I have sometimes wondered why Tolkien chose to represent two poles of evil in Lord of the Rings that of Sauron and Saruman, an unusual structure both in fantastic fiction and in the epic myths from which the story grew. Amongst other ideas it has been suggested that the relationship of Sauron to Saruman reflects the relationship of the various dictators of the Second World War but I find no major evidence of this in the text. A more convincing explanation is that it is part of a theme of how even the supposedly wise and virtuous can be seduced by evil- with the proud Saruman  seduced by Sauron in a way the more humble hobbits are not.

‘A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived-for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength’.

A more esoteric explanation of the twin poles of Sauron and Saruman is perhaps the influence on Tolkien of fellow Inkling Owen Barfield (1898- 1997) Barfield was a long-term friend of C.S. Lewis and a founder member of the Inklings. He was a philosopher influenced by the tenets of Anthrosophy. One of the tenets of Anthrosophy as expressed by the founder Rudolph Steiner was the idea of the soul of man being pulled between the two extremes of materialism and spiritual pride personified as ‘Ahriman’ and ‘Lucifer’.

‘To form a right conception of the historical evolution of mankind during approximately 6000 years, one must grasp that at the one pole stands a Luciferic incarnation, in the center, the incarnation of Christ, and at the other pole the Ahrimanic incarnation. Lucifer is the power that stirs up in man all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine – that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ Impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium. Thus these two poles – the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic – are continuously present in man. Viewed historically, we find that the Luciferic preponderated in certain currents of cultural development of the pre-Christian age and continued into the first centuries of our era. On the other hand the Ahrimanic influence has been at work since the middle of the fifteenth century and will increase in strength until an actual incarnation of Ahriman takes place among Western humanity’.

The Ahrimanic Deception Lecture by Rudolf Steiner in Zurich on October 27, 1919.

Viewed in this light Sauron and Saruman can be seen as opposite poles of false spirituality and gross materialism. Sauron as ‘Lucifer’ has spirit servants (the Ringwraiths) insubstantial and formless given a kind of false immortality (in fact slavery to the ring). Wearing black robes to ‘give shape to their nothingness’.

Saruman as ‘Ahriman’ has as his servant the materialistic Wormtongue who craves worldly power and influence. Unlike the spells of Sauron which grant false immortality the enchantments of Saruman imprison King Théoden in a false old age.  Isengard is a place of ceaseless industry mass-producing the materials of war.

‘Iron Wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded. At night plumes of vapour steamed from the vents, lit from beneath with red light, or blue, or venomous green’

‘The Two Towers’

Treebeard says of Saruman that he has “a mind of metal and wheels.” In contrast Barad-dur is not a factory but seems rather to serve as a physical form for Sauron’s nebulous spirit.

“But Sauron was not of mortal flesh, and though he was robbed now of that shape in which had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men, yet his spirit arose out of the deep and passed as a shadow and a black wind over the sea, and came back to Middle-earth and to Mordor that was his home. There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dur, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Saruman has as his emblem the White Hand signifying action and industry Sauron’s symbol is that of the lidless eye ever watchful but empty within.

‘The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing’.

In a sense Sauron can be seen as spirit without form and Saruman as form without spirit not unlike the Lucifer and Ahriman of the anthrosophical teachings propounded by Owen Barfield.

Bibliography

Anon, Anthroposophy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy [Accessed January 15, 2012a].

Anon, How_Barfield_Thought.pdf. Available at: http://davidlavery.net/Collected_Works/Essays/How_Barfield_Thought.pdf [Accessed January 15, 2012b].

Anon, Lucifer and Ahriman, The Influences of – Rudolf Steiner Anthroposophy lectures. Available at: http://www.skylarkbooks.co.uk/Shop/media/The_Inflences_of_Lucifer_and_Ahriman_Steiner.htm [Accessed May 13, 2012c].

Anon, Owen Barfield – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Barfield [Accessed January 15, 2012d].

Anon, Rudolf_Steiner_-_Lucifer_Ahriman_Asuras.pdf. Available at: http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/steiner/Rudolf_Steiner_-_Lucifer_Ahriman_Asuras.pdf [Accessed May 13, 2012e].

Carpenter, H., 2006. The Inklings : C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends, London: HarperCollins.

Tolkien, J., 1991. The lord of the rings, London: HarperCollins.

In ‘A fragment of Life’ (1922) Athur Machen expounds one of his major themes- the transmutation of the mundane world into a place of wonder through the perception of a spiritually aware observer. The story opens with a juxtaposition of the protagonist Edward Darnell’s dream of  ‘an ancient wood’ with the ‘varnish of the new furniture’ in his suburban home.

‘Edward Darnell awoke from a dream of an ancient wood, and of a clear well rising into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat; and as his eyes opened he saw the sunlight bright in the room, sparkling on the varnish of the new furniture’.

Machen also contrasts Darnell’s spiritual journey through surroundings perceived though a nascent higher consciousness with a routine bus journey to his place of work in ‘the city.’

‘Yes, I think every journey was a success. Of course, I didn’t go so far afield every day; I was too tired. Often I rested all day long, and went out in the evening, after the lamps were lit, and then only for a mile or two. I would roam about old, dim squares, and hear the wind from the hills whispering in the trees; and when I knew I was within call of some great glittering street, I was sunk in the silence of ways where I was almost the only passenger, and the lamps were so few and faint that they seemed to give out shadows instead of light. And I would walk slowly, to and fro, perhaps for an hour at a time, in such dark streets, and all the time I felt what I told you about its being my secret—that the shadow, and the dim lights, and the cool of the evening, and trees that were like dark low clouds were all mine, and mine alone, that I was living in a world that nobody else knew of, into which no one could enter.’

‘But in spite of these distractions he fell into a dream as the ‘bus rolled and tossed on its way Citywards, and still he strove to solve the enigma of his vigil of the night before, and as the shapes of trees and green lawns and houses passed before his eyes, and as he saw the procession moving on the pavement, and while the murmur of the streets sounded in his ears, all was to him strange and unaccustomed, as if he moved through the avenues of some city in a foreign land’.

Despite his limitations Darnell becomes aware of a greater reality than that of mere ‘common sense’

‘It was, perhaps, on these mornings, as he rode to his mechanical work, that vague and floating fancies that must have long haunted his brain began to shape themselves, and to put on the form of definite conclusions, from which he could no longer escape, even if he had wished it. Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking; but he grew certain on these mornings that the ‘common sense’ which he had always heard exalted as man’s supremest faculty was, in all probability, the smallest and least-considered item in the equipment of an ant of average intelligence’.

Machen describes life as a kind of pilgrimage- condemning a modern world which through concentration on the mundane aspects of life means that ‘a race of pilgrims had become hereditary stone-breakers and ditch-scourers on a track that led to destruction’

 ’Life, it seemed to him, was a great search for—he knew not what; and in the process of the ages one by one the true marks upon the ways had been shattered, or buried, or the meaning of the words had been slowly forgotten; one by one the signs had been turned awry, the true entrances had been thickly overgrown, the very way itself had been diverted from the heights to the depths, till at last the race of pilgrims had become hereditary stone-breakers and ditch-scourers on a track that led to destruction—if it led anywhere at all. Darnell’s heart thrilled with a strange and trembling joy, with a sense that was all new, when it came to his mind that this great loss might not be a hopeless one, that perhaps the difficulties were by no means insuperable. It might be, he considered, that the stone-breaker had merely to throw down his hammer and set out, and the way would be plain before him; and a single step would free the delver in rubbish from the foul slime of the ditch’.

The work ends with an epiphany as Darnell realises that that the mundane world is an illusion and the ‘ancient wood’ of his opening dream is a hidden reality.

‘So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.’

Text of ‘A Fragment of Life’ from ‘The House of Souls’ by Arthur Machen http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25016/25016-h/25016-h.htm

Oliphaunt by Inger Edelfeldt

One of my favourite passages from the Lord of the Rings is this sympathetic description of a slain Southron warrior flung from the ‘Oliphaunt’.

‘His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.

It was Sam’s first view of a battle of men against men, and he did not like it much. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he had come from; and if he really was evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace’

‘The Two Towers’

I think Sam’s views are very much those of the author and reflect the humane vision which permeates the work and makes it an enduring classic of Fantastic Fiction.

Photograph of Arthur Machen from the 'South Wales Argus'

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) is one of a number of writers of fantastic fiction such as Charles Williams (1886-1945) whose spirituality permeates their work. Like Williams Machen combines a mystical Christianity with an interest in esoteric practices. This includes the practice of spiritual alchemy which underwent a revival in the writer’s formative years in the nineteenth century through the publication of such works as Mary Ann Attwood’s ‘A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery’ (1850) Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s ‘Remarks Upon Alchymists’ (1855) and ‘The Hermetic Museum’ (1893) by A. E. Waite. Machen wrote of his interest in spiritual alchemy in the first volume of his biography ‘Far Off Things’ (1922) in which he claimed to have first heard of alchemy in a family magazine.

 “…you would expect to find good things of all sorts in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens, but you would hardly expect to find there the curious thing or the out-of-the-way thing. Still, it was in a volume of “Household Words” that I first read about alchemy in a short series of papers which (I have since recognised) were singularly well-informed and enlightened. I do not wish it to be understood that I myself have any strong convictions on the matter of turning inferior metals into superior, though I believe the later trend of science is certainly in favour of the theoretical possibility of such a process. Nor do I hold any distinct brief for the very fascinating doctrine which maintains, or would like to maintain, that the great alchemical books are really symbolical books; that while seeming to relate to lead and gold, to mercury and silver, they hide under these figures intimations as to a profound and ineffable transmutation of the spirit; that the experiment to which they relate is the Great Experiment of the mystics, which is the experiment of God. This, I say, is a fascinating theory; whether it have any truth in it I know not, and perhaps it is one of those questions of which Sir Thomas Browne speaks; questions difficult, indeed, and perplexed, but not beyond all conjecture. But, however this may be, I recollect that those articles in that old, half-calf bound volume of “Household Words,” while not affirming this, that, or the other doctrine as to alchemy in so many distinct words, did suggest that a few of the old alchemists, at all events, were something more than blundering simpletons engaged on a quest which was a patent absurdity, which could only have been entertained by the besotted superstition of “the dark ages,” which had this one claim to our attention inasmuch as the modern science of chemistry rose from the ashes of its foolish fires”.

