ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Dok je SPC i privezanih grupacija bice klerofasista

Dobar si Bato. Čak si i mene naterao da se pokolebam. Pa ipak...

Nestabilnost tvoje postavke je u tome što ignoriše kompletnu religiju koju je Lavkraft kroz svoja dela izgradio, a koja je mnogo komplikovanija od tvojih projekcija.

Quote from: Black swan on 07-12-2015, 16:41:05
meni je svejedno jel knjiga "pirat" ili "original"
što prije dođe pod ruku

samo da 'što prije' dođe, pa da na red za čitanje stigne tamo negde oko 2022. godine.

Quote from: Stipan on 07-12-2015, 20:05:36
Dobar si Bato. Čak si i mene naterao da se pokolebam. Pa ipak...

Nestabilnost tvoje postavke je u tome što ignoriše kompletnu religiju koju je Lavkraft kroz svoja dela izgradio, a koja je mnogo komplikovanija od tvojih projekcija.

izvoli, slobodno me dezignoriši

do tada, navijam za Šogote

ok, Stipanče, eo mojih pet centi, pa reci šta se ne slaže s kompletnom religijom (valjda mitologijom?). Dakle, ne zanima mene Lavkraft privatno, gdje je već dokazani rasista, već kakav pogled na svijet, na društvo, on konstruiše u djelu, to jest kakve desničarske, fašističke i rasističke ideje su prisutne



1. Kulturna degeneracija, progutaju vas gori od vas. Uobičajena desničarska fantazija, gdje varvarske kulture svojim nekvalitetom urušavaju postojeći poredak civilizacije, i uzrokuju propadanje razvijenog carstva. Kao priče o pobunjenim masama i gomilama, koje su sa sela se sjurile u gradove nakon industrijske revolucije, i počeli da uništavaju visoku umjetnost svojim džezom, plesom, seksualnim slobodama, lutkarskim pozorištima, cirkusima, filmovima... pa onda superiorni podlegnu lošim stranama te beskorisne mase, počnu da mentalno nazaduju, klasika, još samo Jevreji fale.
Čim fale dvije opcije, da te gomile mogu donijeti i nešto novo i zanimljivo, kao i da sami vladari sistematski zaglupljuju narod, to je fašistička sfera.



2. stvorite svoje robove genetskim inženjeringom, i namjerno ih napravite retardiranim, poslušnim i fizički jakim, kako bi oni mogli da rade da bi se Stari u dokolici naučno usavršavali. Klasično opravdanje robovlasničkog društva, gdje su upravo crnci obične životinje, mišići bez mozga, ruke kao stvorene za pamuk, a dragi nam Anglosaksi spiritualno uzvišeni. I onda kad im crnci otkinu glave, kuka se: They were men!

To što su ih oni stvorili, a ne pohvatali neđe u Africi, djeluje još gore, jer su imali izbor, i izabrali su da stvore debile, nisu ih stvorili po svom uzoru, što bi rekli hrišćani. I onda kada su kao počeli da emancipuju šogote, kao crnce robove, pokaže se da je greška bre to osloboditi, podučiti, učiniti samostalnim, vi'š šta će da se desi, Vučić i Gašić! Damn you, Lincoln!



3. Stoga ne čudi da Lavkraft bukvalno napiše da im je vlada možda socijalistička, vjerovatno je mislio nacional-socijalistička, kad lijepo podrede sve te duhovne bijednike, makar i silom, onda će krasno živjeti. No, rasistički svjetonazor je u temelju ovoga, ratovi s drugim civilizacijama ili šogotima se ne posmatraju indiferentno, već se navija za dominaciju ''svojih''. Stoga ne čudi da su poklonici Ktulua niže rase, a WASP-ovi poštuju Stare. Inače, imaju li ti Stari negdje u mitologiji karakteristično ime, ili samo ovo patrijarhalno-tradicionalističko tepanje, naspram skarabudženih naziva zlikovaca?



4. Rasistička slika društva preslikana u mitologiju, što se radilo i u pravim mitologijama sa matrijarhatom i podređenim slojevima, bilo da je to mesopotamijska Tiamat ili grčki Titani, poražena božanstva, koja onda zauzimaju niže mjesto u društvenoj hijerarhiji. I stare mitologije su pokušavale da legitimišu nadmoć jednog sloja nad drugim. Razlika je samo što je u starim mitologijama to završena priča, horor davno završen, nego moraju ti zlokobnici da ostanu ovako ili onako aktivni, jer o kakvoj kulturnoj degeneraciji i pobuni robova bi Lavkraft onda pisao. Ko uzrokuje ludilo osjetljivih bledolikih teozofa? Undead Lignjoslav.

Sem ako u nekom drugom djelu nije ispravio, Lavkraft je otišao u sasvim pogrešnom smjeru od Grka, koji su kasnije na jednom htonskom božanstvu Dionisu izgradili same vrhove svoje kulture, dok bi Lavkraft njega posmatrao kao uzročnika degeneracije, tako da on ima sasvim pogrešno, bezvezno nadri-desničarsko viđenje razvoja kulture.

stoga sa sigurnošću možemo zaključiti da je Truman prikriveni fašista

džoši je shvatio da mu satira slabo ide, da su mu pokušaji parodije ostali neshvaćeni, pa je vickasti pristup ostavio iza sebe kako bi se jasno i glasno i direktno osvrnuo na celu ovu nedavnu HPL frtutmu:

November 24, 2015 — Once More with Feeling

It appears that my recent blogs have been somewhat misunderstood: I suppose in this humourless age, where everyone feels at liberty to be offended at anything and everything, satire and reductio ad absurdum are dangerous tools to employ. (How I wish more of us could adopt Lovecraft's sensible attitude: "I am as offence-proof as the average cynic.") One Justin Steele in particular has written a response (http://www.arkhamdigest.com/2015/11/trouble-in-lovecraft-land-were-all.html) that I feel mischaracterises my position, so I felt the need for what I hope is my final word on this matter. I shall attempt here to write in as sober and temperate a manner as possible, so as not to give even the most sensitive of us the impression that I have insulted them. I have made many of these points over and over again during the past year and a half, but they appear not to have sunk in. So here we go:

1) The World Fantasy Award is a purely literary award. It is awarded purely for literary excellence in the field of weird fiction. It commemorated Lovecraft because (a) it was created for the First World Fantasy Convention in 1975, held in Providence, R.I., which was essentially a Lovecraft convention, and (b) it acknowledges Lovecraft's literary greatness, both intrinsically and in terms of his influence. That is all that the award "means." The award says nothing about Lovecraft as a person (just as other awards in this and related fields say nothing about the person or character of the figures they are named for). The changing of the award is an implicit rejection of Lovecraft's literary status. It suggests that Lovecraft's racism is so heinous a character flaw that it negates the entirety of his literary achievement. This is one of many reasons why I find it mystifying how any genuine devotee of Lovecraft can be in favour of changing the WFA bust.

2) We have no reason to be confident that the current agitators will stop at the WFA bust. Indeed, the prime mover in the matter—Daniel José Older—has made his general contempt for Lovecraft quite clear, as when he called him a "terrible wordsmith." (I suspect he would say much the same about Poe, Dunsany, Machen, and any other writers who don't write the kind of slangy, faux-hipster style he favours.) It is quite evident that some of these agitators really don't like Lovecraft as a writer and resent his fame and influence, and have seized on the one flaw of his racism to cast him out into the literary darkness. Vigilance needs to be maintained that the tarring of Lovecraft's reputation doesn't go any further.

3) The discarding of the WFA bust may in itself be insignificant, but it is troubling for a multitude of reasons. It is, for example, an historical error to pass condign judgment on figures of the past because they are perceived to have departed from the moral, political, and social views to which we adhere. This shows a cultural intolerance and lack of historical understanding that is very discouraging. We have not exactly attained moral and intellectual perfection ourselves, and I daresay we will be judged harshly for all manner of derelictions a hundred years from now. (We now hear of students at Princeton University—where I did graduate work in 1982–84—lobbying to have every vestige of Woodrow Wilson's name eliminated from the campus merely because he made a few racist comments, as if these comments somehow repudiate all the significant political and diplomatic achievements of his career.)

4) The current discussion of Lovecraft as a racist is a tendentious caricature. His views are far more nuanced than most people realise. (How many are aware that he expressed admiration for the Hasidic Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for adhering tenaciously to their cultural and religious heritage?) It is easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views (although I have never been clear on what such a condemnation actually accomplishes, or how it contributes to combating racism in our own time); it is lot harder to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the nature, origin, and purpose of his views. That takes actual work—a profound study of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and a canvassing of the scholarship on the history of race prejudice. A few Internet searches will not suffice. (A good place to start is my own compilation, Documents of American Prejudice [Basic Books, 1999].)

5) The assumption seems to have taken hold that racism somehow defines the totality of Lovecraft's life, work, and thought—a preposterous assertion that anyone who knows anything about Lovecraft must realise is false. (Moreover, Lovecraft's racial views have been known for at least five or six decades; it is odd that only now are they evoking sanctimonious outrage.) We all need to do a better job of explaining to the world that Lovecraft was a lot of other things than a racist—he was an atheist, a devotee of science (chemistry, astronomy, physics, anthropology), a traveller, a cat-lover, a student of colonial architecture, a mentor to dozens of younger writers, an acute commentator on the political, social, and cultural events of his time, and so much more.

6) Why is Lovecraft being singled out for excoriation because of his racist views? If the agitators who lobbied against the WFA bust were really concerned about the elimination of racism in our society, they would go after many other targets; but I hear not a peep from them about that. Why this selective outrage? If the heavy-handed satires in my recent blogs have conveyed anything, it was that Lovecraft was far from being alone in the expression of views we currently find obnoxious. As I mentioned, the interpretation of Dracula as an anti-immigrant tract is highly plausible, even obvious. I am an immigrant. I have also won a Bram Stoker Award. If I were really upset at Dracula's (and, by implication, Stoker's) anti-immigrant stance, what should I do? The only decent and honourable thing, it seems to me, is to return the award. What is not decent and honourable is for me to agitate for the changing of the award merely because of my personal discomfort with it. That, my friends, is fascism. The prototypical definition of fascism is: It is not enough that I do (or not do) a certain thing; everyone must do (or not do) that thing. That is exactly what has happened in this case. This whole issue also reveals a deeply anti-democratic bias on the part of the agitators. So far as I know, only two or three individuals who won the WFA have expressed discomfort with it on the grounds of Lovecraft's racism; there are hundreds who have not done so, and certainly more than two or three WFA winners who have objected to the changing of the award—but apparently their views count for nothing. (Moreover, a vote was taken among attendees of the 2014 World Fantasy Convention about whether to keep or discard the bust, and those who wished to keep it were in the majority. But this vote seems to have been disregarded by the WFC committee.)

7) It would help if the World Fantasy Convention committee had presented some—or any—explanation as to why the award was changed. The secrecy with which this matter was handled has done a disservice to the field.

8 ) No fair-minded reader could say that my discussion of Ellen Datlow in any way constituted "vitriol." I was raising a legitimate query as to why she has turned against Lovecraft after profiting from anthologies that could only have been assembled because of Lovecraft's ascending reputation. Similarly, my comment directed at Jeff VanderMeer was in no way insulting to him. It is simply the plain truth that his offhand comment does not begin to address the multifarious complexities of this issue.

9) I do not question the sincerity of those individuals (whether they be persons of colour who have been the victims of race prejudice—as I have been on a few occasions—or others who are concerned about the continuing prevalence of prejudice in our society today, as I certainly am) who genuinely believe that changing the WFA bust might have some positive results in terms of inclusiveness in our genre. I happen to think they are mistaken on that particular issue, but that is a disagreement that I trust we can have without rancour or accusations of bad faith. (I am, however, not convinced that Mr. Older is one of these people.)

