The Mystery of Lustful Illusion -Cthulhu Pregnant- (2015) by Takayuki Hiyori (宇行日和)

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with cartoon depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

愛欲幻想の怪～クトゥルフ・プレグナント～ (The Mystery of Lustful Illusion -Cthulhu Pregnant-) by Takayuki Hiyori (宇行日和) is a 2015 Japanese tankōbon hentai manga published by Unreal Comics (アンリアル). This book is divided into ten chapters, each of which contains a fully-illustrated and sexually explicit Cthulhu Mythos story.

In art style, the book is geared more toward erotic comedy than erotic horror; and many of the Cthulhu Mythos entities within are presented as monster girls. Takayuki Hiyori had been previously known for their dōjinshi based on popular monster girl harem manga Monster Musume, and their manga are essentially a pornographic parallel to the mostly non-explicit books like Monster Girl Encyclopedia II (2016) by Kenkou Cross (健康クロス).

In terms of writing and storytelling, The Mystery of Lustful Illusion -Cthulhu Pregnant- is a disconnected collection of short works, much like most Lovecraft story collections or Lafcadio Hearn’s classic collection Kwaidan. There is no larger overarching story of narrative, the major appeal of the work being simply that it uses the Cthulhu Mythos for these erotic stories and sexualized versions of eldritch entities like Cthulhu, Hastur, Shub-Niggurath, the Deep Ones, the Hounds of Tindalos, and the Cats of Ulthar.

The contents are aimed toward some well-established tropes and kinks: as the title might imply, impregnation is a fairly significant theme in many of the stories, but there are also instances of multiple penetration, sex work, incest, nonconsensual sex, body transformation or modification, breast expansion, group sex, large genitals, etc. Readers familiar with tentacle erotica might wonder if such appendages play their part, as they do in Le Pornomicon (2005) by Logan Kowalsky, but in truth they don’t play a significant role in the proceedings.

In point of fact, The Mystery of Lustful Illusion -Cthulhu Pregnant- is difficult to distinguish from Monster Musume or Monster Girl Encyclopedia products. While Takayuki Hiyori uses references to the Cthulhu Mythos in the crafting and telling of the stories, the manga itself is pretty straight forward monster girl erotica, and aimed more directly at that audience than Lovecraft fans. The depictions of the various Mythos entities is mostly original, but skewed toward “mostly human with a few non-human traits”—the Cats of Ulthar, for example, are indistinguishable from the generic manga or anime “catgirl,” with their primary feline traits being cat ears and tail on a nubile young woman’s body. Eldritch horrors are hinted at but seldom realized.

The contents of this book might be generally compared to the more sexually explicit chapters of The Elder Sister-like One by Pochi Iida (飯田ぽち。), but where Pochi is telling an extended narrative with a few characters with extended character development and exploring emotions, Takayuki Hiyori is necessarily more episodic, with varied content and swift-moving stories that tend to get to the sexual action fast, dwell on them for the majority of the length of the chapter, and come to a relatively swift conclusion.

Arguably the most fun chapter in the book is a variation on “The Cats of Ulthar.” While the forms the cats take are stereotypical for hentai manga, and the results are pretty much what you might expect, it both pays homage to Lovecraft’s original work while playfully subverting aspects of it. One might compare it in some ways to the “erotic” versions of classic horror novels which achieved a bit of notoriety in the 1970s, like The Adult Version of Frankenstein and The Adult Version of Dracula by “Hal Kantor” (Ed Wood, Jr.). Erotic retellings of Lovecraft aren’t exactly new—for example, “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon—but illustrated or graphic adaptations are relatively scarce.

愛欲幻想の怪～クトゥルフ・プレグナント～ (The Mystery of Lustful Illusion -Cthulhu Pregnant-) by Takayuki Hiyori (宇行日和) has not been officially translated into English or published in the United States; perhaps some company like FAKKU might do so in the future and make it more widely available. Until then, those interested in the Japanese original can still find copies available from retailers online.

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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“O que dorme” (2016) by Bábara Garcia & Elias Aquino

“O que dorme” (“What sleeps”) by writer Bábara Garcia & artist Elias Aquino is the final entry in the comic anthology O Despertar de Cthulhu em Quadrinhos (“The Awakening of Cthulhu in Comics,” 2016) by Brazilian publisher Editora Draco. The book was edited by Raphael Fernandes, who introduces the volume on the inside cover flaps:

The cult work of H. P. Lovecraft is the main inspiration for this collection with eight comics that will transfer the imagination to the darkest side of the human mind, a cosmic horror in white and green.