“To the lovers in Mr. Stephen Phillips’s drama of “Paolo and Francesca” the earth appears a greener green, the heavens a bluer blue; all beautiful things are raised to a higher power by the fire of their passion; the whole world is alchemised. And this state, which is a result of love, is the condition of imaginative work in literature, and so the man who is to make romances sees everything and feels everything acutely, or, as Mr. Masefield says, excessively. Now there would be nothing amiss in this state of things if these exalted and intensified perceptions could be utilised when there was a question of making a book and then abrogated and laid aside with pen and ink and paper. Unluckily, however, this cannot be so managed; and too often the dealer in dreams finds that his magic magnifying glass is tight fixed to his eyes and cannot be moved. And thus a mere common bore or nuisance appears to him as dreadful as Nero or Heliogabalus, the possibility of missing a train is as tragical as “Hamlet,” and the pettiest griefs swell into the hugest sorrows”

Several passages  in his semi-autobiographical work ‘The Hill of Dreams’ (1907) also make extended reference to spiritual alchemy including a comparison of the work of the artist to that of the alchemist: transmuting the base metal of experience into the gold of art.

“Often he spent the night in the cool court of his villa, lying amidst soft cushions heaped upon the marble bench. A lamp stood on the table at his elbow, its light making the water in the cistern twinkle. There was no sound in the court except the soft continual plashing of the fountain. Throughout these still hours he would meditate, and he became more than ever convinced that man could, if he pleased, become lord of his own sensations. This, surely, was the true meaning concealed under the beautiful symbolism of alchemy. Some years before he had read many of the wonderful alchemical books of the later Middle Ages, and had suspected that something other than the turning of lead into gold was intended. This impression was deepened when he looked into Lumen de Lumine by Vaughan, the brother of the Silurist, and he had long puzzled himself in the endeavor to find a reasonable interpretation of the hermetic mystery, and of the red powder, “glistening and glorious in the sun.” And the solution shone out at last, bright and amazing, as he lay quiet in the court of Avallaunius. He knew that he himself had solved the riddle, that he held in his hand the powder of projection, the philosopher’s stone transmuting all it touched to fine gold; the gold of exquisite impressions. He understood now something of the alchemical symbolism; the crucible and the furnace, the “Green Dragon,” and the “Son Blessed of the Fire” had, he saw, a peculiar meaning. He understood, too, why the uninitiated were warned of the terror and danger through which they must pass; and the vehemence with which the adepts disclaimed all desire for material riches no longer struck him as singular. The wise man does not endure the torture of the furnace in order that he may be able to compete with operators in pork and company promoters; neither a steam yacht, nor a grouse-moor, nor three liveried footmen would add at all to his gratifications. Again Lucian said to himself: “Only in the court of Avallaunius is the true science of the exquisite to be found.”

“He saw the true gold into which the beggarly matter of existence may be transmuted by spagyric art; a succession of delicious moments, all the rare flavors of life concentrated, purged of their lees, and preserved in a beautiful vessel. The moonlight fell green on the fountain and on the curious pavements, and in the long sweet silence of the night he lay still and felt that thought itself was an acute pleasure, to be expressed perhaps in terms of odor or color by the true artist”.

“They were good nights to remember, these; he was glad to think of the little ugly room, with its silly wall-paper and its “bird’s-eye” furniture, lighted up, while he sat at the bureau and wrote on into the cold stillness of the London morning, when the flickering lamplight and the daystar shone together. It was an interminable labor, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy. The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious things”.

“He had fallen into the habit of always using this phrase “the work” to denote the adventure of literature; it had grown in his mind to all the austere and grave significance of “the great work” on the lips of the alchemists; it included every trifling and laborious page and the vague magnificent fancies that sometimes hovered below him. All else had become mere by-play, unimportant, trivial; the work was the end, and the means and the food of his life—it raised him up in the morning to renew the struggle, it was the symbol which charmed him as he lay down at night. All through the hours of toil at the bureau he was enchanted, and when he went out and explored the unknown coasts, the one thought allured him, and was the colored glass between his eyes and the world”.

In ‘The Great Return’ (1915) the writer refers to experience of the supernatural as being like passing ‘through the Furnace of the Sages, governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know’.

“And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. “That sort of thing has always been happening,” as my friend remarked to me. But the men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages, governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes, but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the glory of the fiery rose had been about them”.

In ‘The Secret Glory’ (1922) Machen writes of the visit of the ‘Arabic Alchemist’ to the court of Caliph Haroun.

“…I once read of the Arabic Alchemist. He came to the Caliph Haroun with a strange and extravagant proposal…The Commander of the Faithful was to gather together all the wealth of his entire kingdom, omitting nothing that could possibly be discovered; and while this was being done the magician said that he would construct a furnace of peculiar shape in which all these splendours and magnificences and treasures of the world must be consumed in a certain fire of art, prepared with wisdom. And at last, he continued, after the operation had endured many days, the fire being all the while most curiously governed, there would remain but one drop no larger than a pearl, but glorious as the sun to the moon and all the starry heavens and the wonders of the compassionate; and with this drop the Caliph Haroun might heal all the sorrows of the universe”.

Bibliography

Anon, Alchemy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy#cite_note-Newtonianism.27_p211-19 [Accessed April 5, 2012a].

Anon, Arthur Machen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Machen#Philosophy_and_religion [Accessed January 22, 2012b].

Anon, Friends of Arthur Machen Website homepage: Horror Fantastic and Supernatural Fiction. Available at: http://www.machensoc.demon.co.uk/ [Accessed January 23, 2012c].

Anon, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Far Off Things, by Arthur Machen. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35153/35153-h/35153-h.htm [Accessed April 2, 2012d].

Anon, The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35611/35611-h/35611-h.htm [Accessed April 2, 2012e].

Anon, The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Secret Glory, by Arthur Machen. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35637/35637-h/35637-h.htm [Accessed April 2, 2012f].

Anon, The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Terror, by Arthur Machen. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35617/35617-h/35617-h.htm [Accessed April 2, 2012g].

Anon, The Project Gutenberg E-text of The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/389/389-h/389-h.htm [Accessed April 2, 2012h].

Anon, Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13969/pg13969.html [Accessed April 2, 2012i].

Machen,Arthur, Hill of Dreams. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13969/pg13969.html [Accessed April 2, 2012].

Illustration by Ray Coyle of Florimel the Vampire from a 1929 Edition of ‘Jurgen: A Comedy Of Justice’ by James Branch Cabell

Florimel in James Branch Cabell’s ‘Jurgen: A Comedy Of  Justice’ (1919) is a notable appearance of a sympathetic vampire character in early Twentieth Century fiction. The episode in which she appears is possibly a comic allusion to the gothic novel ‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) which features a female vampire as a central figure. Florimel becomes the bride of the anti-hero Jurgen during his sojourn in hell and is described as ‘a very poisonous and seductively beautiful creature.’ Something of a social climber her affection for Jurgen is based on his claims to be ‘Emperor of Noumaria, King of Eubonia, Prince of Cocaigne, and Duke of Logreus’. She is conjured into being through the (feverish) imagination of Jurgen’s father who has consigned himself to a netherworld of his own invention.

“Jurgen met precisely the vampire of whom he had inveigled his father into thinking. She was the most seductively beautiful creature that it would be possible for Jurgen’s father or any other man to imagine: and her clothes were orange-colored, for a reason sufficiently well known in Hell, and were embroidered everywhere with green fig-leaves”.

(Her role as a seductress is emphasised by the ‘green fig leaves’ embroidered on her clothing- an allusion to the conventional image of Eve as a temptress in the garden of Eden).

The name Florimel means ‘honey-flower’ and is probably an ironic reference to a character of the same name in Spenser’s ‘Faërie Queene’, a maiden noted for her sweetness and timidity.

“My name, sir,” replied the Vampire, sorrowfully, “is Florimel, because my nature no less than my person was as beautiful as the flowers of the field and as sweet as the honey which the bees (who furnish us with such admirable examples of industry) get out of these flowers. But a sad misfortune changed all this. For I chanced one day to fall ill and die (which, of course, might happen to anyone), and as my funeral was leaving the house the cat jumped over my coffin. That was a terrible misfortune to befall a poor dead girl so generally respected, and in wide demand as a seamstress; though, even then, the worst might have been averted had not my sister-in-law been of what they call a humane disposition and foolishly attached to the cat. So they did not kill it, and I, of course, became a vampire…”

Cabell portrays Florimel in an ambiguous manner which wavers between irony and sympathy. She feels sorry for herself because of her ‘abhorrence of irregular hours’ and thinks it very unjust that she should be fated to be a vampire but feel sorry for her victims.

… Then Florimel told Jurgen of her horrible awakening in the grave, and of what had befallen her hands and feet there, the while that against her will she fed repugnantly, destroying first her kindred and then the neighbors. This done, she had arisen.

“For the cattle still lived, and that troubled me. When I had put an end to this annoyance, I climbed into the church belfry, not alone, for one went with me of whom I prefer not to talk; and at midnight I sounded the bell so that all who heard it would sicken and die. And I wept all the while, because I knew that when everything had been destroyed which I had known in my first life in the flesh, I would be compelled to go into new lands, in search of the food which alone can nourish me, and I was always sincerely attached to my home. So it was, your majesty, that I forever relinquished my sewing, and became a lovely peril, a flashing desolation, and an evil which smites by night, in spite of my abhorrence of irregular hours: and what I do I dislike extremely, for it is a sad fate to become a vampire, and still to sympathize with your victims, and particularly with their poor mothers.”

So Jurgen comforted Florimel, and he put his arm around her”.

Cabell’s description of the couple’s honeymoon in the infernal region of Barathum contains a number of amusing Cabell double-entendres about a ‘cleft’, ‘a candle’ and ‘a magnificent sceptre’.

“So Florimel conducted Jurgen, through the changeless twilight of Barathum, like that of a gray winter afternoon, to a quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood, which she had fitted out very cosily in imitation of her girlhood home; and she lighted a candle, and made him welcome to her cleft. And when Jurgen was about to enter it he saw that his shadow was following him into the Vampire’s home.

“Let us extinguish this candle!” says Jurgen, “for I have seen so many flames to-day that my eyes are tired.”

So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen. And now they were in utter darkness, and in the dark nobody can see what is happening. But that Florimel now trusted Jurgen and his Noumarian claims was evinced by her very first remark.

“I was in the beginning suspicious of your majesty,” said Florimel, “because I had always heard that every emperor carried a magnificent sceptre, and you then displayed nothing of the sort. But now, somehow, I do not doubt you any longer. And of what is your majesty thinking?”

“Why, I was reflecting, my dear,” says Jurgen, “that my father imagines things very satisfactorily.”

The Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius

‘The Place of the Lion’ (1933) by Charles Williams concerns the fate of a group of friends when Platonic forms erupt into the mundane world in the shape of wild animals. At the beginning of the novel Anthony and Quentin are shocked to behold a lion in the English countryside.