10) My dissociation with Dan Clore was not because he disagreed with me, but because he treated me in an abusive and insulting manner. He in effect stated that I was a right-wing racist bigot, even though he knows that I am a leftist. Perhaps he did not intend that impression to be conveyed, but to me it was conveyed. I did not take particular offence at his remark, but I am not enough of a masochist to keep on working with a writer who insults me in this manner. I would have trouble including his work in any of the publications I personally edit, but he is free to appear in any other publications he wishes, and I wish him good luck in his endeavours. I assume there are all manner of other venues for the dissemination of his work. My wife's reaction to Clore's intemperate post was natural and understandable—how could anyone expect her to react otherwise? When she sees me being insulted and abused on a Facebook page devoted to myself and my fans, what can you expect her to do? (I will go on and say that if anyone insults my wife, that person insults me, so I would advise being very careful what you say to or about her.)

11) There is a considerable amount of disingenuousness out there. If there is a "rift" in the weird fiction community, it has not been caused by me but by certain other writers (and their supporters) who have taken umbrage at my less than enthusiastic assessments of their work (they apparently feel their work is above criticism), and therefore joined the Older bandwagon regarding the Lovecraft bust as a way of gaining a bit of revenge on me. There is no need to name names; everyone knows who they are. And anyone who has read their postings about me and about Lovecraft on Facebook and other venues over the past two years will know that they are not exactly ready to adopt the "Can't we all get along" attitude that Mr. Steele recommends.

And that is all. I have no desire for any kind of rift in the Lovecraft or general weird fiction community, but I am well aware that there are those among us who are unalterably opposed to Lovecraft and will do anything to bring him down. I trust we are in agreement that we can't let that happen.

http://stjoshi.org/news.html

http://www.ottgallery.com/MRR.html

http://www.ottgallery.com/WelcometoArkham.html

 

kako se zove lavkraftova priča iz antologije horor - lavkraft, king, barker? evo ga odlomak iz nje na zadnjoj korici knjige

the outsider

PIZDARIJA!

Inclusive Cthulu

by Stuart Conover | Jan 19, 2016

Deadline:February 28th, 2016
Payment: $25 and contributor's copy

This is an anthology born in a panel at Balticon 49 in May 2015. The panel was all about being a fan of problematic things, and the example of loving the work of an author who is not a good person came up, particularly Lovecraft and his Cthulu Mythos. Many people love the Mythos and Cthulu pervades a lot of geek culture, but Lovecraft himself was a rampant misogynist, racist, and anti-Semitic. An audience member jokingly suggested that there should be a collection of stories that would make dear old Lovecraft roll over in his grave – like a black lesbian Jew triumphing over the Unspeakable. And all the authors on panel and in the audience said – "Heeeey, that sounds like fun!"

Here is the call for that anthology, which we plan to debut at Balticon 50 in May 2016. It only seems fitting. Send us your best Mythos story, but make sure it would make dear old Lovecraft roll.

What we don't want to see:
Gratuitous anything – violence, sex, profanity, doesn't matter. If it is not integral to the story and it's not advancing the plot or character development, we don't want to see blood, gore, or sex just for shock value's sake (this goes for language too). We are not opposed to violence, sex, or profanity – as long as it belongs in the story and it's not just there to shock and titillate. Some things would be a very hard sell for us, like rape or torture of any sort, and torture of children or animals will get an immediate rejection. Think of how far we're willing to go based on the well known movie rating system – if it would qualify for a PG, PG-13, or R rating, we'll look at it. If it would be NC-17 or up, we'll have to pass, thank you.

Tri skoro pa zanimljive stvari:

1 -

Children of Lovecraft

Dark Horse Books - Ellen Datlow, Caitlin R Kiernan, Laird Barron, Illustrated by Mike Mignola - 384 pages - 20 Sep 2016

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's stories shaped modern horror more than any other author's in the last two centuries: Cthulhu, the Old Ones, Herbert West: Reanimator, and more terrifying nightmares emerged from the mythos of this legendary writer. Dark Horse teams up with Hugo and Bram Stoker award-winning editor Ellen Datlow to bring you this anthology of original prose stories that are "inspired" in theme and plot by Lovecraft's mythos. No pastiches and no stories in his style. Using variety in tone, setting, point of view, time, but no direct reference in the story to Lovecraft or his works. Featuring work by Laird Barron, Brian Evenson, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud, and many more, with a stunning cover by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.

2-



The Broken Hours : A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft

Talos - Jacqueline Baker - 320 pages - 05 Apr 2016

In the cold spring of 1936, Arthor Crandle, down-on-his luck and desperate for work, accepts a position in Providence, Rhode Island, as a live-in secretary/assistant for an unnamed shut-in. He arrives at the gloomy colonial-style house to discover that his strange employer is an author of disturbing, bizarre fiction. Health issues have confined him to his bedroom, where he is never to be disturbed. But the writer, who Crandle knows only as Ech-Pi, refuses to meet him, communicating only by letters left on a table outside his room. Soon the home reveals other unnerving peculiarities. There is an ominous presence Crandle feels on the main stairwell. Light shines out underneath the door of the writer s room, but is invisible from the street. It becomes increasingly clear there is something not right about the house or its occupant. Haunting visions of a young girl in a white nightgown wandering the walled-in garden behind the house motivate Crandle to investigate the circumstances of his employer s dark family history. Meanwhile, the unsettling aura of the house pulls him into a world increasingly cut off from reality, into black depths, where an unspeakable secret lies waiting. "


3 -



The Age of Lovecraft

University of Minnesota Press - Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock - 01 Apr 2016 - 295 pages

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the American author of weird tales who died in 1937 impoverished and relatively unknown, has become a twenty-first-century star, cropping up in places both anticipated and unexpected. Authors, filmmakers, and shapers of popular culture like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Guillermo del Toro acknowledge his influence; his fiction is key to the work of posthuman philosophers and cultural critics such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker; and Lovecraft s creations have achieved unprecedented cultural ubiquity, even showing up on the animated program "South Park." "The Age of Lovecraft" is the first sustained analysis of Lovecraft in relation to twenty-first-century critical theory and culture, delving into troubling aspects of his thought and writings. With contributions from scholars including Gothic expert David Punter, historian W. Scott Poole, musicologist Isabella van Elferen, and philosopher of the posthuman Patricia MacCormack, this wide-ranging volume brings together thinkers from an array of disciplines to consider Lovecraft s contemporary cultural presence and its implications. Bookended by a preface from horror fiction luminary Ramsey Campbell and an extended interview with the central author of the New Weird, China Mieville, the collection addresses the question of why Lovecraft, why now? through a variety of approaches and angles. A must for scholars, students, and theoretically inclined readers interested in Lovecraft, popular culture, and intellectual trends, "The Age of Lovecraft "offers the most thorough examination of Lovecraft s place in contemporary philosophy and critical theory to date as it seeks to shed light on the larger phenomenon of the dominance of weird fiction in the twenty-first century.Contributors: Jessica George; Brian Johnson, Carleton U; James Kneale, U College London; Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin U, Cambridge; Jed Mayer, SUNY New Paltz; China Mieville, Warwick U; W. Scott Poole, College of Charleston; David Punter, U of Bristol; David Simmons, Northampton U; Isabella van Elferen, Kingston U London. "

malko sam se već smorio od svih tih HPL antologija, ne postizavam ni one najizvikanije da iščitam, mada ovu ću svakako da overim - čim procuri na net.

a The Age of Lovecraft dobijam uskoro na artiji jer ću raditi prikaz za RUE MORGUE.

eto, kad je tebi dojadio lavkraft, zamisli kako se mi ostali patimo...

Quote from: Boban on 10-02-2016, 20:15:39
eto, kad je tebi dojadio lavkraft, zamisli kako se mi ostali patimo...

oduvek si bio nepažljiv čitalac.
nije mi dojadio lavkraft nego legije njegovih imitatora i omažista-oportunista.

sve je to isto... hrpa kvazihororičnog trkeljisanja...

Quote from: Boban on 10-02-2016, 20:49:07
sve je to isto... hrpa kvazihororičnog trkeljisanja...

ti bre ne znaš kad ti se dešava i o čemu ti se radi u knjizi koju si izdao (STRAH I NJEGOV SLUGA) - a sad bi nekog kao ubedio da si pročito bar 3 HPL-omaž priče pa da možeš da donosiš ovako dalekosežne zaključke?

NIGHT SHADE BOOKS - Nick Mamatas - 272 pages - 02 Aug 2016

For fans of legendary pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention the Summer Tentacular. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn t know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hobnobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God Cthulhu, one of their idol s most horrific fictional creations, before the weekend is out. Colleen s trip spirals into a nightmare when her roommate for the weekend, an obnoxious novelist known as Panossian, turns up dead, his face neatly removed. What s more unsettling is that, in the aftermath of the murder, there is little concern among the convention goers. The Summer Tentacular continues uninterrupted, except by a few bumbling police. Everyone at the convention is a possible suspect, but only Colleen seems to show any interest in solving the murder. So she delves deep into the darkness, where occult truths have been lurking since the beginning of time. A darkness where Panossian is waiting, spending a lot of time thinking about Colleen, narrating a new Lovecraftian tale that could very well spell her doom. "

http://www.nightshadebooks.com/book/i-am-providence/#.VseGfFsrKUk

na samom početku novog kingovog romana REVIVAL nalazi se moto, čuveni HPL stihovi:

that is not dead which can eternal lie
and with strange aeons even death may die

taj roman je nedavno kod nas izašao kao BUĐENJE,
a prevodilac Vladan Stojanović navedene stihove ovako je preneo:

"Ni mrtvi ne mogu počivati večno.
Čak i smrt može umreti, sred neznanih eona."
H. F. Lavkraft

uzgred, ovi stihovi su trapavo nadahnuli i promo-slogan upcoming filma RIFT (DEATH IS DEAD)

Repriza:

Sa Amazona -

Revival - 1/5, stephen king has lost his mind, terrible book:

as a lifelong Stephen King fan I hate to say how disappointed I was with this book. To keep this mini-review short and not exactly sweet: if you are an atheist or actively hate God, if you think that life is a bitter, painful pointless struggle from the cradle to the grave and you hope that after you die you can look forward to laboring for all eternity for insect like creatures in a hellish environment devoid of hope and reason, this is the book for you. I thought Pet Sematary, one of his earlier works, was dark. This book is as dark as midnight in a coal mine. It makes pet sematary seem like the Sound of Music. I'm not a Christian but I went to church on Christmas Eve and found it uplifting and beautiful.
For a best selling author to publish a Christian bashing manifesto expressing his downright crazy ideas about God and the afterlife is downright astonishing. Bad book, I'll never read another Stephen King book and I've bought and read dozens in the past.



...ocigledno vrijedi provjeriti ali jos uvjek nisam

daću joj i ja šansu u nekom trenu, možda već ove godine - ali SVAKAKO NE U SRPSKOM 'PREVODU'!

September 13, 2016

In the Mountains of Madness interweaves the biography of the legendary writer with an exploration of Lovecraft as a phenomenon. It aims to explain this reclusive figure while also challenging some of the general views held by Lovecraft devotees, focusing specifically on the large cross-section of horror and science fiction fans who know Lovecraft through films, Role Playing Games, and video games directly influenced by his work but know little or nothing about him. More than a traditional biography, In The Mountains of Madness will place Lovecraft and his work in a cultural context, as an artist more in tune with our time than his own. Much of the literary work on Lovecraft tries to place him in relation to Poe or M.R. James or Arthur Machen; these ideas have little meaning for most contemporary readers. In his provocative new book, Poole reclaims the true essence of Lovecraft in relation to the comics of Joe Lansdale, the novels of Stephen King, and some of the biggest blockbuster films in contemporary America, proving the undying influence of this rare and significant figure.

http://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Madness-Extraordinary-Afterlife-Lovecraft/dp/1593766475


bonus:

Sex und Perversion im Cthulhu-Mythos, FEBRUAR 2017

http://www.festa-verlag.de/sex-und-perversion-im-cthulhu-mythos.html

Njujork Tajms ima članak (u putopisnoj sekciji) o gradu Providensu i njegovim vezama sa Lavkraftom.


