction don’t face this problem - I would argue that Peter Jackson’s translation of The Lord of the Rings produced something which actually improved on Tolkien: gone where the pointless and trite scenes involving Tom Bombadil, in addition to which, Tolkien’s characters were subject to a depth of emotional development and complexity that was entirely missing from the books. Tolkien's work is also very visual in character, insofar as the landscape of Middle Earth is itself a central character in his tales.

I digress. Also of note was the manner in which the production sought to vernacularize its version of The Dunwich Horror. Perhaps not something that Lovecraft purists would be keen on, but it worked for me, and made for some (what I think were intentional) moments of comedy as the Dunwich locals ploughed through reams of Lovecraftian prose in West Country accents. Accordingly, Armitage and Morgan were presented as plummy Oxford Dons (Morgan, by the way, is portrayed as female in this telling of the tale, which creates some interesting and subtle plays of language regarding the sexual politics of Armitage and Morgan’s relationship).

In any case, I did feel that the retention of much of The Dunwich Horror’s original text illustrated the fact that, rather than suffering from adjectivitis as he has been accused, Lovecraft was extremely capable of producing a kind of writing which (as Fritz Leiber and, more recently, Mark Samuels, have noted) has a profoundly evocative, poetic and incantatory character. Joshi similarly recognises this in the introduction to Black WIngs (his recent edited collection of Lovecraftian tales) when commenting on why Lovecraftian pastiches which aim to ape Lovecraft's literary style so often fail. On a related matter, this leads me to a point I’ve wanted to put to bed for a long time: namely the wholly unjustified claim that Lovecraft typically would end stories with narrators desperately writing down their final words (usually in italics) in the face of some rapidly approaching and monstrous doom. As I recall, Dagon is one of HPL’s few tales which is even vaguely guilty of this. In actual fact, the blame for this literary affectation needs to be laid, figuratively as it were, at the door of William Hope Hodgeson’s The House on The Borderland.

In any case, The Courtyard’s version of The Dunwhich Horror was for me one of the more effective visual retellings of the tale (though I do retain a soft spot for Roger Corman's quasi-psychedelic 70s movie version), and is definitely something I’d see again given the chance. Indeed, it has inspired me to make a return visit to the Courtyard tonight to see another show which is also part of the London Horror Festival. On this occasion, The Monster Hunters, which by all accounts is some kind of eldritch hybrid of The Persuaders and late sixties/early seventies Hammer Horror films. Nice.

Of obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable realities

2011-10-31T21:11:00.009Z

Like Lovecraft's protaganist Marinus Bicknell Willit, my delvings into the blackest pits of the internet have threatened to uncovered hints of obscure cosmic relationships of the most blasphemous and unspeakable kind:

Oddbod Junior from Carry On Screaming:

Robert Pattinson:

Separated at birth?

Happy Hallowe'en.

Lovecraftian Hyperdimensional Nazis...

2011-10-06T01:37:00.007+01:00

It's been a busy week and not looking like I'm going to be posting anything substantial by the end of it, so just a quick rumination for now: as I write this, I'm in the middle of re-watching UFOs: The Secret Evidence (currently playing on the UK TV channel More 4) presented by Nick Cook, and based on his 2002 book The Hunt for Zero Point. Cook's thesis - premised in part on the work of Polish UFO researcher Igor Witowski (who appears in the documentary) effectively resurrects what has been called by Jocelyn Godwin, Nicholas Goodrich Clarke and other's 'The Nazi Survival Myth'. Cook's claim is that many modern UFO siightings might be the consequence of 'black project' technology derived from anti-gravity research supposedly developed by Nazi scientists towards the end of World War II, ultimately making its way into the hands of the US military via the infamous Project Paperclip.

Of interest to my ongoing research into what I'm coming to call 'the Lovecraftian Paranormal' is how Cook's claims link with the work of conspiracy theorist Joseph Farrell and his notion of 'Hyperdimensional Nazis'. Without going into too much detail here, the work of Farrell, Cook and Witowski form an interwoven thread of contemporary conspiracy theory which takes as its focus the speculated existence of 'The Nazi Bell': a device which Farrell refers to as 'gateway' technology in the sense that it was supposedly developed as a means of exploring A) the utility of torsion physics in a number of fields ('free' energy, weaponisation, etc.), and B) the relation of said physics to a very Lovecraftian sounding 'hyperdimensional geometry'. Also of interest are Farrell's connection with Richard Hoagland, another conspiracy theorist well know for championing the idea that ancient alien artefacts (many of which are also claimed as demonstrating hyperdimensional geometric properties) exist on the Moon, Mars, Phobos, etc.

Needless to say, Hoagland advocates a variant of the ancient astronaut hypothesis inadvertantly popularised by Lovecraft's work, whilst the Nazi occultism/survival myth finds some of its earliest roots in Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier (both early champions of Lovecraft's work). Not sure if there are any really substantial links with HPL's fiction in all this, but some intriguing hints of how his work may have tangentially brushed off on another odd (and somewhat distasteful) thread of contemporary conspiracism.

Lovecraft as Proto-Chaos Magician?

2011-09-30T12:38:00.004+01:00

Much has been made (especially by Donald Tyson in his recent book The Dream World of H.P. Lovecraft) of Lovecraft’s dalliance with Graeco-Roman paganism during his formative years, especially the claim that HPL had at least one visionary experience of fauns and satyrs. In a similar vein, whilst reading Joshi’s masterful I Am Providence, I was interested to note something Joshi highlights with regard to Lovecraft’s essay ‘A Confession of Unbelief’, and which indicates that HPL may have pre-empted the Chaos magickal methodology of paradigm shifting by some 80 years or so:

‘I read much in Egyption, Hindoo, and Tuetonic mythology, and tried experiments in pretending to believe in each one, to see which might contain the greatest truth.’

Of course, long-time readers will realise that the title of my post is a little misleading, as I don’t mean to entertain here the notion that Lovecraft was involved in any kind of formal 'occult' practice (indeed, in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ Lovecraft follows the above statement immediately with ‘I had, it will be noted, immediately adopted the method and manner of science!’); also I think it extremely unlikely that Lovecraft’s words on this matter were in any way influential on early Chaos magick (despite other overt Lovecraftian influences on that particular genre of postmodern occulture).

Despite the flawed and usually speculative attempts by esotericists to establish formal links between Lovecraft and genuine bodies of occult lore (or, in the case of occultists such as Tyson and Grant, the inference that Lovecraft’s heightened capacity for dreaming meant he must have been attuned to some otherworldly reality), I think there are valuable anthropological insights regarding the human condition to be gained by examining the connection between speculative fiction, visionary experience, and the human propensity to construct hypothetical otherworlds through the medium of religion.

The capacity to formulate and communicate publically symbolic and abstract concepts is central not only to human social life in general, but is key to the transmission of religious and political ideologies, both of which - like much of speculative fiction - are premised on the construction of creatively imagined, alternative moral worlds. Here I’d direct interested readers to David Lewis Williams book on cognitive archaeology, The Mind in the Cave, and Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Human Mind, both of which explore the close relationship between art and religion in the making of modern humanity (at least in a cognitive sense).

Literature is premised on the complex but everyday human capacity known as Theory of Mind, which for brevity’s sake I’ll simply define as the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes (in terms of fiction, we may think that writers are are getting us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the protagonist; but what is really happening is that the author is getting us to imagine being the author who is imagining being the protagonist!). Theory of Mind is a also central cognitive capacity in the production of religious concepts with regard to our ability to actually conceptualise or create mental representations of supernatural entities. Common to many religious systems is the engendering of the belief that powerful supernatural beings are thinking about what you as a believer are thinking about - very useful either as a system of social control and a means, as Scott Atran points out in his book In Gods We Trust, of discouraging defection from any social coalition.

Theory of Mind is also requisite capacity for roleplay - an incredibly socially useful activity which we all participate in (regardless of whether we play Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu or not!) . In relation to Lovecraft, I’ve mentioned in an earlier post his youthful propensity for a kind of activity which in contemporary gamer culture would pass as a kind of simulationist rpging/wargaming. That aside, the capacity for roleplay is something which we also engage in when reading fiction, but it is also a requisite capacity for ritual and ritualised enactments of communion with posited supernatural entities, whether in the form of communicating with an evoked entity, or through trance, possession, channelling, etc. In other words, many religious practices - especially where they involve supposed interactions with alleged supernatural beings - engage the (relatively mundane) functioning of our evolved cognitive architecture, and our capacity for the production of symbols, in forms of creative role-play which may not be that different from those used in the production of fantastic fiction, myth, etc.

In any case, some of these ideas will be explored in a bit more detail my book on the Lovecraftian paranormal (once I get back to writing the damned thing!).

Gratified to discover I'm not part of the problem...

2011-09-28T20:21:00.011+01:00

I found this on Facebook earlier today:

I, for one, am immensely gratified to say that I have absolutely no idea who the woman on the right is. Extrapolating from the minimal context available my presumption is that she has something to do with reality TV...

As for the other bloke (of whom I'm a great admirer), I do believe that he would have found himself in good company had he ever met Lovecraft. A fact, I think, attested to by this and other quotations:

'It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.'

Nice.

A Fond Remembrance of Chaotist Demonology

2011-09-24T01:40:00.011+01:00

Whilst browsing in one of London’s occult book shops recently, I was nicely surprised to discover reissued editions of Ramsey Dukes’ (pictured left) classic (and wonderfully titled) Chaos magick manuals: Blast Your Way to Megabucks Using My Secret Sex Power Formula: And Other Reflections on the Spiritual Path and Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed (perhaps better known as SSOTBME). In addition to which, one cannot fail to remember Duke's classic book (and a personal favourite of mine) What I Did In My Holidays: Essays on Black Magic,Satanism and Devil Worship.

I do hope readers of this blog will excuse the name dropping on this occasion, but the encounter with said books evoked a sudden and unexpected reminiscence of an experience about which I had almost entirely forgotten: a Summer’s afternoon in the late 1990s spent - as part of my doctoral research - in the company of Ramsey Dukes (aka Lionel Snell) discussing the finer points of Chaotist demonology and generally having a wonderful time being shown the sites of rural Oxfordshire from the back of Dukes' motorbike. Not only was Dukes a consumate conversationalist on that occasion, but a gentleman to boot. Ahh, Happy days.

Something a bit more substantive (not to say less self-indulgent) should make it's way onto the blog within the next week or so.

Richard Stanley and the Necronomicon

2011-09-16T00:11:00.005+01:00

In a recent posting on his Terra Umbra blog, cult filmaker Richard Stanley discusses his recent short film Mother of Toads, based on the Clark Ashton Smith story of the same name (and set in Averoigne, Smith's fictionalised version of medieval souther France). By the sounds of things, Stanley has also added additonal Lovecraftian elements to his retelling of the tale.

Of interest to readers of this blog is a mention of the George Hay Necronomicon (portions of which appear elsewhere on the Terra Umbra website). In relation to which Stanley claims there are those within Southern France's esoteric community who believe the Hay Necronomicon to be based on an earlier Cathar grimoire, namely The Book of the Seven Seals. If I recall correctly, elsewhere Stanley also claims that this may have been one of the treasures supposedly smuggled out of the beseiged Cathar castle of Montsegur in 1244 - an event which has come to have a central bearing on many recent grail/holy bloodline conspiracy theories. Stanley also mentions a 12th Century carving containing what he believes to be 'the seal of Eibon', inferring this as possible proof of The Book of Eibon's actual existence. I'm not sure where all this is going, but Stanley has also made allusions to Lovecraftian elements underpinning the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. Hopefully I'll be in a posiiton to provide additional commentary regarding this matter as I learn more.

Have You Seen the Harlequin?

2011-09-13T03:13:00.009+01:00

Jason Offutt is something of a regular on paranormal podcasts and reports here (with, it seems, a degree of artistic licence) on encounters with an entity known as ‘The Harlequin'. Not exactly Lovecraft, but the Harlequin does feel like the kind of weird puppet-like entities that populate the works of Thomas Ligotti. For those interested, Offutt’s blog also offers accounts of strange black-eyed children in Norwich and Ireland, as well as an encounter with a gnome-like being somewhat reminiscent of Machen’s Little People.

Those looking for ‘paranormal’ entities in a more Lovecraftian vein might want to check out the Slender Man internet meme (which I’m sure most readers of this blog have at least a passing familiarity). Invented by Victor Surge on the Something Awful forums in 2009, Slender Man (probable inspiration for Dr. Who’s ‘The Silence’) is fast acquiring status as a new urban legend. Indeed, reports have apparently been emerging of real-world encounters with this being - some of which purportedly predate Slender Man’s documented invention. Given that this is the internet we are dealing with, it is difficult to ascertain whether such accounts are ‘genuine’, or just fueling the creepy Slender Man vibe. As other paranormal pundits have already commented, Slender Man may be an interesting variant of the account of ‘Philip’, supposedly an artificial ghost created as part of a psi-experiment in the 1970s (see I.R. Owens and M. Sparrow’s book Conjuring Up Philip, for more details of this classic case). As is hopefully evident from previous posts, I generally reject such paranormalist explanations of these kinds of 'entity' encounters.

Other interesting cases of ‘entity’ encounters - this time MiBs - are noted in an article by folklorist Peter Rojcewicz (‘The "Men in Black" Experience and Tradition Analogues with the Traditional Devil Hypothesis’ in The Journal of American Folklore, 100 (396): 148-160). Rojcewizc implies that such entity encounters tend to be conjured up by percipients in altered states of consciousness (a position I'm much more LIKELY to entertain). The article is also of interest in that it contains a first-person narrative of an encounter with an MiB. Presented pseudonomyously, apparently Rojcewicz later admitted that he was the actual percipient of this encounter. The Rocjewicz piece is also of interest with regard to the links it makes between MiBs and Judeo-Christian demonology, and is a cornerstone study in the emergent mythology of Demonic Ultraterrestrials theorised by Spooky Paradigm here. And more briefly here at the Mikatonic Museum blog.

In any case, I would certainly be grateful if anyone can point me in the direction of alleged accounts of encounters with Slender Man. Or, indeed, any other of the Lovecraftian entities that increasingly seem to form part of the discursive formations of contemporary occulture.

Nazi Occult Royalty are Spawn of Cthulhu Shocker!

2011-09-07T00:20:00.006+01:00

Apologies for the rather bold and (at least to non-UK reader’s) ungrammatical header. Apropos the (largely unmourned) death of The News of the World, I felt that the UK readers might be cheered by a post header of tabloid proportions.

Needless to say, in the minds of some conspiracy theorists, aforementioned header is figuratively (if not literally) true. Certainly one area of research which is proving to be fertile in relation to my book are apparent links between Lovecraft’s fictive mythology and the whole Holy Blood, Holy Grail/Da Vinci Code shebang. David Icke’s claims – indirectly lifted from Robert E. Howard’s King Kull story ‘The Shadow Kingdom’ - that the ruling elite of the planet are constituted of a bloodline of shapeshifting extra-dimensional reptoids is already a well-established sidereal Lovecraftian take on this particular stream of contemporary esoterica. Another - which I’ve recently become aware of - is Tracy Twyman‘s claim that the sacred bloodline of Jesus goes back, a la 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', to a hybridisation programme between humans and extra-/ultra-terrestrial beings akin to Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones. Here, however, Twyman takes a leaf out of the Simon Necronomicon (peppered with a heavy dose of Zecheria Sitchin filtered through Robert Temple and Kenneth Grant) by claiming that Lovecraft’s pseudomythology is also synonymous with that found in Sumerian mythology: that the Old Ones are identical with the Annanuki (and, indeed, with the Nephilim from The Book of Enoch). Indeed, Simon's Necronomicon is quoted at various points in one of Twyman’s books on the matter, Dead But Dreaming: The Great Old Ones of Lovecraftian Legend Reinterpreted a Atlantean Kings. So far so good - with ultraterrestrials, holy bloodlines, and ancient aliens we’re hitting some of the key signifyers of any contemporary conspiracy theory deserving of the name.

Sadly, Twyman appears not to have undertaken a particularly close reading of Lovecraft, as she submits the Cthulhu mythos to a very Derlethian interpretation (evident in the fact that she claims that in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ R’lyeh sank because of the pride and destructive behaviour of Cthulhu et al offended God). In addition, any good Lovecraftian conspiracist worth their salt would immediately jump on the similarities between ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and the biblical accounts of Jesus’ life as documented by Dirk Mosig (and the basis of Richard Tierney’s novel The Drums of Chaos).

Oh yes, and a rather strained etymological link between ‘Cthulhu’ and ‘Thule’ is made, bringing the Nazis into the picture for no other apparent reason than, well, they are Nazis (and any contemporary conspiratorial occult tale worth its salt needs to contain at least a passing mention of Nazis). In any case, an interesting end result of all this is the inference that Prince William may be a direct descendent of Sumerian/Atlantean/Cthulhoid ultraterrestrials. Not sure where the other red-headed step-child (namely, Prince Harry) fits into the picture. Though given his past proclivities for dressing up in SS uniforms, maybe the Nazi occultists can find something for him to do in the New World Order. Talking of red-headed people, did I mention that the Merovingians are, according to Twyman, also red-headed Aryans? That’s right: not only are the Merovingians hybrid descendents of Sumerian-Atleantean-Cthulhoid Extra-/Ultra-Terrestrials, they are also the Aryan sons of Jesus. Who is, in turn, a descendent of Satan (and thus, one presumes, Cthulhu-Shaitan in Kenneth Grant and Simon’s esoteric interpretation of Lovecraft). So we have it: a bizarre racialised Gnostic Luciferian re-imagining of human prehistory whereby a great war in heaven occurred between the ancient followers of Satan and Jehovah, subsequent to which the benevolent Satan has been depicted as evil by the usurping followers of the god of the Old Testament (i.e. Catholicism and Judaism).

Implicit in this aspect of Twyman’s exegesis of the holy bloodline as Cthulhu mythos is, I think, a common element of contemporary Lovecraftian occulture (and one I’ve documented in my own research): that the multi-dimensionality of the Great Old Ones represents an idealised state of human futurity. Thus the ‘summoning’ of the Great Old Ones becomes the symbolic means of re-awakening their genetic heritage within the human genome and thus allowing us (or at least those of the Great Old Ones’ bloodline) to participate in a transhuman and transcendent phase of being in which the illusory duality of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ will be dissolved in an Nietzschean apocalypse of the Will to Power writ on a cosmic stage. Did I mention that this may come about with the re-awakening’ of the ‘holy grail’ somewhere under Rennes-le-Chateau? And that said grail is none other than the originator of the holy bloodline (Satan-Cain-Cthulhu) who is thus ‘dead but dreaming’ deep beneath Southern France?

The notion of a trans-/post-human metamorphosis of consciousness is a central tenet of elements of contemporary Satanism. A point which, in this context, ties in broadly with Twyman’s generally libertarian outlook on the significance of the holy bloodline as that of the ignominiously maligned ultraterrestrial Satan-Cthulhu. It is a viewpoint evident in the work of her fellow researcher, the wonderfully named Nicholas de Vere von Drakenberg - bearing in mind I have yet to read any of his work. Taking that into consideration, my understanding (elaborated from Twyman) is that de Vere von Drakenberg advocates an explicitly genetic-occult elitism (which, in turn, appears to have its roots in the work of Laurence Gardner, whose work I’ve also yet to read) wherein the selfsame sovereign bloodline also traces its descent to ultraterrestrial God Kings of the primal earth. Who are also elves, apparently. Reading between the lines, I get the sense that both Twyman and de Vere von Drakenberg believe themselves to be inheritors of this genetic tradition.

Thus in an interview on Twyman’s own podcast, de Vere von Drakenberg views this bloodline as heir to a spiritual and political heritage of total and absolute freedom untrammelled by ordinary anthropocentric mores (unsurprisingly, de Sade was also apparently a member of this bloodline). The influence of Kenneth Grant again seems evident, as achievement of this state is interwoven with the evocation of ‘starfire’ via menstrual blood in some kind of system of Tantric magick which De Vere von Drakenberg refers to as ‘Royal Witchcraft’ (only attainable to those of the bloodline). However - and despite spiritual claims which are as grandiose as his title - de Vere von Drakensberg appears to be advocating a vulgar form of Crowley’s magical philosophy of ‘Do What Thou Wilt’. To this end, von Drakenberg also appears to be seeking recognition of his bloodline as a ‘transcorporeal’ sovereign state, with a view of somehow achieving recognition by the United Nations and attaining diplomatic status. The intention behind this - implied but not explicitly stated in the interview with Twyman - is to enable members of the bloodline to acquire immunity from the legal consequences of murder, rape, incest, etc. (all of which, as I understand it, are the ancient prerogative of the bloodline).

Ironically, de Vere von Drakensberg seems not to have considered the possibility that the transition to such a transhuman state might render such corporeal desires meaningless. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Sovereign Grand Duchy of Drakensberg seems more inclined to envisage their ultimate spiritual goal in terms of a violently sexualised masculine fantasy.

This brings me to what I think is an important and up to now unrecognised aspect of 'holy bloodline' conspiracies: that they are reminiscent of British Israelism. British Israelism achieved popularity in England and elsewhere in Europpe during the 19th Century, and formed a precursor to the contemporary right wing white supremacist Christian Identity movement in the US. Interested readers are directed to Michael Barkun’s excellent Religion and the Racist Right for a detailed academic exploration of this relationship.

British Israelism is a complex phenomenon with many offshoots, but in brief elements of this belief system posit the notion that Northern Europeans are one of the 'lost tribes' of Israel, and the true inheritors of the covenant with the Judeo-Christian god of the Old Testament (admittedly this is not quite the same position taken by Twyman and de Vere von Drakenberg). Furthermore, forms of British Israelism also held that the aristocracy of England and Europe are themselves direct descendents of King David, and thus relations of Jesus (a point that is explicitly stated in the work of some bloodline researchers, including Twyman). Importantly, elements of British Israelism also held that Jewish people were not the true 'Israelites', but were presumed to be a racially and spiritually inferior group who usurped that covenent. In the context of the Christian Identity movement, this resulted in the notion that Jesus was not ethically, ‘racially’ or culturally Jewish, but ‘Aryan’ (In contrast to Twyman's work, the Christian Identity movement tends to treat Jewish people as being literally the spawn of Satan - but in this case the evil Satan and not the 'good' one). As indicated above, Twyman also seems to hold the view that the bloodline of Jesus is also 'Aryan'. Of course, these perspectives are not unique to British Israelism, but crop up in the racilaised aspects of Theosophy, as well as the Ariosophy movement documented by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in 'The Occult Roots of Nazism'

I’m sure a goodly number of ‘holy bloodline’ researchers such as Twyman are not pursuing an explicitly racist or anti-semitic agenda. However, sometimes one only needs to scratch beneath the surface to find significant threads of racialist and anti-semitic ideology running through many aspects of contemporary conspiracism and esotericism.

There are other obvious racialised aspects of this story which I have yet to explore, including: Otto Rahn’s quest for the grail (currently the focus of the Lovecraftian tinged work of Richard Stanley) as well as the fact that a few bloodline researchers do rely on a quote from the works of racist esotericists such Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano.

Another point of interest (though not perhaps the most appropriate word to use given the subject matter) are the links I'm discerning between all of the above and elements of racialised esoterism that I think are implicit in, of all things, claims about hoaxed moon-landing and other NASA-related conspiracies. This, I should add, seems to be related to (but goes beyond) the tired claims of a New World Order being brewed up by a global cabal of Jewish bankers, framing this in terms of a cosmic war between different groups of ancient aliens who were/are 'racial' enemies, the material remnants of which are to be found in so-called 'anomalous artefacts' said to be found visible on the Moon, Mars, Phobos, Titan, etc.

Finally, apologies for the lack of embedded links in this post - I'm still catching up on work, but wanted to get this post published even though links are missing. I'll try and add them later.

Back in the UK

2011-09-04T23:48:00.006+01:00

The post header says it all: I finally got back to Blighty (after a gruelling 24 hours of travelling, having had to catch a flight to Minneapolis in order to get a flight back to the UK) late on the afternoon of Wednesday 31st August. Since then, I've spent a busy two days at work dealing with a bunch of exam marking, and have had some family-related events going on over the weekend, so haven't had much time to devote to the blog. However, something substantial on HPL, Tracy Twyman and the Merovingian bloodline should appear in the next few days, where I'll be returing to the issue of Lovecraft, conspiracy theories and race. As I've been delving into this, I'm digging up some highlighting interesting points of intersection between 'Holy Bloodline' conspiracism and forms of anti-semitism emergent from a 19th Century movement known as British Israelism (which also appears to have had an influence on the field of pyramidology and alternative archaeology).