[…] The Awakening of Cthulhu in Comics and the horror that cannot be uttered, get lost in images and stories that shouldn’t have been conceived. Now there’s no turning back for those involved by the tentacles of despair, it’s time to wake up to a decadent reality tinged with just two colors.

All of the comics, including “O que dorme” are done in black, white, and green—and the addition of the bright, almost sickly green against the otherwise stark noir black-and-whites significantly enhances both the effectiveness of the individual stories, and the uniformity of the overall book—readers might compare the glowing green Loc-Nar from the Heavy Metal (1981) film, or the sickly yellow in Frank Miller’s That Yellow Bastard (1996)—it’s not that the Mythos are color-coded, since any entities that appear on the page can be seen in black and white as well, but only that the splash of color is used by the artists to convey subtleties of mood and atmosphere. Like in the title page, where the green is a faint tinge against the night sky.

The setting is contemporary. The sensibility is postmodern. Captions and word balloons, but no thought bubbles, no sound effects. A rural community in the mountains which produces coffee. A young woman named Greta who can’t sleep, but stays up all night reading Edgar Allan Poe, a Bauhaus poster on her wall…

I always planned to leave as soon as I had money or a place to stay. Time passed and neither happened.

Here, the green frames figures and offers contrast. Varies in depth and intensity, fading into the shadows on the corners, but distinct. It gives texture to what would be a blank wall, but doesn’t bleed past the outlines. The atmosphere is aggressively normal, yet something’s off. People talk about the heat, a bad smell, it hasn’t rained, the panels darken as it shifts to nighttime…most of the storytelling is expressed in these little details, showing rather than telling. Ordinary scenes and remarks receive significance only because they are what are being shown to the reader, in the same way as a David Lynch film or Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

But the fact is that, little by little, everyone stopped sleeping. An entire city sleepless.

Things move quicker. The timeline grows uncertain, but within a panel the corpses appear, and things shift from uneasy to macabre. There is a Poe-like quality to the rapid downward spiral…but the reader knows there are pages left. How much worse can it get?

The rain comes.

There’s nothing explicitly Mythos to any of this yet, no ancient tomes, not a whisper of alien entities or black stars. Everything that’s happened to this point, it could a disease, a toxic gas, simple madness as the heat and lack of sleep take their toll on frail human psyches. Then the rules change.

The green in the story to this point had been balanced, contained, a highlight; this deep splash shows it as pervasive, all-encompassing…and a herald of what’s coming. Maybe it was always that.

The only ones who were saved were those who were lucky enough to be already dead.

As narratives go, the twenty pages go by swiftly. This is a story all about mood and atmosphere, not explanations. No one is at fault, no one went poking about where they shouldn’t, or read the wrong spell and awakened the eldritch horror. There is no cult to worship the things that crawl down off the mountain. It isn’t a deep dive into the lore of the Mythos, though there is definitely some artistic influence from the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game on the design of the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. This is almost the definition of the Mythos as uncaring, not even necessarily malevolent, but simply destroying humanity by its very presence, like a tiger in the jungle stepping on so many ants.

“O que dorme” showcases the universality of the Lovecraftian experience. The liminal spaces we know are out there, the things that creep in from outside.

O Despertar de Cthulhu em Quadrinhos has not yet been translated into English.

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

“The Nature of Faith” (2010) by Oscar Rios

In the early 90’s I got into the Cthulhu Mythos, from the works of R.E. Howard and the H.P. Lovecraft. I’d been a role player for years playing Dungeons and Dragons, Star Frontiers and soon learned about the game Call of Cthulhu. […]

I started running Call of Cthulhu games at conventions… I started writing my own games… I started writing for Chaosium, the publisher of the Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game…

Slowly the Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game became a bigger and bigger part of my life. I wrote more, became published more often, and even branched off into cosmic horror fiction. Running scenarios at conventions soon became holding panels and seminars. Writing my own scenarios became editing the scenarios of others. Being published became publishing the works of others while working with Miskatonic River Press. Then that changed to being in charge of a small publishing house producing supplements for the Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game.