How to Find the Spirit of H.P.Lovecraft in Providence

Јел провалио неко фору са породицом Вејтли из Даничког ужаса?

У Некрономикону, Гуљави каже: У том смислу демонски гласник Ниарлатотеп требало би да има улогу Јована Крститеља, Ктулу који "сања" на дну Антлантика био би парафраза Исуса, док је могућа паралела Јехови бог Азатот, слепи и безумни хаос у средишту васионе. Ту су још и Јог-Сотот, чувар капије међудимензионалних пролаза...

И ово би можда имало смисла да није приче Данички ужас.
У њој је Вилбур Вејтли син Јог Сотота, и земаљске жене.
Деда Вилбур Вејтлија, стари Вејтли, започиње  после неког времена да се бави дрводељством, што исто ради и сам Вилбур Вејлти кад мало стаса.
А ко се у Новом завету бавио дрводељством?
Стари Јосиф, као и сам Исус, син Јехове и Марије, управо као у Даничком ужасу стари Вејтли и Вилбур Вејтли, син Јог-Сотота.
Вилбур Вејтли на тај начин представља Исуса, а Јог-Сотот представља Јехову, тако да тлапње Гуљавог о Ктулуу који представља парафразу Исуса падају у воду, а такође и тлапње о Азатоту као Јехови, јер познато је да је Јехова само један од елохима.
Посебна зачкољица је још демонскији брат близанац Вилбура Вејтлија, чиме Лавкрафт алудира на приче о Томи Близанцу, односно рођеном Исусовом брату близанцу.

Čitam ovaj Slučaj Čarlsa Dekstera Vorda...Tabernukle

nisam neš oduševljen...tišični Lavkraft ali nekako razvučeno... ne znam nisam pametan

Добар је Ворд, само се надам да је у том преводу боље одрађен онај архаични део, који у старом издању Бехемота буде зајебан за читање ?
Си одгледао филм са Винсентом Прајсом?

koji
imam ih 19

Управо Случај Чарлса Декстера Ворда, али нисам сигуран да је под тим називом филм урађен?

Zato i pitam

Због једне песмице човек је након толико година био оптужен за расизам. Смејурија.
С друге стране су ми још смешније изјаве неких појединаца одавде -  од којих је један прочитао Лавкрафта само да би дрљао своје бесмислице, а друга "особа" га није ни читала јер књиге не чита, али је била јако гласна у свом баљезгању о расизму.
Мислим, безпоговорно се прхватају  мужеложници Баркер и Дилејни, а замера се Лавкрафту што је писао On the creations of niggers. Смешно. Срећом , па ови не знају да је помињао и Свастику у једној својој причи, већ би исконструисали све и свашта. 

Због тога издвајам неколико финих  детаља из приче Херберт Вест Реаниматор.
Уживајмо сви заједно у врхунским Лавкрафтовим филигранским описима:

Сусрет се одиграо измеђи Кида О'Брајана, здепастог и сад уздрхталог младића са кукастим носом који није подсећао на ирски и Бака Робинсона, "Дима из Харлема". Црнац је био нокаутиран и кратак преглед показао нам је да ће такав заувек и остати. Био је то одуран створ налик горили, с абнормално дугим рукама које нисам могао а да не назовем предњим ногама, и лицем које је призивало помисли на неизрециве тајне Конга и лупање там-тамова под сабласним месецом. Тело је сигурно изгледало још горе за живота али на свету има много ружних ствари. ...

Резултат је био заморни антиклимакс. Ма колико грозно наш плен изгледао, није реаговао ни на један од раствора који смо убризгали у његову црну руку; раствори беху искључиво припремљени према искуству са белим примерцима....

Једна гнусна афричка монструозност ископала се из свог плитког гроба и починила злодело, а Вест је морао да је упуца....

Quote from: Black swan on 09-03-2017, 18:43:22
Zato i pitam

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057128/

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/haunted_palace/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VmmvBq6U4c

У вези оних флоскулица како је Лавкрафт наводно само детектовао зло, и како је Блајв Баркер тобоже зло...

Блајв Баркер је своје дело The Hellbound heart написао под утицајем Лавкрафта.
Иако сам Блајв Баркер то никада није потврдио неком својом изјавом, нити је икада помињао Лавкрафта, ствари су кристално јасне сваком ко је прочитао Лавкрафтову кратку причу  Нечастиви свештеник, или у другом преводу насловљену као Зли свештеник (Evil Clergyman).
У тој Лавкрафтовој причи, главни протагониста помоћу кутијице призове англиканског свештеника и још неке свештенике, док се код Баркера помоћу Лемаршанове коцке призивају кенобити.
Лавкрафтов призвани свештеник је у назнакама и егзекутор (са омчом), а Баркерови кенобити су свештеници-хирурзи-егзекутори, чији назив представља Братство и означава припадност религиозној заједници (одећа главног кенобита је кожна свештеничка мантија која се урезује у његово тело).
Коме није јасно да Баркер своје зло дугује Лавкрафту - нека прочита Лавкрафтовог Нечастивог свештеника.

Убр, ево и једне реченице из Лавкрафтове одличне приче Чињенице у вези са покојним Артуром Џермином и његовом породицом:
Штавише, сер Вејд се на необичан начин старао о својој породици; на пример, по повратку из Африке никоме није дозвољавао да пази на његовог синчића сем једној грозној црнкињи из Гвинеје.

Случај Чарлса Декстера Ворда, радио-драма снимљена 1991. године.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69vLQ58u6VA

Улоге:
Владан Живковић
Славко Симић
Зоран Ранкић
Миодраг Милованов
Милан Михаиловић
Иван Јагодић
Душан Голумбовски

Драматизација:
Бошко Милин

Редитељ:
Мирослав Јокић

Производња:
Драмски програм Радио Београда,
март 1991. године

Quote
H. P. Lovecraft: Aryan Mystic

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence on Rhode Island in 1890. His father died in 1898 in Butler hospital, Providence, allegedly from nervous exhaustion due to over-work, but, in actuality, it was occasioned by general paresis or insanity brought on by tertiary syphilis.

Lovecraft was then raised by his mother and two aunts, Lilian and Annie Emeline Phillips. A cosseted and molly-coddled youth, he developed psychosomatic illnesses of varied kinds – most of which disappeared the further he traveled from his aunts. Did his mother go insane from what might be described as a syphilitic complication, the latter aided and abetted by arsenic tincture as a 'preventative'? She also died in Butler hospital on May the 21st , 1921.

Lovecraft's stories are divided by some into three categories: namely, the macabre, the dreamy and the mythological. His tales all incarnate the premise of some genetic inheritance or other — usually in a morbid manner. They often illustrate notions of a guilty precognition – the former nearly always of a morphic or physiological kind. Other leitmotifs – which are almost Wagnerian in import – prove to be non-human influences, usually of a cosmic indent, that impact on mankind in a detrimental way.

Indeed, Lovecraft's view of a mechanistic and amoral universe goes well beyond Augustinian pessimism – the usual basis for Christian conservatism. It essentially looks to a benumbing terror at civilization's heart; and it also speaks of Pascal's nausea at those cold, interstellar depths. Fate plays a large role here as well, and under such a dispensation progressive notions of free will or evolution fall sheer.

Lovecraft felt that Western society was laboring under an implicit or immediate threat. This took – somewhat inevitably – a racial form. A convinced Anglophile, Lovecraft saw miscegenation and ethnic kaos everywhere in contemporary America – not least in New York city during his brief marriage. His discourse tends to intuit hierarchy, to wish to manage or reify it, and then to string it uppermost like a mobile by Angus Calder. He attempts here – morphically – to create hierarchies of an exclusive or traditional kind, so as to provide Nietzsche's pathos of difference.

All of this is undertaken – without any notion of paradox – in order to make life more three-dimensional or tragic. Truly, a pessimist and an ultra-conservative who's on a par with Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Lovecraft even sees science as grist to his mill. Usually positive enquiry – or evidentialism – is thought of as liberalism's hand-maiden, but, in Lovecraft's oeuvre, it can serve as a basis for overthrowing 'Enlightenment' nostrums.

Let us take, by way of illustration, the relatively lengthy tale which is known as "The Dunwich Horror." It first appeared in the fantasy magazine Weird Tales in 1929. This story involves the idea of transformation or radical change – i.e., of a man into a beast and a beast-man into nothingness. At one remove from the present, a decayed family of backwoodsmen merges in with entities from the beyond. They do so on Sabbat eve up on those stones in dense undergrowth and pursuant to bringing down what exists without.

Two spawn are bequeathed to their witch-mother, Lavinia, one of whom is visible – the other less so. Initially, her father extends the homestead in order to accommodate new borders. An extension is added so as to conceal beneath its wood the threat of what grows within it. A sharp hammering was heard at night, as Old Man Whateley sought to extend his Imperium.

Gradually the more presentable of the two sons, Wilbur, begins to seek out forbidden knowledge and secrets. These tomes happen to be stored at Miskatonic university – a creation of Lovecraft's. Wilbur's deformed torso and trunk – not to mention his devil's foot – as well as his searching out of unhallowed lore, leads to suspicion.

One eminent professor, Doctor Armitage, becomes disturbed by Whateley's desire to access arcane texts. Many of these are in Latin and feature the scribblings of the Elisabethan astrologer, John Dee. Bemused by Dr. Armitage's refusal, Wilbur determines to break into the library at a later date. In a Hammer horror denouement, young Whateley dies trying to extract unhallowed arcana from this 'Bodelian'.

Doctor Armitage – concerned at the presence of satyrs in New England – decides to investigate up country. He gathers a posse around him. Meanwhile, Wilbur's brother has burst out of the house – after the deaths of his mother and grandfather. He (Doctor Armitage) then proceeds to investigate this decayed hermitage. In a dramatic crescendo – punctuated by Lovecraft's love of Yankee patois – a final blaze takes place.

It involves the other Whateley who's observed by some New England peasants floating into the ether. (In this scene, the man's senses are blasted out of all expectation!) The first thing to note is the beast's categorisation: this involves anthropomorphism. For it consists of a writhing and insensate 'mass' of snakes, pipes, vessels or tubular instruments. (These can't help resembling a cancer). It also floats abroad without any discernible support – and yet above its tendrils, suckers and mouths (or living stoves) we see a remarkable sight. It happens to be a face – or, more accurately, a half-face which hovers above Whateley's jelly. It looks like a revolving disc. You see, this creation of inbreeding, miscegenation, Galton's dysgenics and lower occultism is leaving the planet. He/'it' proves to be searching out the Old Ones beyond the stars – he's going back.

For Lovecraft's tale seems to be a rite of passage; in that it's a cautionary wedding of an albino's litter with the occult's left-hand. Could it be thought of as a celebration (albeit in reverse) of a Comus rout? It ticks off the absolute in order to cry out against the cosmos, somewhat pessimistically. Does it resurrect Evola's example here? Certainly, all of this causes the pot to boil over. After all, it's a medley of the albino, racial kaos, a search for 'elementals', satanism, unsacrosanct lore and nineteenth century degeneration theory a la Nordau. . . .

An effluvium which contrives to alter our perspective of a New England dreamer; a man who once produced a journal called The Conservative. A 'zine which was mimeographed in form and truly reactionary in spirit. . . .

