The Evolution of the Spirit

Inevitably, once a person has chosen a mystical, magical, or spiritual path, there comes a time when s/he is challenged in his or her commitment to that path. After the initial enthusiasm and often rapid forward movement, there is a period of stillness. This can be as relatively simple as an “Apophis” stage (see my column, Into the Aethyr, in this month’s issue) or as difficult as the subject of this article — the Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night is an essentially universal concept, one of those core truths that finds its way into all philosophies, due to the profundity of the experience and the deeply felt, vividly remembered effects it can have on an individual.

The Dark Night as Natural Selection

The challenge of the Dark Night of the Soul is intrinsic to the development of the spirit, as by its very nature it weeds out those too weak to sustain the necessary effort to progress beyond it. Those who, by contrast, can maintain their commitment to their goals despite the difficulties presented during the Dark Night will grow without having to do anything more than survive it. It’s a process of natural selection, if you will. The “weaker seeker,” so to speak, is incapable of waiting out the aridity, and even more incapable of accepting the pain and misery inherent in this experience. This seeker will either find something new and exciting to do, thereby abandoning his previous plan in exchange for the “new and shiny,” or he will discard all effort in studying new things and default back to his original, stress-free and automatic religion (usually, in our culture, Christianity). This choice is made in the mistaken belief that he has exhausted all that his magical study had to offer, and has found it empty and unfulfilling.

The thing that few deserters realize is that any true calling to any spiritual pursuit is going to include this particular challenge as a matter of course. Christian mystics experience it as distinctly as any other. But for most people, Christianity is a religion that inspires no serious work; rather, it is a comforting illusion of spirituality that people use to convince themselves that they’ve covered their asses in the event of Judgment Day. By contrast, anyone who takes his spiritual and inner life seriously will encounter the challenges that, over time, hone and shape the spirit into something more. Without challenges, we do not grow. Without trials, we sit in idle acceptance of the status quo and make little effort to gain anything that is not material or does not further ease our idle sitting.

What Makes You Think You Should Have It Easy?

The belief that a life full of spiritual meaning should somehow be less troublesome is amazingly widespread. It’s astounding to me that people can truly think that being close to God (or whatever they call their motivation) should exempt them from harm or from challenges. If God loves me, I should never lose a loved one, have an accident, experience injustice, lose a business deal, lose a political race, etc. What hogwash! An old saying states that “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.” This is true (whether it be God, self, fate, or Universe), and what so many fail to grasp is that as we grow, our ability to take more challenges grows — so the challenges will also grow. This does not make them more difficult, necessarily, when you also consider the growth of our personal strength. It only makes them more impressive-sounding, and more tragic to the onlooker. We may find ourselves more horrified, or more convinced that any second now we are going to completely buckle under the weight of the current stressor, but the fact is that the only way we’ll likely buckle is if we make the choice to do so — a martyr’s choice, choosing noble defeat to collect the sympathy of those superficial witnesses so that we may coddle ourselves and attempt to believe our own bullshit. But if we choose to keep trying — to take one more step, then one more step, then damn it, one more step, we will make an important discovery: the pain will end. It will probably end a step or two past what we were certain was the limit of our ability to cope, but it will end, and then we will find that we were stronger than we thought. Because the fact is, when you’re facing a difficult challenge and you think you can’t possibly take another minute — surprise, time does not stop to give you a break. You might not be able to handle the idea of one more second of this, but the reality of that second, that minute or day or year, is way easier than the anticipation of it ever was. And if you buckle and choose the martyr’s way, then you’re simply prolonging that state of anticipation, and never getting the actual experience out of the way so you can put it behind you and move on. Martyrdom is masturbation, and it’s also one of the stupidest, least pragmatic choices you can make.

Healing, then, is a matter of standing up when it’s all over, and walking on your own power to the next signpost on the path. But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

Who Turned Out The Lights?

The Dark Night of the Soul is so named because when it hits you, all the light in your life is extinguished. The progress you were making stops. The connection you felt to your god(s) or to divinity in general, or to the Universe as a whole, is severed. There is nothing you can do to regain it, and you can’t go back and start over (though many try by constantly changing paths). Everywhere you turn, there’s a wall. You’re in a bubble of misery, unable to articulate what’s wrong, and feeling isolated, abandoned, and dead inside. Nothing inspires. Everything hurts. Depression hits, and at a level you may have never experienced before. Efforts to change things, to progress with anything at all, fail. Relationships suffer. Work suffers. Life is reduced to a routine, colorless existence. And joy becomes a distant dream, doubted in the past and unexpected in the future.

Occasionally (particularly when the Dark Night is coming to a close), you will get a glimpse of that profoundly moving connection, just enough to show you that it was real after all, that you didn’t imagine it. Then it’s gone again, for an interminable time. Exhaustion and despair strike once more, and seem cumulative over time, driving you to a depth of despondency that begins to take hold as the new status quo. At this point, surviving the darkness is most in doubt, and the seeker who perseveres is the fanatical one who absolutely will not be turned away. That seeker has found something with genuine meaning for him, and even if he desires to, even if he tries to, he cannot quite break away from the vision of himself he found in his earlier momentum. That seeker is a rare thing indeed.

The Inner Watcher

There is a key to the survival that you must find if you really want to make it to some elusive unimaginable goal, some “Great Work.” That key is this: Do not suffer over your suffering. Find a way to activate the inner Watcher, and when you need relief from your pain, transfer your awareness (or part of it) to that component of your psyche. The Watcher will always be objective, and will be able to view your situation without attachment. So, as you strain under the weight of despair and feel incapable of taking one more step, transferring the emphasis of awareness to the Watcher gives you the distance necessary to continue without collapsing. The Watcher says, “You know, this is really hard. But you know it’s going to end. It always does. It’s hard, sure, but it’s not endless, and you can do this. I know you can, because you’ve done it before.” The Watcher provides what no encouraging or supportive friend can: the certainty that this is an exercise. It’s not personal. It’s not pushed upon you because you sinned, or were bad, or because you don’t deserve good things, or because you’re not perfect, or any other reason that your inner voices of subversive bullshit are feeding you. It’s just a process of growth, as necessary as cutting teeth. It hurts where it counts — inside — because it provides growth to areas that never age and never break down.

