Saucers of the Illuminati

[Helen Reyes]

...Or maybe I didn't understand David's point precisely.

(my bolding)

Helen, I know too little about Lovecraft to make real judgements about him, but there are others of the ilk of Crowley etc., who seem to positively wish to turn the clock back and recapture the "Old Ones". A serious Qabalist would eventually, and when sufficiently developed, have to tread through the paths of the Tree of Death, but it would be mighty dangerous work, for therein lies the path of despair and utter insanity. No one in their right mind would wish to meddle with the Collective Shadow, to bring Jungian terminology into this matter. But there are many out there who do believe they can harness these forces and, indeed, unleash them into our world. In this they have a will to power. In other words a very dangerous psychological disposition.

OK I understand better now. Lovecraft himself said he was born in the wrong age and his sensibilities were probably more in tune with that of a 17th century aristocrat. He also had a sort of "reversion" to Roman times, both in his youth (see Inconsequential Scribblings) and as a fictional treatment probably derived from dream-visions in his correspondence. I think of him as an "escape artist" who was interested in showing something exists beyond mundane time and space, but he never took his "mythos" seriously, it was a joke for him, and later an inside joke, because he and others in the Weird Tales stable used the same names for the Old Ones and Forces, including Robert E. Howard, who authored Conan, and, I think more significantly, Clark Ashton-Smith.

Escaping the confines of time can be advantageous but where you "visit" in that other place, that other timelessness, is also not without considerable danger - even while it can produce many lasting and very positive experiences. From what little I have read of Lovecraft, his ability to enter those other realms was said to be instinctive and intuitive. BUt I'm not convinced about that. The fact that he was drawn to the most negative and foul parts of it indicates something altogether different. And I have to wonder if the raging insanity that inflicted Lovecraft's father might have been passed along to his son?

Apparently his father had some sort of syphilis-induced madness. He was a travelling salesman, away from home for long periods. At least that's what Lovecraft biographer Joshi says in A Life. His mother, on the other hand, used to make him come home before dusk because of the werewolves, or so I've heard.

There is also that hint given in one of the two .pdf's you kindly posted that someone (unidentified) was passing Lovecraft extremely rare and exotic occult literature that focused his interest and abilities in distinctly negative directions.

Lovecraft received some correspondence regarding his publications in Weird Tales by one person who said he was ignorantly serving real forces in his stories.

But I may, of course, be quite wrong about this. It's just that for me personally, I find it almost impossible to understand why anyone would voluntarily delve into these areas. If one had to use words to describe it, it would be "positive evil". Take, for example, Lovecraft's statement (which I extracted from the Cults of Cthulhu page 10:

Lovecraft also gives a brief description of the world after its
re-inheritance by the Great Old Ones:

“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would
have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild beyond
good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all
men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the
liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout
and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth
would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”2

This is the passage always cited as demonstrating a connexion between Lovecraft and Crowley, specifically his Book of the Law. Some say it also echoes Nietzche's Beyond Good and Evil. There is a spurious insertion in history that Lovecraft's wife Sonia Greene was Crowley's girlfriend or friend. It isn't true.

And then we have Kenneth Grant's observation (on pages 23-4)

Perhaps Lovecraft himself has left us with a rather
unsatisfactory explanation of the true provenance of the
Cthulhu Mythos. Certainly, it appears to hold a great value for
those individuals currently practising ‘the Black Arts’. In the
words of Kenneth Grant, the present Outer Head of the O.T.O.,
“Lovecraft’s great contribution to the occult lay in his
demonstration — indirect as it may have been — of the
power so to control the dreaming mind that it is capable of
projection into other dimensions, and of discovering that
there are doors through which flow — in the form of
inspiration, intuition and vision —the genuine current of
creative magical consciousness.”11
Lovecraft’s occult experiences, disguised as fiction, reveal
the intrusion of forces in complete sympathy with those
archetypes and symbols brought through by Blavatsky and
Crowley, whilst in contact with astral entities ‘from beyond’.
He had become the receiver and transmitter of hidden
knowledge, though in Lovecraft’s case, the process was
intuitive rather than conscious. The internal self-division thus
engendered may have been the root cause of Lovecraft’s mental
and physical peculiarities; or it may have been that these very
traits, which set him apart from the rest of society, made him
the ideal focus for the channelling of these ultra-mundane
forces.

Were I to guess I would suggest that Lovecraft were deeply involved with someone or some others who had distinctly developed occult abilities and who focused his attention into certain obscure directions.

Clark Ashton-Smith might fit that bill. Anton LaVey would say so. He knew Klarkash, as Lovecraft dubbed him, and kept one of his books in his secret locked box.

Changing the subject, I note what you say about the arrival of the rump of the Trojans in Britain - this being, I presume, after their defeat at the hands of the Achaeans and the subsequent sack of Troy. Although I appreciate that this derives from Greek mythology, I know that there is an occult tradition that this actually happened. However, Geoffrey of Monmouth's account is not believed by many scholars because it is argued that the idea of the Trojans coming to these isles was simply a means of elevating the royal bloodlines of those times. Are you aware o any other accounts besides Monmouth's? I have read it elsewhere where it has been stated as undeniable fact - but with no corroborating evidence given. I suspect that it is a Freemasonic continuation - and while many of these guys are often very good scholars, even so I would like to read other sources if they are available?

Wikipedia has some ideas at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Re...ae#Sources
I don't know; it seems like Bede or Augustine (the British one) might've mentioned it somewhere, or it might be in the Welsh or Irish pseudo-histories? wikipedia says Geoffrey claimed an unimpeachable source but no one believes him.

On the Tree of Death and the Collective Shadow, I have it on fairly good authority the French-Lithuanian poet Oscar de Lubicz Milosz used to stay up all night in avid conversation with dead people, including Shakespear. It really bugged Petras Klima when he stayed at some Lithuanian embassy somewhere. Reminded me of a Lovecraft scene.

Also, there's a really good podcast being produced right now which I think fairly portrays Lovecraft in all his atheism, check out episode 42 at the top of the page at http://www.hppodcraft.com, it made me seriously laugh.