At this distance we can see Howard Phillips Lovecraft more clearly: and he floats, free of clutter, like a mystic, a visionary or a mystagogue. His imagination is on fire and he exists amid a transport of energy. Truly, he has seen the Black Sun – to use imagery from the New Zealand writer, Kerry Bolton. This former resident of Rhode Island can now be considered as an Aryan fakir – or a mage who dreams of purple in obsidian (implacably so). These nightmares exist amidst blocks of granite – whether tinted red or green – and in subdued light. He (Lovecraft) preaches the end of the discernible; even the beginning of a cosmic kaos – sometimes called cosmicism.

Moreover, these processes portend a notion of order; i.e., they move towards it before doubling-back or switch-blading. Most definitely, Lovecraft has drawn the Tarot card known as the Tower in either Waite's or Crowley's deck. He succeeds in preaching Apollyon (thereby). Indeed, no other fantasist reckons on such Revelations as these – in the manner of the Apocalypse or the New Testament's last reading. (A discourse which never repudiates the scientific enquiry that this astronomer believed in).

Hail to thee, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and your dark visions of yore. They are bound to end up in either autophagy or a triptych by Memling. Isn't it an example of a Western gothic or baroque sensibility? Or might it be seen in terms of George Steiner's shoah drama, The Portage to San Christobal of A.H.? In this respect, could his lexicon haunt mass consciousness as Grendel's latest trip?

http://www.jonathanbowden.co.uk/writing/articles/article07022009.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7qQ7A4rWM8

Quote from: T2 on 09-03-2017, 00:29:00
Добар је Ворд, само се надам да је у том преводу боље одрађен онај архаични део, који у старом издању Бехемота буде зајебан за читање ?
Си одгледао филм са Винсентом Прајсом?

Ako misliš na onaj stari prevod koji je BIGZ izdao krajem osamdesetih, to je za plakati. Korišćeni su arhaizmi iz svih poznatih i nepoznatih slavjanskih jezika da bi se dočarao arhaični Engleski kojim Karven piše svoje dnevnike. Nisam imao prilike da pročitam original na Engleskom, a nisam ni video novo izdanje, nažalost. 

Да, тај превод Гордане Велмар-Јанковић је објавио и БИГЗ 1990. године, и Бехемот 1998. године, а мислим да је са њеним преводом урађено још неко касније издање .
Гордана Велмар-Јанковић је Карвенов архаични енглески превела користећи старо-србски односно црквено-словенски, и са једне стране је на тај начин дочарала архаичност тог периода, али је са друге стране донекле отежала читање, јер се од тог периода наш језик доста променио.

Quote from: T2 on 07-08-2017, 02:27:57
Да, тај превод Гордане Велмар-Јанковић је објавио и БИГЗ 1990. године, и Бехемот 1998. године, а мислим да је са њеним преводом урађено још неко касније издање .
Гордана Велмар-Јанковић је Карвенов архаични енглески превела користећи старо-србски односно црквено-словенски, и са једне стране је на тај начин дочарала архаичност тог периода, али је са друге стране донекле отежала читање, јер се од тог периода наш језик доста променио.

Ne bih rekao da je u prevodu koristila samo Crkveno slovenski, pre će biti da je koristila i zagorski, slovenački. No sada to nije bitno. Pokušaću da nađem original na engleskom.

Inače Lavkrafta možeš da nađeš i u X-Files, naravno ne direktno, ali crno ulje mene podseća na šogote.

Не знам на које речи мислиш, али знам сигурно да је Велмар-Јанковићева користила црквено-словенски.

Лавкрафт је свеприсутан.

Quote
The Influence of H. P. Lovecraft on Occultism

Kerry Bolton

ABSTRACT

Lovecraft's horror stories have become not just a literary cult like many others, but a tangible cult of the occult. The Cthulhu Mythos of the Old Gods with Unspeakable names are evoked and worshipped, and respected practitioners of the esoteric use the symbolism and mythos as the basis of a magical system. This essay examines some of the individuals, orders and doctrines of the adherents of the Cthulhu Mythos.

RATIONALISING THE IRRATIONAL

The adoption and adaptation of a theme from Lovecraft's horror stories, that of the Cthulhu Mythos, is no less plausible than any other occult system or doctrine of magic. Magic is based on the irrational, on the intuitive, the unseen – literally that which is 'occult' or hidden, being summoned forth for individual or communal purposes by circumventing the causal relationships of the material universe.

Rituals, charms, spells, and incantations are used to produce the willed result, based around two principles, according to Frazer: 'first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed'. Frazer calls these principles, the 'Law of Similarity' and the 'Law of Contact or Contagion' respectively.(1)

Hence ritual magic is based on the 'Law of Similarity' and is generally a complex operation of aligning every word and element used in the ritual, using a system of correspondences,(2) which would in Western magic for example typically include the so--called 'Elemental Weapons', Wand, Cup, Dagger and Pentacle,(3) representing the elements of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth respectively; along with corresponding colours, incense, astrological times, etc. The creation of charms might use the 'Law of Contact'.

One of the primary ceremonial magicians of the 'magical revival' that started in 19th Century England was Aleister Crowley, whose doctrines and practises are now often synthesised with the Cthulhu Mythos.

However, while the practice of occultism might employ a complex formulae of ceremony, or simply comprise the use of hallucinogenics to achieve altered states of consciousness, in the words of Nevill Drury, Australian occult practitioner and author, 'I have found in my study of esoteric traditions that beneath the outer veneer of complexity – occult symbols, elusive meanings, passwords and "keys", and other protective devices – there is a comparatively simple core essence'.(4)

Another form of magic that has become widespread over the last few decades is 'Chaos Magick' which is also heavily influenced by British ceremonial magician Crowley, with an added primary influence being another English occultist of the same era, the artist Austin Osman Spare.(5) Spare disposed of the complex rituals and based his work on sigil(6) meditations. In occultism this is a method called 'path-working' by which the practitioner chooses a symbol and meditates upon it, often as the sign on a doorway that is entered. The result is supposed to be what could be described as image association. Analytical psychology has a similar technique called 'active imagination' whereby a dream image is chosen for the purpose. Jung describing this method wrote, 'start with any image, for instance, just with that yellow mass in your dream. Contemplate it and carefully observe how the picture begins to unfold or to change. Don't try to make it into something, just do nothing but observe what its spontaneous changes are....'(7)

Both shaman and ceremonial occult practitioner, and one might add the LSD experimenters of the Leary generation, seek altered states of consciousness through acts of will. Additionally there is the interpretation of dreams which has a lineage far older than modern psychiatric analysis, the dream world being as important to the ancients as the waking world, just as it is recognised today by psychology. One might recall the particularly famous examples of dream interpretations or 'visions' by Daniel,( or that of John described in The Revelation, both examples being replete with esoteric symbolism.

The purpose of this brief diversion into basic occult theory is to explain that since any symbol could be used that has sufficient impact on the imagination, or the unconscious of the meditator it can be readily seen how the Cthulhu Mythos has sufficient influence upon the psyche to be of use as a complete occult system, despite its origins in 20th century short stories. The words, imagery and symbols portrayed by Lovecraft are sufficiently arcane to excite the imagination, no less than a medieval grimoire, or the Enochian 'Calls', alphabet and language devised by Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I's Court scholar, around which has arisen a major occult school of Enochian magic since the occult revival of the late 19th Century.(9)

Against this fantastical background, we understand how occultists such as Frater Tenebrous, an adherent of the Cthulhu Mythos, explains that Lovecraft was, unwittingly, one of those fantasy writers who could convey genuine occult knowledge via dream.(10)

On that basis the Esoteric Order of Dagon, one of the primary organisations based on Cthulhu, has offered a particularly cogent explanation as to the legitimacy of Lovecraft's mythos and indeed of Lovecraft himself as a seer, despite his own repudiation of the metaphysical:

    Lovecraft's fiction, first published in the American pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, presents an internally consistent cosmology, constructed through the literary realizations of the author's dreams and intuitive impulses. This cosmology came to be known as the 'Cthulhu Mythos', after its central deity. These stories and novels contain hidden meanings and magickal formulae unknown even to their creator.

    Lovecraft suffered from an acute inferiority complex, which prevented him from personally crossing the Abyss in his lifetime. He remained a withdrawn and lonely writer who retained a rational, skeptical view of the universe, despite the glimpses of places and entities beyond the world of mundane reality, which his dream experiences allowed him. He never learned the true origin of the tremendous vistas of cosmic strangeness that haunted his dreams. He never realized that he was himself the High Priest 'Ech-Pi-El', the Prophet of the dawning Aeon of Cthulhu.(11)

Frater Tenebrous similarly explains the relevance of Lovecraft's stories for the serious occultist:

    In the 1920's, an American magazine of fantasy and horror fiction called Weird Tales began to publish stories by a then unknown author named H. P. Lovecraft. As his contributions to the magazine grew more regular, the stories began to form an internally consistent and self-referential mythology, created from the literary realisation of the author's dreams and intuitive impulses. Although he outwardly espoused a wholly rational and sceptical view of the universe, his dream-world experiences allowed him glimpses of places and entities beyond the world of mundane reality, and behind his stilted and often excessive prose there lies a vision and an understanding of occult forces which is directly relevant to the Magical Tradition.(12)

While the shaman and the occultist will their altered states of consciousness, Lovecraft, a rationalist and materialist, is considered by his occult followers as what we might term an 'unwitting shaman,' whose ability to channel the denizens of the astral or unconscious realms through dreams is as legitimate as a willed channelling by the occult practitioner.

As for Lovecraft's own world-view, he eschewed anything of a mystical nature, and saw the universe as mechanistic. However, Lovecraft nonetheless had an interest not only in science but also in ancient history and mythology. Lovecraft scholar S T Joshi writes that Lovecraft, '...confessed, acutely, that his very love of the past fostered the principal strain in his aesthetic of the weird - the defeat or confounding of time'.(13)

His fantasy is therefore a synthesis of the arcane/ mythic and the cosmological: the description of creatures lurking beyond the physical universe, waiting for entry through the nightmares of mortals. Hence, the 'Gods with Unspeakable Names' are an odd mixture of devil and 'extraterrestrial'. But unlike J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis who wrote their stories in the hope of prompting an interest in the mythic and the religious in the face secularism and materialism, Lovecraft as an atheist had no such desire to see a religious revival. In deprecating attempts to relate quantum theory, for example, to religious beliefs, Lovecraft stated:

    ...Although these new turns of science don't mean a thing in relation to the myth of cosmic consciousness and teleology, a new brood of despairing and horrified moderns is seizing on the doubt of all positive knowledge which they imply; and is deducing therefrom that, since nothing is true, therefore anything can be true.....whence one may invent or revive any sort of mythology that fancy or nostalgia or desperation may dictate, and defy anyone to prove that it isn't emotionally true-whatever that means...(14)

As a materialist with a mechanistic view of the universe Lovecraft regarded the supernatural as nonsense, but provided himself with sufficient, albeit scant, knowledge to enable him to include allusions to genuine esoteric figures and texts to provide his tales with arcane plausibility. According to Owen Davies, Lovecraft's main source of occult information was the entry on 'Magic' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.(15) For example when the Necronomicon was mentioned for a second time, on this occasion in 'The Festival', published in 1925 in Weird Tales', the theme of the story was inspired by Lovecraft's having read Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe,(16 & 17) which was itself an influential source for the rebirth of witchcraft or 'wicca' or at least the version synthesised into modern existence by Gerald B Gardner.(18) In 'The Festival', a descendant of New England witches finds three grimoires or occult texts, Saducismus Triumphatus,(19) Daemonolatreia,(20) and the Necronomicon, the first two being genuine grimoires.(21)

Several genuine characters of occult tradition are alluded to by Lovecraft in his stories, again giving them a tantalising hint of genuine esoteric tradition, including the Elizabethan scholar and inventor of the 'Enochian language' and method of scrying, Dr John Dee.(22) Hence, when Lovecraft mentions in 'The Dunwich Horror' that John Dee provided the only English translation of the Necronomicon, this is taken up as a subject for commentary by Robert Turner, in which he describes his discovery in the British Museum of a letter by an 'unknown scholar (dated 1573)' written to Dee, concerning the 'Towne of donwiche'.(23)

While Lovecraft's knowledge of the arcane was limited, the vague hints in his tales are themselves the stuff of which esoteric lore and the occult Orders that form around it, are made. The allusions to Dee and grimoires, etc. provide those looking for a genuine occult tradition in Lovecraft's tales with grounds for contending that Lovecraft was a channel for the transmission of an occult tradition that is traced from Sumeria through to the Lovecraftian 'Mad Arab', to John Dee, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, et al.

