Yep, I'm still here, but lurking more than posting due to a busy teaching
schedule.
My main findings working with Lovecraftian magicians in the UK was that
mythos entities weren't approached by way of worship; rather, they were
treated as (to quote, I think Michael Aquino) as 'spectres of a future
humanity'. The destructive & chaotic nature of mythos entities was, in the
eyes of practitioners, iconoclastic rather than literal in character. In
other words, working with mythos entities (usually via possession) was a
means of unravelling a socially-constructed consciousness in order to
approaching some kind of 'posthuman' condition, a way of bringing about
(via the extremes of cognitive dissonance that occured when practitioners
encountered Lovecraftian entities through ritualised possession) what one
of my informants refered to as 'an apocalypse of consciousness'.
In any case I do now tend to think that something of a gulf exists between
the Lovecraftian universe as interpreted within much of the contemporary
occulture (where the Old Ones are the conceptual tools used for exploring
extremes of consciousness) and the universe as Lovecraft portrayed it in
his (later) writings, which is an inherently non-magical and
'demythologised' universe.
Justin
--
Dr. Justin Woodman
Programme Convenor
Integrated Degree in Social Anthropology
Department of Professional and Community Education
Goldsmiths College
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
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