Mythos
mgro...@hamp.hampshire.edu
hans...@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory L Hansen-1) writes:
>
>Just curious, has anyone checked Lovecraft's gods, and the mythology in
>the various Necronomicans, against the original mythology they're supposed
>to be derived from? For instance, the Babylonian Dagon doesn't seem much
>like the Lovecraftian Dagon.
There was a celtic sea god called Nodens, but I don't believe he was anything
like the HPL Nodens. Same with Dagon (a real god, nothing like the HPL great
old one.) I don't believe that there are any others; I think these are just
cases of the early HPL taking the name of a "real" deity and using it for
something he had made up.
As for the various Necronomicons, they don't have much to do with HPL's
writing. The one I've looked through (the Avon books paperback) isn't very
creative either. I _do_ like what I've seen from the H.R. Giger ones, though...
Good to have some discussion of HPL on this group again!
Matt Grossman
Hampshire College
mgro...@hamp.hampshire.edu
Gregory L Hansen-1
Gregory L Hansen
>In Article <CnsM6...@news.cis.umn.edu>
>hans...@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory L Hansen-1) writes:
>>
>>Just curious, has anyone checked Lovecraft's gods, and the mythology in
>>the various Necronomicans, against the original mythology they're supposed
>>to be derived from? For instance, the Babylonian Dagon doesn't seem much
>>like the Lovecraftian Dagon.
>
>
>There was a celtic sea god called Nodens, but I don't believe he was anything
>like the HPL Nodens. Same with Dagon (a real god, nothing like the HPL great
>old one.) I don't believe that there are any others; I think these are just
>cases of the early HPL taking the name of a "real" deity and using it for
>something he had made up.
man that appears on the horizon before a disaster, which is different
from the stalking Windigo cannibals people were talking about earlier
around here.
Tiamat comes from Sumerian mythology and Revelations. Did HPL
mention her, or am I thinking of Gygax?
>As for the various Necronomicons, they don't have much to do with HPL's
>writing. The one I've looked through (the Avon books paperback) isn't very
>creative either. I _do_ like what I've seen from the H.R. Giger ones,
>though...
I only have the mall paperback. Yesterday I went out to Dreamhaven
to pick up another one, it came out about a year ago and tries to act
more scholarly. But they were sold out.
Steve Kudlak
Lots of it was wholwe cloth and things he picked up. For example
some horror names in Lovecraft Literally mean "Enlightened One"
in Tibetan. I think he made it up as he went along. His letters
seem to indicate this. His method of getting scary was to ever so
slowly slip one out of the conventional world, til one was in some
other shocking universe. If he personally was not so xenophobic and
opposed to things like surrealism, they could have had a lot of fun.
The artistic world would still be reeling artistically.
This is still an undone project! If someone were to do it, there
would be something new under the sun. It would be wild too. Maybe
we/someone should do this. I think "the mask of anarchy is a starting
point!" I'll have to post the book ref to "Surrealism and the Occult."
Have Fun,
Sends Steve
Gregory L Hansen
>In article <CnsM6...@news.cis.umn.edu>,
>Gregory L Hansen-1 <hans...@gold.tc.umn.edu> wrote:
>>
>seem to indicate this. His method of getting scary was to ever so
>slowly slip one out of the conventional world, til one was in some
>other shocking universe. If he personally was not so xenophobic and
>opposed to things like surrealism, they could have had a lot of fun.
>The artistic world would still be reeling artistically.
>
>This is still an undone project! If someone were to do it, there
>would be something new under the sun. It would be wild too. Maybe
>we/someone should do this. I think "the mask of anarchy is a starting
>point!" I'll have to post the book ref to "Surrealism and the Occult."
I agree with everything I could understand, but I'm afraid I'm not
literarily sophisticated enough to understand the artistic implications
of surreal occultism. But it sounds interesting! Could you elaborate?
Steve Kudlak
did paintings like "The Island of the Dead" were very much symbolists.
They played with meaning image and symbols to a high degree. That
fancy "Hippy Art Noveau" font you sometimes see around was designed
by Bocklin. It is in most standard art catalogues. Bocklin dipped into
the gloomy every once in awhile. In fact may of the Giger pictures
are Homages to his ideas.
The 1890s (the fin de siecle c. 1890) was full of weird things.
Art Nouveau itself tried to take things like metal and design them
so they were like Organic Growing Things or some form of bizarre
plant-life. Picasso, with his very Brothel Painting which shocked
the world at that time, was an attempt to arrange things as a many
dimensioned image of planes. Other artists tried to do things like
design images from multiple viewpoints (perspective attempts to use
only one point to get 3-d appearance on 2-d paper). Now others tried
to both paint and sculpt from multiple viewpoints, and to otherwise
depict different dimensions.