‘The lioness as if startled made one leap over the gate, and her flying form seemed to collide with the man just as he also began to take another rhythmical step. Forms and shadows twisted and mingled for two or three seconds in the middle of the garden, a tearing human cry began and ceased as if choked into silence, a snarl broke out and died swiftly into similar stillness, and as if in answer to both sounds there came the roar of a lion–not very loud, but as if subdued by distance rather than by mildness. With that roar the shadows settled, the garden became clear. Anthony and Quentin saw before them the form of a man lying on the ground, and standing over him the shape of a full-grown and tremendous lion, its head flung back, its mouth open, its body quivering. It ceased to roar, and gathered itself back into itself. It was a lion such as the young men had never seen in any zoo or menagerie; it was gigantic and seemed to their dazed senses to be growing larger every moment. Of their presence it appeared unconscious; awful and solitary it stood, and did not at first so much as turn its head. Then, majestically, it moved; it took up the slow forward pacing in the direction which the man had been following; it passed onward, and while they still stared it entered into the dark shadow of the trees and was hidden from sight. The man’s form still lay prostrate; of the lioness there was no sign’.

The lion is ‘a lion such as the young men had never seen in any zoo or menagerie’ because it is the ideal form of a lion- the essence of lionhood rather than any particular lion. On one level the novel can be read as a fantasy of ideas or perhaps the elaboration of a theological conceit. On another level it is arguably a presentation of William’s philosophical and spiritual beliefs in fictional form. Certainly Williams is credited with viewing commonplace perception as a thin veil obscuring a numinous reality.

 ‘Through his writing during the nineteen-twenties ran an increasing element of supernaturalism. He had never fully accepted the conventional distinction between natural and supernatural , or ‘Arch-natural’ as he preferred to call it; and as the years passed he came to feel that no barrier really existed between the two states , and that the supernatural was constantly present , requiring only extra awareness from the beholder to make it visible.’

The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends, Humphrey Carpenter

There is certainly an element of the magician in William’s depiction of the mysterious Mr. Berringer and his ‘study circle’.

‘Mr. Berringer is a very remarkable man, and he generally gives us a short address on the world of principles, as one might call it.”"Principles?” Damaris asked.”Ideas, energies, realities, whatever you like to call them,” Mr. Foster answered. “The underlying  things.” “Of course,” Damaris said, “I know the Platonic Ideas well enough, but do you mean Mr. Berringer explains Plato?”"Not so much Plato–” but there Mr. Foster was interrupted by Mrs. Rockbotham, who came up to Damaris’.

The character central to the themes of the novel is Damaris Tighe an academic and Anthony’s girlfriend. She is writing a thesis on ‘Pythagorean Influences’ and her name is a major indicator. Damaris was an early Christian follower mentioned in the New Testament-

‘Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others’.

Acts 17:34 New International Version (NIV)

Traditionally the biblical Damaris was thought of as the wife of Dionysius the Areopagite – considered to be the author of a number of mystical works with a Neo-Platonist theme. In later times this tradition was considered mistaken and the ‘Corpus Areopagiticum’ became attributed to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite who like the author of William’s fictional ‘De Angelis’ (which I will discuss in greater detail later) posits a hierarchy of forms and powers.

‘Perhaps even more vexing than the nature of union in Dionysius is the question of how the theological treatises relate to Dionysius’ two treatises on hierarchy. The Mystical Theology suggests an ascent from the lower sensuous realm of reality through the intelligible intermediate realm to the darkness of the godhead itself, all accomplished by a single person. The hierarchic treatises, on the other hand, suggest that the sensible and intelligible realms are not places reached by a single being, but different kinds of beings, and that the vision of God is handed from being to being downward through the levels of the hierarchy. On the Celestial Hierarchy describes the intelligible realm as divided into nine ranks of beings: the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels, and angels’.

Corrigan, Kevin and Harrington, L. Michael, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/>.

In a presentation to members of Berringers’s study circle Damaris Tighe makes reference to this ‘Celestial Hierarchy’ and argues that angels are medieval distortion of classical ideas.

“You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels, who were given different names–to be exact” (“and what is research if it is not exact?” she asked Mrs. Rockbotham, who nodded), “in descending order, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, princes, powers, archangels, angels. Now these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world. We may not believe in them as actually existent–either ideas or angels–but here we have what I may call two selected patterns of thought. Let us examine the likenesses between them; though first I should like to say a word on what the path was by which imaginations of the Greek seer became the white-robed beings invoked by the credulous piety of Christian Europe, and familiar to us in many paintings”.

Damaris Tighe also makes direct reference to Dionysius the Areopagite in the following passage

‘The Eidola and the Angeli,” Damaris answered. “It’s just a comparison, you know; largely between the sub-Platonic philosophers on the one side and the commentators on Dionysius the Areopagite on the other, suggesting that they have a common pattern in mind’.

The character Damaris seems to personify a detached intellectualism devoid of engagement. She is someone who plays with ideas but does not engage with them spiritually.

 ‘..she would go on thoughtfully playing with the dead pictures of ideas, with names and  philosophies, Plato and Pythagoras and Anselm and Abelard, Athens and Alexandria and Paris, not knowing that the living existences to which seers and saints had looked were already in movement to avenge themselves on her. “O you sweet blasphemer!” Anthony moaned, “can’t  you wake?” Gnostic traditions, medieval rituals, Aeons and Archangels–they were cards she was playing in her own game. But she didn’t know, she didn’t understand. It wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of her time, her culture, her education–the pseudo-knowledge that affected all the learned, the pseudo-scepticism that infected all the unlearned, in an age of pretence, and she was only pretending as everybody else did in this lost and imbecile century’.

When Berringer summons Neo-Platonic archetypes (‘the Eidola And The Angeli’) into the mundane world and causes a kind of apocalypse he uses knowledge referred to in a philosophical tome which he found in Berlin- ‘De Angelis’ of Marcellus Victorinus of Bologna, published in the year 1514 at Paris, and dedicated to Leo X’.

(Marcellus Victorinus is probably a fictionalisation of the Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla (1407 –1457) who argued that the author of the ‘Corpus Areopagiticum’ and the biblical Dionysius the Areopagite were not the same person).

As well as the ‘Corpus Areopagiticum’ referred to earlier this imaginary book brings to mind the apocryphal ‘Necronomicon ’ of H. P. Lovecraft and the various fictional grimoires of M.R. James such as the ‘Liber Nigrae Peregrinationis’ or ‘Book of the Black Pilgrimage’ in his tale ‘Count Magnus’.

“Berringer picked it up in Berlin–it’s not complete, unfortunately—and lent it to me when he found I was interested to have a shot at translating. There’s nothing to show who our Marcellus was, and the book itself, from what he says in the dedication, isn’t so much his own as a version of a work by a Greek–Alexander someone–written centuries before ‘in the time of Your Holiness’s august predecessor, Innocent the Second.’ In the eleven hundreds about the time of Abelard. However, that doesn’t matter. What is interesting is that it seems to confirm the idea that there was another view of angels from that ordinarily accepted. Not very orthodox perhaps, but I suppose orthodoxy wasn’t the first requisite at the Court of Leo…The idea seems to be that the energies of these orders can exist in separation from the intelligence which is in them in heaven; and that if deliberately or accidentally you invoke the energy without the intelligence, you’re likely eventually to be pretty considerably done for.”

That the author of ‘De Angelis’ dedicates his book to the colourful Pope Leo X is significant. Alexandre Dumas wrote in his work ‘The Cenci’ that

‘Under his pontificate, Latin Christianity assumed a pagan, Greco-Roman character, which, passing from art into manners, gives to this epoch a strange complexion. Crimes for the moment disappeared, to give place to vices; but to charming vices, vices in good taste, such as those indulged in by Alcibiades and sung by Catullus’

There is certainly ‘a pagan, Greco-Roman character’ to the theology of ‘The Place of the Lion’. In ‘The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends’ C.S. Lewis is quoted as calling the novel a ‘Christian fantasy’ but it appears to be missing many commonplace Christian themes; indeed Charles Williams seems more engaged with ‘Gnostic traditions, medieval rituals, Aeons and Archangels’ than with ideas such as sin and salvation and redemption through the sacrifice of Christ. Certainly the eschatology revealed in the closing scenes of the novel tends to reinforce this opinion-

‘There fell over the whole scene a strange and lovely clearness, shed from the wings of a soaring wonder that left the shoulder where it had reposed and flew, scattering light. The intermingled foliage of the trees of knowledge and of life–if indeed they were separate–received it; amid those branches the eagle which was the living act of science sank and rested. But far below the human figure stood and on either side of it were the shapes of the lion and the lamb. His hand rested on the head of the one; the other paused by him. In and for that exalted moment all acts of peace that then had being through the world were deepened and knew their own nature more clearly; away in villages and towns such spirits as the country doctor in Smetham received a measure of content in their work. Friendships grew closer; intentions of love possessed their right fulfilment. Terrors of malice and envy and jealousy faded; disordered beauty everywhere recognized again the sacred laws that governed it. Man dreamed of himself in the place of his creation’.

The ‘lovely clearness’ which falls upon the world seems framed in Gnostic terms with reference to the ‘trees of knowledge and of life’ and salvation through knowledge as ‘all acts of peace that then had being through the world were deepened and knew their own nature’. The ending can also be seen as a resolution of the Damaris bifurcated sensibility theme with unity of mind and soul being symbolised by ‘The intermingled foliage of the trees of knowledge and of life’.

Bibliography

Anon, Acts 17:34 NIV – Some of the people became followers of – Bible Gateway. Available at: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17:34&version=NIV [Accessed March 5, 2012a].

Anon, Anthony (name) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_(name) [Accessed February 23, 2012b].

Anon, CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Apocalypse. Available at: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01594b.htm [Accessed February 21, 2012c].

Anon, CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: St. Anthony. Available at: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01553d.htm [Accessed February 23, 2012d].

Anon, Chrismons Of Many Kinds | Christian Symbols Unlimited | www.christiansym.com. Available at: http://www.christiansym.com/cs/lion.php [Accessed March 4, 2012e].

Anon, Complete Short Stories of Maupassant, Vol. 1 of 2 – Guy de Maupassant – Google Books. Available at: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7PzdbcZ3CR0C&pg=PA326&lpg=PA326&dq=name+Sabot+meaning&source=bl&ots=rG76q5JLlD&sig=tD5wcw976yrwmbiX6heiENx56Ic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RidNT6MFxZDxA7ryxM4C&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=name%20Sabot%20meaning&f=false [Accessed February 28, 2012f].

