Saucers of the Illuminati

[Helen Reyes]

Thanks David. I've explored just a little bit about Lovecraft. I'm trying to think of evidence to support your belief and one thing I can say is that he wrote more letters than anyone I've ever heard of before. I think five volumes in hardback were published years ago just of selected correspondence, and that was just scratching the surface. I'm not certain but I think that Brown University in Providence has a large collection of Lovecraft manuscripts and letters. That might be the contact you're looking for between Lovecraft and an established group practicing magic, but I've never come across mention of any such correspondence. Instead Lovecraft co-authored and ghost-wrote with many people known and unknown, discussed story ideas, encouraged amateur writers and discussed politics, from what little I've seen.

I do have some insights and practical experience when it comes to dreams and speaking personally, I sincerely doubt this was the major source of his knowledge. Rather I have the impression that this was a useful device to cloak other developed abilities. Which is why it seems far more likely to me that he was able to access those timeless places in an ultra deep state of meditation, where his consciousness remained acute - his body virtually dormant - and with well practiced memory skills, he could have later written concise diary notes of his experiences and sensations - a so called "magical diary" (not something that would ever be made publicly available).

This would be what Lovecraft called his Common-place Book, parts of which are available. Dreams, visions... plots stemming from them, spur of the moment ideas for stories... He starved himself at times and was very driven toward active participation in his dreams. There are several time periods he tuned into, one was Roman, another was European America before Columbus (Norse in New England), another was England in the 17th or 18th century with an emphasis on a literary personality there and I suspect he also tuned into Poe, whom he adored. There's also some library outside of time inhabited by a strange race of cone-shaped creatures who are capable of time travel and collect knowledge from all over the universe, with some connexion to Western Australia in the distant past. He did exert his imagination on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, this is what Parker Ryan states about his research efforts (page 10):

I've been researching Arab magick (and it connection to Lovecraft) for nearly 10 years so I won't be able to list every source I've used. However I should be able to give resource in which people interested can verify ALL the claims I make.

Which is the principal reason I was impressed with his conclusion that Lovecraft had access to a very rare treatise on Arab magical traditions - and if this was so, then probably he also had direct access to a teacher or lodge. It would be typical for an occult lodge to have its own library, some of which may have been very rare tombs indeed.

His grandfather Whipple had an extensive library he used as a child and then moved on to Brown U I guess. While he lived the married life in New York he was a fixture at the Public Library there.

One such group who had great insights into Arabic magical techniques were, as you know, the Knights Templar - who went underground just over 700 years ago and arose again just prior to when the current Pope took office and forgave them declaring they were innocent of the charges brought against them (they had earlier issued a threat due to be enacted on their 700th anniversary if this absolution didn't take place - although no one knows outside of themselves and the Vatican what this threat represented).

I think the Necronomicon is supposed to represent exactly that kind of lost knowledge resurfacing, the idea of an occult continuation both from the Islamic alchemists and the Greeks and Egyptians and Chaldeans before them, but also containing antedeluvian lore and things only knowable from higher planes of observation. Lovecraft makes Dee a recipient of a volume that survived the attempt to suppress the book, thus placing him in that continuity from Crotona to Alexandria to Damascus. Saana the capital of Yemen also has some occult significance as the Garden and Alhazred is supposed to have been there or disappeared there or something. Lovecraft's lost knowledge resurfacing, symbolized by the Necronomicon, coincidentalyl took place shortly after his death in the real world, with the discovery of the Chenoboskion codices and Qumran wadi scrolls.

And so I suspect we must probably agree to disagree on how Lovecraft may have come about his apparent knowledge. I doubt either of us will ever know one way or the other for certain.

His knowledge proper came from books and correspondence mainly, but he used his researches to lend credence to the psychic force of his dream-vision symbols and pondered some fairly profound connexions. He does seem to consider the acquisition of specific knowledge via unknown faculties in a lot of his stories. I will continue to think he's home-grown and self-taught but am more than willing to consider otherwise if I can find any reason for it. There are a number of coincidences in his work we haven't touched on but they seem to have been addressed by the Lovecraft scholars at least a little bit. They've been noted, I should say (Sarnath, Azathoth, etc.). There might be more, or more to come as events unfold