“The Old Ones Reborn” (2007) by Erin Donahoe

I. The Book

It all began because I was not afraid

and I told the bookseller so.

Horror tales never disturbed me

never elicited that much desired chill of terror.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007, 36

There are no rules for the Mythos, but there are traditions. H. P. Lovecraft’s original works blazed a trail that many have tread, sometimes following in his footsteps, sometimes eschewing the increasingly well-beaten paths to branch off in their own directions. The route maps for these weird trails are written down in bibliographies, indices, and concordances…but there are too many. No one source can map them all, and even those dryly noted road markers can only point a reader in the right direction.

It is still up to individual readers to hunt down the sources if they want to follow some of these off-trails. There are little-tread and oft-overlooked byways, paths in danger of being forgotten and lost in the weeds. Works that never see reprinting, and aren’t likely to. Some day, the last copy of a magazine will fall apart, and some small part of the Mythos will be lost forever.

II. The Reading

I lifted the heavy tome

and placed it on the table before the window

moonlinght shining in upon the book’s dark surface.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 37

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry for Erin Donahoe shows she was most active in the early 2000s; the page contains a link to the web archive of her long-defunct SFF.net profile, and links from there go to her long-defunct personal blog and a more extensive bibliography. Magazine publications, online publications, and involvements with various small publications. “The Old Ones Reborn,” published in 2007, is the latest work of hers listed. It may well have been her last work published.

More digging would probably find out more about Erin Donahoe, but the point is not to engage in digital stalking or necromancy, it is to illustrate a point: not all creators are in it for the long haul, not every literary or artistic path goes very far. For every writer, poet, artist, and fan-publisher who devotes their life to creation, there are many others whose careers cover only a handful of years when time and enthusiasm allow such efforts. Then other priorities shift to the fore: careers, relationships, kids and parents and pets to take care of, health issues, money issues, etc.

III. The Dream

My explanation at the time was

That it was some kind of hypnosis, that I was sleepwalking.

I only remember feeling that I had been submerged

in warm, nearly scalding water, but that,

in some manner, I was able

to breathe.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 37

“The Old Ones Reborn” is a narrative poem in free verse, perhaps inspired by Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet cycle, and starting in a very similar manner—perhaps as homage—but Donahoe follows tradition only so far. She took it in a different direction, more stylistically similar to Caitlín R. Kiernan than Lovecraft or Derleth. More about the experience of being in that situation, that first encounter with the Mythos, the violation of that threshold, and what happened next.

Donahoe does not need to use the names Arkham, Dunwich, or Innsmouth to invoke something of them; does not need to name the Deep Ones, Cthulhu, or Yog-Sothoth to suggest their presence. The poem is more effective for its restraint; for suggesting connections instead of making them concrete. Making the reader draw their own conjectures, based on the paths they have walked.

IV. The Visions

The things I saw over the net several days,

and so many days since,

were terrifying in ways mre words

could never describe or explain;

but minding that inadequacy, I will attempt

to tell here of the most prominent of my visions.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 38

“The Old Ones Reborn” was published in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. It has not been reprinted, or collected. All the copies of it may well be contained in that print run, and when the grey, soft paper rots and molds…it may be lost. There are no ebooks, as yet, and may never be. Few libraries have copies. What efforts are being made to preserve it are collectors, and the people who sell to collectors. With luck, perhaps it will outlast living memory for a couple generations.

Other works are not so fortunate. Some are lost; others simply…obscure. Poems and stories that are not republished are generally not read, and that is another kind of death. Forgotten paths, some going nowhere, others leading into new dark places…and who is to say which is which? Should works like “The Fluff at the Threshold” (1996) by Simon Leo Barber or “Two Fungi From Yuggoth” (1977) by Alice Briley be lost forever to obscurity? It is always a thought, in retreading these rare paths, to think of what feet may yet follow, and what they will make of it.