Anon, Damaris – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damaris [Accessed February 23, 2012g].

Anon, Dionysius the Areopagite – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_the_Areopagite [Accessed February 23, 2012h].

Anon, Hermes Trismegistus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_Trismegistus [Accessed February 23, 2012i].

Anon, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn [Accessed February 23, 2012j].

Anon, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/#DioPer [Accessed February 23, 2012k].

Anon, Quentin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin [Accessed February 23, 2012l].

Anon, Surname Database: Barringer Last Name Origin. Available at: http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Barringer [Accessed February 23, 2012m].

Anon, The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams « Unknowing. Available at: http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/the-place-of-the-lion-by-charles-williams/ [Accessed February 23, 2012n].

Carpenter, H., 2006. The Inklings : C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends, London: HarperCollins.

Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion. Available at: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601441.txt [Accessed January 15, 2012].

Williams, C., Shadows of Ecstasy. Available at: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608891.txt [Accessed February 20, 2012].

The Destroyer by Frank Frazetta

By Crom Jean-Paul Sartre!  Make way for Conan the Existentialist!

“Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flames and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is an illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

(R.E. Howard Queen of the Black Coast, 133)

Personally I prefer to brood over ‘questions of reality and illusion’ but there you go… with thanks to Harley J. Sims for highlighting this beautifully written passage in his review of ‘The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian’ at  http://www.mythsoc.org/reviews/coming-of-conan-cimmerian/

Map of Demonland from "The Worm Ouroboros" by E.R. Eddison (Artist: David Bedell 1978)

Paul Carrick's Illustration of a Gug from Lovecraft's Dreamlands

The somewhat Freudian Gug with its vertical mouth is a denizen of Lovecraft’s ‘Dreamlands.’ I find the name resonant of the biblical titans Gog and Magog- the Gug’s gigantic size heightening this association.

‘The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs reached the ears of earth’s gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap door of stone with an iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the Gugs are afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos…

…It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened Gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally’.

Lyonesse--Down-A-Down-Derry---Dorothy P. Lathrop

‘In sea-cold Lyonesse,
When the Sabbath eve shafts down
On the roofs, walls, belfries
Of the foundered town…’

‘Sunk Lyonesse’ by Walter de la Mare (1922)

Arthurian legend tells of the sunken land of Lyonesse. One of the earliest literary references to Lyonesse appears in the 15^th Century Arthurian tale ‘Le Morte Darthur’ by Sir Thomas Malory. In Malory’s version of the legend Lyonesse is imagined to have once formed a land bridge between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles- the birthplace of the hero Tristan. During the 19^th and early 20^th Century as the Arthurian legend enjoyed a revival the legend of Lyonesse was directly referenced by in a number of works by writers of romantic and fantastic fiction. These works include ‘Idylls of the King’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1856-1885), ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’ by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1882) and ‘Sunk Lyonesse’ by Walter de la Mare (1922). In addition although not directly referenced the image of a Lyonesse-like ‘foundered town’ or sunken city appears in a number of other works of this period  ‘The Raft-Builders’ in ‘Fifty-one Tales’ by Lord Dunsany (1915) and also in ‘What the Moon Brings’ (1923) ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (1927)  and ‘The Call of Cthulu’  (1928) by H. P. Lovecraft.

In the ‘Idylls of the King’ (1856-1885) Alfred, Lord Tennyson re-imagines the Arthurian legend in a series of twelve narrative poems picturing Lyonesse as  a ‘land of old’ brought up from the ‘abyss’ and returning to the depths from whence it came.

‘Then rose the King and moved his host by night

And ever pushed Sir Mordred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse–

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea’.

There seems to be an air of divine judgement in Tennyson’s description of the destruction of Lyonesse with an image of the land emerging from fire and falling back into the depths of the earth. This image brings to mind the destruction by fire and brimstone of the infamous biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. There are also echoes of John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ (1667) in Tennyson’s description of the destruction of Lyonesse, note the corresponding imagery of abyss, mountains and sea in this section of Milton’s poem.

‘They  view’d the vast immeasurable Abyss

  Outrageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wilde,

  Up from the bottom turn’d by furious windes

  And surging waves, as Mountains to assault

  Heav’ns highth, and with the Center mix the Pole’.

The poet also evokes a feeling of great antiquity with the sunken land descending ‘Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt’. Even the ‘moaning sea’ seems to lament its descent beneath the waves.

Tristram of Lyonesse by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1882) is a lengthy narrative poem which ends in tragedy with the hero slain and his lover dying of a broken heart. The poem depicts Lyonesse as the watery grave of the hero Tristram and his lover Iseult.

‘For the strong sea hath swallowed wall and tower,
And where their limbs were laid in woful hour
For many a fathom gleams and moves and moans
The tide that sweeps above their coffined bones
In the wrecked chancel by the shivered shrine:
Nor where they sleep shall moon or sunlight shine
Nor man look down for ever: none shall say,
Here once, or here, Tristram and Iseult lay:
But peace they have that none may gain who live.
And rest about them that no love can give,
And over them, while death and life shall be,
The light and sound and darkness of the sea’.

The submerging of Lyonesse and the dead lover’s tomb beneath ‘The tide that sweeps above their coffined bones’ is arguably a metaphor for the eternal peace of death- the ‘peace they have that none may gain who live’. At the same time there is a sense of desecration created by the reference to ‘the wrecked chancel by the shivered shrine’ suggesting a certain unhallowed quality to their burial place beneath the’ light and sound and darkness of the sea.’

Lord Dunsany in ‘The Raft-Builders’ in ‘Fifty-one Tales’ (1915) makes no direct reference to Lyonesse but uses the metaphor of drowned cities to show the futility of trying to use art to create a surrogate immortality, picturing ’the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh’-

‘All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.

When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.

They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.

See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things–small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings–and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.

See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen’.

Note how Dunsany pictures oblivion as the sea ’shimmering all around us’ and imagines that ‘Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale.’  The great civilisations of Tyre and Persepolis with all their glory are now submerged by time ‘ in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries.’

‘Sunk Lyonesse’ by Walter de la Mare (1922) mirrors Swinburne’s vision of Lyonesse as a watery grave with its carver ‘Caged in his stone-ribbed side.’

‘In sea-cold Lyonesse,
When the Sabbath eve shafts down
On the roofs, walls, belfries
Of the foundered town,
The Nereids pluck their lyres
Where the green translucency beats,
And with motionless eyes at gaze
Make ministrely in the streets.

And the ocean water stirs
In salt-worn casement and porch.
Plies the blunt-nosed fish
With fire in his skull for torch.
And the ringing wires resound;
And the unearthly lovely weep,
In lament of the music they make
In the sullen courts of sleep:
Whose marble flowers bloom for aye:
And – lapped by the moon-guiled tide -
Mock their carver with heart of stone,
Caged in his stone-ribbed side’.

De la Mare’s description of Lyonesse relies on the juxtaposition of opposites for its effect.  The ‘Sabbath eve’ with its silent Christian belfries contrasts with the image of the pagan Nereids or sea nymphs of classical mythology who ‘pluck their lyres.’ The rhythm of the ‘green translucency beat’ of the sea contrasts with the ‘motionless eye’ of the Nerieds. The ‘ocean water’ is an elemental contrast with ‘the blunt-nosed fish/With fire in his skull.’  The image of ‘marble flowers’ is a paradoxical juxtaposition of organic with inorganic matter. There is a wavelike rhythm in this repetitious juxtaposition which heightens the impression of submergence beneath the sea.  In ‘Sunk Lyonesse’ the ‘foundered town’ can be seen as a metaphor for time obscuring the works of the artist in similar terms to Lord Dunsany in ‘The Raft-Builders’ in ‘Fifty-one Tales’. The final lines of the poem depict the irony of human creation outliving their creator.

‘Whose marble flowers bloom for aye:
And – lapped by the moon-guiled tide -
Mock their carver with heart of stone,
Caged in his stone-ribbed side’.

In ‘What the Moon Brings’ by H. P. Lovecraft (1923) the ‘foundered town’ makes another appearance but unlike ‘Sunk Lyonesse’ where it is the eternal aspects of death which are considered Lovecraft dwells on the ephemeral aspects of decay and the drowned city pictured is a kind of shallow grave of’ all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon…’

‘Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes breeded. And as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. But when that moon went over to the west and the still tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces…

…So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-conquering stench of the world’s dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon…

…Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that the reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shown in the dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and treacherous yellow moon.

And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the stinking shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world’s dead’.

In contrast to the melancholic mood of De la Mare where ‘the unearthly lovely weep,/In lament of the music they make ‘ the mood of ‘What the Moon Brings’ is one of horror where low tide exposes  ‘dead dripping city’ on a reef which is ‘the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon’.

There are further echoes of de la Mare’s Lyonesse in Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (1927) which has references to submerged ‘ruins’ ‘walls  ‘spires’ and ‘phosphorescent fish.’

‘On the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologized for their fears, saying that the ship was about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old for memory, and that when the water was clear one could see so many moving shadows in that deep place that simple folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover, that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; having been hailed when quite close to it, but never seen again.

That night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the water. There was so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean was very calm. Looking over the rail Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of the great temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to what was once a public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins, and porpoises revelled clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface and leaping clear out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of the ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of ancient climbing streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.

Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of simpler architecture than the other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and low and covered four sides of a square, with a tower at each corner, a paved court in the centre, and small curious round windows all over it. Probably it was of basalt, though weeds draped the greater part; and such was its lonely and impressive place on that far hill that it may have been a temple or a monastery. Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the small round windows an aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much for their fears. Then by the watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of that central court, and saw that something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope from the captain’s cabin he saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he was glad that a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea’.

In the final work considered  ‘The Call of Cthulu’ (1928) Lovecraft describes ‘ the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters’  which unlike the drowned city in Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ is not content to accept its doom (or divine judgement) but whose dread inhabitant Cthulu threatens  to ‘rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway’.

‘They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him’.

One interpretation of ‘R’lyeh under the waters’ is as a metaphor for the unconscious mind and the irrational- with the rise of Cthulu  as a kind of Freudian tsunami threatening  to submerge the dry land of the rational mind. (The image can also be understood in the context of the theme of dystheism which permeates Lovecraft’s works).

‘Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47°9′, W. Longitude l23°43′, come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror–the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration..’

Although R’lyeh is sunken it is not even in a clear state of being submerged. It is landscape of paradoxes   a ‘coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry’ i.e. not land not sea not organic (‘weedy’) or a construction (‘cyclopean masonry’) but a mixture of all of these elements. The inhabitants did not fly from the stars but ‘seeped down’ in manner suggestive of bodily fluids. There is a sense of the ‘foundered town’ as a psycho-geography, a mind plagued by Freudian nightmares of a phallic ‘great stone pillar sticking out of the sea’ which ‘sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive.’

