H.P. Lovecraft: aryan mystic

Homo Lupus Hominem; Man is a wolf to his kindred

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, from allegedly 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 travelled 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 civilisation’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 labouring 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 over-throwing ‘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 grand-father. 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?

JONATHAN BOWDEN

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

[WFHermans]

Or might it be seen in terms of George Steiner’s shoah drama

No.

Nyarlathotep, by H.P. Lovecraft, Aryan Esq. & Mystick

Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void...

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which showed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about imposture and static electricity, Nyarlathotep drove us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to show where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

[Zed]