Another curious thing was to still or control the conscious mind so
that other things would flow across. There was also interest among
surrealists of the rantings of mad-people. Ever notice how many HPL
stories are told from the point of view of people who have gone mad,
mad especially thru "dangerous" experiments. There was the view that
flashing colored lights, and electricity somehow represented magic
powers. Notice that often HPL stories have such magic devices with
weird and diverse powers.
To Buddhists, there was, if you will a great "public non-reality"
to borrow from Stephen Bayer (from the Book "The Cult of Tara") and
that lots of Buddhist Moral Theory is based on the idea that, OK
we are going to show you how to master this great "public non-reality"
(subconscious, collective unconscious, things of the mind), and once
you find out how, what can you do? Well the answer is "A Whole Lots"
especialy in the mental/emotional realm...SO if we are going to show
you this you should have a moral framework so won't freak yourself or
others out. You can deal with Tara a medium-high-power deity, with both
"fierce and frigtening aspects" but apt to be forgiving, helpful and
kind even to those who are undeserving, she gets them out of hot water
after cajoling the mere promise to reform. You can deal with the High
Protect Dieties, but you have to be muich more careful.
Now the interesting thing here is that, these entities seem to be very
close in nature to the entities that HPL had throw the nasties behind
a wall and threw away the key. But the nasties in both places can still
get out, try to get out and cause trouble. Hence finding "protective objects"
and using signs and symbols with some form of encoded power to keep away
nasty things. The curious thing is that the HPL was gloomy about the whole
thing in his works, and the Tibetan Buddhists are more cheeerful about it,
and seem to act, as if with due caution, nasty things can get kept away and
at bay. The same can be said as far as we know about the Pre-Buddhist
precursors hanging around in Tibet. Interestingly the idea of huge
cyclcopean cities, especially on high mountains watches very well the
images of many cities in Tibet/Nepal, just amplfified and made weirder.
Now meanwhile Western Occultists were playing with this too. And if you
think there is a lot of drug taking now, well there was lots then.
Various Occultists such as ole Crowley sniffed ether, where he fell
into reveries about the creature/entity he said was called LAM. Now
Crowley felt that he was charged with bringing in "The Age of Horus."
And he even wrote with and without chemical aid, The Book of The Law."
Which has in it, that famous phrase: "Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the Law, for Love is the Law, Love Under Will. Will here means
your true inner will, your true inner nature. Crowley and his descendents
especially Austin Osman Spare had many connections among surrealists.
Spare was known to Andre' Breton the founder of surrealism.
Now this connects back into the multi-dimension stuff that Lovecraft
was into (Like the "strange angles etc. in the Witch House." IN fact
one surrealist said something like:
"Primatives ...obeyed an exalted need of mysticism,
in their paintings, which caused their illumination.
They painted objects not as they saw them, they
painted them as they thought them. This is what
the cubists (editorially I add surrealists) encoded
and readopted and amplified, they did this under the
name of the Other or the Forth Dimsension."
---raynal (be careful my skills in French are not perfect)
Now Spare, was into this multi-dimesnsion and "magical transformation"
stuff too. He approached from the "Occult" side which was different.
He was into tranforming things and getting into "other dimensions"
He just attempted it with ritual, not writing as HPL or Art as the
Surrealists and friends were up too.
Now either, by reading, "being in the atmosphere" or somehow Lovecraft
seems to have picked this up. Now he used it as a literary device, in
the same way he was to have remarked: "I have my characters take Opium
Not I..."
Now artists being what they are, especially at that point attached
"magical" (in intense form "literally", in moderate form "psychologically")
powers to their objects. And they designed them for that effect. And
there is an effect. Witness how many people get influenced (scared by
horror and sleep with the Lights On after reading horror.) With their
works surrealists and artists create things to cause things to happen,
and often it is thru the ambience (best English word combo Feeling-Atmosphere)
This is interesting because when he spoke of how horror works, he proclaimed
that "It is the Atmosphere." And for this reason often his characters take
a back seat to the atmosphere that is generated for them to be in. A good
example is that people who view Lovecraft negatively, often mutter about
how his characters seem poorly developed. As an aside I throw in this is
why it is difficult for the American Movie Industry to generate good
Lovecraft work. American Film is highly based on the character. In fact
if you buy one of those "how to write a screenplay" many will say upfront,
how one must almost always right with a "bankable" star in mind. To do
Lovecraft Right you need AMBIENCE/ATMOSPHERE first, other things come second.
But for an odd number of reasons there does seem to be a connection
between the Surrealist Art World, which itself works by depositing one
into a place of "strange atmosphere" and Lovecraft. In fact much Art
to me seems to work by atmosphere, and it is for this reason I think
Lovecraft would have worked well in Surrealism.
