Nomad Codes

his post was “not a satirical article,” Ryan then described specific Lovecraftian rites he had developed, including this “Rite of Cthulhu”:
    a. Chanting. The use of the “Cthulhu chant” to create a concentrative or meditative state of consciousness that forms the basis of much later magickal work.
    b. Dream work. Specific techniques of controlled dreaming that are used to establish contact with Cthulhu.
    c. Abandonment. Specific techniques to free oneself from culturally conditioned reality tunnels.
    Ryan goes on to say that he’s experimented with most of his rites “with fairly good success.”
    In coming to terms with the magical power embedded in Lovecraft, one quickly encounters a fundamental irony: the cold skepticism of
    Lovecraft himself. In his letters, Lovecraft poked fun at his own tales, claiming he wrote them for cash and playfully naming his friends after his monsters. While such attitudes in no way diminish the imaginative power of Lovecraft’s tales—which arguably lie outside the control and intention of their author—they do pose a problem for the working occultist seeking to establish Lovecraft’s magical authority.
    The most obvious, and least fruitful, answer is to find authentic magic in Lovecraft’s biography. Lovecraft’s father was a traveling salesman who died in a madhouse when Lovecraft was eight, and vague rumors that he was an initiate in some Masonic order or other were exploited in the Necronomicon cobbled together by George Hay, Colin Wilson, and Robert Turner. Others have tried to track Lovecraft’s occult know-how, especially his familiarity with Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. In an Internet document relating the history of the “real” Necronomicon , Colin Low argues, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that Crowley befriended Sonia Greene in New York a few years before the woman married Lovecraft. As proof of Crowley’s indirect influence on Lovecraft, Low sites this intriguing passage from “The Call of Cthulhu”:
    That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. [9]
    Going out on a limb, Low claims this passage is a mangled reflection of Crowley’s teachings on the new Aeon and The Book of the Law . In an article in Societé , Robert North also states that Lovecraft referred to “A.C.” in a letter, and that Crowley was mentioned in Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber , a novel Lovecraft discussed in his Supernatural Horror in Literature . But so what? Lovecraft was a fanatical and imaginative reader, and many such folks are drawn to the semiotic exotica of esoteric lore regardless of any beliefs in or experiences of the paranormal. From The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and elsewhere, it’s clear that Lovecraft knew the basic outlines of the occult. But these influences pale next to Vathek , Poe, or Lord Dunsany.
    Desperate to assimilate Lovecraft into a tradition, some occultists enter into explanations of mystical influence by disincarnate beings. North gives this Invisible College idea a shamanic twist, asserting that prehistoric Atlantian tribes who survived the flood exercised telepathic influence on people like John Dee, Blavatsky, and Lovecraft. But none of these Lovecraft hierophants can match the delirious splendor of Kenneth Grant. In The Magical Revival , Grant points out more curious similarities between Lovecraft and Crowley: both refer to “Great Old Ones” and “Cold Wastes” (of Kadath and Hadith, respectively); the entity “Yog-Sothoth” rhymes with “Set-Thoth,” and Al Azif: The Book of the Arab resembles Crowley’s Liber Al vel Legis: The Book of the Law . In Nightside of Eden , Grant maps Lovecraft’s pantheon onto a darkside Tree of Life, comparing the mangled “iridescent globes” that occasionally pop up in Lovecraft’s tales with the shattered sefirot known as the Qlipoth. Grant concludes that Lovecraft had “direct and conscious experience of the inner planes,” the same zones Crowley prowled, and that