Thoughts on H. P. Lovecraft, Part 3

By Yael Dragwyla, a.k.a. Furshlugginer492

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[Continued from "Thoughts on H. P. Lovecraft, Part 2"]

With that discovery, a massive paradigm shift began which, in a relatively short span of time, revolutionized the human understanding of the nature and causes of disease and thus the possibilities for its cure. From the early 20th Century on, as more and more powerful antibiotics were discovered and added to the medical arsenals aimed at disease microbes and other parasites, humanity became more and more confident of its ability to deal with just about any form of illness that might come along. Sometimes, in cases of non-infectious degenerative diseases such as arthritis and cancer, this confidence was found to be misplaced, but even so, gradually a tremendous battery of effective pharmaceutical remedies against infectious illnesses was created, until it seemed that the day when no one would ever again die from such an illness was soon to come.

Hubris inevitably evokes nemesis. Over the past twenty years it has become abundantly clear that that such confidence was not only misplaced, but actually counterproductive, for it inspired more and more overuse and misplaced use of antibiotics, antiseptics, and other drugs against microbial infections, which in turn produced more and more strains of egregiously drug-resistant microbes. Antibiotics were even used against viruses, which are not susceptible to them, and as a result harmless or even benign bacteria within the bodies of those taking tetracycline for viral infections began to mutate into forms not only resistant to such drugs, but dangerous to their host. The situation has become so desperate, now that we are discovering strains of various deadly microbes such as virulent TB and staphylococcus which no antibiotic we know of can even touch, that researchers are finally beginning to look in new directions for ways to handle infectious disease, such as ingestion of solutions of colloidal silver, hyperoxygenation of the body, mega-doses of vitamin C, and other alternative remedies. Our medical models have turned out to be fallible, often dangerously so, and so we must now find new ways of understanding and treating disease if we are to be able to avoid returning to a time when a stubbed toe or a prick from a rusty nail could mean a death-sentence and death in a horrible form.