To sum up, both Art (especially surrealist art) and Lovecraft put a
high premium on Atmosphere, and "magical objects." Had they know each
other, and had HPL not been such a recluse and a xenophobe (read his letters)
many interesting things could have come up. I have already gone on too
long and discursively, and I just hope it makes some sense to someone
else than myself. Tho at some point I should point out what projects
in Surrealism and Lovecraft Work were left unfinished, or just jotted
down as thoughts. For example building a Surrealistic-Lovecraftian
environment is one of them that could have worked well. And since both
of these things (the Mythos) and Surrealism are still open we could if
we chose to do so create new and powerful art out of it.
Knygathin
> I agree with everything I could understand, but I'm afraid I'm not
>literarily sophisticated enough to understand the artistic implications
>of surreal occultism. But it sounds interesting! Could you elaborate?
** RANDOM SPOILERS FOR EFFECT **
The best examples of this I've seen are the works of Thomas Liggoti,
which people will periodically say "He's cool, uh huh, huh, huh," on
alt.horror about, including me. His imagery and metaphors are so
bizarre and suggestive that in his best stories it's impossible to
tell who's narrating the piece (who IS the 'omnipotent third
person'?), and he's got his share of monsters and demons, but hinted
at to the point of real weirdness. In "Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech" we're
nowhere NEAR realism; the characters are archetypes named like
characters in a Samuel Beckett play, one of whom delivers long,
worrisome speeches ("..NOW I understand! You're disappointed because
it resulted in THEIR demise and not YOURS. Death is always the
answer, but who would have thought you'd be sophisticated enough to
appreciate such a point, Mr. Cheev?") "Les Fleurs" is supposedly about
carnivorous plants, but also Heaven, in a most twisted way. "The
Mystics of Muelenberg" has the ultimate breakdown into surreality-
actual physical objects collapsing into one another, melting into
formlessness, when the collective will cracks. He does his best when
he doesn't even try to be 'real', in my opinion. He's the opposite
of Stephen King who tries to turn his horror-events into the 9
o'clock news. Lovecraft just never dared to be weird enough and have
scary ideas exist for their own sake; the Dreamlands were fairly
conventional fantasy, and his regular stories have the 'science so
beefy it looks like magic' excuse.
Believe it or not, for a while another great example was in DC
comix. Grant Morrison's run of DOOM PATROL (of which the first few
issues, CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE, is available in graphic-novel
form) concerned a nonstop line of evil cults and fiendish gods
trying to reassert their power (and stopped by superheroes), but
some of them were as ludicrous as they were threatening, and he even
evoked the actual '20s art-world that created surrealism with The
Brotherhood of Dada, a group of villains dedicated to anarchy and
madness. He had the Cult of the Unwritten Book, staffed with
Barker-like deformed nepharites and are-they-undead? things, the Men
from Nowhere who served the Telephone Avatar, the Scissormen..
basically enemies acting as representatives of general strangeness
or philosophical pitfalls. Now Grant Morrison no longer does the
comic and it's lost the horror element in its weirdness, but these
original stories were great.
The basis of surrealism is, as I see it, a reliance on unconscious
metaphors for things instead of the things themselves, and a
willingness to jump into dreams at any time; if it has a certain
poetic justice that the astral form of the #3 businessman found dead
a week old in his coat appears as a mass of rolled up flesh with
coat hangers running along the bones, so be it. Thanks to Freud,
too, our 'dreams' are generally sexual and carnal, like David
Cronenberg movies, or any look at Dali's landscapes of yellow flesh
and earlobes. The juxtaposition of elements into odd combinations.
Absurdism is a semi-spin-off about the isolation of people in
modern-day society, the total arbitrariness and totalitarianism of
control by entropy or superior forces, and other stuff in which a
single individual represents millions of other alienated losers in
our society. The sado-masochism and the confinement we undergo
becomes stylized and exaggerated. Although Lovecraft doesn't really
go near either (oops! wrong newsgroup), I'd recommend looking into
them both. Don't complain to me about trying to UNDERSTAND
surrealist literature, though.
- Jason B. Thompson
Gregory L Hansen
Laurence C. Bush <lar...@kaiwan.com> wrote:
>
>At the NecronomiCon convention in Danvers, MA last summer, Dr. W.H.
>Mueller was scheduled to speak about his research that demonstrated
>the connection between the Cthulhu Mythos and Mesopotamia myth patterns.
>A German college professor, he had published considerable etymological and
>linguistic work.
>
>Dr. Mueller, as I recall, could not give his talk because of
>some personal difficulties. Hopefully he'll show up at the next
>NecronomiCon in '95.
Is there any chance you have some journal references or a book by Mueller
or other authors on the subject? I'll probably never get to a
NecronomiCon, but I'd like to read about it.
jonathan broadfield
: Dr. Mueller, as I recall, could not give his talk because of
: some personal difficulties. Hopefully he'll show up at the next
: NecronomiCon in '95.
