CoC - FBI Cthulhu Report.pdf

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Memorandum
TO: File
FROM: Asst . Director Pickman
DATE: 12/1/93
RE : Cthulhu Cult Report
FBI
This is without exception the most miserable excuse for a Bureau
case file that I have ever scene . What kind of maniacal rambling
.
is this? What a sprawling morass of verbal chaos and excrement
I recommend an immediate psychiatric review for agent Neville,
and pending the results of such examination, his continued
service to the bureau will be reevaluated .
Accordingly, this file is considered without plausible merit and
is hereby closed .
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Case No . X9233-93-5
Investigator : Christopher Neville
Date :
November 23,
1993
Los Angeles Bureau
Federal Bureau of Investigation
CONFIDENTIAL CASE FILE
page 2
.
.
In this book it is spoken of . Spirits and Conjurations ; of
Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may
not exist . It is immaterial whether they exist or not . By
doing certain things certain results follow .
--Aleister Crowley
Consumed by cancer in 1937 at the age of 46, the last scion
of a faded aristocratic New England family, the horror writer
Howard Phillips Lovecraft left one of America's most curious
literary legacies . The bulk of his short stories appeared in
Weird Tales, a pulp magazine devoted to the supernatural . But
within these modest confines, Lovecraft brought dark fantasy
screaming into the 20th century, taking the genre, almost
literally, into a new dimension .
Nowhere is this more evident than in the loosely linked cycle
of stories known as the Cthulhu Mythos . Named for a tentacled
alien monster who waits dreaming beneath the sea in the
sunken city of R'lyeh, the Mythos encompasses the cosmic
career of a variety of gruesome extraterrestrial entities
that include Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the blind idiot
god Azazoth, who sprawls at the center of Ultimate Chaos,
"encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous
dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a
demonic flute held in nameless paws ."[1] Lurking on the
margins of our space-time continuum, this merry crew of Outer
Gods and Great Old Ones are now attempting to invade our
world through science and dream and horrid rites .
As a marginally popular writer working in the literary
equivalent of the gutter, Lovecraft received no serious
attention during his lifetime . But while most 1930s pulp
fiction is nearly unreadable today, Lovecraft continues to
attract attention . In France and Japan, his tales of
cosmic fungi, degenerate cults and seriously bad dreams are
recognized as works of bent genius, and the celebrated French
philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari praise his
radical embrace of multiplicity in their magnum opus
A Thousand Plateaus .2 On Anglo-American turf, a passionate
cabal of critics fill journals like Lovecraft Studies and
Crypt of Cthulhu with their almost talmudic research .
Meanwhile both hacks and gifted disciples continue to craft
stories that elaborate the Cthulhu Mythos . There's even a
Lovecraft convention--the NecronomiCon, named for the most
famous of his forbidden grimoires . Like the gnostic science
fiction writer Philip K . Dick, H .P . Lovecraft is the epitome
of a cult author .
Case : X9233-93-5
11/23/9 3
Federal Bureau of Investigation
CONFIDENTIAL CASE FILE
page 3
The word "fan" comes from fanaticus, an ancient term for a
temple devotee, and Lovecraft fans exhibit the unflagging
devotion, fetishism and sectarian debates that have
characterized popular religious cults throughout the
ages . But Lovecraft's "cult" status has a curiously literal
dimension . Many magicians and occultists have taken up his
Mythos as source material for their practice . Drawn from the
darker regions of the esoteric counterculture--Thelema and
Satanism and Chaos magic--these Lovecraftian mages actively
seek to generate the terrifying and atavistic encounters
that Lovecraft's protagonists stumble into compulsively,
blindly or against their will .
Secondary occult sources for Lovecraftian magic include three
different "fake" editions of the Necronomicon, a few rites
included in Anton LaVey's The Satanic Rituals, and a number
of works by the loopy British Thelemite Kenneth Grant .
