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H. P. Lovecraft and Fringe History

2/4/2014

31 Comments

 
As we count down to the release of Cthulhu in World Mythology, which should be available in the Kindle and Nook stores in the next day or so at the latest, I thought it might be an interesting time to take a look at how the pseudoscience and fringe history of the 1920s influenced H. P. Lovecraft in his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The most obvious source for Lovecraft’s fictional universe is Theosophy, which Lovecraft specifically name-checks at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), where he writes that “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle…” Although Lovecraft knew Theosophy primarily secondhand, he was able to distill the post-Blavatsky developments in Theosophy, particularly those of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, down to their essence. In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (1935), written with (read: for) William Lumley, Lovecraft summarized Theosophy in terms that were, in short, the germ of the modern ancient astronaut theory:

The genesis of the world, and of previous worlds, unfolded itself before my eyes. I learned of the city Shamballah, built by the Lemurians fifty million years ago, yet inviolate still behind its walls of psychic force in the eastern desert. I learned of the Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilise our planet.

(Copies of all the Lovecraft stories referenced in this article can be found here.)

The Book of Dzyan was a hoax created by Helena Blavatsky, supposedly translated from ancient texts in an Indian monastery recording pre-human events. Attentive readers will remember it from Erich von Däniken’s Gods from Outer Space (1970), where he takes it for a genuine pre-human text. Lemuria, too, was a Theosophy favorite, an imaginary lost continent they placed in dim prehistory—here married to the Tibetan myth known best in English as Shangri-La. But the Lords of Venus flying in space ships? That was a post-Blavatsky development, one tied to her followers, particularly Annie Besant.

Besant, a women’s rights activist, and her partner C. W. Leadbeater added a great deal of literalizing to Blavatsky’s more ethereal claims, particularly in transforming the vaguely-defined Ascended Masters into more specifically physical extraterrestrials. In 1909, Besant and Leadbeater, who had been recently restored to his post after pedophilia accusations, had identified a 14-year-old boy (but of course) as Theosophy’s next World Teacher, the very incarnation of the alien beings. They also identified ancient heroes and gods, including Heracles and the Buddha, as extraterrestrials from the moon, from Mars, and other heavenly bodies in their 1913 book Man: Whence, How and Whither. I’d quote from it, but their writing is so confusing that it would take the whole blog post just to explain what they were talking about.

The long and short of it is that they envisioned beings from the Moon, Mars, and Venus sending “ship-loads” of souls, “basket-works,” and supplies to the earth, something on the order of Scientology’s thetans traveling to earth in a giant airplane. The key event was the coming of the “Lords of the Flame from Venus” to the earth in chariots “shooting tongues of flame” (i.e., yes, the “chariots of the gods”!). They landed on the White Island in the sea that became the Gobi desert (probably paraphrased from reference to the same in the Vishnu Purana [2.4], or the Mahabharata [12.337]), and their leader—who, of course, was a “youth of sixteen summers”—founded a secret “occult hierarchy” and civilized the earth. This, they said, was recorded in secret in the Sanskrit texts, for those with eyes to read them correctly.

The aliens then genetically engineered whole races of beings and sent “shiploads” of souls from their home world to take mental possession of these vessels on Lemuria.

In 1930, A. E. Powell, writing in a Theosophical tract on The Solar System, repeated the claim in a more accessible form, slightly misquoting Besant and Leadbetter on the White Island. This is only interesting because Powell’s version appears verbatim in George Adamski’s and Desmond Leslie’s classic UFO book Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953). I discussed this several years ago.

Attentive readers will of course recognize the concept of alien races seizing control of human minds from the Great Race of Yith featured in Lovecraft’s Shadow Out of Time (1931), which also offers a similar depth of time for the deep prehistory of the earth.

Similarly, Besant’s and Leadbeater’s cosmic view of various races of aliens descending to earth and inspiring successive waves of earth life, from plants to dinosaurs, to humans, is near-exactly paralleled in Lovecraft’s description of prehistory in At the Mountains of Madness (1935), where the Old Ones (Elder Things) and later the Cthulhu Spawn descend on the earth, create various earthly life forms, and finally create humans.

Lovecraft, of course, did not think there was any reality to Theosophy, just a bunch of hot air. In a letter to William Conover he said as much: “The crap of the theosophists, which falls into the class of conscious fakery, is interesting in spots. It combines some genuine Hindoo and other Oriental myths with a subtle charlatanism obviously drawn from nineteenth century scientific concepts.” Lovecraft would know; he, too, used Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis and other source texts beloved of Theosophists in creating his own fiction. His conclusion about conscious fakery applies equally as well to the ancient astronaut theories derived from Theosophy and, via Morning of the Magicians, Lovecraft’s own adaptation of the same.