Bibliography

Anon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas/Chapter 33 – Wikisource. Available at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/20,000_Leagues_Under_the_Seas/Chapter_33 [Accessed February 4, 2012a].

Anon, A Colder War – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Colder_War [Accessed February 4, 2012b].

Anon, Algernon Charles Swinburne –  Encyclopedia – Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Available at: http://library.eb.co.uk/all/eb/article-9070657?query=lyonesse&ct=null [Accessed February 4, 2012c].

Anon, At the Mountains of Madness/Chapter 7 – Wikisource. Available at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness/Chapter_7 [Accessed February 4, 2012d].

Anon, Atlantis (Smith) – Wikisource. Available at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Atlantis_(Smith) [Accessed February 4, 2012e].

Anon, Atlantis in popular culture – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_in_popular_culture [Accessed January 28, 2012f].

Anon, Books by De la Mare, Walter (sorted by popularity). Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.html/?default_prefix=author_id&sort_order=downloads&query=1108 [Accessed February 4, 2012g].

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Map of Clarke Ashton Smith's Zothique by Tim Kirk

Map published in the 'Arkham Advertiser' showing the route taken by the Miskatonic University expedition to Antartica in 1931.

On a recent visit to the Orne Library I came across this clipping from the ‘Arkham Advertiser’ showing the route taken by the Dr.William Dyer expedition to Antartica in 1931.

A Map of Robert E.Howard's 'Hyperborea'

Illustration for 'Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice' by Frank Cheyne Papé (1878-1972)

In my opinion ‘Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice’ (1919) by James Branch Cabell is one of the seminal ironic fantasy novels of the early Twentieth Century. In many ways it is a vehicle for the humorous discussion of the author’s philosophy- including his views on religious belief. The work could be described as a ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ for the sceptical with the hero Jurgen ’a monstrous clever fellow’  journeying through fantastic realms and expressing his disbelief in all the worldviews on offer. This is spite of the mischievous disclaimer at the beginning of the work that

“Equally in reading hereinafter will the judicious waive all allegorical interpretation, if merely because the suggestions hitherto advanced are inconveniently various…”

In his collection of essays ‘Beyond Life’ (1919) Cabell described his viewpoint in the following terms-

“I prefer to take it that we are components of an unfinished world, and that we are but seething atoms which ferment towards its making, if merely because Man as he now exists can hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one could very heartily revere. We are being made into something quite unpredictable, I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we are sustained by our instinctive knowledge that we are being made into something better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as surely as we know that we will to have it thus.

And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but “as they ought to be”, which we call romance. But when we note how visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about God”.

(I find this a significantly ambiguous statement on Cabell’s part- is he suggesting that what we ‘perceive’ as God is in reality ‘romance’ or is he alternately suggesting that ‘romance’ is  just another name for an ineffable God)?

In order to imaginatively discuss ideas such as the existence of God, the afterlife, and the nature of religious belief Cabell employs an eclectic pantheon of gods and demi-gods that interact with the eponymous hero in the Homeric manner. This pantheon includes Persian, Russian, Classical and Norse elements. The Persian fertility goddess Anaitis (or Anahita) appears as one of Jurgen’s lovers- the hero enjoys ‘much curious pleasure’ with her in the kingdom of ‘Cocaigne’. ‘Mother Sereda’ a goddess based on Russian folklore launches Jurgen on his quest through the realms of Poictesme. Jurgen revisits his lost youth in ‘The Garden between Dawn and Sunrise’- a realm with distinctly Arcadian overtones. Ædhumla, the cow of the first created being of Norse Mythology also makes an appearance. Cabell categorises these diverse supernatural beings inhabiting Poictesme as ‘Léshy’ a term borrowed from Russian folklore-

“He made a song of this, in praise of the Léshy and their Days, but more especially in praise of the might of Mother Sereda and of the ruins that have fallen on Wednesday. To Chetverg and Utornik and Subbota he gave their due. Pyatinka and Nedelka also did Jurgen commend for such demolishments as have enregistered their names in the calendar of saints, no less. Ah, but there was none like Mother Sereda: hers was the centre of that power which is the Léshy’s. The others did but nibble at temporal things, like furtive mice: she devastated, like a sandstorm, so that there were many dustheaps where Mother Sereda had passed, but nothing else”.

Cabell also appears to poke fun at Aleister Crowley’s tantric rites in this description of the ritual goings-on in the aptly named kingdom of ‘Cocaigne’

“Said the hooded man behind Jurgen: “So be it! but as you are, so once was I.”

Anaïtis answered: “There is no law in Cocaigne save, Do that which seems good to you.”

He laughed, and turned to Anaïtis: now that the candles were behind him, she was standing in his shadow. “Well, well! but you are a little old-fashioned, with all these equivocal mummeries. And I did not know that civilized persons any longer retained sufficient credulity to wring a thrill from god-baiting. Still, women must be humored, bless them! and at last, I take it, we have quite fairly fulfilled the ceremonial requisite to the pursuit of curious pleasures.”

An amusing aspect of Cabell’s pantheon is that the power that appears to control the lesser gods is the ‘Master Philologist’ presumably because he names and categorises the pantheon.

“You will discover very soon, sir, that actions speak louder than words.”

“I believe that is so,” said the Master Philologist, still blinking, “just as the Jewish mob spoke louder than He Whom they crucified. But the Word endures.”

“You are a quibbler!”

“You are my guest. So I advise you, in pure friendliness, not to impugn the power of my words.”

(The ‘Master Philologist’ may also be a humorous reference to Sir James George Frazer author of the anthropological work ‘The Golden Bough’ who categorised myths and legends and theorised that human belief progressed through three stages- a belief in magic, religious beliefs and then finally into a modern scientific worldview).

It is notable that Cabell depicts a ‘Master Philologist’ rather than a ‘Master Philosopher’ as a demi-god- is this because a philosopher uses words to explain reality whereas a philologist is essentially concerned with words alone? This theme of words obscuring reality rather than illuminating it is a thread that runs through the novel as a whole- note for example the following passage of dialogue between the protagonist and the Bishop of Merion.

“Now the Bishop of Merion passed him, coming from celebration of the early mass.”My Lord Bishop,” says Jurgen, simply, “can you tell me the truth about this Christ?”

“Why, indeed, Messire de Logreus,” replied the Bishop, “one cannot but sympathize with Pilate in thinking that the truth about Him is very hard to get at, even nowadays. Was He Melchisedek, or Shem, or Adam? or was He verily the Logos? and in that event, what sort of a something was the Logos? Granted He was a god, were the Arians or the Sabellians in the right? had He existed always, co-substantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit, or was He a creation of the Father, a kind of Israelitic Zagreus? Was He the husband of Acharamoth, that degraded Sophia, as the Valentinians aver? or the son of Pantherus, as say the Jews? or Kalakau, as contends Basilidês? or was it, as the Docetês taught, only a tinted cloud in the shape of a man that went from Jordan to Golgotha? Or were the Merinthians right? These are a few of the questions, Messire de Logreus, which naturally arise. And not all of them are to be settled out of hand.”

Despite his exotic pantheon, as is indicated in the previous passage Cabell’s principal philosophical engagement is with Christian theology and the established church. At the beginning of the tale Jurgen berates a monk for his ingratitude to the Prince of Darkness for his hard labour-

“None the less,” observes Jurgen, “it does not behoove God-fearing persons to speak with disrespect of the divinely appointed Prince of Darkness. To your further confusion, consider this monarch’s industry! day and night you may detect him toiling at the task Heaven set him. That is a thing can be said of few communicants and of no monks. Think, too, of his fine artistry, as evidenced in all the perilous and lovely snares of this world, which it is your business to combat, and mine to lend money upon. Why, but for him we would both be vocationless! Then, too, consider his philanthropy! and deliberate how insufferable would be our case if you and I, and all our fellow parishioners, were to-day hobnobbing with other beasts in the Garden…”

This use of ironic theological conceits is the defining style of Jurgen. For example Cabell pictures the devils of Hell attending church and celebrating Christmas

“Now the tale tells how the devils of Hell were in one of their churches celebrating Christmas in such manner as the devils observe that day; and how Jurgen came through the trapdoor in the vestry-room; and how he saw and wondered over the creatures which inhabited this place. For to him after the Christmas services came all such devils as his fathers had foretold, and in not a hair or scale or talon did they differ from the worst that anybody had been able to imagine”.

Another one of the many ironies of Cabell’s vision of Hell is that the lesser devils express surprise that Jurgen does not want to be punished like all the other damned souls-

“Your conscience, then, does not demand that you be punished?”

“My conscience, gentlemen, is too well-bred to insist on anything.”

“You do not even wish to be tortured?”

“Well, I admit I had expected something of the sort. But none the less, I will not make a point of it,” said Jurgen, handsomely. “No, I shall be quite satisfied even though you do not torture me at all.”

A further humorous aspect of the nature of hell in ‘Jurgen’ is this description of infernal politics

“For with the devils Jurgen got on garrulously. The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy. This contented the devils, and Jurgen had learned long ago never to fall out with either of these codes, without which, as the devils were fond of observing, Hell would not be what it is”.

In ‘Jurgen’ heaven and hell are portrayed as the psychological constructs of the human imagination or perhaps the afterlife defined by human belief; both states of being given concrete form by the obliging deity ‘Koschei the Deathless.’

“But wherefore is this place called the Hell of my fathers?”

“Because your forefathers builded it in dreams,” they told him, “out of the pride which led them to believe that what they did was of sufficient importance to merit punishment. Or so at least we have heard: but if you want the truth of the matter you must go to our Grandfather at Barathum.”

“I shall go to him, then. And do my own grandfathers, and all the forefathers that I had in the old time, inhabit this gray place?”

“All such as are born with what they call a conscience come hither,” the devils said. “Do you think you could persuade them to go elsewhere? For in that event, we would be deeply obliged to you. Their self-conceit is pitiful: but it is also a nuisance, because it prevents our getting any rest.”

Likewise the ‘God of Jurgen’s grandmother’ is described in the conventional terms of a pious old lady of the time-

“Jurgen then went unhindered to where the God of Jurgen’s grandmother sat upon a throne, beside a sea of crystal. A rainbow, made high and narrow like a window frame, so as to fit the throne, formed an arch-way in which He sat: at His feet burned seven lamps, and four remarkable winged creatures sat there chaunting softly, “Glory and honor and thanks to Him Who liveth forever!” In one hand of the God was a sceptre, and in the other a large book with seven red spots on it.

