Episode 95 – Through the Gates of the Silver Key

[hsparks]

Great stuff again and I'm picking up those magnets. The archetype discussion was fantastic. I never knew the exact details of Theosophy, but this episode totally got me into researching it more. The amalgamation of Lovecraft's universe with the philosophy's of these other writers is pretty impressive and I would have never have known that if it wasn't for the show and these odd one off stories. Does Ken Hites' book, Tour de Lovecraft, go into detail with some of philosophical studies that Lovecraft maybe incorporating? I haven't gotten around to that yet, but I'm now even more intrigued.

[Genus Unknown]

Does Ken Hites' book, Tour de Lovecraft, go into detail with some of philosophical studies that Lovecraft maybe incorporating?

Nope. Just some brief summaries and thoughts on the stories themselves.

[catamount]

Great episode! I love the reverse Scooby Doo reference, so true in this case! I never tire of Randolph Carter, his trans-formative journey both figuratively and literally has been a great read. Hard to believe that this was the same guy who was Harley Warren's b*tch. The discussion about Theosophy was interesting, like hsparks I'm also interested to learn about this fascinating subject. Oldbook that's your cue...

[Genus Unknown]

Theosophy = what crazy people had before Scientology.

[hsparks]

I bet with those Lovecraft magnets you could make some great Theosophical Statements.

[old book]

Well...

I am flabberghasted. There is more to this one than I remember. I have to go back and re-read it slowly.

Thank you for the Scooby Doo reference. It was so true.

Regarding theosophists and Theosophy, just recently I was listening to Radio Misterioso and some other alternative internet radio broadcasts about a book about Aleister Crowley in Southern California and some associated strange corpses that popped up around the same time, and one of these internet radio shows mentioned TWO Theosophy colonies Crowley visisted, one of which bears a distinct resemblance to the one Lovecraft mentions in CoC.

Sich and Chard tried to paint Theosophy as somewhat innocent in their "Aryanism," saying that all modern humans were considered Aryan, but the truth is Helena Petrovna Blavatskaya didn't exactly think of it in this way. She said Bushmen (from Southern Africa) and Australian aborigines were not part of the Aryan root-race, and thus are soulless. It's a small step for Indo-Europeanist/Indo-Germanist thinkers to decide Poles aren't really Aryan in the 1930s. This ever-more-exclusive Aryanism, well, we know where that led.

I'm really overwhelmed by what Sich and Chard said about this story, and have to go back and read it again. It has stuck in my mind as one of my favorites, but I don't remember all the content. If it truly contains a sort of G R S Mead "World-Soul" wrap-up of all H P Lovecraft personalities (and Mead was a theosophist, but probably one of the most intelligent ones), I missed it on my first reading.

(I think Sich and Chard slightly misued the term "archetype" in the current episode; what they meant was the ideal type of Plato, not Jung's archetypes, which aren't completely comprehensible to the waking mind. Other words to consider in this regard are "meme" and "arcana." Speaking of memes, did anyone else notice the "magnetic child" meme this week in the English language media?)

[osyrisdiamond]

Theosophy = what crazy people had before Scientology.

Makes me wonder what Lovecraft would have made of Scientology and how he might incorporate it into "his mythos". ...or maybe Scientology is just the new public face of a certain ancient cult that will never die. O_O

[old book]

The term "scientology" was crafted during Lovecraft's time on this earth in The New Word by Allen Upward, 1901 (available in toto at sacred-texts.com) to describe a sort of fascination with things scientific To quote from "index.htm":

"...unhappily scientology is as often mistaken for science as theology is for worship."--The New Word, p. 149

The term Scientology was apparently first coined in this book by Allen Upward (1863-1926), written in 1901, five decades before L. Ron Hubbard founded the belief system of the same name. It appears four times as a noun and once as an adjective (on p. 119, p. 139, p. 149 and p. 156).

Some opponents of Scientology have implied that this indicates that Hubbard plagiarized the word. However, I'm not aware of any evidence that Hubbard knew of this fairly obscure book. And the philosophy which Upward expounds in The New Word has nothing to do with any of the ideas of the latter-day Scientologists, as far as I can tell.

In fact, Upward uses it here as a disparaging term, to indicate a blind, unthinking acceptance of scientific doctrine. Nor is the 'New Word' of the title Scientology. Rather, the word here is Idealist, drawn from Alfred Nobels' will, the starting point for Upward's essay, and as Upward shows, a difficult concept to pin down.

Upward, who here claims to be a philologist, is critical of Latin and Greek neologisms, while not hesitating to invent some new words of his own besides 'Scientology': 'verihood,' 'katasynthetic,' 'interplode.' He uses a children's book about science to deconstruct some of the vaguer scientific concepts of the day, particularly the behavior of gas molecules and the all-pervading ether. Ironically, an obscure Swiss patent clerk named Einstein demolished these parts of 19th century physics in 1906, shortly before this book finally saw print, making Upward's critique a bit moot.

Intensely critical of everything and often uproariously funny, Upward's book is enjoyable reading in its own right, even if it is not exactly the Nobel prize material which he hoped for. He was apparently as obsessed with the Nobel prize as this book intimates. As a tragic footnote, Upward shot himself in November, 1926, upon learning that George Bernard Shaw had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Production notes: The New Word was originally written in 1901, and first published in 1908 in London. The copytext used to create this etext was a 1910 American reprint, which has a short postscript. Otherwise it is presumably identical to the first edition. This book is long out of print and difficult to find used. The copytext was obtained by interlibrary loan from Santa Clara University, and is autographed by Upward on the front end papers.