I'll also be updating links in previous posts, and hopefully including some photos of my Providence trip.

Lovecraft Pilgrimage Update

2011-08-27T21:54:00.003+01:00

Unfortunately updates on my Lovecraft pilgrimage will have to wait, due to the unfortunate circumstance of my being caught in the middle of a hurricane. The good news is that I managed to visit HPL's grave and do a tour of Lovecraftian Providence before rushing back to New York. Am now hunkered down in my hotel (the Waldorf Astoria, no less!) but have limited internet access. The likelihood is that I'll be here for another week before my flight is rescheduled, so I'll be trying to use the time to compose posts to be uploaded on my return to Blighty.

Lovecraft Pilgrimage, Day 2

2011-08-24T04:05:00.005+01:00

Again, just a very brief update. Made it to the Nicholas Roerich Museum today - great to experience firsthand some of the paintings that inspired what I consider to be Lovecraft's greatest work. I also took the opportunity to pick up about 20 postcards of Roerich's eerily evocative art (mostly the mountainous landscapes for which he's famed), including my personal favourite 'Himalaya - Pink Mountain' and a piece entitled 'Tibet - Himalayas' (which seems to have been a key influence on the imagery in AtMoM - I'll try to emded images of these paintings later). All of which will look very nice on the walls of my study once framed. I also bought a very reasonably priced copy of Roerich's travelogue Altai-Himalaya. If I'm not mistaken, this is the book in which Roerich details what some consider to be an early/pre-Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting over Tibet.

Time constraints meant that I wasn't able to make it to Lovecraft's old apartment in Brooklyn today, so have scheduled that for tomorrow, along with shopping trips to various bookshops in NY. I'm also planning a trip to the Compleat Strategist game store just on the off-chance that they have a copy of Fantasy Flight Game's newest Lovecraftian offering, Elder Sign (though I suspect this won't have made it into FLGS' until next week).

Later posts will include photos from my trip, hopefully accompanied with some more insightful commentary on my travels.

Lovecraft Pilgrimage, Day 1

2011-08-23T03:37:00.002+01:00

Just a quick update on my Lovecraft pilgrimage: made it to New York without incident, but am feeling extremely jet-lagged (first time this has happened to me on a relatively-long haul flight). After checking in to my hotel, spent a few hours wandering around downtown Manhattan before heading back to base. Tomorrow I plan to visit the Nicholas Roerich museum with a view to seeinging the originals of a few of the pieces that inspired At The Mountains of Madness, and probably the tenement block in Brooklyn where Lovecraft stayed during his New York sojourn.

Radio Host Interviews Nyarlathotep?!!

2011-08-22T00:13:00.005+01:00

Apologies in advance - there are no embedded links to the source material mentioned in this post. I’ll add these when I’m back from my Lovecraft pilgrimage in a week’s time.

Readers of this blog will not be entirely surprised by the claim that Lovecraft’s work has, for some time, been informing the current conspiracy zeitgeist. Indeed, a very useful summary of affairs can be found in a post from the Spooky Paradigm blog (in which the author of which was also kind enough to mention my Treadwell lecture series) froma couple of months back. I have to say, I’m very much in agreement with Spooky Paradigm that the current centre of conspiratorial gravity seems to be drifting towards a Lovecraftian and interdimensionalist interpretation of phenomenon such as UFOs.

To date, one of the most controversial offerings regarding the matter of a grand occult interdimensional demonic conspiracy comes in the form of Nick Redfern’s fascinating book Final Events, detailing the apparent existence of government think-tank who seek to establish a right wing Christian theocracy in order to combat the threat of UFOs (demonic incursions from other planes of existence whose entrance into our realm was precipitated by the shenanigans of Aleister Crowley, Jack Parson and L. Ron Hubbard). On a related matter, there is a very good academic article looking at the roots of ufology in Christian demonology by Christopher Partridge.

I’ve already noted some Lovecraftian predilictions expressed in Redfern’s cryptozoological writings, but will have more to say on the matter in a later post - although he’s missed a rich vein of source material in the work of the late lamented Kenneth Grant (I don’t recall Redfern mentioning Grant in Final Events). Interested readers in the Grant/Crowley/Lovecraft/UFO thing as viewed from a conspiratorial perspective might find this article by Adam Gorightly of interest.

However, I digress. On listening to an episode of the US based internet radio show Ground Zero Live I was a little taken aback to discover the host - Clyde Lewis - claiming to have interviewed an MiB either claiming to be (or perhaps just using the moniker of)Nyarlathotep! Apparently this may also exist as a recording online (if anyone is able to track it down, I’d be very grateful if you could furnish me with the link). Further investigations into the matter have uncovered two online articles by Lewis which elaborate somewhat on the matter, including his claims - a la Redfern - that the US Government have been engaged in interdimensional research with the aim of contacting entities not dissimilar to Lovecraft’s Old Ones. In the second of these articles, the Simon Necronomicon is invoked (although Lewis seems to attribute the text to Lovecraft himself) and used to identify the Lovecraftian extraterrestrial Elder Gods with Sumerian deities as per Zecharia Sitchin’s theories regarding the Annunaki.

The Sumerian connection that crops up with alarming regularity up in a lot of contemporary ufology and conspiratorial discourse is a rather interesting phenomenon, as is the recent fascination with the Jinn of Islamic folklore amongst conspiracists and paranormal resrearchers - especially those of a right wing bent. In light of which, I find it difficult not to see these intriguing set of intersections as linked to the recent Orientalist post-millenial fears regarding Islam whipped up by the War on Terror. In the context of the ‘paranoid style’ of contemporary conspiratorialism, these fears concerning the West’s perceived assimilation by an 'alien other' are apparently being liberally and literally translated into a fear of alien gods. Almost inevitably, it seems, such fears also end up being conjoined with the toxic substrate of anti-semitism which seems to underpin so much of conspiracy culture. In this respect, it is sadly the case that the spectre of HPL’s racism lives on in modern day appropriations of his pseudomythology: even the British Nationalist Party have gotten in on the act (evidently there’s a talk on Lovecraft by BNP speaker Jonathan Bowden available on YouTube – I haven’t yet had the heart to listen to it). It is likely that I shall also have more to say on this matter when I come to examine Lovecraft’s influence on the contemporary Grail /’Holy Bloodline’ conspiracies.

Happy Birthday HPL!

2011-08-20T22:57:00.006+01:00

Today being Lovecraft's birthday, I thought it would be propitious to announce the resurrection of Whispers from the Ghooric Zone. After nearly two years of inactivity (not including my rather enigmatic post from August 2010), the essential saltes have been gathered up, the requisite formulae incanted, and the inchoate ruminations of yours truly have once more been called up to ye liveliest awfulness from deep within the silent staring void that is the blogosphere.

This will form part of a wider phase of increasing creative activity and writing output (opportunities for which have been minimal over the past few years as I've had to focus on work). This creative resurgence will, I hope, also culminate in the completion of a book provisionally titled Lovecraft's Monsters: The Pulp Roots of the Paranormal. A preliminary outline has been drafted, with some initial work already started on the early chapters. More of this later as I present some of the ideas and source material relevant to book in forthcoming posts (which I hope to upload on a basis of around 2-3 weekly).

Needless to say, I shall also be using the blog as the means of inflicting my varied and curmudgeonly ruminations regarding Lovecraftian culture and occulture on anyone who cares to read them! It is also likely that the blog may include some ranting, fist-shaking and general bigotry regarding my current inability to win a game of my current obsession, Malifaux - a skirmish scale miniatures game which incorporates some Lovecraftian elements.

The provisio to all of the above is that, while I mean to try and post something substantial in the next day or so to get things started (possibly regarding an apparent encounter with Nyarlathotep), this coming Monday (22nd August) I'm flying to New York; thence to Providence on 25th August for my second pilgrimage to Lovecraft's grave (or rather the memorial in the Lovecraft plot at Swan Point). I'll be taking my handy little netbook with me and, if circumstances allow, will post updates regarding my travels. Otherwise, expect full service to be resumed during the last week of August.

Be seeing you.

Thought for the day

2010-06-18T00:13:00.001+01:00

Ownership of a telescope is the first step in disabusing oneself of the fallacy that literal truth inheres in any religious system.

New Weird Class Warriors. Oh Really?

2009-06-27T21:21:00.008+01:00

Though a long time advocate of M. John Harrison (though see my relatively recent post on Harrison on Lovecraft), I have found myself somewhat blindsided by a quote of Harrison's which, I believe quite rightly, this blogger has railed against

No doubt apologists will say that Harrison was being ironic or somesuch, but sadly, I feel his claim that 'it is undignified to read for the purposes of escape' is sadly all too indicative of broader attitudes emergent within the current 'New Weird' trend in speculative literature (of which, nonetheless, I still consider myself a fan). Especially so amongst a number of these genres' acedemic/philosophical exegetes, who would style themselves as revolutionaries without really - I mean really - having any experiential or conceptual understanding of what it means not to have come from anything other than a relatively privileged middle-class background.

Joshi's The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos

2009-04-27T19:56:00.005+01:00

Beware that this post continues with the trend of curmudgeonly bitterness common to my earlier scribblings. Though hopefully what I have to say wont end up alienating what few readers this blog retains. In any case, I've finally started reading Joshi's The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos and, two chapters in, a couple of things jump out.

Most notable of which is the fact that Joshi doesn't offer up much so far in terms of a critical methodology. While he often points an accusatory finger at many mythos tales as having no literary merit, the manner in which this merit is to be measured (outside a set of rather conservative and unimaginative 'abstract aesthetic standards' that are 'widely accepted') lacks analytical depth. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here, for in truth a lot of mythos fiction does tend to be a bit shit.

In any case Joshi doesn't really seek methodological support from contemporary (for which read 'faddish') literary theorists. In chapter 1, for example, he takes a snide dig at Robert M. Price's highly informed and theoretically rich insights into mythos fiction as the product of (a presumably suspect!) avante-gardism. Now, I'm not an expert in recent trends in literary criticism (though fortunately my sister is an academic who is) but it seems to me that Joshi is unfairly dismissive of some thirty odd years of developments in the field, many of which (far from being faddishly avante-garde) have come to inform the academic mainstream. In this respect it strikes me that Joshi, like Lovecraft, is a man out of his time.

Indications at this stage, then, are that anyone who doesn't tow a line that broadly recapitulates Joshi's own construction of Lovecraft are in for similar treatment - evident for example in Joshi's insistence that his is the absolute authoritative definition of the meaning of the word Necronomicon and one that brooks no argument - especially from Price. Joshi's literalism in this respect indicates a disappointing unwillingness to engage with wider developments in literary, critical and cultural theory.

That said, up to this point I'm finding the book insightful and enjoyable (when not infurating). More feedback as I delve deeper into the mouldering tome. By the way, if this does come across as rather elitist view of Joshi's work, fear not - look out for a forthcoming iconoclastic post which takes a pop at recent obscurantist co-options of Lovecraft from within academia. Nice.

Mark Samuels Sighted

2009-04-17T01:09:00.005+01:00

A few weeks ago I believe I caught, from the corner of my eye, the spectral figure of Mark Samuels lurking around the Lovecraft section (where else?) of London's Forbidden Planet. Unfortunately I was in a rush to be somewhere else and (rather impolitely) didn't have the time to say hello. For those not familar with Mark, he is a writer of some outstanding weird fiction and 'mystical horror'. If you are a fan of Machen, Lovecraft and Ligotti chances are you will appreciate Mark Samuels' writing.

I can't claim to have known Mark very well, but became acquainted with him a few years ago via the London socials held by the Lovecraft Scholar's yahoo group, and once had the pleasure of being invited by Mark to a meeting of (what I believe was)the almost mythical Sodality of Shadows one Saturday evening in Highgate. As I recall, the last time I saw Mark was at a send-off do at London's Cittie of Yorke pub prior to his absconding to Mexico (from whence I understand he has recently returned).

In any case, this post is inspired by the fact that I've since discovered Mark has a new blog - while it's fair to say I'd probably disagree with some of the religious views expressed therein, it is definitely worth checking out for afficianados of the weird. Of particular note is Mark's April 7th post critiquing claims that it is the socio-political content of weird fiction which validates it as literature. Again, there's some points that Mark raises which I would probably take issue with, although I think he makes a valid argument that even the most materialist of weird fiction often ends up transcending its own materialism. Indeed, I believe I am taking a similar position vis-a-vis Lovecraft's 'non-supernatural cosmic art' in an article-in-progress (though on a personal note this doesn't constitute a revision of my own atheism; in fact I think it is eminently possible to maintain a fairly stalwart position of atheism without denigrating human religiousity or indeed the need to reject the 'naturalness' of religious ideas).

Go Mark!

Knowing (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS)

2009-04-02T23:58:00.007+01:00

Greetings. Whilst the thick, gloopy strands of Azathothian entropy have entangled us further and drawn us deeper into the unreflective depths of cosmic ennui, we at Ghooric Zone are still making the occasional attempt - as the mood takes us - to pass on our reflections on Lovecraftian popular culture. In all probability no one is listening anymore, but being the good Lovecraftians that we are, we don’t care and will continue spouting our jibber-jabber into the audient void (often to the sound of atonal flutes and monotonous drumming).

On to business. If The Mist was purportedly a movie of existential horror with (as I have argued previously) an implicit moral message, then I’m about to suggest that Knowing is at its core a movie of existential, materialistic (and, dare I say it, Lovecraftian) horror masquerading as a ‘feel good’ movie (albeit one concerning the end of the world). Please be warned that the following contains major spoilers regarding the film's plot. In fact, I'm about to tell you how it ends.

Broadly speaking the film is a category (though not in the strictest sense) of what Brian Aldiss has elsewhere called a ‘shaggy god’ story , where religious or biblical themes and stories turn out to have science-fictional causes. It is also a film the where the ancient astronaut hypothesis is implicitly invoked; additionally, Knowing shares a certain kinship with M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, where an apocalyptic science fiction premise is actually concealing a spiritual message about hope subverting meaninglessness and the existence of life –after-death. In brief, Knowing is about how space aliens (who turn out to look a bit like angels) save some children from the end of the world and spirit them off to an Eden-like planet (replete with Biblical Tree of Knowledge) along with some pairs of animals (rabbits, actually - quite useful being the fast breeders they are and hence providing a potentially indefinite supply of protein) a la Noah (the film-makers certainly seemed to enjoy mixing their Biblical metaphors). Oh, and somehow along the way the atheistic astrophysicist Nicholas Cage (whose mechanistic materialism is a consequence of his wife meaningless death in a fire - a bit like Mel Gibson’s character in Signs) finally comes to believe in life after death (a bit like Mel Gibson’s character in Signs), helpfully reconciling with his pastor father before Cage, his remaining family and the rest of the Earth’s population die horribly in a conflagration caused by a massive solar flare.

The mirroring of the intervention of the aliens with the story of Noah seems to be the locus of this spiritual message - that there is hope, that death isn’t really the end, that there are more things out there than are dreamt of it our philosophy and so on. But wait a minute...the film implies that nothing happens without a reason - death isn’t a matter of random unthinking chance. Does this mean that the end of the world was itself part of a bigger plan? Given that in the film the space aliens - following the ancient astronaut hypothesis - are the secular analogue of God (or at least His angelic instruments) might this imply that they themselves instigated the apocalypse? Interestingly, when taking human form the aliens do seem to conform to the ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ extraterrestrials beloved of most right-wing ufologist crack-heads. Perhaps after all, they really were space-Nazis conducting a eugenics programme on a massive scale? Hmm...maybe they should have got Mel Gibson to play the part instead. At least the aliens had the good sense not to take Nicholas Cage with them.

On a more serious point, if as I suspect the film makers were trying to putting a re-enchanted New Age spin on things akin to what Shyamalan attempts in Signs, I wonder if this aspect of the film might not again unwittingly point to some of the more problematic aspects of Theosophical-New Age-ufological apocalypticism? Especially those tinged with the suspect racialist undertones of Victorian social evolutionism (if not the outright discourse of ethnic ‘cleansing’), and wherein the perfect ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ extraterrestrials are coming to save the chosen from an ‘impure’ world. In this respect, the children in the film who are ‘the chosen’ seem to have remarkable knowledge and innate telepathic abilities - perhaps a reflection of real-world New Age beliefs surrounding ‘indigo children’ (as well as some of the ideas regarding human-ET hybridisation emergent from alien abductee narratives) who are seen to represent a more ‘spiritualised’ step in human evolution. The rest of us, being unnecessary and 'impure' throwbacks can be consigned to the dustbin of history as the ubermensch forge ahead to create a perfect and 'pure' world. (I use the terminology of purity and pollution here purposely, as I think it perhaps one of the most powerful sets of symbols/metaphors that humans have deployed for social and political ends - especially in the discourse and practice of racism, ethnic violence and genocide).

I’m prone to put my own sly spin on what this movie might be about: that in fact its use of dodgy alien astronaut tropes actually undermines the very point it (seems) to be trying to communicate: that even the most secular of atheists must eventually abandon their disbelief and accept the comfort that there is ‘more’ (in a spiritual sense) to this world than this world itself. Cage’s character’s reconciliation with his religious father and seeming acceptance that death is not the end is problematic because the saviours appear to be aliens and not angels. The film seems to pushing toward a recognition that perhaps the aliens look like angels because perhaps they really are angels. But the other subtextual possibility that the film seems to contain is one emergent from the very same demythologising alien astronaut hypothesis that Lovecraft prefigured in his work: that there are, in fact, no angels; angels and other representations of the supernatural are simply the symbolic cloth in which we clothe the nuts and bolts matter of extraterrestrials. This seems to be supported by the fact that the ET’s craft first manifests in a form akin to the vision of Ezekiel which is referenced earlier in the film: all wheels within wheels. In any case, this infers that the ETs certainly have interfered before in human history. In other words, the aliens don't look like angels; rather it is the case that we have constructed our image of angels based on extraterrestrial interventions in our past history.

This being the case, there doesn’t seem anything to contradict the notion that the end of the world as it happens in the film is anything other than meaningless random chance. Or as suggested above, perhaps an act engineered by the aliens themselves. Indeed, the more I think about this the more I consider it to be a distinct possibility according to the logic that underlies the film: if the aliens possess the godlike power of fortelling the future, why could they not have stopped the solar flare with their technology? Given that they knew this was going to happen so far in advance and (presumably) harbour such altruistic attitudes towards humans, why didn’t they take the time to save all of the world’s population? In fact, their altruism only seems to extend toward children with special powers, not us ‘less evolved’ primates. Or maybe they weren’t fortelling the future but using their technology to manufacture it and pass their well-laid plans as ‘prophesy’ (here I’m of course following the Clarkean adage that any sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic. Or in this case, religion). Cage, then, has simply (and understandably) fallen into the very human trap of manufacturing hope where there is none as a means of alleviating anxiety in the face of, well, a horrible death. Could I be right, then, that the belief that ‘this isn’t all there is’ turns out to be false consciousness (in this case, engendered by our alien overlords)?

I would like to think so. I’d also like to think that this was the subversive intention of the film-makers (especially in the context of the litigious New Age science-fictional clap-trap spiritualities that appear to be rampant amongst the Hollywood hoi-polloi - what happened to all the Satanists?), but I imagine that’s beyond the realms of possibility given that this is a movie starring Nicholas Cage, which is about unsubtle as you can get.

Harrison on Lovecraft via Houellebecq...Oh Dear.

2009-01-05T22:42:00.004Z

A word of warning - this is something of a reactive post and as such probably not one that is not carefully considered to say the least. So something I'll likely return to as and when time permits.

Now down to business. To say I was rather disappointed with M. John Harrison’s recent review of the Lovecraft on the Guardian’s website is something of an understatement. It's not that I object to criticism of Lovecraft; rather it is Harrison’s (quite frankly lazy) reduction of Lovecraft’s considerable contribution to the literature of the weird to a piece of cod Freudianism : Lovecraft’s work represents in Harrison’s eyes ‘a last desperate clutch at the undependable maternal skirt’ and Lovecraft’s cosmicism consequently rendered as ‘ the terror and disappointment of not being the universe's favourite child’. This sweeping and ill-considered evaluation based, it seems, on a quote of Lovecraft’s (‘adulthood is hell’) taken from Houellebecq. Indeed, it is Houellebecq who (implicitly) seems to come in for most praise in the review as the ‘rehabilitator’ of Lovecraft.

Sadly, Harrison seems to have been bedazzled by a new (and in my mind often insubstantial) trend in Lovecraft scholarship which is emerging from within a relatively small group of contemporary academic philosophers. A trend which also seems to treat as unimportant or trivial many of the pre-Houellebecq academic engagements with the Lovecraftian milieu (especially those that are not informed by an impenetrably obscurantist category of poststructuralist Marxism). A point I shall return to when I get around to revising my ‘missing’ post.

In any case, Harrison ultimately deems Lovecraft’s work escapist. I’m somewhat ambivalent on this point; more worrying though is Harrison’s own views that escapism in the literature of the weird and the fantastic is politically irresponsible (bloody hell man - thats what hobbies are for!). Not only does this come off sounding very close to the preachiness of middle-class Guardian-reading liberals who are all too ready to lay the responsibility of any number of social ills at the feet of Grand Theft Auto, but by telling us that we should be spending our time more productively seems in its own way to reproduce some of the core values of capitalism.

'A Study in Emerald' MP3 Download & 'Missing' Post

2008-11-15T23:58:00.011Z

A recent post on yog-sothoth.com put me on to this one: Neil Gaiman's audio rendition of his Hugo Award winning short story 'A Study in Emerald' can be freely downloaded as an MP3 file for your listening pleasure here.

If you haven't encountered this tale before, you are in for a treat. This was the only worthy contribution to the otherwise execrable Shadows Over Baker Street anthology wherein(as the title suggests) Arthur Conan Doyle's famous consulting detective enters Wold Newton-like into a twisted relationship with the universe of Lovecraftian horror. Gaiman's tale is marked by its daring originality and its witty subversion/inversion of the basic assumptions of both the Lovecraftian and Holmesian milieux. A pdf of the story, produced as a 'facimile' of a late 19th Century news sheet can be found here.

Also a brief note on a recently 'missing' post (for those of you who caught it, the one entitled 'Some Heads Are More Haunted Than Others'). Said post has now been removed - I was moderating a comment when I realised that the posted version was a highly unsatisfactory rough draft and not the revised version (which, it seems, I have inadvertantly deleted).

Lovecraftian Traveller II (Prologue): Three Men Seeking Monsters

2008-10-20T20:07:00.005+01:00

Ok, ok, so I haven’t quite managed to update this blog as regularly as expected. Nonetheless, I’m back for another crack of the whip. One forthcoming post will be a belated entry in my Lovecraftian traveller series, relating sundry adventures in Dunwich and surrounding environs back in July this year. Which brings me to a Fortean tome acquired just prior to the Dunwich jaunt, Nick Redfern's Three Men Seeking Monsters - a book of interest to myself because a) it involved some of the locales I was planning to visit and b) more importantly, it’s about monsters.

Redfern may be well known to some of the readers of this blog for his ufological writing and indeed focus of this book covers related conceptual terrain - in this case a kind of cryptozoological road-trip involving Redfern, Jonathan Downes and Richard Freemen (well-known figures on the UK’s Fortean scene and regulars at the Fortean Times’ annual UK UnConvention). The fact, however, that the six weeks of said road-trip is fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol and (I'm afraid I do feel somewhat qualified to make this claim) amateurish occult theatrics as the ‘gang’ seek to unravel a range of monstrous mysteries does little to support Redfern’s requests to be taken seriously.

