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

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!!!?

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

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

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

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

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)

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?

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?

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

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

Christmas Cthulhu Cornucopia!

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

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!

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!

'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

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

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

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'?

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.