fbi report cthulhu

Memorandum

TO: File

FROM: Asst. Director Pickman

DATE: 12/1/93

RE: Cthulhu Cult Report FBIThis is without exception the most miserable excuse for a Bureaucase file that I have ever scene. What kind of maniacal ramblingis this? What a sprawling morass of verbal chaos and excrement.

I recommend an immediate psychiatric review for agent Neville,and pending the results of such examination, his continuedservice to the bureau will be reevaluated.

Accordingly, this file is considered without plausible merit andis hereby closed.

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

Case No. X9233-93-5

Investigator: Christopher Neville

Date: November 23, 1993

Los Angeles Bureau

Federal Bureau of InvestigationCONFIDENTIAL CASE FILE

page 2

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

In this book it is spoken of...Spirits and Conjurations; ofGods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or maynot exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. Bydoing certain things certain results follow. --Aleister Crowley

Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scionof a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writerHoward Phillips Lovecraft left one of America's most curiousliterary legacies. The bulk of his short stories appeared inWeird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural. Butwithin these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasyscreaming into the 20th century, taking the genre, almostliterally, into a new dimension.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycleof stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Named for a tentacledalien monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in thesunken city of R'lyeh, the Mythos encompasses the cosmiccareer of a variety of gruesome extraterrestrial entitiesthat include Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiotgod Azazoth, who sprawls at the center of Ultimate Chaos,"encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphousdancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of ademonic flute held in nameless paws."[1] Lurking on themargins of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of OuterGods and Great Old Ones are now attempting to invade ourworld through science and dream and horrid rites.

As a marginally popular writer working in the literaryequivalent of the gutter, Lovecraft received no seriousattention during his lifetime. But while most 1930s pulpfiction is nearly unreadable today, Lovecraft continues toattract attention. In France and Japan, his tales ofcosmic fungi, degenerate cults and seriously bad dreams arerecognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated Frenchphilosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise hisradical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opusA Thousand Plateaus.2 On Anglo-American turf, a passionatecabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies andCrypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research.Meanwhile both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craftstories that elaborate the Cthulhu Mythos. There's even aLovecraft convention--the NecronomiCon, named for the mostfamous of his forbidden grimoires. Like the gnostic sciencefiction writer Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft is the epitomeof a cult author.


page 3

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

The word "fan" comes from fanaticus, an ancient term for atemple devotee, and Lovecraft fans exhibit the unflaggingdevotion, fetishism and sectarian debates that havecharacterized popular religious cults throughout theages. But Lovecraft's "cult" status has a curiously literaldimension. Many magicians and occultists have taken up hisMythos as source material for their practice. Drawn from thedarker regions of the esoteric counterculture--Thelema andSatanism and Chaos magic--these Lovecraftian mages activelyseek to generate the terrifying and atavistic encountersthat Lovecraft's protagonists stumble into compulsively,blindly or against their will.

Secondary occult sources for Lovecraftian magic include threedifferent "fake" editions of the Necronomicon, a few ritesincluded in Anton LaVey's The Satanic Rituals, and a numberof works by the loopy British Thelemite Kenneth Grant.Besides Grant's Typhonian O.T.O. and the Temple ofSet's Order of the Trapezoid, magical sects that tap theCthulhu current have included the Esoteric Order of Dagon,the Bate Cabal, Michael Bertiaux's Lovecraftian Coven, and aStarry Wisdom group in Florida, named after the nineteenth-century sect featured in Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark."Solo chaos mages fill out the ranks, cobbling togetherLovecraftian arcana on the Internet or freely sampling theMythos in their chthonic, open-ended (anti-) workings.

This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the factthat Lovecraft himself was a "mechanistic materialist"philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of anykind. Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of manycurious problems raised by the apparent power ofLovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp visions "work"?What constitutes the "authentic" occult? How does magicrelate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope toshow, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but animaginative and coherent "reading" set in motion by thedynamics of Lovecraft's own texts, a set of thematic,stylistic, and intertextual strategies which constitute whatI call Lovecraft's Magick Realism.

Magical realism already denotes a strain of LatinAmerican fiction--exemplified by Borges, Gabriel GarciaMarquez, and Isabel Allende--in which a fantastic dreamlikelogic melds seamlessly and delightfully with the rhythms ofthe everyday. Lovecraft's Magick Realism is far more dark andconvulsive, as ancient and amoral forces violently puncturethe realistic surface of his tales. Lovecraft constructs andthen collapses a number of intense polarities--betweenrealism and fantasy, book and dream, reason and its chaoticOther. By playing out these tensions in his writing,Lovecraft also reflects the transformations thatdarkside occultism has undergone as it confronts modernity in


page 4

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

such forms as psychology, quantum physics, and theexistential groundlessness of being. And by embedding allthis in an intertextual Mythos of profound depth, he drawsthe reader into the chaos that lies "between the worlds" ofmagick and reality.

Written mostly in the 1920s and '30s, Lovecraft's work buildsa somewhat rickety bridge between the florid decadence of finde si`ecle fantasy and the more "rational" demands of the newcentury's science fiction. His early writing is gaudy Gothicpastiche, but in his mature Chtulhu tales, Lovecraft adopts apseudodocumentary style that utilizes the language ofjournalism, scholarship, and science to construct a realisticand measured prose voice which then explodes into feverish,adjectival horror. Some find Lovecraft's intensity atrocious--not everyone can enjoy a writer capable of comparinga strange light to "a glutted swarm of corpse-fed firefliesdancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh."[3]

But in terms of horror, Lovecraft delivers. His protagonistis usually a reclusive bookish type, a scholar or artist whois or is known to the first-person narrator. Stumbling ontoodd coincidences or beset with strange dreams, hisintellectual curiosity drives him to pore throughforbidden books or local folklore, his empirical turn of mindblinding him to the nightmarish scenario that the reader cansee slowly building up around him. When the Mythos finallybreaks through, it often shatters him, even though theinvasion is generally more cognitive than physical.

By endlessly playing out a shared collection of images andtropes, genres like weird fiction also generate a collectiveresonance that can seem both "archetypal" and cliched. ThoughLovecraft broke with classic fantasy, he gave his Mythosdensity and depth by building a shared world to househis disparate tales. The Mythos stories all share a liminalmap that weaves fictional places like Arkham, Dunwich, andMiskatonic University into the New England landscape; theyalso refer to a common body of entities and forbidden books.A relatively common feature in fantasy fiction,these metafictional techniques create the sense thatLovecraft's Mythos lies beyond each individual tales,hovering in a dimension halfway between fantasy and the real.

Lovecraft did not just tell tales--he built a world. It's noaccident that one of the more successful role-playing gamesto follow in the heels of Dungeons & Dragons takes place in"Lovecraft Country." Most role-playing adventure games buildtheir worlds inside highly codified "mythic" spaces of thecollective imagination (heroic fantasy, cyberpunk, vampireParis, Arthur's Britain). The game Call of Cthulhu takesplace in Lovecraft's 1920s America, where players become"investigators" who track down dark rumors or heinous occult


page 5

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

crimes that gradually open up the reality of themonsters. Call of Cthulhu is an unusually dark game; the bestinvestigators can do is to retain sanity and stave off themonsters' eventual apocalyptic triumph. In many ways Call ofCthulhu "works" because of the considerable densityof Lovecraft's original Mythos, a density which the gameitself also contributes to.

Lovecraft himself "collectivized" and deepened his Mythos byencouraging his friends to write stories that take placewithin it. Writers like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard,and a young Robert Bloch complied. After Lovecraft's death,August Derleth carried on this tradition with great devotion,and today, dozens continue to write Lovecraftian tales.

With some notable exceptions, most of these writers manglethe Myth, often by detailing horrors the master wisely leftshrouded in ambiguous gloom.[4] The exact delineations ofLovecraft's cosmic cast and timeline remain murky even aftera great deal of close-reading and cross-referencing. But inthe hands of the Catholic Derleth, the extraterrestrial GreatOld Ones become elemental demons defeated by the "good" ElderGods. Forcing Lovecraft's cosmic and fundamentally amoralpantheon into a traditional religious framework, Derlethcommitted an error at once imaginative and interpretive. Fordespite the diabolical aura of his creatures, Lovecraftgenerates much of his power by stepping beyond good and evil.

