Sunday, May 07, 2006
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I do not understand. I mean I really don't get it.
I've been researching Discordianism/chaos magick for a report to the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. Those of you who check in here regularly know that I blogged some of the material associated with Patricia Monaghan and excommunicated Catholic "priest" Rev. Dagmar Braun Celeste in connection with the Discordians; and that just recently there was a murder, and the killer had associations with the Church of the SubGenius, a Discordian-type of irreligion.
The Discordians are a fun-loving bunch. The dark side of Discordianism is Chaos Magick. Austin Osman Spare is the father of Chaos Magick. One of the myth makers of the cult is H. P. Lovecraft who wrote horror fiction novels about a destructive creature named Cthulhu, a creature who appears briefly in Discordian Robert Anton Wilson's ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY.
Lovecraft's books are described this way by Phil Hine, another prominent Chaos Magician:
...it is unsurprising that contemporary occultists should be interested in the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraftian rituals have been served up by writers such as Anton LaVey (The Satanic Rituals), Michael Aquino (head of The Temple of Set), and Pete Carroll (Illuminates of Thanateros). Kenneth Grant, in his progression of 'Typhonian' works has made much use of Lovecraftian imagery in his interpretations of the work of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare. Michael Bertiaux, head of La Coulvoire Noir, the Voodoo-Gnostic order, has also incorporated elements of the Cthulhu Mythos into his work. Following August Derleth's attempt to cohere the Cthulhu Mythos into an identifiable cosmology, several occultists (notably Kenneth Grant) have attempted to work the Great Old Ones into an 'identifiable' system of one kind or another.
You can't get any deeper into occultism than that line-up represents. These people hate Christianity.
To me this just doesn't sound like something that a Catholic should be taking pleasure in. But it seems that I am completely out of touch with younger traditional Catholics who find this to be something to enjoy according to Jimmy Akin's blog. Is this a case of the glamour of evil seducing the faithful? Or am I just being a cranky old lady who doesn't have enough to keep her busy?
Jimmy is a spokesman for the Catholic Church. He speaks with some authority. Yet there does seem to be a disconnect between his Catholic faith and his reading material. At least that's the way it appears to me. But then I do seem to be hopelessly out of touch on this whole First Commandment issue when it comes to the young writers that speak for Catholicism these days. Do we really belong to the same faith family?