Another facet of growth somewhat connected to the experience of the Dark Night is vacillation between ecstasy and agony, often in rapid succession. These little darknesses, or little abysses, provide exercise for the “psychic” muscles, allowing them to develop and strengthen over time for a more consistent long-term connection to the divine (or other levels of reality, depending on how you categorize your experience). These often precede and follow the Dark Night experiences, in a sort of warm up/cool down effect. They become easier to handle once you’ve gained some ground and realize that what you gain never actually leaves; it just changes, and sometimes that change can feel like starting over. But moving up a level is always rewarding in the long run, and moving down (or backing up) is simply not part of the program, regardless of how it may seem while you’re having those growing pains when initiation to a new level of awareness occurs.

Take strength in the knowledge that if this path is what truly captures your heart and inspires you, you will make it. Don’t give up when the going gets tough. You don’t have to force it, and in fact you can’t force it, but if you stick with it on some level of awareness, you will know when it’s time to apply effort again. You’ll feel the shift and things will start to move, and once again you will make great strides in your work. Until that shift occurs, any effort made toward moving things will fail. You can go through the motions, but the rewards will not be there.

In the midst of the Dark Night, despair is king, and its job is to keep you down. Assimilation of knowledge gained in your most recent leap forward takes place, and there is little you can do except review, digest, and try to cope with the frustration and pain that cycle through. How long will this phase last? Well, that depends. In my experience, a Dark Night can last anywhere from six months to three years. Shorter ones than six months can’t rightly be called Dark Nights, in my opinion, as anything shorter really isn’t that challenging. (See the “Apophis” stage at link above.) But I’m sure others have had longer ones and scarier ones than I’ve had. One thing I can say for certain is that it will shake you to the core. Its job is to test your faith, and it often results in a seemingly complete loss of faith for a period so long that you will believe yourself to have given up. At such point, ask yourself this: “Do I wish I could experience that surge again?” If you answer yes, you’re hanging in there.

Even if you’re convinced that your previous experience of attainment and growth was illusory or fluke, and that you are not worthy or capable of getting to that place again, in time you will rediscover the joys of movement and activity. No one will be able to convince you of that during the darkest moments of this rite of passage. You will be certain of your failure and of your inability to go on. You will be isolated and unable to get a glimmer of divine energy on command. You will be lost. But in time, eventually, you will find your way again.

A quote from Evelyn Underhill, in her manuscript Mysticism, underlines the necessity of understanding the individual experience of the Dark Night of the Soul:

In some temperaments it is the emotional aspect — the anguish of the lover who has suddenly lost the Beloved — which predominates; in others, the intellectual darkness and confusion overwhelms everything else. Some have felt it as a “passive purification,” a state of helpless misery, in which the self does nothing, but lets Life have its way with her. Others have experienced it rather as a period of strenuous activity and moral conflict directed to that “total self-abandonment” which is the essential preparation of the unitive life. Those elements of character which were unaffected by the first purification of the self — left as it were in a corner when the consciousness moved to the level of the illuminated life — are here roused from their sleep, purged of illusion, and forced to join the grooving stream.

The Dark Night, then, is really a deeply human process, in which the self which thought itself so spiritual, so firmly established upon the supersensual plane, is forced to turn back, to leave the Light, and pick up those qualities which it had left behind. Only thus, by the transmutation of the whole man, not by a careful and departmental cultivation of that which we like to call his “spiritual” side, can Divine Humanity be formed: and the formation of Divine Humanity — the remaking of man “according to the pattern showed him in the mount” — is the mystic’s only certain ladder to the Real. “My humanity,” said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso, “is the road which all must tread who would come to that which thou seekest.” This “hard saying” might almost be used as a test by which to distinguish the genuine mystic life from its many and specious imitations. The self in its first purgation has cleansed the mirror of perception; hence, in its illuminated life, has seen Reality. In so doing it has transcended the normal perceptive powers of “natural” man, immersed in the illusions of sense. Now, it has got to be reality: a very different thing. For this a new and more drastic purgation is needed — not of the organs of perception, but of the very shrine of self: that “heart” which is the seat of personality, the source of its love and will. In the stress and anguish of the Night, when it turns back from the vision of the Infinite to feel again the limitations of the finite the self loses the power to Do; and learns to surrender its will to the operation of a larger Life, that it may Be. “At the end of such a long and cruel transition,” says Lucie Christine, “how much more supple the soul feels itself to be in the Hand of God, how much more detached from all that is not God! She sees clearly in herself the fruits of humility and patience, and feels her love ascending more purely and directly to God in proportion as she has realized the Nothingness of herself and all things.”¹

As she states, “We must remember in the midst of our analysis, that the mystic life is a life of love: that the Object of the mystic’s final quest and of his constant intuition is an object of adoration and supreme desire.” This, then, is the trick of it: love for the process itself, leading to the object of desire, regardless of whatever degree of abstract or concrete quality it may possess — this love is what carries you through. It may be repressed during the Dark Night to the point that you believe it to be extinguished, but a single glimpse of that original inspiration, revisited, will fan the hidden spark to a roaring flame in an instant. And then you’re off again… until next time.

Footnotes

1. Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. Oneworld Publications; Reissue edition (October 1, 1999) Excerpt link.