V. The End (?)

[…]

I am not alone on this rocky pedestal;

the bookseller is here with me,

the gleam in his eye telling me

that while he may not be the father of the

burden in my womb

he certainly had the pleasure

of violating me.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 39

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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Cthulhu (2007)

What the story reminded me of, more than anything else, was friends of mine who are gay, who come from these backwoods towns and then escape to the city to make an adult life. And then, fifteen or twenty years later, they’re in their thirties, and a parent dies, or the sister has a child, or whatever, and they have to go back and engage with that family and that place. One of Lovecraft’s major themes, and I think “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” expresses this best, is the horror of heredity. So I was writing from that feeling of threat, but also the issues of heredity, of anxiety about having children, and I decided to merge the two things.
—Grant Cogswell, “Interview: Dan Gildark & Grant Cogswell of Cthulhu” by Kent M. Beeson

The 2007 horror film Cthulhu was written by Grant Cogswell & Daniel Gildark, directed by Gildark, and stars Jason Cottle as Russell Marsh, a homosexual history professor at Cascadia University that has to return to the small town he escaped from when his mother dies. The 100 minute long film that follows is largely inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” but is almost a cinematic adaptation of Robert M. Price’s essay “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider'” (1982).

Cthulhu had an odd production; from interviews and the commentary track on the DVD, it seems like the idea for the script was born in 2003, actual shooting happened in 2005, and it finally premiered at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, with limited theatrical release in 2008 followed swiftly by a DVD release. The film was shot in the Pacific Northwest and had an estimated budget of $1 million dollars, a chunk of which ($175,000) was personally financed by Cogswell, who was left homeless when the film failed to recoup costs (Subject of Seattle film talks about the movie that almost destroyed him). Gildark and Cogswell are very forthright in the DVD track about the cinematic shortcomings of the film and their own inexperience in filmmaking, but the film that they made is worth considering on its own merits:

The genre films I’m most interested in are the ones that are indescribable, that move back and forth across genres. They aren’t true horror in the traditional sense; they kind of skirt the edges. To call our film a gay film is misleading, but to call it a straight horror film is misleading as well, so it really is kind of a bastard version of those genres, which I’m totally comfortable with. It makes it hard to market, but anything interesting takes from different fields and doesn’t try to be a purist art form.
—Dan Gildark, “Interview: Dan Gildark & Grant Cogswell of Cthulhu” by Kent M. Beeson

In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” from a plot perspective the sexuality of the main character is largely moot. There are no real potential love-interests, and romance and sexual attraction are not on the menu. Homosexual (or transsexual) readings of the story focus on the nameless protagonist as an outsider who enters a community of outsiders, scared and frightened by what they uncover, and who discovers too late that they are what they had sought to escape—and finally come to embrace that, and the community that they at first had rejected.

This is not the story that Cogswell & Gildark tell. The homosexuality of Russell Marsh is a key component of character and a driver for many of the conflicts and relationships in the film, but he is openly aware of that fact—and it blinds him to some of what is going on, viewing some of the conflict with his family as a reflection of his sexuality instead of the much darker reality. Yet at the same time, his sexuality very much is a key aspect to this story, because the Innsmouth story is a generational one—and it’s hard to get biological grandkids from a gay prodigal son. Brian Johnson in “Paranoia, Panic, and the Queer Weird” elegantly describes this as “the monstrous forces of a cultic paternal heteronormativity” (New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature 257).

That’s compelling, at the level of personal horror. Russell Marsh thinks himself an outsider because of his homosexuality, but the reality is far weirder. There are things he still doesn’t know about himself—but during the course of this film, he finds out. That revelation, filtered through a much more different perspective than Lovecraft ever intended as it may be, still works. Getting there, however…that doesn’t work so well.

Jason Cottle, who plays Russell Marsh, is also credited with some additional writing, and it’s more or less his performance that carries most of the film. His ability to convey irritation, outrage, disgust, and quiet longing is what will appeal to the audience’s sympathies, if anything. Richard Garfield’s performance as Zadok is fun, and Scott Patrick Green’s performance as Marsh’s homosexual friend Mike also stand out as they get basically scenes to themselves, talking while Cottle’s Marsh listens. The other characters have fewer lines and less development, and it’s Cottle who has to be the focus of the film, and he is.

Like the ill-fitting wig Cottle wears early on in the film, however, it’s not enough. Sometimes passion and vision can only take you so far, and unlike Dagon (2001), another film adapted from “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” there really isn’t that strong, almost campy and arresting visual style, fast pacing, and effects work which can take a clunky script and still produce an effective horror film. There are also some beautiful cinematography in Cthulhu, and the production really did their best to make use of the local scenery. The breadth and majesty of the Pacific rolling up in some scenes is excellent, until the CGI Deep Ones come marching in.