One of the major problems Lovecraft faced was that Theosophy fetishized the East and all the Eastern faiths. For someone as virulently racist as Lovecraft, that made it an uncomfortable source for fiction, and this is something that bleeds over into his work. The believers in the Cthulhu cult are primarily non-white, and even those who are white are in thrall to Eastern faiths, whether they be Mesopotamian devil worship (“The Horror at Red Hook”), Egyptian mysteries (“The Haunter if the Dark”), or Polynesian polytheism (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”). It’s a leitmotif throughout Lovecraft—white Anglo-Saxon culture is fragile and can maintain its civilization and hegemony only by actively suppressing the truth and downplaying the accomplishments of non-white peoples, who are, symbolically, also the aliens or allied to them. Thus, the Necronomicon—pointedly written by a “mad” Arab—must be kept under lock and key. Thus, too, the U.S. government destroys Innsmouth, and scholars suppress the accounts of the Miskatonic expedition to Antarctica and willfully destroy or hide archaeological evidence of the Old Ones. This is not an organized conspiracy, however, for a university sponsored the Antarctic expedition, and a meeting of archaeologists tried to analyze the star-forged idol of Cthulhu; instead, it is the individual’s dawning realization of the peril faced by Anglo-Saxon high culture that leads to suppression and destruction. This is the very opposite of modern fringe theories, which imagine a conspiracy working to impose non-white views and destroy Anglo-Saxon culture, but the same cultural panic remains.

Nowhere is this clearer than in examining the theme of the tainted lineage in Lovecraft—and here the taint isn’t just race per se but the entire history of the primitive and the wild associated with pre-modern culture, the nemesis of Anglo-Saxon civilization as Lovecraft knew it. In the 1920 short story “Arthur Jermyn,” the titular WASP literally burns himself alive after learning that his ancestor was a white gorilla from Africa, a none-too-subtle symbol of miscegenation, made worse by the fact that the black Africans worship the mummy of this white ape as a goddess. (It was probably inspired by Edgar Rice Burrows’s human-ape hybrid African race from the Tarzan novels.) The Royal Anthropological Institute destroys the mummy to protect all of white civilization from the taint. In “The Quest of Iranon,” the title blond Aryan youth shrivels up and dies when he learns he is not in fact nobility but a mere commoner. In “The Rats in the Walls” (1923), the narrator goes mad after discovering that the veneer of his WASP civilization hides primitive, pre-Roman ancestral cannibalism. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) a young man is possessed by an evil ancestor who consorted with Yog-Sothoth. In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931), another WASP finds himself driven to madness upon discovering that he is not a pure Caucasian but instead bears some Polynesian ancestry, which in this story takes the form of an evil colonial-era mermaid. And on it goes for many more stories, not counting his revisions, but you get the idea. In every case the theme is the same: WASP civilization, and even WASP blood (what we would call genes today), is so fragile that a single tainted ancestor could bring down the entire house of cards from the micro-level (the individual’s pristine Aryan body) to the macro-level (WASP high culture). The only way out is madness or repression: “we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

But Lovecraft didn’t limit himself to just theosophical and racial claims, as widespread as they were. He also had a detailed knowledge of innumerable fringe history claims from his own time and earlier eras. As a Rhode Islander, he was thoroughly familiar with the fringe claims made for Gov. Benedict Arnold’s old stone windmill, better known as the Newport Tower. In an unused fragment in his commonplace book, later incorporated by August Derleth into The Lurker at the Threshold, Lovecraft created an exaggerated version of the Tower, expanding its legend from Viking to pre-human: “S. of Arkham is cylindrical tower of stone with conical roof — perhaps 12 feet across & 20 ft. high. There has been a great arched opening (      up?), but it is sealed with masonry. […] Indian legends speak of it as existing as long as they could remember — supposed to be older than mankind.”

But here we see something else: Lovecraft took over from the Mound Builder myth the idea that Native Americans—indeed all peoples who are not upper-class WASPs—are benighted recipients of the boons delivered from Outside. We can perhaps see a clear example of this in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) where the strange stone circles found crowning the hillsides are officially the work of Native people, but only to hide the Caucasian truth: “Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.” Here Lovecraft was probably drawing on popular ideas that rock formations found in New England were Viking tumuli or the work of Bronze Age Europeans. He took this claim to its obvious extreme in “The Mound” (1930), written for Zealia Bishop, in which Lovecraft makes Native people deny any connection to the great mounds and instead assigns them to an alien race living below ground. The germ of the idea, from Bishop, involved very real colonial era folklore that the mounds were haunted by Native American ghosts, but Lovecraft, even in employing Native Americans in his story, removed them from history by making them witnesses and adjuncts to the alien race in their midst—the very essence of the Mound Builder myth that was still popular among racists in the 1920s, despite having been conclusively proved wrong in 1894.

