Christopher Knowles Claims Chatbot "Proved" Lovecraft Borrowed from Alice Bailey

​In the wake of the recent tragedies that plagued this week, Christopher Knowles, known to readers of this blog as the author of Our Heroes Wear Spandex, which I reviewed in 2014, and more recently as a blogger and podcaster under the name of The Secret Sun, put forward a confusing conspiracy theory in which the Brown University shooting, the death of Rob Reiner and his wife, and the push to release the Epstein files are all connected through H. P. Lovecraft, Theosophy, and a global plot to resurrect the Old Ones. It’s as confounding as you might expect, and now Knowles is calling me his “longtime nemesis” and promising to prove that Lovecraft adapted the Cthulhu Mythos from Theosophist Alice Bailey’s books of cosmology.

​I wasn’t aware that I was Knowles’s “nemesis”—“the Moriarty to my Holmes” in his words (!)—given that, as best I can tell, my sum total discussion of him was a review of his book in 2014 (in two parts) and two follow-up blog posts later that year. As best I can tell, I never discussed his decade-old claim, which he is now revisiting, that Lovecraft stole the Cthulhu Mythos from minor Theosophical figure Alice Bailey, though I did note in 2014 that he said he was upset that I (whom he called  “Jason ‘It’s All About Me! Me!’ Colavito”) did not deign to attempt to debunk him on the merits.
 
Since then, Knowles has become increasingly enraptured by the idea of synchronicity, claiming that what most of us would dismiss as coincidence is really part of an ancient, byzantine master plan to bring back ancient gods through magical rituals. So, for instance, he was quite pleased to discover that this week’s mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia took place on the fifty-third anniversary of the release of The Poseidon Adventure, whose namesake deity was also the patron of Atlantis, the lost continent he sees as the foundation for the secret religion of ancient gods animating the world’s corrupt elites. Because Lovecraft also mentioned Sydney in “The Call of Cthulhu,” he sees this as a signal to the Old Ones.
 
It is, of course, impossible to deal with this kind of conspiratorial mysticism at the level of the rational. Some people will simply choose to believe that Australian Islamists who planned a Hannukah massacre did so because of the day a largely forgotten 1970s blockbuster had its opening day in New York City, either by intentional choice or the diabolical intervention of fallen angels, who are also apparently fans of aging American pop culture.
 
Similarly, Knowles tried to draw a connection between Bondi Beach and the current U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi. The names are not pronounced the same, and I seriously doubt AG Bondi has much name recognition in Australia. He also alleged that Bondi Beach, located at 33° S, has some sort of Atlantis connection because Atlanta, Georgia is located at 33° N. Never mind that north is not south and Atlanta wasn’t named for Atlantis or even the Atlantic Ocean but instead was derived from its founding as the terminus for the Western and Atlantic Railroad.
 
Anyhow, as I explained back in 2014, there is no evidence that H. P. Lovecraft read the works of Alice Bailey. Instead, his own letters and the evidence in his stories indicate that he gleaned his knowledge of Theosophy from W. Scott-Elliot’s composite book The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1925), which he read shortly before starting “The Call of Cthulhu,” and from a summary of Theosophical ideas sent to him by E. Hoffmann Price in the 1930s. In 1926, he specifically told Clark Ashton Smith that he wished he had access to more Theosophical material but only had Scott-Elliot’s book: “Really, some of these hints about the lost ‘City of the Golden Gates’ & the shapeless monsters of archaic Lemuria are ineffably pregnant with fantastic suggestion; & I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff. What I have read is The Story of Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria, by W. Scott Elliot.”
 
In 1933, again to Smith, Lovecraft wrote about what Price told him, and—crucially—Lovecraft didn’t recognize that Price’s account of the Stanzas of Dzyan (Helena Blavatsky’s fake prehuman text) was Theosophical or connected to Theosophy, instead calling it an “another cycle of actual folklore” and adding that “I don’t know where E. Hoffmann got hold of this stuff, but it sounds damn good. I shall ask him to spill particulars to you and me—though you may have met this cycle before. It reminds me of the Scott-Elliot stuff connected with theosophy.”
 
It was only a few weeks later that, after further consultation with Price, that Lovecraft sheepishly conceded to August Derleth that “it turns out that Price’s mystical legendry was, after all, only the stuff promulgated by the theosophists.”
 
Lovecraft never got to read Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine or the other key Theosophical texts. He received a loaned copy of The Secret Doctrine at the end of 1936, when he was already dying of cancer and almost certainly never read it.
 
You can read more about Lovecraft’s involvement with Theosophy in the exhaustive account by Bobby Derie in Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, complete with receipts, from which I borrowed the Lovecraft quotations above that weren’t already familiar to me.
 
There is no mention in any of his papers of Alice Bailey, a relatively obscure Theosophist of the era, though it is, of course, not wholly impossible that he may have come across her work. However, Knowles now claims that because Bailey’s publisher, Lucifer Publishing, had its offices four blocks from the church in Manhattan where Lovecraft married Sonia Greene, he must therefore have been aware of her books, read them, and borrowed his Mythos from them: “So there goes the argument that Lovecraft couldn’t possibly have had any awareness of Alice Bailey or her books, right out the window. Do you really think HPL could have resisted at least a peek at the wares offered by a press called ‘Lucifer Publishing?’”
 
From here, Knowles’s argument becomes depressing, in that he “researched” it using Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok:

That in turn led to a long exchange with Grok where I demanded that the skeptics’ arguments (Grok always argues from authority) play by their own rules when it comes to their claims about Scot-Eliot and the rest.
 
And while doing so, I found the smoking gun which proves - in Lovecraft’s own words, no less - that he was indeed poring through Bailey’s bugnutz books, and mostly using Scot-Eliot as a beard (I guess so his penpals wouldn’t think he was going soft and squishy on them).

​I will of course be interested to see if Knowles found anything that might be “prove” Lovecraft’s dependence on Bailey, but there is no known mention of her in any of his surviving correspondence, so it will be a tall order. Doing so would, of course, mean that Lovecraft was a liar who falsified his own letters for no discernible purpose. As he had no trouble extolling various occult texts he mined for his fiction, I can’t fathom why he would hide Bailey’s, or why Scott-Elliot would somehow be more acceptable to Derleth, Smith, and Robert E. Howard, all of whom were also researching in similar books.