Then I stopped and looked back… to realize that twenty years has gone by.
—Oscar Rios, “Twenty Years Searching For The Necronomicon” (2013)

The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game is undoubtedly one of the most critical vectors of infection for disseminating Lovecraft and the Mythos into the popular consciousness. Certainly, Weird Tales and Arkham House did their parts, popular paperback editions from Ballantine and Del Rey assured a wider audience, Hollywood films like The Dunwich Horror (1969) and Re-Animator (1985) spread the word. Yet after the death of August Derleth, it was Chaosium that launched its Call of Cthulhu Fiction line, reprinting both long-out-of-print classics and introducing new authors into the field. The roleplaying game has an international scope and appeal, and has attracted talented artists and writers.

Oscar Rios had been writing for Call of Cthulhu for six years when “The Nature of Faith” was published in Cthulhu’s Dark Cults: Ten Tales of Dark & Secretive Orders (2010). The roleplaying game roots show, but only if you’re already familiar with the material. The Order of the Silver Twilight, mentioned in passing, is from the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign. This isn’t a gaming scenario re-cast as a novella, just an original work of fiction from someone steeped in the setting and its lore.

In a real way, the story is a love-letter to Dunwich, both as Lovecraft first described it and as it developed with the additions of other authors. It should be considered in the context (if not actually the continuity) of “The Devil’s Hop Yard” (1978) by Richard Lupoff & “The Cry in the Darkness” (2011) by Richard Baron, although unlike those stories it makes no mention of the Whateleys at all. The character of Gertrude “Gerdy” Pope, in particular, whose near-albino appearance is so evocative of Lavinia Whateley and Hester Sawyer, explained here as a “type” that shows up in Dunwich on occasion.

If there’s a flaw in the story, it might be a penchant for organization and exposition. When Rios writes:

Gerdy’s understanding of the Believers history was scant, but she knew they were a secretive group dedicated to worshiping nature, studying various forms of magic, and living in harmony with the world around them. Exactly the type of organization that appealed to her sensibilities.

The first Believers had apparently come to Dunwich from Salem, fleeing the witch hysteria that swept through that coastal community. It was said they were led here by dreams, unconscious calls beckoning them to these hills. For hundreds of years the Believers have lived in Dunwich, elarning much about the landscape’s unqiue and still-mysterious history. Many knew they were not the first people called here, and some suspected they would not be the last. Gerdy had seen enough of their inner workings to know that Believers varied in the nature of their gifts, abilities, and worship, but one rule was universal within their cult: secrecy.
—Cthulhu’s Dark Cults 136

It’s almost a write-up from a setting-book, and certainly more in line with New Age-y, Wicca-oriented, post-WWII fiction than the rather more sinister and nameless cultic activities of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” or August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945).

Which is not to say that the Believers don’t have their darker aspects, nor that there aren’t more mysteries left unspoken than laid out plain. It’s notable that the plot is mainly focused on the women of the town—Gerdy, Mother & Marie Bishop, Virginia Adams, Ne’seal, Celestia. The story wouldn’t pass the Bechdel Test, but by Mythos standards it has much more female representation than typical. But then, the gist of the story boils down to gender politics, with the intrusive, logical male outsider invading the peaceful, intuitive, female-dominated Dunwich. And hinted at being part of a cycle of such things.

“Men!” she proclaimed aloud, “ya never listen. Mebbe next time.”
—Cthulhu’s Dark Cults 152

A bit of an inversion from “The Dunwich Horror,” where Lavinia Whateley is used, sidelined, and ultimately disappeared; the female playing her role and then ushered quickly off-stage. Yet not exactly progressive either; there are still stereotypes at play here, both male and female. It is difficult to break out of those ideas of gender roles and actions, in any mode of fiction.

Oscar Rios’ “The Nature of Faith” was first published in Cthulhu’s Dark Cults (2010), it has not been republished.

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

“This Human Form” (2014) by Lyndsey Holder

(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness”

You call me black, but I am beyond black. I am the space between the stars, the darkness that lies on the edge of your dreams, the sound of death in small spaces.

You say I am from the woods, but my woods contain no trees or birds, no peaceful sounds of wind and stream, no quiet rustle of delicate creatures. My forest pulsates, vibrates, glistens. […]

You call me a goat, and sometimes I am.
⁠—Lyndsey Holder, “This Human Form” in Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath

More of a prose-poem or an invocation than a short story, Lyndsey Holder’s “This Human Form” reminds me of “The Elder Sister-like One, Vol. 1” (2016) by Pochi Iida (飯田ぽち。), “Red Goat, Black Goat” (2010) by Nadia Bulkin, and “Cthulhu Sex (ahem!)—a poem—” (1998) by Katherine Morel. Works that take inspiration from the Mythos, but don’t lean heavily on them; they forge their own lore, not bound by any convention of the Mythos and yet still strongly connected to it thematically.