Even so, the book warrants mention here due to the fact that what unfolds is a story that meshes Lovecraft with John Keel via an ancient possibly pre-human conspiracy. To cut a long story short, said conspiracy is co-ordinated by the usual bunch of occult hidden masters (in this case ‘The Nine’, who seem to appear fairly regularly in New Age discourse) seeking to open gateways to a nightmarish realm of unreality inhabited by the ‘Cormons’. A rather rubbish and unscary name for an equally unimaginative bunch of entities who thrive on human emotion but, like Forbidden Planet’s creature of the id can only sustain itself through the power of the mind. Incredibly, Redfern asks us to believe that the British Secret Service has, since WWII been involved in a massive occult cover-up as they seek to thwart the plans of the Nine (a consequence of this being, apparently, the appearance of a sea monster near MI5's HQ on the Thames and the existence of giant worm-like cryptids lurking in the obligatory underground bases near, in or around Rudloe Manor - which, it seems, the gang have little or no trouble accessing ). Indeed, like many of the monsters Refern and his friends are chasing, Lovecraft lurks as a constant albeit unseen presence at the periphery of the book. The only difference being that, unlike said monsters, the Old Gent actually does appear (at least in name) on a couple of occasions. Also of note is Redfern's recounting of Freeman’s youthful attempts to summon up Clark Ashton Smith’s spider god Atlach Nacha, along with a second-hand account of astral time-travelling to view the summoning and capture of a Nightgaunt-like creature (albeit with glowing red eyes) by a bunch of Neolithic hunter gatherers.

Sadly, none of this comes across as being anything close to believable given the aforementioned state of inebriation that characterises the gang’s ‘investigations’, the key methodological principle of which is invariant reptition: if a witness tells the same story twice without elaborating on it the second time, they are deemed a worthy and truthful witnesses. A twisted logic also prevails in Redfern and friends' evaluation of witnesses: in one instance, the mental aberrations that the gang detect in one individual (who believes the UK Government is involved in covering up the existence of roving bands of cannibals) is deemed to be the result of trauma caused by an encounter with a genuine paranormal entity. The fact that the encounter might itself be the product of mental illness is not considered. on top of all this circumstantial evidence, vague supposition and half-glimpsed shadows are constructed as powerful evidence that something crytozoological really is afoot in this green and pleasant land: for example, a rustling in the treetops at night accompanied by a vague feeling of a nearby ‘presence’ is taken as evidence of the reality of some weird bat-winged entity. In another instance we are told that after hearing mysterious howls during a nightime exploration of Rendlesham Forest (site of the now generally discredited ‘British Roswell’), that the sound ‘could not have been a fox’ - the insinuation being that if it could not have been something entirely natural, it must be something altogether...unnatural.

This is one of the points at which Redfern’s book intersects with my own experience in and around Dunwich, as I also heard howling whilst strolling through Rendleshem Forest (only to discover about twenty minutes later that it’s source was an altogether mundane pack of dogs visible in the garden of a house next to Woodbridge RAF base). I also saw what looked to be a giant black dog (a repetitive cryptozoological feature of Redfern’s narrative) running through the undergrowth, only to realise as it came running toward me (owner in tow) that it was of regular size and provenance.

The book also displays a frightening lack of reflexivity when, despite a willingness to believe some very outlandish tales, the gang apparently refuse to believe overweight geeky twenty-something Gavin - a caricatutre all too reminiscent of the monster hunters themselves - who claims to have encountered some kind of wild man of the woods (Redfern rather callously disbelieves Gavin's claims to actually having once had a girlfriend, despite being more than willing to accept far less credulous claims.

All in all, what this boils down to is a bunch of inexpert forty-somethings acting like over-excited adolescent occultists who have a) just discovered how cool Chaos magick is five years after it is no-longer derigeur and b) subsequently making a nuisance of themselves after having supped a glass too many of Henry Weston’s Vintage Cider whilst reading Lovecraft.

If you are looking for a slightly surreal rock n' roll Fortean road trip book, ignore this and try Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail instead.

Praying to the Aliens

2008-09-02T20:21:00.005+01:00

It is always, for me, a profound disappointment when someone on the very cutting edge of scientific discovery falls prey to the gravitic pull of metaphysical wish-fulfillment fantasies. Though perhaps this isn’t so surprising when said discoveries literally and in a very corporeal sense bring to attention the fact of our very insignificance.

Such, it seems, is the case of Edgar Mitchell, NASA astronaut and New Age mystagogue who walked on the moon in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission. While his involvement in New Age jiggery-pokery is nothing new (he apparently conducted unsanctioned remote viewing experiments on the moon ) Mitchell has (at least according to a short piece in issue 240 of the Fortean Times) now bought wholesale into the Roswell crash shebang - apparently in part as a consequence of his experiences on the moon.

Mitchell has chosen to refute the Lovecraftian strains of 1990s ‘Darkside’ ufology (which was generally dominated by a bunch of paranoid pre-Ickean neo-Nazis) in favour of the reconstructed contacteeism characteristic of post-1990s New Age ufology: in other words, ETs are abducting humans and subjecting us to the ubiquitous anal probe as a means of facilitating our spiritual evolution. A bit like Thelemic magick, by the sounds of it.

Call me cynical, but I’m prone to view this as ET-valorised positive valuation of human beings’ place in the cosmos as a negative reaction to the massive cultural impact of the space age and the likes of Mitchell’s moon walk: finally we were presented - via the first pictures of the Earth from space - with empirical evidence of our insignificance. (Oddly, I’d see the conspiracy theorists who reject the Moon landings as fake as inhabiting the very same conceptual space as Mitchell. As with Mitchell - and like Creationists - their claims are not so much founded on hard evidence as on an deeply rooted psychological need to affirm absolute faith in a divinely ordained pre-Copernican anthropocentrism, albeit one that is usually disguised by ill-considered psuedo-scientific tomfoolery). By no means a new or original point of view, but nonetheless foreshadowed by what are probably the most recognisable lines from the Lovecraft canon:

'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age'.

In some respects, this returns me to my criticism of Darabond’s The Mist in the previous post. There I talked about ‘the expiation of consciousness’ - a concept that returns me to an article I wrote some years back for Mark Pilkington's Strange Attractor where I stated that

‘the ultimate horror of the Old Ones lies not in their physical appearance, but in the irresolvable existential conundrum they signify: that human sentience generates a desire for meaning and purpose which, in Lovecraft’s abundantly strange and ultimately meaningless cosmos, is denied fulfilment’.

Although I failed to recognise it at the time I was using Lovecraft's pseudo-mythology to paraphrase a point with which Thomas Ligotti’s J.P. Drapeau was already well aquainted. Indeed, Drapeau offers us what is, perhaps, the most concise summation of the materialist nucleus of Lovecraftian horror - and something which, I think, provides an important insight into both Mitchell’s optimistic New Age refutation of a Lovecraftian cosmos and the more general turn towards supernaturalism that seems (almost counterintuitively) to have come to dominate the social, cultural and political life of modernity:

‘But is there really a strange world? Of course. Are there, then, two worlds? Not at all. There is only our own world and it alone is alien to us, intrinsically so by virtue of its lack of mysteries. If only it actually were deranged by invisible powers, if only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us, and less like an empty room filled with the echoes of this dreadful improvising. To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange!’

This week I have been mostly watching (SPOILER ALERT)...

2008-08-27T21:41:00.007+01:00

I’ve never been a huge Stephen King fan, but along with the short story ‘Crouch End’ his novella The Mist rates high on my list of favourite Lovecraftian genre literature. In truth it’s been a while since I’ve read the novella, but was pleasantly surprised to discover this week that Frank Darabond’s cinematic adaptation does an outstanding job of remaining true to its source material - up to a point (about five minutes before the end to be exact).

Notably, I wasn’t put off by the quality of the CGI effects (which seems to be the principle criticism levelled at the film) - perhaps a result of Darabond’s skill at keeping me engaged with the story rather than the spectacle. Indeed, I felt that the film made excellent use of the eponymous mist - especially toward the end of the film - as a means of suggesting rather than depicting some of its monstrous inhabitants. However, I have a rather different view of what is, perhaps, the most controversial issue surrounding the film, namely its 'shock' ending which deviates from (or rather provides a coda to) the novella’s original ending. Much has already been said about the film’s denouement - especially by the hoards of dullard internet critics who found it too depressing (it’s a horror movie for god’s sake!). Even so, I feel bound to add my tuppence to said discussion. Undoubtedly Darabond makes an exceedingly brave attempt at producing a horror movie with what is (at least in relation to most horror films) a very dark and horrifying conclusion. And, admittedly, he succeeds in some good measure.

That said, I maintain some reservations about the ending wherein - SPOILER ALERT - the protagonist shoots his own son and a host of other folks to spare them from the mist, only to discover moments later that the cavalry - in the form of flamethrower-weilding military types - has arrived to save the day. Added to this the fact that said protagonist's distress is made all the worse by the appearance of a young mother and her children amongst those saved by the military. This moment is, presumably, meant to evoke a moment of horrifying irony given that said woman appeared briefly at the beginning of the film, where she flees into the arms of certain death after being shamefully refused help in finding her children by the frightened men holed up in the mist-beseiged supermarket.

A few minutes before the shock ending (and the point at which King’s novella actually ends) we are treated to a much more powerful scene where the surviving protagonists, having fled the supermarket, encounter the absolute apocalyptic enormity of the film’s narrative premise when they are overtaken momentarily by the massive tentacular thing of cyclopean proportions striding through the mist. Darabond, at this moment, manages to captures a sense of utter incomprehending despair and resigned horror on the face of the actors that is, in this reviewers mind, far more powerful than the very human horror that unfolds in the concluding moments of the movie. This moment of realisation exemplifies a very Lovecraftian expiation (to borrow a term from the film) of consciousness where the very fact of self-awareness becomes blasphemous in the face of what an awareness of the wider cosmos has to offer. Indeed, this expiation of consciousness is not only foreshadowed in the mindless and totalitarian immersion in religion explored earlier in the film, but also via the three suicides that occur during the movie (although guilt rather than a refusal to face the horrors of the mist are suggested causes in two of these cases). In this respect, the subsequent mercy killing by the protagonist of his son and companions isn’t the problem here - in fact, the shock ending would have been more powerful if the protagonist actually had enough bullets to kill himself, fade to credits. Self-immolation is, after all, the most rational of responses to a Lovecraftian cosmos!

As such it is the addendum to the mercy killings where Darabond’s film ultimately disappoints. At this point the facade of a intelligent horror film is stripped away to reveal a rather banal morality tale aftyer the forces of darkness have been dispersed by the cleansing fire of military might. By way of explanation: initially the film sets itself up as a kind of Lovecraftian Lord of the Flies - a commentary on the fragile and ultimately brutal, self-serving nature of the human condition: ‘as a species, we are insane’ comments one character. Yet the film's finale appears to offer a moral condemnation of the actuality of a Lovecraftian universe at the precise moment it accepts that actuality. This is, indeed, the final nail in the film’s coffin: it is not that it’s suggestion of apocalyptic cosmic horror is undermined by the emotional horror of having unnecessarily taken the life of one’s child, but what the reappearance of the young mother and her children signifies. In the same way that those that have sex end up the first to die in typical slasher movies, the young mother's re-appearance implies that the horrible fate of the other characters was deserved - a punishment for transgressions of socio-moral norms and a lack of faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. Thus, while trying to challenge our assumptions about the actual scope and nature of human 'good' (especially those grounded in religion) the film ultimately emasculates itself by inadvertantly supporting those assumptions. In other words, this is actually a film with a happy ending.

Venger Satanis Interviews Ligotti!!!?

2008-08-17T21:34:00.011+01:00

Not something I would typically comment on here but for it's somewhat surreal nature: word has recently reached Ghooric Zone central of a rather curious event, namely Darrick Dishaw - aka ‘Venger Satanis’ aka 'I AM the way' and head honcho of the Lovecraftian magical group the Cult of Cthulhu - posting his interview with Thomas Ligotti here. Regular readers may already be familiar with Mr. Satanis from his various escapades on yog-sothoth.com and from his occasional run-ins with Dan Harms (details of which Dan has posted on his own blog).

The fact that this involves Ghooric Zone’s most favoured of all juxtapositions - the occult and weird fiction - is interesting enough. The fact that this involves the even stranger juxtaposition of Lovecraftian cult-of-one Darrick Dishaw and enfant terrible of the weird Thomas Ligotti might lead one to expect the kind of deranged metaphyicial catastrophe found only within the pages of Ligotti’s own tales. Especially when Darrick asks Ligotti if he is currently dating.

I've been waiting expectantly for someone to begin integrating Ligotti's work into an occultural framework, so was extremely gratified to note that Darrick appears to have elevated Ligotti to the position of 'prophet' of the Cult of Cthulhu. The fact that Ligotti has elsewhere indicated that he sees much the post-60s occult and New Age scene as a variety of spiritual hucksterism is an irony, it seems, lost on Venger Satanis.

That said, I can’t find it in my heart to entirely condemn Darrick despite his youthful fumblings and schoolgirlish exhuberance for Ligotti (‘the earth’s greatest living writer ’). Indeed, as one of the contributors on Thomas Ligotti on-line notes, Darrick does display an refreshing openness about his own shortcomings as an interviewer whilst Ligotti’s responses to Darrick’s sometimes unusual questions are full of sinister wit. In particular Ligotti’s comments about the ‘cornfield’ are also revealing insofar as they indicate a probable influence on his novella ‘My work is not yet done’ - one of the few genre tales (along with Danielewski’s House of Leaves ) that has left me feeling genuinely disturbed.

Go Darrick!

The Lovecraftian Traveller I: Non-non-Euclidean Geometry at the South Bank

2008-08-16T03:26:00.006+01:00

No doubt the observant amongst Ghooric Zone regulars (if such a rare beast truly exists) will have noticed the lack of updates for some time. In yet another attempt to stave off apathy and encroaching cosmic ennui, we at Ghooric Zone central have decided to introduce a new ‘series’ of articles (amongst other things) detailing some of the strange journey’s we have undertaken of late. Some of these are reports on genuine sorties undertaken by us (often at great personal peril) into abysmal zones of abject horrors (Suffolk comes to mind), whilst others may - or may not be - the products of our fevered imagination...

First up a trip to the Psycho Building exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at London’s South Bank Centre, ostensibly for a viewing Mike Nelson’s ‘To The Memory of H.P. Lovecraft’. I wasn’t able to take any photos at the time, so a stock image from the internet will have to suffice:

By the artist's own admission ‘To The Memory of H.P. Lovecraft’ owes more to Borges’ take on Lovecraft in his short story ‘There Are More Things’ than the writings of the Old Gent himself. Indeed, given the character of the exhibition, it seems something of a missed opportunity that the artist didn’t opt to construct a piece more in tune with the theme of architectural strangeness which Lovecraft so often uses to signify alien otherness. Other than an oddly shaped concrete bench (which again Nelson takes from Borges) the exhibit makes no sustained attempt to evoke non-Euclidean geometric principles or strange angles. Instead we are presented with something akin to the Whateley Farm following the escape of the Dunwich Horror. Even though Nelson’s piece is suitably suggestive in attempting to engage the viewer’s imagination (i.e. inferring the shape and substance of the monster by its aftermath) the piece is less interesting as a result of emphasising the theme of the unnameably monstrous (and let’s not forget that Lovecraft invariably describes his indescribable monsters in exacting detail) instead of the cosmicism that is Lovecraft’s unique trademark .

Psycho Buildings is on until the 25th August 2008.

On Gaming

2008-02-24T01:09:00.019Z

This sad specimen - once a virtual superman but now a disgraced dissolute and notorious aesthete - demonstrates the unhealthy dangers of refraining from regular boardgaming

A while back back on the yog-sothoth forums, Blair Reynolds made
the following announcement.

In brief, Reynolds bemoans the trivialisation of Lovecraft not only in the field of roleplaying games but within popular culture more widely. One wonders what Blair Reynolds would have to say at the venerable Ken Hite’s recent supplement of Lovecraftian superheroism for The Mutants and Masterminds rpg, or indeed Hite's forthcoming Lovecraftian children's picture book...

No doubt Lovecraft would view much of what is produced in the name of the Cthulhu mythos as a crass commercialisation of his cosmic vision. Perhaps, then, the only genuine route to a ‘pure’ Lovecraft experience is to abandon all attempts at replicating the master’s vision in other media and simply spend one’s time reading Lovecraft in the original.

Needless to say, many respondents on the yog-sothoth.com forums challenged Blair Reynolds' somewhat petulant tantrum, citing the way Lovecraft’s treated his own pseudomythology with a certain playfulness. Indeed, this leads me to ruminate more generally on Lovecraft and gaming. While Lovecraft did not seem to hold much thought for gaming in adult life, his childhood was replete with rich imaginative efforts that many miniatures wargamers and rpgers would recognise (a point I hope to return to in a later post about roleplaying and the occult). Indeed, this leads me to speculate that perhaps Lovecraft’s adolescent roleplaying did continue into his adult life. Yes, you heard me aright. Lovecraft was a roleplayer: as S. T. Joshi suggests, Lovecraft’s ‘Yog-Sothothery’ came to constitute a kind of parlour game and a shared imaginative space which Lovecraft and his literary circle explored - a form of collective storytelling (one might even say proto-geekdom)which I'm sure many contemporary rpg players would not only recognise but also feel a deep sense of kinship with. Indeed, the elements that inform today's roleplaying experience also informed Lovecraft's literary theory (an emphasis on verisimilitude) and his personal aesthetics (the evocation of particular moods - 'adventurous expectancy' - often via the imaginative suspension of natural law).

To push the gaming analogy further, the protagonist in virtually all of HPL’s tales was Lovecraft's own player character - usually an idealised imaginary of his very own self as genteel New England aesthete himself as genteel aesthete. In addition, we can see HPL as engaging in a kind of proto-Call of Cthulhu rpging during his literary exchange with Robert Bloch in their Haunter of the Dark – Shambler From the Stars escapade: each 'player' (Lovecraft and Bloch in turn taking the role of the GM) sought to drive mad and ultimately kill off the other’s player character in the context of an interesting and engaging narrative. Indeed, in a hyperreal twist the kind of literary and epistolarian roleplaying in which Lovecraft indulged formed the methodological basis of an actual rpg (the Lovecraftian themed letter-writing game De Profundis).

On a more personal note, this has led me to reflect on my own experiences of gaming and rpging, which I've been doing for nigh on 30 years now - although more of an occasional activity during the last 15 years or so. 2004 – 2006 was an especially fallow period, during which I set out to uncover the ultimate solitaire gaming experience in lieu of more social forms of the activity. Thankfully, at London's Dragonmeet in 2006 at London’s Dragonmeet I bumped in to a friend from university I hadn’t seen for over ten years, and have since resumed gaming on a quasi-regular basis. However, the kind of gaming that we have both come to involve ourselves in has changed considerably from the halcyon years of rpg all-nighters and non-stop dungeoncrawls during the summer holidays. The gaming industry has also transformed to reflect the changing demographic of its customers: in brief, the kind of games I’ve been playing of late are the Eurostyle and Ameritrash kinds of boardgames and cardgames; in fact, it seems that this 'new' breed of boardgames has become the dominant order of the day in contemporary gaming geekdom: as gamers get older and have less time (and more responsibilities), rpging is becoming less of a viable option (especially those of us approaching - of having surpassed - middle age!). To this end, rpging has also transformed , with game systems becoming more streamlined, requiring less prep time and emphasising storytelling over simulation. This is also mirrored in the structure and content of rpg books, which are often more visually appealing than in the heady days of the now almost mythical D&D white box, emphasising setting, background and plot over rule complexity and the guilty pleasures of killing imaginary monsters and taking their imaginary stuff while exploring an imaginary hole in the ground. Although roleplaying is becoming a distant memory to me, I’m sure I’m not the only person who buys rpg books just for the pure pleasure of reading them (like China Mieville, I’m especially partial to the odd rpg bestiary or two).

Back to boardgaming though. Earlier today I participated in a marathon 7 hour session of Fantasy Flight Games’ Twilight Imperium. Twilight Imperium is Big. Epic even. And in all senses of the word: it covers the sweeping saga of galactic empires in conflict whilst taking an epoch to play (in addition to which, the game is housed in a box of monolithic proportion). Six of us played and, although unable to finish the game, it was (for me at least) an immensely enjoyable and incredibly involving and immersive experience. Fantasy Flight Games are one of the main players in this new kind of boardgaming which offers outstanding production values, tension, strategy and, importantly, theme and setting to facilitate a kind of condensed rpg experience which far outstrips the abstract mechanics at the heart of most of these games (although with the best of this ‘new’ breed of games, the mechanics are often closely tied to theme). Despite the often competitive nature of these games, theya re often rich enough and grande enough that the playing itself - and not the winning - suffices(no, really!).

I might even go so far as to say that boardgaming is the new rpging. Well, perhaps not. Yet this ‘new’ boardgaming milieu maps out the topography of a genuinely unique gaming experience - albeit highly commodified and neatly packaged - which is more immersive and involved, often engaging players (albeit minimally) in forms of rpging. This, of course, is a godsend to those of use who are rpgers at heart, yet lack the time or opportunity for roleplaying. That said, the high production values do offer a lazy way into the gaming experience: the gaming worlds are presented through outstanding graphics which mean that on a visual level the imagination becomes a little redundant. Even so, with the best of these games offer potential for tense and engaging immersion into the themed player interactions.

Bringing this back to Lovecraft, it struck me that there exist one of this ‘new’ breed of boardgames that neatly encompasses a highly immersive Lovecraftian experience within a solitaire gaming medium - and in doing so might even be more ‘authentically’ Lovecraftian than the classic Call of Cthulhu rpg experience. Playing Call of Cthulhu is great fun, but often it does become something closer to a pulpish world-spanning Indiana-Jones-meets-the-Mummy kind of affair rather than evoking the nameless dread indicative of the Lovecraftian milieu.

In any case the boardgame in question is Fantasy Flight Games reissue of Arkham Horror: a cooperative boardgame in which the players take on the cosmic awfulness of the mythos. And usually lose. The game is gorgeous (especially in its first printing - the second printing included a less colourful board) and is appropriately cyclopean (it comes with one of the biggest boards I’ve yet encountered, barring Railroad Tycoon - though add the Dunwich Horror expansion and it probably eclipses the RT board). Where the game excels is in generating a sense of tension and impending doom through the clever mechanic of the, erm, doom track. What this means is that the players are involved in a battle against time and the forces of the mythos. When the doom track is filled, it pretty much means you will be eaten by some Monstrous Thing From Beyond Time and Space and the world will end. This, coupled with a few other clever mechanincs allow a single player to battle against the game system goes a long way to evoking the structure and content of many of Lovecraft’s best tales which, unlike the Call of Cthulhu rpg rarely involve loosing gangs of borderline-psychopathic gun-toting pyromaniacs (i.e. the player characters)amongst the tropes of Lovecraft’s mythos.

Not only does Arkham Horror neatly fuses an elegant and fairly simple system (although it might not seem so from reading the rather poorly organised rulebook), it also ties mechanics to the rich and evocative themes of Lovecraft’s mythos - and in such a way that even loosing the game by going insane or dying horribly (as often the end result of the game as it is the fate of Lovecraft’s protagonists) is fun.

Dare I say it: gaming is dead. Long live the new gaming!

Lovecraft in Italy DVD

2008-02-09T03:17:00.000Z

As an addemdum to my last post, it seems that Il Mistero di Lovecraft - Road to L is in English (with Italian subtitles - and presumably English subtitles to the parts of the film which are in Italian). It is available in DVD format and distributed by Raro Video of Italy.

Lovecraft in Italy: Il Mistero di Lovecraft - Road to L

2008-02-09T02:39:00.000Z

I've recently dug up a few intriguing scraps of information concerning a Blair Witch style mockumentary - Il Mistero di Lovecraft: Road to L - which claims to have uncovered evidence of Lovecraft's travelling to Italy in 1926. There he apparently encountered a decaying town (somewhere within the Po delta) harbouring strange rites and abominable...things which would become the model for Innsmouth. Il Mistero di Lovecraft was made in Italy in 2005, but I've yet to track down any information regarding an English language DVD release. A trailer (in English with some Italian) can be found on Google Video, though it's unclear as to whether the film was produced for an English- or Italian-speaking audience. A three-part background documentary (in Italian with English subtitles) to the mockumentary (akin to the Curse of the Blair Witch that preceded the release of the original movie) can also be found here.

Based on the available documentary-of-the-mockumentary, the film seems to regurgitate the usual misguided fare about Lovecraft - that he was extremely knowledgeable about the occult, believed in Cthulhu, etc. Of course, Lovecraft's life is extremely well-documented, and the fact of the matter is that Lovecraft was nowhere near Italy in 1926. Nonetheless, those who recall Ghooric Zone Central's good friend H.P. Albarelli and his claims concerning Lovecraft's alleged involvement in the strange case of the 'Awful' will no doubt be wondering how long it will take the Cthulhuvian conspiracists out there to jump on this as 'evidence' of Lovecraft's occult proclivities and the reality of Cthulhu et al...