So why not try to communicate with the microbes within our bodies, see if we can't establish some sort of *modus vivendi* with them by which we and they can coexist without damaging one another in some terrible way? After all, Western humanity is finally recovering the ecological understanding that if we do not learn to live in some sort of peaceful coexistence with our world, we will end up doing ourselves in as a result of destroying the very world upon which we depend for our continued existence. Microbes are a part of that world, and it may be that our ancient ancestors, like many "primitive" cultures that still exist today, really had something with their herbal, homeopathic, and other non-confrontational therapies for disease, including various religious, shamanistic, and Magickal ceremonies. They survived - they survived very well. So their medical technologies must have worked, at least well enough to ensure that there would be enough fertile people in each generation to produce the following one, and so on down through the centuries and the millennia. Thus those technologies, including the psychospiritual ones, were developed and retained because of their proven worth, and we would be idiots not to investigate them to learn whether they might have useful application today. Above all, those "primitives" believed that everything that lived was, in its way, sentient and sapient, and could be communicated with, and successfully reasoned with, by the use of the proper techniques. They did not strive to wipe out the non-human organisms with which they shared their world (though as human populations increased in size and range, over-hunting of their ranges and successful elimination of individual predators by human beings, not to mention the impact on local wildlife of diseases carried in by the dogs and other commensals of human populations new to the area, gradually made such drastic inroads on those other organisms that in many places they died out). They knew that their continued existence depended upon continuation of the health of the ecosystems in which they lived, and they modified their behavior accordingly. So why not try this approach with microbes? To be sure, sometimes the only way you can really communicate something to somebody is with a good hit upside the head with a 2" x 4", and that may well be the case with many microbes with which we have crossed paths (and swords). But there may be many cases in which microbes may be inclined to be reasonable about things, and in such cases, communicating with them might be the first step toward preventing diseases that otherwise might be caused by them. Possibly in that idea, or one related to it, will be found the germ of an appropriate redemption and fulfillment of the work Lovecraft began but wasn't able to finish in his lifetime. Lovecraft was a Leo, ruled by the Sun. According to theoretical astrology, the physical characteristics of the Lights (Sun and Moon) and Planets are supposed to be reflected in the people and things they rule. As it happens, the main portion of the Sun, everything below His photosphere, is so dense and massive that light can't escape from it. I.e., below the photosphere, the Sun is black. This is the reason that the hearts of sunspots look black: they are electromagnetic vortices or tornadoes in the Sun's photosphere that have roots all the way down to levels below the photosphere, from whence little light emanates compared to the photosphere itself. So while the lower levels of the Sun produce the energy which eventually, after migrating up to the photosphere, expresses itself in the form of light, they do not themselves give off light as such - they are dark, or would seem so to our eyes, if the photosphere were stripped away. At the conclusion of the Eleusinian Mysteries, initiates were told: "Osiris is a dark God!" Osiris is a God of Light and Life, but He is also Lord of the Dead, and His heart is dark. Lovecraft, so loved by his inner circle and followers, so kind and generous-hearted, was nonetheless the author of the darkest, bleakest stories ever conceived by human beings, and his philosophy of reality was just as bleak. If Lovecraft had patron Gods, They must have included both Apollo/Ra and Hades/Osiris. Of course, Hermes/Djehuti is the Patron of all writers, and being the Psychopompos, He would also have had special jurisdiction over Lovecraft. And if Leo rules love, then Eros, the God of Love, more ancient than all other Gods save, perhaps, Hermes, would also have been his Patron. From which we may conclude that the heart of darkness may be love - but darkness is the heart of love itself. (*Nota bene*: according to the Greek myths, Eros is, on the one hand, the son of Aphrodite, and, on the other, first of the Gods. According to Robert Graves, in Section 15 of his 2-volume work, *The Greek Myths* \[Pelican Books, 1960; Volume I, pp. 58-59\], some philosophers argued that Eros, hatched from the World Egg, was first of the Gods since, without Him, none of the others could have come into being. They made Him equal with Mother Earth and Tartaros, and deny that He had any father or mother. But others believed that He was the son of Aphrodite either by Hermes, or Ares, or Her own father, Zeus, and still others that He was the son of Iris \[the spirit of the Rainbow, the feminine counterpart of Hermes\] by the West Wind.) To equate Lovecraft, the supposedly sexless celibate whose one attempt at marriage was a dismal failure, with Eros, God of Love, at first glance may seem ludicrous. However, as originally conceived, Eros isn't at all the sweet, childish little imp Cupid of Victorian conceits or today's Valentine's Day cards. He is among the very first and most powerful of even the Elder Gods, fearsome and terrible, for none can stand before His power. He raises commoners to the stature of kings - and reduces empires to charred rubble. He is the essence and core of Life itself, the instrument and spirit of its Will to continue, world without end, amen. Part of the ancient triumvirate which includes Himself as well as Anteros, or Response to Eros, the ancient original of which Ares/Mars is a but latecomer avatar, and Thanatos, Lord of Death, he helps ensure Life's continuance regardless of the cost to individual organisms and even whole biological taxa. By His Will all things are called to join in the Dance of Life, whether they want to or not, whether they profit from it or not, whether they understand why or not. He uses us up in Life's service, then gives us over when we are no longer useful to Life in our present forms to be recycled by His partner Thanatos into new forms more useful to Life. He doesn't give a damn about fairness or justice or anything else beyond perpetuating Life in whatever form. Art, science, sentience itself - all our most cherished pursuits and characteristics are just Life's tools, and if they get in the way of the job of keeping Life going, Eros and His partners Anteros and Thanatos will happily obliterate them if doing so has a chance of doing Their jobs. What could be more fearsome than that, especially to members of a culture that sees Life and its basic issues as peripheral to their own precious egos and major concerns, rather than viewing their lives and concerns and activities as aspects of Life's business, and perhaps not very important aspects of it, at that? Aleister Crowley - remember him? - in *Liber Al* gave this formula for the new Aeon of Horus/Aquarius: "Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under Will." Perhaps Crowley was the Will of the Aeon, and Lovecraft the