just wanted to mention a few things...

activity, as you can see, is low. however, it's not just us. other Left Hand Path groups/forums are slowing down. perhaps this is a widespread disinterest in vital matters? universal forces trying to manipulate man...

as long as your thinking of Yule, gift giving, and dark spiritual endeavors; i hope you will consider contributing to the Cult of Cthulhu. if you think this organization is on the right track and would like to see it progress, then send a money order (and short application) for a lifetime membership.

to those who have already officially joined, thank you!

[cultofcthulhu.net]

additionally, i still have quite a few Cthulhu pendants for sale.

i'm surprised that this Cthulhu Cult hasn't generated more motivation. the apathy of routine hunts man continually.



let us struggle to break free now before it's too late,

Venger Satanis
Cult of Cthulhu High Priest

p.s. read "The Festival" by Lovecraft sometime in December.

darrick Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> just wanted to mention a few things...
>
> activity, as you can see, is low. however, it's
> not just us. other Left Hand Path groups/forums
> are slowing down.

"us \ Other"? I would in no way construed this as being a "Left Hand Path groups/forums".

CAS would probably laugh.

Clark would be amused both grammatically and sociologically - he was one of the most vocally resistant friends I have known to any kind of "pigeon holing", or group/movement identification I ever met --even his association in the public mind with HPL was a matter of fundamental indifference - he just wanted to write what he wanted to write and experienced much frustration with editors/publishers et al ordering him to change his stuff to fit their version of public taste -
he liked Yogi Berra's "when you come to a fork in the road, take it." left, right, who cares?

Green ink.

Am I the only one who realizes that the Mythos was all fiction?

rutledge_442 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Am I the only one who realizes that the Mythos was
> all fiction?


Evidently, except me. Cult of Cthulhu.... Gimme a break.

I think I will start "The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign" lol. But honestly, I'd like to see how these "ocultists" explaine the fact that the Mythos...is fiction.

Care to explaine Darrick?

But then how many major world religions are based on fictions? All of them, arguably!

I can't speak for the CoC, which appears to be a fee-collecting exercise (and I must confess to being a trifle annoyed by these troll-like incursions into what are to me [and to most of us, I presume] essentially literary sites) - but if one has the realisation that any given religious / magickal system is (according to the Zen proverb) the finger pointing at the moon rather than the moon itself - then its quite possible to use that system (if it works - a great big "if", of course) whilst simultaneously being aware of its fictional origins.

HPL would, of course, be more than bemused....

Mikey_C Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ...but if one has the realisation
> that any given religious / magickal system is
> (according to the Zen proverb) the finger pointing
> at the moon rather than the moon itself - then its
> quite possible to use that system (if it works - a
> great big "if", of course) whilst simultaneously
> being aware of its fictional origins.

That's a bit like saying, "The map isn't the territory, but you can use the map to navigate anyway." Problem with the analogy is, that if it's a map of fictitious territory, ya gotta get there somehow first. Since we are all (those of us not involved in the "fee-collecting exercise", anyway, LOL) agreed that the works of HPL and CAS are fiction, the only way to get there is to read the stories, so by definition the CoC "system" can't possibly "work" (whatever that means)...

Which leads me to the "Lovecraftian Satanism" (yes, I actually went to darrick's website, much to my shame) that this ridiculous charlatan is propounding. He's simply taken the philosophy of the so-called Church of Satan, and brushed a thin layer of (as HPL might put it) Yog-Sothothery on top of it. Cute, but "evil is cool, selfishness is cool, and oh yeah by the way please send me $50," is hardly a religion. Makes me almost wish freedom of religion weren't in our Bill of Rights.

I went to his site to, just for the sake of seeing stupidity in its highest form.
Yes, some religions are based on some fiction but they have ethics and morals, Darrick is proposing a religious anarchy. "Do what thou wilt and that shall be the whole of the law." Is a quote from Aleister Crowely, seems he couldnt organize a new religion so he made that up. I see that in Darrick.

Yes, I am studying christian Kabalah and numerology, but at least I'm not basing a religion of off articles in the NAPA and the AAPA.

Just to add some on topic trivia:

Anton LaVey used the Clark Ashton Smith's poem "Resurrection" in the first satanic wedding ceremony, 1967. Unfortunately no copy of the ceremony exists.

A "Lovecraftian magician" and academic writes:

Quote:

Justin Woodman
Given his seemingly uncompromising view of the occult, the merging of the Cthulhu mythos with contemporary occultism would seem to go against the grain of Lovecraft's own worldview. However, Lovecraft was (to quote the title of a recent biography), a "visionary and a dreamer", and he once remarked that

"Time, space and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat - especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral"

Such sentiments emerged as a result of Lovecraft's profound sense of displacement and alienation in the modern industrial age; despite espousing scientific atheism, he also waged a "war with rationality". This being the case, it is possible to treat the Old Ones as emblematic of the "return of the repressed", the resurgence of those non-rational, unconscious forces that are deeply antagonistic to the instrumental rationality which dominates Western thought.

These ideas are evident in contemporary occultism which, according to the anthropologist (and practising pagan) Susan Greenwood, represents a psychotherapeutic "space of unreason" wherein the debilitating effects of modern rationality and consumer capitalism can be resisted. Here, the Old Ones emerge as a shadowy and chaotic counter-narrative to the old, authoritative forms of western knowledge and morality. As such, they challenge the increasingly unsustainable myth of an ordered, rational society whose moral judgements continue to be informed by what Crowley called the "Old Aeon" of Christianity.
_{"Return of the Old Ones: H.P. Lovecraft and the Crisis of Modernity;" Strange Attractor, Journal One.}

I must say that, on second reading, that comes across on second reading as a mixture of pseudo-Freudian psychobabble and post-modern academic rambling!