Night Thoughts: On Cloverfield (SPOILERS)

2008-02-02T21:05:00.000Z

While Cloverfield is far from being a 'Lovecraftian' movie in any purist or canonical sense, I did feel that at times a Lovecraftian mood was nicely evoked. The monster itself being a case in point.

Although not explicitly Cthulhoid (whatever that means) I've noted that the monster has been described variously as 'weird' and 'creepy' on some of the internet forums about which I've been lurking of late. Indeed, these do seem apt descriptors: although not entirely unanthropomorphic the beast does have a rather curious - one might even say 'strangely angled' - anatomy and mode of locomotion, attributes suggestive of its 'outsideness'. Certainly the monster is a bit different from what one usually encounters in the standards of the giant-monster-on-a-rampage movie genre. This on top of what I felt was already quite a 'weird' movie, where an intrusion of otherness leaves a trail of chaos, confusion and ambiguity where nothing is fully or satisfactorily explained. In turn, this leaves plenty of scope for the play of the imagination and the mapping of one's own vague fears and terrors onto the tabula rasa of Cloverfield's monster(s).

Interestingly, after I'd seen Cloverfield a number of friends expressed their concern about watching a monster movie where one never actually gets to see the monster. In actual fact (and as should be evident from the above), the monster is seen on a number of occasions (especially toward the end of the film). All in all, the revealing of the monster is handled rather expertly and in what I took to be a very Lovecraftian fashion: you do get to see what it looks like, but the shaky-cam gimic means that it is never revealed too clearly or for too long - somewhat akin to Ridley Scott's strategy in Alien. That is until very close to the end of Cloverfield where the director has seen fit to go for a close-up of the beast - presumably the film's 'money shot'. Here we are given a very clear view of the thing's torso and head (and in full daylight). Whether this was supposed to evoke horror I can't say, but at this point Cloverfield departed from what was presumably J.J. Abrams' original vision, and in doing so nearly ruined the movie for me. In revealing everything, you invariably reveal too much - in this case something like the hybrid bastard of the Rancor from Return of the Jedi and the Honey Monster.

So, Hollywood still seems a long way off from producing the quintessential Lovecraftian movie (and as the HPLHS' version of Call of Cthulhu demonstrates, maybe Hollywood isn't the right place to be looking anyway). Still, assuming it gets green-lighted we at least have del Toro's touted At the Mountains of Madness to look forward to a few years hence.

A Forgotten Episode of Lovecraftian Ufology?

2008-02-02T01:40:00.001Z

Gray Barker’s famed 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers first introduced the mythology of (what was to later become) the Men in Black into ufology. In the book Barker documents his friendship with Alfred Bender, who claimed to have stumbled upon the truth about flying saucers. Before making this knowledge public, Bender was apparently visited by three strange men dressed in black. The men (who, with diabolic aplomb, always left behind them a faint smell of sulphur) initially claimed to be representatives of the US government. Bender was left terrified and in fear of his life, refusing to say more on the matter.

Bender’s silence lasted until 1962 when he revealed the horrifying truth in his own account of events, Flying Saucers and the Three Men (New York, Paperback Library Inc.) There he states that the MIB’s are in fact aliens in disguise, having established bases on Earth (usually in remote locations) with the intention of siphoning-off a chemical from sea water for some unknown purpose - an activity not so far removed from Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth. Bender also claims that the MIB’s visited him numerous times, on one occasion - and here the story takes a truly Lovecraftian turn - spiriting him off via some sort of teleportation or hyperdimensional travel to their central base of operations buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice.

There, one of the MiB’s reveal its true form: according to Bender a ‘hideous monster, more horrifying than any I have ever seen depicted in the work of science fiction or fantasy artists’ (p.81). This latter admission of familiarity with the sci-fi genre may be important, and a point I shall return to. Needless to say, in true Lovecraftian fashion the alien is so horrific as to be indescribable. Or in any case, Bender apparently lacks the vocabulary to do so as there is never any attempt at description made in the manuscript.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact, in marked counterpoint to the utopian and millenarian messages offered to other contactees of the period, that the MIBs reveal to Bender a nihilistic cosmology that seems to have jumped right out of the pages of Lovecraft. The monstrous aliens tell him that the physical universe is the product of a ‘vast glowing body so immense one cannot calculate its density. It is the creator of us all, and more families of planets are constantly being formed and thrown off into orbits’ (p.79). I certainly discern here something quite similar to Lovecraft’s Azathoth.

Later in the book this cosmology is elaborated in more detail:

‘there is a large main body from which all the planets and their suns are formed by means of being cast off into the vast void we call space. This main body seems to grow in size and never diminishes, despite the fact that it discards new bodies constantly. It is so hot a mass you could not go near it, even in terms of billions of your light years. All the bodies cast off are hot burning balls of fire, and as they reach the cooler parts of space they explode and form smaller bodies that circle them. These smaller bodies become planets as they cool off, but the cooling-off period consumes many, many years. We have sent out spacecraft to explore the regions beyond the circling bodies where there is an area that is deep black and in which you are unable to see anything…We have lost many of our exploring craft who went too far into the deep black and never returned’ (p.98-99)

This rather dark, melodramatic - and suitably cosmic - vision of the cosmos is reified in the aliens' comments on religious matters: they reveal that there is neither god nor life after death, and that Jesus was a fraud. Morally ambivalent entities themselves - perhaps akin to Lovecraft’s Old Ones who are ‘beyond good and evil’ - the aliens are quite open about the fact that they have abducted, experimented upon, and even killed humans to protect their interests; they also implant Bender with a small metal disk (foreshadowing a key element of later abduction narratives) and make dire warnings not to reveal what they have shown him until they have left the planet. Almost as an afterthought, the MIBs tell Bender that the Dero of Richard Shaver are real (and, in fact, the source of most human accounts of supernatural beings).

Indeed, the themes of abduction, experimentation and implantation by sinister forces which Bender’s apparently experience owe a massive debt to Shaver’s imagined underground worlds book (and in turn inspired the tales of alien underground bases which gained renewed vigour in the 1980s and 1990s when American ufology took a decidedly disturbing turn). Elements of Bender’s tale also seem strikingly akin to themes found in Lovecraft - even moreso given the disparity of Bender’s paranoid vision with the more optimistic provisions supplied from within the contactee movement. A likely source of inspiration for Bender's tale would be The Whisperer in Darkness which seems to have set the template not only for the ‘abductee’ phenomenon that swept ufology in the 1980s – 1990s, but also introduces MiB-like figures in the strangely hypnotic human agents of the Fungi from Yuggoth. Similar to Bender’s narrative, and central to Lovecraft’s Whisperer, are the awe-inspiring but nihilistic revelations of cosmic magnitude revealed to the narrator - albeit only hinted at for the reader - by the character of Akeley (or an alien who is impersonating Akeley).

Sadly, there is no hard evidence to support the claim that Bender was drawing upon Lovecraft in the construction of his and Gray Barker’s conspiratorial narrative (one that set the tone for later ramblings of ‘darkside’ ufologists). However, I noted earlier Bender’s implied familiarity with genre fiction: Bender does, in fact, admit to a fascination with the literature of the weird and supernatural, mentioning Shelley, Stoker and Poe as favourites. No sign of Lovecraft per se, but it seems that Bender was familiar with the later pulps such as Palmer’s Amazing Stories, so it is possible that he had a passing familiarity with Lovecraft’s tales. If so, Bender's work may represent an additional link in the chain between Lovecraft and contemporary ufology.

Night Thoughts: Lovecraftian Tarot - Deal or No Deal?

2008-01-24T01:08:00.000Z

These (somewhat pompously titled) 'Night Thoughts' are brief commentaries, odd musings and inane ramblings - usually written late at night - about whatever Lovecraftian topic takes my fancy. I plan to post these two or three times a week (depending on how the fancy takes me) in addition to a more substantial weekly post.

On this occasion, I have taken as my topic Lovecraftian tarot, of which a number of sets exist. Principally, there are two commercially available decks: one published by Mythos Books which constitutes a monotone/sepia deck (and to my mind the more Lovecraftian of the two), and Donald Tyson's full colour Necronomicon deck published by Llewellyn. This latter deck is more closely tied to Tyson's novels Necronomicon and Alhazred, and deviates somewhat from 'canonical' Lovecraft.

As regular readers of our missives already know, we at Ghooric Zone Central have a long standing fascination with such occult gewgaws. Thus we wasted no time in charging our agents with the task of purloining copies of these strange artifacts. After a careful examination of the cards for evidence of genuine otherworldly power, I was reminded of the observation (which I think was first made by Jason Colavito) that worshipping or otherwise placing one's faith in Lovecraft's Old Ones constitutes a kind of 'cargo cult'. Given that the role of the tarot is to elide some kind of structure or meaning from the seemingly random occurance of events, it strikes me as odd that producers of a Lovecraftian tarot are not in the least dissuaded by the possibility that the Old Ones, in their indifference, would simply have no interest in providing humans with such a useful tool of divination...

Still, the cards do look rather nice on our bookshelf.

Night Thoughts: Post-Lovecraftian Lovecraftian Fiction

2008-01-23T01:21:00.000Z

Recently, we at the Ghooric Zone have been pondering what shape a post-Lovecraftian Lovecraftian fiction might take. In other words, if we recognise that Lovecraft's 'non-supernatural cosmic art' radically overturned the established themes and tropes of supernatural fiction, what (if anything) could replace push Lovecraftian fiction forward and beyond Lovecraft's original cosmic vision? Is such a thing even conceivable? Did Lovecraft, as Erik Davis suggest, mark the limits of human conceptual boundaries with his fiction? If so, could it be that a post-Lovecraftian Lovecraftisn fiction could only be suggested through the scrawl of a Burroughsian word-salad, or via an inscription of alien sigils perpendicular to reality?

These perverse and impious ruminations aside, a few viable contenders to the post-Lovecraftian Lovecraftian throne spring to mind: Thomas Ligotti, of course. No doubt a worthy successor to the Lovecraftian mantle; though perhaps Ligotti's work strays a little too close to personal horror to fully qualify as 'cosmic' in the way that Lovecraft's best work does. China Mievielle at his best wonderfully evokes the cosmic in new and alien worlds although his work ultimately revolves around a very human politics. Jeffrey Thomas' 'Punktown' novels also merge Lovecraftian themes with the urban decay and inhumanity of far-future cyberpunk: a universe populated by chameleon private dicks and tentacular-eyed alien prostitutes, where Vietnam-like corporate wars are waged across dimensions and the dead communicate through the latest cell-phone technology. However my personal recommendation - and about as far from trad Lovecraftian as you can get - is M. John Harrison. His most recent novels (Light and Nova Swing) come very close to articulating the inconceivable via the fractured physics of an alienated and alienating (almost)posthuman universe.

Coming in 2008

2008-01-22T00:45:00.001Z

Christmas Cthulhu Cornucopia!

2008-01-22T00:10:00.000Z

Alas, yet another yawning gulf between posts...
Undaunted by my seeming inability to add something to the blog on a (semi-) regular basis, I'm yet again setting myself the task (New Years resolution!) of trying to produce one post - no matter how brief or banal - per week. To facilitate speed of writing and publication, I've neglected to include links in this post. Sorry, but if you're interested in any of the below it should be easy enough to find via Google.

The Christmas/pre-Christmas season was marked by a dearth of Cthulhoid rpg goodness, including: pre-release copies of Cthulhutech and Trail of Cthulhu (both of which I managed to pick up at Dragonmeet 2007), as well as the long-awaited Delta Green: Eyes Only. In addition, Worlds of Cthulhu issue 5 also appeared just prior to Christmas. In light of which, this first post of 2008 constitutes a brief review of the former three volumes.

Cthulhutech: an interesting Mecha-style take on the Mythos (not as bad as it sounds!). The book is glossy full-cover and looks beautiful - only marred by the cheap print-on-demand style binding. The mythos is dealt with in an interesting (but often 'non-canonical') manner, and although the idea of giant robots taking on Mythos beasts sounds counterintuitive to Lovecraft's original vision, it is dealt with intelligently and is well supported by some of the short fiction found in the volume. Probably something I won't get around to playing. Unless, of course, they were to turn it into a tabletop miniature game...

Trail of Cthulhu: the pre-release version was very nice looking, with some great illustrations and gaming content geared towards an innovative, storytelling style of play. I still have issues with one of the central claims of this book - that it 'fixes' what was 'wrong' with Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu (namely that finding clues is dependent on die rolling, and a bad die roll can blow the game). In my opinion, this is a non-issue and is easily dealt with by thoughtful scenario design(most Keepers worth their salt will ensure that there are multiple routes to clues built into scenarios). I haven't yet had time to fully read and digest the rules, but one problem I noticed with the Esoterrorist rpg (upon which ToC is based) is that it seemed to encourage a kind of railroading when it comes to character creation. Even so, a worthy effort, and worth picking up for Ken Hite's take on the the Mythos alone.

Delta Green: Eyes Only: Of the bunch, the one I was most looking forward to, and the one I was subsequently most disappointed with. I'm avoiding spoilers here for fans of the DG universe so some of the following may seem rather vague. Despite the hype, Delta Green: Eyes Only (published in a limited run of 1,000 copies) didn't quite deliver. The book is essentially a collection of material that didn't make it into the original Delta Green sourcebook. This was put out in a series of three chapbooks in the late 1990s, now collected for the first time in this volume with some additional material. The piecemeal nature of the material shows - particularly in the first section of Eyes Only. Overall, the first half of the book doesn't really seem to add anything substantial to the DG background, and only one major secret concerning a member of the Fate is (kind of) revealed to be pretty much what was hinted at in earlier volumes. The latter half of the book is an improvement (especially the stuff on the Philadelphia experiment), but overall Delta Green: Eyes Only failed to excite despite the anticipation.

That's it for now. Be seeing you!

The Weird, Yog Meet & The Occult of Personality

2007-11-25T23:41:00.000Z

After yet another extended hiatus (nearly three months!) the amorphous hive-mind that is the Ghooric Zone is back. Albeit at short notice, here's some info about the follow-up to the Weird Realism: Lovecraft & Theory event at Goldsmiths College this coming Saturday suitably entitled The Weird

Papers already circulated indicate that Lovecraft will continue to be a key focus of discussion. Although I was planning on attending this (despite negative comments about the Weird Realism thing in an earlier post), I've realised it clashes with this year's Yog Meet at Dragonmeet 2007 (which I missed last year). Hmm, roleplaying or academia...tough choice, though I think a day of gaming goodness (and the chance to grab copies of The Trail of Cthulhu and Cthulhutech rpgs) wins out on this occasion.

Onto other news: a round table discussion of Lovecraft's influence upon occultism can be found at the Occult of Personality podcast site. Sadly, the participants collectively demonstrate a confused and rambling understanding of Lovecraft's life and work that is also shot through with factual errors, vague supposition and 'occult insight'. Echoing 'Pickman's Model', one of the hosts suggests that Lovecraft actually summoned up the entities of the Cthulhu mythos and took his descriptions of them 'from life' as it were. Another denies this, but claims that Lovecraft didn't practice ceremonial magick because he was too lazy...None of the discussants seem to have any inkling as to Lovecrafts well-attested atheism and mechanistic materialism (despite the fact that one of them admits to having read a biography of Lovecraft), instead recapitulating the old chestnut about Lovecraft being a practicing occultist with genuine knowledge of forces from Outside. If this weren't enough, constant reference is made to the Simon Necronomicon as if it were the genuine article, and one of hosts even uses Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos as 'proof' of her own ideas - via The Book of Enoch & Simon Necronomicon - about Atlantis. A case of a fiction being used to verify a myth. As I recall, the whole thing ends up being dragged in the direction of some kind of Icke-derived Ultraterrestrial Illuminati conspiracy. Oh dear...

Rick Wakeman Denounces Crowley Shock!

2007-08-21T10:16:00.000+01:00

We at Ghooric Zone central like to keep abreast of cutting edge developments in the world of contemporary occultism, so imagine our mixed reaction of shock, surprise and delight at being informed of Aleister Crowley's moral shortcomings by none other than the mighty Rick Wakemen.

After providing the score for a new documentary about Aleister Crowley, Rick Wakeman had the following to say about the Great Beast: 'There is no doubt that Alistair [sic] Crowley was one of the most evil men that walked this earth'. Good God man, do you not have anything better to do with your time!

Granted that Crowley wasn't the most pleasant of people and could be a pretty nasty piece of work (as well as a rather pathetic figure)at times, but he doesn't really deserve this level of vilification. This all-too common insistence on blaming the worlds ills on some external (and usually supernatural) evil is, to my mind, a highly dangerous strategy, and one which - via scapegoating and the subsequent creation of moral panics - is often complicit in the very production of human suffering and evil it seeks to prevent. This is obviously over stating the case in this instance, as it's unlikely that we'll be seeing Wakeman at the forefront of a major witch-hunt against Thelemites and other occultists in the nerar future, but nonetheless scapegoating of this sort only helps to mystify the very real but banal sources of human evil - an issue I mean to explore in a forthcoming post concerning Lovecraft and the 'Occult Reich'. At least Crowley had the courtesy to refrain from unleashing the abject horror of twenty-five minute synthesiser solos on the world whilst wearing a sequined cape and pretending to be Merlin.

In any case, Wakeman's comment demonstrates a total ignorance of Crowley's life and magical philosophy. My presumption is that Wakeman's views were also derived from the documentary, which is pretty much being marketed as a kind of sensationalised horror story. The fact that it's slated for a straight-to-DVD realease doesn't bode well either.

Happy Birthday, HPL!

2007-08-20T12:36:00.000+01:00

'That is not dead which can eternal lie'

Today being Lovecraft's birthday, I shall celebrate by spending an hour or so in quiet contemplation (accompanied, perhaps, by a small glass of fine vinatge port!) while listening to the excellent audio version of Lovecraft's sonnet cycle The Fungi from Yuggoth (produced by Fedogan & Bremer in 1987). Having nothing profound to say in honour of the occasion, I'll let the Old Gent speak for himself and leave you with two excerpts from the aforementioned cycle which epitomise the man and his vision. Enjoy.

XXX. Background
I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes -
These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.

Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,
Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths
That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths
Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.
They cut the moment's thongs and leave me free
To stand alone before eternity.

XXXVI. Continuity
There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence - more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.

It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.

Lovecraft & Burroughs

2007-08-07T01:15:00.000+01:00

An interesting snippet which I picked up from a post by Fun Guy from Yuggoth on the redoubtable yog-sothoth.com: according to this William Burroughs was taught by Lovecraft's literary executor Robert H. Barlow while studying anthropology in Mexico. Barlow apparently introduced Burroughs to the study of the Mayan Codices.

While I was aware of Barlow's career in anthropology and Burrough's early interest in the subject matter, it never occured to me that the two may have met.

Admittedly Burroughs' connection with things Lovecraftian is somewhat tenuous: outside of the infamous blurb he supplied for the (equally infamous) Simon Necronomicon (though curiously absent from later printings), Burroughs did include cut-ups of parts of Frank Belknap Long's 'The Hounds of Tindalos' in (if I remember aright) The Place of Dead Roads. I'm not aware that Burroughs ever mentioned Lovecraft by name, and I don't recall reading anything about Lovecraft in the Burroughs' biographies I've read. Even so, one wonders if Burroughs first heard of Lovecraft as a result of this meeting?

The Return of the Awful I

2007-07-31T14:38:00.000+01:00

Moving on from - though perhaps tangentially related to - my last couple of posts dealing with religion, more news on Vermont's very own Lovecraftian horror, The Awful:

Mr. H.P. Albarelli recently contacted me, having been understandably offended by the sarcastic tone I took toward his article in the Northwest Vermont County Courier concerning the Awful. In any case, I requested details of the sources of the contested Lovecraft quotes. A protracted exhange then followed during which Mr. Albarelli clearly stated his position: that Lovecraft's involvement was peripheral to the whole matter. I countered this by arguing that his original article had strongly emphasised Lovecraft's role in the story of the Awful.

Mr. Albarelli did go on to state that the letters from which he quoted existed in a public archive (though at this point he did not include any additonal information about this archive). An implied accusation of my being a Lovecraft fanatic followed, which was fair comment, although the added insinuation that I had lost touch with reality because of my obsession with the letters smarted: indeed, a rather odd claim given that all I was trying to do was establish the existence of a letter and not that of a winged monster which supposedly haunts the wilds of Vermont...

Sarcasm aside, I must admit to being not entirely unsympathetic to Mr. Albarelli's claims and I certainly don't think he is involved in a purposeful or malicious hoax. Similarly my own intentions toward Mr. Albarelli are not malicious (though I hope he might find it in his heart to forgive me for the occasional dig I make at his expense!). Even so, an important epistemological issue underlies my somewhat dogged pursuit of this case: namely the manner in which Lovecraft's name is often deployed within contemporary occultures as a source of legitimicay. In fact, what one usually encounters in these instances is a kind of non-sequitur appeal to false authority (two fallacious arguments for the price of one).

In any case, I've decided to include herafter the full text of two of the later e-mails which I sent to Mr. Albarelli, with summaries of his replies. In fairness to Mr. Albarelli, please do bear in mind that what follows is my own biased account of the exchange:

Dear Mr. Alberelli,

The letters are of importance insofar as traceable sources are necessary to validate the claims that Lovecraft did go to Vermont to investigate 'the Awful' in 1925, and that the experience subsequently influenced his writing career - and that is all I am trying to establish here. A matter, as you say, of remaining grounded in reality.

My own experience is that Lovecraft has gained far greater recognition than you give credit for - both in North America and abroad (in France, for example, Lovecraft is considered the literary equal to Edgar Allen Poe). This was why I raised the issue of your mentioning Lovecraft in the first place - certainly on the few forums where I have seen your article discussed, the Lovecraft link seems to be one of the key talking points. In all honesty, for me this begs the following question: if you feel Lovecraft to be such a minor figure, why do you give him such a central
role in your account? I'm not asking you to respond to this; I'm simply indicating that this as a question which has been raised.

I'm guessing that the publicly accessible archive you speak of is the collection of Lovecraft's letters at John Hay Library, Providence R.I.? It would be most helpful if, in your update, you could provide exact dates of the letters in question, if possible with details as to their recipients?

Yours sincerely,

Justin Woodman

It turned out that Mr. Albarelli was not familiar with the John Hay collection. He did, however, say that more information about the Lovecraft sources would be appearing in a second article he was preparing about the Awful. In response I sent the following e-mail. To give some context to this, I was responding to Mr. Albarelli's claims that Lovecraft was a marginal literary figure and that it was doubtful (as I had earlier suggested) that he was considered the equal of Poe in French intellectual circles:

Dear Mr. Albarelli

I was not at all implying that you should not mention Lovecraft in your article, but mentioning him in relation to a matter that has escaped the attention of those of us interested in him as an important literary figure is something that is going to draw attention to your claims. As an aside, the fact of the matter is that Lovecraft is now a significant international literary figure - in the United Kingdom, for example, a review of his work have recently appeared in at least one major national
broadsheet newspaper; also the French (and international bestselling) author Michel Houllebecq recently published a lengthy essay on Lovecraft (introduced by Stephen King). Lovecraft has also been discussed by Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher whose work has become internationally recognized since the 1990s. The list of French scholars and intellectuals who have come to recognize Lovecraft as a literary figure equal to Poe goes on. Millions of copies of Lovecraft’s work have, since the 1970s,
been made available in paperback editions; as well as being incredibly popular now in Europe and North America, I understand that Lovecraft has attracted growing audiences in Japan, South and Central America and Eastern Europe (indeed, the Russian president Putin was recently asked, jokingly, how he meant to deal with the return of Cthulhu).

In any case, I was wondering whether, prior to the publication of your second article, you would be willing to furnish me with the sources of the following quotes:

‘When H.P. Lovecraft returned to southern Vermont from Richford he told friends he was convinced that the Richford locals he had interviewed were "not in the least mistaken about what they had witnessed." Lovecraft later wrote, "The Awful became ample sustenance for my imagination" and "over time the creature became the basis for many of my own fictional inventions."’

If you do not wish to furnish the requested citations yourself, you mentioned in a previous e-mail that ‘The letters cited have been sitting in a publicly accessible archive for decades’ and also that the references in question were provided to an internet site months ago. Could you provide further details about the aforementioned archive and the internet site?