Of all of this, though, there was one thing Lovecraft found too ridiculous even to apply to his fictional world: The Tucson Lead Artifacts. These hoax crosses and other artifacts, written in a crude pastiche of Latin and Hebrew, were found in 1924 and supposedly detailed the flight of Jews from Rome to Arizona in the eighth century CE. Lovecraft, writing six years later, misremembered where the lead crosses had been found, but he knew they were unbelievable, even in a world of alien gods, calling them “the leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe.”

Lovecraft almost certainly read about them in the local New York papers in 1925. On December 13, the New York Times, for example, had a front-page story about the lead crosses, and the headline stated bluntly that “Serious Doubt Expressed” and that the Metropolitan Museum’s “Mr. Bashford Dean Calls Them Forgeries.” Although the article was balanced between skeptics and believers, to Lovecraft’s skeptical eye, Dean’s statement must have impressed itself upon him: “The crowns shown on these figures are not accurate representations of an early period. The shapes of the swords are childish, crudely designed, evidently after some imperfectly pictured Roman swords.” The Times further noted a rash of other forgeries plaguing Arizona at the time. The story was covered for nearly a week, and within three days when Frank Fowler, the great Classicist, reported that all of the Latin on the crosses came from quotations from Classical authors as routinely given in “Latin grammars.” Indeed, later research would confirm that fact. He also noted that the references to “Gaul” instead of “Gallia” could not have occurred before 1600 CE. In short, by December 16, it was impossible for a well-educated man to believe the story of the lead crosses at face value. The only doubt was whether the hoax had occurred in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or 1900s.

Lovecraft wasn’t going to puncture the tentative verisimilitude of his stories with a hoax this crude and silly—which is going some since Atlantis, Lemuria, and Venusian spaceships were all acceptably silly!

31 Comments
Scott David Hamilton
2/4/2014 08:16:50 am

For a guy who was so obsessed with purity, it's amazing how many lines Lovecraft straddled. He was poor, but thought of himself as the aristocracy. His stories combine horror and science fiction in a way that was still novel through the 1980s. And he serves as a bridge between all the spiritual "New Genesis" movements (Theosophy, Contactees) and the conspiracy movements that would replace them in more recent decades.

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
2/4/2014 08:33:53 am

Scott -

While I agree with your sentiment, I'm nitpicky, so I'm also going to point out that there have been plenty of poor aristocrats, both acknowledged (poor samurai, hedge knights, even much of the French nobility in 1789) and implicit (Southern planters).

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
2/4/2014 08:48:53 am

Jason -

This actually reads like something you were interested in writing, rather than a chore. I realize that a lot of it is already on hand for you, but it still feels like it came together a whole lot more easily than Round n+1 of Wolterism.

---

I would like to point something out, to anyone who's been watching this circus recently, that Jason's point of entry for writing was horror criticism, focusing on Lovecraft, and discussion of racial themes in Lovecraft is pretty up-front here. In other words, it's not just momentary celebrities and woo TV that get the race discussion. I didn't attend an East Coast liberal college - rather the opposite - and even so, I can see the blood-purity strains in a story like "Call of Cthulhu."

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/4/2014 12:04:23 pm

Indeed it's more fun to write about something I enjoy.

Reply
J.A.D
2/4/2014 06:50:29 pm

H.P Lovecraft & A.E, Poe are more contemporary
than Jules Verne & Edgar Rice Burroughs indeed!

Clint Knapp
2/4/2014 10:41:51 am

Ia! Ia! Finally back to something that makes sense!

I'll never tire of the Lovecraft discussion. It's always amusing to find that even a racist, xenophobic recluse like H.P. Lovecraft can take most of the fringe claims that we still see perpetuated today and reduce them to hogwash best suited for embellishing a fictional world than applying to the real one.

That said, it's perhaps even more poignant to see that the one he did uphold was the Mound Builder myth. Before it was mentioned in the comments thread the other day, I hadn't read The Mound. I have it open right now, though, and intend to shortly.

At this moment I'm listening to last night's Coast to Coast, and the guest, Richard Dewhurst, is invoking this very same tripe. However, he's applying a Nephilim-esque race of giants to the Mound Builders and claiming (of course) that 9-12 foot giant remains have been routinely suppressed, tying the Grand Canyon cave hoax into the mix and generally babbling on and on claiming a population of over 100,000 giants in America. Horribly derivative, but entertaining enough.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/4/2014 12:00:11 pm

In "Cthulhu in World Mythology," I make reference to the "historical" accounts of the Spanish explorer who visited the title mound, as translated by H. P. Lovecraft!

Reply
Martin R
2/4/2014 07:06:55 pm

I'm rather late to the Lovecraft (though I've always been a fan of Poe), so all of this is really interesting. I look forward to reading your book.