©2007 Sheta Kaey
Edited by Trinity

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
— Albert Einstein

Initially, the ethics of government and business were to be examined under separate sections. I found it impossible, however, to speak of one without mentioning the other, and for good reason: government and business, at least in the USA, are one and the same. It would not be unreasonable to think of U.S. government as a Corporate Democracy.

I wish I could have come up with another country to serve as a better example of capitalism gone awry. It saddens me to no end to see the country I love, a country founded with such lofty ideals by such great minds, and whose government has been the object of poetry as an example for all other governments and freedom loving individuals, hijacked by corporate giants and special interest groups.

In the last few years alone, we have witnessed American intervention in El Salvador, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Columbia, Panama, and South Africa. In Iran, our government overthrew a democratic government and replaced it with a dictatorship. The United States government funded Saddam Hussein for years, even before he came to power, and even stood by as he used chemical weapons against the Kurds, killing men, women and children alike. Panama did not exist as an independent country until the U.S. decided it wanted to build a canal there. Then there is the matter of Manuel Noriega’s ties to the CIA and the “Company’s” involvement in cocaine trafficking. In Chile, our government overthrew another popularly elected government, although it took two tries. And this doesn’t even touch on American economic policies.

Even though most American citizens would rather not know these things, they are not secrets. No form of self-imposed ignorance, such as blind patriotism or sentimentalism, will change the fact that the horrible events, and the senseless disaster that occurred on 9/11 are (at least in part) in some way the result of American foreign policy. Our leaders know this. Those poor people did not deserve what happened to them on that fateful day, and the individuals that caused it should be hunted down like the animals that they are. Instead, government leaders have seized upon this opportunity to launch huge military campaigns for corporate interest groups. This is precisely why we must learn and use critical thinking skills and ethics, choosing freedom to deliberate rather than swallowing propaganda, logical thinking rather than sentimentalism, and individual pride in doing the right thing instead of blind patriotism if we are going to prevent this from ever happening again.

For many people¹, the United States is a failed experiment. Americans are deeply divided; even the propaganda fails to cast a believable illusion of unity, and there appears to be little hope for reconciliation in the near future. The very government that pretends to be a champion of freedom has used the fear generated by the attacks of that fateful September day to convince its subjects to voluntarily surrender what is left of their freedoms. What little culture there is appears to be quickly fading under the military boots of America’s so-called “Religious Right.”² The liberals distrust the highest political practices and this will eventually erode whatever civility is holding this country together. Dialogue is useless because most people surrender like sheep to every lie fed to them by their religious leaders, such as the myth that America’s Forefathers were champions of a Christian government. It is similarly useless to recommend that they read the works penned by the architects of this country, because they prefer a lie of their own making to the truth.

Men that loved freedom and were willing to die for it built up this country: ethical men. Their voices can be heard while reading the founding documents, personal memoirs, and the letters they wrote to their family and compatriots. The United States has not seen its greatest day, and that day is only delayed by greed, lack of critical thinking and ethics, blind patriotism and sentimentality. We must be capable of thinking beyond our own needs to observe the impact that these lies are having on our families and friends, government, and ultimately the relationship and responsibility that you share with every other human on this planet. In corporate democracies, people vote with their money. Every dollar is a vote. Think of money as a talisman, and learn to use the power it affords you wisely.

So why apply ethics to business? The Libertarian will tell you that corporations are, by definition, designed solely to make money for their stockholders. In other words, a corporation’s “True Will” is to make money, and as such, it should not be subject to the same penalties or restrictions as regular people. The stockholders, lacking ethics, lobby to make a world where their corporations rule supreme. In such a world, they can do business without any mandatory compliance to environmental restrictions, workers’ rights or unions, without paying corporate taxes, and without shame for exploiting people at home and abroad. Consider the benefits afforded to HMOs, oil companies, energy brokers, and the like. The Food and Drug Administration, which was instituted to protect consumers from harm caused by snake oil salesmen, takes donations from the very pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs it is supposed to regulate. This is a conflict of interest at best, and accepting bribes at worst. Is this ethical?

Was it ethical for the Fox Network to persuade the court that they were not obligated to report the truth in their news broadcasts? Fox thereby avoided paying damages in a lawsuit awarded to a former reporter wrongfully terminated for trying to report the truth. Where were the ethics of this company? Where were the ethics of the judge that ruled in their favor? Knowing this, what can be said of people that still tune in to get their news there?

Is a company that was fined for polluting in one country ethical when it relocates its plants to other countries too poor to demand environmental compliance? What of a rancher that introduces a cow displaying symptoms of mad cow disease into the food chain rather than lose a few bucks? Is the sole purpose of business to make money, without concerning itself with ethics? Can a business justify its disregard for public or ecological responsibility because their primary objective is to make money for their stockholders? If a business creates an environmental disaster affecting people everywhere, should that company be responsible for cleaning up its own messes, or should the taxpayers foot the bill? Is it ethical when government forces the taxpayer to pay for the logging roads that will be utilized exclusively by logging companies in harvesting our forests?³

Consider capitalism⁴ and how governments embracing this paradigm conduct their affairs as businesses. Capitalism, in its present form, is concerned with the accumulation of wealth to no particular end. When the few benefiting from the money-grab have milked their own country dry, capitalism must, by necessity, spread its domain to other cultures in order to continue feeding their addiction. This is why countries go to war. It isn’t for freedom or liberty. It isn’t for a love of justice, but a love for more and more things.