I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for being so tenacious about this, but it is simply that I cannot seem to trace any mention of ‘The Awful’ in the four volumes of Lovecraft’s published letters that cover his life from the period of 1925 until his death in 1937. I sincerely hope that you can understand why I’m so curious about this matter: if Lovecraft’s investigations into the Awful had such a profound effect on him, I have to ask why it isn’t something that he returns to time and time again in his letters (where he otherwise amply elaborates on the sources of his fictional ideas). I think that there is also a secondary issue here in that Lovecraft was an avowed rationalist, atheist and mechanistic materialist - a point he reiterates time and time again in his letters, and a viewpoint which he held from a very young age until his death. Lovecraft certainly was familiar with the writings of people like Charles Fort, but nowhere does he seem to intimate any interest of belief in
cryptozoology, the supernatural or other ‘Fortean’ phenomena - other than to publicly debunk them.

Also, the renowned scholar and biographer of Lovecraft S.T. Joshi, who is the person most familiar with the collection of Lovecraft’s letters at John Hay library, fails to make any mention of Lovecraft’s trip to Vermont in 1925 or of the influence of the Awful on Lovecraft’s writing in 680+ pages of his carefully documented and rigorously researched biography of Lovecraft (‘H.P. Lovecraft: A Life). Given the wealth of information now available about Lovecraft’s life, I hope you can understand my scepticism regarding your claims - it’s simply that this matter has not (to my knowledge) been mentioned before in any of Lovecraft’s published writings.

Another of the reasons why I so curious about these claims is because at least one individual has already used your article to make (what I feel to be) spurious on-line statements about Lovecraft - statements to the effect that Lovecraft whole-heartedly supported a belief in the existence of a range of occult, Fortean, cryptozoological, ufological and supernaturalist phenomena (again, a claim that is unsupported in Lovecraft’s published letters and essays). Also - a fact you may not be aware of - your article was cited in a recent edition of the The Fortean
Times (which has a readership in the UK of, I believe, around 100,000; I also know that it is published in a North American edition). As such, the claims found in your article will potentially have acquired a larger readership than, perhaps, you intended. Of course you cannot help how some people have interpreted the information contained in your article once published. However, the problem here is that people seem to be viewing this claim uncritically simply because Lovecraft’s name is invoked. This is why I feel it so important that the sources of the quotes/claims are
made available.

Yours sincerely,

Justin Woodman

Mr Albarelli then informed me that the letters from which he quoted were not in the public domain, but did in fact reside in the hands of two individuals in Vermont (one of which is a minister). Further to this, he told me that more information regarding the Awful was to be found in a) the archives of a Richford newspaper, and that possible one of the contentious Lovecraft quotes could also be found in the journal of the Masonic Lodge 9 based in Richford, Vermont.
Hopefully more news regarding the sources of the alleged Lovecraft quotes will be made available when Mr. Albarelli returns to the matter of the Awful in his next article. In the mean time, I propose to do a bit of background research into the journals of the Richford Masonic Lodge.

Understandably the individuals' possessing the Lovecraft letters were not named. This does, however, mean that clear and unambiguous evidence of Lovecraft's alleged involvement in the affair of the Awful cannot be ascertained (at least to my satisfaction). In light of which, the weight of evidence still lies with what Lovecraft himself has said and which is in the public domain, and which also supports his well-documented skepticism of things Fortean, and certainly offers no suggestion whatsoever that he either investigated the Awful in 1925 or that his alleged investigation of said beast profoundly influenced his weird fiction.

At this point Mr. Albarelli seems to have given up the ghost with the Lovecraft connection, informing me that henceforth the story of the Awful would stand on its own two (cloven? webbed?) feet without Lovecraft's aid. To reiterate - and in fairness to him - I fully believe that Mr. Albarelli is quite genuine about his interest in and pursuit of the Awful, and I'm quite prepared to believe that he has seen letters purporting to be from Lovecraft. Indeed, there is something about the style of the contested quotes that rings true to my ear (which is not to say that Lovecraft's style isn't easily copied), so it could well be that the letters (assuming they are real) are also genuine Lovecraft. If this is the case, then the context of the quotes needs to be assessed. Even if Lovecraft himself made these statements, the Old Gent was prone to the occasional joking turn of phrase. This certainly wouldn't be the first time that Lovecraft's own words have been taken out of context by Forteans, esotericists et al.

Anyway must dash now, but some additional commentary on this - regarding sites that have uncritically assumed Lovecraft's involvement in the tale of the Awful to be genuine - in a few days.

'The Cancer of Superstition' II

2007-07-27T13:14:00.000+01:00

First up, a big thank you to GB Steve (one of the moderators over ay yog-sothoth.com) who informed me in a comment to my last entry (which I have since revised due to the number of grammatical errors it contained)that he has syndicated the blog's RSS feed to a group of his friends. Steve also raises a question about my previous claims regarding the 'naturalness' of religion, providing me with the opportunity to do something I've been meaning to do for a while here: give a somewhat detailed overview/summary of current cognitive theories of religion - a set of theories which I generally subscribe to. Again, this is a far cry from the usual Lovecraftian goodness we like to provide you with at Ghooric Zone central. That said, I'll reiterate the point that the following fits generally with Lovecraft's own materialism and anti-supernaturalism, and in fact is a contemporary take on Lovecraft's own views on religion as expressed in some of his letters and in parts of 'The Whisperer in Darkness'. Also, some of the ideas contained herein will probably inform later ramblings dealing with the Lovecraft-occultural interface. That said, I'm pretty busy with a number of other projects at the moment (painting miniatures as well as writing my book on Lovecraftian occultures!) so although this entry will be far from brief, it is not going to be thoroughly or properly referenced or contain footnotes, etc.

The 'Naturalness' of Religion
First off, I think Steve is quite right to question the notion that religion is 'natural' because to assume such is the case means that us atheists are somehow 'unnatural' or 'abnormal'! In any case, such a claim is something that definitely requires clarification. Here I’m following Pascal Boyer (see his book Religion Explained) who refers to the ‘naturalness of religious ideas’ in the following sense: it is not so much the case that it is ‘natural’ to believe in the supernatural because of how our brain is wired; rather it is the case that religious concepts can come to seem ‘natural’ and acceptable because the ability to conceptualise the supernatural is an offshoot or by-product of the very ordinary, mundane, and ‘natural’ but often unreflective aspects of our day-to-day cognitive functioning (what Boyer calls our ‘ontological intuitions’). This is an important distinction - that religion is a by-product but not a function of how our minds work. Hopefully this will be further clarified at various points throughout this post. In fact, Boyer and some of the other theorists I'm going to be talking about below are perhaps less concerned with why people believe than with the cognitive capacities that enables the human mind to conceptualise and entertain ideas about the supernatural in the first place.

Also I'm not convinced that it is always fruitful to encourage people to critically review their beliefs on the basis that said beliefs are irrational (even though I perosnally believe this to be the case). In part, this is probably down to my background in anthropology which emphasises sensitivity to other 'ways of seeing'. In this respect I think Dawkins 'evangelical' evolutionism tends to do more damage to his own argument than is necessary. This is because all of us in all sorts of ways apply and demonstrate counter-intuitive and counterfactual ‘magical’ or 'religious' thinking on a daily basis: for example we probably all unreflectively and implicitly attribute human-like characteristics to non-human things or inanimate objects (getting annoyed with your computer when it crashes, or with your car when it won’t start). As Marx also pointed out, under capitalism people tend to attribute organic properties of self-replictation to money (bank advertisements talking about ‘letting your money grow’ and so on), obscuring the actual exploitation upon which the accumulation of capital depends.

Returning to the important distinction above, this doesn’t of course mean that we actually come to believe that money is a living, breathing entity, simply that we are capable of thinking in that way, and that the ability to think like this may be the consequence or by-product of a helpful survival strategy by which we deal more effectively with our environment by projecting human-like qualities on to it (partly a consequence of the complex forms of 'social intelligence' which humans possess). In the theory I’m going to summarise below, this propensity for anthropomorphism is (according to one anthropologist at any rate) the foundation upon which all complex religious doctrines and supernatural beliefs are built. Importantly, its root cause may be the evolved but ‘hyperactive’ ability humans possess for detecting predators.

I'd also like to emphasise the fact that religion is not being treated here as a functional aspect of how our minds work - humans have not 'evolved' the capacity for religion because it is 'useful'; rather, religion is a spandral or by-product of our evolved cognitive architecture. Which is to say that humans beings, once they 'have' religion, can put it to all sorts of uses (engendering social cohesion, for example). However, religion, as a by-product of 'normal' brain functioning, is not in itself inherently useful.

Neurotheology, the God Module and the 'Function' of Religion
A counter-argument to this is sometimes referred to as the 'committment' theory of religion, or more popularly as the 'God Module' theory: a ‘hardwired’ or ‘neurotheological’ view of religion which I am suspicious of. According to two of its main exponents, Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newberg, humans have evolved as part of their brain structure a ‘God Module’. In their 1993 article ‘Religious and mystical states: A neuropsychological model’ in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science) D’Aquili and Newberg have also argued that various religious practices (meditation, trancing, etc.) generate neurological changes, including an increase in activity in the frontal lobes. It also leads, they claim, to decreased activity in the superior parietal lobe (the part of the brain which generates an awareness of the physical limitations of the self)which in turn leads to a sense of transcending material existence, or a feeling of unity with god, oneness with the universe, etc.
D’Aquili and Newberg go on to argue that experiences such as these are more likely to be generated in ritual context, where they create a feeling of unity and connectedness with others. As such, the ‘god module’ may be an evolutionary adaptation to enhance social co-operation. In effect, neurotheology has tried to place Emile Durkheim’s claim that religion is concerned with social cohesion on a neurological footing. This is perhaps a useful way of understanding how ritual functions to facilitate group bonding; this 'neurotheological' approach also suggests that religion is an ‘illusion’ created by neurological processes. However, it also leaves open the doorway for ‘intelligent design’ for the more savvy of creationists: namely that god has used evolutionary processes to open a neurological doorway to communion with he/she/it (the fact that god tends to be gendered is an important point to which I’ll return later). It also posits a hardwired view of religion that does, again, implicitly suggest that us atheists are not functioning properly.

The prevailing view (at least as I see it) is that whilst religion is an outcome of evolutionary processes, it is not an evolved adaptation per se. Steven Pinker has, for example, argued that:

‘Many of our faculties are adaptations to enduring properties of the real world. We have depth perception, because the world really is three-dimensional. We apparently have an innate fear of snakes, because the world has snakes and they are venomous. Perhaps there really is a personal, attentive, invisible, miracle-producing, reward-giving, retributive deity, and we have a God module in order to commune with him. As a scientist, I like to interpret claims as testable hypotheses, and this certainly is one. It predicts, for example, that miracles should be observable, that success in life should be proportional to virtue, and that suffering should be proportional to sin. I don't know anyone who has done the necessary studies, but I would say there is good reason to believe that these hypotheses have not been confirmed’. (pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ media/2004_10_29_religion.htm)

Scott Atran also suggests that god module theory is profoundly flawed: the claim that religion offsets apparent disadvantages is countered by the fact that it creates other disadvantages. Thus most theories that have been posited to explain religion in functional terms can be countered by showing how religion also does the exact opposite:

‘It tries to answer the question Why? It prevents answers to the question Why? It creates meaning for an arbitrary world. It postulates and imaginary world that hides reality’s reason. It discovers the origin of nature’s regular occurrences…It disguises the origin of nature’s regular occurrences…It relieves anxiety. It terrorizes…It aims to overcome evil, suffering, misfortune and injustice among believers. It aims to cause evil, suffering, misfortune and injustice among nonbelievers…It benefits elites. It benefits the downtrodden…It’s the workhorse of war. It’s a player for peace’ (Atran, 2002. In Gods We Trust, pp. 6-7).

In their joint article (www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Atran-12172002/Atran.doc) Atran and Norenzayan go on to claim that whilst ‘commitment’ theories of religion like the 'god module' are useful for understanding how religion can faciltate the kinds of non-kin-based and non-reciprocal altruism necessary for the survivial of human grousp, they are not sufficient explanations of religion in and of themselves. The problem being that such theories don’t account for the apparently universal belief in supernatural beings: the existence of Marxism and humanism as non-religious moral systems suggest non-religious moral systems that do not invoke supernatural agents can be sufficient to engender human co-operation. As such, commitment theories are incomplete explanations of religion because they fail to account for the specificity of its supernaturalist elements.

The approach outlined below is, I think, incredibly useful in helping to demonstrate how and why people potentially acquire religious concepts by understanding religious thought not as 'innate', 'natural' and necessary but in naturalistic terms which are explicable via material processes and by a secular scientific understanding of the universe. In brief, this approach states that religion can be both extremely useful to humans and highly damaging, but in either case it is not necessary for humans to function and survive. This is also sometimes refered to as the 'spandrel' theory of religion: a spandrel being an architectural term for describing an aspect of a builing which was not designed with a function in mind, but is a by-product of the functionality of some other aspect of the building (the space under the stairs is often used as storage, but it was not designed as a storage space; rather, it is necessary to have a space in the building at that point as a consequence of the stairs).

The 'Spandrel' Theory of Religion
An initial step in understanding how people are capable of conceptualising the supernatural begins with Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind(ToM) is the remarkable ‘mind reading’ ability that most humans possess which allows us to impute motivations to others. By ‘mind reading’ I am referring to our apparently natural aptitude for inferring what other people are thinking and feeling and predicting their behaviour accordingly, based on visual cues, body language and the like rather than any kind of genuine ‘psychic’ ability! Another key definition of ToM (which I will return to in the epilogue to this piece) is the ability to detect false beliefs in others (I think that she thinks so-and so, even though I know so-and-so to be false). In fact, this is how the 'existence' of ToM is generally demonstrated: if you show a child of around 5 years of age a box of sweets and ask that child what they think is in the box, the will usually say 'sweets!'. Then you show the child that the box actually contains pencils. A second child is brought into the room. The first child is then asked what he or she thinks that the second child thinks is in the box. A child who demonstrates ToM will reply sweets, even though they know it contains pencils. What is demonstrated here is the ability to think about what other people are thinking, even if you know that the other people's beliefs about the world are mistaken.

All in all, ToM is a pretty remarkable ability, but one that we take for granted. This kind of slippage towards taken-for-grantedness is, I think, important in understanding why people are often likely to accept religious ideas and supernatural beliefs (i.e. the dominant beliefs in most cultures have a taken-for-grnated character). This is probably because ideas and beleifs about the supernatural emerge from very banal taken-for-granted cognitive capacities that most of us possess.

With regard to religion, the important thing about ToM is that it allows us to impute a seemingly invisible motivational force to other human beings (‘mind’). We are used to dealing with other humans who have corporeal bodies but are also agents with recognisable motivations, feelings etc. When we encounter a dead body, we are suddenly faced with the corporeal body that is lacking agency and a motivating force. As Pacal Boyer has it, it is then only a small step to inferring the existence of this ‘invisible’ and seemingly non-corporeal mind as something which has ‘left’ the body, and which is, indeed, independent of the body. ToM is one factor that allows us to hypothesis the existence of human-like but non-corporeal entities (i.e. gods, spirits and demons). However, ToM does not demand beleif in said hypothetical otherworldly agents.

The complex kinds of ‘social intelligence’ demonstrated by humans (which allow us to establish massive coalitions such as nation states or global religious communities)are fundamental to our survival (which, for humans is massively dependent on social co-operation - especially in terms of parental investment for human infants - even though humans still remain the main predators of other humans). As such, the social intelligence we possess presumably spread through populations in our evolutionary past as a consequence of its usefulness. However, one of the things about social intelligence is that we simply can’t ‘switch it off’. A consequence of this is that we tend to maintain social relationships with the dead (visiting graves, etc.): especially with members of our immediate family or close friends (with who we have shared deep emotional ties and who, presumably, we depended on in various ways for our daily well-being) even after they have died.

Added to this the human ability for anthropomorphism which cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen claims is probably a result of ‘cognitive fluidity’. Cognitive fluidity is tied to the idea of ‘modularity of mind’: that the human mind is not some big general all purpose learning tool - if it was, we probably wouldn’t be able to communicate meaningfully via language. The fact that we have language is, according to the 'modularity of mind' theory, a consequence of our having developed a specialised ‘lingusitic intelligence’ mental module. A useful analogy here is to think of a non-modular mind as being like a toolbox containing some nails, a hammer, a saw, a screwdriver and a wrench. There’s lots of stuff you can usefully do with all of this equipment (cut down a tree and build a shelter), but the toolbox has rather limited application when your computer breaks down. For this kind of repair job, you need a specialised toolkit. Understanding weather patterns may be important for successfully undertaking activities like hunting and farming, but the weather doesn't really impact upon the way we learn language. However, the claim is that if we don't possess modularity of mind, we simply would not be able to realise what factors are important when it comes to hunting, and what are important when it comes to learning language. The net result being that it takes much longer to learn how to farm and to learn how to speak a language. Human children appear to be born with a 'technical intelligence' module which means that even very young children find it easy to learn basic tool use. However, the same does not appear to be true of infant chimps who often take a very long time to master using rocks in a simple hammer-and-anvil technique to break open nuts.

What has this to do with religion? What humans also seem able to do think across these mental modules or domains of knowledge - i.e. cognitive fluidity. The dates remain contentious, but this may have been one of the major evolutionary shifts that brought about the 'cultural revolution' or explosion that seems to have taken place somehwere around 70-40,000 years ago. Generally speaking, this period also evidences the emergence of religious thinking amongst anatomically modern human beings (burial sites, rock art, etc.). In any case, cognitive fluidity allows for analogical thinking which is an incredibly useful tool. Not only does the ability to think analogically enable technical development (thus greater human control over the environment and increased chances of survival), it also seems to underlie a great deal of scientific thinking (looking for universal principles of motion by comparing a birds wing to a fish’s fin).

Cognitive fluditiy also means that when social intelligence (the part of the mind we use for dealing with other people, i.e. ToM and the like) interacts with natural history intelligence (the part of the mind we use for dealing with, thinking about and categorising our environment) we can come up with concepts such as an animal who thinks and acts like a human. This can be an incredibly useful way of interacting with one’s environment, and it certainly seems to be the case that human success in hunting comes from attributing human-like qualities to prey. However, it also allows us to attribute a human-like mind to a tree or a statue. In brief, this ability for analogy and anthropomorphism may have tangentially given rise to the ‘earliest’ kind of religious concept: animism. To reiterate, cognitive fludity does not require religion; rather, religious concepts (along with art, poetry, etc.) are by-products of the evolved capacity for cognitive fluidy (which in and of itself is a useful day-to-day survival strategy).

In enabling symbol use, analogy, metaphor, etc. (‘the wine dark sea’) cognitive fluidity also faciltated the development of complex forms of communication that have also allowed humans to establish and maintain equally-complex forms of social networks and relationships previously mentioned. Things like nation states and religious communities are often dependent on ideas about 'fictive' or 'metaphorical' kinship. To the extent that symbol use, analogy and metaphor are also central to the development of various artistic forms, I wonder if the links between cognitive fluidity, anthropomorphism and animism indicates why, for much of the time we've been on the planet, human artistic endeavours (whether literary, visual or plastic) often deal with religious or supernatural themes. This is also one of the reasons why I think that there is a significant overlap between contemporary occultism and the literature of the fantastic. However, one thing I’m not claiming here is that art, poetry, etc. are inherently religious pursuits.

Tying all of this in a roundabout way to the racist invective we find in Lovecraft, Steven Mithen also makes the interesting point that prior to acquiring cognitive fluidity, humans simply may not have been capable of racist thinking: while cognitive fluidity allows us to think of animals as being human-like, it also allows us to conceptualise other humans as animal-like or less-than human (this doesn’t, of course, mean that animosity between humans wouldn’t have existed prior to cognitive fluidity; but according to Mithen such animosity wouldn’t have been given expression through the discourse of race).

As a consequence of ToM, social intelligence (what Boyer generally refers to as 'intuitive psychology'), religious concepts, universally, seem to be constrained by a propensity toward anthropomorphism. The anthropologist Stewart Guthrie (1993, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion) reiterates this in claiming that the most efficient interpretation that human beings can place on events in an uncertain world is to assume that those events are structured by a human-like intentional agency: that shape in the distance might be a boulder, or it might be a bear. It is better to assume that it is a bear if you want to ensure your survival. If it turns out to be a boulder, you've lost nothing. If you think it's a boulber but it turns out to be a predator, you're in trouble. In this respect, anthropomorphism may be relate to an evolved adaptation which (if I recall aright) psychologist Justin Barrett calls the 'Hyperactive Agent Detection Device' (HADD) - a biased psychological-perceptual capacity for ‘over detecting’ potential predators. Like social intelligence, this is 'hyperactive' because we simply cannot turn it off, and in the bear-boulder example above it is a useful survival strategy t to start from the assumption that the boulder is a predator. The HADD kicks alerts us to potential danger when, for example you hear a floorboard creaking downstairs at night, or you hear a rustling behind you during a walk in the woods. The floorboard may be creaking because of temperature changes, and the rustling behind you might just be the wind, but our intuitive response is to react as if a potential predator is in the vicinity. The implications being that the HADD often leads us to detect for agents where none exist. In conjunction with ToM and so forth, this can add weight to the notion that non-corporeal human-like agents exist. The reason why it is human-like spirits that are posited is because the main predator of human beings has been other human beings. Thus the HADD is more likely to lead us to infer human-like predators rather than animal-predators.

This returns me to Tylor's minimal definition of religion as a 'belief in spiritual beings' mentioned in my last post: doctrinal aspects of religion do not necessarily reflect what people think at the 'grass-roots' of religious belief and practice. Christianity holds that god is atemporal, omnipotent and omnipresent; however, when praying people often make different inferences about the nature of god - that 'he' experiences time like other human beings, and that he is specifically focusing on the person praying. In European Christian art, God is often represented in gendered, corporeal, tangible and anthropomorphic form (i.e. a bearded old man enthroned in heaven); in the Bible, God also has human attributes (i.e. being jealous and wrathful). Similarly, Justin Barrett found that many Hindu’s applied anthropomorphic qualities to deities in everyday situations, even though when questioned about the nature of deities in a more formal setting would recapitulate formal, learnt theology that claimed otherwise (J. Barrett, 1998. ‘Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine’ in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion). What this indicates is that human religious concepts are, to an extent, constrained and are ‘minimally counterintuitive’. While cross-culturally gods and spirits may be conceived of as all-knowing, there are innumerable instances in the myths of various cultures where humans are able to trick supposedly omniscient gods and spirits.

The Counterintuitiveness of Religious Ideas
Similarly, Pascal Boyer argues that supernatural concepts seem to follow a cross-cultural template, and the nature of such concepts appears to be constrained by existing intuitions about the world which are either innate or which humans acquire early in childhood. These ‘ontological intuitions’ form the basis of what anthropologists refer to as ‘folk knowledge’ - namely implicit assumptions about the way the world is ordered. In brief, humans recognise distinctions between animate objects, inanimate objects, natural kinds, artificial objects, and persons. For example, if we encounter an animate object we have never encountered before, we are able to quickly infer a number of things about it: it has four legs, fur and moves, so it is probably an animal. As an animal, we infer that it is mortal, eats to live, reproduces, etc. We are so used to this that it seems unremarkable, but without these pre-existing ontological intuitions which allow us to cognitively structure our environment in relatively coherent ways (and which are presumably a product of long evolutionary processes) we would have difficulty in recognising that a rock is of a different kind to a fish.

In any case, Boyer what is characteristic of religious representations is that they violate these ontological assumptions in some way. The reason why religious representations become widespread is because they disrupt out ontological intuitions, and as such become more salient or memorable than other kinds of knowledge or ideas, and thus more likely to be passed on. Again, this doesn';t mean that such ideas will necessarily be believed, but it suggests a reason why mental representations of the supernatural become widespread through populations.

