Nomad Codes

Typhonian O.T.O. and the Temple of Set’s Order of the Trapezoid, magical sects that tap the Cthulhu current have included the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the Bate Cabal, Michael Bertiaux’s Lovecraftian Coven, and a Starry Wisdom group in Florida, named after the nineteenth-century sect featured in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” Solo Chaos mages fill out the ranks, cobbling together Lovecraftian arcana on the Internet or freely sampling the mythos in their chthonic, open-ended (anti-) workings.
    This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact that Lovecraft himself was a “mechanistic materialist” philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind. Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of many curious problems raised by the apparent power of Lovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp visions work? What constitutes the authentic occult? How does magic relate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope to show, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and coherent interpretation set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft’s own writings, a set of thematic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies which constitute what I call Lovecraft’s magick realism.
    Magical realism already denotes a strain of Latin American fiction—exemplified by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende—in which a fantastic dreamlike logic melds seamlessly and delightfully with the rhythms of the everyday. Lovecraft’s magick realism depicts a more convulsive eruption, as ancient and amoral forces violently puncture the realistic surface of his tales. Throughout his work, Lovecraft constructs and then collapses a number of powerful polarities—between realism and fantasy, book and dream, reason and its chaotic Other. By playing out these tensions in his writing, Lovecraft also reflects the transformations that darkside occultism has undergone as it confronts modern thought in such forms as psychology, quantum physics, and the existential groundlessness of being. And by embedding all this in an unusually original mythos, he draws the reader into the chaos that lies “between the worlds” of magick and reality.

THE HORROR OF REASON

    Lovecraft largely abandoned the religious underpinnings of the classic supernatural tale, turning instead towards science to provide frameworks for horror. Calling Lovecraft the “Copernicus of the horror tale,” the fantasy writer Fritz Leiber Jr. wrote that Lovecraft was the first fantasist who “firmly attached the emotion of spectral dread to such concepts as outer space, the rim of the cosmos, alien beings, unsuspected dimensions, and the conceivable universes lying outside our own space-time continuum.” [5] As Lovecraft himself put it in a letter, “The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming s upplements rather than contradictions of the visible and measurable universe.” [6]
    For Lovecraft, it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but reason with its eyes agog. By fusing cutting-edge science with archaic material, Lovecraft creates a twisted materialism in which scientific breakthroughs returns us to the untamed abyss, and hard-nosed research revives the factual basis of forgotten and discarded myths. Hence Lovecraft’s obsession with archeology; the digs which unearth alien artifacts and bizarrely angled cities are simultaneously historical and imaginal. In 1930 story “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Lovecraft identifies the planet Yuggoth (from which the fungoid Mi-Go launch their clandestine invasions of Earth) with the newly discovered planet called Pluto. To the 1930’s reader—probably the kind of person who would thrill to popular accounts of C.W. Tombaugh’s discovery of the “ninth planet” that very year—this factual reference opens up Lovecraft’s fiction into a real world that is itself opening up to the limitless cosmos.
    Lovecraft’s most self-conscious, if somewhat strained, fusion of occult folklore and weird science occurs in the 1932 story “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” The demonic characters that the folklorist Walter Gilman first glimpses in his nightmares are stock ghoulies: the evil witch crone Keziah Mason, her familiar spirit Brown Jenkin, and a Black Man who is perhaps Lovecraft’s most