American paganism in the making?

Thomas Sheridan is an Irish occultist with “pagan” tendencies active on YouTube. I sometimes link to his (saner) content, but much of the rest is very bizarre and on the Alt-Right side of things (although I suppose it *could* be trolling, Sheridan claiming to be a “chaos magician” when he discusses politics). This documentary about H P Lovecraft (1890-1937) is relatively interesting. Strictly speaking, it´s not really a documentary, but a long lecture set to pictures and creepy music.

Lovecraft hardly needs a closer introduction, but if you must know, he was the American horror writer who invented the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, according to which the universe is dominated by powerful ancient intelligences (sometimes known as the Eldritch or the Old Ones) which are utterly indifferent to the fate of humanity. They might even be threatening, seeing this world as theirs for the keeping. A mysterious scripture known as the “Necronomicon” plays an important role in Lovecraft´s stories. Standard accounts claim that Lovecraft was really an atheist and a materialist, and that his monsters are therefore symbols of the vastness and utter indifference of empty space. In some cases, they also represent fear of racial mixing or hereditary degeneracy. “Necronomicon” is of course a product of the author´s imagination, nothing more.  

However, many occultists and Satanists *want* the Cthulhu Mythos to be real, a good example being the existence of several fake editions of the “Necronomicon”, of which the “Simon Necronomicon” is the most widespread. The entire mythos has also been turned on its head (or perhaps put on its feet!) by John Michael Greer, a fantasy writer with Neo-Druid connections, whose “The Weird of Hali” series claims that the Great Old Ones are really the good guys. I reviewed several volumes of his saga here on my blog – it´s actually quite interesting. By contrast, Sheridan clearly wants the Mythos to remain on the darker side of things, but his case for its authenticity is perhaps more sophisticated than that of the local Satanist basic bitches. Sheridan doesn´t deny outright that Lovecraft was an atheist-materialist. Rather, he believes that the author nevertheless knew the truth (the real occult truth) about the universe, but recoiled in sheer horror from it, adopting hard-line atheism as a kind of psychological defense mechanism. Since Lovecraft couldn´t entirely suppress what he knew, he wrote “horror fiction” freely based on the ancient lore… In the same way, Harry Houdini chased fake mediums as a way of coping with the insight that the world of the fairy and the paranormal was actually very real indeed. Houdini was a friend of Lovecraft´s, and the stage magician was also on a first name basis with Arthur Conan Doyle during the latter´s “Spiritualist” period. Houdini and Doyle went separate ways after Houdini started attacking paranormal beliefs.

I don´t know what modern Lovecraft or Houdini scholars would think of this (although I could venture a few guesses), but it seems to be a fact that many admirers of H P Lovecraft consider his works to be simply *too good* to have been written by an absolute skeptic. Unless I´m mistaken, Sheridan doesn´t consider the pagan gods to be literally real – rather, they are anthropomorphic representations of certain archetypal energies. It´s not even clear to me whether these archetypes actually exist “out there” or only “in here”, in our own minds. The gods of the Cthulhu Mythos could be seen as such archetypes, and Sheridan clearly hopes that the Mythos will one day become the basis of a homespun American pagan-occult tradition. He points out that most characters in Lovecraft´s stories aren´t literally killed by the Ancient Ones or their minions. Rather, they self-annihilate since the existence of the Old Ones prove that the universe is of such a nature that they simply can´t cope with it anymore. The Eldritch creatures themselves are in many cases almost oblivious to their presence. They view us the same way we view animals we for some reason cannot use – with utter and pitiless indifference, but not necessarily with hatred or spite. Thus, they are not strictly speaking “evil”. What if humans use the Old Ones instead, or rather work with them? To Sheridan, this could make humans “gods”, making the entire Biblical idea of God completely irrelevant (Sheridan is very explicitly anti-Christian and anti-Judaic). The narrator is particularly intrigued by “Shadow over Innsmouth”, viewing it as a virtual initiation drama. He says very little about “Necronomicon”…

“Liber Providence: The Real Necronomicon” is probably not very interesting if lovely crafted horror just isn´t your cup of tea (or hemlock), but if you are into this kind of material, it might be worth taking a look or two at it.