Reflect on the present conundrum in the Middle East. In recent memory, we can trace this problem to an Iranian “bad guy” that wouldn’t play ball with the U.S. government. The U.S. government replaced this leader with someone they could exploit. This led to the American hostage crisis, where the radical Iranians kidnapped American citizens. Back then, Saddam was a “good guy,”⁵ and Reagan armed him to fight against the Ayatollah, who was a “bad guy.” When Saddam wouldn’t play ball with the U.S., President Bush Sr. dubbed him a “bad guy” and carpet-bombed his country. Later, when now Vice President Cheney wanted to do business with him, he was once again a “good guy” — until, of course President Bush Jr. needed a diversion for not being able to find Bin Laden — who in turn was a “good guy” when we armed him to fight the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the ’70s and ’80s, but a “bad guy” for having the U.S. bombed in 2001. In short, people who do what we want are “good guys” — but they are “bad guys” when they resist exploitation. Government can get away with these things time and time again when citizens suffer from historical amnesia and intellectual laziness.

The simplest way to make this point is to compare capitalist or corporate governments to ancient Rome. Much like today, Roman soldiers were deployed to other countries in order to feed some emperor’s hunger for gold and other luxuries. There is an obvious difference between Rome and our present world: Roman citizens benefited from Rome’s conquests, and the Roman government only catered to the greed of the emperor rather than business interests. Like those of yesteryear, today’s emperors remind us to be “patriotic” and “support our troops” while they send our boys and girls to fight — not to liberate some country from an intolerable despot, but to capitalize the country and exploit its resources. It is surprising that more people don’t protest these maneuvers, but it is even more astounding that they can find people to fight these wars in the first place.

At the same time, well-meaning soldiers that enlisted for a love of their country, or because joining the military provides them the only opportunity to have an education,⁶ spill their blood and the blood of the occupied people so that the friends of the commander-in-chief can enlarge their coffers. Presently, concurrent with the call for patriotism and support, senators plot the end of military medical benefits for those very same soldiers they sent to the desert, in order to pass those savings on to the hungry corporations (HMOs and other medical insurance corporations). That’s some support.

It is typical to blame human nature for our own individual failures or our inability to exchange the things we want to do for the things we should do. Killing others over resources is often justified as human nature. It is romanticized by religion, portrayed as some lofty spiritual goal. We force ourselves into the social acceptance of war when we accept it as a form of “patriotism.” To posit that true human nature is driven by a desire for universal brotherhood is to invoke the wrath of individuals who find it easier to watch the atrocities of war than to stand against it. To categorize war as human nature without a second thought is to deny the possibility that we may one day evolve beyond our own self-destructive behavior. It denies the existence of the True Will, making all of us slaves unable to choose our own course.

It is a good scam, if you think about it. Taxpayers foot the bill for a military occupation to benefit their business interests. Soldiers are exploited and are stripped of their benefits so that they will either have to pay to for the emotional and physical injuries that they incurred while fighting for the same companies that are now discarding them like broken tools, or else join the thousands of mentally and physically handicapped vets — a large majority of whom are homeless.

Elsewhere, genocide and ethnic cleansing occurs on our little blue planet, but since there is no economic benefit to corporate interests there, “the powers that be” turn a blind eye to the slaughter. To prove this point, we must simply consider how the U.S. has imposed trade embargoes on Cuba and Vietnam because they are communist⁷ while China, which is also communist and is a country with a horrible record and long history of human rights violations, can be awarded “most favored trade status.” The answer is quite simple. Capitalism has spread to China, and its emperor is willing to play the capitalist game to cash in on its resources of slave labor so that huge corporate interests in the U.S. can benefit by the cheap manufacturing that slave labor provides. American government turns a blind eye to the fact that the Chinese government regularly harvests the organs of living prisoners against their will for profit, even when the overwhelming majority of Chinese prisoners have been imprisoned solely for having spoken against an oppressive government.

Again, this form of capitalism has to spread abroad, once all resources in the homeland are exhausted. The relationship between the U.S. and China is tenuous at best and dangerous at worst, since once each of these countries have exploited one another they will once again have to compete with one another for resources, and today is a much more dangerous world that it was during the Cold War. And all the while, people in Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba die every day from hunger and lack of medical supplies because they refuse to cave in to capitalist pressure. This is what we can expect to see from ethically bankrupt governments (and businesses).

Footnotes

1. Many of them Native Americans.
2. Must we wonder why religion is so repulsive to so many people?
3. The same forest taxpayers pay to protect.
4. Capitalism is not unethical in and of itself. There are ethical ways of doing business. It is what is been passed off as “capitalism” today which is without ethics.
5. Even though he was using chemical agents to genocide the Kurds.
6. How fortunate for the military.
7. The “red threat” is still an effective boogieman for fear-based societies.

©2007 Gerald del Campo
Edited by Naya and Sheta Kaey.

Modern occultists are working practical magic based on the fictional characters of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). This would have amused to no end the Old Man of Providence, as he preferred to be known among his circle of literary friends. He was always tickled when a reader asked him where he could buy a copy of the Necronomicon, a book originated by Lovecraft as background for his stories of cosmic horror. Lovecraft wrote primarily for the genre magazines known as the pulps between the years 1917 and 1937. Most notable among these publications was Weird Tales, which hosted the writings of many popular authors of the period working in horror, adventure, suspense and science fiction.

The stories of Lovecraft are loosely connected by certain themes and common elements that create a fictional world all their own. Central to this world is the Necronomicon, a dread book of black magic that is mentioned in many of the tales. Those who read the Necronomicon usually wish they had not done so, and often come to a horrifying end. Lovecraft created an entire history for this imaginary book. It was supposed by him to have been written by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of the Arabian kingdom of Yemen, during the early part of the 8th century. How Alhazred lost his reason was never revealed by Lovecraft, but he became privy while wandering the desert wastes to certain secrets concerning forbidden subjects such as the processes of necromancy and the ways of the dead, and also to a history of this world that long predates human history, and even the human species.