Holder’s first-person account is only implicitly that of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, reveling more in sensation and imagery than any concrete connections to any other story in the Mythos. The connection is stronger by association: the story is in a Mythos anthology, which makes the imagery more apparent. But stick this story in a dark fantasy or horror magazine and would people still get it? Would their minds still make the connection? Probably not, if they weren’t already initiated in Mythos-lore and familiar with Shub-Niggurath, her aspects and attributes. But they could still enjoy the story.

“This Human Form” is exemplary of how in a largely disorganized way, the Mythos has evolved organically into something which the SCP wiki has done by considered design. While it has been said there is no canon to the Mythos, it would be more accurate to say there is no one canon. Certainly, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories are fairly consistent in themselves, as are Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley tales, Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow stories, W. H. Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley, Charles Stross’ the Laundry Files, etc. Peter Rawlik has curated a canon centered around “Herbert West—Reanimator,” and Shane Ivey has spent considerable time doing much the same with the Delta Green setting.

Most of these works are independent, interconnected, sometimes conflicting. Myths do that. Conflict, arguably, might even be essential to the Mythos: it forces the reader to engage with it, to juggle different concepts, maybe try to reconcile them.

There is on thing you do not call me: mother. My body has sent a thousand children into this world, a thousand mewling, crawling things, suckling and whining, slithering down silvery dream-threads into the soft comfort of your warm beds.
—Lyndsey Holder, “This Human Form”

It is rare to get a first-person take from a Mythos entity, although far from unknown. Neil Gaiman famously did it with I, Cthulhu, or, What’s a Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing in a Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W)? (1987) (later publications have quite reasonably shortened this to “I, Cthulhu”). Gaiman’s take, of course, is a quiet taking of the piss. The idea of Cthulhu addressing the user is the main joke. For Mythos entities that are largely defined as ineffable and unknowable, the first-person narrative rather kills the mystery…unless, as Holder does, the meat of the text is salacious, sensation-driven, and suggestive. Making telling feel like showing.

Lyndsey Holder’s “This Human Form” was published in Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2014). Her other Mythos fiction includes “Parasitosis” (2015) and “Chosen” (2015).

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

“Red Goat, Black Goat” (2010) by Nadia Bulkin

“The Goat is our real mother! She is everyone’s real mother!”
—Nadia Bulkin, “Red Goat, Black Goat”

From the 1930s on, fans and writers have tried to give shape and order to the Mythos. It is a participatory ritual: the reader’s understanding is always unique, built and shaped by what they have read, what connections their intellect has made, how their imagination fills in the blanks. There is no one canon. There are only possibilities.

In “Red Goat, Black Goat” Nadia Bulkin cracks opens up a new possibility.

It is a story of Shub-Niggurath only by inference. Bulkin eschews the tropes of Mythos pastiche. The Black Goat of the title is a hint, at best; a suggestion of the epithet “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.” Yet the entity in this story is never named as such; there are no tomes, no familiar place names. “Red Goat, Black Goat” does not partake of the “lore” of the Mythos in the tongue-in-cheek manner of “ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” (2012) by Molly Tanzer or “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes.

Bulkin carves her own bit of lore, with the bloody skill of an Indonesian horror film. The setting is not played up as some exotic bit of the “mysterious Orient” as it might have been in Lovecraft’s day. She grounds and develops the setting as Lovecraft did Dunwich, the characters an organic part of the whole so that none of the non-English terminology that peppers their thoughts and speech seems false or unnecessary.

At the same time, “Red Goat, Black Goat” partakes of the essence of the Mythos. The Goat is something outside the system of superstition that the characters know; it exists beyond their framework of understanding. Aspects of it echo themes developed by other writers; the terrible all-mother Cybele of “The Rats in the Walls,” or “Koenigsberg’s Model” (2011) by Peter Tupper, but it is far less defined than even those incarnations.

Nor is the story leavened by any real attempt at humor, wry or otherwise; there is gore, but not the microscopic dwelling in viscera that is splatterpunk. Bulkin moves quick, lest the tale be bogged down in dirty details. Her horrors are passing, visceral images that build shortly toward mini-climaxes, her pacing cinematic as the narrative moves swiftly toward a point of finality—not the ending of a story, but the closing of one chapter.

