Nomad Codes

wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a things was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!” [13]
    In his electronically circulated text “Kathulu Majik: Luvkrafting the Roles of Modern Uccultizm,” Tyagi Nagasiva, writing under the name Haramullah, argues that most Western magic is ossified and dualistic, heavily weighted towards the forces of order, hierarchy, moralizing, and structured language. “Without the destabilizing force of Kaos, we would stagnate intellectually, psychologically and otherwise ... Kathulu provides a necessary instability to combat the stolid and fixed methods of the structured ‘Ordurs’ ... One may become balanced through exposure to Kathulu” (Tyagi’s “mis-spellings” show the influence of Genesis P-Orridge’s Temple ov Psychick Youth). Haramullah criticizes black magicians who simply reverse “Ordur” with “Kaos,” rather than bringing this underlying polarity into balance (a dualistic error he also finds in Lovecraft). Showing strong Taoist and Buddhist influences, Haramullah calls instead for a “Midul Path” that magically navigates between structure and disintegration, will and void. “The idea that one may progress linearly along the MP [Midul Path] is mistaken. One becomes, one does not progress. One attunes, one does not forge. One allows, one does not make.”
    In the Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magic , the anonymous author of “Return of the Elder Gods” presents a more evolutionary reason for Lovecraftian magic. The author accepts the scenario of an approaching world crisis brought on by the invasion of the Elder Gods—Qlipothic trans dimensional entities who ruled protohumanity until they were banished by “the agent of the Intelligence,” a Promethean figure who set humanity on its current course of evolution. We remain connected to these Elder Gods through the “Forgotten Ones,” the primal forces of hunger, sex, and violence that linger in the subterranean levels of our being. Only by magically reabsorbing the Forgotten Ones and using the subsequent energy to bootstrap higher consciousness can we keep the portal sealed against the return of the Elder Gods. Though Lovecraft’s name is never mentioned in the article, he is ever present, a skeptical materialist dreaming the dragons awake.

TRICKSTER AT THE CROSSROADS

    The gods of the Fon and Yoruba peoples of West Africa stand as some of the most vital and evocative beings ever to make their way through the souls of human beings. These orisha are profoundly living gods, constellations of images and forces that actively permeate the psychic lives of their devotees. On the simplest level they are alive because they are worshiped: to this day, the orisha are prayed to, invoked, and ritually charged by many millions of people in both Africa and the Americas. They are long-lived as well; unlike, say, the host of contemporary Neopagan deities like Brigid and Thor, which have essentially been reconstructed from the inquisitional ashes of history, the orisha have been sustained by countless generations of worshipers with little interruption.
    The orisha are also alive in the most fundamental way that we know—the way we ourselves experience life. Though West African tradition does posit a central creator god, he/she is generally quite distant, which means that the orisha are, like us, left in a world they did not create—a world of nature and culture, of war, rivers, stars, and marketplaces. So though they possess godlike powers, the orisha are not transcendent beings; rather, they are idiosyncratic personalities thoroughly bound up with ritual, practice, and the sort of exchanges that define human community. They eat, drink, fib, and sleep with each other’s mates, and are ritually “fed” with animal blood, food, and gifts. During these ceremonies the gods frequently possess the human bodies of some devotees, and their subsequent behavior reflects, in addition to whatever boons they may grant, the full range of human hungers, from sexuality to humor to intoxication.
    Depending on your view of religious ritual, this can be consternating, even bracing stuff. Even sympathetic polytheists sometimes feel aversion; as one Neopagan I know put it, “Why be interested in these grotesque and parasitic deities?” You could answer that these