Ironically, Lovecraft's occult interpreters are committed to precisely what their unwitting shaman found contemptible in his own day in those who "invent or revive any sort of mythology... and defy anyone to prove that it isn't emotionally true..." Nonetheless Lovecraft provided his stories with sufficient plausibility for seekers of arcane knowledge to enable them to weave a tapestry out of the threads he provided.

'THE CALL OF CTHULHU'

The Cthulhu Mythos manifested first with Lovecraft in his short story 'The Call of Cthulhu', published in 1928.(24) The 'heroes' of the story, at least to the followers of the cult, are the Great Old Ones whose earthly followers might evoke them from extraterrestrial dimensions when astral alignments are right. Their followers were, from Lovecraft's description, the most degraded dregs of the Earth:

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.(25)

Frater Tenebrous, rationalising the existence of the Great Old Ones as objective realities, explains:

    These entities exist in another dimension, or on a different vibrational level, and can only enter this universe though specific 'window areas' or psychic gateways - a concept fundamental to many occult traditions. Cthulhu is the High Priest of the Old Ones, entombed in the sunken city of R'lyeh,(26) where he awaits the time of their return. He is described as a winged, tentacled anthropoid of immense size, formed from a semi-viscous substance which recombines after his apparent destruction at the conclusion of the tale.(27)

The Cthulhu Cult is given a certain objective legitimacy by supposedly having extant remnants since time immemorial, examples alluded to by Lovecraft including South Seas Islanders, Voodoo worshippers, and the angakoks(28) of Greenland.(29) Hence, the present day Western adepts, dedicated to a return of the Great Old Ones to Earth to assume their godly mantles, claim to be part of a living tradition that has long existed, the very phenomena Lovecraft deplored in his own time.(30)

While it is difficult to discern the doctrines of this cult from Lovecraft's stories, there is nonetheless sufficient indication to enable a weaving of a dogma that is clearly nihilistic or chaotic as is the nature of the Great Old Ones; the new earthly dispensation upon their return evoking a society that many people might consider to be a utopia of psychopathology. Hence Frater Tenebrous cites a passage from the seminal 'Call of Cthulhu':(31)

    The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.(32)

Frater Tenebrous attempts to bring this pathological, nihilistic outlook into accord with the doctrines of certain occult schools, including Templars, Assassins, Gnostics, and in particular the 'Law of Thelema' the new religion of Lovecraft's contemporary, Aleister Crowley.(33) This is a theme that is especially adopted by Kenneth Grant and those of similar outlook who synthesise Cthulhu with Thelema. While the Aeon of Horus as a martial age would be ushered in by conflict, to compare the vision of a Thelemic society that Crowley advocates with the a global atavistic bedlam under the regime of the Great Old Ones is to offer a superficial analysis at best, despite all these adepts of Cthulhu seeming to also be well versed in Thelema.

Aleister Crowley (1875- 1947) has had a seminal influence on the occult revival since the late 19th Century. His enduring legacy has been helped by the notoriety he sought as the self-described 'Great Beast 666', and the sensationalist headlines that appeared in the press in his time describing him as 'The King of Depravity' and the like. Crowley entered the crypto-Rosicrucian(34) society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the basis of the occult revival in England, whose initiates included W B Yeats, in 1898.(35) As befits his temperament Crowley soon argued with the Golden Dawn, and in 1912 transferred his commitment to a so-called 'sex-magical order', Ordo Templi Orientis, at the invitation of its founder, journalist and German intelligence agent Theodor Reuss.(36) As one would expect from such an energetic personality Crowley became Outer Head of the Order, and used the Order as a vehicle for the propagation of his religion for the 'New Aeon', Thelema, a synthesis of mysticism and Nietzsche.

What Crowley advocated was a society that offered the individual the chance at discovering and fulfilling his 'True Will', or what might be broadly termed in a mundane sense self-actualisation. However the Thelemic society Crowley advocated was anything but anarchistic let alone nihilistic, being hierarchically structured, and reminiscent of the Medieval era but with Thelema replacing Christianity. Crowley wrote of his Thelemic state as conferring both rights and duties, each individual being, 'absolutely disciplined to serve his own, and the common purpose, without friction'.(37) The Thelemic social structure is based on the guild, which is also a feature of the organisational structure of Thelemic orders.(38) The premise of the Thelemic state Crowley described as being to, 'gather up all the threads of human passion and interest, and weave them into a harmonious tapestry...' reflecting the order of the cosmos.(39) This incorporation of all human passions and interests into a 'harmonious tapestry' seems remote from the raving, frenetic, murderous lunacy promised by the return of the Great Old Ones and looked upon with enthusiastic expectation by the Cthulhu cultists.

With this moral nihilism the cult of the Great Old Ones must be classified as part of the Left Hand Path, or the sinister tradition, the doctrine of Eastern origin that repudiates orthodox morality. The purest remnant is that of Left Hand Path Tantra as a heresy of Hinduism, where adherents in their rites partake of the substances prohibited by orthodox Hinduism, and include women in sexual rituals, regarded as a yogic interplay of the male and female cosmic principles represented by Shiva and Shakti. In India this is called Vama Marg, Sanskrit for 'left path', which according to Kenneth Grant, a Western initiate, who will be considered below, is 'so called because it involves the use of Woman and/or certain organic substances that are usually regarded with abhorrence'.(40) Hence the interest by overtly Satanic cults in the West.

CULTS OF CTHULHU

Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Cultus
The individual most responsible for the development of Cthulhu as an occult system seems to be the British occultist Kenneth Grant, one of several claimants to Aleister Crowley's mantle on the latter's death in 1947.(41) Grant has the advantage of having met Crowley and having been in correspondence with him as one of his magical students. Grant is also a practitioner of the sigil magic of the aforementioned A O Spare; hence synthesising the two systems, while adding a third element, that of Cthulhu to form 'Typhonian Thelema'. Grant created the 'Typhonian' Ordo Templi Orientis in 1955,(42) as the heir to the occult organisation taken over by Crowley in 1922 from Reuss.(43) Grant's assumption to head what was his own version of the OTO with the designation 'Typhonian', named after the Egyptian dark god Set(44), emerged in the predictable midst of a conflict of succession following Crowley's death.

Grant has done much in an attempt to reconcile Lovecraft's nightmare fantasies with ancient mythic entities, the view of Grant and others being that Lovecraft's ancient (fictional) grimoire, The Necronomicon, is a legitimate esoteric text extant on the akashic or astral realm and accessed via dreaming. Grant writes of this: 'As I have shown... it is not unlikely that Blavatsky(45), Mathers(46), Crowley(47), Lovecraft and others are reading from an akashic grimoire...'(48)

Grant regards Lovecraft and Crowley as parts of the same mythic and occult system, Crowley's Book of the Law (also referred to as Liber Al) being 'interpreted as the Book of the Law of the Great Old Ones; it is the grimoire containing the keys to mans' intercourse with Them'.(49) Hence, Lovecraft's fiction is regarded as a legitimate part of occult tradition, and an important part for Grant and others; as dream interpretation has been a major aspect of occultic, shamanic, and religious experiences from antiquity to the present, in which we might include the prophetic dreams and visions that are a feature of the Old and New Testaments.(50) Lovecraft attained to visions as a frequent and unwilled part of his dream-world while occultists work hard and long to achieve the same results via complicated magical formulas.. Thus, Crowley's 'Awaiss(51) Current', Austin Spare's 'Zos Kia Cultus'(52), and Lovecraft's 'Cthulhu Cultus', 'are different manifestations of an identical formula – that of dream control'.(53) Grant specifically alludes to Lovecraft as a 'magician':

    Each of these magicians lived their lives within the context of cosmic dream myths which, somehow, they relayed or transmitted to man from other dimensions. The formula of dream control is in a sense used by all creative artists, though few succeed in bringing human consciousness into such close proximity with other spheres.(54)

The difference is that Lovecraft was a rationalist of middle-class background, who found the imagery evil and horrendous. As Grant explains it, Lovecraft held back from 'Crossing the Abyss', which prevented him from seeing his dreams in magical context and from detaching himself from moral judgements on good and evil Grant writes of this:

    The quality of evil with which Lovecraft invests the types of his Cthulhu Cult and other mythoses is the result of a distortion in the subjective lens of his own awareness, and I have shown elsewhere how these images emerge when not so deformed, approximating sometimes to the point of actual identity with Crowley's cult-types of Shaitan-Aiwass and The Book of the Law...(55)

Grant takes to task those Lovecraft fans who claim that their favourite author's stories are uniquely original, rather than manifesting a long occult tradition; and for Grant Lovecraft's status is thereby not diminished but enhanced, when he is recognised as a channel for cosmic forces of epochal or aeonic significance.(56)

Grant regards Lovecraft as having tapped through dreams, albeit in distorted manner, the same 'Current' as Crowley, of whom Lovecraft apparently had not heard, Grant providing a number of corresponded between the Cthulhu Mythos and that of Crowley:

Lovecraft: Al Azif The Book of the Arab; Crowley: Al vel Legis, The Book of the Law.

Lovecraft: The Great Old Ones; Crowley: The Great Ones of the Night Time.

Lovecraft: Yog-Sothoth; Crowley: Sut-Thoth, Sut-Typhon.

Lovecraft: Gnoph-Hek (The Hairy Thing); Crowley: Coph-Nia (a barbarous name in Liber vel Legis).

Lovecraft: The Cold Waste (Kadath); Crowley: The Wanderer of the Waste (Hadith).

Lovecraft: Nyarlathotep (a god accompanied by 'idiot flute players'). Crowley: 'Into my loneliness comes the sound of flutes', Liber VII).

Lovecraft: The overpowering stench associated with Nyarlathotep; Crowley: 'The perfume of Pan pervading ' (Liber VII).

Lovecraft: Great Cthulhu dead, but dreaming in R'lyeh. Crowley: The Primal Sleep, 'In which the Great Ones of the Night time are immersed'.

Lovecraft: Azathoth ('the blind and idiot chaos at the centre of infinity'). Crowley: Azoth, the alchemical solvent; 'Thoth, Mercury: Chaos is Hadit at the centre of Infinity (Nuit)'.

Lovecraft: The Faceless One (The God Nyarlathotep); Crowley: The Headless One.

Lovecraft: The five pointed star carven of grey stone; Crowley: Nuit's Star: the five pointed star with the circle in the middle. Grant explains: 'Grey is the colour of Saturn, the Great Mother of which Nuit is a form'. (57)

Of these correspondences, however forced they appear to the non-adept, Grant states:

    The table is interesting because it shows how similarly and yet how differently related were certain archetypal patterns characteristic of the New Aeon. But whereas to Crowley the motifs conveyed no moral message, to Lovecraft they were instinct with horror and evil.(58)

It could be contended that Grant places too much focus on Lovecraft's failure to attain adeptship or occult understanding of what he was unconsciously channelling because of his alleged moral hang-ups; however, as quoted by Joshi, Lovecraft does not seem to have had any such moral prejudices, but rather like Nietzsche to have considered the universe to operate 'beyond good and evil'.