The Horror of Reason

For the most part Lovecraft abandoned the supernatural andreligious underpinnings of the classic supernatural tale,turning instead looked towards science to provide frameworksfor horror. Calling Lovecraft the "Copernicus of the horrortale," the fantasy writer Fritz Leiber Jr. wrote thatLovecraft was the first fantasist who "firmly attached theemotion of spectral dread to such concepts as outer space,the rim of the cosmos, alien beings, unsuspected dimensions,and the conceivable universes lying outside our own spacetimecontinuum."[5] As Lovecraft himself put it in a letter, "Thetime has come when the normal revolt against time, space, andmatter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with whatis known of reality--when it must be gratified by imagesforming supplements rather than contradictions of the visibleand measurable universe."[6]

For Lovecraft, it is not the sleep of reason that breedsmonsters, but reason with its eyes agog. By fusing cutting-edge science with archaic material, Lovecraft creates atwisted materialism in which scientific "progress" returns usto the atavistic abyss, and hard-nosed research revives thefactual basis of forgotten and discarded myths. HenceLovecraft's obsession with archeology; the digs which unearth


page 6

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

alien artifacts and bizarrely angled cities aresimultaneously historical and imaginal. In 1930 story "TheWhisperer in Darkness," Lovecraft identifies the planetYuggoth (from which the fungoid Mi-Go launch theirclandestine invasions of Earth) with the newly-discoveredplanet called Pluto. To the 1930 reader--probably the kind ofperson who would thrill to popular accounts of C.W.Thompson's discovery of the ninth planet that very year--thisfactual reference "opens up" Lovecraft's fiction into areal world that is itself opening up to the limitless cosmos.

Lovecraft's most self-conscious, if somewhat strained, fusionof occult folklore and weird science occurs in the 1932 story"The Dreams of the Witch-House." The demonic characters thatthe folklorist Walter Gilman first glimpses in his nightmaresare stock ghoulies: the evil witch crone Keziah Mason, herfamiliar spirit Brown Jenkin, and a "Black Man" who isperhaps Lovecraft's most unambiguously Satanic figure. Thesefigures eventually invade the real space of Gilman'scuriously angled room. But Gilman is also a student ofquantum physics, Riemann spaces and non-Euclidianmathematics, and his dreams are almost psychedelicmanifestations of his abstract knowledge. Within these"abysses whose material and gravitational properties...hecould not even begin to explain," an "indescribablyangled" realm of "titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-planeclusters and quasi-buildings," Gilman keeps encountering asmall polyhedron and a mass of "prolately spheroidalbubbles." By the end of the tale that he realizes that theseare none other than Keziah and her familiar spirit, classicdemonic cliches translated into the most alien dimension ofspeculative science: hyperspace.

These days, one finds the motif of hyperspace in sciencefiction, pop cosmology, computer interface design, channelledUFO prophecies, and the postmodern shamanism of today's high-octane psychedelic travellers--all discourses that feedcontemporary chaos magic. The term itself was probably coinedby the science fiction writer John W. Campbell Jr.in 1931,though its origins as a concept lie in nineteenth-centurymathematical explorations of the fourth dimension.

In many ways, however, Lovecraft was the concept's firstmythographer. From the perspective of hyperspace, our normal,three-dimensional spaces are exhausted and insufficientconstructs. But our incapacity to vividly imagine this newdimension in humanist terms creates a crisis ofrepresentation, a crisis which for Lovecraft calls up ourmost ancient fears of the unknown. "All the objects...weretotally beyond description or even comprehension," Lovecraftwrites of Gilman's seething nightmare beforeparadoxically proceeding to describe these horrible objects.In his descriptions, Lovecraft emphasizes the


page 7

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

incommensurability of this space through almost non-sensicaljuxtapositions like "obscene angles" or "wrong" geometry,a rhetorical technique that one Chaos magician calls"Semiotic Angularity."

Lovecraft has a habit of labeling his horrors"indescribable," "nameless, "unseen," "unutterable,""unknown" and "formless." Though superficially weak, thismove can also be seen a kind of macabre via negativa. Likethe apophatic oppositions of negative theologians likePseudo-Dionysus or St. John of the Cross, Lovecraft marks thelimits of language, limits which paradoxically point to theBeyond. For the mystics, this ultimate is the ineffable One,Pseudo-Dionysus' "superluminous gloom" or the Ain Soph ofthe Kabbalists. But there is no unity in Lovecraft's Beyond.It is the omnivorous Outside, the screaming multiplicity ofcosmic hyperspace opened up by reason.

For Lovecraft, scientific materialism is the ultimateFaustian bargain, not because it hands us Prometheantechnology (a man for the eighteenth century, Lovecraft hadno interest in gadgetry), but because it leads us beyondthe horizon of what our minds can withstand. "The mostmerciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of themind to correlate all its contents," goes the famous openingline of "Call of Cthulhu." By correlating those contexts,empiricism opens up "terrifying vistas of reality"--whatLovecraft elsewhere calls "the blind cosmos [that] grindsaimlessly on from nothing to something and from somethingback to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishesor existence of the minds that flicker for a second now andthen in the darkness".

Lovecraft gave this existentialist dread an imaginativevoice, what he called "cosmic alienage". For Fritz Leiber,the "monstrous nuclear chaos" of Azazoth, Lovecraft's supremeentity, symbolizes "the purposeless, mindless, yet all-powerful universe of materialistic belief." But thissymbolism isn't the whole story, for, as DMT voyagers know,hyperspace is haunted. The entities that erupt fromLovecraft's inhuman realms seem to suggest that in a blindmechanistic cosmos, the most alien thing is sentienceitself. Peering outward through the cracks of domesticated"human" consciousness, a compassionless materialist likeLovecraft could only react with horror, for reason must cowerbefore the most raw and atavistic dream-dragons ofthe psyche.

Modern humans usually suppress, ignore or constrain theseforces lurking in our lizard brain. Mythically, these forcestake the form of demons imprisoned under the angelic yokes ofaltruism, morality, and intellect. Yet if one does notbelieve in any ultimate universal purpose, then these


page 8

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

primal forces are the most attuned with the cosmos preciselybecause they are amoral and inhuman. In "The Dunwich Horror",Henry Wheeler overhears a monstrous moan from a diabolicalrite and asks "from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmicconsciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, werethose half-articular thunder-croakings drawn?" The Outside iswithin.

Chaos Culture

Lovecraft's fiction expresses a "future primitivism" thatfinds its most intense esoteric expression in Chaos magic, aneclectic contemporary style of darkside occultism that drawsfrom Thelema, Satanism, Austin Osman Spare, and Easternmetaphysics to construct a thoroughly postmodern magic.

For today's Chaos mages, there is no "tradition". The symbolsand myths of countless sects, orders, and faiths, areconstructs, useful fictions, "games." That magic works hasnothing to do with its truth claims and everything to do withthe will and experience of the magician. Recognizing thedistinct possibility that we may be adrift in a meaninglessmechanical cosmos within which human will and imagination arevaguely comic flukes (the "cosmic indifferentism" Lovecrafthimself professed), the mage accepts his groundlessness,embracing the chaotic self-creating void that is himself.

As we find with Lovecraft's fictional cults and grimoires,chaos magicians refuse the hierarchical, symbolic andmonotheist biases of traditional esotericism. Like most Chaosmagicians, the British occultist Peter Carroll gravitatestowards the Black, not because he desires a simpleSatanic inversion of Christianity but becuase he seeks theamoral and shamanic core of magical experience--a core thatLovecraft conjures up with his orgies of drums, gutturalchants, and screeching horns. At the same time, Chaosmages like Carroll also plumb the weird science of quantumphysics, complexity theory and electronic Prometheanism. Somedarkside magicians become consumed by the atavistic forcesthey unleash or addicted to the dark costume of the Satanicanti-hero. But the most sophisticated adopt a balanced modeof gnostic existentialism that calls all constructs intoquestion while refusing the cold comforts of skeptical reasonor suicidal nihilism, a pragmatic and empirical shamanismthat resonates as much with Lovecraft's hard-headedmaterialism as with his horrors.

The first occultist to really engage these notions isAleister Crowley, who shattered the received vessels ofoccult tradition while creatively extending the dark dream ofmagic into the twentieth century. With his outlandish image,trickster texts, and his famous Law of Thelema ("Do what thouwilt shall be the whole of the law"), Crowley called into


page 9

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

question the esoteric certainties of "true" revelation andlineage, and was the first magus to give occult antinomionisma decidedly Nietzschean twist.[7]

Unfettered, this occult will to power can easily degenerateinto a heartless elitism, and the fascist and racistdimensions of both twentieth-century occultism and Lovecrafthimself should not be forgotten. But this self-engenderingwill is more exuberantly expressed as a will to Art. In manyways, the fin de siecle occultism that exploded duringCrowley's time was an essentially esthetic esotericism. Agood number of the nineteenth-century magicians who inspireus today are the great poets, painters, and writers ofSymbolism and decadent Romanticism, many of them dabblers oradepts in Satanism, Rosicrucianism, and hermetic societies.The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was infused withartistic pretensions, and Golden Dawn member and fantasywriter Arthur Machen was one of Lovecraft's strongestinfluences.