It wasn’t long ago that a horror film with gay content would have had no hope of landing a major U.S. distributor, but in today’s niche-driven industry, the sexuality of Cthulhu‘s main character may well prove a savvy marketing move. On the one hand, gay and lesbian film festivals have cultivated an audience that’s been proven hungry for movies with gay themes, regardless of hype or production values.
—“Oh, the Horror: The Making of ‘Cthulhu'” by Annie Wagner

Cthulhu wasn’t really marketed or distributed as a gay or queer film, but it has been adopted by some critics as queer cinema. Russell Marsh is certain homosexual; the first protagonist in a Mythos film to be openly played as homosexual. His homosexuality is crucial to the conflicts in the story. But Russell Marsh himself isn’t really conflicted about his homosexuality. Russell starts the film at peace with himself, agitated only by confronting those that he feels see him as the monstrous other. Yet Gildark wouldn’t call it a gay or straight horror film…and maybe with good reason.

Consider the argument that:

[…] monstrous figures in American cinema were and are informed by their given era’s social understanding of homosexuality, or more broadly queerness.
—Harry M. Benshoff, “‘Way Too Gay to Be Ignored’: The Production and Reception of Queer Horror Cinema in the Twenty-First Century” in Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology 131)

Homosexuality and transsexuality have made tremendous strides in mainstream acceptance and legal recognition in the last few decades, but this is still the cultural era of incels and TERFs. It is the heterosexual characters in this film that appear to be the real monsters—but Russell Marsh isn’t exactly heroic or normal by contrast either. As estranged from his family as he might be, he is still a Marsh…and in his own way he is a monster too. The inevitability in that, the way Marsh discovers that he cannot escape the essential kinship with these characters that he opposes, the ties that bind—is very Lovecraftian. Yet the ending is ambiguous; Marsh lashes out, but the audience never sees at who. The blow fails to fall.

Cthulhu lives in that undefined, unknowable, unfilmed ground. Russell Marsh is confronted with who he is, who his family is; but we don’t see the choice he is forced to make, between his family and his friend-and-lover. Between the demands of tradition, culture, and (arguably) biology, versus friendship and sexuality. If he strikes down his lover, he has completed the Lovecraftian arc of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and become that which he hated. If he strikes down his father, he affirms his sexuality and friendship over any ties of blood…even though it will probably cost them both their lives. Which is more horrific depends on the audience; either way, Russell Marsh will have to betray someone, and himself.

Cthulhu (2007) is available on DVD and some streaming services.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

“Quest of the Nameless City” (2007) by Tachihara Tōya (立原透耶)

It has been known for a long time, then, that Lovecraft had the same prejudice againt the Japanese as he did againt the Chinese, or African-Americans. […] So what? Mishima Yukio was gay, and Kawabata Yasunari committed suicide after being spurned by the maid. The personal proclivities of literary greats have nothing to do with the quality of their masterpieces.

We Japanese tend to be forgiving of heroes. We feel absolutely no contradiction in being enthralled by the Cthulhu Mythos, and the fact that Lovecraft was prejudiced.
—Asamatsu Ken, foreword to The Dreaming God 2

“Quest of the Nameless City” (2007) by Tachihara Tōya (立原透耶) is a story in The Dreaming God, the fourth and final volume in the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series from Kurodahan Press, edited by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健). It is the English-language translation of the 2002 story 苦思楽西遊博 (Kushi Kakusei Yūhaku); the translator was Kathleen Taji.

Journey to the West is one of the classic Chinese novels, comparable to Homer’s Odyssey in Western literature, and has served as inspiration for a vast array of fiction, film, manga, cartoons, etc., including the venerable and popular Dragon Ball saga. Tachihara Tōya may be the first to remix this classic with the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price also notes in the introduction that the story also draws from (or at least strongly parallels) August Derleth’s Trail of Cthulhu serial novel in parts. Most notably, the third chapter (“Sandy’s Story”) echoes a major plot point in “The Black Island” (1951) where the narrating character is affected by the Elder Sign.