Besides Grant's Typhonian O .T .O . and the Temple of
Set's Order of the Trapezoid, magical sects that tap the
Cthulhu current have included the Esoteric Order of Dagon,
the Bate Cabal, Michael Bertiaux's Lovecraftian Coven, and a
Starry Wisdom group in Florida, named after the nineteenth-
century sect featured in Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark ."
Solo chaos mages fill out the ranks, cobbling together
Lovecraftian arcana on the Internet or freely sampling the
Mythos in their chthonic, open-ended (anti-) workings .
This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact
that Lovecraft himself was a "mechanistic materialist"
philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any
kind . Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of many
curious problems raised by the apparent power of
Lovecraftian magic . Why and how do these pulp visions "work"?
What constitutes the "authentic" occult? How does magic
relate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope to
show, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an
imaginative and coherent "reading" set in motion by the
dynamics of Lovecraft's own texts, a set of thematic,
stylistic, and intertextual strategies which constitute what
I call Lovecraft's Magick Realism .
Magical realism already denotes a strain of Latin
American fiction--exemplified by Borges, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, and Isabel Allende--in which a fantastic dreamlike
logic melds seamlessly and delightfully with the rhythms of
the everyday . Lovecraft's Magick Realism is far more dark and
convulsive, as ancient and amoral forces violently puncture
the realistic surface of his tales . Lovecraft constructs and
then collapses a number of intense polarities--between
realism and fantasy, book and dream, reason and its chaotic
Other . By playing out these tensions in his writing,
Lovecraft also reflects the transformations that
darkside occultism has undergone as it confronts modernity in
Case : X9233-93- 5
11/23/93
Federal Bureau of Investigation
CONFIDENTIAL CASE FILE
page 4
such forms as psychology, quantum physics, and the
existential groundlessness of being . And by embedding all
this in an intertextual Mythos of profound depth, he draws
the reader into the chaos that lies "between the worlds" of
magick and reality .
Written mostly in the 1920s and '30s, Lovecraft's work builds
a somewhat rickety bridge between the florid decadence of fin
de si`ecle fantasy and the more "rational" demands of the new
century's science fiction . His early writing is gaudy Gothic
pastiche, but in his mature Chtulhu tales, Lovecraft adopts a
pseudodocumentary style that utilizes the language of
journalism, scholarship, and science to construct a realistic
and measured prose voice which then explodes into feverish,
adjectival horror . Some find Lovecraft's intensity atrocious-
-not everyone can enjoy a writer capable of comparing
a strange light to "a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies
dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh ."[3]
But in terms of horror, Lovecraft delivers . His protagonist
is usually a reclusive bookish type, a scholar or artist who
is or is known to the first-person narrator . Stumbling onto
odd coincidences or beset with strange dreams, his
intellectual curiosity drives him to pore through
forbidden books or local folklore, his empirical turn of mind
blinding him to the nightmarish scenario that the reader can
see slowly building up around him . When the Mythos finally
breaks through, it often shatters him, even though the
invasion is generally more cognitive than physical .
By endlessly playing out a shared collection of images and
tropes, genres like weird fiction also generate a collective
resonance that can seem both "archetypal" and cliched . Though
Lovecraft broke with classic fantasy, he gave his Mythos
density and depth by building a shared world to house
his disparate tales . The Mythos stories all share a liminal
map that weaves fictional places like Arkham, Dunwich, and
Miskatonic University into the New England landscape ; they
also refer to a common body of entities and forbidden books .
A relatively common feature in fantasy fiction,
these metafictional techniques create the sense that
Lovecraft's Mythos lies beyond each individual tales,
hovering in a dimension halfway between fantasy and the real .
Lovecraft did not just tell tales--he built a world . It's no
accident that one of the more successful role-playing games
to follow in the heels of Dungeons & Dragons takes place in
"Lovecraft Country ." Most role-playing adventure games build
their worlds inside highly codified "mythic" spaces of the
collective imagination (heroic fantasy, cyberpunk, vampire
Paris, Arthur's Britain) . The game Call of Cthulhu takes
place in Lovecraft's 1920s America, where players become
"investigators" who track down dark rumors or heinous occult
Case : X9233-93- 5
11/23/93

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