But it was Austin Osman Spare who most decisively dissolvedthe boundary between artistic and magical life. Thoughworking independently of the Surrealists, Spare also basedhis art on the dark and autonomous eruptions of"subconscious" material, though in a more overtly theurgiccontext.[8] Today's Chaos magicians are heavily influenced bySpare, and their Lovecraftian rites express thissimultaneously creative and nihilistic dissolution. And aspostmodern spawn of role-playing games, computers, and popculture, they celebrate the fact that Lovecraft's secrets arescraped from the barrel of pulp fiction.

Proof in the Pudding

In a message cross-posted to the Internet newsgroupsalt.necromicon [sic] and alt.satanism, Parker Ryan listed awide variety of magical techniques described by Lovecraft,including entheogens, glossalalia, and shamanic drumming.Insisting that his post was "not a satirical article," Ryanthen described specific Lovecraftian rites he had developed,including this "Rite of Cthulhu":

A) Chanting. The use of the "Cthulhu chant" to create aconcentrative or meditative state of consciousness thatforms the basis of much later magickal work.

B) Dream work. Specific techniques of controlled dreamingthat are used to establish contact with Cthulhu.

C) Abandonment. Specific techniques to free oneself fromculturally conditioned reality tunnels.


page 10

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

Ryan goes on to say that he's experimented with most of hisrites "with fairly good success." In coming to terms withthe "real magic" embedded in Lovecraft, one quicklyencounters a fundamental irony: the cold skepticism ofLovecraft himself. In his letters, Lovecraft poked fun at hisown tales, claiming he wrote them for cash and playfullynaming his friends after his monsters. While such attitudesin no way diminish the imaginative power of Lovecraft'stales--which, as always, lie outside the control andintention of their author--they do pose a problem for theworking occultist seeking to establish Lovecraft's magicalauthority. The most obvious, and least interesting, answeris to find authentic magic in Lovecraft's biography.Lovecraft's father was a traveling salesman who died in amadhouse when Lovecraft was eight, and vague rumors that hewas an initiate in some Masonic order or other were exploitedin the Necronomicon cobbled together by George Hay, ColinWilson, and Robert Turner. Others have tried to trackLovecraft's occult know-how, especially his familiaritywith Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. In an Internetdocument relating the history of the "real" Necronomicon,Colin Low argues that Crowley befriended Sonia Greene in NewYork a few years before the woman married Lovecraft. As proofof Crowley's indirect influence on Lovecraft, Low sitesthis intriguing passage from "The Call of Cthulhu":

"That cult would never die until the starscame right again and the secret priestswould take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive Hissubjects and resume His rule of earth. The timewould be easy to know, for then mankind would havebecome as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, andbeyond good and evil, with laws and moralsthrown aside and all men shouting and killing andrevelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Oneswould teach them new ways to shout and kill andrevel and enjoy themselves, and all earth wouldflame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Low claims this passage is a mangled reflection of Crowley'steachings on the new Aeon and the The Book of the Law. In anarticle in Societé, Robert North also states that Lovecraftreferred to "A.C." in a letter, and that Crowley wasmentioned in Leonard Cline's The Dark Chamber, a novelLovecraft discussed in his Supernatural Horror in Literature.

But so what? Lovecraft was a fanatical and imaginativereader, and many such folks are drawn to the semiotic exoticaof esoteric lore regardless of any beliefs in or experiencesof the paranormal. From The Case of Charles Dexter Ward andelsewhere, it's clear that Lovecraft knew the basic outlinesof the occult. But these influences pale next to Vathek, Poe,or Lord Dunsany.


page 11

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

Desperate to assimilate Lovecraft into a "tradition", someoccultists enter into dubious explanations of mysticalinfluence by disincarnate beings. North gives this InvisibleCollege idea a shamanic twist, asserting that prehistoricAtlantian tribes who survived the flood exercisedtelepathic influence on people like John Dee, Blavatsky, andLovecraft. But none of these Lovecraft hierophants can matchthe delirious splendor of Kenneth Grant. In The MagicalRevival, Grant points out more curious similarities betweenLovecraft and Crowley: both refer to "Great Old Ones" and"Cold Wastes" (of Kadath and Hadith, respectively); theentity "Yog-Sothoth" rhymes with "Set-Thoth," and Al Azif:The Book of the Arab resembles Crowley's Al vel Legis: TheBook of the Law. In Nightside of Eden, Grant maps Lovecraft'spantheon onto a darkside Tree of Life, comparing the mangled"iridescent globes" that occasionally pop up in Lovecraft'stales with the shattered sefirot known as the Qlipoth. Grantconcludes that Lovecraft had "direct and conscious experienceof the inner planes,"[9] the same zones Crowley prowled, andthat Lovecraft "disguised" his occult experiences as fiction.

Like many latter-day Lovecraftians, Grant commits the errorof literalizing a purposefully nebulous myth. A subtler andmore satisfying version of this argument is the notion thatLovecraft had direct unconscious experiences of the innerplanes, experiences which his quotidian mind rejected butwhich found their way into his writings nonetheless. ForLovecraft was blessed with a vivid and nightmarish dreamlife, and drew the substance of a number of his tales frombeyond the wall of sleep.

In this sense Lovecraft's magickal authority is nothing moreor less than the authority of dream. But what kind of dreamtales are these? A Freudian could have a field day withLovecraft's fecund, squishy sea monsters, and a Jungiananalyst might recognize the liniments of the proverbialshadow. But Lovecraft's Shadow is so inky it swallows thestandard archetypes of the collective unconscious like ablack hole. If we see the archetypal world not as a staticstorehouse of timeless godforms but as a constantlymutating carnival of figures, then the seethingextraterrestrial monsters that Lovecraft glimpsed in thechaos of hyperspace are not so much archaic figures ofheredity than the avatars of a new psychological and mythicaeon. At the very least, it would seem that things aregetting mighty out of hand beyond the magic circle of theordered daylight mind.

In an intriguing Internet document devoted to theNecronomicon, Tyagi Nagasiva places Lovecraft's potentdreamtales within the terma tradition found in the Nyingmabranch of Tibetan Buddhism[10]. Termas were "pre-mature"


page 12

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

writings hidden by Buddhist sages for centuries until thetime was ripe, at which point religious visionaries woulddivine their physical hiding places through omens or dreams.But some termas were revealed entirely in dreams, oftencouched in otherworldly Dakini scripts. An old Indianrevisionary tactic (the second-century Nagarjuna was said tohave discovered his Mahayana masterpieces in the serpentrealm of the nagas), the terma game resolves the religiousproblem of how to alter a tradition without disruptingtraditional authority. The famous Tibetan Book of the Dead isa terma, and so, perhaps, is the Necronomicon.

Of course, for Chaos magicians, reality can coherentlypresent itself through any number of self-sustaining butmutually contradictory symbolic paradigms (or "realitytunnels," in Robert Anton Wilson's memorable phrase). Nothingis true and everything is permitted. By emphasizing the self-fulfilling nature of all reality claims, this postmodernperspective creatively erodes the distinction betweenlegitimate esoteric transmission and total fiction.

This bias toward the experimental is found in Anton LaVey'sSatanic Rituals, which includes the first overtlyLovecraftian rituals to see print. In presenting "DieElektrischen Vorspiele" (which LaVey based on aLovecraftian tale by Frank Belknap Long), the "Ceremony ofthe Angles," and "The Call to Cthulhu" (the latter two pennedby Michael Aquino), LaVey does claim that Lovecraft"clearly...had been influenced by very real sources."[11] Butin holding that Satanic magic allows you to "objectivelyenter into a subjective state," LaVey more emphaticallyemphasizes the ritual power of fantasy--a radicalsubjectivity which explains his irreverence towards occultsource material, whether Lovecraft or Masonry. In naming hisOrder of the Trapezoid after the "Shining Trapezohedron"found in Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark"--a black,oddly-angled extraterrestrial crystal used to communicatewith the Old Ones--LaVey emphasized that fictions canchannel magical forces regardless of their historicalauthenticity.