However, the implication of this claim is that the more 'outrageous' or ‘counter-intuitive’ a religious idea is, the more likely it is to be remembered and transmitted. Boyer suggests otherwise: a balance is usually struck in religious concepts between being counterintuitive enough to be memorable and being so counterintuitive that the concept no longer sensibly fits with out intuitive understanding of the world. For example, the belief in ghosts, spirits and deities fits into our intuitive assumptions insofar as these entities are classified as persons (sentient beings that have intentions, desires and motivations); however, they are also counterintuitive according to our folk concepts of biology, psychology and physics (they can move through walls, see everything, etc.).
On the other hand, a chair that exists only on Thursdays or (to borrow Justin Barrett's example) cat that never dies, has wings, is made out of steel, experiences time backwards, lives underwater and speaks Russian is so counterintuitive to our concept of a cat that it could no longer be classified as a cat. It is certainly so outside our experience as to be wholly unbelievable. In brief, only concepts which are counter-factual and counter-intuitive in a limited sense are likely to become transmissible and culturally salient. Beliefs that are ‘excessively’ unusual or violate our ontological assumptions to the extreme are likely to be rejected as unbelievable. As an aside, this is something I hope to revisit with regard to representations of the Old Ones in Lovecraft. Following China Mieville's comments at the Weird Realism conference about the overdetermined nature of Lovecraft's descriptions (despite his use of adjectives such as 'indescribable'), I actually think that Lovecraft's representations of the Old Ones are much more anthropomorphic than is often assumed.

In summary, ideas about gods and spirits - which seem to constitute the 'core' of religious and supernatural beliefs cross-culturally - are 'universal' because they only require a slight modification of Theory of Mind, because of social intelligence and because the posited HADD encourages a belief in non-corporeal persons or agents. However, all of these things together produce religion as a by-product of cognitive functioning, but the production of religion is not the function of these ordinary (although in some senses remarkable) human abilitites. In brief, religion is not an evolved adaptation necessary for human survival or co-operation. Human beings can do quite well without it.

Epilogue
That said, Scott Atran does see scope for incorporating 'committment' theories into a more general understanding of the evolutionary contours of religious thought. Earlier I mentioned that Theory of Mind enables humans to recognise false beliefs in others. This also allows us to represent and communicate counterfactual or false beliefs to others. The capacity for deception is useful for our survival, but as social beings it is also a potential threat to the social order. Scott Atran points out that 'religion often involves hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments to supernatural agents, that is, offering and sacrifice (offerings of goods, property, time, life). A general problem in the maintenance of cooperation is how to distinguish people who are altruistically committed to a coalition from those who are not. One way to test who's genuinely committed is to see who is willing to undertake a costly sacrifice. Painful ritual practices such as tattooing, scarification and circumcision are not the kind of thing that anyone would do unless they took their affiliation with the group seriously.'

Our ability to recognize potentially false beliefs (including supernatural beleifs) also means that most human societies are always under threat of defection. If some better ideology comes along there is no longer any reason to accept the current ideology. Once human beings have the ability to conceptualise supernatural agents, such agents become incredibly useful in encouraging people not to defect from the group, especially if this supernatural agent is believed to possess the power to invisibly check and review people's thoughts and behaviours, and can punish them accordingly. The 'social usefulness' of the supernatural (despite the fact that this can also be incredibly damaging on a personal and individual level) may also be an important component to understanding why religious moral systems are more widespread than non-religious ones, despite the fact that (as Atran himself seems to recognise) non-religious moral systems can also be used to facilitate social co-operation. On this point, I am not advocating the necessity of religion; rather, I'm pointing to a factor that might be important in understanding the social contexts underpinning people's 'preference' for supernaturalism and resistance to atheism.

Here endeth the lesson.

'The Cancer of Superstition'?

2007-07-26T10:05:00.000+01:00

As returning readers may be aware, we at Ghooric Zone central are not afraid to take the occasional meander down avenues somewhat tangential to our favoured Lovecraftian topics. This post being no exception (although I will justify it as being in the spirit of Lovecraft materialist atheism).

Guardian readers out there will no doubt have encountered Gordon Lynch's piece berating Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett popular books on religion (published Saturday 21st July 2007) which can be found here.

It seems to me that, as one commentor to the article has already noted, Lynch has constructed something of a straw man argument: invalidating Dawkins and Dennett's claims not by what they have said, but what they have failed to say. In all, this seems to be a case of sour grapes on the part of a sociologist of religion who is a bit miffed that his particular field of expertise has not achieved popular recognition in the way that Dawkins and Dennett have popularised their take on religion.

The problem here (or so it seems to me) lies in the 'crisis of representation' afflicting the social sciences since the 1980s (especially in the wake of Clifford & Marcus' 'Writing Culture'). In brief, this 'crisis' (which has led disciplines such as anthropology to argue themselves into a corner) was the consequence of concerns surrounding how a range of literary and rhetorical devices were being deployed (in anthropological writings, for example) as a means of presenting partial and culturally-biased 'data' as scientific fact. This was highly problematic because of the way anthropological writing in particular presented often deeply ethnocentric views of other cultures (views which implicitly asserted the 'superiority' of the Western anthropologists' own culture) as 'factual'. Further to this, postmodernist and poststructuralist trends in the social sciences have also emphasised the folly of pursuing 'objective' knowledge, and have maintained that 'Western' science is a myth or 'discourse' (an approach which fails to take into account the fact that centres of scientific thought have, of course shifted geographically across the duration of human history), and that 'rationality' is a culturally and historically contingent product of the European Enlightenment rather than a panhuman propensity. Don't get me wrong - there are sound and important epistemological issues being addressed here, not least of which is the way politics, ideology and knowledge become intertwined. As an anthropologist, I absolutely recognise the many problematic ways in which my discipline is founded on - and has been used to support - colonial expansionism and the exploitation of people's across the globe. Furthermore, 19th Century pseudo-scientific anthropological theories (outmoded even in the 1920s) were brought to bear as 'scientific proof' of Nazi racial doctrines. Thus Nazi scholars used anthropological pseudo-science to justify the Holocaust. More than enough reason to exercise caution when one encounters claims that a particular set of ideas is 'scientifically proven' (New Agers take note).

A consequence of these debates is a kind of epistemological double-bind meaning that social scientists become complicit in their own marginalisation. Eschewing explanations of human behaviour - particularly those grounded in the 'myth' of science, rationality and reason - many social scientists have come to favour self-conscious and reflexive 'interpretations' of human behaviour. Said interpretations also favour an outmoded view of a)the mind as tabula rasa and b)the social and the cultural as forces which exist external to human beings.

As mentioned above, there are good reasons for this turn away from science in the social sciences. However, emphasising the role of the social on our behaviour has enabled social scientists to dispense with the need for investigating 'human nature' or to have outright rejected the notion that such a thing might even exist. I personally don't doubt that culture and society have a profound part to play in shaping our behaviour; however, if one goes looking for books on human behaviour, what one tends to find on the shelves of most major bookshops these days is a range of popular science texts written by biologists and geneticists offering 'hardwired' explanations of said behaviour. It is unsurprising that ideas about human behaviour have eclipsed sociological and social anthropological thinking about the same issue, because said texts offer concrete explanations of human nature. Social and cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, tend to offer very wooly semi-autobiographical musings about (to paraphrase Clifford Geertz) their own interpretations of other peoples interpretations about what they think they might be doing.

For all their rejection of science, social scientists have tried to write themselves out of this mess via an elistist retreat into obscurantism which, paradoxically, legitimises itself through the deployment of 'technical' and quasi-scientific jargon (for an excellent critique of this - though one generaly rejected by the social sciences - see Sokal's 'Intellectual Impostures') disguised as genuine knowledge (a huge generalisation, I know, but we of the Ghooric Zone are not known for out impartiality). I should know, as I've been guilty of this myself on more than one occasion. To be frank, I find this obscurantism both patronising and incredibly hypocritical given that it almost wilfully re-instates the very problem that responses to the aforementioned 'crisis of representation' sough to address. This, of course, compounds the problem of the marginalisation of the social sciences because people who might otherwise be interested in what anthropologists and sociologists have to say are quickly put off after encountering even the most 'basic' of introductory texts. Compared to the mass of popular texts about human behaviour produced by natural scientists like Dawkins, I can think of only two popular books written by social anthropologists in the past twenty years.

The accessibility of the social sciences is further compounded by the claims iterated by Gordon Lynch in his article (and nicely summarised by another commentor on the Guardian website): that to fully understand the issues in their depth and complexity, one must have read X,Y & Z. While a broad knowledge of the intellectual history of a given field is always desireable, failure to take into account the breadth and depth of that history doesn't logically invalidate the claims of Dennett and Dawkins.

What Gordon Lynch does not address here is the fact that Dennett's work (if not Dennett himself) is informed by a wide array of research provided by long-standing and respected anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer, Dan Sperber and Scott Atran - specialists who aware of the history of their field and who do explicitly address the shortcomings of prior anthropological understandings and theories of religion.

American anthropologist Scott Atran (in his book In Gods We Trust), for example, has taken pains to demonstrates the failure of previous approaches in the social sciences to develop anything close to a comprehensive explanation of religion. At heart, Atran's argument is quite simple: every (functionalist) theory of religion can be countered with by an example of religion acting to support an opposed function. For example: 'religion is a way of dealing with anxiety in the face of death'. Yes, but religion also generates anxiety in the face of death (i.e. the threat of what might come in the afterlife, hellfire and damnation and so on). In effect, Atran (along with Boyer) argues that prior explanations of religion are not, in fact, 'scientific' expanations; rather they are a kind of interpretive folk-psychology or folk-sociology masquerading as scientific theories. What Boyer and Atran do instead is to posit a generally non-functionalist cognitive theory of religion: the human ability to conceptualise religious and other kinds of hypothetical otherworlds, spiritual beings etc. is simply a by-product of our mundane everyday cognitive functioning (itself a product of millennia of evolution). What this approach also suggests is (to borrow a phrase from Boyer) 'the naturalness of religious ideas'. In otherwords, religion can be understood not as 'irrationality' or 'superstition' (although of course Dawkins often couches the issue in comparable terms) but as a 'natural' outcropping of our day-to-day cognitive functioning. This is, I think, where people like Dennett and Dawkins fall short and where I probably find myself partially agreeing with Lynch: as an atheist, I can't but help regarding religion as part of what Lovecraft called the 'cancer of superstition'. However, from another point of view I can understand why religion is unlikely to go away: it's simply part of how our mind works, and the production of religious concepts and representations well be tied to the same cognitive capacities (the production of symbol, metaphor and analogy) which allows our imaginative faculties to flourish and which (oddly enough) enabled Lovecraft to produce his visionary but atheistic fictional otherworlds. Of course, simply having the capacity to cognise hypothetical otherworlds doesn't necessarily mean we have to believe in them!

In fact, the general approach of Atran and Boyer (which to my mind is part of a hugely significant, groundbreaking approach to the understanding the origin of religious concepts) is profoundly indebted to the intellectual history of their discipline, starting with 19th century anthropological and psychological theories of religion posited by Edward Tylor, who offered a minimal definition of religion as a 'belief in spiritual beings'. Interestingly, Talal Asad is invoked in the Lynch article as demonstrating the partial and ethnocentric definitions of religion deployed by Dawkins and Dennett. This leads me to raise a point that perhaps addresses some of Lynch's concerns: does Buddhism (a non-theistic religion) not, therefore problematise this presumably ethnocentric definition of religion as a belief in spiritual beings (one based, according to Asad, in the Christianity and philosophy of Western Europe)? Probably not. Social anthropological studies of Buddhism have themselves supported the view that non-theistic and 'rational' forms of Buddhism found in places like Sri Lanka and Thailand are, in part, fairly recent European 'inventions'. In brief, the 'elite' (often middle class) forms of Buddhism found in these areas (which espouse non-theism and demand that Buddha was just an enlightened human being) are, to some extent, products of a Buddhism transformed by European colonialism and reinterpreted by European scholars to fit a 'rational' Western world-view, then fed back to indigenous populations via Western forms of education. However, as the scholar of Buddhism Martin Southwold points out, localised village and rural forms of Buddhism in places like Sri Lanka do in fact incorporate spiritual beings into their beliefs and practices, and various Buddhist scriptures also support the 'supernatural' nature of Buddha. What this brief example hopefully goes some way to showing is that the consequence of reviewing the intellectual history of (in this case) anthropological approaches to religion - and the subsequent recognition that cultural and historical contingencies shape the content, meaning and character or 'religion' - does not necessarily invalidate the apparently ethnocentric claim that religion is concerned with spiritual beings. (Further to this, psychologist Justin Barratt has undertaken a number of research projects which appear to demonstrate cross-culturally that, regardless of what a given doctrine teaches, in informal settings human beings tend to think about religion in terms of human-like but supernatural beings such as gods and spirits).

It seems to me, then, that the argument Lynch employs is typical of the self-sustaining (and condescending) argument marshalled within the social sciences in order to promote the continued neccessity of (increasingly marginalised) social sciences specialists: i.e. we are the only people who have the time and resources to read and properly understand all of this stuff - if you challenge our view or fail to buy our books or accept our ideas that is a consequence of your ignorance, not a failure on our part to communicate our ideas clearly or to support them with hard data.

Again, this is why people turn to the likes of Dennett and Dawkins: they offer concrete explanations (not 'interpretations') grounded in empirical data (not 'discourse'), and couched in an accessible and comprehensible style. This is not to say that such popular reviews of religion are without flaws. However, the emphasis on interpretation over explanation provided by social scientists is generally not satisfactory for the majority of human beings. This latter point is indeed one that anthropologists have themselves recognised. Why is it, then, that they have consistently failed to operationalise in their own field of study? A failure to 'properly' understanding the complex role of religion in the modern world lies not with the Dennett and Dawkins, but with the inability of those who oppose them to mount anything close to sustainable defence.

Vote Yog Radio!

2007-07-22T12:29:00.000+01:00

Yog Radio - Yog Sothoth.com's podcast about Lovecraftian games and gaming - has been nominated for this year's Gen Con EN World rpg award (the 'Ennies') for best gaming podcast. We at Ghooric Zone central would ask all of our regular blog viewers to head over to the Ennies site here and vote for Yog Radio. If you haven't yet had the opportunity to listen to Yog Radio, mp3 files can be downloaded here. Though Yog Radio's general emphasis is on the Call of Cthulhu rpg the show demonstrates a much broader remit: the most recent episode including, for example, an interview with Brian Aldiss. Fans of things Lovecraftian are certain to find something of interest in the Yog Radio vaults so please do take the time to check out some of the episiodes and cast your vote for Yog Radio. The hosts Paul Maclean ('Paul of Cthulhu'), Fin Patterson and Neil Young provide an excellent, informative and highly entertaining show in addition to maintaining yog-sothoth.com - currently in its ninth year of existence and without doubt the best provider of on-line resources and support for the international community of Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraftian roleplayers (as well as being kind enough to host the mp3 files of my 'Lovecraft and the Occult' lecture series).

Vote for Yog Radio now. You know you want to.

New Cthulhu Movie?

2007-07-11T00:20:00.000+01:00

Unless you've been hiding in a lead-lined bunker with no internet connection for the last few days, likelihood is that you've encountered some aspect of the viral marketing campaign for JJ Abrams forthcoming untitled movie aka 'Cloverfield' aka 'The Parasite' - think Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. If not, you can view the trailer that started the whole ball rolling here. Though I'm loathe to be party to said viral marketing, one claim that keeps cropping up is that the movie might be inspired by Lovecraft, or be about the return of Cthulhu. Though my own gut reaction is that this will probably turn out not to be the case, the buzz of interest this is generating around Lovecraft may well mean that Hollywood moguls will begin to take heed of the call of Cthulhu...

Chariots of the Dark Gods?

2007-07-08T13:46:00.000+01:00

A recent thread on yog-sothoth.com brought this ufo sighting to my attention:

The underside of the vehicle is also marked with the following characters:

While I'm in no doubt that this is a hoax, the following site claims otherwise. Specifically, the author of said piece claims that the symbols on the craft (one of which is, according to a commenter on the yog-sothoth.com thread, the Japanese for 'hoax') signify a kind of ET technology or alien superscience akin to magic:

'a language, that could quite literally execute itself, at least in the presence of a very specific type of field. The language, a term I am still using very loosely, is a system of symbols (which does admittedly very much resemble a written language) along with geometric forms and patterns that fit together to form diagrams that are themselves functional. Once they are drawn, so to speak, on a suitable surface made of a suitable material and in the presence of a certain type of field, they immediately begin performing the desired tasks. It really did seem like magic to us, even after we began to understand the principles behind it.'

The author also provides images from a 'linguitic analysis primer':

As well as reiterating the Lovecraftian (and Clarkean) theme of magic-as-superscience - and that of (imaginary) non-human languages which paradoxically signify the inconceivable or represent the unrepresentable - the above 'interpretation' (worth reading in its entirety) may well have taken its conceptual lead from Delta Green, a sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu rpg. For those unfamiliar with Delta Green, it reframes the Cthulhu mythos in terms of late-20th Century conspiracy theories, particularly those surrounding ufos, alien abductions and of course the now-legendary Roswell incident. Without giving too much away, Delta Green includes information concerning symbols suposedly found on the crashed Roswell saucer, wherein the source and function of said symbols are grounded in the now familiar time-and-space warping non-Euclidean geometries of the Lovecraftian cosmos. According to Delta Green's take on modern ufology, those that learnt the secrets of the saucer's language invariable went mad, died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Needless to say, Delta Green implicates the Greys as agents of Unseen Powers From Beyond.

All in all, I'd say that this case presents us with additional (albeit circumstantial) evidence of how Lovecraft's influence - via a roleplaying game - continues to be felt in contemporary ufological lore. This will probably feed into a forthcoming post of mine dealing with the controversial topic of roleplaying and the occult.

Hello Dave!

2007-07-07T23:13:00.000+01:00

Dr. Dave Evans has recently returned to the UK and his new book (based on Dave's PhD thesis) exploring the contours of contemporary occultures post-Crowley is now available. Although I've yet to read Dave's book, I understand that Lovecraft gets a look in (presumably with regard to Kenneth Grant, whose work I believe form's a focal point of Dave's book). A review will hopefully appear here once I've had a chance to pick up a copy, but word is that this is defintely one not to miss so be sure to order your copy from Amazon forthwith

Dave will also be speaking at Treadwell's in August:

16 August 2007 (Thursday)
The Amado Crowley Phenomenon
Sons and Lovers
Dr Dave Evans
£5
7.15 for 7.30 pm start

Amado Crowley claims to be the son of Aleister Crowley and has published numerous books on the alleged private teachings he received. Dave Evans has researched in detail the claims and proven biographical details of the individual in question. He lays out his findings on this night, and makes some remarks on wider issues raised: the role of the teacher, discipleship and hero-worship in Western occultism, as well as that sub-culture’s ideas on magical heirship, lineage and transmission. Dave Evans has recently completed a Ph.D at Bristol, the results of which are published in his History of British Magic After Crowley: Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, the Left-Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality (Hidden Design, 2007).

On a similar note, I will be revisiting 'The Occultural Lovecraft' at London's Moot With No Name (run by the redoubtable David V. Barrett and compered by the mighty Steve Wilson of 'Chaos Ritual' fame) on Wednesday 29th August 2007. More details to follow.

You're my wife now.

Back with a Vengeance II: The Profligate Weird

2007-07-06T00:47:00.000+01:00

Perhaps as a consequence of the relatively recent ‘Weird Realism’ conference at Goldsmiths College, the concept of the ‘weird’ suddenly seems profligate online - particularly as a focal point of academic inquiry. It may be just me, but this seems a typical strategy of the academy (especially within the realm of the social and cultural ‘sciences’): namely the (jaded, populist) theoretical encompassing and championing of anything which smacks of the marginal, anomalous and oppositional simply as a consequence of said phenomenon’s perceived oppositional nature.

Academia is by its nature elitist and while I don't want to be accused of anti-intellectualism, the need to categorically define concepts such as ‘the weird’ and to erase any sense of the porousness of their boundaries smacks of a kind of 'colonisation of consciousness' and often prefigures the commodification and emasculation of said terms/concepts.

As an aside, I’m curious why the notion of ‘the weird’ (including the much vaunted ‘new weird’) has suddenly gained wide currency, particularly with regard to Lovecraft. In fact, Lovecraft seems to have used the term interchangeably with ‘the supernatural’ and also as an adjunct to - but in this instance not necessarily interchangeably with - his own cosmic indifferentism (granted, I might need to dig up some quotes to justify this). One wonders if there a danger lies in this tangential sideslip toward a concern with the weird: namely that of diverting attention from the more challenging problem of the cosmic (whose presence in Lovecraft's tales threatens to overthrow all categorical distinctions as the product of anthropocentric thought).

Back with a Vengeance I: Intellectual Decompression Chamber

2007-07-06T00:44:00.000+01:00

It has come to my attention that misunderstandings about what I was banging on about at the Weird Realism conference continue to abound. No doubt this matters to no-one else other than my curmudgeonly very own self; but some recent disparaging remarks about Lovecraftian magicians coming from within the academy has left me with a rather unpleasant taste in my mouth, hence the following tirade: that Leftist academics (in whose company I generally, but not exclusively, count myself) actually seem to have a great deal of trouble grappling with the materiality of human agents when said agents intervene into the otherwise tidy abstractions of theory (most of which, it seems to me, have become increasingly distant and disengaged from the political realities of everyday life). This probably explains why I became an anthropologist, being generally better at dealing with people than I am with theories...

I'm also incredibly frustrated by the impenetrable Lacanian pseudo-psychology that informs much of the current intellectual critique of capitalism. Which is not to say that said theories and approaches do not have their value, but in most cases academics are working with incredibly outmoded, unsupportable or folk- theories of the mind (usually some variant of the tabula rasa) that have been left far behind by current research in neuroscience, the cognitive sciences more generally and (the ever unpopular) evolutionary psychology. That said theories are still presented as having explanatory power without, it seems, actually being testable compounds the problem.

That aside, an accusation made against Chaos magicians' that their position on Lovecraft was politically 'unsound' was, in any case, a position I myself expressed (or so at least I thought!) at the Weird Realism conference. Not wanting to detract from what was an excellent day, I must say that I'm still somewhat flummoxed as to why a number of the discussants failed to realised this. Ultimately, though, there is no-one to blame but myself and my inability to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly. Also granted that the theme of my paper seemed somewhat out of alignment with what the conference was supposed to be about. In any case, there seemed no point in mounting a 'defence' of my comments as at least two of the more challenging questions they raised appeared to reiterate the very points I was trying to put across.

Claiming that Chaos magical co-options of Lovecraft is ineffectual and politically unsound also demonstrates, to my mind, a deep rooted fear of the magical (itself a reiteration of capitalism’s own rationalizing discourse) which also ignores the potential ‘radicalism’ of magic and religion. This brings to mind the anthropologist Peter Worsley who, employing a Marxist analysis, attempted to demonstrate that millenarian movements in colonized areas such as Polynesia and Africa were not simply the responses of an ‘irrational’ peoples to colonization, but laid the foundations for later more overtly ‘politicised’ independence movements.

Given that the capacity to generate magic, religion and overtly fictional fantasies may very well intimately interlinked via our cognitive evolution, one wonders why academics thus deem fantastic and weird fiction worthy of investigation. Magic and the literature of the weird and fantastic participate in a shared field of relations. Indeed, much of what passes as ‘theory’ partakes of the fantastic to such a degree that I would consider much of it a form of ‘magical thinking’! On a final accusatory note, I really don’t see how the theorizing of the Left in and of itself constitutes an effectual alternative to capitalism, especially when it has come to constitute (at least for Luddites like myself) a form of cultural capital indented in the elitism of its own obscurantism.

Even so, I'm also feeling rather quixotic this morning so will try to respond (yet again) to how Chaos magickal appropriations of Lovecraft can be potentially 'revolutionary': identification with 'alien otherness' - whether through the embodiment of possession or whether simply reading sci-fi - has the capacity to transform consciousness and raise awareness through the adoption of a different position or perspective. (In this respect, Lovecraftian magick might even be considered to be an occultural variant of standpoint theory). If this is any different to what most politically-engaged academics are trying to do (albeit not very effectively given the aforementioned obscurantism that has spread with viral-like intensity throughout academic discourse) then I don't know what is.

Something else I have decided to address here is the fascistic overtones of Chaos magick - a point raised on the day of the Weird Realism conference. This is, indeed, a point that I have myself raised on occasion. They are certainly there, although on this point the blame again lies squarely on myself in highlighting apparent links between Chaos magick and right-wing occultures (though in fact most Chaos magicians of my acquaintance seem to be more left-leaning). The whole issue was initially exacerbated by my statement that Chaos magick involves the imposition of one's will upon the cosmos. In actual fact, Chaos magical practices tend (at least in theory) to emphasise the attunement of one's 'will' with the universe. In this respect, the notion of 'will' closely follows that of Crowley's; and rather than magick being an act of violent imposition, it is concerned (again) with the transformation of awareness: namely, unbinding oneself from dualistic assumptions about the universe and instead recognising the permeability between one's microcosmic self and the macrocosm. Of course, as an atheist and materialst I hold all of this to be hogwash; even so, as I think Patricia MacCormack argued in her recent paper at Treadwell's, notions of permability, of flux, of amorphousness found within Chaos magick (and particularly in its engagement with the Lovecraftian demonic) offer an alternative to phallocentric hegemony (at which point I have, of course, rendered myself guilty of using the same obscurantisms for which I just admonished the rest of academia...)

