For a bit of a change of pace today, I thought I’d call your attention to a strange new comedy series airing on IFC and available for streaming online called The Mirror. The six-part series is composed of a five-minute video “lessons” created by a cult calling themselves “The Children of the Mirror.” The videos begin as a parody of Christian televangelist programming but degenerate quickly into a bizarre world of paranoia and fear. Personally, I was a little cold toward the show and didn’t quite get on its wavelength, but the reason I mention the series is because of its Lovecraftian references
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This Halloween, Explore Cross-Overs Between H. P. Lovecraft and Conspiratorial Fringe History10/31/2016 Happy Halloween! The world can be a dark and scary place, but today is the day when we celebrate that darkness and look for the light at the end of the tunnel. To that end, I thought I’d give a shout out to Lovecraft scholar Justin Woodman, whose seemingly inexhaustible supply of items for his “Lovecraftian Thing a Day” blog has churned up some interesting non-fiction fringe books that connect Lovecraft to modern fringe history in unexpected ways, and a few ways that I wasn’t aware of.
Last week, S. T. Joshi, the famed Lovecraft scholar, published a blog post (August 7, 2016; he doesn’t separate entries with permalinks) in which he accused the editor of The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, book editor and reviewer Paula Guran, of vastly overstating Lovecraft’s racism in order to engage, essentially, in trendy social justice moralizing. Indeed, Joshi make a rather astonishing counterclaim, based on his 1999 book about racism in America:
Since tonight is yet another edition of Ancient Aliens, this time revisiting the claim that the moon is a hollow alien space station, I have only a couple of brief things to talk about while we wait. The first is the weird trailer that Universal released for Matt Damon’s upcoming 2017 movie The Great Wall, or, as it will soon be known, The White Supremacy. I know that Hollywood believes that audiences won’t see an action movie that stars an Asian person, but how utterly bizarre is it to see Matt Damon leading the charge to defend medieval China from an invasion of dragons? Already this year we had a filmmaker apologize for making all of the Gods of Egypt lily white, and now Universal cut the trailer for The Great Wall—a movie directed by a Chinese director and funded in part by China—to make it look like all of the forces of Asia are helpless until the white guy shows up. The director, Zhang Yimou, said that he purposely put a white guy as the lead to follow “a film language that [Americans] are familiar with” in order to introduce them to Chinese culture.
Do you remember the Stanzas (or Book) of Dzyan, the imaginary book of ancient lore concocted by Helena Blavatsky as the peg for her Secret Doctrine? I’ve been puzzling over a questionable claim about the Stanzas and it took me quite a while to find its source. That claim is that space aliens wrote the book, or, more specifically, how it was that both H. P. Lovecraft and Erich von Däniken came to use nearly identical words to describe the extramundane origins of the Stanzas of Dzyan. It’s something I wrote about in 2012, and finally I have the answer. To be fair, I probably could have found it a few years ago, but it didn’t cross my mind again until this weekend.
The New Yorker has an interesting meditation on what it means to live in a post-fact world, including a thoughtful discussion of the breakdown of Enlightenment epistemology in favor a medieval worldview of divine judgment and might making right. How, Jill Lepore asks, can we have rational discussions, political or otherwise, if we can’t agree on how to establish whether something is true?
If you watched the Yesterday TV (UK) and American Heroes Channel (US) series Forbidden History, you probably saw frequent commentator Andrew Gough, the publisher of Heretic magazine. If you did not watch this series, chances are you have never heard of Andrew Gough or Heretic magazine. Anyway, the newest edition of the Heretic is out and in it the British writer Mark Oxbrow, author of a book on the history of Halloween, has a piece on “Lovecraft, Scientology, and the Black Pilgrimage” that I think overstates its case a bit.
John Reppion Meditates on the Connections between Islamic State, "The Exorcist," and H. P. Lovecraft1/7/2016 It is day three of bathroom renovations, and I have reached the breaking point. The contractor, who came with good recommendations and reviews, has ruined the bathroom. (The contractor I previously used left the business.) It looks worse than if I had tried to do it myself. There isn’t a single straight line in the tilework. I’m at the end of my rope, and I’m not sure what to do.
Over at the Daily Grail website, British writer John Reppion, the son-in-law of graphic novel superstar Alan Moore, posted a strange and rambling meditation on ISIL and its destruction of ancient sites and artifacts that somehow folds The Exorcist and H. P. Lovecraft into his reaction to the Islamic State destroying pre-Islamic cultural heritage. I’d like to talk about this a little bit and explain some of the reasons that I think Reppion’s meditation says more about him and modern Western pop culture than it does about ISIL. Last week I received an email from occultist Peter Levenda, who was upset that a decade ago I had included in my 2005 book The Cult of Alien Gods the then-recent news that writer, conspiracy theorist, and occultist Alan Cabal had revealed in the New York Press in 2003 that Levenda was in fact the author of the infamous Simon Necronomicon, a hoax claiming to be the authentic ancient text of the book that otherwise originated in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. (My copy of the article was dated 2004, but the currently available version reads 2003.) According to later accounts, Cabal and Levenda both worked at the same occult bookstore at the time of the Necronomicon’s release and traveled in the same social circles. Levenda denies the claim, but so far as I know never demanded a retraction or accused Cabal or the New York Press of libel. Indeed, the U.S. Copyright Office lists Levenda as Simon’s real name and as the holder of Simon’s copyright for the Necronomicon’s 2006 sequel. Levenda says this is merely a legal formality to protect the identity of the intensely private Simon.
You have to love the Internet. It makes it so easy to just copy and paste your way to success. Today’s example comes from the clickbait website Ancient Code, which posts recycled and repurposed content related to the ancient astronaut theory and then lards it with large amounts of advertising in order to generate revenue. The problem is that the content isn’t just recycled, or even rewritten from linked sources, but often copied nearly verbatim from previously published material belonging to other people and then resold for profit.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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