In his two rituals, Michael Aquino expresses the subjectivepower of "meaningless" language by creating a "Yuggothic"tongue similar to that heard in Lovecraft's "The DunwichHorror" and "The Whisperer in the Dark." Such gutturalutterances help to shut down the rational mind (trychanting "P'garn'h v'glyzz" for a couple of hours), a notionelaborated by Kenneth Grant in his notion of the Cult ofBarbarous Names. After leaving the Church of Satan to formthe more serious Temple of Set in 1975, Aquinoeventually reformed the Order of the Trapezoid into thepractical magic wing of the Setian philosophy. For Stephen R.Flowers, current Grand Master of the order, the substance of


page 13

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

Lovecraftian magic is precisely an overwhelming subjectivitythat flies in the face of objective law. "The Old Ones arethe objective manifestations...of the subjective universewhich is what is trying to 'break through' the merelyrational mind-set of modern humanity."[12] For Flowers, suchinvocations are ultimately apocalyptic, hastening atransition into a chaotic aeon in which the Old Onesreveal themselves as future reflections of the Black Magician("There are no more Nightmares for us," he wrote me).

This desire to rebel against the tyranny of reason and itsordered objective universe is one of the underlying goals ofChaos magic. Many would applaud the sentiment expressed byAlbert Wilmarth in Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness":"To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of timeand space and natural law--to be linked with the vastoutside--to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets ofthe infinite and ultimate--surely such a things was worth therisk of one's life, soul, and sanity!"[13]

In his electronically circulated text "Kathulu Majik:Luvkrafting the Roles of Modern Uccultizm," Tyagi Nagasivawrites that most Western magic is ossified and dualistic,heavily weighted towards the forces of order, hierarchy,moralizing, and structured language. "Without thedestabilizing force of Kaos, we would stagnateintellectually, psychologically and otherwise...Kathuluprovides a necessary instability to combat the stolid andfixed methods of the structured 'Ordurs'...One may becomebalanced through exposure to Kathulu" (Tyagi's "mis-spellings" show the influence of Genesis P. Orridge's Templeof Psychick Youth). Haramullah criticizes black magicians whosimply reverse "Ordur" with "Kaos," rather than bringingthis underlying polarity into balance (a dualistic error healso finds in Lovecraft). Showing strong Taoist and Buddhistinfluences, Haramullah calls instead for a "Midul Path" thatmagically navigates between structure and disintegration,will and void. "The idea that one may progress linearly alongthe MP [Midul Path] is mistaken. One becomes, one does notprogress. One attunes, one does not forge. One allows, onedoes not make."

In the Cincinatti Journal of Ceremonial Magic, the anonymousauthor of "Return of the Elder Gods" presents an evolutionaryreason for Mythos magic. The author accepts the scenario ofan approaching world crisis brought on by the invasion of theElder Gods, Qlipothic transdimensional entities who ruledprotohumanity until they were banished by "the agent ofthe Intelligence," a Promethean figure who set humanity onits current course of evolution. We remain connected to theseElder Gods through the "Forgotten Ones," the atavistic forcesof hunger, sex ,and violence that linger in the subterraneanlevels of our being. Only by magically "reabsorbing"


page 14

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

the Forgotten Ones and using the subsequent energy tobootstrap higher consciousness can we keep the portal sealedagainst the return of the Elder Gods. Though Lovecraft's nameis never mentioned in the article, he is ever present, askeptical materialist dreaming the dragons awake.

Writing the Dream...

Within the Mythos tales, one finds two dimensions--the normalhuman world and the infested Outside--and it's theontological tension between them that powers Lovecraft'smagick realism. Though Cthulhu and friends havematerial aspects, their reality is most horrible for what itsays about the way the universe is. As the Lovecraft scholarJoshi notes, Lovecraft's narrators frequently go mad "notthrough any physical violence at the hands of supernaturalentities but through the mere realization of the theexistence of such a race of gods and beings." Faced with"realms whose mere existence stuns the brain," theyexperience severe cognitive dissonance--precisely the sortsof disorienting rupture sought by Chaos magicians.[14]

The role-playing game Call of Cthulhu wonderfully expressesthe violence of this Lovecraftian paradigm shift. Inadventure games like Dungeons & Dragons, one of yourcharacter's most significant measures is its hit points--anumber which determines the amount of physical punishmentyour character can take before it gets injured or dies. Callof Cthulhu replaces this physical characteristic with thepsychic category of Sanity. Face-to-face encounters with Yog-Sothoth or the insects from Shaggai knock points off yourSanity, but so does your discovery of more informationabout the Mythos--the more you find out from books orstarcharts, the more likely you are to wind up in the ArkhamAsylum. Magic also comes with an ironic price, one thatLovecraftian magicians might well pay heed to. If you use anyof the binding spells from De Vermis Mysteriis or thePnakotic Manuscripts, you necessarily learn more about theMythos and thereby lose more sanity.[15]

Lovecraft's scholarly heros also investigate the Mythos asmuch through reading and thinking as through movementsthrough physical space, and this psychological explorationdraws the mind of the reader directly into the loop. Usually,readers suspect the dark truth of the Mythos whilethe narrator still clings to a quotidian attitude--atechnique that subtly forces the reader to identify with theOutside rather than with the conventional worldview of theprotagonist. Magically, the blindness of Lovecraft's heroescorresponds to a crucial element of occult theory developedby Austin Osman Spare: that magic occurs over and againstthe conscious mind, that ordinary thinking must be silenced,


page 15

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

distracted, or thoroughly deranged for the chthonic will toexpress itself.[16]

In order to invade our plane, Lovecraft's entities need aportal, an interface between the worlds, and Lovecraftemphasizes two: books and dreams. In "Dreams of the Witch-House," "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Shadow overInnsmouth," dreams infect their hosts with a virulencethat resembles the more overt psychic possessions that occurin "The Haunter in the Dark" and The Case of Charles DexterWard. Like the monsters themselves, Lovecraft's dreams areautonomous forces breaking through from Outsideand engendering their own reality.

But these dreams also conjure up a more literal "outside":the strange dream life of Lovecraft himself, a life that (asthe informed fan knows) directly inspired some of thetales[17]. By seeding his texts with his own nightmares,Lovecraft creates a autobiographical homology betweenhimself and his protagonists. The stories themselves start todream, which means that the reader too lies right in the pathof the infection.

Lovecraft reproduces himself in his tales in a number ofways--the first-person protagonists reflect aspects of hisown reclusive and bookish lifestyle; the epistolary form ofthe "The Whisperer in Darkness" echoes his own commitment toregular correspondence; character names are liftedfrom friends; and the New England landscape is his own. Thispsychic self-reflection partially explains why Lovecraft fansusually become fascinated with the man himself, a gaunt andsolitary recluse who socialized through the mail, yearned forthe eighteenth century, and adopted the crabby outlook andmannerisms of an old man. Lovecraft's life, and certainlyhis voluminous personal correspondence, form part of hismyth.

Lovecraft thus solidifies his virtual reality by addingautobiographical elements to his shared world of creatures,books and maps. He also constructs a documentary texture bythickening his tales with manuscripts, newspaper clippings,scholarly citations, diary entries, letters,and bibliographies that list fake books alongside realclassics. All this produces the sense that "outside" eachindividual tale lies a meta-fictional world that hovers onthe edge of our own, a world that, like themonsters themselves, is constantly trying to break throughand actualize itself. And thanks to Mythos storytellers,role-playing games, and dark-side magicians, it has.

...and Dreaming the Book


page 16

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

In "The Shadow out of Time," Lovecraft makes explicit one ofthe fantastic equations that drives his Magick Realism: theequivalence of dreams and books. For five years, thenarrator, an economics professor named Nathaniel WingatePeaslee, is taken over by a mysterious "secondarypersonality." After recovering his original identity, Peasleeis beset by powerful dreams in which he finds himself in astrange city, inhabiting a huge tentacle-sprouting conicalbody, writing down the history of modern Western world in abook. In the climax of the tale, Peaslee journeys tothe Australian desert to explore ancient ruins buried beneaththe sands. There he discovers a book written in English, inhis own handwriting: the very same volume he had producedinside his monstrous dream body.