The result is a fragment of an epic. Tachihara provides three chapters from three different character perspectives; the full story could be a hundred. A taste of what-might-have-been. The Mythos in “Quest of the Nameless City” is not quite that as Lovecraft or Derleth had written it; the Old Ones are filtered through a different cultural lens, and though we are not given vast details about their place within the cosmology, the story incorporates the Mythos entities into the gestalt as it does all the other inhuman creatures from Journey to the West. As the character Pigsy notes in chapter two:

The world is vast, and there are even manuscripts like the Book of Mountains and Seas, full of Chinese mythology. Thus, I suppose the existence of such fantastic beings is not astonishing in the least.
—Tachihara Tōya, “Quest of the Nameless City” in The Dreaming God 41-42

Initially, one of the key aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos is that it is different, explicitly alien and other to both Christian theology and “typical” horrors like ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies which abounded in the pulp fiction of the time. This was not an ironclad rule if you tiptoed even a little outside the bounds of Lovecraft’s own writing; Robert E. Howard had no qualms about including the occasional vampire in his Conan and Solomon Kane stories, which are tied in to the wider Mythos, and other authors have been more explicit in adding Cthulhu & co. to the kitchensink of contemporary fantasy and horror. This trend was perhaps best emphasized when Dungeons & Dragons added the Cthulhu Mythos to Deities & Demigods (1980), Cthulhu was given stats alongside Japanese and Norse deities and Arthurian and Native American heroes.

What Tachihara is doing in “Quest of the Nameless City,” whether intentionally or just as a side effect of the brilliant idea of combining the Mythos with Journey to the West, is effectively lampshading this tendancy to assimilation. Like any “authentic” mythology, the Cthulhu Mythos is ripe for multiple interpretations, some conflicting, and some adapting the familiar stories into new contexts. There are no contradictions here that cannot be ironed out by another chapter, another gloss, or simply let stand to be enjoyed on their own merits.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

“The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” (1977) by Richard Lupoff & “In The Yaddith Time” (2007) by Ann K. Schwader

He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,
And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Alienation,” Fungi from Yuggoth XXXII

This is the first appearance of the terms “Yaddith” and “the Ghooric zone” in Lovecraft’s work; though references to the former alien world would appear in his collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and a few other places. Neither exactly captured the popular imagination in the same way as R’lyeh or Yuggoth, Carcosa or Innsmouth. Yet this one sonnet served as inspiration for several notable works.

“Discovery of the Ghooric Zone — March 15, 2337” (1977) by Richard Lupoff owes more to New Wave science fiction than Lovecraftian horror or sensibilities; it is the Mythos as space opera, as an epic of an unseen future, an exploration of the solar system as pure as any Golden Age sci fi epic, a looking-forward to cyberpunk, but it is also a literal and literary homage to H. P. Lovecraft—the man, the myth, the legend.

It opens up with what the first interracial LGBTQ+ threesome in Mythos fiction.

They were having sex when the warning gong sounded, Gomati and Njord and Shoten. […]

Njord Freyr, born in the Laddino Imperium of Earth, had retained his masculinity even as he had undergone the customary implantations, excisions and modifications of pubescent cyborging. […]

Sri Gomati, of Khmeric Gondwanaland, had similarly retained her female primary characteristics in function and conformation even though she had opted for the substitution of metallic labia and clitoris, which replacement Njord Freyr found at times irritating.

But Shoten, Shoten Binayakya, fitted with multiply-configurable genitalia, remained enigmatic, ambiguous as to his or her own origin […]
—Richard Lupoff, “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone”

Readers today might smile at Njord’s private crisis of masculinity, reminiscent of the same issues apparent in “Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1986) by Robert Silverberg, but the delineation of gender roles echoes in a very real way the alienation of Lovecraft’s poem. Njord clings to his masculine identity while at the same time feeling inadequate compared to the cybernetically enhanced Shoten:

Njord, the male crew member, cursed, distracted by the radar gong, angered by Gomati’s inattention, humiliated by her amusement and by her drawing away from himself and Shoten. Njord felt his organ grow flaccid at the distraction, and for the moment he regretted the decision he had made prior to the cyborging operations of his adolescence, to retain his organic phallus and gonads. A cyborged capability might have proven more potently enduring in the circumstances but Njord’s pubescent pride had denied the possibility of his ever facing inconvenient detumescence. (ibid.)

