Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Lovecaftian Thing a Day No.188: The Infernal Texts: Nox & Liber Koth


Day 3 of Lovecafian Occult Week brings us to Stephen Sennitt's The Infernal Texts: Nox & Liber Koth, published respectively in 1997 and 1998, and collected in the 2007 edition presented here. Nox is a collection of essays often incorporating Lovecraftian themes from a Left-Hand Path/Satanic/occulturally 'darkside' perspective. However, interested readers should be warned that Nox also contains essays by Anton Long and David Myatt (who may or may not be the same person), and which relate to the ideology and ritual practice of the controversial/notorious Order of the Nine Angles - a Satanic/Left- Hand Path order which has espoused a neo-Nazi ideology and apparently has links with neo-Nazi groups. This being the case, I will pass over Long and Myatt's contributions fairly quickly - other than to say one of these essays represents a point of overlap between contemporary New Right/neo-Nazi esotericism and Lovecraft's fictive mythology (an issue which I hope to explore in some of my academic work in the future). On a more positive note, Nox also contains an essay entitled 'The Nameless Sodality' containing some very informative Left-Hand Path perspectives on Lovecraft's mythology, but in this case thankfully free of the toxic Nazism - though still plenty of antinomianism and iconoclasm! Liber Koth develops somewhat from 'The Nameless Sodality', exploring the Cthulhu mythos by way of a synthesis of Typhonian, Voudon Gnostic, EOD and Chaos magic perspectives, and represents another keynote in esoteric understandings of Lovecaft's fiction. Overall, this may not exactly be the kind of book for you if your taste in the esoteric doesn't encompass some of the extremities of Left-Hand Path occultism, but nonetheless an important volume - historically speaking - in the development of Lovecaftian occulture.

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