Reply
J.
2/4/2014 11:52:34 am

tried to get ahold of you to ask this question earlier- on Lovecraft- he has Theban on cover or first pages of a book, your take on this-thank you.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/4/2014 11:58:55 am

I'm afraid I don't understand the question.

Reply
Clint Knapp
2/4/2014 02:07:10 pm

I assume he means this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet

I'm not sure what Lovecraft book he refers to, though, since Lovecraft himself never had a book published while he was alive. I'd guess someone thought it was a cute addition to a title page or perhaps a reference to one of the hoax Necronomicons floating around.

J.
2/4/2014 02:23:21 pm

in my research on Lovecraft, it is said that he wrote Theban on a first page of his book- which one, I can't say-- but I knew you were an expert on him- can you tell me what the Theban script said?

J.
2/4/2014 02:29:36 pm

in researching Theban, I entered into google Theban+Lovecraft.. you will see it come up.. Cradle of Filth? bottom of first page. Do you or have you seen examples of his use of Theban script?

Clint Knapp
2/4/2014 02:43:17 pm

Cradle of Filth is a goth-rock band. From what I'm seeing it looks like some fans confused the Theban script (itself a concoction of the 16th century magical movement) on one of the band's album booklets for Lovecraft's work.

Thane
2/4/2014 12:03:11 pm

>>They landed on the White Island in the sea that became the Gobi desert (probably paraphrased from reference to the same in the Vishnu Purana [2.4], or the Mahabharata [12.337]), and their leader—who, of course, was a “youth of sixteen summers”—founded a secret “occult hierarchy” and civilized the earth. This, they said, was recorded in secret in the Sanskrit texts, for those with eyes to read them correctly.<<

Venusian summers? Earth summers? Mars summers? or other?

I couldn't help but ask. Given the answer, his age could be something other than 16......

:D

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/4/2014 12:07:50 pm

I don't have it in front of me, but I believe he had the appearance of a 16 year old, not that he necessarily was. Apparently Leadbeater felt that teen boys were the epitome of divine perfection and therefore imagined the aliens in that image.

Reply
Thane
2/4/2014 02:44:11 pm

oh, I made that connection. It was a joking question but more seriously......

Whether or not he acted on his...."appreciation"....of the youthful form or not...the idealization of youth is an age old motif in art. Since the 19th century was very enamored of the classical age, it is possible it lead to the further fetish-ization of youth in some fringe philosophies or it could just have been the current artistic conceit.

I don't know the details of the accusations against Leadbeater other than the "masturbation advice" and I am not defending him, I am just suggesting that the selected imagery may be based on a popular artistic style (in form and word) equating the youthful form with perfection and not related to his personal preferences.

yakko
2/4/2014 03:39:04 pm

I'm curious to know if there's any possibility that the Gobi Sea actually existed in historical times. I remember reading about it in, I think, James Churchward's books, and THERE'S a real source of accurate information! I especially love the quotes that have a footnote that reads "Various records". (Yeah, let me go look that up and check that quote.) It seems to me that in Churchward's books, the Gobi, the Sahara, and the Amazon Basin were inland seas, drained of their water when Mu and Atlantis sank (due to gas chambers underneath them collapsing - say what?). I know nothing of the geology of the Gobi Desert, but since it sits a few thousand feet above sea level today, it seems a bit unlikely that it was underwater at any time within the last few million years. Everything about the Gobi Sea that I can find in a quick Web search is related to Theosophy or related concepts.

Reply
Matt Mc
2/4/2014 12:16:10 pm

Quite refreshing and it serves as a good tease for your book which I can wait to read in a few days


Reply
Drew
2/4/2014 01:00:43 pm

Dude might have been racist as a Confederate Widow, but dang did he love cats. Cats and ice cream. I've done a fair bit of research into his trips to Salem and the various inspirations behind Arkham and some of his favorite subjects, besides how Poles are ruining the town and little horror vignettes, are the cats he meets.

I'm curious - where in Arkham did he place the Tower? There's a gazebo on the actual Common, but it's only from the 1840s or so.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
2/4/2014 03:39:00 pm

"In every case the theme is the same: WASP civilization, and even WASP blood (what we would call genes today), is so fragile that a single tainted ancestor could bring down the entire house of cards from the micro-level (the individual’s pristine Aryan body) to the macro-level (WASP high culture)."

If I didn't know better, I'd say Lovecraft was doing some kind of ironic Twainian commentary on the frailty of mind of the common American racist. Erm, well, that's exactly what he was doing--I meant, if I didn't know better, I'd say he was doing *on purpose*.

By the way, while we're on the subject of proto-ancient-astronautics, Crowley's "Liber LI" (51) touches on the subject:

http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib51.html

Evidently it was written in 1913 at the latest, and seems to show a lot of Theosophical influence. It details Atlanteans, who, tradition held, had settled on Earth from Mars en route to the sun. In the end, they leave our planet for Venus on a magical rocketship.