Though we learn very little of their contents, Lovecraft'sdiabolical grimoires are so infectious that even glancing attheir ominous sigils proves dangerous. As with their dreams,these texts obssess Lovecraft's bookish protagonists to thepoint that the volumes, in Christopher Frayling's phrase,"vampirize the reader." Their titles alone are magic spells,the hallucinatory incantations of an eccentric antiquarian:the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Ilarnet Papyri, the R'lyehText, the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. Lovecraft's friendscontributed De Vermis Mysteriis and von Junzt'sUnaussprechlichen Kulten, and Lovecraft named the authorof his Cultes Des Goules, the Comte d'Erlette, after hisyoung fan August Derleth. Hovering over all these grim tomesis the "dreaded" and "forbidden" Necronomicon, a book ofblasphemous invocations to speed the return of the Old Ones.Lovecraft's supreme intertextual fetish, the Necronomiconstands as one of the few mythical books in literature thathave absorbed so much imaginative attention that they'veentered published reality.

If books owe their life not to their individual contents butto the larger intertextual webwork of reference and citationwithin which they are woven, than the dread Necronomiconclearly has a life of its own. Besides literary studies, theNecronomicon has generated numerous pseudo-scholarlyanalyses, including significant appendixes in theEncyclopedia Cthulhiana and Lovecraft's own "History of theNecronomicon." A number of FAQs can be found on the Internet,where a mild flame war periodically erupts between magicians,horror fans, and mythology experts over the reality of thebook. The undead entity referred to in the Necronomicon'sfamous couplet--"That is not dead which can eternal lie,/Andwith strange eons even death may die"--may be nothing more orless than the the text itself, always lurking in the marginsas we read the real.

Lovecraft's brief "History" was apparently inspired by thefirst Necronomicon hoax: a review of an edition of the


page 17

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

dreaded tome submitted to Massachusetts' Branford Review in1934.[18] Decades later, index cards for the book startedpopping up in university library catalogs.

It's perhaps the principle expression of Lovecraft's MagickRealism that all these ghostly references would finallymanifest the book itself. In 1973, a small-press edition ofAl Azif (the Necronomicon's Arabic name) appeared, consistingof eight pages of simulated Syrian script repeated 24 times.Four years later, the Satanists at New York's Magickal Childepublished a Necronomicon by Simon, a grab bag that containsfar more Sumerian myth than Lovecraft (though portions were"purposely left out" for the "safety of the reader"). GeorgeHay's Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names, also a childof the '70s, is the most complex, intriguing, andLovecraftian of the lot. In the spirit of the master'spseudoscholarship, Hay nests the fabulated invocations ofYog-Sothoth and Cthulhu amongst a set of analytic,literary and historical essays.

Though magicians with strong imaginations have claimed thateven the Simon book works wonders, the pseudohistories of thevarious Necronomicons are far more compelling than the textsthemselves. Lovecraft himself provided the bare bones: thetext was penned in 730 A.D by a poet, the Mad ArabAbdul Alhazred, and named after the nocturnal sounds ofinsects. It was subsequently translated by Theodorus Philetasinto Greek, by Olaus Wormius into Latin, and by John Dee intoEnglish. Lovecraft lists various libraries and privatecollections where fragments of the volume reside, and givesus a knowing wink by noting that the fantasy writer R.W.Chambers is said to have derived the monstrous and suppressedbook found in his novel The King in Yellow from rumors of theNecronomicon (Lovecraft himself claimed to have gotten hisinspiration from Chambers).

All of the Necronomicon's subsequent pseudohistories weavethe book in and out of actual occult history, with John Deeplaying a particularly conspicuous role. According to ColinWilson, the version of the text published in the HayNecronomicon was encrypted in Dee's Enochian cipher-textLiber Logoaeth . Colin Low's Necronomicon FAQ claims thatDee discovered the book at the court of King Rudolph II'scourt in Prague, and that is was under its influence that Deeand his scryer Edward Kelly achieved their most powerfulastral encounters. Never published, Dee's translation becamepart of celebrated collection of Elias Ashmole housed at theBritish Library. Here Crowley read it, freely cobblingpassages for The Book of the Law, and ultimately passing onsome of its contents indirectly to Lovecraft through SophiaGreene. Crowley's role in Low's tale is appropriate, forCrowley certainly knew the magical power of hoax and history.


page 18

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

For the history of the occult is a confabulation, its lieswedded to its genealogies, its "timeless" truths fabricatedby revisionists, madmen, and geniuses, its esoterictraditions a constantly shifting conspiracy of influences.The Necronomicon is not the first fiction to generatereal magical activity within this potent twilight zonebetween philology and fantasy.

To take an example from an earlier era, the anonymousRosicrucian manifestos that first appeared in the early 1600sclaimed to issue from a secret brotherhood of ChristianHermeticists who finally deemed it time to come above ground.Many readers immediately wanted to join up, though itis unlikely that such a group existed at the time. But thishoax focused esoteric desire and inspired an explosion of"real" Rosicrucian groups. Though one of the two suspectedauthors of the manifestos, Johann Valentin Andreae, nevercame clean, he made veiled references to Rosicrucianism asan "ingenius game which a masked person might like to playupon the literary scene, especially in an age infatuated witheverything unusual."[19] Like the Rosicrucian manifestos orBlavatsky's Book of Dzyan, Lovecraft's Necronomicon is theoccult equivalent of Orson Welles' radio broadcast of the"War of the Worlds." As Lovecraft himself wrote, "No weirdstory can truly produce terror unless it is devised with allthe care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax."[20]

In Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco suggests that esoterictruth is perhaps nothing more than a semiotic conspiracytheory born of an endlessly rehashed and self-referentialliterature--the intertextual fabric Lovecraft understood sowell. For those who need to ground their profound statesof consciousness in objective correlatives, this is a damningindictment of "tradition." But as Chaos magicians remind us,magic is nothing more than subjective experience interactingwith an internally consistent matrix of signs and affects. Inthe absence of orthodoxy, all we have is the dynamic tantraof text and perception, of reading and dream. These days theGreat Work may be nothing more or less than this "ingeniusgame," fabricating itself without closure or rest, weavingitself out of the resplendent void where Azazoth writhes onhis Mandelbrot throne.

Appendix: The Cthulhu Project

We note the following from H. P. Lovecraft's “The Call ofCthulhu”:

1. There exists a conspiratorial organization of globalreach;

2. It is centered around “the undying leaders of the cultin the mountains of China”;


page 19

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

3. “Remains of Them [according to the “deathless Chinamen”]were still to be found as Cyclopean stones in islands inthe Pacific”;

4. “When the stars were right, They could plunge from worldto world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong,They could not live”;

5. “the center [of the organization] lay amid the pathlessdeserts of Arabia, where Iram, the City of Pillars,dreams hidden and untouched”;

6. “It was not allied to the European witch-cult”;7. The center of the interests of the cult has moved under

water;8. Biological abnormalities are of great interest to the

cult; so is non-Euclidian geometry.

We conclude that Lovecraft was misinformed --- his informantsdo not appear to have been the most stable individuals ---and that Cthulhu did not come from the stars, it will go tothem. Cthulhu is a starship.

The “cult” is in fact the conspiracy; the links to China andArabia are clear evidence of this. The “deathless Chinamen”are obviously successful Chinese alchemists, and in theArabian Nights, Irem (or Iram) is reached by an alchemistwith an astonishing ability to perform biologicaltransformations. The “Cyclopean” structures in the Pacific ofwhich Lovecraft wrote must be then ruins known as Nan Madol(also called Nan Matol), on the island of Ponape in theCarolines. These were constructed when the Islamic andChinese branches of the Conspiracy were at theirheight. The non-alliance with the European witches is alsoexplicable --- those who were not merely a local reactionagainst Christianity were a splinter group, isolated andthrown on its own resources during the Dark Ages, anddetached from the Conspiracy as such.

We may take the identification of the Cthulhu cult and theConspiracy as established. “Plunging from world to world” andthe intense interest in the stars and non-Euclidean geometrysuffice to show that the project is about interstellartravel, and at speeds greater than c at that. The link withbiology is not so strange as it might seem. Evidently theConspiracy decided against human or mechanical control;instead, it is seeking to create a living starship whosenervous system is already adapted to a wide range of non-Euclidean geometries and the intricacies of space travel, asours is adapted to Euclidean geometry and throwing things.The "when the stars are right" formula is a misunderstanding;when it is working properly, Cthulhu will plunge from worldto world, from the Earth to the stars. When they are notright, Cthulhu is quiescent, inactive, in a state ofsuspended animation - dead. The possible incorporation of


page 20

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

more conventional mechanical elements may have contributed tothe notion that Cthulhu is somehow at once alive and dead.