When Aliens Ruled the Earth

The Necronomicon describes the colonization of the Earth in its primordial beginning by a series of alien species. The first arrived before life had even appeared on land on in the seas. According to Lovecraft, we are the descendants of life forms created by that first race, which is called the Old Ones, or more commonly among students of Lovecraft, the Elder Things, to distinguish it from another race of aliens that came to this planet somewhat later, which were also known as the Old Ones. Lovecraft used the term “Old Ones” to describe several alien species inhabited this planet before the evolution of mankind.

Chief among the species mentioned by Alhazred in the Necronomicon, or described by Lovecraft elsewhere in his stories, were the already named race of crinoids known as the Elder Things or Elder Race; a race of creatures with heads somewhat resembling octopuses known as the spawn of Cthulhu; a blind race of gigantic invisible monsters larger than elephants to which the name Old Ones is usually applied; the Great Race of time travelers from the planet Yith which inhabits our past and our future but not our present; a race of highly intelligent fungous crustaceans from the planet Pluto, who came to our world to mine it for metals; and a race of immortal humanoids dwelling in the vast subterranean cavern of K’n-yan, deep below the plains of Oklahoma, who were carried to our world across the gulf of space by the spawn of Cthulhu.

According to the Necronomicon, these colonizing races have not so much disappeared from our world, but have simply withdrawn temporarily. In the case of the Old Ones and creatures of a related kind, they wait patiently in deep places beneath the earth or in the oceans, or in alien dimensions parallel to our own, until conditions in the heavens are more conducive to their nature, which is utterly unlike anything that has evolved on the surface of this planet. They wait for the stars to “come right” once again, as they were in primordial times. The patterns of the stars and planets are constantly changing. At present they are baneful to many of these unimaginably alien beings, whose bodies are not even composed of matter as we know it.

Lords of the Old Ones

The Old Ones have certain leaders or lords who are mentioned by name in the Necronomicon or in other ancient texts that are less well known. Azathoth, the blind idiot god of chaos, has only an indirect link with our world. He sits on his black throne at the center of chaos and pipes a music composed of the proportions and harmonies that sustain the universe, while great blind gods dance around him, mesmerized and compelled by the sounds. He is awkward, misshapen, covered in his own filth, yet he holds the power of creation and destruction in the form of the musical notes he pipes. As he plays, the elder gods who dance weave the fabric of the universe or unravel it. In them may be seen mythic echoes of Shiva, the dancing Hindu god whose dance creates or destroys the world, and also of the three Greek Fates who control the spun threads of life for all human beings.

The soul and messenger of the blinds gods who dance to the music of Azathoth is known as Nyarlathotep. He despises Azathoth, but he is bound by his nature to serve him, for Azathoth is merely a personification of the central vortex of chaos itself, and Nyarlathotep is a servant of chaos. Alone among the Old Ones he enjoys walking the surface of our world in the shape of a human being. He has many avatars or vessels that serve him as bodies, some not even remotely humanoid, but he prefers that of a deathless Egyptian pharaoh who is dark, tall, gaunt, with bony hands and eyes that gleam like stars. Sometimes he wears the face of a human being in this desert-robed form, but other times he goes faceless. He has a sardonic sense of humor. Our race, with its petty wars and desires, gives him amusement. He diverts himself by controlling, tormenting and killing men. Even so, he is the most human of all the Old Ones, the only one among them that it is even possible to communicate with in any familiar way. Nyarlathotep enjoys the company of humans in much the same way a malicious child enjoys tormenting a nest of ants.

The blind and invisible Old Ones, whose substance is so alien that we cannot even see it with our unaided eyes, move between worlds, and even between galaxies, by means of dimensional gateways. These are controlled by the sky dweller, Yog-Sothoth, who sometimes appears to human beings in the form of interlocking iridescent spheres when he opens one of his gates. In one of the longer passages from the Necronomicon quoted by Lovecraft in his story “The Dunwich Horror,” the relationship between Yog-Sothoth and the Old Ones is described:

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

As the Necronomicon makes very clear, it would be wrong to think of Yog-Sothoth as a gatekeeper. He is not only the keeper of the gates, but the key that opens them, and indeed, he is the very gates themselves, or rather the very gate, since all gates are one in Yog-Sothoth – a single gate that he may open anywhere in any dimension of time or space. The Old Ones ruled by Yog-Sothoth dwell hidden in dimensions of the upper air, yet there are other invisible Old Ones who dwell in vast tombs deep beneath the sands of the Arabian desert, where they were banished in a great war with the time traveling race from Yith in our distant past.

Mighty Cthulhu

Cthulhu and his spawn lie sleeping in stone houses on the sunken island of R’lyeh, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The spawn are smaller creatures similar in form to their great lord and high priest, mighty Cthulhu. They came to the Earth to conquer it, and for long millennia waged a series of wars against the first occupiers of the sea and land, the crinoid Elder Things. They were defeated by the Elder Things, and a truce was arranged wherein Cthulhu and his spawn were given certain newly-risen volcanic land masses in the Pacific Ocean. When the stars went wrong, Cthulhu and his people withdrew into stone crypts on their main island of R’lyeh. Cthulhu used his science, which to humanity has the appearance of a form of magic, to place himself and his people into a deep sleep that resembled death.

Cthulhu is said to be like a walking mountain. This is an exaggeration, but his body is more vast than any terrestrial organism, larger even than the blue whale, which is the largest creature of flesh and blood on this planet — the largest of which science is aware, at any rate. His body has two arms and two legs, but his hands and feet are clawed, and his great, soft mass of a head is covered over its lower face with tentacles or feelers that somewhat resemble the tentacles of an octopus or squid. He has six eyes, three on each side of his head arranged in a triangular pattern, and from his back spread membranous wings similar to those of a bat, that he uses to fly not only through the air but through airless space itself. In some manner that cannot be fathomed, he is able to use them to push against the very substance of space. His innumerable spawn, like smaller versions of himself, are similarly equipped.