It’s a good story that leaves you wanting more; Bulkin could have written “Red Goat, Black Goat” out as a Javanese Gothic novel and it wouldn’t have seemed out of place. There are no answers, really, and that’s okay. Readers will fit this into their own personal understanding of the Mythos just fine; one more incarnation of Shub-Niggurath, one more thread in the endless tapestry. It’s a story that should be part of more reader’s personal Mythos.

“Red Goat, Black Goat” was first published for free online in Innsmouth Free Press #4 (June 2010); it has been reprinted in Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014) and Nadia Bulkin’s collection She Said Destroy (2017).

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

“The Curate of Temphill” (1993) by Peter Cannon & Robert M. Price

It should be noted that this tale attempts a new stage of the evolution of Mythos fiction. It has been justly said that much Mythos fiction fails for its redundancy: the same thing happens that happened in Arkham House books of fifty years ago. Once we read certain book titles or demonic names we know what will happen. The story reduces to the collection of names, almost as if that were all most readers were looking for anyway. For new Mythos fiction to have any chance of being effective perhaps it must be scrupulously spare in its referenced to the received lore.
—Robert M. Price, The Shub-Niggurath Cycle 187

This story can be read as one of the most homophobic stories in the Cthulhu Mythos. That in itself might explain why this first collaboration between Robert M. Price & Peter Cannon is a bit of an orphan. It has been published only twice, first in the ‘zine Grimoire Vol. 1, # 1 (Spring 1993), and in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle (1994), a volume edited by Price as part of the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu Fiction line. Neither Price nor Cannon has seen fit to reprint it in any of their subsequent collections, nor written much about it; though it is clear from Price’s editorial comments that Cannon probably wrote the bulk of it, attempting to emulate the style of M. R. James, and that Price supplied much of the theological background. It is therefore feasible that this collaboration operated similar to their later story “Nautical-Looking Negroes” (1996).

The Jamesian atmosphere may have suggested the religious theme, which is Dr. Price’s special area of expertise; the setting is Temphill, part of the Severn Valley setting created by Ramsey Campbell for his own Mythos stories. Campbell might be credited with one of the first overt references to homosexuality in Mythos fiction with his short story “Cold Print” (1969), though whether that was any inspiration on “The Curate of Temphill” or simply coincidence is unclear—James was British, and Campbell’s Severn Valley is the most prominent and memorable British setting for the Mythos outside of Exham Priory (“The Rats in the Walls”). The name itself recalls the Templars…and if one traces that line of thought, perhaps leads us to the inspiration for this story.

There are certain relatively obscure elements of homosexuality in the demi-monde of legend surrounding Christianity, if you look for it. One of these is the charge at their trials that the Knights Templar practiced sodomy; another is the Secret Gospel of Mark, an apocryphal text which reads in part:

And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God…naked man with naked man…
—”The Curate of Temphill” in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle 196

Price & Cannon quote this material almost verbatim from the original source; what the authors are doing here is taking known elements from Christian scholarship and weaving them together to form the Mythos “lore” that the protagonist, Rev. Morgan Ackerley, slowly uncovers. It is a genuine Lovecraftian approach, developing the “secret history” of the story with all the care and attention of a good hoax, only with very unconventional (for the Mythos) source materials; readers might compare it to how Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003)created a narrative based on the remixed history, legend, and conspiracy theories of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982).

Where it gets problematic in the story is specific applications. One of the most prominent:

Shortly after deciding the vandalism episode was too trivial to report to the secular authorities, he received a solemn summons to the hospital in Brichester, where Ms. Radclyffe lay in a coma, the victim of violent rape. She expired before his arrival, never regaining consciousness.
—”The Curate of Temphill” in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle 198

While the matter is treated by suggestion and implication rather than outright stated, Vita Radclyffe was a lesbian—unmarried, living with her “companion” Florence Trefusis, reading the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, and opposed to the domination of the local church by the previous curate, who had preached “You know, the woman shalt be subservient to her lord and master, her husband—obsolete rot like that.” (ibid 190) Her death by sexual assault is treated as horrific, but the why of it is hauntingly unclear…as with much in this story.

A large part of the mystery is on purpose. M. R. James was careful to leave much of the detail to the reader’s imagination, so certain mysteries would always remain. Readers might well argue that since Radclyffe had opposed the old curate, she would also oppose the new one, and so her death would benefit the conspiracy surrounding Temphill.