YOU FOOL! DR. MUELLER IS _DEAD_!
: -- Laurence
--
-- \
-- starman - sta...@astro.ocis.temple.edu - *
-- \
--
ASH
>: some personal difficulties.
>YOU FOOL! DR. MUELLER IS _DEAD_!
What do _you_ call `personal difficulties?'
Ia! Slack!
Matt `Ash' Abrams
Arran Stewart
[Lots of stuff about 1890s artistic and cultural movements, and their
impact on HPL's writings, deleted for space.]
>To Buddhists, there was, if you will a great "public non-reality"
>to borrow from Stephen Bayer (from the Book "The Cult of Tara") and
>that lots of Buddhist Moral Theory is based on the idea that, OK
>we are going to show you how to master this great "public non-reality"
>(subconscious, collective unconscious, things of the mind), and once
>you find out how, what can you do?
Exactly what sort of Buddhism are you talking about? Do you mean
Buddhism as a philosophy, or Buddhism as a religion (which it became, to
many people, after the death of Gotama)? Buddhism as a philosophy has
nothing to do with "mastering" anything, be it a non-reality or
otherwise. It has to do with dissolving the attachments which a person
has to the material world, and thereby eliminating sufferinmg. This was
clearly stated by Gotama, and the Eightfold Path was the route to
acheiving them. Buddhism did not entertain the existence of a
subconscious. Its concept of the "self" was similar to that of Hinduism
at the time, and the subconscious and collective unconscious are
concepts which are alien to the beliefs of Buddhism or Hinduism. You
refer later to Tibetan Buddhism. This really is a fairly peculiar form
of Buddhism, and doesn't have much in common with any other sort.
> Well the answer is "A Whole Lots"
>especialy in the mental/emotional realm...SO if we are going to show
>you this you should have a moral framework so won't freak yourself or
>others out. You can deal with Tara a medium-high-power deity, with both
>"fierce and frigtening aspects" but apt to be forgiving, helpful and
>kind even to those who are undeserving, she gets them out of hot water
>after cajoling the mere promise to reform. You can deal with the High
>Protect Dieties, but you have to be muich more careful.
>Now the interesting thing here is that, these entities seem to be very
>close in nature to the entities that HPL had throw the nasties behind
>a wall and threw away the key.
HPLs stories do not, to my knowledge, ever mention any "good" entities
which exiled/locked up/whatever the "bad entities" in any way. Such
ideas really only appear in the stories written by August Derleth, and
show the effects of his Catholicism. His writings are (ultimately)
optimistic, because these people can rely on these "good" entities to
save them. HPL's stories don't provide any such comfort. In his
writings, mankind is lost and alone in a vast, alien universe, with
little hope of salvation.
> But the nasties in both places can still
>get out, try to get out and cause trouble. Hence finding "protective objects"
>and using signs and symbols with some form of encoded power to keep away
>nasty things. The curious thing is that the HPL was gloomy about the whole
>thing in his works, and the Tibetan Buddhists are more cheeerful about it,
>and seem to act, as if with due caution, nasty things can get kept away and
>at bay.
Just as HPL never included the idea of all-powerful "good" entities in
his work, he never mentioned many "protective objects" of the sorts
described. For instance, his stories do not include the idea that "Elder
Signs" can be used to ward off Great Old Ones. I think he mentions
"Elder Signs" in _At the Mountains of Madness_ and a couple of other
stories, but he never suggests they can be used as protection. In fact,
very few of his stories give the characters much protection at all. In _The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward_, the doctor obtained a spell with which to
return Ward's ancestor to death, but I can't think of any others. Clark
Ashton Smith and August Derleth, on the other hand, often include
"protective objects" in their writings.
> The same can be said as far as we know about the Pre-Buddhist
>precursors hanging around in Tibet. Interestingly the idea of huge
>cyclcopean cities, especially on high mountains watches very well the
>images of many cities in Tibet/Nepal, just amplfified and made weirder.
I really don't think HPL new about any such "huge cyclopean cities" in
Tibet. Nay, I will go further: I don't think any such cities exist now
or existed in historical times.
[Stuff about western occultism deleted.]
> Have Fun,
> Sends Steve
- Arran
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arran STEWART | The truth shall set your teeth free.
University of Western Australia |
zste...@tartarus.uwa.edu.au |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James Fellrath
> Tiamat comes from Sumerian mythology and Revelations. Did HPL
>mention her, or am I thinking of Gygax?
creature of evil in the Babylonian Creation epic was used as parts to create
the world and universe - it seems that one could make a case for the foul
parts of Tiamat's body being the thing that spawned such creatures as those
contained in the Cthulhu mythos.
--
|\__/| "Lady, I'm afraid I'm going to have
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