Evidently the Cthulhu project began in Irem, but was forced,for some reason, to relocate to the east --- much furthereast. The Kitab al-Azif, later known in the west as theNecronomicon, is evidently a product of the research carriedout at Irem. The Greek name translates as the “Book of thelaws [or rules or science, etc.] of the dead.” It may thuseither refer to those syntheses which were not fully alive,”or to unsuccessful projects.

Some hundreds of years after the relocation to Ponape, thatsite too was abandoned, being left to the native (or perhapsencroaching) Micronesians. We believe it unlikely that theCthulhu project went to Easter Island or the still unexploredhighlands of Papua New Guinea. Instead, it is probably thatthey moved under water. The sea, after all, is a free-fallenvironment, abundant in resources and energy, and evenpossesses some insulation against the seismic activity of thePacific, as the survival of coral reefs attest.

Reports of Cthulhu indicate a tremendous size and an at leastpartially cephalopod nature. Octopodes are the mostintelligent of the invertebrates, and in addition possessdexterous limbs. It is not implausible that the Conspiracy asaltered some of them sufficiently to make them valuablegraduate students, if not researchers, and may even haveincorporated cephalopod elements into the starship. Underwater, huge structures may be assembled, such as blue whales,giant squid, and starships, ignoring the constraints ofgravity, no more relevant there than in space.

This hypothesis explains some otherwise quite puzzling data.The relationship of the Cthulhu cult to the Deep Ones andshoggoths is now plain as a pikestaff, as is their preferencefor remote areas, where the Conspiracy could work on themundisturbed by priests, princes and people in general. (Thereare other, and quite obvious, advantages to situatingresearch facilities in the South Pacific.) The elucidation ofa fact which has perplexed scholars for decades - namely,that Nan Matol means in space --- is now trivial. Further, itis in full accordance with local tradition. The common beliefof the Cargo Cults that European wealth was due to themigration of their ancestral magicians to England and Hollandis, in a sense, perfectly true. So, rightly viewed, are thePonapean legends about the origin of Nan Matol:

“The story that Hambruch [A Germananthropologist who visited Ponape in 1908-10] heardabout the building of Nan Matol tells how two youngwizards, Olo-Sipe and Olo-Sopa [or: Olo-Shipe andOlo-Shaupa], set out from Jokaz [a nearby island]


page 21

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

to build a great cult center to the gods, demons,and ghosts. They tried several places on the coastsof Ponape, but each time the wind and the surfdestroyed their handiwork. At last they found theirideal site at Temuen. A mighty spell made thebasaltic prisms on Jokaz fly through the air andsettle down in the right positions to form NanMatol....

“Until recent times Nan Matol was used as acenter for the worship of the turtle godNanusunsap. Whenever the Ponapeans caught a seaturtle, they brought it to Nan Matol and kept it inone of the buildings. When the tribe was assembled,the priests anointed the turtle with coconut oiland hung it with ornaments. The priests loaded theturtle into a boat and paddled about the canals ofNan Matol, while one priest stared at the turtleand blinked his eyes every time the turtle blinked.When they arrived at Pan Katera, where a fire hadbeen lit, a priest killed the turtle by breakingits shell with a club. The turtle was cut up,cooked, and served to the priests and the king,with prayers and ritual.

“In the reign of the Nan-Marki Luk-En-Mueiu,about 1800, the ritual was brought to an end in aridiculous fashion. At one a rage, howling curses,and went off to live by himself on a sand bank andeat eels. [Compare the American children's song:``Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'llgo eat worms.'' It goes on to describe thegastronomic delights of annelidophagy in detail.]The Metalanimians [i.e. natives] feared that he hadso profaned the ceremony that they could no longerhold it.

“The Ponapeans also had myths about a dragonor giant lizard. In one version, the dragon livedin Jokaz and gave birth to two girls. When thegirls grew up, they married the reigning Satalurand asked their husband to let their mother come tolive in Nan Matol. When he assented, the dragonmoved into one of the buildings, excavating thecanals of Nan Matol in the process.

“Next morning, when the Satalur brought somefood for his mother-in- law, he saw the dragon forthe first time. In terror he burned up the houseand the dragon. His wives jumped into the fire andburned themselves up too; and in his grief theSatalur did likewise. The likeliest explanation forthe dragon myth is that Ponape was once visited by


page 22

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

the New Guinean crocodile, a large man-eatingspecies often found swimming in the open sea, whereone would never expect to see a crocodile.''

(pp. 233-235 of L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp, AncientRuins and Archaeology.)

The last sentence of rationalization is easily explained. L.S. de Camp was a protege of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith andHoward Carter. Undoubtedly his researches into the roots ofthese men's ideas lead him to the Conspiracy. If he is not amember, he is at least a pawn, attempting to cover the tracesof the Secret Masters of the Conspiracy. The de Camps begintheir chapter on Nan Matol with the quotation

And there, in sombre splendour by the shore Of Hali dark, an ancient city stood; Black monolithic domes and towers loom Stark, gigantic in the starless gloom Like druid menhirs in a haunted wood.

from Carter. Hali is a lake associated with Hastur, full of -need it be said? --- octopodes.

(The novel The Moon Pool, by A. Merritt, is set (in part) inNan Matol; the rest of its action takes place in acivilization of astonishing scientific sophistication beneaththe Pacific. Cephalopods are specifically mentioned by onecharacter as a plausible form of non-human intelligence. Theimmediate sequel, The Metal Emperor, deals with artificialintelligences and what appear to be the descendants ofparticipants of the Balkh Conference in the inner reaches ofCentral Asia --- i.e., Lovecraft's Leng. The Face in theAbyss implies that there is at least one transhuman SecretMaster of the Conspiracy in the Andes, while the Dwellers inthe Mirage has fascinating parallels with Cthulhu. HowMerritt --- an editor for the Hearst papers --- came by hisastonishing knowledge of the Conspiracy --- to say nothing ofhis distinctive, perhaps unique prose --- is a mystery.)

The insanity of Lovecraft's informants is thus quiterational. The creation of a living starship, hardwired tomake sense of quantum gravity and general relativity, wouldhave been incomprehensible to any non-Conspirator beforethis century; and communication with such an entity ---especially a not-fully-debugged prototype --- as good a wayas any of frying one's neurons. In fact, the testing of FTLstarships appears distinctly hazardous. Things go wrong inunpleasant ways. One of them was the Krakatoa explosion -ominously, right on the Pacific. Another was the Tunguskaevent. It went up; it came down; it did horrible things tolarge parts of Siberia and spawned new religions among theaborigines. According to Lovecraft, the later test in the


page 23

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

1920s merely drove thousands of people insane. We may observethat the Conspiracy has been making progress. His publisheddate does not match that of the start of the great stockmarket bubble, but he may have fudged matters a little. Nodoubt subsequent tests have been responsible for otherinstances of wide-spread lunacy --- the re-election of RonaldWilson Reagan springs to mind.

Lovecraft evidently misunderstood the Conspiracy, if in facthe was not deliberately fed disinformation by its enemies.The divergence between an ancient and unspeakable alien deityand a man-made starship boggles the mind. Nonetheless, he wasright about one thing: Nothing will ever be the same afterCthulhu rises.

Incidentally, based on his interest in space travel, the deepoceans and giant squid, we can confirm that A. C. Clarke is aConspirator.

In August Derleth's thumbnail biography of Solar Pons, it wasstated that he had written six monographs, two of whichconcern us, as they deal with the "Cthulhu Mythos." The firstmonograph, published in 1905, was entitled An Inquiry intothe Nan-Matal Ruins of Ponape, and the second, published in1931, was entitled An Examination of the Cthulhu Cultand Others.

In going through the adventures that were written up byDr. Lyndon Parker, there is only one adventure which touchedupon the "Cthulhu Mythos." This adventure was entitled "TheAdventure of the Six Silver Spiders" upon its publication inthe public press. In examining a catalogue for the sale of aprivate collection of twenty volumes, Parker mentioned someof the titles therein: Necronomicon, UnaussprechlichenKulten, Cultes des Goules, De Vermis Mysteriis, and LiberIvonis. It is obvious to the student of the "Cthulhu Mythos"that these are titles of books which are integral tothe understanding of the threat from this mythology, ifeverything about it can be taken as absolute truth.

Pons told Parker that "All these books have a precariousexistence only in the writings of certain minor authors ofAmerican origin, all apparently followers, in a remote sense,of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The catalogue is, in short, ahoax."