That doesn’t explain why Radclyffe was either a lesbian or specifically raped to death. Neither aspect of the character is a necessary detail for the purposes of her role in the story, but the fact that both were included strongly suggests that to the authors they were. The implications are therefore nasty: Radclyffe was included in the story because it needed a female antagonist to oppose a cabal of chauvinistic men, who were preaching the strong patriarchal version of the Bible; her opposition to this patriarchal slant would be stronger if she were a feminist—and disinterested in men generally, hence a lesbian; her death would be all the more horrific if it came about by the very thing she opposed, hence the rape.

Horror exists for violating taboos; the thrill of crossing a boundary, be it social, sexual, legal, religious, even geographic or physical is real. Rape and violent death are a part of that, and many slasher films eagerly combine sex and death, race and death, etc. Characters are introduced as predestined victims, with the only question being not if they will survive but how they will die. It is still an ugly thing to introduce a woman to the plot specifically for her to be raped to death a few pages later, but it is not beyond the pale: H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop story “The Curse of Yig” is built around a supernatural sexual assault.

The rape in “The Curate of Temphill” in nasty in part because of the ideology behind the attack. Would a man who opposed the group be raped to death? The new curate isn’t; he is instead initiated. Would a woman who was not a lesbian be raped to death? The option is not explored, and that in itself is a bit damning. The story, as brief as it is, only gives hints and suggestions to the actual nature of beliefs held by the old curate and his group…and this is where the homophobia really starts in the story.

In Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print,” homosexuality is a secondary aspect of the main character’s sexuality, which is primarily tied up with discipline, spanking, and sadomasochism in the grand tradition of British private schools, or at least the fetishistic pornographic depiction of the same, with hints of pedophilia—all appropriate for the character Campbell was developing. Price & Cannon seem to have taken their inspiration from “Secret Mark” and the implication that Jesus Christ’s hidden teachings involved a pedophilic encounter with a young boy—and perhaps by extension touching on general allegations of pedophilia and inappropriate sexual contact on the part of Catholic and Anglican priests, accounts of which have become much more public in the past several decades.

All of which Price & Cannon bring together in their finale, where they hint strongly at this turn of events with:

His parishioner had subsequently invited h im to a special meeting of select members of the Temphill and Goatswood youth groups, where certain wondrous ceremonies would be performed.
—”The Curate of Temphill” in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle 200

Basically, there is no male homosexual in “The Curate of Temphill” who is not also implicitly a pedophile. This might not have been the intended depiction, but the story is short and the cast is small: we aren’t given any other details to go by. It should be mentioned that this conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia is not pursued by Price or Cannon in any other story. Maybe it was just the pursuit of this one set of ideas as a connecting theme—homosexual Templars, a gospel that preaches homosexual pedophilia, the prevalence of homosexual pedophilia among some priests—that suggested the story.

Yet each of those individual elements also embodies homophobia: the Templars were charged with sodomy because homosexuality was a sin; Secret Mark is blasphemous because it suggests Jesus had gay sex with a young boy; the most popular depiction of sexual assault by priests against youth is that they targeted altar boys for abuse, with the homosexual element heightening the scandal for churches that still often disapprove of homosexuality. All of that plus the ultimately needless death-by-rape of Vita Radclyffe makes this a short story with a lot of issues.

Readers at this point might ask “How does all this relate to Shub-Niggurath?”—and it does not, directly. Shub-Niggurath is associated with Campbell’s Severn Valley setting via nearby Goatswood and its inhabitants in “The Moon-Lens” (1964). The Templars were accused of worshiping Baphomet, who in turn was famously depicted as the Satanic Goat by Eliphas Levi, and Price in his introduction to The Shub-Niggurath Cycle thematically connected this figure with “The Black Goat of the Woods,” often taken as a title for Shub-Niggurath. It is implied that the entity that raped and killed Vita Radclyffe was a satyresque figure, which would make this a rare masculine depiction of Shub-Niggurath, comparable to that in “The Thing from Lover’s Lane” (1996) by Nancy A. Collins.

