Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny - Mark Stavish 2018

The Lovecraft Circle

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT AND THE NECRONOMICON

H. P. Lovecraft (1890—1937) can be counted among America’s most important authors of the twentieth century, if not of all time. His literary output was considerable. Along with it he penned an estimated one hundred thousand letters to friends and acquaintances—particularly those who formed “the Lovecraft Circle” of pulp horror and adventure writers of the period. In his voluminous correspondence he often generously encouraged aspiring authors as well as those who had experienced greater fame and commercial success than himself. As a result, despite having virtually no notoriety during his lifetime, Lovecraft’s life is considered to be one of the most well-documented ever, with an estimated twenty thousand items written by him believed to be in existence today.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890, Lovecraft primarily based his stories there, as well as in neighboring Massachusetts. Lovecraft was raised by his mother, her two sisters, and her father. Sickly as a child, he did not attend school until the age of eight, and then only for one year. He read widely growing up and is described as being a prodigy—particularly in poetry. His interest in mythology as well as science was encouraged. By the age of nine he had produced several publications and eventually returned to public high school, although it appears he did not graduate, for reasons that are uncertain.

It was also during his childhood that Lovecraft would have the most formative experiences of his life, dominating and even directing the course it would take, at least in a literary sense. Nightmares, terrors, and various forms of as of yet undiagnosed sleep paralysis disorders appear to have plagued him, and it is from these early experiences that many of the characters we see later in his horror stories were drawn.

Lovecraft was a creature of the night, rarely going out before dark. After finishing high school he lived at home with his mother, spending his time writing poetry and eventually publishing his first story—“The Alchemist”—in 1916. In 1917, with America’s entry into World War I, he attempted to join the Rhode Island National Guard but, unsurprisingly, failed the physical.

H. P. Lovecraft is best known for the Cthulhu Mythos, works that are characterized by a primary theme of the powerlessness of humanity and its relative insignificance in the cosmos. Cthulhu Mythos was written during the last ten years of his life—a period in which he was also engaged as a ghostwriter—in what would prove to be his most productive time.

Unfortunately, Lovecraft would only achieve renown after his death. His failure to flourish as a writer during his lifetime can be directly connected to his excessive sensitivity. While this is what allowed him to be creative, it’s also what prevented him from pressing forward when encountering difficulties. He frequently collapsed into self-pity and slipped into a discouraged frame of mind. On top of this, his poor health—engendered by poverty and his nocturnal living habits—coupled with what was his social isolation (despite his massive correspondence) all hindered his way.

However, whatever the source of his inspiration: childhood traumas, neurotic ideations, nightmares—or preternatural intelligences, as some occultists would have us believe—Lovecraft himself stated in a letter to the editor of Weird Tales:

Now all of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or universes. To achieve the essence of a real externality, whether of time or space or dimensions, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrial-ism at the threshold.¹

The overarching theme in Lovecraft’s work can be summed up in the following points.

· The search for knowledge is ultimately self-destructive for those who peek behind the curtain of reality.

· We cannot escape the past, even the past of our ancestors.

· We are not in control of our destiny—larger forces prevail.

· The modern age is decadent and self-destructive and under threat from primitive and barbaric forces, both within and without.

· Ancient evil persists into the modern world in inconceivable ways and, once realized, leads to insanity and death.

Lovecraft’s impact has been widespread and lasting. He has been a seminal influence on some of the greatest horror writers of the twentieth century. The mythos he created—or as some would tell us, “unconsciously revealed”—appears in television shows, movies, music, video, board and card games, and even occult practices. The powerful and overwhelming appeal of this man and his nightmares reveals something deep and powerful within the human psyche. Through his writing of the insignificance of humanity and of the individual, H. P. Lovecraft ultimately achieved fame and immortality. In a sense he has become the egregore in death of what he did not achieve in life.

