kaos

make the subject of their study. In a thousand years time maybe there will be a civilization
that has pledged its all in Lovecraft’s deities, that perhaps has colonized planets in the
name of Cthulhu, and if so then that would warrant an occultist’s attention, no doubt
about it. But I don’t think that will happen, I think the present interest in the Lovecraft
mythos is a fad and fashion that will die out having no meaning or purpose, a tribute to
nihilistic glitz and nothing more.
Anton LaVey was interviewed in MF Magazine #3, a Heavy Metal/Pop Culture
mag, it was his final interview, and was asked: “In your book, The Satanic Rituals, you
include a ritual for Cthulhu—does this mean you find some truth in the stories of H P
Lovecraft?” LaVey answered: “H P Lovecraft has a place in Satanic literature because
he innovated a style beyond that of Poe, Blackwood, James, etc. The fact that his stories
have had enough dramatic impact to establish a cult—without even trying—is reason
enough to recognize him as a sorcerer to be reckoned with.”
Now that’s actually an interesting point, but really the sheer pathology of it is what’s
most worth examining. LaVey himself exploited this pathology, I mean what drives a
person to dress up as Satan most of their adult life? Pity his poor daughter, “an otherwise
charming girl everso slightly fucked up by having Satan as a dad”, as Alan Moore once
put it to me.
JOEL
The mystery of the Steganographia: demonic
cryptography
Some thoughts coming out of correspondence on the decipherment by Jim Reeds of
Book III of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia
The Steganographia, written in 1500 and published in 1606, is an intriguing work because
it contains an almost an exact copy of parts of the Lemegeton, but the idea is that this
was a blind for what was actually a book on cryptography. The implications are slightly
mindboggling. So you’ve got a book that resembles the Lemegeton, the classic manual of
demonic evocation, but it contains hidden cipher messages intended to show Trithemius’s
methods of cryptography. But why choose to disguise it as a book on demonic evocation,
particularly at a time of witch-hunts? Could the hidden ciphers in the Steganographia
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