The attention on biological gender, gender transition surgery, and polyamory in general may seem unnecessary in a Mythos story, but in the case of “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” the trio are representatives of their respective future states as well as plot points along a gender spectrum; their interactions echo the places and peoples that they represent, all of future humanity striving together for this voyage of exploration. And, at the same time, the difference between 1977 and 2337 was never so vast as in the openness in sexuality…to which Lupoff wrote:

Cut to logo representing sex.

The major sexual attitude of the time was androgyny, rivaled but not equaled by the cult of pan-sexuality. Androgyny implies recognition of the full sexual potential of each individual. Former distinctions were abandoned. It was no longer regarded as improper to pursue a relationship of male to male or female to female; nor was it required to have two partners in a relationship. Practices ranging from onanism to mass interplay became acceptable.

The pan-sexualists held that androgyny was needlessly limiting in scope. If one could relate to any man or woman—why not to a giraffe? A condor? A cabbage? A bowl of sand? A machine?

The ocean?

The sky?

To the cosmos?

To God? (ibid.)

The format of the “cutscene” is cinematic; Lupoff draws out the action with excerpts on the history of the last four hundred years, anecdotes, personalities, commentaries on culture reminiscent of Dune (1965). It looks forwards and backwards at the same time; the Apollo 11 mission that landed humans on the moon occurred only seven years prior, in 1969, and yet:

Why has it taken until 2337 to reach — Yuggoth? When space flight began almost as long ago as the era Sri Gomati babbles about. The first extraterrestrial landings took place in 1969. Mars thirty years later. Remember the stirring political slogan that we all learned as children, as children studying the history of our era? Persons will set foot on another planet before the century ends! That was the twentieth century, remember?”

“Every schoolchild knows,” Shoten affirmed wearily.

Gomati, recovered from the shock of Njord’s blow, spoke; “We could have been here two hundred years ago, Njord Freyr. But fools on Earth lost heart. They began, and lost heart. They began again—and lost heart again. And again. Four times they set out, exploring the planets. Each time they lost heart, lost courage, lost interest. Were distracted by wars. Turned resources to nobler purposes. (ibid.)

There are more explicit Mythos references; and more explicit references to Lovecraft too. The story is set on the four hundredth anniversary of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, and if the future history is fantastical and impossible, it is also fascinating, an extended meditation that seeks to bridge past and future, weird fiction and New Wave, in a way no other author at the time did—and would be the spiritual precursor to works of Lovecraftian space opera such as Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monett’s trilogy “Boojum” (2008), “Mongoose” (2009), and “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” (2012).

Yet those three do not come back safely from the Ghooric zone.

Three decades later, Ann K. Schwader published In the Yaddith Time (2007), a sonnet-cycle deliberately patterned after and echoing Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth.” It begins with a quotation from “Alienation,” and continues on a similar theme to Lupoff’s—humanity’s faltering voyage into the unknown solar system, and into familiar territory:

[…] Our captain pointed
us toward the chaos framed beyond that stone
“Through there,” he cried, “awaits the Ghooric zone!”
—Ann K. Schwader, “Sacrifice Eyes,” In the Yaddith Time 14

The literary DNA has echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Alien (1979), Event Horizon (1997), and Ghosts of Mars (2001), the strange extraterrestrial relics left in space for humans to find, the madness overtaking captain and crew. Yet Schwader’s vision is an exploration of Lovecraft’s Mythos, told through her own imagery and captured in her own verse, and again there is that weird echo of Lupoff’s novella:

Writ strange, Earth’s chronicle was what we saw.

Past bled into the present, then ran on

down corridors torn deep in living stone,

revealing future horrors still unspawned

which showed mankind had never been alone.
—Ann K. Schwader, “The Walls of Prophecy,” In the Yaddith Time 26

The specific image here recalls Robert Bloch’s “Fane of the Black Pharaoh” (1937), but it echoes the secret history which underlies Lovecraft’s fiction, and Lupoff’s secret future unveiled piecemeal to his readers: humanity has never been alone, and never will be…

Schwader goes farther than Lupoff, at least in terms of distance; her astronauts go beyond Yuggoth, to the library of Celano, to Carcosa and the Lake of Hali, and finally to Yaddith. In conceptual terms, she travels less far: the bones of the story are old as sailing ships, captains gone mad, visiting places that test the imagination, loyalties tested beyond endurance by death and travails. No playing with gender, and indeed few references to how Earth had changed in whatever span of time separates the “now” of our contemporary period with the “then” of her sonnet-cycle. It is timeless in its futurity, and for her the focus is on the moment, the alien worlds to be explored, not the Earth left behind…except once, and that in a dream.