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

“Koenigsberg’s Model” (2011) by Peter Tupper & “The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust” (2016) by Raine Roka

Romantic young devil, too—full of high notions—you’d call ’em Victorian, now—
—H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, Medusa’s Coil

Sex is an intimate aspect of racial prejudice and stereotyping in the United States. The word in Lovecraft’s day for interracial sexual relationships was miscegenation; in many parts of the country during the 1930s interracial marriages were illegal and socially taboo. Charges of rape against white women spurred outrage in high-profile cases like the Massie trial and Scottsboro Boys; an attempted sexual assault by a black man is one of the key elements of Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), which was adapted into a play and then the film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which in turn led to the re-formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Lovecraft had seen the play and the film; he would discuss the Massie and Scottsboro Boys trials with correspondents like Robert E. Howard and J. Vernon Shea. Given his prejudices, it is not surprising that sex across the colour line rarely finds an explicit reference in Lovecraft’s fiction, except in some individual of mixed race heritage—although many readers find allegorical examples in “Facts in the Case of Arthur Jermyn and His Family” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Even in subsequent works by other authors working in the Mythos it is uncommon to find interracial couples. While less taboo today than in the 1930s, the taboo remains powerful.

The power of the interracial taboo, however, makes it very attractive for erotic literature. The kink has been approached any number of ways by different authors, playing up to racial stereotypes of sexual attitudes, genitalia size, and behavior to fantasy scenarios based on historical stereotypes. Visually, the contrast between the actors can often be distinct and dramatic, but the real eroticism is often based on the centuries of emotion and social mores built into the culture—sometimes playing to these prejudices via depicting rape, slavery, degradation, or going against these prejudices by depicting positive interracial relationships that nonetheless emphasize cultural and physical differences between the players involved.

Lovecraftian erotica very rarely takes on the issue of race, but there are at least two notable exceptions: “Koenigsberg’s Model” (2011) by Peter Tupper, and “The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust!” (2016) by Raine Roka. The difference in their approach highlight aspects of both Lovecraft’s prejudices in his life and the Mythos, and make for an interesting comparison and contrast.

“Koenigsberg’s Model” is Tupper’s love letter to Jack Kirby, Joe Shuster, and H. P. Lovecraft, more or less in that order. Comic books were the direct heirs of pulp fiction, often sharing many of the same writers and artists, and just as pulpsters wrote for the Spicy pulps to get paid, several notable comic book artists moonlit creating erotic drawings and comic books—as chronicled in Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. Tupper’s protagonist, Miskatonic graduate student Rick, is on the hunt for exactly this kind of secret smut for his thesis…and finds more than he bargained for in the notebook of comic book artist Jozsef Koenigsberg (Jack “King” Kirby’s original name was Jacob Kurtzburg; “König” is German for “King.”)

Tupper has fun in the story mixing history and pseudohistory; like many of the best Mythos stories, “Koenigsberg’s Model” has all the attention to detail of a good hoax, dropping the titles of real-life historical volumes of erotica along with Mythos tomes like Nameless Cults. His research shifts to Koenigsberg’s sketch of a beautiful black woman, and ultimately the eponymous model.

Everywhere Rick went in Koenigsberg’s prodigious imagination, there was an enigmatic, dark woman, remote yet seductive, a dispenser of cryptic knowledge, taller than most men, with the same sly Mona Lisa smile and all-knowing eyes looking out of the page. Regardless of genre, Koenigsberg always invested his considerable talents in conveying the woman’s sensuality and charisma. Free Agent of the New Pantheon was guided by a black giantess named No-Sys. Hardboiled detective Johnny Grace matched wits with a dark-haired femme fatale named Jette savvee. Even the downtown Kids took advice from the spooky Widow Sable in Harlem.
—Peter Tupper, “Koenigsberg’s Model”

The turn, as in a good deal of Lovecraftian erotica, brings not just revelation but sexual release. Koenigsberg’s Model is someone more than Rick’s fantasies of curvaceous, imposing black women with hourglass hips…and while many stories end there, Tupper goes a little further beyond that first revelation, drawing Rick a little deeper into his studies and holding up his racial fetishization as if it was a jewel to be examined in the light from different angles, touching on early imprinting, differences in size, shifting from being sexually dominant to submissive…and, by contrast, with how others approach the same material:

A tall, thin man with an elongated face huddled in the gap in the wall, curled up in a fetal ball. “We are not pure, we are born of things from beyond the stars, the crawling chaos…” he muttered.
—Peter Tupper, “Koenigsberg’s Model”

What marks Tupper’s story out as exceptional is that it goes beyond being just erotica; it is an onion of secrets, peeled back one layer at a time, challenging what Rick—and the readers—think they know about themselves. In this sense, the interracial aspect is something of a red herring or a white lie, the first step toward a deeper understanding. The focus on race by Rick an unforced error, an artifact of not being able to see the world as it really is…and that in itself might be a quiet commentary on racism and prejudice.