There would seem to be a discrepancy here, for if Ponsfirmly believed that these books were spurious, then what dowe make of the two monographs which he published? To rectifythis discrepancy, and to give some justification for therectification, we need to backtrack a little.


page 24

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

Solar Pons was born in 1880 and graduated from Oxford in1899. His first monograph, An Inquiry into the Nan-MatalRuins of Ponape, was published in 1905. He established hisprivate inquiry practice in 1907, which was only interruptedby his service with British Intelligence during World War I.Dr. Lyndon Parker moved in with Pons at 7B Praed Street andbegan writing up the adventures of Solar Pons in January1928, moving out in January 1933 when he married. "TheAdventure of the Six Silver Spiders" occurred in Januaryof 1930. And the second monograph, An Examination of theCthulhu Cult and Others, was published in 1931.

In this day and age, the 1990's, the two monographs areexceedingly rare, whereas Parker's write-ups of Solar Pons'sadventures are kept in print almost continuously. To givesome feeling to the conclusions which will follow, we willquote from both monographs.

The following excerpts were deleted from Solar Pons'smonograph An Inquiry into the Nan-Matal Ruins of Ponapebefore its publication in 1905 and were recently discoveredamong his notes. He is known to have commented to Dr. LyndonParker that he had found it necessary to omit severalstriking incidents because of a request from the Admiralty inone case, an obligation to protect the reputation of acertain noble family in another, and in all a fear that theiroutre nature would work against acceptance ofhis conclusions.

Of course hearsay abounds concerning strangehappenings in the area, but there is one well-documented incident, the episode of the sloopNaples near Ponape. The account released to thepress said only that the crew had been lost in astorm, but certain additional details were madeknown to me privately. Several shells of molluscs,pierced as though for use in jewelry, were foundaboard. They were identified as belonging to aspecies of clam thought to exist only at greatdepths. There were peculiar scratches on the decks,arranged in star-shaped groups of five andsuggesting nothing so much as the claw marks ofsome strange beast. But the most bizarre pointdid not appear until the ship was towed to NewZealand and placed in dry dock. There was foundjammed in the rudder hinge the limb of an unknownsea creature, resembling the arm of a frog the sizeof a man.

I was reminded of those star-shaped scratchesduring the Adventure of the Abandoned Lighthouse,where a man went mad after following up a hint in aforbidden book. I was unable to shed any light on


page 25

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

the young man's death and was obliged to record thecase in my files as an inconclusive failure. He hadlocked himself into the beacon chamber andcollapsed into gibbering imbecility, leaving notestimony to his experience. On the stairs leadingup to the chamber I found minute traces ofscratches arranged like those on the Naples. Therewere also traces of a slimy substance which wasdefinitely organic, though I could not match itwith any known marine or terrestrial organism.Considering our limited knowledge of sea life andthe chemistry of living things this is notsurprising; but I did succeed in matching it withtraces found on the outside surface of the beaconroom window, a place so difficult of access that mycompanion professed fear of heart failure whilewatching me obtain the samples.

The second excerpt is as follows:

There exists in the files of Scotland Yardanother case with a thread leading to Ponape. It isofficially labeled "unsolved," as is the humanecustom when the murderer is known to be dead. In myown files it is labeled the Adventure of the Eye ofLapis Lazuli. The murderer was the educated andwidely travelled son of a highly placed family andshowed no outward sign of any morbid, vicious orunbalanced qualities either before or during theperiod when he committed some of the most atrociousdeeds in the history of crime. Indeed so wholesomedid he seem that the police, convinced that themurders must be the work of a raving lunatic, neverconsidered him suspect until I entered the case. Heultimately took his own life, leaving a handful ofcrushed fragments of lapis lazuli and a diary whichrecounted his acquisition on Ponape of a device inthe form of an eye of inlaid gemstone and hisgradual enslavement, through the stone, by somemalignant intelligence from beyond the visibleworld.

And the third fragment:

I have had one other case in which a connectionwith Ponape appeared: the case of the Doom amongthe Standing Stones. The connection was indeedtenuous; my quarry had spent two years there in hisyouth and made a cryptic reference to it in aletter, which I contrived to inspect, to amysterious and untraceable associate on thecontinent. But the case itself, or rather the endof it, was quite worthy of the reader's attention.


page 26

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

My client had been for some time subject toharassment, at once terrifying and yet so subtlethat the police could do nothing with the object offorcing him to hand over certain books andartifacts of great antiquity which had beencarefully guarded by his family for generations,even though their significance had been lost andwas now unknown to him. The perpetrator was an evilman with a reputation for dabbling in black magic.At my suggestion the client had agreed to hisdemands in order to trap him with proof ofextortion. Possibly suspecting a trap, the villain had dictated a meeting at night in a circleof megalithic tors and arches in the midst of adesolate moor.

Early on the day of the meeting I went therealone to scout out the terrain. I soon observedthat the place had been very recently visited,though the indications were inadequate to deducetheir purpose. There was a circular smudge from thebase of a bull's eye lantern, there were coloredwax drippings as from candles, and a foul smellingoil substance had been poured on the ground at fourpoints around the central altar stone. I was ableto identify this as a mixture of herbal distillatescombined with unidentifiable animal material.

There was an even more peculiar trace justoutside the circle. It had been completelysurrounded with a series of rough stones in theshape of five-pointed stars, very evenly spaced atintervals of three feet, four inches. Upon pickingone up I felt such a strong tingling sensation inmy hand that I dropped it, smashing it into fourparts. I reassembled the broken star asinconspicuously as possible, picked up another andplaced it in my pocket for later examination andmade a substitute of pebbles and clay that wouldkeep my man from noticing any change in the arrangement.

I returned that evening, a half hour beforesunset and an hour and a half before my client hadagreed to meet him, approaching the circlecautiously by a devious route from the villagewhere I was lodging. My intention was to arrivewell before either of them and find a hiddenvantage point but as I made my wary approach Idescried the blackmailer proceeding alone along themain path. This slowed my progress considerably andI was unable to reach the circle before darkness


page 27

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

had fallen and a mist was rolling in from thedirection of the sea. By then I could see that hewas performing some sort of ritual by thelight of a number of small candles, declaiming tothe empty night in the harsh syllables of somealien tongue.

I have never been able to explain what happenednext in terms of our normal concepts of reality,and shall leave it for the reader to form his ownspeculation, bearing in mind that I am a trainedobserver of unimaginative temperament.

The mist now formed a solid gray backgroundacross the candle-lit circle of great stones, whilethe circle itself appeared filled with low curls ofthe drifting vapor. I have had much experience withfogs of all kinds and am quite certain of thepreternaturally dense blackness which began to formwithin the fog outside the circle and move in oilybillows as the ritual proceeded. It appeared on theside opposite my position, but gradually driftedaround the circle, sometimes seeming more dense andsometimes less. As it neared me I could discernminute pinpoints of light within it, like a swarmof radiant bees.

The blackmailer had completed his ritual andnow stood quietly in an attitude of watchfulness,alternately looking toward the black cloud andstaring blankly as though listening for some faintsound. I heard the distant crunch of a footstep onthe gravelly path from the village and knew that myclient was approaching. The blackmailer seemed tohear it too and smiled.

By now the black cloud had reached the point tomy right and behind the man where I had smashed onestar-stone and removed another, which I carried inan inside pocket of my coat. I could see the cloudbulge inward, as though purposefully probingagainst some unseen barrier. The man was staringintently in the direction of my client and did notsee the great tendril of star-flected blacknessmove toward him through the gap I had made in hiscarefully arranged circle of star-stones, and beganscreaming only when it reached and engulfed him.Before my eyes he disappeared into the thing,though I could still hear his hoarse animal cries.As the blackness withdrew from the circle anddisappeared the voice receded and seemed to becoming from above, though whether this was somestrange acoustical effect of the fog I cannot say.


page 28

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

Naturally I returned and went over the sitemeticulously in daylight, but I found no trace, noclue to what had happened. The man neverreappeared, alive or dead, and my client and hispeculiar heirlooms were never troubled again.

These excerpts were written in, or prior to, 1905. Atthat time, if Pons was not writing his monograph with tonguefirmly lodged in cheek, he believed in what his researcheshad revealed concerning the "Cthulhu Mythos."

By January of 1930, Pons has seemed to have done acomplete reversal concerning his knowledge of the "CthulhuMythos." He tells Parker that the catalogue is a hoax,meaning the books themselves are a hoax, and, in effect, thatthere is no basis in fact to substantiate the "CthulhuMythos."