[…] Sudden night

spread shadowwings in one vast inky smear,

erasing daylight as a shriek of fear

arose from every throat: the stars turn right!
—Ann K. Schwader, “A Dream of Home,” In the Yaddith Time 28

Both “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” and In the Yaddith Time remains true to the Mythos as Lovecraft conceived it, the weird forces beyond human ken; what they are faced with when they travel out beyond the safe borders of the known into the outer dark. Yet both also go beyond Lovecraft: these are stories of exploration, in a sense which Lovecraft could only vaguely imagine. Space travel was never a reality for him, but Lupoff and Schwader lived through that—and could extrapolate that much further.

Richard Lupoff’s “Discovery of the Ghooric Zone — March 15, 2337” was first published in Chrysalis (1977), and republished in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1990, Arkham House; 1998, Del Rey) and his collection Claremont Tales (2001, Golden Gryphon Press).

Ann K. Shwader’s In the Yaddith Time was published in 2007 by Mythos books. It has been reprinted in her collection Twisted in Dream: The Collected Weird Poetry of Ann K. Schwader (2011, Hippocampus Press).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Necronomicon Gnosis: A Practical Introduction (2007) by Asenath Mason

“He is firmly convinced that all our gang—you, Two-Gun Bob, Sonny Belknap, Grandpa E’ch-Pi-El, and the rest—are genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark and profound for human conception or comprehension. We may think we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry.”
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 3 Oct 1933, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 449

During their lifetimes, H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries received inquiries into whether or not the grimoires and entities in their pulp fiction were real—Lovecraft, ever the materialist, always admitted they were fiction. Yet in time occultists did begin to appropriate elements of the Mythos, and notable early works include Kenneth Grant with his Typhonian Trilogies, beginning with The Magical Revival (1972); Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible (1976). These works and others like them have in turn inspired further occult material, either expanding on previous work or adapting Lovecraftian elements to other magical paradigms. Lovecraftian occult literature has grown up alongside and occasionally interacting with Cthulhu Mythos fiction.

Much of the early occult interest centered around the Necronomicon, the most evocative of Lovecraft’s fictional grimoires, and in the 1970s it inspired a few prominent hoaxes, including editor George Hay’s Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names (1978) and “Simon” with the ersatz Necronomicon (1977), which for the last several decades has been in print in a cheap and eminently affordable paperback edition. These last two books were presented in the format of genuine grimoires, complete with ritual texts, sigils, talismans, etc. These books have formed the basis for a “Necronomicon tradition” in contemporary occult literature, with writers and practitioners attempting to reconcile, reconstruct, expand upon, and incorporate material from the various sources of the Lovecraftian occult into a cohesive system—or at least their personal system. It is only appropriate that Asenath Mason begins her work addressing this reality:

“[This book] refers to chosen published versions of the Necronomicon (by ‘the Necronomicon’ I will refer in this book to the general idea of the book and the particular lore of entities, not to any specific published text) as well as on some Necronomicon-related texts and grimoires which have appeared in the internet over the last few years. All these texts are generally considered hoaxes and if you do any serious research, you will find out that none of them is the ‘genuine’ Necronomicon. […] This fact, however, should not discourage us from working with these texts. […] Magical power is not contained within any written book but within our minds, and a mind of a creative individual can transform fiction into a genuine experience. In this sense we can use the Lovecraftian lore as a tool in exploration of dark labyrinths of our mind.”
—Asenath Mason, Necronomicon Gnosis 9

Mason’s statement here is derived from chaos magicians like Phil Hine, author of Prime Chaos (1993) and Pseudonomicon (1994). While “Simon” presented their hoax Necronomicon with a false backstory as an actual text which inspired Lovecraft, and Kenneth Grant asserted Lovecraft had stumbled upon some occult truth which he expressed through his fiction, chaos magicians owned the fact that Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon, that it was a fictional text—but chose to work with it anyway. Fictional concepts and ideas in their tradition can be as valid for magickal operations as those taken from factual mythologies; to an inhabitant of the 20th or 21st century, Cthulhu and Osiris are both essentially dead names to conjure with.