For eons Cthulhu continued to control many of the creatures that remained free to wander the surface of our world by using his power of mental telepathy, in which he and his spawn excelled. Cthulhu lay sleeping in a death-like slumber, but in his dreams he ruled and instructed his worshippers, by communicating with them in their dreams. He projected into their minds strange and beautiful images of alien landscapes and architecture, and whispered commands below their conscious awareness that compelled them to actions he desired them to perform.

Then an unexpected disaster struck, and R’lyeh sank beneath the waves of the Pacific. This event Cthulhu had not foreseen. The vast body of water cut off his telepathic link with his servants on the surface, including the primitive tribes of human beings that had heard his siren call in their dreams, and had begun to worship him in Cthulhu cults around the world. So the situation remains today, according to Lovecraft. The human cults of Cthulhu sustain their faith, even though they have been cut off from mental communication with him for long ages. Cthulhu continues to dream on sunken R’lyeh, and bides his time until the stars come right, and R’lyeh rises.

Goat with a Thousand Young

Another of the named lords of the Old Ones is Shub-Niggurath, the Goat With a Thousand Young. She is said to resemble somewhat the occultist Eliphas Levi’s concept of Baphomet — a creature with the head of a goat, the torso and arms of a woman, and the hairy legs and cloven hooves of a goat. Her function is mother of monsters. It may be that Azathoth is her husband — this is an uncertain point, and various lords of the Old Ones have been named as her spouse. She is by nature promiscuous and has coupled with many to produce many strange and horrifying beings, some of whom continue to dwell deep in the intestines of this planet in dark and secret caverns. Shub-Niggurath may be hermaphroditic. She may even be capable of engendering children on herself. At times she is referred to as if she were male in Lovecraft’s works, and it is significant that the sexual parts are concealed by Levi in his illustration of Baphomet.

Distant Relations

There are other great lords in Lovecraft’s mythology who are not so closely tied to the Old Ones, and whose origins are not even know with certainty. They may be aliens to this planet and related in some way to the Old Ones, or they may have arisen after the crinoid race of Elder Things arrived in our sterile oceans and began their experiments in genetic manipulation. Humanity was one of their creations, brought forth as a kind of joke to amuse themselves. Who knows what else they created, and what evolutions took place in the darkness of lost ages among their more misshapen experiments?

Yig is known as the father of all serpents. It is my belief that he is of an alien race, but this is not stated by Lovecraft. He is worshipped as a god by many primitive cults in Lovecraft’s world, and has the power to curse with misfortune those who harm his sinuous children. As it true of the Old Ones, Yig has the ability to breed with mortal women, and to engender in their wombs monsters that are half human and half serpent. He sometimes comes with the body of a man and the head of a snake. The Plains Indians of North America propitiated his wrath by drumming and dancing for part of the year, and took great care never to harm a snake. His power was greatly feared. Yig is worshipped in the vast subterranean cavern of K’n-yan, along with Cthulhu, who carried the race dwelling in K’n-yan across space to the Earth.

Another ancient lord worshipped as a god is Dagon, whose size is almost as vast as that of mighty Cthulhu. He dwells deep in a rift in the Pacific Ocean. In overall shape he resembles the body of a man, but his fingers and toes are webbed for swimming, and his head is like that of a fish, and sits directly on his shoulders without a neck. His eyes are large and fish-like. Gills for breathing underwater open and shut on the sides of his head. Dagon is sometimes depicted with only a single eye, but this appears to be an error caused by Lovecraft’s use of the term “cyclopean” to describe him. By this term Lovecraft meant that Dagon is very large, but some artists have interpreted it to mean that Dagon, like the Cyclops, had only a single eye in his forehead. He appears in this striking manner in the trumps of my own Necronomicon Tarot (Llewellyn, 2007).

Just as Cthulhu has his spawn to serve him, Dagon has the race known as the Deep Ones, an amphibious race of humanoids with froglike heads and lungs for breathing the air of the surface world, along with gill slits for breathing the water of the deeps of the ocean. The Deep Ones intermarry and interbreed with human beings, to produce a race of hybrids who are human when they are born, but who gradually assume the aspect of the Deep Ones as they age. These hybrids are deathless unless killed by accident, disease, poison or some other mishap. They live their early lives among mankind, but around the age of seventy years they take to the water permanently, and seldom return to the surface world. According to Lovecraft, the Deep Ones are highly intelligent and are skilled artisans and engineers who could destroy the human race anytime they choose. They live in their millions in stone cities in deep fissures on the sea floor of the world’s oceans.

The Cthulhu Mythos

These are only some of the alien races and ruling lords who make up the mythology created by Lovecraft over the course of his writing career. It has come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a somewhat misleading title since Cthulhu, although important in the mythology, is not the god nor leader of all the other races, but merely one among many. Perhaps it would have been better to call it the Elder Mythos, but Lovecraft’s close friend near the end of Lovecraft’s life, the writer August Derleth, came up with the name Cthulhu Mythos and it was adopted by general consent.

Lovecraft himself never tried to put a name on his evolving mythology during his lifetime. Other writers who were his friends added to his mythological structure, and allowed Lovecraft to borrow the occasional piece from their stories. For example, the toad-god called Tsathoggua became a part of the mythos when Lovecraft incorporated this strange deity into his work from the stories of his friend Clark Ashton Smith. Similarly, the book known as the Black Book, or more commonly as Nameless Cults, was borrowed by Lovecraft from the writing of his friend Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian. Lovecraft used it in much the same way as he used the Necronomicon, as a source that described forgotten or forbidden secrets.

