Nomad Codes

She grins.“Even if you’re a fusion (mixed-race), you’re treated as one of the group. There’s no such thing as me, me, me.
    “Role playing gives me a chance to act out my fantasies. When I was a kid I used to think about being from a different planet, traveling the stars, being someone other than Danielle Thompson, this only child. I kept telling myself, these aren’t my real parents, I’m from some other planet and my real parents are going to come pick me up soon. So I developed a real fascination with space and exploration.”
    She likes working security as a Klingon because “You get to have attitude. You get to walk up to other people and tell them what to do and not explain why. And if you bump into someone you don’t have to say ‘I’m sorry’—two words we never say. It’s pure power.”
    I point to her riding crop. “Oh that? That’s just something to hold on to. When I’m doing crowd control, its just an extension of my arm. As far as domination, I don’t need this.”
    1994

CALLING CTHULHU

    H.P. Lovecraft’s Magickal Realism

    In this book it is spoken of ... Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow ...—Aleister Crowley

    Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scion of a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one of America’s most curious literary legacies. The bulk of his short stories appeared in Weird Tales , a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural. Within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasy screaming into the twentieth century, taking the genre, almost literally, into a new dimension. Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycle of stories known, somewhat problematically, as the Cthulhu Mythos. Named for a tentacled alien monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in the sunken city of R’lyeh, the mythos encompasses the cosmic career of a variety of gruesome extraterrestrial entities that include Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiot god Azathoth, who sprawls at the center of Ultimate Chaos, “encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in nameless paws.” [1] Lurking on the margins of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of Outer Gods and Great Old Ones attempt, in story after story, to invade our world through science and dream and horrid rites—and, just possibly, through the medium of pulp fiction.
    As a marginally popular writer working in the literary equivalent of the gutter, Lovecraft received no serious attention during his lifetime. But while most 1930s pulp fiction is nearly unreadable today, Lovecraft continues to attract attention. In France and Japan, his tales of cosmic fungi, degenerate cults, and seriously bad dreams are recognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise his radical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus . [2] On Anglo-American turf, a passionate cabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies and Crypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research. Meanwhile both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craft stories that elaborate the Cthulhu mythos, while fans gather at Lovecraft conventions like the NecronomiCon, named for the most famous of his forbidden grimoires. Like the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft epitomizes the cult author.
    Lovecraft fans do exhibit the unflagging devotion, fetishism, and sectarian debates that have characterized religious sects throughout the ages. But Lovecraft’s cult status has a curiously literal dimension. Many magicians and occultists have taken up his mythos as source material for their practice. Drawn from the darker regions of the esoteric counterculture—Thelema and Satanism and Chaos magic—these Lovecraftian mages actively seek to generate the terrifying and atavistic encounters that Lovecraft’s protagonists stumble into compulsively, blindly, or against their will. Secondary sources for this Lovecraftian magic include three different “fake” editions of the Necronomicon , a few rites included in Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals , and a number of works by the loopy British Thelemite Kenneth Grant. Besides Grant’s