Nomad Codes

the cosmos precisely because they are amoral and inhuman. In “The Dunwich Horror”, Henry Wheeler overhears a monstrous moan from a diabolical rite and asks “from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?” The Outside is within.

CHAOS CULTURE

    Lovecraft’s fiction expresses a future primitivism that finds its most intense esoteric expression in Chaos magic, an eclectic contemporary style of darkside occultism that draws from Thelema, Satanism, Austin Osman Spare, and Eastern metaphysics to construct a thoroughly contemporary magic. For today’s Chaos mages, there is no tradition. The symbols and myths of countless sects, orders, and faiths, are constructs, useful fictions, games. That magic works has nothing to do with its truth claims and everything to do with the will and experience of the magician. Recognizing the distinct possibility that we may be adrift in a meaningless mechanical cosmos within which human will and imagination are vaguely comic flukes (the “cosmic indifferentism” Lovecraft himself professed), the mage accepts his groundlessness, embracing the turbulent self-creating void that is himself.
    As we find with Lovecraft’s fictional cults and grimoires, Chaos magicians refuse the hierarchical, symbolic, and monotheist biases of traditional esotericism. Like most Chaos magicians, the British occultist Peter Carroll gravitates towards the Black, not because he desires a simple Satanic inversion of Christianity but because he seeks the amoral and shamanic core of magical experience—a core that Lovecraft conjures up with his orgies of drums, guttural chants, and screeching horns. At the same time, Chaos mages like Carroll also plumb the weird science of quantum physics, complexity theory, and electronic Prometheanism. Some darkside magicians become consumed by the primitive forces they unleash or grow addicted to the dark costume of the Satanic anti-hero. But the most sophisticated adopt a balanced mode of gnostic existentialism that calls all constructs into question while refusing the cold comforts of skeptical reason or suicidal nihilism, a pragmatic and empirical shamanism that resonates as much with Lovecraft’s hard-headed materialism as with his horrors.
    The first occultist to explore these modern mysteries was Aleister Crowley, who shattered the received vessels of occult tradition while creatively extending the dark dream of magic into the twentieth century. With his outlandish image, nefarious texts, and his famous Law of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”), Crowley called into question the esoteric certainties of revelation and lineage, and was the first magus to give occult antinomianism a decidedly Nietzschean twist. Unfettered, this occult will to power can degenerate into a heartless elitism, and the fascist and racist dimensions of both twentieth-century occultism and Lovecraft himself should not be forgotten. But this self-engendering will is more exuberantly expressed as a will to Art. In many ways, the occultism that exploded during Crowley’s time was an essentially esthetic esotericism. A good number of the nineteenth century’s more inspiring magicians were poets, painters, and writers, Symbolists and decadent Romantics who dabbled in Satanism, Rosicrucianism, and esoteric societies. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was infused with artistic pretensions, and Golden Dawn member and fantasy writer Arthur Machen was one of Lovecraft’s strongest influences.
    But it was Austin Osman Spare who most decisively dissolved the boundary between artistic and magical life. Though working independently of the Surrealists, Spare also based his art on the dark and autonomous eruptions of subconscious material, though in a more overtly theurgic context. [8] Today’s Chaos magicians are heavily influenced by Spare, and their Lovecraftian rites express his simultaneously creative and nihilistic destruction of limitations. And as the spawn of role-playing games, computers, and pop culture, they celebrate the fact that Lovecraft’s secrets are scraped from the barrel of pulp fiction.

PROOF IN THE PUDDING

    In a message cross-posted to the Internet newsgroups alt.necromicon [ sic ] and alt.satanism, Parker Ryan listed a wide variety of magical techniques described by Lovecraft, including entheogens, glossolalia, and shamanic drumming. Insisting that