There were twelve smaller thrones, without rainbows, upon each side of the God of Jurgen’s grandmother, in two semi-circles: upon these inferior thrones sat benignant-looking elderly angels, with long white hair, all crowned, and clothed in white robes, and having a harp in one hand, and in the other a gold flask, about pint size. And everywhere fluttered and glittered the multicolored wings of seraphs and cherubs, like magnified paroquets, as they went softly and gaily about the golden haze that brooded over Heaven, to a continuous sound of hushed organ music and a remote and undistinguishable singing.”

I think is important to note here that whilst striking a sceptical note and highly critical of the established church and hypocritical believers there are a number of passages in the novel which imply a deep respect for Christ, his apostles and his teachings. The conversation between St. Peter (‘an Apostle and a gentleman’) and Jurgen in heaven is a good example of this viewpoint.

“Well, it is true, St. Peter, that you founded the Church—”

“Now, there you go again! That is what those patronizing seraphim and those impish cherubs are always telling us. You see, we Twelve sit together in Heaven, each on his white throne: and we behold everything that happens on Earth. Now from our station there has been no ignoring the growth and doings of what you might loosely call Christianity. And sometimes that which we see makes us very uncomfortable, Jurgen. Especially as just then some cherub is sure to flutter by, in a broad grin, and chuckle, ‘But you started it.’ And we did; I cannot deny that in a way we did. Yet really we never anticipated anything of this sort, and it is not fair to tease us about it.”

“Indeed, St. Peter, now I think of it, you ought to be held responsible for very little that has been said or done in the shadow of a steeple. For as I remember it, you Twelve attempted to convert a world to the teachings of Jesus: and good intentions ought to be respected, however drolly they may turn out.”

It was apparent this sympathy was grateful to the old Saint, for he was moved to a more confidential tone. Meditatively he stroked his long white beard, then said with indignation: “If only they would not claim sib with us we could stand it: but as it is, for centuries we have felt like fools. It is particularly embarrassing for me, of course, being on the wicket; for to cap it all, Jurgen, the little wretches die, and come to Heaven impudent as sparrows, and expect me to let them in! From their thumbscrewings, and their auto-da-fés, and from their massacres, and patriotic sermons, and holy wars, and from every manner of abomination, they come to me, smirking. And millions upon millions of them, Jurgen! There is no form of cruelty or folly that has not come to me for praise, and no sort of criminal idiot who has not claimed fellowship with me, who was an Apostle and a gentleman. Why, Jurgen, you may not believe it, but there was an eminent bishop came to me only last week in the expectation that I was going to admit him,—and I with the full record of his work for temperance, all fairly written out and in my hand!”

Despite his scepticism Jurgen is far too egotistical to accept that his life has no meaning (reflecting Cabell’s views on the human condition). Note his response to a notice he finds in the ‘Garden between Dawn and Sunrise’

“Read me!” was written on the signboard: “read me, and judge if you understand! So you stopped in your journey because I called, scenting something unusual, something droll. Thus, although I am nothing, and even less, there is no one that sees me but lingers here. Stranger, I am a law of the universe. Stranger, render the law what is due the law!”

Jurgen felt cheated. “A very foolish signboard, indeed! for how can it be ‘a law of the universe’, when there is no meaning to it!” says Jurgen. “Why, for any law to be meaningless would not be fair.”

In a probable reference to the ‘Livre d’Artus’ Jurgen also meets Merlin in the form of a brown man with ‘curious feet’ who imparts him with knowledge of the futility of human existence- but he yet again is too vain to accept the views of  ‘a delusion or a god or a degraded Realist’.

…”Facts! sanity! and reason!” Jurgen raged: “why, but what nonsense you are talking! Were there a bit of truth in your silly puppetry this world of time and space and consciousness would be a bubble, a bubble which contained the sun and moon and the high stars, and still was but a bubble in fermenting swill! I must go cleanse my mind of all this foulness. You would have me believe that men, that all men who have ever lived or shall ever live hereafter, that even I am of no importance! Why, there would be no justice in any such arrangement, no justice anywhere!”…

…”That vexed you, did it not? It vexes me at times, even me, who under Koshchei’s will alone am changeless….”.

…”Make answer, you who chatter about justice! how if I slew you now,” says the brown man,—”I being what I am?”

“Slay me, then!” says Jurgen, with shut eyes, for he did not at all like the appearance of things. “Yes, you can kill me if you choose, but it is beyond your power to make me believe that there is no justice anywhere, and that I am unimportant. For I would have you know I am a monstrous clever fellow. As for you, you are either a delusion or a god or a degraded Realist. But whatever you are, you have lied to me, and I know that you have lied, and I will not believe in the insignificance of Jurgen.”

A curious figure in ‘Jurgen’ is that of ‘Koshchei the Deathless’. The name is taken from Russian folklore- originally an ancient Slavonic god now reduced to an evil spirit. However the Koschei of Cabell although initially mistaken by Jurgen for Satan (‘the black gentleman’) appears instead as the vague, put-upon but benign manager of all existence. Koschei is perhaps a humorous depiction of’ the first cause’ of classical deism- a logical necessity but with no particular concern for mankind’s destiny.  In a scene reminiscent of the dénouement of the ‘Wizard of Oz’ Jurgen finds Koschei in ‘the last part of the cave.’

“So Jurgen went on down the aisle between the rows of benches wherefrom Thragnar’s warriors had glared at Jurgen when he was last in this part of the cave. At the end of the aisle was a wooden door painted white. It was marked, in large black letters, “Office of the Manager—Keep Out.” So Jurgen opened this door”.

Significantly Koschei is the final step of Jurgen’s quest but can give no ultimate answers.

“I do not know, sir. But I suspect that my quest is ended, and that you are Koshchei the Deathless.”

The black gentleman nodded. “Something of the sort. Koshchei, or Ardnari, or Ptha, or Jaldalaoth, or Abraxas,—it is all one what I may be called hereabouts. My real name you never heard: no man has ever heard my name. So that matter we need hardly go into.”

“Precisely, Prince. Well, but it is a long way that I have traveled roundabout, to win to you who made things as they are. And it is eager I am to learn just why you made things as they are.”

Up went the black gentleman’s eyebrows into regular Gothic arches. “And do you really think, Jurgen, that I am going to explain to you why I made things as they are?”

“I fail to see, Prince, how my wanderings could have any other equitable climax.”

“But, friend, I have nothing to do with justice. To the contrary, I am Koshchei who made things as they are.”

Jurgen saw the point. “Your reasoning, Prince, is unanswerable. I bow to it. I should even have foreseen it. Do you tell me, then, what thing is this which I desire, and cannot find in any realm that man has known nor in any kingdom that man has imagined.”

Koshchei was very patient. “I am not, I confess, anything like as well acquainted with what has been going on in this part of the universe as I ought to be. Of course, events are reported to me, in a general sort of way, and some of my people were put in charge of these stars, a while back: but they appear to have run the constellation rather shiftlessly. Still, I have recently been figuring on the matter, and I do not despair of putting the suns hereabouts to some profitable use, in one way or another, after all. Of course, it is not as if it were an important constellation. But I am an Economist, and I dislike waste—”

James Branch Cabell’s influence on the fantasy writers that followed him is marked. For example the idea of God as an overworked technocrat can be seen in the character of Slartibartfast the planet designer in Douglas Adams ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (1978) who complains about being given the boring  job of creating Africa rather than designing fjords. The figure of Koschei can also be detected in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ creator who appearing in ‘Eric’ (1990) complains that the ‘Big Bang’ was too ‘showy’ for his tastes.  Cabell’s use of philosophical conceits appears also to have strongly influenced Neil Gaimen in his novel ‘American Gods’ (2001) where the underlying premise is that the mythological beings depicted only exist because human beings believe in them.

Bibliography

Anon, Discworld gods – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_gods#Small_gods [Accessed February 2, 2012a].

Anon, Home Page of David Rolfe. Available at: http://home.earthlink.net/~davidrolfe/ [Accessed January 26, 2012b].

Anon, James Branch Cabell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell [Accessed January 3, 2012c].

Anon, James Branch Cabell (Cabell, James Branch, 1879-1958) | The Online Books Page. Available at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Cabell%2C%20James%20Branch%2C%201879-1958 [Accessed January 6, 2012d].

Anon, James Branch Cabell (Cabell, James Branch, 1879-1958) | The Online Books Page. Available at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Cabell%2C%20James%20Branch%2C%201879-1958 [Accessed January 6, 2012e].

Anon, James Branch Cabell (Cabell, James Branch, 1879-1958) | The Online Books Page. Available at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Cabell%2C%20James%20Branch%2C%201879-1958 [Accessed January 26, 2012f].

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Rockbridge Alum Springs

“What inspired Cabell to create Poictesme? The answer is in part an area in Virginia called Rockbridge Alum Springs. Cabell went there throughout the ‘twenties even after its decline. It began as a summer retreat in the 1880s and rivalled America’s leading spas. Dedicated to romance and illusion it was far from the workaday world of Richmond. Towards the end of his life Cabell wrote: “I found nothing that sent my imagination soaring like that little charmed circle of buildings called Rockbridge Alum Springs.”

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958): America’s Greatest Mythmaker  by Desmond Tarrant

Map of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Nineteenth Century Illustration for 'Toilers of the Sea' by Victor Hugo

‘If terror were the object of its creation, nothing could be imagined more perfect than the devil-fish.’

Victor Hugo ‘Toilers of the Sea’

The kraken and the devil-fish are but two archaic names for the cephalopod we now know as the giant squid. The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the giant squid emerge from the legends of the Icelandic sagas and Homer’s odyssey into the scientific journals of the day. The natural scientist Carolus Linnaeus had in fact included kraken as cephalopods in the first edition of his taxonomy of the natural world ‘Systema Naturae’ as early as 1735 but had excised the reference from the second edition. It was not until the 1850s that the giant squid re-entered the scientific lexicon when Japetus Steenstrup, Professor of Zoology at the University of Copenhagen wrote a number of papers on the subject. In 1861 the French naval vessel the ‘Alecton’ obtained part of a giant squid and from the 1870s onwards many specimens washed ashore in Canada and New Zealand.  The giant squid also undulated its way into general culture via articles of the time such as this from ‘Popular Science Monthly’

“PERHAPS no better introduction to this chapter can be given than to recall to the minds of our readers the terribly vivid description of the devil-fish by that grand master of romance, Victor Hugo; for, though incorrect in several scientific details, the general description is the best we have had, though Jules Verne’s is almost as dramatic and nearer to Nature. In “Les Travailleurs de la Mer” M. Hugo says: “To believe in the existence of the devil-fish, one must have seen it. Compared to it the ancient hydras were insignificant…” In a letter addressed to me on this subject by Prof. Spencer F. Baird, under date of April 1, 1878, this distinguished naturalist says: “The giant squid in the New York Aquarium can only be designated as an infant or dwarf in comparison with the gigantic species of the Pacific Ocean— those upon which the sperm-whale is known to feed. Chunks of squid-remains are not infrequently found in the throat or stomach of the sperm-whale, apparently indicating specimens from ten to fifty times the size of the Newfoundland variety. I was informed that a considerably larger specimen than that at New York was cast ashore at Newfoundland later in the season. The arms of the latter, if I recollect right, were some ten feet longer than those of the other”.