Necronomicon Gnosis is essentially an exegesis of Lovecraftian occult materials: Mason’s interpretation of the body of magical ideas presented in the original stories (focusing primarily on H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft) and already-presented occult material (primarily the Simon and Hay Necronomicons, Kenneth Grant, Phil Hine, Peter J. Carroll, Stephen Sennitt, and Donald Tyson). The text is not exhaustive and aimed at beginners who have limited experience with the occult or Lovecraft; the result is a bit odd but workable, a combination of literary analysis followed by suggestions or instructions for occult rituals or exercises, with many references to occult works the readers aren’t likely to be familiar with (titles included in a handy bibliography in the back).

While Lovecraft or his contemporaries might include some impressive feats of magic in their fiction like raising the dead, Mason’s Necronomicon Gnosis rites are generally more modest in scope, and focus on the understanding and spiritual development of the practitioner—the gnosis aspect of the title. For example, part of the instructions for “The Black Communion” a rite to invoke Shub-Niggurath include:

While the priest recites the incantation, the priestess must concentrate on becoming possessed by the invoked force. She should envision the Goddess with all her attribute and fully identify with her, o that the consciousness of the entity and the priestess become one. She should also arouse her sexual energy of the Kundalini serpent and inflame herself until she feels the primal insatiable lust, embodied by Shub-Niggurath.
—Asenath Mason, Necronomicon Gnosis 134

The sexual aspect of this ritual is not unusual among Lovecraftian occult rites; Kenneth Grant was a disciple of Aleister Crowley, whose system incorporates ceremonial sex magick and the use of sexual fluids in rituals, for example. However, the vast majority of Lovecraftian occult materials are written by men, and there is a distinct androcentric and heteronormative approach to sex and sexual workings in the works of Grant, Simon, Tyson, etc., the material often focus either on lascivious depiction (like Grant’s infamous “Rite of Ku”) or on a male practitioner. In interpreting the material, Mason addresses some of the more obvious biases briefly:

[…] sex gives us power over ourselves because it is the ultimate expression of life. Thus, we have the conviction, characteristic of all monotheistic religions, telling us that sex is sin, as all mastery over life is reserved to God and man is not allowed to aspire to the divine power.
—Asenath Mason, Necronomicon Gnosis 127

Shub-Niggurath has been associated with any number of female mythological figures by various authors, and Mason spends quite a bit of time running through her accumulated symbolism. While Lovecraft described her as a “sophisticated Astarte”, occultists have associated her with Kali, Inanna, Ishtar, Lilith, Tiamat, Pan, and Bamphomet; with the moon, the planet Venus, and the elemental Earth…and so on and so forth. Mason makes a game effort to untangle the varied strands of symbolism and association with Shub-Niggurath, but as with efforts to “sort out” the Cthulhu Mythos itself, too many writers have contributed too many conflicting thoughts to produce a unified and consistent approach, except at a very high level: Shub-Niggurath is about sex, and exploration of your sexuality is a valid path to gnosis.

That is the point that Mason returns to, again and again, circling back to it through her readings of the Mythos and the Lovecraftian occult, the rituals and invocations. The desire for gnosis could be said to guide a number of Mythos readers who have no practical interest in the occult, and might well balk at the concept, but still thrill to the emotions evoked by a weird tale or look forward eagerly to a terminal revelation, or perhaps seek to broaden their horizons by reading Lovecraftian fiction that challenges the structure of the Mythos they are familiar with. It is a pursuit which, stripped of the occult trappings of spells and grimoires is explored in works like Scott Jones’ When The Stars Are Right: Toward An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality (2014).

Necronomicon Gnosis: A Practical Introduction more or less fulfills its remit. While not as simple a magical system as presented in Donald Tyson’s Necronomicon series or as consistent a system as presented in the Necronomicon books by “Simon”, it is a solid effort at condensing the probably irreconcilable mystic mishmash of forty years of dedicated occult kitchensinking and presenting it while maintaining a consistent philosophy. For those who are interested in going deeper into the Lovecraftian occult, the Necronomicon Gnosis is a useful jumping-off point, naming key texts and authors to further their explorations.