In the decades after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, other writers continued to set their stories in the mythological world he created, until it grew into a universe of bewildering complexity. I make no attempt to examine the entire range of the mythos, but limit myself to investigating it as it existed when its creator died. It is not that I regard later evolutions of the mythos as illegitimate, but merely that it took off in so many different directions after Lovecraft’s death that it is almost impossible to reconcile all its offshoots. The Cthulhu Mythos continues to live today. New stories are constantly being written that are set within its framework. Like the Necronomicon itself, the mythos refuses to die.

Reading over this summary of some of the key players in the Cthulhu Mythos, it would be easy for a modern magician to dismiss it all as silly fantasy. There are several factors to consider before doing so. One is the sheer persistence of the Necronomicon and of the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole. Why would something of no practical value be cherished and sustained and replenished with such devotion by so many writers and their fans? Clearly there are aspects of both the book and the mythos that resonate deep in the human psyche, an innate recognition of significant meaning below the level of articulation. The power of the Necronomicon and of the Old Ones is in part confirmed by their very continued existence.

Themes of the Mythos

A central theme of Lovecraft’s mythology is that the universe is inhabited and ruled by races of great beings who are largely indifferent to humanity. They are not malevolent in any human sense, but neither are they benevolent. They simply do not notice or care about us in any serious way. If, at times, our actions attracted their notice, they might kill us with the same casual ease with which we would swat a fly, but there would be no malice in the act. Humanity is not important enough to hate. None the less, it is possible to communicate with some of these lofty and indifferent beings, and through the use of magic alluded to in Lovecraft’s quotes from the Necronomicon, to manipulate their power for human ends.

Another theme that has a profound resonance for practitioners of Necronomicon magic is the assertion by Lovecraft that these beings are not on distant planets, but still walk among us under the cloak of darkness, or invisible to our sight. They dwell concealed in deep places beneath the ground, on under the water of wells, lakes and oceans, or in parallel dimensions just slightly out of phase with our own. Lovecraft’s world is filled with alien creatures who possess ancient wisdom that they can, if they wish, pass on to human beings. They are dangerous to deal with, but the potential rewards justify the risks in the minds of many magicians.

You may be saying to yourself, Lovecraft’s creations are only fictional characters, they have no reality. Well, maybe. Reality is a slippery concept for those of us who deal with ritual occultism. There is a form of reality that is not composed of material substance, yet it is no less potent for its lack of a body. It is known as the astral. Astral things are shaped in the mind from mind-stuff and have no tangible base, yet they sometimes exhibit a potency that extends beyond the imagination to resonate in the physical world. Many magicians regard astral beings and astral landscapes as real on a higher level of reality than the physical.

Lovecraft’s Strange Nightmares

Lovecraft was a very strange man. I do not mean merely that his personality was odd. This has been established by numerous aspects in his life, such as his love for sitting in old graveyards late at night, his obsession with anything English, his inability to part with the furniture or objects of his youth, his complete nervous breakdown in childhood, his determination to write in the style of two centuries before his birth, his determination not to earn a living because he considered it beneath the dignity of a gentleman, his precocious intellect, his conviction that he was so ugly as to be deformed, his period in early life of shunning the daylight and only venturing out at night.

All these things and countless more verify that Lovecraft was eccentric, but that was not the height of his strangeness. What made him weird, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, were his dreams. From very early childhood to the day of his death, he was plagued or gifted by nightmares of uncommon force and clarity. Many of these nightmares repeated over and over for years. During his early life, Lovecraft lived in his dreams more than he lived in the waking world. He was fortunate enough to have a pair of aunts who indulged him. They took care of the running of the house, and cooked the meals, leaving him free to wake or sleep when he chose. He was not troubled by school, after withdrawing at a fairly early age. He was not troubled by work. He had no woman friend with whom to plan a future family, and few male friends. He lived in a waking dream, and when he slept his dreams were more real than waking reality.

Lovecraft began to write these dreams down. This is seldom adequately stressed by his biographers. He did not merely draw on the occasional dream for inspiration — much of his fiction is directly based on his repeating nightmares. Indeed, some of it is no more than a direct transcription of his nightmares. This is true of the early tale “Nyarlathotep” in which this great figure of the mythos is first described. It is important to understand this point, which is why I stress it — Lovecraft did not invent Nyarlathotep. The story was a verbatim copy of his repeating nightmare.

Similarly, Lovecraft did not invent the Necronomicon. He saw the book repeatedly in his dreams. One night in sleep, the name was given to him. He heard it in his dream, and knew it was the name of the book, but he had no idea what the name meant. Lovecraft’s use of the title Necronomicon marks its first appearance — it is totally original. Later he did some research and concluded from its Greek roots that it must mean “an image (or picture) of the law of the dead.” Others have questioned this translation, and the exact meaning of the name is open to debate, but not the name itself, which was delivered to Lovecraft’s sleeping mind from a higher source. Lovecraft’s most respected biographer, S. T. Josi, translated the title as “Book Concerning the Dead.” Assuming Josi’s interpretation to be valid, perhaps the simplest rendering would be “Book of the Dead.”

Astral Portals

Lovecraft’s fictional characters often undergo transitions from one world to another through the portal of dreams or daydreams. For example, in “Dreams In the Witch House,” the protagonist of the tale is taken to various alien settings when he falls asleep in a particular room that has strangely angled walls. He at first believes himself to have seen these places only in dreams, until physical evidence forces him to confront the fact that somehow he has actually gone to them bodily while still asleep.