Reply
J.A,D
2/4/2014 07:05:16 pm

H.P Lovecraft is that much closer than we are to being
a contemporary of Nathaniel Hawthorne whose story
"Young Goodman Brown" has in it cultural clues as to
why the Salem Witchcraft Trials were fueled by the sad
hysteria they were. Was Lovecraft pitching his stories to
an audience comprise of the children of Millard Filmore
voting bigots? Orson Welles himself did not believe in
Percival Lowell's Martians but had wanted his version of
H.G. Well's ones to scare the proverbial pants off of half
his listening audience. Was Lovecraft less of a bigot but
more of a showman? Calvinism has the theme that the
flaws of character in us can predestine a fall from grace...

Reply
J.A.D
2/4/2014 07:18:11 pm

comprised = comprise (small typo)

H.P Lovecraft made it easier for many of Southern Gothic
writers to then have their fledgling stories be published.
His bleak sense of imminent doom reminds me of Poe.
The Anglo-Saxons if ethnic & fragile are sandwiched in
between the confident Normans and the idyllic & sublime
nature worshiping Druids & Celts. I admit I did have a few
Bette Davis meets up with the Children of the Corn thoughts
about how fragile the job of Chieftain or King was in the very
context of the religious beliefs of the early Celts! I had a quiet
Lovecraft moment when thinking over civilization. The magazine
culture of the USA in the 1800s was often literate & bigoted and
had less in common with Alfred the Great's Saxon followers...

The Other J.
2/4/2014 08:53:31 pm

I was curious about a Lovecraft-Yeats connection, since Yeats was in the Theosophical Society and Annie Besant wrote one of the better interpretations of his bizarre metaphysical exploration called "A Vision."

BUT

As it happens, Crowley was part of that hermetic crowd Yeats ran with back in the day, and it seems they didn't get along. Crowley found Yeats to be haughty and removed, and apparently thought Yeats was jealous of him because Crowley felt Yeats knew Crowley was an incomparably inferior poet to Crowley. Yep.

From Yeats' perspective, he basically thought Crowley was a bit of a putz, a 'me feiner' (Irish for self-obsessed -- my term, not Yeats'). This all came to a head when Crowley had finally earned enough merit badges to be admitted into the inner order of the Golden Dawn in London, but he was turned down. So he went to Paris to appeal to one of the founding fathers of the Golden Dawn, McGregor Matthers, who had started a whole thing about how he was actually the highest chief (since the Secret Chiefs were still remaining secret). Mathers then sent Crowley back to the London Golden Dawn temple to demand oaths of loyalty to Mathers, and Crowley showed up wearing a mask, a kilt and a sword. Yeats stopped him at the door and called the cops. And as far as I know, that was about it for Crowley and the Golden Dawn crowd.

Crowley and Yeats didn't really get along after that. Or before.

Reply
The Other J.
2/4/2014 08:55:31 pm

That should read 'Crowley felt Yeats knew YEATS was an incomparably inferior poet to Crowley.' It makes more sense if I keep the principals in order.

J.A.D
2/4/2014 09:01:46 pm

Yes... W.B Yeats had principles and
Crowley was amoral and unprincipled.
I think I'd have sided with Mister Yeats!

Shane Sullivan
2/5/2014 03:58:32 am

How very appropriate, then, that Yeats is actually remembered as a poet, while Crowley is perhaps best known as the guy who lived in the house Jimmy Page later owned.

Poetic justice at its most literal. =P

J.A.D
2/4/2014 07:36:57 pm

The poor South once again was hit by New England
or Great Plains temperatures only to see the major
roads reduced to chaos in places. Lovecraft's sense
of doom is like the regional funk we feel up here before
the March winds and melt let emotions burst forth in our
town meetings. He is living inside a sublime reality that
extends and elongates the shut-in feelings of February
throughout the rest of the year. I feel he was playing into
a prejudice in a manner not unlike Mark Twain, who was
less Copperhead or Lost Cause in belief than many of
his readers. The Founding Fathers did not believe in the
Divine Right of Kings claims that allow an aristocracy to
hold sway. William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt were
less bigoted than Millard Fillmore, but the mass media in
the 1800s could react in a very bigoted manner. Were some
of the "Anglo-Saxons" of a genteel breeding in his stories
based on some of the Boston Brahmans who had a Southern
belle in the ancestry, unlike their poorer "Swamp Yankee" kin?
King Arthur's sense of knighthood and chivalry became in
time a Romantic ideal but Alfred the Great left actual institutions
behind. There is a war between the ideal and the practical...

Reply
Jase
2/10/2014 06:20:12 am

Jason, I've got to say that I really like your recent blog posts as well as the opening chapters of "The Cult of Alien Gods." Your writing style is logical and crystal clear. There is something pretty amazing about how the ideas of Theosophy and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft have morphed into an collection of pseudo-religious beliefs that have an incredible effect on pop culture today.

