Nomad Codes

unambiguously Satanic figure. These figures eventually invade the real space of Gilman’s curiously angled room. But Gilman is also a student of quantum physics, Riemann spaces, and non-Euclidian mathematics, and his dreams are almost psychedelic manifestations of his abstract knowledge. Within these “abysses whose material and gravitational properties ... he could not even begin to explain,” an “indescribably angled” realm of “prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings,” Gilman keeps encountering a small polyhedron and a mass of “prolately spheroidal bubbles.” By the end of the tale that he realizes that these are none other than Keziah and her familiar spirit, classic demonic clichés translated into the most alien dimension of speculative science: hyperspace.
    These days, one finds the motif of hyperspace in science fiction, pop cosmology, computer interface design, channeled UFO prophecies, and the neo-shamanism of today’s high-octane psychedelic travelers—all discourses that feed contemporary Chaos magic. The term itself was most likely coined by the science fiction writer John W. Campbell Jr. in 1931, though its origins as a concept lie in nineteenth-century mathematical explorations of the fourth dimension. In many ways, however, Lovecraft was the concept’s first mythographer. From the perspective of hyperspace, our normal, three-dimensional spaces are exhausted and insufficient constructs. But our incapacity to vividly imagine this new dimension in humanist terms creates a crisis of representation, a crisis that for Lovecraft calls up our most ancient fears of the unknown. “All the objects ... were totally beyond description or even comprehension,” Lovecraft writes of Gilman’s seething nightmare before paradoxically proceeding to describe these horrible objects.
    Lovecraft has a habit of labeling his horrors “indescribable,” “nameless,” “unseen,” “unutterable,” “unknown,” and “formless.” Though superficially weak, this move can also be seen a kind of macabre via negativa . Like the apophatic oppositions of negative theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysus or St. John of the Cross, Lovecraft marks the limits of language, limits which paradoxically point to the Beyond. For the mystics, this ultimate is the ineffable One, Pseudo-Dionysus’s “superluminous gloom” or the Ain Soph of the Kabbalists. But there is no unity in Lovecraft’s Beyond. It is the omnivorous Outside, the screaming multiplicity of cosmic hyperspace opened up by reason.
    For Lovecraft, scientific materialism is the ultimate Faustian bargain, not because it hands us Promethean technology—a man for the eighteenth century, Lovecraft had no interest in gadgetry—but because it leads us beyond the horizon of what our minds can withstand. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” goes the famous opening line of “The Call of Cthulhu.” By correlating those contents, empiricism opens up “terrifying vistas of reality”—what Lovecraft elsewhere calls “the blind cosmos [that] grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.” [7]
    Lovecraft gave this existentialist dread an imaginative voice, what he called “cosmic alienage.” For Fritz Leiber, the “monstrous nuclear chaos” of Azathoth, Lovecraft’s supreme entity, symbolizes “the purposeless, mindless, yet all-powerful universe of materialistic belief.” But this symbolism isn’t the whole story. For as DMT voyagers come to suspect, hyperspace is haunted. The entities that erupt from Lovecraft’s inhuman realms seem to suggest that in a blind mechanistic cosmos, the most alien thing is sentience itself. Peering outward through the cracks of domesticated “human” consciousness, a compassionless materialist like Lovecraft could only react with horror, for reason must cower before the most raw and atavistic dream-dragons of the psyche.
    Modern humans usually suppress, ignore, or constrain these forces lurking in our lizard brain. Mythically, such forces take the form of demons imprisoned under the angelic yokes of altruism, morality, and intellect. Yet if one does not believe in any ultimate universal purpose, then these primal forces are the most attuned with