This curious blurring of the boundary between waking and sleeping occurs in the practice known as astral projection. Those who project the astral body usually do so while lying with their eyes closed. The experience of astral projection is in many ways very similar to dreams. Indeed, it may be asserted that dreams are a form of spontaneous astral projection. Deliberate astral projection differs from dreams in that the traveler on the astral plane is conscious of what he does and can control his own actions, whereas in dreams the dreamer is usually unaware that he is dreaming. Yet there is a well-known phenomenon called lucid dreaming in which the dreamer is aware that he dreams. Lucid dreams differ in no significant way from astral projection.

It is my contention that Lovecraft was engaged in a form of astral projection when he experienced his vivid, repeating nightmares. A large portion of his mythology, perhaps the major part of it, was based on astral visions that he had himself experienced firsthand while asleep. This explains their uncommon clarity and intensity. Lovecraft did not merely make them up, but recorded what he experienced.

How much reality is granted to Lovecraft’s mythology depends in large part upon how seriously we take the astral realm. Even if the early history of the Earth as recorded in his short stories is not factually true, in a material sense, it may still be true on the astral level. The Old Ones may have inhabited, not the physical surface of the Earth itself, but its astral reflection. This would have allowed them to interact at times with human beings, when the barrier between the physical world and the astral world was thin. This sort of interaction takes place between fairies and humans in certain favorable locations at favorable times, such as early morning or twilight, or on certain days such as the equinoxes.

From a human viewpoint, the most important portal controlled by Yog-Sothoth is the portal between the ordinary waking world of human consciousness, and the astral world experienced during dreams. By passing through this portal, the Old Ones and their great lords can be confronted and perhaps bargained with. In the traditional Christian sense, such dealings would be considered black magic. It is no accident that in Lovecraft’s stories Shub-Niggurath is the same as the Black Goat of the sabbat, or that Nyarlathotep is the same as the Black Man who presided over the secret festivals of witches.

Necronomicon Is Chaos Magic

However, from a modern perspective the Old Ones should not be regarded as evil, but rather should be treated as agents of chaos. Necronomicon magic is chaos magic. We know that it must be, because mindless Azathoth who rules cunning Nyarlathotep has his throne at the center of the great central vortex of chaos, and indeed is himself that vortex. In Lovecraft’s mythology, Azathoth is at the center of all. Everything spirals out from him and eventually spirals back into him. The structure of the universe is composed of the music of his flute, as expressed through the dance of the blind gods. But it is not the music that is the foundation of creation, but the mathematical intervals and interrelations between the sounds and the silence. Creation is a mathematical formula that Azathoth ceaselessly works out on his flute.

Of all the lords of the Old Ones, the easiest to reach is probably Nyarlathotep. He is frequently to be found moving among men — or rather, moving through their dreams. He will heed a summons, but he is utterly lacking in human compassion and will destroy the person who summons him if it offers him a moment of amusement. To travel into the astral in a conscious way, it is necessary to make use of the gateway of Yog-Sothoth. All astral travelers do so, even though they never realize it. By summoning Yog-Sothoth and offering sacrifices of various kinds to his honor, the gateway may be approached more easily. Sacrifices to the Old Ones transfer esoteric energy to them, and for this reason are welcomed. They need not be sacrifices of blood, but may involve devotions in the form of chants and prayers, or offerings of various substances such as food, drink, incense, music, precious objects, or money. They may take the form of pledges of service, or physical austerities. All these activities can, if done well, transfer esoteric energy that astral beings are able to use as a kind of nourishment.

Cthulhu will be difficult to reach. He dreams at the bottom of the ocean, a way of symbolizing that he exists on a very deep astral level. An astral traveler venturing through the gate of Yog-Sothoth will have to dive very deeply indeed to reach Cthulhu. The same is true of Dagon, but Dagon is free to surface when he chooses, although he does this seldom. Dagon can come to the dreamer, but the dreamer must descend to Cthulhu.

Shub-Niggurath is much easier to reach, almost too easy. She is connected with Lilith worship, and all worship linked to great mother goddesses, particularly to their darker and wilder aspects. The way to Shub-Niggurath is through sex magic and sexual energies, which serve her for nourishment. By contrast, the way to Yig is through ritual austerities of the kind practiced by the shamans of the Indian tribes of North America. To contact Shub-Niggurath controlled indulgence under will is required, but to contact Yig, one must abandon the self to denial and endurance.

Power of the Old Ones

Even though the Old Ones have their existence on the astral levels, there is reason to believe that they can work physical effects when they wish to do so. The astral world and the physical world are so close together, they almost touch. At twilight in some locations on the Earth, and at other opportune moments under favorable circumstances, the separation drops to almost nothing, and it becomes possible to walk from one world to the other, and back again. The gate of Yog-Sothoth may be more easily opened at these times. It allows passage through in either direction. The Old Ones may be petitioned to act, and they may project their will on the Earth.

The greatest effects of the Old Ones are worked indirectly, through physical agents such as other human beings, which the Old Ones influence on the astral level, particularly during dreams. Even though the action may be indirect, it can be potent and achieve results that seem miraculous. When every person and condition is made to favor a certain outcome, that outcome becomes almost inevitable, even though the exact manner of its achievement remains undecided until the very last moment of realization.

Necronomicon magic is a dark form of occultism not to be engaged in without serious consideration. It remains largely unwritten. The book by Simon titled the Necronomicon that has been so popular contains little or nothing of practical value, in my opinion. It remains for a serious ritual magician, working in the Western tradition and familiar with its history and various currents, to compose a serious set of rituals upon which a viable cult of the Old Ones may be based and sustained. Such a cult is possible, and indeed inevitable, given the continuing popularity of the Necronomicon and of Lovecraft’s fiction.

©2007 Donald Tyson
Edited by Sheta Kaey.