Michael Bertiaux and the Lovecraftian Coven
Bertiaux is a Chicago-based practitioner of 'Gnostic Voudoo', synthesising Thelema and Lovecraft, who has received a lot of interest from Kenneth Grant. Bertiaux's main vehicle for esoteric transmission is as Master of the Cult of La Couleuvre Noire, The Black Snake, and director of the Monastery of the Seven Rays.(59) Grant writes of Bertiaux that he 'claims to have established contact with the "Deep Ones", the fearful haunters of Outer Spaces that Lovecraft has brought so close to earth in his terrifying fictions'.(60)

The Lovecraftian Coven is a branch of the Cult of La Couleuvre Noire, and is led by 'a priestess of the Black Snake Cult'.(61) The basis of the practise is that of sexual magic, or what might be called a version of Left Hand Path Tantra, 'structured on the basic law of sexual polarity', with the female principle represented by the sea-goat which corresponds astrologically with Capricorn, a 'sea-shakti', mated with the male principle as the Goat, or 'sea beast', or in Lovecraft Shub-Niggurath, the Goat of a Thousand Young.(62)

Grant claims that according to August Derleth, who continued the literary tradition of Lovecraft, parts of Wisconsin (where Derleth establish his publishing house) ' contain specific Cthulhu power zones', the most potent being centred on a deserted lake. This area is frequented by Bertiaux and his followers where the 'Deep Ones' are evoked, whose point of entry to earth lies in the lake itself. The rites are performed when astrologically propitious and the 'Deep Ones' are said to 'assume an almost tangible substance'. The performance is one of ceremonial magic and includes the use of paintings and statues of sea monsters, turtles, amphibia and batrachia, consecrated with the kalas (fluids) of the priestess. A special chant in Creole-French is particularly effectual. (63)

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Church of Satan

Without getting too far off field with definitions, the reader might generally perceive by now that the Cthulhu Mythos comes closest to the Western or Judaeo-Christian conceptions of 'Satanism' and 'evil' in the normally accepted use of the word, although advanced esotericists such as Crowley and Grant would eschew the definition of 'Satanism' as too limited for their systems. Nonetheless, the Arabic word Shaitan does appear in the Thelemic cosmology and in particular in that of Grant.(64) Mankind throughout history and across ethnicities and cultures has had a conception of 'good and evil' as a necessity for living together in some type of workable accord. Taboos and commandments with divine sanction are devised to create society per se. Lovecraft saw his nightmares as representing figures as entirely negative or evil and life-negating in-so-far as he believed that 'good and evil' is defined as whatever serves the social fabric. Crowley, Grant, and Satanists advance the proposition that the cosmos is an interplay of polarities, the 'evil' or negation represented in Judaeo-Christianity as Satan, 'the accuser and adversary', which to such occultists is a necessary part of cosmology, otherwise stasis and eventual stagnation would ensue.(65) During the late 19th Century Satan even appeared to certain political rebels as the heroic, archetypal 'rebel in the cosmos'.(66)

With the Cthulhu cultists it is difficult to see mere 'rebellion' or 'heresy' in a zealous commitment to supposedly 'restore' The Great Old Ones to sovereignty over the Earth. The only indication of what type of regime these Great Old Ones would impose is that of greater and more horrific ways of killing, and the imagery invoked is probably closer to the scenes from a blood-and-guts soaked Earth from the recent movie version of the 'War of the Worlds'(67) where the outer 'gods' (?) proceed to feast upon humankind, than a 19th century romantic revolutionary image of a Miltonian Lucifer enthroned over a freed humanity, or the hierarchical and ordered society that Crowley himself proposed. Despite the attempts of occultists to put a positive and even liberating slant on the return of the Old Ones to reign over the Earth, Phil Hine has stated more realistically:

    The Great Old Ones are served by various human, and non-human cults in wild and lonely places, from 'degenerate' swamp-dwellers to the innumerable 'incestuous' Whateley's of the fictional region Dunwich. These cults are continually preparing both to bring about the return of the Old Ones, and also to silence anyone who does stumble across the awful secret of the existence of the Old Ones.

    The return of the Old Ones involves, as Wilbur Whateley puts it in 'The Dunwich Horror',(68) the 'clearing off' of the Earth. That is, the clearing off of humanity, apart from a few worshippers and slaves. This apocalyptic reference can be asserted as metaphorical, or as referring to an actual physical catastrophe - Nuclear holocaust perhaps? Perhaps Lovecraft wished to emphasise that the Great Old Ones would give no more thought to wiping out humanity than we might give to wiping up water on a table. Exactly why the Old Ones wish to return to Earth is never clear, but we might assume that for them, Earth is close to the bars and convenient for bus routes!

    Lovecraft is careful to point out that most of the Old Ones are, in fact, mindless, or 'idiot gods'. Only those who are already insane or degenerate could worship them sincerely. Only Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is given a human semblance of intelligence...(69)

One would expect that given Phil Hine's description of the Great Old Ones as for the most part 'idiot gods' rather than teachers of man, whose servants are imbeciles, and whose only perceivable goal is to eliminate humanity, save for a few craven inbreeds, he would be a fervent rejectionist of the Cthulhu Cult among occultists, yet Hine is one of the principal members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon (70), which will be described below.

It is therefore not surprising that self-described Satanists have a considerable interest in the Cthulhu Mythos. The most overt manifestation of present day Satanism is of the Church of Stan founded in San Francisco in 1966 by Anton LaVey.(71) The principal exponent of the Cthulhu Mythos in the Church of Satan was Michael Aquino, who was a Magus IVº in the Church, i.e. LaVey's deputy. LaVey's Satanic Bible(72) had become a best-seller, and LaVey compiled The Satanic Rituals(73) in 1972 with Aquino's assistance.

Aquino's Cthulhuean chapters in The Satanic Rituals comprise a chapter on Lovecraftean metaphysics, 'The Ceremony of the Nine Angles', and 'The Call of Cthulhu'. No other subject in The Satanic Rituals has as much dedicated to it as Cthulhu.

Aquino here regards Lovecraft as having penned 'the most convincing and thoroughly terrifying works of macabre fiction in modern times'.(74) Aquino aimed in the essay to consider Lovecraft as a philosopher despite noting the scorn with which Lovecraft regarded any such metaphysics. Aquino suggests a Faustian theme of man's drive for knowledge to the point of self-destruction and cataclysm represented by the Great Old Ones:

    This theme of a constant interrelationship between the constructive and destructive facets of the human personality forms the keystone of the doctrines of Satanism, even as theism argues that the integrity of the individual can be increased by a rejection of the carnal and an obedience to morality.(75)

Aquino attempts to present the Cthulhuean monstrosities as somewhat benevolent towards mankind, as teachers that do not require worshipping other than to be evoked by festivals. Aquino invites the reader to compare a Cthulhuean festival to the 'element of servility' in Christian and other religions. Here then is a revival of the 19th century romantic notion of the devil as the cosmic rebel and teacher of humanity. It is also suggestive of the divine beings, the 'Watchers', who became the 'Fallen Angels' after rebelling against Jehovah and under the leadership of Azazel (or Samyaza), descended to Earth to not only mate with the daughters of man whom they lusted after, siring offspring of mighty renown,(76) but also teaching humanity all the arts of civilisation.

Aquino continues with this type of theme, stating that Lovecraft sought to portray the Great Old Ones as 'never conclusive stereotypes of good or evil; they vacillate constantly between beneficence and cruelty'. Conversely, it might be recalled, Kenneth Grant, contends that Lovecraft did regard these nightmare creatures as wholly evil and destructive and completely alien to human consciousness. The protagonist of each story 'abandons every prudent restraint' on a Faustian quest for knowledge.

It was from this introductory essay that Aquino proceeded with two Cthulhuean rituals. 'The Ceremony of the Nine Angles'(77) is to be performed in a 'closed chamber with no curved surfaces', and lighted by a single brazier or flame-pot, before an altar behind which there is the sign of a trapezoid. All celebrants are masked to distort their facial features. 'Yugothic' language was formulated by Aquino to enhance the evocative atmosphere of the rite by the main celebrant, to whom the participants respond in their mundane language. The beings evoked are Azathoth as 'great center of the cosmos'; Yog-Sothoth, 'master of dimensions'; Nyarlathotep, 'black prince from the Barrier'; and Shub-Niggurath, 'father of the World of Horrors'. After evoking Nine Angles, each representing a cosmic sphere presided over by an Old One, the celebrant intones that 'the hounds are loosed upon the barrier, and we shall not pass; but the time shall come when the hounds will bow before us, and apes shall speak with the tongues of the hornless ones. The way is Yog-Sothoth, and the key is Nyarlathotep. Hail, Yog-Sothoth. Hail, Nyarlathotep'.(78)

In 'The Call of Cthulhu' the ritual is performed in a secluded area 'near a major body of water', preferably on an overcast night, when the water is tempestuous. The chief celebrant assumes the role of Cthulhu, while the participants encircle a large bonfire. Participants evoke sundry water deities indulging Kraken, Poseiden, Typhon, Dagon, Neptune, Leviathan, Midgard, and Cthulhu.(79)

Something of the positive aspect Aquino aims to suggest is alluded to when the participants chant in unison that Cthulhu crossed the Abyss to walk upon Earth, and 'taught the apes [humanity] to laugh and to play, to slay and to scream'. This is suggestive of the mad utopia described by Frater Tenebrous in referring to 'The Call of Cthulhu' when the Old Ones will teach humanity new ways to slaughter each other; apparently an update of what was taught millennia ago.

The participants state in unison: 'I danced and I killed, and I laughed with the apes, and in R'lyeh I died to sleep the dreams of the master of the planes and the angles'. The ritual ends with a repudiation of the Christian God, as the 'god of death' who will be overthrown upon the return of the Old Ones.

Aquino explained in an article for Nyctalops Magazine(80) that he constructed the 'Yugothic' language by the patterns suggested in Lovecraft's incantation given in the 'Call of Cthulhu': 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn'.

There is nothing phoney about such an invention per se, within the context of the occult traditions. All such 'magical languages', other than those that are obscure or ancient languages used for a magical purpose, are contrivances, as are the magical alphabets. It is the very nature of their unfamiliarity that makes them evocative. On a more common level, Latin Mass might be particularly evocative to a non-Latin speaker. The most famous of the occult languages is Enochian, formulated by Elizabethan scholar Dr John Dee, around which an entire system of magic has been practised from the time it was revived by the Golden Dawn in England during the late 19th Century. Enochian is said to be the langue of the angels, and Dee claimed that he scried with the use of the Enochian language and sigils and received communications from the Enochian denizens of other planes. Either one accepts that Enochian really is a supernatural language given to Dee, or that Dee made it up, but it has nonetheless remained a very evocative language.(81) A more familiar form of evocative language is the 'speaking in tongues' by some Pentecostal churchgoers. I heard this spoken several decades ago, much to my mirth at that time; however a Pentecostal friend of Indian descent recently offered a quite rational explanation as to its efficacy, stating that as a practitioner himself he finds it to be an efficacious means of altering one's consciousness, like the mantras used in meditation by Eastern religions.

