kaos

The call of the Cthulhu “mythos”
Joel—On Cthulhu magick—Well the actual rub is, if in some sense they are trying to
invest these fictional creations with some kind of spirit life—making a kind of artificial
spirit—they are certainly not making the beings according to H P Lovecraft. Besides,
only a complete and total idiot would… they don’t exist to grant power to mortals; they
certainly don’t exist to be made tools of by mortals—they want to devour and destroy…
that’s what they do. And really, their description by Lovecraft is the only one that
counts (ok and maybe his writing children). Even those magicians who suggest investing
fictional creations with “life” to be in the realms of possibility, would probably suggest
that you are dependant on the form taken by the being as it is already “described in the
Collective Unconscious”.
If you call it Cthulhu but you describe it as a helpful spirit… well it just ain’t Cthulhu.
Certainly the “shoggoth” summoning spells of chaos magick don’t represent the Lovecraft
original; rather, just a borrowing of the name as it makes for kewl spelz. Mind you,
many of these people also think that blood-sucking, undead vampires are real and that
the main public view of them doesn’t come from the imaginations of the creator of
Varney and Bram Stoker but was rather “channelled” to them to reveal the “Truth”—as
is often asserted by those who insist that Lovecraft was not the actual creator of his
stories but a mere participant in an automatic writing session from “beyond the gates”.
Lovecraft would likely suggest that such individuals were escaped inmates from Bedlam.
That vibrating sound isn’t the arrival of a wandering evil from beyond the stars… it’s
Howard Phillip spinning in his Rhode Island grave. The beings written of in the fictional
tales by Lovecraft (an admitted non-believer in magic) or bastardized for role-playing
games were so totally inimical to humanity that only those possessed or insane would
ever deliberately summon them, and those others who did so by accident were either
dead, soul-devoured, or hopelessly mad by the end of the story. Heck even Satan himself
is more approachable… for the cost of your soul. Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones “used” humans
merely as weak tools to inflict themselves upon the earth. They were great characters
for horror stories. That’s it. They certainly don’t have the provenance of the majority of
entities described in the grimoires, even if those beings’ only claim to fame or reality
may be the test of time.
Rather than playing it safe, I would suggest that the people you describe are merely
time-wasting poseurs looking for another affectation to flesh out their dull middleclass
lives along with dark clothing, body piercing and shishi coffee bars, rather than
participating in any discovery of ultimate reality, mystical experience , or even a pursuit
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