‘The Devil-Fish and Its Relatives’ By W. E. Damon in Popular Science Monthly Volume 14 January 1879

As is alluded to in this article the giant squid also made notable appearances in Nineteenth Century works of fiction such as ‘Toilers of the Sea’ by Victor Hugo (1866) and ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ by Jules Verne (1870) but there were earlier appearances such as in ‘Moby-Dick;’ or, The Whale’ (1851) by Herman Melville. I would further argue that imagery of the giant squid can also be found in the scientific romance ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1898), by H.G. Wells and is much in evidence in the Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft (1890 –1937).

Melville had direct experience as a mariner having served on two whaling ships including the whaler Acushnet in 1842 and may have been made aware of the existence of the giant squid on these voyages. Melville’s depiction of the creature in ‘Moby Dick’ is prosaic in the extreme – categorised as a mere snack for that mighty symbolic beast the white whale.

“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.

“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.”

But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest as silently following.

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.

There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.

By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe”.

The white whale is arguably a central character of Moby Dick and described by Captain Ahab as his sworn enemy or nemesis-

 “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him…”

In contrast the squid is a mere footnote, clearing up an ancient mystery related by Bishop Pontoppodan or a curiosity of the naturalists along with the cuttle-fish.

The giant squid makes a more striking appearance in ‘Toilers of the Sea’ by Victor Hugo where it is described as a ‘sea vampire’ as it was believed to suck out the vital fluids of its victims. For Hugo the ‘devil-fish is so otherworldly it is best described in negatives-

“The whale has enormous bulk, the devil-fish is comparatively small; the jararaca makes a hissing noise, the devil-fish is mute; the rhinoceros has a horn, the devil-fish has none; the scorpion has a dart, the devil-fish has no dart; the shark has sharp fins, the devil-fish has no fins; the vespertilio-bat has wings with claws, the devil-fish has no wings; the porcupine has his spines, the devil-fish has no spines; the sword-fish has his sword, the devil-fish has none; the torpedo has its electric spark, the devil-fish has none; the toad has its poison, the devil-fish has none; the viper has its venom, the devil-fish has no venom; the lion has its talons, the devil-fish has no talons; the griffon has its beak, the devil-fish has no beak; the crocodile has its jaws, the devil-fish has no teeth…

What, then, is the devil-fish? It is the sea vampire”.

Hugo describes the giant squid as a creature so hideous its existence casts doubt on the idea of a benign creator. (In this regard the description appears something of a precursor of the tentacled horrors of Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos).

“It is difficult for those who have not seen it to believe in the existence of the devil-fish.

Compared to this creature, the ancient hydras are insignificant.

At times we are tempted to imagine that the vague forms which float in our dreams may encounter in the realm of the Possible attractive forces, having power to fix their lineaments, and shape living beings, out of these creatures of our slumbers. The Unknown has power over these strange visions, and out of them composes monsters. Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod imagined only the Chimera: Providence has created this terrible creature of the sea.

Creation abounds in monstrous forms of life. The wherefore of this perplexes and affrights the religious thinker.

If terror were the object of its creation, nothing could be imagined more perfect than the devil-fish”.

According to Hugo science can classify the giant squid but cannot define its meaning- it is left to philosophy to do this. Hugo even speculates that the existence of the giant squid is an argument for Manichean-style dualism: that is the existence of opposing poles of good and evil in the Universe.

‘These strange animals, Science, in accordance with its habit of excessive caution even in the face of facts, at first rejects as fabulous; then she decides to observe them; then she dissects, classifies, catalogues, and labels; then procures specimens, and exhibits them in glass cases in museums…This done, she leaves them. Where science drops them, philosophy takes them up…

‘…Philosophy in her turn studies these creatures. She goes both less far and further. She does not dissect, but meditate. Where the scalpel has laboured, she plunges the hypothesis. She seeks the final cause. Eternal  perplexity of the thinker. These creatures disturb his ideas of the Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the death’s-head at the feast of contemplation. The philosopher determines their characteristics in dread. They are the concrete forms of evil. What attitude can he take towards this treason of creation against herself? To whom can he look for the solution of these riddles? The Possible is a terrible matrix. Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form. Portions of shade issue from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats, condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things. It is as if night itself assumed the forms of animals. But for what good?  with what object? Thus we come again to the eternal questioning.

These animals are indeed phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved and yet improbable. Their fate is to exist in spite of à priori reasonings. They are the amphibia of the shore which separates life from death. Their unreality makes their existence puzzling. They touch the frontier of man’s domain and people the region of chimeras. We deny the possibility of the vampire, and the cephaloptera appears. Their swarming is a certainty which disconcerts our confidence. Optimism, which is nevertheless in the right, becomes silenced in their presence. They form the visible extremity of the dark circles. They mark the transition of our reality into another. They seem to belong to that commencement of terrible life which the dreamer sees confusedly through the loophole of the night.

That multiplication of monsters, first in the Invisible, then in the Possible, has been suspected, perhaps perceived by magi and philosophers in their austere ecstasies and profound contemplations. Hence the conjecture of a material hell. The demon is simply the invisible tiger. The wild beast which devours souls has been presented to the eyes of human beings by St. John, and by Dante in his vision of Hell.

If, in truth, the invisible circles of creation continue indefinitely, if after one there is yet another, and so forth in illimitable progression; if that chain, which for our part we are resolved to doubt, really exist, the cephaloptera at one extremity proves Satan at the other. It is certain that the wrongdoer at one end proves the existence of wrong at the other.

Every malignant creature, like every perverted intelligence, is a sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of the existence of Evil.

It is this perfection of evil which has sometimes sufficed to incline powerful intellects to a faith in the duality of the Deity, towards that terrible bifrons of the Manichæans”.

(Once again I am struck by the likely influence of these passages on Lovecraft’s dystheistic worldview and the centrality of squid- like horrors in his imagery- a theme I will return to later).

Illustration from first English edition of 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea published 1870

In ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ by Jules Verne the giant squid that famously attack the ‘Nautilus’ are described in terms which evoke horror- reference is made to the ‘ horned beak’ and ‘several rows of pointed teeth’.

“Nothing, my friends; at least of that which passes the limit of truth to get to fable or legend. Nevertheless, there must be some ground for the imagination of the story-tellers. One cannot deny that poulps and cuttlefish exist of a large species, inferior, however, to the cetaceans. Aristotle has stated the dimensions of a cuttlefish as five cubits, or nine feet two inches. Our fishermen frequently see some that are more than four feet long. Some skeletons of poulps are preserved in the museums of Trieste and Montpelier, that measure two yards in length. Besides, according to the calculations of some naturalists, one of these animals only six feet long would have tentacles twenty-seven feet long. That would suffice to make a formidable monster.

I looked in my turn, and could not repress a gesture of disgust. Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed, watching us with its enormous staring green eyes. Its eight arms, or rather feet, fixed to its head, that have given the name of cephalopod to these animals, were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair. One could see the 250 air holes on the inner side of the tentacles. The monster’s mouth, a horned beak like a parrot’s, opened and shut vertically. Its tongue, a horned substance, furnished with several rows of pointed teeth, came out quivering from this veritable pair of shears. What a freak of nature, a bird’s beak on a mollusc! Its spindle-like body formed a fleshy mass that might weigh 4,000 to 5,000 lb.; the, varying colour changing with great rapidity, according to the irritation of the animal, passed successively from livid grey to reddish brown. What irritated this mollusc? No doubt the presence of the Nautilus, more formidable than itself, and on which its suckers or its jaws had no hold”.

Unlike the ‘Devil-fish’ of Victor Hugo, although terrifying these giant squid are acknowledged as creations of God admired for their natural vigour and objects of interest to the amateur naturalist.

“Yet, what monsters these poulps are! what vitality the Creator has given them! what vigour in their movements! and they possess three hearts! Chance had brought us in presence of this cuttlefish, and I did not wish to lose the opportunity of carefully studying this specimen of cephalopods. I overcame the horror that inspired me, and, taking a pencil, began to draw it”.

Martian tripod illustration from the 1906 French edition of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds".

The Martian invaders and their tripods in ‘The War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells are described in very squid-like terms as ‘a sort of metallic spider’ with ‘clutching tentacles’ and having a kind of ‘fleshy beak.’

 “The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed, agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars, and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it extracted them, were lifted out and deposited upon a level surface of earth behind it.

They were huge round bodies–or, rather, heads–about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils–indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body–I scarcely know how to speak of it–was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist Professor Howes, the hands”.

Perhaps the unease that H.G. Wells vision provokes is that earthly squid may be a type of ‘sea vampire’ but they are clearly some way down the food chain from human beings.  On the other hand extra-terrestrial squid have superior technology and drink human blood on an industrial scale…

“Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads–merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . “.

Cthulu

In the works of H.P. Lovecraft the giant squid achieves its (possibly) final apotheosis into the gods and demi-gods of the Cthulu mythos. Note the squid imagery from the following passages where references are made to ‘The awful squid-head with writhing feelers’  ‘a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes’ and ‘cuttlefish head’.

“Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething” astern; where–God in heaven!–the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

“the region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight”.

“The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen”.

‘The Call Of Cthulhu’

Unlike the ‘devil-fish’ of ‘Toilers of the Sea’ or even the Martians of ‘The War of the Worlds’ whose simple aim is to digest their victims ‘great Cthulu’ has no such dietary requirements. It simply exists as a kind of metaphysical threat to the sanity of humankind, bringing to mind Victor Hugo’s description of the ‘devil-fish’

“These animals are indeed phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved and yet improbable. Their fate is to exist in spite of à priori reasonings. They are the amphibia of the shore which separates life from death. Their unreality makes their existence puzzling. They touch the frontier of man’s domain and people the region of chimeras”.

Lovecraft acknowledges his debt to Victor Hugo, writing in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’

“Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass’s Skin, Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows”.