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Having looked into Hubbard's belief system, I can say he did not use the term Scientology originally to refer to his concepts of subconscious suppression of the personality. He called it Dianetics, the science of mind.

Harlan Ellison (see youtube et al.) recalls a meeting in New York of various science fiction writers during which the idea of starting a new religion for personal profit was discussed. Hubbard was present.

While Hubbard "dabbled" in Enochian calls, Egyptian mythology and a sort of received occultism, his system is far different from Theosophy, whose eternal cycles and cosmic frames of reference were much more in line with Lovecraft's thinking, at least to the extent that he could adapt the idea of a Book of Dzyan for his own tales, and insert certain references to race in line with Theosophy's root-races concepts.

It probably bears mention that Hubbard was a much more prolific and popular pulp contributor than Lovecraft whose ouvre ranged from Western stories to the Yellow Peril to straight-up horror to swashbuckling adventures. And one must not forget the aviation stories. In a sense they were strictly competitors for the pulp audience, although Lovecraft saw his art as something higher.

What would Lovecraft have made of scientology? He would have laughed and guffawed at Nyarlathotep's continued benighting of humanity. It's sort of like asking what Lovecraft would have borrowed from the Book of Mormon. Probably not very much.

[Chris Lackey]

Well... Helena may of been one of the founders of Theosophy, her opinions aren't all shared by all theosophists. The tenants of theosophy state are pretty all encompassing when it comes to different races and such.

[Bob Lovecraft]

I hate to sound like the odd man out (yeah, right), but I really didn't like this story much. The episode was very well done, but the story itself was, to me, boring and way, WAY overblown. There was far too much cosmic garbage. It could have been cut by 5 pages and still retained its relevance to the story. Also, who didn't guess from the first descriptions of the characters that the swami was an alien monster? It was so obvious fro the very first page that it completely ruined the story for me.

And come on! Carter = Yog Sothoth? Really? Way to overinflate your ego HPL. Why does Carter suddenly get to be god? I like the idea of the archetypes, but linking one directly to the greatest power in the universe and then letting that link connect to your favorite character? It just really feels to me like this was Lovecraft's munchkin gaming character in a Montey Hall game and we had to read it. What a let-down.

I will admit that Lovecraft did succeed in instilling a bit of narrative tension in me for once when Carter/Chadraputra was talking about how Carter almost had the formula to separate himself into his human form again. I think that worked well, and I did feel as if I had been robbed when the Zkaura facet took over and went right back to Yaddith through the clock. That worked well in the story, too. Unfortunately, I had to read through 15 extra pages of total bullshit before getting to the real meat of the story.

All in all, I could have skipped this story completely.

Bob

[JulieH]

I just picture Yog-Sothoth relaxing in his cosmic lazyboy, chortling to himself "heh heh heh - Carter actually BELIEVED all that!   These humans!  LOL!"

On the other hand, if everything is connected to everything, then Carter is not only Yog-Sothoth, he's also Angelina Jolie. 

[Bob Lovecraft]

I just picture Yog-Sothoth relaxing in his cosmic lazyboy, chortling to himself "heh heh heh - Carter actually BELIEVED all that!   These humans!  LOL!" 

LOL. I never thought about that. Nice!

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

So if Randolph Carter is an avatar of Yog-Sothoth... and Yog-Sothoth is one with all space and time... and all space and time flows from Azathoth... and the soul and messenger of Azathoth is Nyarlathotep... and Nyarlathotep spends much of his time pursuing Randolph Carter in order to take him to Azathoth...

... then does that mean that Nyarlathotep is "really" working to help Carter, and bring him into the fold, as it were? I mean Yog is clearly "evil" by human standards (see: Dunwich), and Yog is Carter...

Bah. Brain numb.

[old book]

Well... Helena may of been one of the founders of Theosophy, her opinions aren't all shared by all theosophists. The tenants of theosophy state are pretty all encompassing when it comes to different races and such.

She's pretty much THE founder, but what you say is true, there was and is a diversity of opinion among theosophists. There was also a political dimension involving Russia and Britain in the Great Game for control of Inner Asia (Central Asia) and the Indian independence movement. Theosophists popularized the term "mahatma" for example, which Gandhi then had applied to himself in typical humble fashion. Bessant and the others fell out over the issue of Indian independence I think, and there were two different communes of schismatized theosophists living in the LA area, both of which Aleister Crowley visited in 1915 or something. I believe HPL references one of these groups in CoC but don't recall exactly. "Aryan" and "Semitic" were of course originally terms from historical linguistics which were borrowed by various and sundry to create pet theories about race. Semitic meaning descendents of Shem, i.e., Jews, Arabs, Egyptians I suppose, Babylonians, et al., and Aryan refering to Indians and Iraniansm but by extension to early Indo-European speakers (or as they still say in German, Indo-Germanisch).

[old book]

Just re-reading the beginning of it now...

Naacal is the language James Churchward said he found and translated to write his Lost Continent of Mu series of books, laden with symbols he says came from the tablets in the Himalayas.

When Lovecraft says people fled the Salem witchcraft trials to the area, he doesn't seem to me to specify that Arkham was founded that way, only that some of the accused came to a certain area near Arkham and in the neighborhood of the Carter estate. Worth remembering that Rhode Island was begun as a refuge for religious dissenters fleeing Massachusetts Bay Colony.