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Lovecraft & Hermetics

C.O.T.

Devoted Cultist
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Dec 29, 2020
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Spain
Does anyone know about hermetic activities of HP Lovecraft and his friends? I know about a magician that worked about his creations, but I mean activities of HP by himself. On some letters to friends he talks about using his dreams as material for narrations, did maybe that dream working go further than the simple inspiration?
lovecraft--644x362.jpg
 
Does anyone know about hermetic activities of HP Lovecraft and his friends? I know about a magician that worked about his creations, but I mean activities of HP by himself. On some letters to friends he talks about using his dreams as material for narrations, did maybe that dream working go further than the simple inspiration?
lovecraft--644x362.jpg

To be honest it doesn't ring a bell. He was as you obviously know a prolific letter writer so there might be something.

What's your interest?
 
My understanding has always been that ... Lovecraft employed - and substantially invented - a lot of occult allusions in crafting his fiction. However, he was not an occult scholar or practitioner himself. I recall reading somewhere that Lovecraft once admitted his knowledge of occult / magic practices came from an ordinary encyclopedia.

Later occultists adopted, invoked or elaborated upon elements from Lovecraft's fiction, especially from the Sixties onward. In other words, it was Lovecraft's fiction influencing occultists' themes and motifs rather than occult knowledge informing or guiding Lovecraft's personal life or writing.
 
He lived close to the place of the witch persecutions , not so long ago from the time he was born, so probably he were very far to want to be related with any that could be even remotely related with anything that could be labeled as witchery.
But at the same time is evident that the interest and attraction of occultism over him was permanent and strong. It is showed not only by the direct references, but by the main work itself. forgetting the grimoire stile of the myths, there are other, more subtle signs, but recognizable for the knower. As for example in the tale, “the color that came from space” (I think that one of his best works) that talks about a color that: “ was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.”
I think that maybe on an informal, and novel way, he and his friends started to generate a kind of true hermetic activity. That activity was around the work with dreams, and hipnogogic states. But they never want to give formal organization to such technics, and of course, even less label it as magic, or any kind of label that could be related with witchcraft.
 
Don't share the HP political agenda, of course. But i keep thinking on the idea of non formal hermetic practice. We had been too used to the idea of someone getting magic knowledge by tradition, and not by building one new from the scratch.
 
Does anyone know about hermetic activities of HP Lovecraft and his friends? I know about a magician that worked about his creations, but I mean activities of HP by himself. On some letters to friends he talks about using his dreams as material for narrations, did maybe that dream working go further than the simple inspiration?
lovecraft--644x362.jpg
There are covens that do believe his stories are real facts. They worship Cthulu and the other ones and try different technique to bring them to this world. Everyone of that period was a little bit racist in their writings. Lovecraft based his horrors and creatures on different immigrants, he hated immigrants of all kind for taking employment opportunities. But Lovecraft was a Nazi Sympathizer and had a letter from Edgar Allan Poe to bloody knock it off because America was joining the war on the Allied side.
 
I get my information from Michael Houellebecq H.P. Lovecraft Against The World, Against Life Biography
 
I did break two Lovecraft fan sites by directing them to this book in the past. Also I am in a Coven myself and I had been offered in the past to join other Covens that worshipped Cthulu. I turned them down.
 
... But Lovecraft was a Nazi Sympathizer and had a letter from Edgar Allan Poe to bloody knock it off because America was joining the war on the Allied side.

???? ... How did an author who died 90 years before WW2 started send a letter to another author who died before the war began?
 
There are covens that do believe his stories are real facts. They worship Cthulu and the other ones and try different technique to bring them to this world. Everyone of that period was a little bit racist in their writings. Lovecraft based his horrors and creatures on different immigrants, he hated immigrants of all kind for taking employment opportunities. But Lovecraft was a Nazi Sympathizer and had a letter from Edgar Allan Poe to bloody knock it off because America was joining the war on the Allied side.
The Chaos Magic folks including Peter Caroll and Phil HIne others would see a Cthulhu conjuration as perfectly reasonable; they have even invoked Mr. Spock:
"One of my colleagues had to sit a computer exam, and was wracking his brains trying to think of an appropriate god-form to invoke upon himself to concentrate his mind on programming. Mercury? Hermes? And then he hit on it – the most powerful mythic figure that he knew could deal with computers was Mr. Spock! So he proceeded to invoke Mr. Spock, by learning all he could about Spock and going round saying “I never will understand humans” until he was thoroughly Spock-ified. And he got an ‘A’, so there!

Morrison too advocates drawing upon fictional entities in magical practice (full interview here):

https://nthmind.wordpress.com/2012/...c-part-1-superman-archetypes-and-invocations/
 
Writer Kenneth Grant, a disciple of Crowley developed this kind of HP cults, maybe as early as 50s. He's a very interesting Hermetist. There is asite about his works and magic system. here.
I keep on the idea of some borderline hermetic activities, the HP gang of friends ( the ones that talk, and help to develop the mythology with HP).
Maybe other intellectual activities of the pastcentury had touched this borderline, one of themostfamous is Freud and psychoanalysis, todayis seen as very primitive science, but what would be his valoration as magic. Someone will say, and what has been it's magical work? Maybe there is one, the sexualization of today's culture. That was a work that psychoanalysis did successfully.
 