The eternal temptation of such a combined approach is à la carte occultism—readers taking what they want or can use, and leaving the rest. This is effectively the same dilemma faced by readers and authors of the Cthulhu Mythos, and for many of the same reasons: with all these different stories, riffing off of the material created by Lovecraft and others, some of which is clearly incompatible with the rest—how do you decide what is true for you? What exactly are you as a reader or writer of Mythos fiction looking to accomplish? Perhaps we should all take a page from Mason’s book and consider not the trappings of the Mythos, but what we are trying to achieve through the use of the Mythos, what philosophy underlies it all. Do we seek escapism…or revelation and gnosis?

Asenath Mason is the founder of Lodge Magan, the Polish lodge of the Dragon Rouge magical order. Necronomicon Gnosis was published in both Polish and English editions by Edition Roter Drache in 2007. Those interested in a nonfiction history of the Lovecraftian occult and the Necronomicon tradition in particular should read The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind the Legend by Daniel Harms and John W. Gonce III.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)

“Take Your Daughters to Work” (2007) by Livia Llewellyn

And then when I was maybe around eleven years old, my mother took me to Mr. Monk’s Antique Store, in a little suburb of Tacoma. Mr. Monk, a sweet man who was around eighty years old, led me to a back room filled with dusty furniture and a single bookcase crammed with horror, fantasy and science fiction novels and anthologies. Apparently my mother had decided that I could graduate to “adult” fiction – probably she was tired of my throwing fits in the stacks because she wouldn’t let me read novels like The Exorcist – and she trusted his judgment. I picked out five books (which I still have to this day), and on the way out of the store, Mr. Monk slipped a few extra paperbacks into the bag – one was a collection of Lovecraft’s stories. Naturally, I read it and promptly went insane with joy. And that was it. Lovecraft led directly to my discovery of the horror and weird fiction writers I love so much.
—Interview: Livia Llewellyn and the Weird

Some of the best Mythos fiction is not very long: it doesn’t need to be. One of the advantages of an existing mythology is the ability to build and riff of it, to say and imply much more with a single word or phrase than could otherwise be expressed. “Take Your Daughters to Work” is Livia Llewellyn expressing that economical philosophy: four pages of razor-edged ideas, shiny and new, that cut to the core.

Sadie adjusts the heavy gold at her throat—her mother gave it to her this morning. It’s been in the family at least a thousand years.
—Livia Llewellyn, “Take Your Daughters to Work” in The Book of Cthulhu II 69

Our protagonist is Sadie, the eldest daughter of the man that runs the company. When and where are never expressed directly; though readers know this is not Innsmouth, not as Lovecraft or any of those that followed his portrayal slavishly ever painted it. Sadie moves within a deliberately Victorian milieu, the Industrial Age, with all its implications of class and behavior, servants in livery, and the vast machinery of the ever-expanding factory. Like an H. R. Giger biomechanics landscape reproduced in brief, but tied together with all the hallmarks of massive industrialization—the poisoned sky, smokestacks that belch ash and metal filings, looming edifices that block the horizon… In many of Lovecraft’s stories, the environment itself is a character, Innsmouth itself an indelible part of the narrative of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; so it is here.

Sadie has never seen the sea. None of the daughters have. The aspect of a descendant of the Deep Ones that is purposely kept from the water is a reoccurring image in Mythos fiction, a trope that suggests the unnatural separation and longing, as in “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys and “Objects From the Gilman-Waite Collection” (2003) by Ann K. Schwader. The reuniting of these lost descendants of Innsmouth to the ocean is not always possible—Brian Lumley explores such a situation in “The Gathering” (2017)—nor is it always happy. There is a very good reason the fathers have taken their daughters to work at the New Y’hanthlei Steelworks today—and Llewellyn packs in a few more surprises, no Chekov’s gun left unfired.

“Take Your Daughters to Work” was first published in Subterranean #6 (2007), reprinted in Llewellyn’s collection Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011), and The Book of Cthulhu II (2012). Livia Llewellyn’s other Lovecraftian fiction includes Her Deepness (2010), “The Girls of the World” (2012), “Lord of the Hunt” (2012), “Allocthon” (2014), and “Bright Crown of Joy” (2016).

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)