Love. There is something almost Arthurian about Lovecraft. I don't mean anything as stupid as his being a reincarnation of King Arthur or any of the rest of the Tolkien/New Age/Arthurian nonsense that a lot of people have gotten into from the 1970s on. Rather, Lovecraft's inner circle of correspondents and his followers all looked upon him in much the same way that, in Bill Forstchen's *Lost Regiment* series of novels, Andrew Keane's soldiers look on him: as someone they couldn't bear to let down, someone they'd follow to the ends of the earth, the true human Alpha Male who leads by dint of the love his followers have for him rather than through the use of force. Maybe the beginning of every new age is characterized by just such a leader, who, by sheer force of personality and his impact on archetypal instinctive reactions of others to that personality, manages to put his stamp on countless generations to come. Sometimes that stamp includes his genes, but that isn't so important. It's the reactions of others to him at the time that somehow shapes the world for centuries, even millennia onward. When Mallory wrote his Arthurian cycle, he was really writing about the heart and soul of the Middle Ages and the Age of Chivalry, and the fact that the historical Arthur had lived and died hundreds of years before that time meant very little, in that context. Similarly, when I write about Lovecraft, in a very real way I'm writing about the Zeitgeist of the 20th Century and whatever comes of it for our species and planet. The curious thing here is that Lovecraft seems so unlikely a candidate for the position of Alpha Male of the New Aeon, at least on the surface. His natal horoscope, his fiction, and his impact on the lives of everyone he touched, directly or indirectly, do support the idea that he did indeed fill that role in history, at least on an esoteric plane, but the man himself in life seemed to be anything but. (But then, what did Jesus really look like, act like in real life, as opposed to his historical impact? -- Which leads to the sort of idea that only a New Ager idiot would take seriously: Was Lovecraft the Second Coming? But if God has a sense of humor, it would have been Anton Szandor LaVey who was Jesus come again, and if God doesn't have a sense of humor it's all up with us, anyway, so we don't have to go down that particular pot-holed mental road . . . <G>) . . . in his natal chart, the benefic fixed stars Spica and Arcturus are conjunct his Moon and Uranus in Libra in his First House, which would make him (according to the theory) a most benefic being to be around. Second, the ruler of his Fifth House, Uranus, is in his First House. Among other things, Uranus rules kinky sex, while the 5th House rules sex for pleasure, including kinky sex, and with the ruler of the 5th in his 1st, it would make him extremely sexy. This seems way off the mark for Love-craft, considering how sexless he was supposed to be. And yet . . . there is all that horrendous energy from the close conjunction of Pluto with Neptune in Gemini in his 8th House - the House of sex for reproduction, Magick (Tantra), and sexual bonding beyond life. The conjunction trines Venus, Who closely conjoins his Ascendant, but from the 12th House rather than the 1st, and also rules his Ascendant, which is in Libra, and thus he himself. So his nature was love - but in a hidden form. And that love was backed up by enormous sexual and Kundalini energy coming from the Neptune/Pluto con-junction in his 8th House. Because the conjunction was in Gemini, which rules the written word, the energy was expressed mainly in his writing - but not overtly, thanks to the fact that Venus was in his 12th House (She is also the ruler of Taurus, the Sign on his 8th-House cusp). The energy is there in his writing, but is not couched in sexual terms. Rather, it evokes horror and terror from the reader, as well as a sense of being in a dream - which themselves are calculated to call up Kundalini energy from the reader. This is a man who inseminated generations all over the world with visions of a uni-verse not restricted by any of our notions of what ought to be, what should be, even what can be, a universe most of which is so utterly alien to us it is nearly inconceivable. His sexuality wasn't physical - it didn't need to be. His spirit will go forth in us all as long as any descendants of Terra still exist, anywhere in the universe, and what is sex but an ecstatic reaching for the future by whatever means are possible? And what is ecstasy, even that of horror, but a sureness and a certainty that in such reaching one is accomplishing that for which one was truly made? This man, who would have been so shocked at any such interpretation of his work, at least consciously, who avoided sex for most of his life, is one of the sexiest men who ever lived, in the most primordial senses of the word. How could a man be so powerfully sexual, without expressing it physically? The only dependable clue we have - and I don't count Freudian interpretations, because they aren't worth a damn - is his natal chart, and even that leaves us with far more questions than answers. People are more than they ever seem to be on the Outer Planes. But Lovecraft seems to be far more and far larger than anyone else I know of on the Inner Planes, with a few probable exceptions. - As I write this I can feel the world changing out there, on an astral or psychic level, into one with fewer people, more open space, less tame. Physically, it's still Seattle out there, thronged with people. Astrally -- I am getting a wind from another world, perhaps, or maybe from what this one really is underneath the veil of appearances. The way the American West was before the stampede of white settlers from the East got underway, maybe. Lovecraft was deeply in tune with the spirit of the land that comprised New England, the way it was before, say, the 18th century, and maybe long, long before that. Was he, perhaps, also in tune with this continent as a whole? Did the tension so evident in his work come from a conflict between his outer self, consciously a white New Englander of genteel background, and some profound, unconscious inner core of himself that was one with the living land of this continent? I wrote an essay some years ago about Kali and the birth of the Dekkan Traps, formations in India that came into being as the result of vast outwellings of lava that went on for a long, long time as, possibly, a reaction to the impact of a gigantic asteroid near the Yucatan peninsula on this continent, half a world away, some 65 million years ago, the one that ended the Cretaceous. Certainly the Earth must have rung like a bell for a long, long time afterward. Even now, however damped it may be after all this time, echoes of that enormous blow must still reverberate through the bedrock of this continent. Every continent has its song; each continental plate has a huge keel that trawls through the underlying plastic material of the Earth’s mantle, and every stirring in that mantle impacts on that keel like a bow strumming the strings of a violin, or the fingers of a pianist hitting the keys of a piano. The shape of every continent is different, thus its song is different from that of any other, just as the shape of a musical instrument’s sound-box makes a tremendous difference as to the quality of the music that comes from it. Every part of a continent has its own song, too, for the same reasons, overtones overlaid on the primary continental melody. We all live in the midst of subliminal music, the music of the rocks, the Earth below: 