The Necronomicon is by far Lovecraft’s greatest and most famous literary achievement. First appearing in his short story “The Hound” (written in 1922 and published in 1924), the Necronomicon is a fictional magical book, or grimoire. The book is purported to have been written by a character known as the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred and contains the history and rites for summoning “the Old Ones.” The Old Ones are described as primordial beings who came to the Earth from the sky and now are trapped beneath the ocean in the mystical city of R’lyeh, beneath the South Pacific Ocean. Lovecraft stated that the idea and title for the Necronomicon came to him in a dream, although mystical texts of various sorts were a common literary device in gothic and horror writing. However, few fictional books have taken on the life and vitality of Lovecraft’s creation.

Lovecraft said that the title was from the Greek language and meant “an image of the law of the dead.” However, other translations of the word have been put forward, and Lovecraft’s etymology is in error. When asked about the Necronomicon, Lovecraft stated that most of the “terrible and forbidden books” were in fact quite boring, and it was more fun to create your own, as had so many of his friends and fellow authors.

What makes this all the more intriguing from the perspective of the study of egregores is that a close examination shows that nearly all of the famous magical texts in Western occultism were in some way contrived. The “Solomonic” and “Faustian” literature are prime examples. In Tibet a similar circumstance occurs with “revelations” of the origin and teachings attributed to the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Guru Padmasambhava, as with the terma teachings. In fact, the entire history of Padmasambhava as generally taught did not exist until several hundred years after his death, when it was revealed to twelfth-century Tibetan figure Nyangrel Nyima Ozer (1124—1192) in a series of dreams and visions. Nyangrel said that he was King Trisong Detsen of Tibet (742—797) in a previous life and that he remembered his experiences with Padmasambhava and was simply writing them down.

This was the first codifying of the Padmasambhava story; with it came the formation of the accepted doctrine concerning Padmasambhava’s life and adventures in Tibet. Just as many of the magical texts attributed to antiquity in the West demonstrate poor knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, so in Tibet many of the “discovered” teachings and new practices were given a Sanskrit gloss (and often a poor one at that) to make them appear Indian in origin. Thus Lovecraft has a widely accepted precedent both in literature and in esotericism in his creation of the Necronomicon—complete with corrupted Greek and Arabic.

These erroneously or even falsely attributed practices, East and West, have not prevented generations of practitioners from having some kind of psychological (if not paranormal) experience—or even enlightenment itself. Neither has the fictional nature of the Necronomicon been a stumbling block for those who see it as a gateway to genuine and existing alternate realities, even if it means risking insanity, as in the case of the “Mad Arab” before them.

Lovecraft wrote a backstory or pseudo-history of the Necronomicon in which we learn of the origin of the text, its demonic nature, as well as of the adventures and fate of Alhazred. What makes this all the more fascinating is that the book is linked through various fictions to both historical people and locations as well as fictional ones, thus bending the framework of reality for the reader. This is further exacerbated by a variety of editions of the Necronomicon appearing in print, each to varying degrees working with or ignoring the Cthulhu Mythos, and often being viewed as practical books of magic.

KENNETH GRANT: REVEALER OF DEEP ESOTERIC TRUTH

English ceremonial magician and writer Kenneth Grant (1924—2011) has been described by those who knew him as both the “elder statesman of Twentieth Century magick” and “a schoolboy gone berserk on brimstone aftershave.”² As the close associate, even if only briefly, of three of the most important characters in modern magic—Aleister Crowley, British occultist Austin Spare (1886—1956), and British Wiccan Gerald Gardner (1884—1964)—Grant had a front row seat at the creation of the magical systems that would dominate the later part of the century: Thelema as expressed in the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), , Chaos Magic, and Wicca.

In his own works covering half a century of writing, Grant provided a synthesis of the writings of Crowley and Spare, along with unique interpretations of them. In addition, Grant incorporated the mythological hierarchies found in the writings of predominant horror writers, primarily H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen. It is through this inclusion of fiction as well as his extremely verbose writing style that Grant made a memorable mark for himself as a modern occult author.