Rant over (if, indeed, that made any sense whatsoever). I do of course welcome comments to this post, but following the example of Mr. Alberelli don’t be surprised if I’m not of a mind to respond to them...

The Al Hazred Legacy

2007-06-21T21:14:00.000+01:00

I've had a couple of requests (Hi Terje!) concerning an update about the Al Hazred Legacy (my proposed indie roleplaying game). Fear not, the game is still in development. However, the bad news is that a first draft is unlikely to see the light of day for a while yet. This is mainly due to generally busy-ness, and the fact that I have a number of other more pressing projects to focus on at present. This is compounded by the fact that, although I have the opportunity to play boardgames with some lovely folk over in South East London every so often, I'm not currently part of a roleplaying group (and that's not likely to change in the near future), which means playtesting the damn thing could be somewhere way down the line.

However, I may as well use this as a plug for Contested Ground's Cold City indie rpg, with which I currently enamoured with (think Cold War monster hunting in 1950's Berlin with a good dose of Lovecraft and Charlie Stross thrown in to boot).

Back Soon

2007-06-19T18:18:00.000+01:00

Whispers from the Ghooric Zone has been on hiatus for the last few weeks (a consequence of our temporary entrapment in exam-marking hell) but be assured we will be back soon. At least it gives Mr. H.P. Alberelli more time to respond to my previous post...

Lovecraft & the Awful Redux

2007-05-27T17:01:00.000+01:00

H.P. Albarelli Jr. has contacted Ghooric Zone central on the matter of 'the Awful' (his comments can be found attached to the earlier post on this topic), having taken issue with my thoughts on his article. Mr. Albarelli informs me that he has no reason for emphasising a link between Lovecraft and Vermont, and that he does not even care for Lovecraft's writings. 'Fair enough' we at Ghooric Zone central say. But why then make such an issue of Lovecraft's alleged involvement in the case? And why claim that said cryptid had an important influence on Lovecraft's writing career? However, questions such as these simply sidetrack the main issue: where is the evidence to support claims about Lovecraft's interest in the case? And, indeed, for his supposed secret visit 1925 to Vermont? Given that Mr. Albarelli's article emphasises the important influence of 'the Awful' on Lovecraft's writing, it would also be helpful if full and proper referencing/sourcing of Lovecraft's alleged quotes on the matter could be provided. The following paragraph being the most problematic on this account:

"When H.P. Lovecraft returned to southern Vermont from Richford he told friends he was convinced that the Richford locals he had interviewed were "not in the least mistaken about what they had witnessed." Lovecraft later wrote, "The Awful became ample sustenance for my imagination" and "over time the creature became the basis for many of my own fictional inventions."

I'm trying not to be too smug or trite about this, because if Mr. Albarelli's claims can be supported they would constitute a major breakthrough in contemporary Lovecraftian scholarship, indicating a significant new source of Lovecraft's ideas, and necessitating a re-evaluation of Lovecraft's well-documented scepticism of things Fortean. I await Mr. Albarelli's response with trepidation.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

2007-05-26T18:17:00.000+01:00

My, how the last couple of weeks have flown by! It only seems a few days ago since my last post...

In any case, Thomas Ligotti has posted his first major work of philosophical non-fiction The Conspiracy Against the Human Race at Thomas Ligotti Online. The essay is currently available to view for free on-line or as a pdf download for members of the site, but is likely to be removed once Durtro publish the essay in hardcopy.

This seems like a good move, especially to someone like myself who has become increasingly frustrated at how difficult it has become to procure Ligotti's recent works (most of which seems to have been published in expensive limited editions): as a major literary exponent of the weird, Ligotti certainly deserves wider recognition.

Lovecraft & 'The Awful'

2007-05-11T15:11:00.000+01:00

The June issue of the Fortean Times (no. 223 in the UK) contains an article on p.10 drawn from a Vermont local newspaper, the County Courier. Said article reports on the return of a flying cryptid known locally as 'the Awful', and the author makes various claims that Lovecraft secretly visited Vermont in 1925 to investigate this monstrous entity. In fact, the article in its entirety can be found on-line here, where additional claims are made about the pervasive influence of 'the Awful' on Lovecraft's writing. Unsurprisingly no references are supplied for any of the supposed quotes, although the final quote of Lovecraft's cited in the comlete article comes from his short travelogue 'Vermont - A First Impression' (an account of his documented 1927 trip to Vermont and published in March 1928 - see Lovecraft's Collected Essays vol. 4 published by Hippocampus Press, 2005). Otherwise, there is no evidence (at least of which I am aware) to support the claim that Lovecraft went to Vermont in 1925. Of course, the trip being secret, we can presume that evidence is either non-existent or difficult to come by (which begs the question of exactly how the article's author uncovered these 'facts'!).

In any case, said author was probably banking on the association between Lovecraft and Vermont via 'The Whisperer in Darkness', working Lovecraft into the tale about 'the Awful' retrospectively. In any case it seems that what we are actually dealing with here is a case of a fiction being used authoritatively to support another fiction.

On a more conspiratorial note (those of us at Ghooric Zone central being partial to the occasional dissemination of conspiracies) the on-line context in which the article appears makes me wonder if 'the Awful' - sounding a little bit too Lovecraftian, perhaps, to constitute an piece of established local folklore - has been purposely manufactured to legitimise a particular reading of Lovecraft as occult/Fortean apologist?

What fascinates here is the cultural salience of Lovecraft's very name (especially, it seems, within Fortean and occultural circles) and the presumption that simply adding 'Lovecraft' to the mix implicitly validates the claims of the writer deploying it.

Lovecraft & the Occult MP3 files available for download

2007-05-10T00:37:00.001+01:00

The mp3 files of my 'Lovecraft and the Occult' talks at Treadwells Bookshop are now available for download at yog-sothoth.com.
A massive thank you to Paul of Cthulhu for offering to host the files, and for maintaining what is without doubt the premier (and Ennie award-winning) site for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying community.

Also thanks to Dan Harms, John Gonce and Jason Colavito whose works I plundered for the second and third instalments of the talks.

Patricia MacCormack at Treadwell's

2007-05-07T18:26:00.000+01:00

Patricia MacCormack - of whom the fungal hive-mind here at Ghooric Zone central can claim a brief acquaintance - will be speaking at Treadwell's tomorrow night, and rumour has it that her talk will include more than a little Lovecraft:

08 May 2007 (Tuesday)
Enfolding Magic
The Demon of the Female
Dr Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)
£5
7.15 for 7.30 pm start

'The reconfiguration of flesh underpins contemporary Continental philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. Tonight, Patricia MacCormack takes this idea, and enfoldment of surface, as a starting point on a journey through inflecting flesh of female genitalia, sexuality, magic, horror, daemonic alliance, and the idea of becoming-woman. The female genitalia, she posits, is a monster, all the more monstrous for being so tempting, for evoking the fascination of ambivalence. For all the ways it transgresses dominant phallic paradigms it is both prohibited and revolt-ing (in both senses of the word). It is, above all, an assemblage of folds, organs, elements, textures, tastes and involutions with its disciples. It is a daemon. Who dares and invokes this daemon, then? Tonight's speaker is senior lecturer of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University; she works on philosophical issues in contemporary magic, including chaos magick, feminism, occult culture and HP Lovecraft.'

Those of us here able to extract ourselves from the tendrils of the rhizomic Ghooric zone collective (currently residing at an undisclosed location below the Plateau of Leng) will endeavour to be present tomorrow. For those of you not fortunate enough to be in the locale on the evening, we would point you in the direction of the following online essay on Lovecraft, Lefanu and Leibniz which Patricia contributed to the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

Lovecraft Scholars

2007-05-06T22:56:00.000+01:00

I've just added a link to the Lovecraft Scholars discussion group at yahoo which I co-moderate with James Kneale and Bill Redwood. The group is a diverse and sometimes lively forum for discussing things Lovecraftian from a broadly 'scholarly' (though not necessarily 'academic') point of view. Admittedly, though, I haven't been much of a contributer myself in recent months due to general busy-ness. Whispers on the Lovecraftian esoteric grapevine also intimate that additional visual evidence of yours truly engaging in 'anthropological fieldwork' may be forthcoming on YouTube...

Weird Realism Re-visited

2007-05-05T14:33:00.000+01:00

Just a note to the effect that Mark Fisher has posted some astute observations and reflections on the the notion of the 'weird' as well as commenting on the recent Weird Realism conference at his k-punk blog.

As Mark notes, the conference remained largely focused on its stated aim (although admittedly my paper strayed somewhat from this), but did not satisfactorily resolve the 'problem' of 'the weird' in definitional terms (not that such a thing should be expected from a one-day conference!). China Mieville summed up the problematics of the weird when he made a statement along the lines of 'I can't define the weird but I know it when I see it', which leaves me wondering whether an attempt to conceptually 'fix' the weird might ultimately fall into the trap of overdetermining the concept (thus divesting it of its power)? This is why, in my mind, occultural appropriations and explorations of Lovecraft's universe often fail: they tend to frame Lovecraft's Old Ones - a la Derleth - within the safe and meaningful intersubjectivity of an anthropocentric worldview, or otherwise try to fix Lovecraft's cosmicism within the familiarity of established esoteric structures of thought(attempts by Kenneth Grant and Alan Moore to subsume Lovecraft's creations into the kaballah for example). However, as Mark notes, this is the very reason why many of Lovecraft's tales are written from a first-person perspective: the very 'weirdness' of the 'weird' is produced by intrusions 'from beyond' upon the normative expectations and contraints produced by an all-too human subjectivity. The problem with the occultural use of Lovecraft - and perhaps a consequence of subjecting the weird to too strenuous an analysis - is it so often takes the weird and makes it familiar. Even when Lovecraft does this (describing the Elder Things of Antarctica as 'men') he then presents us with a kind of recursive horror(to paraphrase Fritz Leiber, Lovecraft intimates that there is something that even the monsters are afraid of).

Also, I wonder if it is useful to delineate a clear conceptual boundary between the 'weird' and 'the fantastic': Hodgson's 'Night Land' seems to straddle both the weird and the fantastic; the same could also be said of M. John Harrison's 'Viriconium' tales and indeed Mieville's Bas-Lag novels. There are even (albeit brief) intimations of intrusions of 'outsideness' in Tolkien, although I certainly wouldn't consider his writing to be of 'the weird'.

I guess I'm wondering here at the embodied, affective and experiential dimensions of reading Lovecraft that are perhaps not easily fixed or reducible (and that coming from a reductionist materialist!)...

None of this is, of course, meant to suggest that Lovecraft should not be theorised - as modernity's key 'mythographer' he more than any other modern writer is in desparate need of a sustained theoretical investigation.

Post-Weird Realism Tentacularity

2007-04-29T16:57:00.000+01:00

Last Thursday's 'Weird Realism' conference was a blast, despite the emphasis being on philosophical interpretations of Lovecraft's work (not being a philosopher - to be frank, Continental philosophy gives me the willies - some of the more gritty discussion was a bit hard to follow).

Sadly, my paper appeared to cause some confusion, I guess as a result of failing to communicate my ideas clearly. In any case some of the participants seemed to think that I was saying the opposite to what I was actually trying to express (that occultural appropriations of Lovecraft's fiction does tend to drift towards a kind of 'McDonaldisation' and celebration of consumerism). One point I also failed to emphasise, though, was that such appropriations can be considered 'revolutionary' in the way that science-fiction and fantasy genres more generally are replete with a 'revolutionary potential': namely in facilitating a re-envisioning and re-pereception of the world. In any case, it was a fruitful experience, forcing me to re-evaluate some of my notions about Lovecraft's work. Also fantastic to see, at last, Lovecraft being taken seriously within academia. I'm not aware that any other conference has been solely dedicated to Lovecraft, making this a first.

Highlights of the day were Benjamin Noys presentation of 'The Shadow out of Time' and (trying not to be too much of a fanboy here) China Mieville's discussion of the post-WWI explosion of the 'tentacular' (which is also explored in his introduction to 'At the Mountains of Madness'). I also felt that Mieville's notion that Lovecraft's entities - far from being 'unnameable' - are drawn with an explicit and often overdetermined precision was spot on.

Cogratulations to all who made it such a fascinating event - special thanks go out to Mark Fisher for organising it

Weird Realism Paper

2007-04-23T15:36:00.000+01:00

Here's the paper I've written for this week's Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory conference at Goldsmiths College. Please note that I haven't yet revised the bibliography, which still contains a number of sources not currently cited in the text of the essay. There are a small number of footnotes that go with the essay, but, to be honest, I can't be bothered incorporating them at the moment!

‘All dimensions dissolve in the absolute’:
Magick, modernity and the horror of indetermination in
Through the Gates of the Silver Key

Justin Woodman (2007)

Introduction

'The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality - when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt - as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiousity?’ (Lovecraft 1971: 295-296)

S.T. Joshi concludes that this statement - made whilst Lovecraft was writing his ‘demythologised’ (Price 1990) masterpiece ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ - ‘may be the most important theoretical utterance Lovecraft ever made’ (Joshi 1996: 489). What Joshi (quite rightly) treats as significant here is Lovecraft’s ‘Copernican’ (Leiber 1980) materialist reframing and modernist re-imagining of the literature of the weird. Equally important, though, is the fact that Lovecraft’s ‘most important…utterance’ retains a ‘gnostic’ sensibility at its theoretical core, albeit locating this within what Erik Davis has famously described as ‘a twisted materialism in which scientific progress returns us to the atavistic abyss, and hard-nosed research revives the factual basis of forgotten and discarded myths’ (Davis 1995: 5). Indeed, despite his varied and well-documented iterations of unbelief (and uncompromisingly negative views of the occult), a gnostic sensibility remained central to Lovecraft’s personal aesthetics:

'Time, space and natural law hold…suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat - especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral' (Lovecraft 1971: 220)

The conceptual tension which Lovecraft attempts to resolve in his later weird writings - between myth and modernity, between a romantic gnosticism and materialism - footnotes wider Western social and cultural tensions: those emergent from the rationalising and disenchanting project of Enlightenment modernity which reactively birthed the romantic, anti-materialistic and overtly gnostic magical revival of the 19th century. In its late 20th and early 21st century manifestations this revival does, in fact, owe a huge debt to Lovecraft’s fictions (see for example Lachman 2001; Woodman 2004; Colavito 2005), a point I explore later in this paper. No doubt Lovecraft would stand aghast at these contemporary romantic and anti-rationalist occultural appropriations of his literary vision were he alive today; even so, if Colin Wilson is to be believed Lovecraft himself waged a ‘war with rationality’ (Wilson 1976: 1), palpable in his own gnostic romanticism and in his ‘Cthulhu mythos’ tales which uncompromisingly delineate irruptions of chaotic, non-rational forces deeply antagonistic to the quotidian and to modernity’s instrumental rationality.

Lovecraft may, indeed, have waged a war against rationality but he framed this revolt in terms of an ‘adventurous expectancy’ (Lovecraft 1971: 100), enumerating the symbolic power of the topographies of the everyday to generate (at least for the aesthete) a ‘sense of expansion, freedom, adventure, power, expectancy, symmetry, drama, beauty-absorbtion, surprise and cosmic-wonder’ (Lovecraft 1971: 124) . As China Mieville points out, Lovecraft is ‘a kind of bad-son heir to a religious visionary tradition, an ecstatic tradition, which…locates the holy in the everyday’ (Mieville 2005, xii-xiii). In which case, Lovecraft’s ‘gnosticism’ is one that is profoundly embedded in a particular perception of the materiality of things. In this respect his war against rationality did not necessitate a denial of the real, nor a complete dissolution of the self in some transcendent absolute. This latter point is conspicuous in the ‘horror of indetermination’(Bauman 1991: 56) expressed by Lovecraft in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ (and, indeed, many of his tales). In fact, for Lovecraft the ‘revolt against time space and matter’ was one that remained deeply grounded in two authoritative principles of Enlightenment modernity: that of the autonomous self, and the claim of science to a privileged objectivity. Thus Lovecraft writes:

‘my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather that liberation. My wish is best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background that gives all things significance’ (Lovecraft 1971: 214).

Crucially, though, the horror of indetermination given expression in Lovecraft’s key literary creations (Azathoth, Yog Sothoth, shoggoths, the hybrid Deep Ones et al) is as much a consequence of that very same rationalist and materialist epistemology to which Lovecraft subscribed. This is, in fact, explicitly recognised in the opening paragraphs of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

‘The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’ (Lovecraft 1926: 125).

This paper seeks to make sense of the cultural popularity and salience of Lovecraft’s life and work: a salience, I claim, which rests on Lovecraft’s ability to capture and encapsulate modernity’s own ambivalence toward chaos and the indeterminate as alluring, desirable and liberating on the one hand, and polluting and horrifying on the other.

That ‘progressive’ capitalistic modernity produces chaos - a notion implicit in the works of social theorists like Weber and Marx - paradoxically enunciates the possibility of disrupting the hegemonic aspects of that selfsame modernity. While Lovecraft’s view of chaos was, generally, reactionary, Benjamin Noys (2007) suggests that Lovecraft offers cautionary ruminations on chaos via the ‘horror of indetermination’. In ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’, for example, Lovecraft’s fictional alter-ego Randolph Carter seeks to step across the threshold of order and structure in search of ‘the untrammeled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute’, only to discover a site of abject horror and detestable hybridity. Through an exploration of these ambivalences which surround chaos and uncertainty - in this instance, as articulated in Lovecraftian occultural enactments which take their cue from ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ - I consider that, though undoubtedly replete with revolutionary potential, engagement with the uncertain is neither exclusively exterior to consumerist modernity nor antithetical to it.

Lovecraft, Magick, and Modernity
Parts of this article draw loosely upon anthropological fieldwork conducted amongst the community of Chaos magicians in London between 1997 - 2001. Chaos magick appeared in the United Kingdom during the late 1970’s under the aegis of Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin (Sutcliffe 1995: 127; Hawkins 1996: 31-34) and forms part of a wider occult subculture. Chaos magick is significant here in constituting one of the major strands of contemporary occultures which has explicitly engaged in sustained magical enactments of Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu mythos’.

The focal point of Chaos magick is the attainment of gnosis through altered states of consciousness, and is the means of awakening practitioners to an unmediated experience of “Chaos”: a term denoting the inchoate, indeterministic and amoral life-force which forms the ontological foundation of the cosmos and the microcosmic self. Gnosis also enables Chaos magicians to engage the “magical will”: the single-pointed focusing of practitioners’ intentionality and imagination upon the nascent potentia of Chaos, in doing so transforming both the substance and their perception of the world.

A popular maxim amongst Chaos magicians - who view themselves as ‘postmodern’ magicians advocating a radical epistemological and moral relativism - is ‘Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted’. In the absence of absolutes, practitioners posit the necessity of adopting a Nietzschean attitude of self-affirmation and self-creation. Through gnosis, Chaos magicians thus attempt to bypass the conditioning and conventions imposed upon the individual by culture, society, and ideology. This is sometimes referred to as illumination - the experience of Chaos, unmediated by socially-constructed and sublimated beliefs, expectations and desires. Despite these libertarian tendencies the Chaos magicians I worked with often displayed an ambivalence towards authoritative epistemological discourses: whilst rejecting “positivist” science, they embraced popular exegeses of quantum theory and the science of ‘chaos’ or non-linear dynamics. Chaos magick is thus conceptualized as a quasi-scientific project:

‘a kind of scientific anti-science...Chaos Magic attempts to show that not only does magic fit comfortably within the interstices of science but that the higher reaches of scientific theory and empiricism actually demand that magic exists.’ (Carroll n.d.a.: 1).

Such claims promote and legitimise the view that the apparent structure and order of observable reality is founded upon indeterministic, acausal, and non-teleological bases. Crucially it also underpins the Chaoist claim that reality is no more than the product of perception and belief. Given such concerns, it is unsurprising that Lovecraft’s pseudo-mythology has formed a focal point of Chaos magical practice.

Merged with the therapeutics of spirit possession, Chaos magick also aim to make visible the ‘demons’ of the psyche. Such demons are conceived of as socially-inculcated and unconscious fears, desires and habits which shape practitioners’ personae, and are often personified and imbued with a degree of agency by Chaos magicians. Practitioners also believe that they can negotiate with or master these demons; the demonic thus form the locus of the project of self-transformation, another key aspect of Chaoist praxis.

With regard to the central themes of this paper, it is worth noting that recent analyses of Western occultures have tended to position them as sites of resistance to the rationalising and alienating effects of modern consumer capitalism. However, another body of Marxian-influenced theory concerned with the ‘modernity’ of postcolonial African witchcraft beliefs (Comaroff & Comaroff et al 1993; Geschiere 1997; Clough & Mitchell 2001 et al; Moore & Sanders 2001 et al) offers an alternative to polarising tendencies (especially in the field of anthropology) which have equated witchcraft and magic with the ‘traditional’, the ‘romantic’ and the ‘non-rational’. Rather, witchcraft is seen to represent an inherently modern idiom by which the impersonal, mystifying and occluded transnational economic interventions which have increasingly come to shape actors’ local experience are made visible, and by which new inequalities of power - as well as the allure of commodities and a market economy - become comprehensible within indigenous systems of thought.

In the face of this, the ‘anti-modernity’ of Chaos magick is rendered problematic; for Chaos magicians, the demonic is a highly ambivalent category (both morally and ontologically) insofar as it represents a source of both alienation and (within the context of possession practices) creativity and resistance. As such, encounters with the ‘demonic’ aspects of the self - often rendered in terms of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos comparable with Randolph Carter’s self-identification with Yog Sothoth in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key - enable practitioners to construct contextual and contingent narratives of selfhood, narratives that are commensurable with the uncertainties and anxieties inherent in the ‘condition’ of modernity. As Paul Heelas (1996: 3) argues, ‘New Age’ spirituality (in which he includes neo-pagan and magical subcultures) challenges certain aspects of modernity, but it also incorporates many of modernity’s core values and assumptions: typically those of responsibility and self-reliance (Heelas 1996: 168) which form part of the utilitarian and individualistic “enterprising self” of capitalist modernity (Heelas 1991b: 74, 78). Similarly Susan Greenwood (2000: 10) suggests that neo-paganism also forms part of the individualistic discourses of modernity in searching for an experience of an “authentic” or core self.

Importantly, the modernity of Chaos magick is discernable in its praxis, which not only incorporates the ‘modern’ discourses of self-discipline and self-surveillance (Foucault 1977), but also re-formulates the supernatural in a manner commensurable with the psychologistic discourses of modernity. In common with ‘New Age’ movements, the supernatural is thus seen in terms of ‘atavistic’ irruptions the unconscious forces, or imaginally-realised manifestations of the occluded self which can be ‘worked’ with as part of a psychotherapeutic project. As a result, the broadly libertarian and therapeutic goals of Chaos magick also constitute a set of discursive practices attuned to the social, economic and ideological requirements of modernity, and to its characteristic ontological and moral uncertainties (Lash & Friedman 1992, Giddens 1991, Beck 1992, Rose 1990). Thus the Chaos magician Phil Hine not only states that ‘being a ‘good’ magician...is being effective and adaptive in as many areas of one’s life as possible’ (Hine 1995: 48), but also claims that Chaos magick has emerged ‘out of the twists of contemporary culture, a reflection and reification of the current social landscape’ (Hine 1995: 175 -176). Subsequently, the practices of Chaos magick - in reifying the ‘current social landscape’ - encourage participation in the consumption of neatly-packaged experiences of exotic otherness, drawn from the profusion of signs, images and ‘lifestyle options’ characteristic of consumer capitalism.