Writer Kenneth Grant, a disciple of Crowley developed this kind of HP cults, maybe as early as 50s. He's a very interesting Hermetist. There is asite about his works and magic system. here.
I keep on the idea of some borderline hermetic activities, the HP gang of friends ( the ones that talk, and help to develop the mythology with HP).
Maybe other intellectual activities of the pastcentury had touched this borderline, one of themostfamous is Freud and psychoanalysis, todayis seen as very primitive science, but what would be his valoration as magic. Someone will say, and what has been it's magical work? Maybe there is one, the sexualization of today's culture. That was a work that psychoanalysis did successfully.
Well, looking at the old grimoires, the spirits are said to appear in a variety of metaphoric forms, so perhaps updating them and giving them some tentacles and a good story doesn't hurt.. With magic, the perceived legitimacy of a system can often depend on disappearing into the depths of time and myth; once the cultural and religious context is understood the magic can often be seen to be derivative and created by people, same applies to religion. I don't know if that matters in the end though :cool: Spare's magic was based on reifying atavisms from the collective unconscious of the universe, and he wasn't using traditional spirits, etc.
 
There is an old article I found where a bunch of people are staring at an "airship" in the sky in New England and believe it or not Lovecraft walks up to them and points out they are looking at Venus! Really happened.. Surprising he didn't write a few airship stories.
 
Ha! Now this is funny. I just actually read the Wiki entry for the book and near the bottom:

"Owen Davies calls Simon Necronomicon "a well-constructed hoax",[3] but adds that making a grimoire by stitching together material from previous sources is a well-worn motif in grimoire history, and that "it is their falsity that makes them genuine." The same thing is pointed out by Dan Clore who writes[4] that the hoax Necronomicons are every bit as "authentic" as the Lesser Key of Solomon or the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. "
 
???? ... How did an author who died 90 years before WW2 started send a letter to another author who died before the war began?
It was Robert Bloch and J. Vernon Shea in letters to them in 1933 about Hitler's rise in the Nazi Party
 
My pal just made a new account but for some reason she can't speak to you. I have been banned for a month by my coven for revealing I'm in a coven on this post. I'll see you in a month
 
My pal just made a new account but for some reason she can't speak to you. I have been banned for a month by my coven for revealing I'm in a coven on this post. I'll see you in a month

I'm not sure I understand your post? Your coven banned you from here for a month for revealing you're a member?
 
I did break two Lovecraft fan sites by directing them to this book in the past. Also I am in a Coven myself and I had been offered in the past to join other Covens that worshipped Cthulu. I turned them down.

You have been offered to join covens, so two or more, who worship Cthulhu and are attempting to bring the Great Old Ones et al to this earthly plane?
 
My pal just made a new account but for some reason she can't speak to you. I have been banned for a month by my coven for revealing I'm in a coven on this post. I'll see you in a month
You didn't say which coven, so they can't really ban you for simply saying 'I'm a witch and I'm in a coven'.
 
My pal just made a new account but for some reason she can't speak to you. I have been banned for a month by my coven for revealing I'm in a coven on this post. I'll see you in a month

Look after yourself, and maybe don't get mixed up with people who have that kind of control over your life.
 
I'm back the coven leader was snooping over my shoulder. Nosey cow. She let me off early because I'm the only one that's been going outside to bring up the Moon and Sun and bring them down at set outside in the snow, ice and cold, whilst they've been doing it all inside like wimps. Also are ceremonial pond froze over so I had to deal with that. Argued with her for days. I'm already in trouble for something else in the past so I had kind of listen to her. But she's been impressed with how I've been baring against the cold only wearing my cloak. She has agreed to let me talk about me being in a Coven. But I can't name other people ,Coven name, or where it is and the type of magic we practice.
 
Like Bob Anton Wilson, as he wrote in "The New Inquisition" and elsewhere - I wonder a bit, especially in the early morning hours when sleep, for whatever reason, eludes me. And one of the things I sometimes wonder about is whether H.P.Lovecraft's avowed scepticism of all things occult and mystical was in fact a conscious defence mechanism against the subconscious images of cosmic horror, of Cthulhu and Azathoth and Nyarlathotep and the rest, that assailed him in dreams and became the subjects of his stories - or is this just altogether too Freudian?

And then again, did these cosmic denizens simply find it relatively easier to manifest themselves through the mind of an obscure New England recluse who wrote weird stories and claimed to be a sceptic, rather than, say, that of someone with a more fundamentalist religious mindset, whose closed mind would have presented much more formidable obstacles?

Or is my wondering becoming just altogether too mystical? Not to say convoluted . . . . . ?
 
And then again, did these cosmic denizens simply find it relatively easier to manifest themselves through the mind of an obscure New England recluse who wrote weird stories and claimed to be a sceptic, rather than, say, that of someone with a more fundamentalist religious mindset, whose closed mind would have presented much more formidable obstacles?

I honestly think Lovecraft just had a talent for building on other things. The more you read in general, the more you find his roots, or if not those works themselves, material that includes things he also used and that was in books at his time. Add in the stuff that's "what if I was xenophobic, but scifi" and a taste for mixing genre flavors and you have him.
If you read Myths and Legends of our Own Land, by Skinner, you find the story that would become the Shunned House (it's "The Green Picture)-- with some sciencey stuff and other historical detail added in the mix.
Recently I was reading Songs of the Russian People, by Ralston, dated 1872, and ran into the idea of birds carrying away someone's soul after death, plus the idea of witches/wizards going up into the hills to sacrifice to their (folklorically nonspecific) powers-that-be. That shows up in Dunwich Horror and them being in such close context in the book is curious.
(Also note that the first author seems like a git personally and the second is from a point where .. the academic concept of the origins of eurasian people is, I think, not correct-- but such is history reading and I don't suppose that's out of place for lovecraft either)
 
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