Writer, illustrator, and self-described magician Alan Moore stated, “It is hard to name another single living [as of 2002] individual who has done more to shape contemporary western thinking with regards to Magic.”³ And yet, he also called into question Grant’s mental health and emotional maturity: “[Grant’s] grasp upon conventional worldly reality was at best precarious.”⁴

Moore was not alone in this assessment. Even Crowley, whom Grant worked for as personal secretary in exchange for magical instruction, expressed similar views, despite his desire for Grant to continue his magical training. In his biography Remembering Aleister Crowley, Grant himself admits that he was “unable to acquire a practical approach to mundane affairs.”⁵ Be this as it may, to many people Grant is seen as a revealer of deep esoteric truths regarding the darkest aspects of nature.

It is also through Grant that we get a glimpse of Crowley’s final years. While Israel Regardie is well known for having served “The Beast” (Crowley) twenty years earlier, when he was in his prime, with Grant we see the more solitary man experiencing the effects of a life of adventure catching up with him: ill health and an addiction to heroin (prescribed earlier on for a bronchial infection), frustration of rationing, and the demands of a prodigious literary output all were taking their toll.

Just as we as sentient beings in this world of matter and the senses spend our time looking for homes to live in, jobs to perform, recreation for amusement, and a place where we belong, why should it be any different for sentient beings of a nonhuman class? Animals adapt to us and we adapt to them; yet when it comes to the invisible, suddenly we are to believe that what we are dealing with is completely fiction—a fiction with no hope of either being or becoming reality.

But what if anything are most spiritual practices but some form of creative fiction? All of the great spiritual luminaries are legendary and yet little historical evidence demonstrates that they even existed, let alone support the miraculous actions they performed. King Solomon, Jesus, Padmasambhava, Rosicrucian founder Christian Rosenkreutz, noted fourteenth-century author Nicholas Flamel and his wife, the renowned benefactress Perenelle Flamel—and many others less well known—exist more as inspirational legends than historical facts. Yet this does not in any way diminish their power as personalities. As we discussed, an individual can be exalted after death by various occult rites and turned into a focal point—their surviving consciousness even recruited to the task—for leading others on a particular spiritual quest. The number of saints in Roman Catholicism and other religions is a virtual testimony to the truth of this.

So then should it be any different with a fictional personality wrapped around a fictional book containing a cosmological vision compiled out of historical mythologies, connected to a real author? Is it surprising that the book and its mythos takes on “a life of its own,” spawning not only additional published stories and legends but also a variety of serious occult practices, academic studies, board games, and even efforts at reproducing the very thing—a demonic occult text itself?

The name for this now is fan fiction and live action role playing. The question is: Where does fantasy end and alternate reality—or rather a new reality—begin?

No other book written in the twentieth century has been used to answer this question more soundly than H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon. A favorite source of inspiration for Grant, his words in Against the Light perfectly describe the creative and personal life of Lovecraft.

Have you ever considered, dear Reader, that every time you awaken from the dreams of night or of the day, the forces set in motion by the characters and events that occurred therein do not cease abruptly with your change of consciousness to daytime or to nighttime [?] No, indeed, those creatures of your dream world, set in motion by impulses you no longer own, contrive to expend their energies until their impetus subsides, or until, dear Reader, you sleep again and take up a further chapter in the destiny of your creations which are—all of them—only and entirely yourself.⁶

ROBERT E. HOWARD AND CONAN THE BARBARIAN

Robert Ervin Howard (1906—1936) wrote more than a hundred stories for publication in a career that lasted twelve years. He is widely accepted as the father of the “sword and sorcery genre” with his creation of the character known as Conan the Barbarian. Howard lived his entire life in his native Texas, and its Wild West atmosphere, larger-than-life characters, and rugged terrain fueled his massive literary output. Howard was primarily self-educated and, as a result, widely read. Just two days prior to the death of his mother from tuberculosis, Howard committed suicide. This was not an impulsive act; he had carefully planned for it. He had expressed suicidal thoughts and had made plans for his own demise several times in the past, only to be interrupted by his mother.