Associations of the occult with ‘tradition’ also fail to acknowledge the ‘modernity’ that is fundamental to the central project of contemporary occultures: namely, the pursuit of an synthesis of science, religion and magic that is instrumental, rationalising and demystifying (Ben-Yehuda 1989: 254, 1985: 104; Truzzi 1972: 413; see also: Truzzi 1974b). This is, in fact, precisely the space that Lovecraft inhabits within the structure of contemporary occultural thought (and precisely the reason for recognizing his wider cultural salience): the ‘Cthulhu mythos’ has garnered wide appeal because it does, indeed, offer a rationalized and technologised reframing of the supernatural. Thus does the atheist and materialist Lovecraft thus sit comfortably alongside such iconic figures of the contemporary occulture as Helena Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley: all three, in their varied ways, sought to reconcile ancient myth with scientific modernity (Harms 2004: 39).

‘Becoming-Monstrous’: Occultural Enactments of Lovecraftian Chaos
Importantly, the popular and occultural appeal of Lovecraft’s work lies not just in his demythologising of the supernatural, but (as suggested in the introduction) his ability to reveal science as a source of profound awe and strangeness: the denouement of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ suggests even greater cosmic horrors lurking just beyond the horizon of the Elder Things’ advanced scientific knowledge; as Robert Price (1992) himself has admitted, there is an ambivalence about the supernatural in Lovecraft’s work: even the most ‘secular’ of his alien races are given to abandoned ecstatic worship of monstrous cosmic abnormalities.

Perhaps this is why there appears a strange but brief disjuncture in Lovecraft’s literary output during 1933: the merging of science and sorcery that is a key thematic component of his other work of this time slips momentarily with the writing of ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’. Originally penned by E. Hoffman Price under the title ‘The Lord of Illusion’ (see Price 1997), the tale was later re-written almost in its entirety by Lovecraft. Situated initially within Lovecraft’s burgeoning ‘weird materialism’, the tale forms an adjunct to his earlier literary explorations of hyperspace in ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ (1932) wherein archaic New England witchcraft is revealed as an alien science. This is problematised, however, by the recalcitrant quasi-mystical ruminations which permeate ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ and which at first glance seem far removed from Lovecraft’s materialism. Even though the overtly occult and Theosophical sentiments of the story can be attributed to Price, the themes and substance of the finished collaboration appear to be Lovecraft’s. Those themes are, indeed, consistent with Lovecraft’s peculiar form of ‘gnostic materialism’: how an ‘ecstatic’ perception of things does not mystify everyday reality in terms of a ‘higher’ transcendent reality, but ‘reveals’ the meaning of the everyday as a matter of one’s perspectival positioning and perception within the indeterminate multiplicity of the real . As Randolph Carter discovers in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’:

‘The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing - the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where 'Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality, and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality…so do the local aspects of an unchanged and endless reality seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding. To this variety of angles of consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since with rare exceptions they can not learn to control them. Only a few students of forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have thereby conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary change-involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance with their will.’ (Lovecraft 2005: 284 - 284, my italics).

Though Lovecraft and Price here equate substance with illusion, I would suggest that Lovecraft’s own gnostic sensibility attempts to recover the marvelous within the everyday. What is illusory here, it seems, is not reality itself; rather, it is the localized perceptions of that reality which lack substance. Contemporary occultures such as Chaos magick have, indeed, directly co-opted this core element of Lovecraft’s fiction and deployed it as a kind of ‘social diagnostics’ by which imaginal delvings into Lovecraftian hyperspace via trance and other altered states of consciousness are treated by practitioners as generating liberating perspectival shifts (Woodman 2004). As I suggest below, for Chaos magicians a renewed perception of the real-as-monstrous strives also to recover the marvelous in the everyday from the alienating conditions of consumer capitalism. Importantly these perspectival reorientations require, as Randolph Carter realizes in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’, a Nietzschean transition from a human to a ‘monstrous’ post-human condition:

‘Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath on mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres and radiating a message which he understood: 'We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has made you one of us.'’ (Lovecraft 2005: 275- 276; my italics).

Here Lovecraft prefigures what I have identified elsewhere (Woodman 2004) as a central characteristic of ‘Lovecraftian magick’: that of Chaos magicians’ self-identification with the monstrous and alien ‘other’. In this sense Lovecraft’s ‘Old Ones’ are rendered not as alien outsiders but as an alien immanence and a kind of Deleuzian ‘becoming-alien’ which precipitates a post-human metamorphosis. In the words of Anton LaVey, Lovecraft’s Old Ones are ‘spectres of a future human mentality’(LaVey 1972: 178). Invariably occultural enactments of Lovecraft’s fictive universe rest on a ‘becoming alien’ through the kinds of hybridity commonly encountered in Lovecraft’s tales and, indeed, evident in the Carter-Zkauba hybrid and Carter’s immersion within a multiplicity of identities in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’. Correspondingly, practitioners of Chaos magick seek to experientially embrace atavistic chaos whose multiplicity is invited to take habitation of otherwise stable bodies in ritual acts of spirit possession. This was described by one Chaos magician as the process of

'waking up the Great Old Ones that lie sleeping...the primeval consciousness of the universe which has been lying dormant in humanity but is now slowly waking up...becoming the monsters ourselves.'

Similarly, another practitioner informed me that seeking possession by the Old Ones was a method of ‘trying to approach the unthinkable through the monstrous’. It was these acts of ‘becoming-monstrous’ which precipitated perspectival disruptions of ‘normative consciousness’.

Becoming alien, monstrous, and hybrid marks a transgression, a culturally forbidden stepping across the thresholds and boundaries into the hinterlands of structure, precipitating heterogeneity, amorphousness and anomaly. Martin Bridgestock (1989) thus argues that horror fiction is fundamentally characterised by a concern with the marginal, the anomalous and the interstitial: it is the ‘horror of indetermination’, the incursion of chaos, the ‘blasphemous’ violation of established cultural codes and categories which evokes horror. Inhabiting ‘the borderland between mental categories', Lovecraft’s entities threaten ‘our entire system of thought and, by implication, the society which generates it’ (Bridgestock 1989: 115). As with Lovecraft’s own protagonists, these disruptions provoke corresponding perspectival disruptions of ‘normative consciousness’, causing many of the Chaos magicians I worked with to experience physical and psychological distress. Yet as James Kneale notes ‘while we might inevitably locate the place of horror on the threshold...we do not have to value these thresholds in the entirely negative way that Lovecraft did’ (Kneale 2003): in contrast to Randolph Carter’s horror at the foundational indeterminacy and multiplicity in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’, this distress was subject to a positive valuation. For Chaos magicians possession by Lovecraft’s Old Ones was initiatory: it actively destabilised categorical boundaries and socially-circumscribed modes of thought upon which ‘consensual reality’ was built, causing them to dissolve within the undifferentiated wholeness, continuum or 'primal chaos' of consciousness; the ‘atavistic resurgence’ (Spare 1913) of the primordial Old Ones within human consciousness was thus open to interpretation as a political and revolutionary act: one that enabled practitioners to cognize and imagine their social worlds anew, and in doing so contest embedded alienating and prejudicial categories (including, significantly, that of race) .

Normalising ‘the Horror of Indetermination’
Within the context of globalised capitalist modernity, patterns of coherence are disrupted when individuals encounter experiences which are discontinuous with conventionalized conceptions of order and categorization. This cognitive dissonance may produce identity problems and a whole range of destabilizing anxieties, often resulting in ‘the desire for purity’ (Sennett 1970: 22) via the anchorings of religious fundamentalisms or populist nationalisms (and their concurrent racism), or the modernist project of subordinating the inchoate and ambivalent elements of reality in order to make them manageable (Bauman 1990; 1991: 15). Of course, Lovecraft’s own horror of indetermination, multiplicity and subsequent desire for purity is evident in his own racist tirades against ‘miscegenation’, but is also powerfully evoked in various passages in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’:

‘Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realised in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.’ (Lovecraft 2005: 279)

‘in a chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the local manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate.’
(Lovecraft 2005: 279 - 280)

‘No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings - that one no longer has a self - that is the nameless summit of agony
and dread.’ (Lovecraft 2005: 280)

For Lovecraft, the horror evoked by these particular liminalities and boundary-crossings is the horror of displacement from the authoritative Cartesian self to a selfhood which is fragmentary, multiple and knows no centre or grounding. One reading of Lovecraft’s hyperspatial adumbrations is that entry into hyperspace does, indeed, entail a ‘twisted materialism’ which, much like Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, opens perception up to the warped, monstrous, fragmented and alienated nature of the everyday social and material relations when seen through the lens of capital.

Yet there is, potentially, another aspect to this horror of indetermination which problematises the celebrations of chaos found not only in Chaos magick but conventionally lauded within academia. In postmodernist and poststructuralist parlance this kind of visioning constitutes a kind of core experience of ‘hyperreal’ consumerist modernity as

‘a melange of fiction and strange values, intense affect-charged experiences, the collapse of boundaries between art and everyday life, an emphasis upon images over words, the playful immersion in unconscious processes as opposed to detached conscious appreciation, the loss of a sense of reality, of history and tradition; the decentring of the subject’(Featherstone 1995: 222).

Certainly much of contemporary occultural praxis is itself formulated via a sampling of this ‘melange’ including, ironically, Lovecraft’s own pseudomythology. Such practices can, therefore, be problematised aspects of the detraditionalised utilitarian self of contemporary consumer culture, which seek transcendence through self-indulgent experiential consumption of otherness (Heelas 1994, 1995; Bauman 1998).

Rather than seeking certainty within ‘traditional’ forms of religious transcendental absolutes - and somewhat following Delueze and Guattari’s concern with ‘becomings’ - Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos offers a cosmological model suffused with post-Newtonian salience, in which dynamism and fluidity, chaos and uncertainty are foundational in ways which explicitly ‘undermines the certainty of knowledge’ (Giddens 1991: 21) - itself the legacy of Enlightenment positivism - thus creating conditions in which the

‘autonomous, self-constituting subject that was the achievement of modern individuals, of a culture of individualism, is fragmenting and disappearing, owing to the social processes and the levelling of individuality in a rationalized, bureaucratized, medialized, and consumerized mass society’ (Kellner 1992: 142).

According to Kellner, as both the subject and its locus of meaning become fractured and decentred under the conditions of consumerised mass society, “Anxiety...becomes a constituent experience of the modern self.” (Kellner 1992: 142). The Satanist Rex Monday suggests that the Chaos magical response to this is to advocate ‘a “go with the flow” mentality...[but] They offer no way out of the Postmodern cultural decay, only total immersion in the mirage.” (Monday n.d.a.: 2). This comment expresses what I take to be a crucial point: that an attempt to expiate the modern experience of anxiety lies at the root of occultural appropriations of Lovecraftian chaos. For example one Chaos magician of my acquaintance described how he often situated himself at the centre of the ‘chaotic hyperspace’ comprising the contemporary consumer landscape by

‘visualising all things around me (both animate and inanimate) merely as brief tangible manifestations of an endless swirling primordial chaos with myself in the centre...Good to do whilst walking down the street or shopping or something like that.’ (My italics).

Similarly the Chaos magician Ed Richardson suggests that:

‘With the collapse of grand narratives and a fragmented market the individual develops a schizoid, jumbled up view of reality that is open to change (sounds pretty cool, eh?), and designer cults (like magick!) start to replace organized religion...Magick stands to benefit from many of the effects of post-modernity...As post-modernity implies a depthlessness we are free to drop ideas or paradigms which are of no more use to us. This is all useful in the process of deconstructing the self...By fragmenting the self and being selves instead we are open to change and therefore more adaptable’ (Richardson 1999: 5-6)

Occultural borrowings from Lovecraft constitute a practice that, in normalizing the horror of indetermination, is adaptive to and normalizing of the capacity for capitalism to colonise otherness: as Jonathan Rutherford (1990) notes, within the context of global modernity difference ‘ceases to threaten, or to signify power relations. Otherness is sought after for its exchange value, its exoticism and pleasures, thrills and adventures it can offer’ (Rutherford 1990: 11). In other words, ‘otherness’ has also become commoditised within the Lovecraftian occulture . Contemporary occultural movements - particularly in their ecstatic forms - have often been theorised as forms of resistance to the alienating conditions of capitalist-driven global modernity. Peter Geschiere (1999), however, notes that the proliferation of occultural movements is as much a consequence of economic booms as of social and economic deprivation. In the former case, Geschiere argues that these movements represent a means of managing the anxieties emergent from the indeterminacies that proliferate within consumer capitalism rather than challenging the conditions which produce those anxieties.

Concluding Remarks
Finally, then, I would like to sound a note of caution where contemporary academic celebrations of chaos are concerned: as Benjamin Noys notes, Lovecraft’s horror of indetermination can be read as ‘a refusal to simply celebrate chaos, which could slip all too easily into the celebration of the symmetry of chaotic nature with the deregulated forces of free-market capitalism.’ (Noys 2007: 4). Whether in the case of the Bahktinian carnivalesque, notions of anti-structure, or Deleuzian becomings, it is worth noting that these reversals, inversions and hybridities often foreshadow a return to structure and the status quo. They are themselves ‘occult’ in the sense of occluding and mystifying this fact, which they do by implicitly signifying the ‘rightness’ of what they claim to challenge.

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Demonic in “Lovecraftian Magick”’ in the Journal for the Academic Study of
Magic, no 2, pp. 13 - 47.

Mysterious Benefactor

2007-04-20T16:20:00.000+01:00

Attempts to record my recent series on 'Lovecraft and the Occult' at Treadwells in London were, sadly, only partially successful. Thankfully, some enterprising member of the audience recorded the talks and has forwarding MP3 files of the complete set of lectures anonymously. Whoever the mysterious benefactor is, should you read this, then a big thank you. Thanks must also go to Ian and Christina at Treadwells for agreeing to host the files, which I'll link to as soon as they are up on the site.

I'm also introducing a discussion of 'Through the Gates of the Silver' at the 'Weird Realism: Lovecraft & Theory' conference at Goldsmiths college this coming Wednesday (26th April 2007). If you're attending, I look forward to seeing you there. In my attempts to be more active as a blogger, I'm hoping to submit a short report/review of the conference later in the week. Also, expect to see entries with a bit more substance in the coming weeks (including excerpts from the book on occultural appropriations of Lovecraft's fictions I'm currently writing).

Ghooric Zone Re-Booted Soon (ish)

2007-04-01T22:39:00.000+01:00

Clearly my attempts to submit regular posts have failed utterly and abysmally since starting the blog last year, so I'm going to 're-launch' the site over the next week or so. This may involve a cosmetic make-over, but is principally a symbolic act which (hopefully) will drive me to further efforts where the blog is concerned.

New Year's Resolution and Podcasting

2007-01-13T12:34:00.000Z

Well, I've finally had the chance to update things here, and one of my New Year's resolutions is to try and post to the blog at least once a week. The first piece of news for the new year is that plans are afoot to release the first episode of the Whisper From the Ghooric Zone podcast which - at least in theory - aims to take a look at Lovecraftian popular (or, indeed, unpopular) culture. A rough, unedited version of this has been completed, but there remain a number of issues concerning content which need to be ironed out (principally the fact that it consisted of mainly gaming content, and this is something that the folks over at Yog Radio already deal with). In addition, there are the practicalities of everyday life which mean I'm going to be pretty busy over the next few weeks with work. Even so, if episode 1 of the 'formal' podcast doesn't appear in some shape or form by the end of January, I'm hoping to make 'special' podcasts available, which will be recordings of my forthcoming series of talks at Treadwells. Transcripts of these talks will (hopefull) also be made available.

A couple of other bits of news before I sign off: issue 7 of 'Lovecraft's Disciples' arrived today, containing my tale 'The Sparkling Darkness'. It's not a brilliant story, and one that is heavily derivative of Thomas Ligotti's style, but nonetheless I'm quite pleased with it in my own small and cosmically insignificant way! Lovecraft's disciples can be ordered via Rainfall Records & Books, and is limited to 100 copies signed by the editor John B. Ford.

Finally, for those of you who want to see me 'in action' as it were: you can pop over to YouTube and check out the following link (I'm the one in the suit and tie). Thanks to Clai for this.

Full Details of Lovecraft Lectures

2006-12-06T11:58:00.000Z

A reminder that seating for these talks is limited and it is recommended that tickets are booked in advance via Treadwell's Bookshop.

17 January 2007 (Wednesday)
HP Lovecraft and the Occult (Series of Four)
Evening One: The Man, the Myth, the Magic
Dr. Justin Woodman (University of London)
£5 in advance
7.15 for 7.30pm start

Treadwell’s presents Dr Justin Woodman’s series of four talks analysing aspects of HP Lovecraft (1890–1937), the author best known for the creation of the Cthulhu mythos, a fictional mythology detailing monstrous powers “from beyond”. Tonight, Woodman casts a critical eye on the “magical” context of Lovecraft’s life and work. He then explores some of the myths surrounding the man and his fiction. This first talk also begins to examine the powerful influence that Lovecraft’s unique literary creations have exerted over the contemporary occult imagination.

31 January 2007 (Wednesday)
HP Lovecraft and the Occult (Series of Four)
Evening Two: Legends of the Necronomicon
Dr. Justin Woodman (University of London)
£5 in advance
7.15 for 7.30pm start

In part two of this series, Justin Woodman explores the history of the legendary Necronomicon in fact and fiction, and ponders its continuing relevance to contemporary occult cultures. Penned by the Yemeni poet and mystic Abdul Alhazred circa 700 CE, the dreaded Necronomicon is perhaps one of the most powerful and alluring of HP Lovecraft’s creations: a grimoire able to rend apart the very fabric of reality and bring forth the Great Old Ones themselves. Although a work of fiction, the Necronomicon has yet achieved a social and physical reality with more than twenty versions having been published since the 1960s.

14 February 2007 (Wednesday)
HP Lovecraft and the Occult (Series of Four)
Evening Three: Chariots of the Dark Gods
Dr. Justin Woodman (University of London)
£5 in advance
7.15 for 7.30pm start

Many of H.P. Lovecraft’s best known tales of the Cthulhu mythos intimate that the human species is nothing but a by-product of extraterrestrial interventions in Earth’s prehistory. His idea predates the “Ancient Astronaut” theorists and “alternative archaeologists” by over thirty years. Woodman demonstrates that Lovecraft is a pervasive (but often unacknowledged) influence upon ufology and UFO religions. In the second part of the lecture, Woodman speculates further on the relationships that have developed between imaginative fiction, Forteana and contemporary occult cultures.

28 February 2007 (Wednesday)
HP Lovecraft and the Occult (Series of Four)
Final Evening: Chaos, Cthulhu, and Contemporary Consciousness
Dr. Justin Woodman (University of London)
£5 in advance
7.15 for 7.30pm start

Tonight’s talk concludes the series exploring the relationship between Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and contemporary occult cultures. Woodman here focuses on Chaos magic and other recent movements, and considers the claim that Lovecraft was a “mythographer of modernity”. It can be argued that he was a writer whose enduring vision is consonant with the claims of cutting-edge magic and theoretical physics; moreover, Woodman suggests, his work intimates something about the current trajectories of Western culture and consciousness.

Dr Woodman lectures in anthropology at Goldsmiths College, Birkbeck College, and the University of Westminster. He has contributed articles on Lovecraftian themes to Strange Attractor and The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic.

Lecture Series on Lovecraft at Treadwells

2006-12-05T15:46:00.000Z

I'm giving series of four linked lectures on H.P. Lovecraft and the Occult at Treadwell’s bookshop in Covent Garden, London. The series will present a sceptical and critical assessment of the influence of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos on contemporary ‘occultures’ (including Thelemic and Chaos magick, new religious movements, ufology and other fortean subjects) to suggest that Lovecraft’s work continues to offer a challenging point of reflection on the trajectory of modern culture and consciousness in the 21st century. The talks will also use Lovecraft’s writings as a springboard for exploring the relationship between the evolution of human cognition and imagination, the literature of the weird and the fantastic, and the nature and origins of magico-religious ideas. The first lecture is on Wednesday 17th January, and tickets cost £5.00. Dates and times of later lectures can be found at Treadwell's Bookshop.

Space is limited, so if you're interested, I'd suggested booking in advance (my last talk at Treadwells sold out).

I am Lovecraft's disciple!

2006-10-29T01:53:00.000Z

Things have been progressing slowly but surely on The al-Hazred Legacy. In the interim I've received some good news from John Ford at Rainfall Records & Books: John has kindly agreed to publish my short story 'The Sparkling Darkness' in issue 7 of Lovecraft's Disciples, due out Christmas 2006. Although not the first time my work has seen print, this will be my first published piece of fiction, and I'm well pleased about it.

A note on site content: The al-Hazred Legacy

2006-10-03T14:02:00.000+01:00

I've been something of a roleplayer for well over 25 years (I even remember when the original D & D white box set was still available!). Sadly, I've had little time over the past 18 months to pursue my interest, resulting in my recently having to (yet again) let down a good friend of mine down after promising to run a Delta Green campaign for the umpteenth time. So, in lieu of actual gaming, I now intend to use this blog as a means for detailing initial development of my Lovecraftian indie rpg, tentatively titled The al-Hazred Legacy. If you're not sure what an 'indie' rpg is, check out The Forge for more info.

This will be my first attempt at game design, so I'm not sure how it will pan out; even so, I hope to have a rough-and-ready version available as a free pdf download by December 2006 (which I'll link to this site as and when). Clearly, I'm not going to be in much of a position to undertake rigorous playtesting of the initial version of the game, but I hope to address this problem post-December 2006.

The idea for The al-Hazred Legacy began as an attempt to put a Cthulhoid spin on Ron Edwards' Sorcerer rpg, but I've decided instead to take the bull by the horns and design the damned thing as an original game from the ground up. For the moment, all I can say about the game is that it will (hopefully) be something more than just an indie re-working of Chaosium's classic Call of Cthulhu rpg.

Ghooric Zone undergoing...transformation

2006-09-28T22:03:00.000+01:00

Apologies, dear reader, for the lack of content thus far. Hopefully this will change over the next week or so as Whispers from the Ghooric Zone undergoes some minor transformations, and I find a way of getting the site map (whatever that is) recognised by Google. One piece of news, though: my talk at Treadwells went down a treat, it seems, and at the suggestion of one Mr. Ash I have decided to expand the talk into a series of four lectures which will take place during January and February 2007.

Tell Me, Have You Found the Ghooric Zone?

2006-08-24T18:34:00.000+01:00

Whence comes the title of my blog? Seasoned Lovecraftians will already know; but for that small minority who a) actually end up reading my blog and b) are even interested, the Ghooric Zone is first mentioned by Lovecraft in his The Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle, and later in his epistolary meanderings. However, my first encounter with this malign realm of abject extraterrestrial horror was in Richard Lupoff's story 'Discovery of the Ghooric Zone'. Originally published in 1977, Lupoff's tale did not see print again until a version was included in the Golden Anniversary edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos issued by Arkham House in 1990. Thankfully, the story is now available online (see my links). This is one of my favourite Lovecraftian tales by an author other than the Old Gent of Providence, and manages to be both intimate and touching at the same time evoking an unearthly sense of cosmic awe worthy of HPL himself (though what he would have made of the interplanetary cyborg sex with which the tale opens is another matter entirely...). Also included is a link to Charles Stross' 'A Colder War'. Stross' recent collection The Atrocity Archive is strongly recommended, and this online tale gives a taste of the unique way the writer combines Le Carre with Lovecraft to create a new genre: the Cthulhoid spy thriller. Read and enjoy.

Yrs most cordially,

Justin

Lovecraft Scholars & yog-sothoth.com

2006-08-24T17:51:00.000+01:00

I've just posted links to two of my favourite sites: the Lovecraft Scholars mailing list (which I co-moderate) at yahoo groups and yog-sothoth.com, a site dedicated to the Call of Cthulhu rpg. Check them out for crunchy scholarly Lovecraftian debate and cthulhoid gaming goodness.

Yrs in the Magnum Innominandum,

Justin

Welcome to the Ghooric Zone

2006-08-24T16:49:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the Ghooric Zone - my blog concerning all things Lovecraftian. Hopefully this site will also be host to an occasional podcast, but more on that as and when it happens. For now, though, I'd just like to mention my forthcoming talk at Treadwell's bookshop in Covent Garden (London, UK) on Thursday 31st August at 7.30pm. The talk is titled 'Primal Sources: The Lovecraftian Roots of Contemporary Occultures', and will be a somewhat whirlwind overview (with a Q&A session to follow) of Lovecraft's influence on esotericism, ufology and things fortean. Tickets are £5.00, and be advised to book in advance as seating is limited. I'll add a link to the Treadwell's website in the meantime. That's it for now.

Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin,

Justin