Reply
Beth
8/11/2014 05:55:28 am

Two things continue to amaze me:

1) That anyone with any sense at all would give credence or legitimacy to the gobbledygook that is Blavatsky's, Besant's or Hall's writings. People...this junk makes no sense!
2) That anyone fails to see how ridiculous all of these channeled writings are. They all sound the same, no matter who is channeling, who they are channeling, or in what time period these channeled writings are written.

My belief is that when people channel spirits, they are simply allowing a demonic entity to take over their bodies. These demons undoubtedly laugh their asses off at all of the stupid humans who believe the garbage that Blavatsky, Besant, J.Z. Knight and their channeled "Ascended Masters" share with the world.

And, seriously...who would really believe any steaming pile of crap that was dictated by a dude named "Day-Zhwah Cool"? Hilarious! Sounds more like the name of a rapper than that of an "Ascended Master." Oh, my achin side! LMAO!!!

Reply
Charles Verrastro link
8/21/2020 04:18:22 pm

Reading Norman Spinrod's 'New Tomorrows" SF collection and spotted Philip Jose Farmer's pastiche 'The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod', written as if a Tarzan story were written by William Burroughs rather than ERB. Stuff he called his 'polytropical paramyths'
Came across this wild passage which is so loaded with cryptic references it could be one of the manuscript drafts of Ulysses by James Joyce I used to puzzle through in the library attic at my old Alma Mater. By way of Mad magazine. Tarzan is given the kind of over the top stereotyping and genre mixing only Jason would love to surgically unravel. Here's his revenge for the Nazis kidnapping Jane:

"Along come The Rumble To End All Rumbles 1914 style, and them fuckin Huns abduct Jane... they got preying-mantis eyes with insect lust. Black anti-orgone Horbigerian Weltanschauung, they take orders from green venusians who telepath through von Hindenburg.
– Ja Wohl! bark Leutnant Herrlipp von Dreckfinger at his Kolonel, Bombastus von Arschangst. –Ve use die Baltimore snatch to trap der gottverdammerungt Jungle Rot Kid, dot pseudo-Aryan Oberaffenmensch, unt ve kill him unt den all Afrika iss ours!
Drei cheers for Der Kaiser unt die Krupp Familie!
The Kid balling La again but he drop her like old junkie drop pants for a shot of horse, he track down the Hun, it the code of the jungle."

