Saucers of the Illuminati

[Helen Reyes]

I just checked the foregoing semi-citation I made and it refers to comments made in Parker Ryan's essay on the Necronomicon in which he suggests that Lovecraft must've had access to a very rare Arabic text connected to the Necronomicon - apparently derived from Muqarribun magical practises - which he says were not available during Lovecraft's time (page 5).

...

Let's closely examine the material on Arab magick. I believe it leads to one conclusion. Lovecraft had access to rare material on Arab magick and myths. Ignoring the possible coincidental equivalence of Kutulu and Khadhulu there is still overwhelming evidence supporting this proposal. Lovecraft used Irem in a manner that Parallels the Muqarribun use before this information was generally available. The Rub al Khali (Roba el Khaliye) is in truth important to the Muqarribun. The Jinn are exact counter parts of the "Old Ones." Lovecraft's description of Alhazred is VERY consistent with the Arabic Meaning of the "Mad Poet" even though this also was generally unknown in the 1930's. The Al Azif (the howling of the Jinn) is obviously related to Alazred's title: "The One Who is Possessed by Jinn and Whose Writings Are Inspired by Jinn." Al Azif being a book of poetry is consistent with the fact that almost all mystical or prophetic writings in Arabic are poems. Khadhulu's association with the sleeping Dragon of the Abyss is VERY close to Lovecraft's Cthulhu who lays Dreaming in the Abyss (ocean). To my knowledge there was nothing available (in print) about Khdhulu in English in the 1930's. All this seems to indicate that Lovecraft had a source of information of Arabic magick and myths not commonly accessible. It appears HPL expanded on some of the material, in this source, in his fiction. Please note that this in no way detracts from his considerable creastivity. HPL's stories are great not because of few isolated elements but rather because of the way Lovecraft could blend the individual pieces into a whole.

I accept in advance that I may be adding two and two and coming up with five. However, largely due to the apparent obscurity of the Arabic magical traditions he appears to have had access to, my sense is that Lovecraft may actually have amounted to more than is publicly apparent.

He was a voracious reader. In the quote, "not generally available in the 1930s to my knoweldge" and "not generally known" fail on two counts: the author probably hasn't done an exhaustive survey of scholarly literature available on the subject ca. 1930, and Lovecraft has never been accused of dabbling in "general knowledge."

He said Al Azif refers to the buzzing of insects, not jinn, granted it's a small step from flying insect to fairy. You can believe that Cthulhu is related to Khadhulu as Parker Ryan has it, but there are plenty of alternative explanations, too. You could even connect it with the Icelandic volcano, Ketla, which lies deep in the ocean, dreaming Here's an entry from a book called The Discovery of Language by Holger Pedersen, translated to ENglish and published by Harvard Press in 1931, pg. 146:

"Thus, the different forms of the verb to kill in Arabic run as follows:
katala he killed
kutila he was killed
katalta thou didst kill
ya-ktulu he will kill
katlun killing, murder"

(all of the initial Ks have a little dot under them.)

Lovecraft wrote Call of Cthulhu sometime in 1926 or so, before the English translation of Pedersen's book came out, and his story was published in the February, 1928, issue of Weird Tales. This is, supposedly, his first mention of Cthulhu, which he later explains is a human approximation at pronouncing an extraterrestrial word, the Hs adding gutteral values.

Alhazred, according to Lovecraft, was suggested to him as an Arabic name by an older friend of the family when he was young and fascinated with Thousand and one Nights. It likely was an orthographic form of a transliterated name floating around in the literature in the late 1800s. Likely it was a form of Khezr, or Heder, see http://hermetic.com/bey/anticaliph.html
The appelation "the Mad Arab" is interesting but not all that surprising imho.

If you download and listen to the following radio drama from 1937, Men of Vision - Roger Bacon, at 2:47 in you'll hear someone make reference to Alhazred, at least I think that's what I heard. They mention his name several times as one of the preservers of European science among the Arabs. Lovecraft died in 1937 and it's possible the radio drama was using his character, but he himself was fairly obscure even then, and it seems odd they'd insert a Lovecraft character into a serious drama about Roger Bacon.

Men of Vision 370505 Roger Bacon

Apologies for the sound quality.

It was one of Jung's analytical techniques to assess the state of an individuals active psychology by the fiction they write (amongst other applications). And the concern is that Lovecraft may have been promulgating, via his fiction, various aspects of Arabic left-hand magic with the purpose of stimulating in the Collective Unconscious of his readers the hidden dark regions in order to create a new pulse of life - a sort of proselytizing at arms length if you will. Can this happen unconsciously? Yes. But it seems more likely in view of the foregoing that Lovecraft probably knew what he was doing.

I think that it is the ability to interpret Lovecraft in so many ways that points the way toward the real process at work. He was attempting to convey his own dreams, the emotional power of his dreams, through his fiction, without resorting to cliches and tired literary devices. He certainly knew he was doing this because he wrote about it. What he drew up from the well has resonated in various circles. His creative process is a lot like that the surrealists cultivated in themselves and their works, drawing on dream imagery to make art.

This certainly seems to be the undertone or thinking of Kenneth Grant and others who are, or have been, deeply involved in such practices themselves (which is why I think they are inclined to "adhere" to Lovecraft) - a coming together of like minds perhaps - and one reason I should think why certain Lovecraft's stories seem to be required reading by the Brotherhood of the Left Hand path (to lift the occult terminology used by Parker Ryan), whereas Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for example, is not on their curriculum (I checked a Satanic online book list).

I think his imagery and stories draw on a lot of sources but that it is teh electric charge of his dreams that animates it all and makes it worth contemplating.

For what it's worth, this is the main concern I have with Lovecraft.

It's possible to trace conspiracies and networks around Lovecraft, but he really is the lone pen-man if you will, a total loner, the archetype of the loner. His opening paragraph for Call of Cthulhu is his most-quoted item, and it makes the case against science, and on a higher level, against cosmic and spiritual knowledge, which will lead to the dissolution of human dignity and civilization if pursued. The problem is, Lovecraft didn't really believe this himself, he was an atheist and a scientist at heart, but he was interested in widening the conceptual horizons, in expanding the human imagination to encompass larger things. I think he's innocent, was interested in having fun, making friends (pen-pals) and writing mind-blowing stories. I think he got bad press the same way Oskar Milosz railed against Ed Poe as some sort of menace to the human spirit. Anyway, here's the first paragraph, and the quote from Algernon Blackwood; I like the style:

The Call of Cthulhu

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when...consciousness was manifest, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...
- ALGERNON BLACKWOOD


I. THE HORROR IN CLAY

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Rather than adopting the view he is promoting anticosmic agnosis, think of a youngish man trying to tell a really spooky story, but instead of doing so around a campfire, since he has no friends to go camping with, he resorts to prose fiction on paper, an activity for which he has some talent.