{"id":732,"date":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=732"},"modified":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-05T19:48:00","slug":"unspeakable-blasphemous-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=732","title":{"rendered":"Unspeakable blasphemous horror"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/19454\">The Heroic Nerd<\/a>,&#8221; a review essay by Luc Sante in <em>The New York Review of Books<\/em>, discussing works by and about H.P. Lovecraft:<\/p>\n<p><em>He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering\u2014the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list. He evidently took pleasure in his fears, at least those on the creepy-crawly end of the spectrum, and although he really did suffer from his fear of cold, for example, this did not prevent him from exploiting that fear in a couple of stories, one of them (&#8220;At the Mountains of Madness&#8221;) his best.<\/eM><\/p>\n<p>H\/T: <a href=\"http:\/\/3quarksdaily.blogs.com\/\">3 Quarks Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From &#8220;The Heroic Nerd,&#8221; a review essay by Luc Sante in The New York Review of Books, discussing works by and about H.P. Lovecraft: He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-bO","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11466,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11466","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":0},"title":"Thelema, New York, and Esoteric Publishing: A Quick Review of &#8220;In the Center of the Fire&#8221;","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 27, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"James Wasserman, In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966\u20131989 (Lake Worth, Fla.: Ibis Press, 2012). (In the cover photo, Wasserman is in back and his business and magickal partner Bill Breeze in the foreground.) Before I found my first Wiccan coven, a friend connected me\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1377,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1377","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":1},"title":"Apollo, God of Coffeehouses","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Back when Enchant\u00e9 was a zine rather than a blog, Brightshadow did a series of articles on \u201cgods of the city.\u201d These were representations of the Old Gods in statuary, architecture, etc., primarily in New York City, where he lives. New York has no monopoly on them, of course. I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"Solar Roast Coffee, 226 N. Main St., Pueblo, Colorado","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/solarroast-190x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6302","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":2},"title":"New York&#8217;s &#8216;Occult Revival&#8217;: Everything Old Is New Again","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 26, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"From The Revealer (see blogroll under Religion and Journalism): \"Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival.\" There\u2019s been a magical revival happening in New York City for two to three years,\u201d Damon Stang, the \u201cshop witch\u201d for Catland Books in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, told the New\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14267,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=14267","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":3},"title":"What Wines to Pair with Esotericism?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 22, 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"John Crowley's novel \u00c6gypt came out in 1987. It gained three sequels: \"The series describes the life and work of Pierce Moffett, a history professor who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"esotericism\"","block_context":{"text":"esotericism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=esotericism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Aegypt-wines-2-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Aegypt-wines-2-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Aegypt-wines-2-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Aegypt-wines-2-1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":12103,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12103","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":4},"title":"We Pagans Are the &#8220;Useful Idiots&#8221;","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 19, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Reading Religion, which is a book-review site run by the American Academy of Religion, recently assigned me a book to review: Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others Are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life. The author is a Boston University law professor, and he well summarizes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/non-christian-nation-199x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1120,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1120","url_meta":{"origin":732,"position":5},"title":"Review: Youth without Youth","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"My movie-fu was strong the other night. I watched the opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola's Youth without Youth (2007), all dissolving clocks and such, and said to M., \"It's the 'terror of history.' Where is Mircea Eliade when we need him?\"And it turned out to be made from one\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"movies\"","block_context":{"text":"movies","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=movies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}