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    • Magicians of the Gods Review
    • The Curse of the Pharaohs
    • The Antediluvian Pyramid Myth
    • Whitewashing American Prehistory
    • James Dean's Cursed Porsche
  • The Library
    • Ancient Mysteries >
      • Ancient Texts >
        • Mesopotamian Texts >
          • Eridu Genesis
          • Atrahasis Epic
          • Epic of Gilgamesh
          • Kutha Creation Legend
          • Babylonian Creation Myth
          • Descent of Ishtar
          • Resurrection of Marduk
          • Berossus
          • Comparison of Antediluvian Histories
        • Egyptian Texts >
          • The Shipwrecked Sailor
          • Dream Stela of Thutmose IV
          • The Papyrus of Ani
          • Classical Accounts of the Pyramids
          • Inventory Stela
          • Manetho
          • Eratosthenes' King List
          • The Story of Setna
          • Leon of Pella
          • Diodorus on Egyptian History
          • On Isis and Osiris
          • Famine Stela
          • Old Egyptian Chronicle
          • The Book of Sothis
          • Horapollo
          • Al-Maqrizi's King List
        • Teshub and the Dragon
        • Hermetica >
          • The Three Hermeses
          • Kore Kosmou
          • Corpus Hermeticum
          • The Asclepius
          • The Emerald Tablet
          • Hermetic Fragments
          • Prologue to the Kyranides
          • The Secret of Creation
          • Ancient Alphabets Explained
          • Prologue to Ibn Umayl's Silvery Water
          • Book of the 24 Philosophers
          • Aurora of the Philosophers
        • Hesiod's Theogony
        • Periplus of Hanno
        • Ctesias' Indica
        • Sanchuniathon
        • Sima Qian
        • Syncellus's Enoch Fragments
        • The Book of Enoch
        • Slavonic Enoch
        • Sepher Yetzirah
        • Tacitus' Germania
        • De Dea Syria
        • Aelian's Various Histories
        • Julius Africanus' Chronography
        • Eusebius' Chronicle
        • Chinese Accounts of Rome
        • Ancient Chinese Automaton
        • The Orphic Argonautica
        • Fragments of Panodorus
        • Annianus on the Watchers
        • The Watchers and Antediluvian Wisdom
      • Medieval Texts >
        • Medieval Legends of Ancient Egypt >
          • Medieval Pyramid Lore
          • John Malalas on Ancient Egypt
          • Fragments of Abenephius
          • Akhbar al-zaman
          • Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah
          • Murtada ibn al-‘Afif
          • Al-Maqrizi on the Pyramids
          • Al-Suyuti on the Pyramids
        • The Hunt for Noah's Ark
        • Isidore of Seville
        • Book of Liang: Fusang
        • Agobard on Magonia
        • Book of Thousands
        • Voyage of Saint Brendan
        • Power of Art and of Nature
        • Travels of Sir John Mandeville
        • Yazidi Revelation and Black Book
        • Al-Biruni on the Great Flood
        • Voyage of the Zeno Brothers
        • The Kensington Runestone (Hoax)
        • Islamic Discovery of America
        • The Aztec Creation Myth
      • Lost Civilizations >
        • Atlantis >
          • Plato's Atlantis Dialogues >
            • Timaeus
            • Critias
          • Fragments on Atlantis
          • Panchaea: The Other Atlantis
          • Eumalos on Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Gómara on Atlantis
          • Atlantis as Biblical History
          • Sardinia and Atlantis
          • Atlantis and Nimrod
          • Santorini and Atlantis
          • The Mound Builders and Atlantis
          • Donnelly's Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Morocco
          • Atlantis and Hanno's Periplus
          • Atlantis and the Sea Peoples
          • W. Scott-Elliot >
            • The Story of Atlantis
            • The Lost Lemuria
          • The Lost Atlantis
          • Atlantis in Africa
          • How I Found Atlantis (Hoax)
          • Termier on Atlantis
          • The Critias and Minoan Crete
          • Rebuttal to Termier
          • Further Responses to Termier
          • Flinders Petrie on Atlantis
          • Amazing New Light (Hoax)
        • Lost Cities >
          • Miscellaneous Lost Cities
          • The Seven Cities
          • The Lost City of Paititi
          • Manuscript 512
          • The Idolatrous City of Iximaya (Hoax)
          • The 1885 Moberly Lost City Hoax
          • The Elephants of Paredon (Hoax)
        • OOPARTs
        • Oronteus Finaeus Antarctica Map
        • Caucasians in Panama
        • Jefferson's Excavation
        • Fictitious Discoveries in America
        • Against Diffusionism
        • Tunnels Under Peru
        • The Parahyba Inscription (Hoax)
        • Mound Builders
        • Gunung Padang
        • Tales of Enchanted Islands
        • The 1907 Ancient World Map Hoax
        • The 1909 Grand Canyon Hoax
        • The Interglacial Period
        • Solving Oak Island
      • Religious Conspiracies >
        • Pantera, Father of Jesus?
        • Toledot Yeshu
        • Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay on Cathars
        • Testimony of Jean de Châlons
        • Rosslyn Chapel and the 'Prentice's Pillar
        • The Many Wives of Jesus
        • Templar Infiltration of Labor
        • Louis Martin & the Holy Bloodline
        • The Life of St. Issa (Hoax)
        • On the Person of Jesus Christ
      • Giants in the Earth >
        • Fossil Origins of Myths >
          • Fossil Teeth and Bones of Elephants
          • Fossil Elephants
          • Fossil Bones of Teutobochus
          • Fossil Mammoths and Giants
          • Giants' Bones Dug Out of the Earth
          • Fossils and the Supernatural
          • Fossils, Myth, and Pseudo-History
          • Man During the Stone Age
          • Fossil Bones and Giants
          • Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man
          • American Elephant Myths
          • The Mammoth and the Flood
          • Fossils and Myth