After purchasing three plots, he borrowed a gun from a friend (his own presumably had been hidden by his father) and arranged his affairs. He sat in his 1935 Chevy and shot himself above his right ear. The bullet exited out the left side of his head. He managed to survive for eight hours afterward, but he never regained consciousness. After Howard’s death, his father donated his extensive book collection to Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas.

In August 1930, Howard wrote a letter to Weird Tales magazine that would begin an active correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft. This exchange of letters, opinions, and literary ideas would initiate Howard into the Lovecraft Circle. As mentioned in the previous section, Lovecraft carried on an extensive and detailed campaign of letter writing with his numerous friends and associates. As part of the Lovecraft Circle, Howard was introduced to many authors with whom he had many interests in common, and each member of the group encouraged others to contribute to the various fictional worlds and mythologies they had created. This unique feature of the circle elevated it beyond what is often thought of as “networking” in modern business terms, or a “writers’ club,” but in many ways it turned the circle into a magical operation wherein the thoughtforms it generated took on vigorous lives of their own. This can be seen by the longevity of the works created by its members almost three-quarters of a century after it was started. Considering that the genre was pulp fiction, designed for mass consumption and not expected to be or become great literature, this is an amazing feat in itself.

With the nickname “Two-Gun Bob” assumed as an homage to his southwestern origins, Howard wrote several important stories around the Cthulhu Mythos: “The Black Stone,” “The Cairn on the Headland,” “The Children of the Night,” and “The Fire of Asshurbanipal.” In addition, he corresponded with Cthulhu Mythos writers Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Hoffman Price, and August Derleth. They all, along with the American science-fiction writer, poet, and editor Donald Wandrei (1908—1987), established Arkham House in 1939 to publish the works of Lovecraft. (Derleth is also attributed with inventing the phrase Cthulhu Mythos.)

In April 1932, Howard wrote to Lovecraft and detailed his most recent heroic character, again, something larger than life. This would be Howard’s most famous creation—King Conan the Cimmerian—also known as Conan the Barbarian. Howard later stated, “Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.”⁷

Howard would later state to fellow Lovecraft Circle member Clark Ashton Smith:

While I do not go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly deny anything), I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces from the past or present—or even the future—work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen—or rather, my typewriter—almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-telling.⁸

FELLOW MAGICIAN ARTHUR MACHEN

While Grant’s admiration for and use of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft in occult practices is well known, he was also a fan of the Welsh writer and fellow magician Arthur Machen (1863—1947). Machen, who was as well a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was close friends with fellow Golden Dawn member (and later leader of one of its splinter groups) A. E. Waite (1857—1942). It was through Waite that Machen joined the Golden Dawn, although his relationship to the organization seems more important to historians than it was to Machen, and his membership was short-lived.

The son of an Anglican clergyman, Machen was deeply enthralled with Celtic, mystical Christianity, with a healthy dose of alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism thrown in for good measure. Despite his distrust of the increasingly rationalistic and technological advances of the age, he was also distrustful of the seemingly neurotic indulgences of spiritualism, and to his credit he required firm proofs of the reality of paranormal phenomena despite his personal belief in paranormal realities. Simply put, he was at once an irreconcilable romantic caught in dreams of a mystical medieval world that may never really have existed and a pragmatic realist.

His greatest literary achievements were in the gothic horror genre and were read by Lovecraft, Howard, and other members of the Lovecraft Circle. Like Grant, Aleister Crowley also felt that Machen’s fiction presented profound occult truths to an unknowing public. Machen’s influence as a horror writer was widespread, both during his life and to this very day. However, it is his often ignored involvement in a widely reported “paranormal event” that is of interest to shapers of mass consciousness and public perception.

In August 1914, the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium was in retreat after its first major engagement with German forces. The war—that was supposed to end in a few weeks—was going badly for Allied forces in France, and morale was plummeting. Machen recalled reading the newspapers of the day describing the retreat of British forces and stated that he fell into despair. He was then working as a journalist writing war reports and various propaganda pieces from the home front, and he wrote a piece titled “The Bowman,” first published on September 29, 1914, in the London Evening News. It was a work of fiction, but this apparently was not clearly stated, as the story presented soon took on a life of its own. The story reports of ghostly apparitions appearing at a critical moment to protect the retreating British soldiers with phantasmal arrows slaying advancing Germans by the thousands. In one report intervention took the shape of a strange cloud that covered the British retreat from German observation.

