Lovecraft’s Magick Realism

H.P. Lovecraft claimed to be a total materialist, so how did his stories become so involved with the realms of the esoteric and magical?

Eric Davis, in an essay titled “Calling Cthulhu,” writes,

This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact that Lovecraft himself was a “mechanistic materialist” philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind. Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of many curious problems raised by the apparent power of Lovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp visions “work”? What constitutes the “authentic” occult? How does magic relate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope to show, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and coherent “reading” set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft’s own texts, a set of thematic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies that constitute what I call Lovecraft’s Magick Realism.

Speaking of new Lovecraftian visions, I finally saw The Call of Cthulhu, a retro-silent movie released in 2005.  The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has more, much more, unspeakably more.

The Lovecraft cult has even reached the shooting sports: “Bullets over Arkham.”

 

Gallimaufry with Graphs

• The writing process, graphed, from Boing Boing.

• The “great conversation” lives on: University students discovering ideas that their so-called teachers kept from them because they were not “relevant” or something.

•  Why did Borders crash? Here is one view. Too much space given to music. for one thing, says the writer.

• Support for a “gap year” before university grows in the U.S. I could have used one.

Photographic Evidence . . .

. . . that Gerald Gardner did not invent Wicca in the early 1950s.

Or not.

But it is one of a series of “50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos.”

Number 2 looks like some kind of fertility ritual to me.

 

Another Bright Idea Not Working

FedEx “Office Print Online” sounds like a great idea for work-at-home types like me. But if it won’t work in Los Angeles, I hold out no hope for southern Colorado.

The follow-up customer (dis)service is equally bad.

No doubt FedEx is promoting this as a wonderful time-saver for the self-employed.

TSA Fires Wiccan

Another strike against the so-called Transportation Safety Administration’s general bureaucratic ineptitude. Add religious discrimination to their list of ugly attitudes.

Judge: Let’s take the witchcraft out of it. If someone complains to you, he’s Jewish, and refers to a stereotype about his Judaism, go to mediation and work it out? Is that management’s response to that?

Lloyd: No. That would not be management’s response to that.

Judge: OK. But witchcraft takes it into a different thing? I guess. I guess witchcraft and Judaism are different in the sense that — what?

Lloyd: To be perfectly honest, sir, at the time, I wasn’t even — I didn’t know anything about witchcraft or Wiccanism. … I wasn’t even aware that Wiccanism was a recognized religion at the time. I had to research it afterwards.

Old Underground Doings in Tennessee

In cave-riddled Tennessee, archaeologists are discovering more and more ancient art, mostly from the High Mississippian culture (roughly coeval with the European Middle Ages) but some much, much older.

Just to whet your interest, here are a few paragraphs from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “America’s Ancient Cave Art.”

The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the Eastern part of North America around 1200 A.D. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spooky­-eyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity.

•••

High Mississippian culture fell apart just before the Spanish reached Florida, not just after as you’d expect, given the diseases and the massacres—it’s a riddle of American archaeology.

•••

A good archaeologist, Russ Townsend—he’s now the “tribal historic preservation officer” for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Townsend has worked with Jan on plenty of projects, but he has never gone into the caves. I asked him about it. “The Cherokee interpretation is that caves are not to be entered into lightly,” he said, “that these must have been bad people to go that deep. That’s where they took bad people to leave them. So they can lie on rock and not on the ground. It makes a lot of Cherokee uneasy. The lower world is where everything is mixed up and chaotic and bad. You wouldn’t want to go to that place, where the connection between our world and the otherworld is that tenuous.”

•••

It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffee-­table books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird—its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.

Read the whole thing here.

First, Learn to Talk like a Professor …

If you liked this, you will like Office Hours, “a humor website about academia through the eyes of an adjunct.” Bonus:  actual human actors.

Here is Season Two, Episode One, but maybe you will want to start at the beginning.

 

Among the Writer’s Style Books

The AP Stylebook, the holy book of the American journalist, is making some changes, such as now specifying “email” instead of “e-mail.”

In my journalist days, I used to tell people that I had it memorized, but now I have moved on.

Since entering academic journal and book editing, I have embraced the true path of the Chicago Manual of Style—the Torah, nay, the Urantia Book of style books.

And if there is any question that it does not answer, its editors will issue a fatwa to the seeker after truth.

I have received one, and I felt blessed.

Still, in deference to the AP and just to keep my hand in, expect to see “website” instead of “Web site” here in the future.

This is Civic Nature Religion

Deep in Mother Earth, an important ritual takes place.

Don’t tell the wrong people that we might count it as “nature religion.”

Gallimaufry at Ostara

• Star Foster’s Pagan song list for Ostara—with videos!

• St. Patrick’s Day has passed, with all these Pagans saying “Not us, we’re the snakes,” etc. Sannion has a different take: Patrick as Dionysos (Or Fun with Iconography).

• I need to prune apple trees. Peg Aloi has some links.

• If you are really watching the calendar, then the spring equinox occurs just before midnight Sunday, Greenwich time.