Two things appear to have happened, however. First of all, literary, historical and anthropological research has revealed that much of the basis of modern paganism is either empirically shaky or downright fictional (e.g. the works of Gerald Gardner) and secondly, academic fads (i.e. post-modernism, post-structuralism, et al) have attempted to undermine the basis of all "grand narrative" accounts of reality, be they scientific or religious. (At its most notorious extreme, this has led to students being told that they must not write the word reality without inverted commas.)

The end-result is a sense of "anything goes" when it comes to belief systems. If all "reality" is nothing but a constructed "grand narrative", then the Cthulhu mythos is as good a map of the Universe as Newtonian physics or Mayan cosmology. Better, perhaps, as we remain aware of its fictional nature.

Now, despite having quoted the "finger pointing at the moon" Zen koan in my previous post, I have to admit that this is pretty mad stuff. Traditional spiritual practice such as Zen and Tantra may involve constructing contingent views of reality that are eventually demolished as higher realisations are reached, but all this must be done within the context of ethical boundaries and under the guidance of a Teacher who has already travelled the Path. It is not something which happens at random and without protection.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 8 Dec 06 | 02:11PM by Mikey_C.

“Over my soul there came a sense of utter solitude as I moved among these, my professional brethren; I felt as if I were looking in at a window rather than sharing in the conference. Until I returned to my old haunts I had not realized how far I had come along the path that Taverner trod; living always in his atmosphere, hearing his viewpoint, my soul had become tuned to the key-note of his, and I was set apart from my fellows. I knew I could enter into no relationship outside the strange, unorganized brotherhood of those who follow the Secret Path, and yet I was not one of these either; an invisible barrier shut me off from them also and I could not enter into their life.

(…)

And as I realized that I no longer valued the things that most men value, I suddenly felt that I dared reach out towards the things of the Unseen which I had long secretly coveted in spite of all my denials but had never dared to touch lest I should wreck my career by so doing. Oblivious to the crowded room and the prosing of the chairman, lost in a brown study, I pondered these things………”

--Dion Fortune, “A Son of the Night”, The Secrets of Dr. Taverner

No doubt CAS would indeed have given any organized groups a wide berth, (CAS to RHB in 1937: “I could never embrace it [communism], since, as far as humanity is concerned, I see little good in anything but development of the exceptional individual, and am unable to think in terms of mass-values and numbers. My feeling is , that communism could not really favor the genius, the ‘sport‘, the exception: it would stamp him out as a traitor to the party, since he would inevitably react against it… To hell with it.” [SL 309]) ----although CAS was able to appreciate the work of individual occult visionaries, such as the artist Austin Osman Spare: (CAS to HPL: “I was especially taken with the drawings of the London artist, Spare. The man certainly must have had a vision of paganry and demonry.”[SL 254]) Interestingly, CAS's extolling of the individual is a value likewise shared by the so-called "Satanists" ---but whether these "Satanists" ever succeed in fulfilling this goal is of course a matter of opinion.

I do not see why visiting the CoC website should be any cause for shame or embarrassment! It’s fascinating stuff (speaking for myself, at least), and there is no better place on the Internet to discuss things like the formless horrors of the abyss…..

“Religious anarchy” is just as scary to me as religious conformity, and finding a moderate mean between these two extremes would seem to be the key to healthy and successful living, in religion as in all other things.

Certainly there is nothing stranger to be found on the CoC website than was once to be found among the endless welter of mystery religions, gnostic sects, magical groups, and pagan priesthoods of Ancient Babylon or Rome. Mankind never changes. We are superstitious, because our ancestors were superstitious, and they gave birth to generations which were just as crazy and horny as themselves. This is of course no reason to repeat or recapitulate the errors of the past ---and the central struggle of any thinking person’s life will always be between the (opposing?) forces of bestial hallucination and rational logic. ---One can never be too certain, however, that hallucination, too, does not have its proper place or purpose, or that weird fables of the past might not contain some secret or unexpected truth, not yet visible to our mundane logic or more prosaic senses.

The magical system of the CoC, for its part, would seem to derive from something called “Chaos magic”, which sees fictional paradigms to be just as efficacious as any “true” or “real” system for a magical working ---an idea which would seem to be born out by both modern science and ancient Eastern Religions, both of which posit that an illusion, or “Maya”, underlies all things. Indeed, what are the allure of sex, the taste of food, or the satisfaction of (drinking) water, if not illusions devised by nature to fool ourselves into satisfying needs which are ultimately separate from these desires? And the proven efficacy of such fictional rituals in many cases would seem to be directly tied to this strange fictional bent of reality. Indeed, it would seem to me that reality itself especially lends itself to the creation of fictions, and that the same space-time which provides a world for our bodies, likewise provides a space for the development for hallucinations and dreams ---and that weird-fiction writers and poets, perhaps more than any other writers of fiction, are particularly indebted to this thirst and desire for fiction, on the part of both man AND the universe ---especially as it enables them to earn (albeit sometimes quite a meager) living.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10 Dec 06 | 05:53PM by Gavin Callaghan.