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Never forget: beneath your feet,

beneath the rose, below the wheat,

beyond the bastioned granite floor,

lies the ultimate, molten core.

The tides of fire, locked in sleep,

a vigil down the aeons keep.

Across the whirling gulfs of space

the elements of motion race.

The aeons burn; the cycles ebb;

the stenciled stars retrace their web.

Never forget: in the heart of earth

Still licks the fire that brought its birth.

Our calendar of iron and flame

invokes the time without a name,

the days of fire, the final men,

the molten core made whole again.

 \-- “Heart of Earth,” by Joseph Payne Brennan 

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Did Lovecraft hear the song of New England’s bedrock, perhaps even that of our continent as a whole, more consciously than most of us ever do? Is that the subliminal musical background informing all his fiction with tenebrous, minor-keyed accompaniments to despair, and crashing discords framing the death of worlds? Music is a right-brained phenomenon, the primordial language of the emotions. In his quotidian, mundane life, Lovecraft was very much a left-brained man, logical, reserved, aloof, almost cold. But his fiction burns with the bright primordial fires and darkly toxic smoke of the birth and death of worlds and species, the opening of doors upon utterly alien universes, unholy marriages of mortal human flesh and soul with utterly unearthly alien spirit. Sunsets bright as the fires of Hell, mornings dark as the end of time fill his work, and all the unshed tears and screams of humanity from its beginnings to its end glitter and ring throughout it. A writer’s soul is laid naked for the world to see in his best writing - and Lovecraft’s soul was nothing like the staid, stuffy scholar that he seemed to be to most of the world. The endless sorrow and loneliness and terror and beauty of his work bespeaks a soul ranging far throughout the Inner Planes, the Underworld - and so alone, always alone, save for a few lonely Outsiders like himself, and the night-gaunts and other horrors that infest our nightmares. One is tempted to ask what could have made such a horrendous split in him? But maybe it isn’t a split at all. Maybe he deliberately constructed a mask for the world to see, letting only his readers see what was behind it, for reasons that were most appropriate. Or maybe there *was* a split - but maybe not something caused by the sort of thing that parlor psychoanalysts are so prone to come up with. Maybe he suffered from some childhood illness with a high fever, or an injury, or something else of which we have been left no record. At any rate, there is something almost . . . holy about Lovecraft’s work, about the spirit that is revealed through it, and attempting to psychoanalyze that would be as sacrilegious as performing taxidermy on a dead angel, or bulldozing the Parthenon to put in a housing development. This was a true priest of Hades and Persephone, of Pele and Kanaloa. The tremendous charge of Kundalini energy in his work befits the marriages of such a God and such a Goddess - and perhaps therein lies a seed of a true *Purgatorio* and *Paradiso* to complete the *Inferno* begun by his life-work: for whereas Hades receives the newly-dead, and is Lord over the dead, Persephone, His wife, is the one who leads them to Lethe, to forget what has gone before, then hand them over to Hermes to lead back to the light and a rebirth in flesh in a new incarnation. So it is the pomegranates of Persephone that may give birth to fulfillment of the work begun by Lovecraft - not only literarily, but in the form of a literal road to the stars. 

[Continued in "H. P. Lovecreaft, Part 4"]

Submitted September 03, 2019 at 10:44PM by Furshlugginer492 https://ift.tt/2ZHZXvL