          • Fossil Origin of the Cyclops
          • History of Paleontology
        • Fragments on Giants
        • Manichaean Book of Giants
        • Geoffrey on British Giants
        • Alfonso X's Hermetic History of Giants
        • Boccaccio and the Fossil 'Giant'
        • Book of Howth
        • Purchas His Pilgrimage
        • Edmond Temple's 1827 Giant Investigation
        • The Giants of Sardinia
        • Giants and the Sons of God
        • The Magnetism of Evil
        • Tertiary Giants
        • Smithsonian Giant Reports
        • Early American Giants
        • The Giant of Coahuila
        • Jewish Encyclopedia on Giants
        • Index of Giants
        • Newspaper Accounts of Giants
        • Lanier's A Book of Giants
      • Science and History >
        • Halley on Noah's Comet
        • The Newport Tower
        • Iron: The Stone from Heaven
        • Ararat and the Ark
        • Pyramid Facts and Fancies
        • Argonauts before Homer
        • The Deluge
        • Crown Prince Rudolf on the Pyramids
        • Old Mythology in New Apparel
        • Blavatsky on Dinosaurs
        • Teddy Roosevelt on Bigfoot
        • Devil Worship in France
        • Maspero's Review of Akhbar al-zaman
        • The Holy Grail as Lucifer's Crown Jewel
        • The Mutinous Sea
        • The Rock Wall of Rockwall
        • Fabulous Zoology
        • The Origins of Talos
        • Mexican Mythology
        • Chinese Pyramids
        • Maqrizi's Names of the Pharaohs
      • Extreme History >
        • Roman Empire Hoax
        • America Known to the Ancients
        • American Antiquities
        • American Cataclysms
        • England, the Remnant of Judah
        • Historical Chronology of the Mexicans
        • Maspero on the Predynastic Sphinx
        • Vestiges of the Mayas
        • Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel
        • Origins of the Egyptian People
        • The Secret Doctrine >
          • Volume 1: Cosmogenesis
          • Volume 2: Anthropogenesis
        • Phoenicians in America
        • The Electric Ark
        • Traces of European Influence
        • Prince Henry Sinclair
        • Pyramid Prophecies
        • Templars of Ancient Mexico
        • Chronology and the "Riddle of the Sphinx"
        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
        • Remarkable Discoveries Within the Sphinx (Hoax)
        • Spirit of the Hour in Archaeology
        • Book of the Damned
        • Great Pyramid As Noah's Ark
        • The Shaver Mystery >
          • Lovecraft and the Deros
          • Richard Shaver's Proofs
    • Alien Encounters >
      • US Government Ancient Astronaut Files >
        • Fortean Society and Columbus
        • Inquiry into Shaver and Palmer
        • The Skyfort Document
        • Whirling Wheels
        • Denver Ancient Astronaut Lecture
        • Soviet Search for Lemuria
        • Visitors from Outer Space
        • Unidentified Flying Objects (Abstract)
        • "Flying Saucers"? They're a Myth
        • UFO Hypothesis Survival Questions
        • Air Force Academy UFO Textbook
        • The Condon Report on Ancient Astronauts
        • Atlantis Discovery Telegrams
        • Ancient Astronaut Society Telegram
        • Noah's Ark Cables
        • The Von Daniken Letter
        • CIA Psychic Probe of Ancient Mars
        • CIA Search for the Ark of the Covenant
        • Scott Wolter Lawsuit
        • UFOs in Ancient China
        • CIA Report on Noah's Ark
        • CIA Noah's Ark Memos
        • Congressional Ancient Aliens Testimony
        • Ancient Astronaut and Nibiru Email
        • Congressional Ancient Mars Hearing
        • House UFO Hearing
      • Ancient Extraterrestrials >
        • Premodern UFO Sightings
        • The Moon Hoax
        • Inhabitants of Other Planets
        • The Fall of the Sky
        • Blavatsky on Ancient Astronauts
        • The Stanzas of Dzyan (Hoax)
        • Aerolites and Religion
        • What Is Theosophy?
        • Plane of Ether
        • The Adepts from Venus
      • A Message from Mars
      • Saucer Mystery Solved?
      • Orville Wright on UFOs
      • Interdimensional Flying Saucers
      • Poltergeist UFOs
      • Flying Saucers Are Real
      • Report on UFOs
    • The Supernatural >
      • The Devils of Loudun
      • Sublime and Beautiful
      • Voltaire on Vampires
      • Demonology and Witchcraft
      • Thaumaturgia
      • Bulgarian Vampires
      • Religion and Evolution
      • Transylvanian Superstitions
      • Defining a Zombie
      • Dread of the Supernatural
      • Vampires
      • Werewolves and Vampires and Ghouls
      • Science and Fairy Stories
      • The Cursed Car
    • Classic Fiction >
      • Lucian's True History
      • Some Words with a Mummy
      • The Coming Race
      • King Solomon's Mines
      • An Inhabitant of Carcosa
      • The Xipéhuz
      • Lot No. 249
      • The Novel of the Black Seal
      • The Island of Doctor Moreau
      • Pharaoh's Curse
      • Edison's Conquest of Mars
      • The Lost Continent
      • Count Magnus
      • The Mysterious Stranger
      • The Wendigo
      • Sredni Vashtar
      • The Lost World
      • The Red One
      • H. P. Lovecraft >
        • Dagon
        • The Call of Cthulhu
        • History of the Necronomicon
        • At the Mountains of Madness
        • Lovecraft's Library in 1932
      • The Skeptical Poltergeist
      • The Corpse on the Grating
      • The Second Satellite
      • Queen of the Black Coast
      • A Martian Odyssey
    • Classic Genre Movies
    • Miscellaneous Documents >
      • The Balloon-Hoax
      • A Problem in Greek Ethics
      • The Migration of Symbols
      • The Gospel of Intensity
      • De Profundis
      • The Life and Death of Crown Prince Rudolf
      • The Bathtub Hoax
      • Crown Prince Rudolf's Letters
      • Position of Viking Women
      • Employment of Homosexuals
    • Free Classic Pseudohistory eBooks
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