Squid imagery is also apparent in Lovecraft’s ’Old Ones’ a race of sentient extraterrestrial demi-gods who are credited with creating the human race (by accident). Note the references to ‘five main head tentacles’ and ‘The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched’

“Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way–the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads–senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating processes–probably to secure phosphorescence–which the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming–using the lateral crinoid arms–and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fanlike folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination–ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.

‘At the Mountains of Madness’

According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were only partly material–as we understand matter–and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions”.

‘The Shadow Out of Time’

All in all quite an evolution for a cephalopod, from whale-bait in ‘Moby Dick’ through sinister ‘Devil-Fish’ and Martian invader to star-borne demi-god in less than one-hundred years of fiction.

Bibliography

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H.P. Lovecraft is in my opinion one of the great mythopoeic fantasy writers of the last one hundred years. In his dark universe sanity is but a candle guttering in an encroaching gust of madness. Add to this existential horror a pantheon of dark gods so vividly pictured as to rival any fantasy mythos and it is not surprising that the writings of Lovecraft have such a devoted readership (myself included). In recent years critics such as S.T. Joshi et al have made much of the fiction of Lovecraft as a kind of scripture or mythology of atheism. Whereas the writer himself clearly professes this philosophy in his personal correspondence it is my contention that these ideas are not so apparent in the fictional works themselves and in fact on closer examination a somewhat different worldview emerges.

Lovecraft writes in a letter quoted in ‘Against religion: the atheist writings of H. P. Lovecraft’ that

“The word “Christianity” becomes noble when applied to the veneration of a wonderfully good man and moral teacher, but it grows undignified when applied to a system of white magic based on the supernatural.”

If this form of polemical engagement with Christianity was an important theme in Lovecraft’s’ fictional works one might expect to find significant direct references to God and Christianity: the supernatural genre in which he wrote would give ample opportunity to do this. In fact a textual analysis of Lovecraft’s ‘Collected Works’ shows only a handful of occurrences of the words ‘God’ and ‘Christ*- mostly incidental. On the other hand there are overwhelmingly higher significant occurrences of words such as ‘gods’ and ‘cults.’ (It could be argued there are in fact more significant references to Theosophy than Christianity a theme which I will explore later). Although the odd significant direct reference to sceptical themes can be found even these references are ambiguous. In the context of the narrative they can be just as easily read as evidence of the wickedness of the characters concerned as authorial scepticism about the existence of a Christian God. One example of this can be found in ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ which could be read as either Obed making a theological point about the non-existence of God or an example of his blasphemy in equating a race of fish people with the Deity.

“Then’s the time Obed he begun a-cursin’ at the folks fer bein’ dull sheep an’ prayin’ to a Christian heaven as didn’t help ‘em none. He told ‘em he’d knowed o’ folks as prayed to gods that give somethin’ ye reely need, an’ says ef a good bunch o’ men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o’ sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o’ fish an’ quite a bit of gold”.

A concern for the well-being of orthodox religion also emerges in another passage from the same story.

“Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth–which she never seen–was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.

It was called, she said, “The Esoteric Order of Dagon,” and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green”.

The idea of blasphemy as a sinister activity is also near the surface of a lot of Lovecraft’s stories- a strange choice of theme if the works were polemically engaged with Christianity or even deism in general.

“Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from my lips, and in my shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, Man, or Nature. Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon the boisterous company”.

‘The Tomb’

On the contrary I think what largely emerges for the casual reader of Lovecraft’s weird tales is the need to keep within conventional boundaries and the danger of entertaining occult ideas. (This might be particularly true of the original pulp readership Lovecraft wrote for).

“One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell”.

‘The Call of Cthulu’

 “He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe..”

‘The Horror at Red Hook’

A casual reader ignorant of Lovecraft’s scepticism in his personal correspondence would more likely conclude that at least some of the stories are morality tales showing the dangers of irreligion and new-fangled philosophy rather than sceptical attacks on Christianity). A good example of this kind of story is ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ where the Promethean protagonist is punished for tampering with the natural order and bringing the dead back to life. Note in this passage West’s contemptuous references to ‘Puritanism’ (for which read ‘Christianity’) revealing an arrogance which turns out to be his later undoing.

“That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the “professor-doctor” type–the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high–souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins–sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation….”

‘Herbert West: Reanimator’

Of course what is missing from the surface reading of the casual reader is a closer examination of Lovecraft’s fictional mythos and some of the deeper themes of his works which I would argue include polytheistic dystheism, a very singular kind of dualism and oddly a greater engagement with the ideas of Theosophy than Christianity.

(Just to clarify at this point I am not suggesting that Lovecraft necessarily believed in his mythos merely that his fictional works seem more influenced by consistency with the created mythos than the personal scepticism of the author. Having said this I personally suspect that at times Lovecraft genuinely entertained the theological position of his works given his somewhat tragic life).

Polytheistic dystheism can be defined as the theological position that god/s exist but they are either indifferent to the fate of mankind or actively malevolent. This idea seems closer to the mythos underlying Lovecraft’s tales than that of atheism which implies disbelief or scepticism about the existence of any gods at all.

“It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence’s whole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign…”

‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’

“There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity–the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep”.

‘The Haunter of the Dark’

Note the references to ‘limitless being and self’ and ‘outside the ordered universe.’ The beings described are not merely demi-gods or higher beings (like Lovecraft’s ‘Old Ones’) but are described in terms commonly used of transcendent gods. Azahoth has prophet called Nyarlathotep but his message is ‘crawling chaos.’  Azahoth may be ‘blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless’ but via Nyarlathotep he has agency if not purpose. Interestingly Lovecraft’s transcendent gods are not creators or even destroyers but agents of disorder and chaos-

“The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth…”

‘The Whisperer in Darkness’

Another significant aspect to the dystheism of Lovecraft’s tales is that although composed of seething chaos the realm of the gods is ‘reality’ and it is the mundane world which appears unreal by comparison.

“Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of Earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know”.

‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’

The ‘Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines dualism as

“…the idea is that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles. In theology, for example a ‘dualist’ is someone who believes that Good and Evil—or God and the Devil—are independent and more or less equal forces in the world. Dualism contrasts with monism, which is the theory that there is only one fundamental kind, category of thing or principle; and, rather less commonly, with pluralism, which is the view that there are many kinds or categories”.

I would argue the dualism that emerges from the fictional work of Lovecraft is a form of matter/spirit dualism as expressed in the following passages-

“I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter, why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes–or absences of shapes–which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly “unnamable”? “Common sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility”.

‘The Unamable’

“From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon”.

‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’

“My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere”.

‘The Unnamable’

“A gate had been unlocked–not, indeed, the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth and time to that extension of Earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter”.

‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’

“These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape–for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?–but that shape was not made of matter”

‘The Call of Cthulu’

“The thing has gone for ever,’ Armitage said. ‘It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father–and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills”

‘The Dunwich Horror’

“These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead–in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense”.

‘The Thing on the Doorstep’

In classical religious dualism ‘matter’ is generally seen as ‘evil’ and ‘spirit’ as good- as for example in the case of Catharism-

“The radical Cathars-and also the moderate Cathars-in contrast, teach a ‘vertical dualism’: what is above is good, what is below is bad. The light has fallen into the darkness (the physical world) and must be liberated from it. The creation has been made by a creatormalus. The Cathar perfecti in particular have a horror of the creation and the body (van Schaik, pp. 79-86)”.

CATHARS, ALBIGENSIANS, and BOGOMILS http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cathars-albigensians-and-bogomils

The unique nature of the dualism that emerges from the fictional works of Lovecraft is that unlike classical religious dualism it appears to view ‘matter’ as ‘good’ and ‘spirit’ (or that which is beyond the material world) as ‘evil’ (or at least ‘not good’). It is the mundane material world which is safe and wholesome and what lies beyond is threatening and harmful-

“I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder”.

‘The Shunned House’

“Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras–dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies–may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition–but they were there before. They are transcripts, types–the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body–or without the body, they would have been the same…That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual–that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy–are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence”.

–Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears

‘The Dunwich Horror’

If it is agreed that Lovecraft’s fiction seems unengaged with Christianity this is not the case with Theosophy. Robert M. Price argues convincingly in his essay ‘HPL and HPB: Lovecraft’s Use of Theosophy’ that despite the writer’s limited direct knowledge of the subject his mythos was greatly influenced by Theosophical imagery.

“From the Theosophists, too, Lovecraft seems to have derived his ubiquitous references to “cyclopean” ruins, denoting the past dominance of gigantic alien races, such as those just described. In “Out of the Eons”, a “gigantic fortress of Cyclopean stone” is attributed to “the alien spawn of the dark planet Yuggoth, which had colonized the earth before the birth of terrestrial life.” In “The Call of Cthulhu”, Wilcox dreams of “the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone. . . . The size of the Old Ones [who built the city of R'lyeh], he curiously declined to mention.” In The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph Carter wonders at “the vast clay-brick ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered.” He “did not like the size and shape of the ruins. . . . And what the structure and proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to conjecture.”

Price goes on to argue that in the addition to the use of Theosophical imagery Lovecraft’s fiction shows a polemical engagement with Theosophy (or perhaps with ‘Occultist Optimism’ in general) –

“In all these instances, the implications contain a dim hint of an archaic truth terrible in its reality. It is as if to say that the Theosophists have only a small part of the truth, and that their little knowledge is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. In fact, HPL’s narrator says as much in our fourth quote (again, from “The Call of Cthulhu”): “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.” There is, so to speak, indeed something at the end of the rainbow, only instead of a pot of gold, it is a bottomless pit. In their occultist optimism, Theosophists had postulated the ancient origin of humanity amid alien super-intelligences. So glorious an origin seemed to imply a bright destiny for the race. But Lovecraft’s “cosmic futilitarianism” led him to repaint the picture in darker, pessimistic hues. As depicted in At the Mountains of Madness, the genesis of the human race was a breeding accident in the laboratories of the star-headed Old Ones. The resultant vision is one of absurdity. Lovecraft has represented precisely what fundamentalist “creationists” see as being at stake in their quixotic crusade against Darwinism: if man’s origin was random, so is his meaning, and so will be his destiny”.

(Where I take issue with Price is the suggestion that Theosophy can be viewed as a kind of proxy for creationist Christianity in Lovecraft’s fiction- I think given it’s inferior relation as a ‘cult’ as compared to orthodox Christianity in the narrative I find this unconvincing).

Yeats famously wrote of the necessity for the reader to distinguish between the works of an author and the personal opinions of ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast.’ I think that the difference between the worldview of Lovecraft the creator and the mythos he created are very much a case in point.

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