Aquino explains also that the 'nine angles' are the five points of the pentagram and the 4-edge angles of the 'phi-trapezoid' or the pentagon within the pentagram.(82)

In 1972, the year The Satanic Rituals was published, Aquino wrote in the Church of Satan's newsletter the Cloven Hoof an article attempting to identify the location of R'lyeh.(83) Aquino identifies this as Nan-Madol, Ponape in Micronesia, Ponape being a destination for sea captain Ahab Marsh in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.(84) The immense and still mysterious stone walls of Nan-Madol, considered by the islanders to be haunted, is a convincing location, given that it matched key features for R'lyeh given by Lovecraft as an island in the Pacific with mysterious megalithic structures. Aquino states that island tradition tells of the city having been created by a race of gods, the Anti-Aramach, 'who came down from the sky in great canoes', while the great stones of the city flew down from the sky.

Aquino, like Grant, has attempted to draw objective parallels with the imagery presented from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, although while Aquino does this as an intellectual exercise in itself, Grant places literal significance on the mythos as being an echo of actual ancient traditions, cults and myths, mainly deriving from the demonology of Egypt and Sumeria.

Esoteric Order of Dagon
The Esoteric Order of Dagon (EOD), named after the society in Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth,(85) was founded in 1981. Randolf Carter had assumed the shape of a 'thought form' existing in the word of dreams (or the astral realm) even during Lovecraft's lifetime, waiting for the right moment to manifest into a human consciousness. This occurred in the 1960s during the drug induced state of a young man, Steven Greenwood,(86) who assumed the name and character of Carter and issued The Manifesto of the Aeon of Cthulhu, which led to the formation of the Temple of Dagon, from which emerged the EOD. Greenwood (aka Randolf Carter) inaugurated his own Aeon, like Crowley with the Aeon of Horus, and Michael Aquino with the Aeon of Set; this having the numerological value as 'Current 23' equating with Chaos or Kaos and represented by the Great Old One named Azathoth.(87)

In 2007 Obed Marsh, representing the Supreme Council of the Temple of Dagon, went to England to meet Michael Staley of Grant's Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis, and the EOD became an affiliate of the Typhonian OTO.(88)

The EOD explanation on the Lovecraft mysteries followers the line of other occultists, that Lovecraft's transmissions from the Great Old Ones are part of a genuine tradition, but Lovecraft himself was not capable of 'Crossing the Abyss'(89) and of becoming an adept.

The EOD embraces Thelema, Wicca, Tantra, and like Grant traces its tradition back to Sumeria and Egypt, and to stellar worship centred on Sirius, the Dog Star that Grant has identified with Set.(90)

The EOD is loosely based on self-initiation with three degree, that of Neophyte, Initiate, and Adept.(91)

What is of particular significance about the EOD is that within this have coalesced the principal representatives of a number of primary magical systems and/or organisations including: Kenneth Grant, who is stated to have been an important influence on the formation of the EOD and has 'graciously acknowledged his honorary membership'; Michael Staley, spokesman for Grant's Typhonian OTO; Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica(92); Phil Hine, previously mentioned, a philosopher of Chaos Magick; John Balance of the British industrial band Coil; Nema the formulator of Maat Magick;(93) Michael Aquino, previously mentioned author of the Lovecraftian elements within the Church of Satan, and founder of the Temple of Set,(94) along with authors, publishers, film-makers and artists.

From this it can be seen that the EOD includes representatives of Thelema, Chaos Magick, Industrial sub-culture, Maat Magick, and Setianism.

NECRONOMICON

There have been several attempts to present to the discerning occultist public, editions of the Necronomicon, the dreaded grimoire for summoning the Great Old Ones alluded to in Lovecraft's stories. As one should expect, Kenneth Grant has attempted to argue for the existence of the Necronomicon on an objective basis, albeit as a book that exists on the astral plane which might be accessed by occult practices or via dreams, as Lovecraft did unwittingly.

The Necronomicon was first mentioned by Lovecraft in 1922 in a short story, 'The Hound', which was published in 1924. The protagonists are an unnamed hero and his now mangled, dead friend St John, who had both become so jaded in a Faustian quest for evil and decadence that they resorted to grave robbing, being collectors of diabolic antiquities:

Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity - that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.(95)

The corpse that was uncovered, that of a 500 year old satanic character, was adorned with an amulet bearing markings reminiscent of the symbols found in the Necronomicon, the book being introduced to Lovecraft's reading public in a quite unassuming manner:

    ...Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.(96)

An account of the origins of the Necronomicon has been provided by Lovecraft, stating that the original title is, 'Al Azif - azif being the word used by the Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of daemons'.(97)

Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaa', in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia - the Roba El Khaliyeh or 'Empty Space' of the ancients - and 'Dahna' or 'Crimson' desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death.(98)

Abdul Alhazred wrote Al Azif in Damascus and died or disappeared in 733AD, one account being that he was devoured by an invisible demon in broad daylight in front of a multitude of terrified witnesses, after having lived in madness for years, 'worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu'.

In 950 AD Azif was translated into Greek as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople, followed during the Medieval era by translations into Latin and Spanish.(99)

With a quite convincing historical chronology provide by Lovecraft, the Necronomicon became the subject of much speculation as to its actual existence.

Avon Books published this dread document, said to induce insanity by its mere possession let alone by practising its rites, in 1980, from a previous edition published in 1977 at the instigation of Herman Slater, proprietor of Magickal Childe bookstore, and himself a publisher under that imprint, in Manhattan. The edition was published thanks to a thought-form entering the consciousness of L K Barnes, publisher, which prompted him to enter Slater's bookshop, 'the crazed proprietor' waving the MS of Azif about. Fortunately, Barnes had long been looking for the genuine Necronomicon, which since childhood he had known existed. This MS had been produced by 'Simon' who had the necessary documentation to prove the authenticity of Azif.(100) This edition makes it plain thatit is an aspect of Thelema, and the preface to the second edition ends with a reference to entering the 'New Age of the Crowned and Conquering Child, Horus, not in a slouch towards Bethlehem, but born within us at the moment we conquer the lurking fear within our own souls'.(101)

This version of Azif is rather interesting in that despite the situation of such a dread tome being published by Avon Books, a respectable amount of research has gone into tracing Mesopotamian and other parallels, reminiscent of the approach of Kenneth Grant:

It is of extreme importance to occult scholars that many of these deities had actual counterparts, at least in name, to deities of the Sumerian Tradition, the same Tradition that the Magus Aleister Crowley deemed it necessary to 'rediscover'.(102)

A 'Chart of Comparisons' links correspondences between names used by Lovecraft, Crowley and Sumer, as follows:

    Cthuhlu – The Great Beast CTHAH 666 – Ctha-lu; Azathoth – Aiwass – Azagthoth; Shub Niggurath – Pan – Shub Ishniggarab(?); Out of Space – The abyss – Absu; IA! – IO! IAO! – IA, EA; The Five Poutned grey Star carven – The Pentagram – The Ar; Vermis Mysteriis – The Serpent – Erim.(103)

The Avon Books Necronomicon proceeds with several hundred pages of incantations, spells and sigils. What is of interest again however, is that the corpus of the book is mainly drawn from Babylonian mythology, and includes the names of deities such as Inanna, Ishtar, Enki, Marduk et al, these being identified with what in the Cthulhu Mythos are the Elder Gods who defeated the Great Old Ones; which has its analogue in the Babylonian Creation Myth of the defeat of the dragon Tiamat by Marduk. It is not until one reaches the 'Urilia Text', or 'the Book of the Worm', that the diabolical adept gets to the Cthulhu conjurations, which provides 'the formulae by which the wreakers of havoc perform their Rites'. These are the conjurations of the 'hidden priests' of the creatures that were defeated by Marduk, and here the author identifies Tiamat, 'the Ancient Worm', with Kutulu, slain by Marduk, 'yet who lies not dead, but dreaming', which is the manner by which Cthulhu is described by Lovecraft.(104) The demons evoked are from the Sumero-Babylonian traditions; such as Humwawa,(105) Pazuzu,(106) and Lilit[h].(107)

Given that Tiamat is the dragon or great worm of the primal chaos and moreover of the sea in Mesopotamian legend, defeated by Marduk,(108) the analogies between these Mesopotamian myths and the Lovecraftian theme of the Great Old Ones defeated by the Elder Gods, seems sufficiently close to contrive a convincing and workable system of occult theory and practise. At any rate, it captured the imagination of a sufficient number of Cthulhuean aspirants to prompt the Church of Satan to set up a website to 'answer the large amount of e-mail the Church of Satan continually receives concerning this purported book, the Necronomicon, and its history and validity'.(109) The author of the Church's response, Peter Gilmore, who assumed the role of High Priest on LaVey's death, states that he had conversed with Herman Slater of Magical Childe about the book, who told Gilmore that the number of requests about the existence of a Necronomicon clearly showed that there was a large market for such a volume:

    The book thus fabricated by the mysterious Simon is an artful blend of pseudo-Sumerian and Goetic ritual, with names crafted to resemble those of Lovecraft's invented monster gods. More importantly for many would-be Black Magicians who bought copies, it had performable rites and plenty of arcane sigils. It was more than enough to sucker-in the gullible and it still sells well today.(110)

However, within the context of LaVeyan Satanism, this certainly does not mean that the Simon Necronomicon is without value. It could not consistently be stated otherwise, as LaVeyan ritual, including the Lovecraftian rites written by Aquino for LaVey's Satanic Rituals (also published by Avon Books) are also contrived with introductory histories for each no more nor less accurate than those of the Simon tome. The advice of Gilmore is simply that one should not be fooled into thinking that the rites are authentic and arcane, regardless of whatever practical use they might be in shifting one's consciousness. This accords with the nature of LaVeyan Satanism, as distinct from the schools of thought developed by Crowley, Grant, et al, that the entities being called upon are symbolic and without any objective existence on any plane. In that respect, LaVeyan Satanism is a form of 'atheism' with ritual trappings that are not claimed to be anything but 'psychodramas'.(111)

CONCLUSION

While Tolkien penned his Ring Trilogy as a Mythos for Britain that he hoped would prompt a rejection of materialism and industrialism, having a strong moral outlook in regard to waging a chivalric war against 'evil', inspired by the Heathen ethos of England and Northern Europe; Lovecraft was quite different. He was a rationalist, who eschewed any notion that his stories and the nightmares that inspired them had any cosmic or moral consequences. Nonetheless, Lovecraft's mythos has taken on a life of its own in precisely the same manner Lovecraft lamented the emergence of such crypto-religious and mythic revivals in his own time. Not surprisingly, the mythos has attracted the perverse fascination of occultists who are drawn to the 'dark' and 'chaotic' sides of life and the cosmos. There are moreover sufficient hints in the Lovecraft stories around which an entire occult system of theory and practise can be woven, especially when synthesised with other dark forms of occultism such as those of Crowley. Since the occult, and indeed in the wider context religion, has since times immemorial been based in no small measure upon dreams, dream interpretations and visions, often wilfully invoked by the use of rituals or of drugs, it is entirely fitting that some occultists would conclude that Lovecraft was unwillingly tapping into the astral plane, or what Jung called the collective unconscious, where there exist many atavisms repressed into the subconscious since the dawn of humanity, awaiting conscious awakening. Whether one calls such archetypes gods and devils is a matter of semantics or moral relativity. The Lovecraft mythos is just as 'legitimate' – or otherwise – as any other form of occultism or mysticism, and if it has sufficient force to impact upon the psyche then it is at least as proficient as any other, whether old or new.

http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news190120120210.html

У светлу најновијих дешавања по Америци, не треба никако заборавити да је фашистичко лудило започело тако што су "антифашисти" прво ударили на Лавкрафта, инсистирајући да се за World Fantasy Award награду промени статуета са Лавкрафтовим ликом.

Прво су дошли по Лавкрафта, а затим и по све остало...

gul u rue morgue biblioteci objavio:

https://rue-morgue.com/product/rue-morgue-library-11-the-weird-world-of-h-p-lovecraft/

Wow! Prenesi čestitke!

