Aloha,
Justin Woodman wrote:
> There were certainly any number of uneasy moments, scares and extended
> states of paranoia that afflcted the magicians I worked with, but nothing
> akin to the major psychological breakdowns or being driven utterly and
> irrecoverably insane by what they experienced, and after a while I'm
> afraid that it all became rather banal.
It crossed my mind that, given the generally understood parameters of
Lovecraft's
story universe, all contacts with the Mythos entities and all attempts
to work with
them end up at a bad outcome--derangement, insanity, death, destruction.
The
Mythos incorporates a powerful negative feedback mechanism, one that
cannot be
overcome by any human effort.
The negative feedback mechanism and our hesitation given that we are
aware of it,
would sorta make any Lovecraftian working tend toward the banal.
> This was, I felt, about as Lovecraftian as you could get from within
> a magical perspective - one which, as I suggested earlier, is not really
> commensurable with the worldview/cosmology that Lovecraft actually seems
> to have perpetrated in his later works ('At the Mountains of Madness' in
> particular).
I've noticed that those enthusiastic about Lovecraftian magical
activities often disregard
the considerable and growing body of Lovecraft (literary) criticism.
And, although I
tend not to look to an author's intentions for an appreciation of her or
his works, Lovecraft
seems not to have been successful at getting the supernatural out of his
stories, as far as
many of his readers are concerned.
Another observation. The version of the Mythos that magical
practitioners (that I've
met) often turn to is not strictly Lovecraft's. It is the later
expansion and reorganization
carried out by August Derleth and the Arkham House editions. Derleth had
no issue
with the supernatural in the Mythos, and regularized the Mythos pantheon
according
to widespread occultural notions.
Musing I Have Met Yog-Sothoth & ........ Rose,
Pitch
|