Desire for such divine (or at least supernatural) intervention was so strong amid a population hearing of their army in retreat that the report went from featuring not just the ghosts of English longbowmen—as Machen had originally written—but to angels under the direction of St. George, the patron saint of Great Britain. Churches and other religious bodies took up the story to inspire, comfort, and encourage their congregations, whose fathers and sons were fighting in France for reasons that were not always very clear. Soon stories appeared of enlisted men and officers who claimed to have seen something miraculous on the day in question—but these were all after the fact, and none were ever substantiated. The British Society for Psychical Research reported in December 1915 that no firsthand accounts of the phenomena in question could be ascertained.

Machen would later write a letter of regret stating that it “was as if I had touched the button and set in action a terrific, complicated mechanism of rumours that pretended to be sworn truth, of gossip that posed as evidence, of wild tarradiddles that good men most firmly believed.”⁹ Over time this event—one regretted by Machen—went from being one of divine intervention to wishful thinking, coupled with collective hallucination induced by the stress of battle. Yet the desire for supernatural intervention in our world, particularly that of St. George—the patron saint of the British egregore, if you will—was not enough. Many in the occult community saw it as a magical act, either intentional or unintentional by Machen, using the collective energies of the mass mind. Here Machen was not simply raising the spirits of his readers during a time of despair; he was in fact raising real spirits, an army of them to do battle with very real corporeal enemies. Although there appears to be no truth in this given that Machen himself regretted the story, the effect was nonetheless the same: a collective thoughtform had been created, it was attached to an egregore (St. George), and it was strengthened through repetition and the enactment of religious rites.

Machen himself pointed out in the introduction to his selected writings from Dickens, A Handy Dickens, something Grant would seize upon in Outside the Circles of Time.

Arthur Machen drew attention to a profound magical fact when he observed that an entity such as Mrs. Gamp—the inimitable creation of Dickens—is known to almost all literate inhabitants of this planet, whereas Mrs. X, Y or Z—our next-door neighbor—is only known to the few that constitute her immediate circle of acquaintances. Yet Mrs. X is “real,” and Mrs. Gamp is “unreal,” the figment of a human mind. But that mind, being truly creative, was potent to imbue its images with some of its vital and enduring energy so that the images came alive and haunted the minds of countless individuals.¹⁰

The description given is clearly that of a thoughtform, if not of a full-blown egregore (even one accidently created through required reading and ritualized Christmas plays and shows). It is complete with some intelligence at one end, given the degree of longevity that we see in Dickens’s works. And for works such as those of Lovecraft or Howard it is easy for the psychologist to say that what we are reading is simply the creative process of their subconscious revealing its contents in the form of dreams or sudden flashes. It is equally simplistic for the occultist or spiritualist to say that these and other artists are but channels for superior intelligences—particularly when the content of their creation is not something beyond the normal understanding of the artist. That is, we rarely see science-fiction writers describing actual science. Nor in their writings did Lovecraft or Howard point us to new archaeological discoveries. In the end it may be a little of both, with the experience and content of the artist’s mind being the true canvas upon which the masterpiece is created—even if inspired from something or somewhere from the great beyond.

It is easy to see why, for Grant and other esoteric writers as well, fiction and reality at some point became intertwined and unrecognizable from one another. Grant even stated that the purpose of his books was to prepare people for “unfamiliar states of consciousness,” making the reading of his works a magical act itself. Here we see that magic was no longer something conjured up by a small group in a rented lodge room but instead a single story, with a single idea, read by millions of people, and believed in, even if just momentarily, by many of them. Intentionally or unintentionally Machen had let a genie out of the bottle, and his having done so was a fitting testimony to the influence of magic on mass media in the twentieth century.