H. P. Lovecraft - Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction

Despite the current flood of stories dealing with other worlds and universes, and with intrepid
flights to and from them through cosmic space, it is probably no exaggeration to say that not more
than  a  half-dozen  of  these  things,  including  the  novels  of  H.  G.  Wells,  have  even  the  slightest
shadow of a claim to artistic seriousness or literary rank. Insincerity, conventionality, triteness,
artificiality, false emotion, and puerile extravagance reign triumphant throughout this overcrowded
genre, so that none but its rarest products can possibly claim a truly adult status. And the spectacle
of such persistent hollowness had led many to ask whether, indeed, any fabric of real literature can
ever grow out of the given subject-matter.
The  present  commentator  does  not  believe  that  the  idea  of  space-travel  and  other worlds is
inherently unsuited to literary use. It is, rather, his opinion that the omnipresent cheapening and
misuse of that idea is the result of a widespread misconception; a misconception which extends to
other departments of weird and science fiction as well. This fallacy is the notion that any account of
impossible,  improbable,  or  inconceivable  phenomena  can  be  successfully  presented  as  a
commonplace  narrative  of  objective  acts  and  conventional  emotions  in  the  ordinary  tone and
manner of popular romance. Such a presentation will often "get by" with immature readers, but it
will never approach even remotely the field of aesthetic merit.
Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot
be  made  convincing  by  any  mere  process  of  casual  narration.  They  have  the  handicap  of
incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every
other  phase  of  the  story,  plus  a  gradual  atmospheric  or  emotional  building-up  of  the  utmost subtlety. The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena.

Over and above everything else should tower the stark, outrageous monstrousness of the one
chosen departure from Nature. The characters should react to it as real people would react to such
a  thing  if  it  were  suddenly  to  confront  them  in  daily  life;  displaying  the  almost  soul-shattering amazement which anyone would naturally display instead of the mild, tame, quickly-passed-over emotions  prescribed  by  cheap  popular  convention.  Even  when  the  wonder  is  one  to  which  the characters are assumed to be used, the sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the presence of such a thing must somehow be suggested by the author.
When an account of a marvellous trip is presented without the colouring of appropriate emotion, we never feel the least degree of vividness in it. We do not get the spine-tickling illusion that such a thing might possibly have happened, but merely feel that somebody has uttered some extravagant words.
In general, we should forget all about the popular hack conventions of cheap writing and try to
make our story a perfect slice of actual life except where the one chosen marvel is concerned. We
should work as if we were staging a hoax and trying to get our extravagant lie accepted as literal
truth.
Atmosphere, not action, is the thing to cultivate in the wonder story. We cannot put stress on the
bare  events,  since  the  unnatural  extravagance  of  these  events  makes  them  sound  hollow  and absurd  when  thrown  into  too  high  relief.  Such  events,  even  when  theoretically  possible  or conceivable in the future, have no counterpart or basis in existing life and human experience, hence can never form the groundwork of an adult tale. All that a marvel story can ever be, in a serious way, is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing.

Therefore a fantastic author should see that his prime
emphasis  goes  into  subtle  suggestion—the  imperceptible  hints  and  touches  of  selective  and
associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange
reality of the unreal—instead of into bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no
substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and mood-symbolism. A serious adult
story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they
must shift their emphasis toward something to which they
can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless  moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural laws.
And how are these general principles of adult wonder fiction to be applied to the interplanetary
tale in particular? That they can be applied, we have no reason to doubt; the important factors
being  here,  as  elsewhere,  an  adequate  sense  of  wonder,  adequate  emotions  in  the  characters,
realism in the setting and supplementary incidents, care in the choice of significant detail, and a
studious  avoidance  of  the  hackneyed  artificial  characters  and  stupid  conventional  events  and
situations  which  at  once  destroy  a  story's  vitality  by  proclaiming  it  a  product  of  weary  mass
mechanics.  It  is  an  ironic  truth  that  no  artistic  story  of  this  kind,  honestly,  sincerely,  and
unconventionally written, would be likely to have any chance of acceptance among professional
editors of the common pulp school. This, however, will not influence the really determined artist
bent  on  creating  something  of  mature  worth.  Better  to  write  honestly  for  a  nonremunerative
magazine than to concoct worthless tinsel and be paid for it. Some day, perhaps, the conventions of
cheap editors will be less flagrantly absurd in their anti-artistic rigidity.
The events of an interplanetary story—aside from such tales as involve sheer poetic fantasy—are
best laid in the present, or represented as having occurred secretly or prehistorically in the past.
The future is a ticklish period to deal with; since it is virtually impossible to escape grotesqueness
and  absurdity  in  depicting  its  mode  of  life,  while  there  is  always  an  immense  emotional  loss  in
representing  characters  as  familiar  with  the  marvels  depicted.  The  characters  of  a  story  are
essentially  projections  of  ourselves;  and  unless  they  can  share  our  own  ignorance  and  wonder
concerning what occurs, there is an inevitable handicap. This is not to say that tales of the future
cannot be artistic, but merely that it is harder to make them so.
A  good  interplanetary  story  must  have  realistic  human  characters;  not  the  stock  scientists,
villainous assistants, invincible heroes, and lovely scientist's-daughter heroines of the usual trash of
this sort. Indeed, there is no reason why there should be any "villain", "hero", or "heroine" at all.
These artificial character-types belong wholly to artificial plot-forms, and have no place in serious
fiction of any kind. The function of the story is to express a certain human mood of wonder and
liberation,  and  any  tawdry  dragging-in  of  dime-novel  theatricalism  is  both  out  of  place  and
injurious.  No  stock  romance  is  wanted.  We  must  select  only  such  characters  (not  necessarily
stalwart  or  dashing  or  youthful  or  beautiful  or  picturesque  characters)  as  would  naturally  be
involved in the events to be depicted, and they must behave exactly as real persons would behave if
confronted with the given marvels. The tone of the whole thing must be realism, not romance.
The crucial and delicate matter of getting the characters off the earth must be very carefully
managed. Indeed, it probably forms the greatest single problem of the story. The departure must be
plausibly accounted for and impressively described. If the period is not prehistoric, it is better to
have the means of departure a secret invention. The characters must react to this invention with a
proper sense of utter, almost paralysing wonder, avoiding the cheap fictional tendency of having
such things half taken for granted. To avoid errors in complex problems of physics, it is well not to
attempt too much detail in describing the invention.
Scarcely less delicate is the problem of describing the voyage through space and the landing on
another world. Here we must lay primary stress on the stupendous emotions—the unconquerable
sense of astonishment—felt by the voyagers as they realise they are
actually off their native earth, in  cosmic  gulfs  or  on  an  alien  world.  Needless  to  say,  a  strict following  of  scientific  fact  in representing the mechanical, astronomical, and other aspects of the trip is absolutely essential. Not all  readers  are  ignorant  of  the  sciences,  and  a  flagrant  contravention  of  truth  ruins  a  tale  for anyone able to detect it.
Equal  scientific  care  must  be  given  to  our  representation  of  events  on  the  alien  planet.
Everything  must  be  in  strict  accord  with  the  known  or  assumed  nature  of  the  orb  in
question—surface  gravity,  axial  inclination,  length  of  day  and  year,  aspect  of  sky,  etc.—and  the
atmosphere must be built up with significant details conducing to verisimilitude and realism. Hoary
stock devices connected with the reception of the voyagers by the planet's inhabitants ought to be
ruled  rigidly  out.

Thus  we  should  have  no  overfacile  language-learning;  no  telepathic communication; no worship of the travellers as deities; no participation in the affairs of pseudo-human  kingdoms,  or  in  conventional  wars  between  factions  of  inhabitants;  no  weddings  with
beautiful anthropomorphic princesses; no stereotyped Armageddons with ray-guns and space-ships;
no court intrigues and jealous magicians; no peril from hairy ape-men of the polar caps; and so on,
and so on. Social and political satire are always undesirable, since such intellectual and ulterior
objects detract from the story's power as a crystallisation of a mood. What must always be present
in  superlative  degree  is  a  deep,  pervasive  sense  of  strangeness—the utter,  incomprehensible strangeness of a world holding nothing in common with ours.
It is not necessary that the alien planet be inhabited—or inhabited at the period of the voyage—at
all.  If  it  is,  the  denizens  must  be  definitely  non-human  in  aspect,  mentality,  emotions,  and
nomenclature, unless they are assumed to be descendants of a prehistoric colonising expedition
from  our  earth.  The  human-like  aspect,  psychology,  and  proper  names  commonly  attributed  to
other-planetarians by the bulk of cheap authors is at once hilarious and pathetic. Another absurd
habit of conventional hacks is having the major denizens of other planets always more advanced
scientifically  and  mechanically  than  ourselves;  always  indulging  in  spectacular  rites  against  a
background of cubistic temples and palaces, and always menaced by some monstrous and dramatic
peril. This kind of pap should be replaced by an adult realism, with the races of other-planetarians
represented,  according  to  the  artistic  demands  of  each  separate  case,  as  in  every  stage  of
development—sometimes high, sometimes low, and sometimes unpicturesquely middling. Royal and
religious pageantry should not be conventionally overemphasised; indeed, it is not at all likely that
more than a fraction of the exotic races would have lit upon the especial folk-customs of royalty and
religion. It must be remembered that non-human beings would be wholly apart from human motives
and perspectives.
But the real nucleus of the story ought to be something far removed from the specific aspect and
customs  of  any  hypothetical  outside  race—ought,  indeed,  to  be  nothing  less  than  the
simple sensation of wonder at being off the earth.
Interest had better be sustained through accounts of bizarre and un-terrestrial natural conditions, rather than through any artificially dramatic actions of the characters, either human or exotic. Adventures may well be introduced, but they should be properly subordinated to realism—made inevitable outgrowths of the conditions instead of synthetic thrills concocted for their own sake.
The climax and ending must be managed very carefully to avoid extravagance or artificiality. It is
preferable,  in  the  interest  of  convincingness,  to  represent  the  fact  of  the  voyage  as  remaining
hidden from the public—or to have the voyage a prehistoric affair, forgotten by mankind and with
its  rediscovery  remaining  a  secret.  The  idea  of  any  general  revelation  implying  a  widespread
change in human thoughts, history, or orientation tends to contradict surrounding events and clash
with actual future probabilities too radically to give the reader a sense of naturalness. It is far more
potent not to make the truth of the story dependent on any condition visibly contradicting what we
know—for  the  reader  may  pleasantly  toy  with  the  notion  that perhaps these  marvels may have
happened after all!
Meanwhile the deluge of inept interplanetary tosh continues. Whether a qualitative upturn will
ever occur on anything like a large scale, this commentator cannot venture to prophesy; but at any
rate, he has had his say regarding what he deems the main aspects of the problem. There are,
without doubt, great possibilities in the serious exploitation of the astronomical tale; as a few semi-
classics like "The War of the Worlds", "The Last and First Men", "Station X", "The Red Brain", and
Clark  Ashton  Smith's  best  work  prove.  But  the  pioneers  must  be  prepared  to  labour  without
financial return, professional recognition, or the encouragement of a reading majority whose taste
has been seriously warped by the rubbish it has devoured. Fortunately sincere artistic creation is
its own incentive and reward, so that despite all obstacles we need not despair of the future of a
fresh literary form whose present lack of development leaves all the more room for brilliant and
fruitful experimentation.

I konačno Lavkraft u verziji prilagođenoj za decu...

nečitljivo u tabernakul izdanju
ne namjeravam dalje pokušavati

ovo je sada očišćeno od svih lavkraftobudalaština, pitak tekstić za razvijanje mašte nižih osnovaca...

e nisam dotle došao u školovanju