Then, in 1931, Pons's second monograph was published, ofwhich the preface is hereby appended:

In the annals of crime, cases involving magic,witchcraft and traffic with supernatural powers areby no means rare; to the connoisseur of crime oneneed only mention the schemes of "Count Cagliostro"or the scandalous affairs of Aleister Crowley. Thegreat majority of these are easily explained interms of ordinary fraud and of the unbalancedmentality naturally attracted to such things. Butthere remains a residue which teases the intellectand haunts the imagination.

The cases I have encountered in my own careermay all be dismissed as the result of mundane humancriminality except for a small number. Thedisturbing feature of these, however, is that theyall have a common link in a body of lore known inoccult and scholarly circles as the "CthulhuMythos."

I first became aware of these apparentlyoutlandish ideas in the wake of the hideous case ofThreadgill, the notorious necrophile, whosefiendish activities were conducted with suchmaniacal cunning as to elude the official policefor many years. At his death the case was treatedwith circumspection by the press, and his crimesdescribed only vaguely as the most repulsiveresults of mental aberration. But I had learnedthat the man had combined the sort of insanitydocumented by Kraft-Ebing with attempts atnecromancy, guided by a collection of recherche


page 29

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

books. Unfortunately his library was destroyedin the fire in which he perished, save only ahandful of notes which I carried out with me. Theyconsisted of copies of lengthy inscriptions in anunknown tongue, labeled "Eltdown Shards," togetherwith a partial translation. They purported to bethe records of visitors from beyond this planet whovisited the earth long eons ago. The earth had bythat time a long history of contact withextraplanetary life, in particular a group offearsome creatures referred to as the "Old Ones."Naturally I dismissed this at the time as aludicrous imposture.

My next inkling of the "mythos" came in theaffair of the murderous astrologer Hawthorne. Hiscriminal depredations were all too real and all toohuman, but like many of his kind he combinedblatant chicanery with a genuine belief in thesupernatural. Three days before his execution hewrote a will leaving me his library. It consistedfor the most part of preposterous quackery, butthere were two books which did not share thehysterical gullibility of the others. They wereCultes des Goules by the Comte d'Erlette andUnaussprechlichen Kulten by the Baron von Junzt.They were obscurely written and difficult tointerpret but undoubtedly shared many conceptswith the "Eltdown Shards."

My next and most important exposure to the"Cthulhu Mythos" again proved nothing; but thistime the documentary evidence was more impressive.I encountered it while pursuing a criminal geniuswhose exploits have been substantially recorded bymy loyal biographer, but about whom a great dealmore may be told someday, and about whom a verygreat deal may never be known. In the course of anunauthorized visit to his quarters during the smallhours of the morning I discovered an ancientmanuscript written in Arabic. I have made a specialstudy of documents of all ages with regard toidentification and authenticity, and can vouch forthe age and Arabian peninsular origin of the book.This genius among criminals had translated the bulkof it into English. I was deeply impressed by this,for aside from his strange compulsive inclinationtoward criminality the man was a logician andscholar of the first water. From the time andeffort he had expended one could safely deduce thathe knew of additional facts which made the book ofmore importance than legend or fraud. In the briefmoments at my disposal, I read of the Great Old


page 30

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

Ones, including great Cthulhu of the ocean deeps,Hastur of the starry void and the formidable Yog-Sothoth among others, who once ruled the earthand waited with malign patience to rule again. Thetreatise included rituals of magic for contactingthese creatures and creating the necessaryconditions for their return. Sandwiched in amongthe pages of translation was an apparentlyunrelated item, several pages of mathematicalcalculations, in the man's own hand, based on theexistence of more than three spatial dimensions.

The translations were labelled "Necronomicon,"which intrigued me because I had heard of this rarebook before and believed, on seemingly goodevidence, that it was a fictional invention. Butthis formidably ancient book was quite real, andits translator was no gull or fantasist.

It was many years before I found the leisure tofollow out these threads and track down the obscuresources which detail the Cthulhu Mythos. I foundwith monotonous regularity that books had beenstolen or destroyed, and often had to exercise thegreatest ingenuity in gaining access to carefullyguarded copies. This monograph is the result ofthat investigation, and I trust that it willstimulate interest, if not acceptance, and pointthe way to further research. I believe that I havedemonstrated, at the very least, thatsubterranean groups of dangerously fanatic cultistsdo exist, and that enough hints exist to warrantreexamining our limited concept of the earth's vastand awesome history.

And a short quotation from the body of the monograph: It is said that the middle American town of Harkness is populated by the spawn of Othuyeg, the doom-walker who was imprisoned by the Elder Ones. It is also said that J'Cak Iggarthan, author of the Black Book of the Skull lives here,and has done so ever since Quy vanished except when he musttake off for some esoteric journey.

It is obvious from the preface to his second monograph,that Pons did, indeed, believe the truth of his researchesinto the "Cthulhu Mythos." It is believed that the twomonographs were intended for students of the "CthulhuMythos," whereas "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders"was intended for a wider audience, it was best to put forththe "truth" that the "Cthulhu Mythos" was a complete hoax, inorder to protect mankind from the horrors masked by thatterminology. In effect, there is no discrepancy betweenthe monographs and the written-up adventure. Parker had been


page 31

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

living with Pons for at least a year when this adventureoccurred. There is no doubt that Parker went along with thefacade in order to protect humanity from his own bumblingnaivete.

Practicality

Most importantly underlying this particular account of theCthulhu cycle is the notion that Cthulhu is not dead, but“dreaming”. It is a fundamental notion among modern occultistparticipating in the Cthulhu movement, that the return ofCthulhu and other Great Old Ones to power is an immenentfact. The true minions to Cthulhu will prepare for his comingand facilitate his process of “awakening”. And as Cthulhureturns to enslave mankind in the yoke of ancient magick, thefaithful followers of his bidding shall enjoyed an exaltedstatus above the remainder of mankind.

It is written, in the R’lyeh Text that the passing of eachsolar cycle bears the potential to bring the Great Lordcloser to his eruption from the sea. Cthulhu takes the mindsof small groups of humans and as he holds their psyches inhis thrall, he demands sacrifice from them. Those held in hissway follow his compulsion to perform self-sacrifice;somtimes in the taking of their own lives, more often in theself-destruction of a limb or member of their own body. Thisyielding of flesh strengthens His might. A sacrificial cycleof individuals will occur during the the lunar monthpreceeding the Hallowmas. Each will follow the bidding ofCthulhu, giving up, quite literally, life and limb to appeasethe Great Old One and to hasten his return. The cycleculminates with the sacrifice of the twelfth victim who willtake his own life two days prior to the Hallowmas. The“Chosen One” will meet with other followers of Cthulhu, andin ritual circle the Chosen One will sever his or her ownhead as the ultimate self sacrifice to Cthulhu. The finalsacrifice is essential, as it culminates the cycle andcreates a psychic force which propels Cthulhu’s sunken tombin R’lyeh towards the surface. When it surfaces, his dominionshall be complete. It is writ that unto the year when thewarm water shall come forth from R’lyeh and the secondmilenium of the false prophet is nigh, this shall be the yearthat Cthulhu cometh forth and darkness forever falls upon theepoch of man.

Cthulhu exerts his will upon mankind through the “call”. ThisCall of Cthulhu, appears to be an entirely real phenomenon.Most common of its symptoms are that the afflicted individual“hears” Cthulhu. Individuals hearing the Call have littlechoice but to do its bidding. To the outside world they seemas mad men, but they know within whom they must serve withouthesitancy or reserve. The call cannot be escaped.


page 32

Case: X9233-93-511/23/93

CONFIDENTIAL

FOR

INTERNAL

FBI USE

ONLY

The R’lyeh text states that the Call can be broken, at leastfor such time as most swift action may be taken. It requiresa special invocation of Cthulhu, performed before his sign.The sign being drawn, a tooth should be brought to touch it,reminding the supplicant of the Great Old One’s hunger forthe flesh of man. This done, the invocation of “Phnglui mgwanafh, Cthulhu R’lyeh w’gahnagl fthagn” is thrice intonated,within the hearing of the He Who Doth Hear the Call. Thisdone, the tooth shall become enriched with the strength tobreak grip of the Call. But such is to be taken only withgreat dread, as Cthulhu shall take notice upon those breakinghis grasp upon the living and unto them, if they beunrighteous, shall he send forth his calling.

I have heard the call.

fbi report cthulhu

Documents

cthulhu mythos

cthulhu cult report

inweird tales

cult author

short stories

popular writer

bureaucase file

new dimension