“The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust!” by Raine Roka takes a different tack. Essentially a sequel to Lovecraft’s “Facts in the Case of Arthur Jermyn and His Family” and part of a brief trend among ebook erotica focusing on ape-men, in Roka’s story African-American anthropologist Dr. Amanda Carey meets Sir Mark Jermyn, last descendant of the infamous family that was not extinguished at the conclusion of Lovecraft’s tale. She’s arrived to do research on British colonialism and its effects on the world…and ends up studying the strapping, tall, ape-like baronet.

Lovecraft’s original tale of a British explorer who finds and weds a “white ape” princess in Africa borrows more than a little from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan stories and La of Opar, albeit with a more visceral, tragic twist. Allegorical readings of the tale can get complicated: following the idea that apes were less evolved than human beings, many white supremacists during the 1920s—including Lovecraft—described or compared black people to apes to emphasize their “primitiveness,” so the overall idea of a wife from Africa and children who show ape-like traits can be taken as an horrific fable of miscegenation…if you ignore Tarzan angle, and the fact that these are white apes.

What Lovecraft appears to be suggesting is that the inahbitants of the primeval African city of “white apes” are not only the “missing link” between ape and human but also the ulimate source for all white civilization. The entire white race is derived from this primal race in Africa, a race that had corrupted itself by intermingling with apes. This is the only explanation for the narrator’s opening statement, “If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did [i.e., commit suicide]”: we may not have a white ape in our immediate ancestry, but we are all the products of an ultimate miscengeation.
—S. T. Joshi, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories 365

Joshi’s basic idea had been developed in fiction in stories like “Magna Mater” (2015) by Arinn Dembo. Roka’s approach to the material echoes Tupper in that there is a focus on the real-world beliefs that underwrote Lovecraft’s original story, name-dropping Lord Monboddo and Thomas Love Peacock for their early thoughts on evolution and the relations of humans and apes, but there are other readings that go into “The Ape in Me” as well.

Mark Jermyn might be the descendent of an ape princess, but he is still explicitly white and a member of the British peerage, while Dr. Carey is not, preserving the explicit difference between the players, but while there is mutual attraction neither Carey or Jermyn has an explicit racial fetish—that’s for the audience to project. Tupper presents Koeningsberg’s model as a figure of mystery, but Wade’s heritage makes him almost a figure of monstrous deformity and pity, “privileged but outcast.” The nature of his heritage allows a writer to use terms to describe him that would be racist if applied to a black man.

Unlike Tupper, there is more focus on actual sex than revelation-that-happens-to-be-sexual; while Roka touches on some of colonialism and racism, the main thrust of the story is the two ending up in bed. Even if Roka’s approach is somewhat more superficial, there is one final statement that might strike home for readers:

The contrast between his pale skin and my light-brown flesh is rather fetching. Imagine the gossip in the village, all that looking askance, if I were to become the next Lady Jermyn! Well,s tranger things have happened, and we are both of African descent, albeit by different and rather tortuous paths.
—Raine Roka, “The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust!”

The Out-of-Africa Theory is at the crux of racial prejudice surrounding evolution; ultimately all human beings are the same species descended from a common ancestor, and the biological variations which scientific racialists tried to codify in Lovecraft’s day are largely cosmetic. The idea that all humans are essentially the same undercuts racial prejudice; the horror of miscegenation and the sexual thrill of racial fetishization are based on social conceptions of race, not biological ones. The two states of excitement are closely intertwined, and while Lovecraft plays with the horror of facing “the Other” in this way, Roka plays with the sensuality of it.

Tupper and Roka are ultimately playing with related themes, albeit both are taking off from Lovecraft in very different directions. Race in their stories serves as a complication to their character’s relationships with other characters, and during the course of the stories these characters come to face their own conceptions of race, and to some degree how that conception defines or re-defines their idea of humanity.

“Koenigsberg’s Model” by Peter Tupper was published in Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica (2011, Circlet Press). It has not been reprinted.

“The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust!” (2016) by Raine Roka was published as an Amazon Kindle ebook; it is currently not available on the Kindle store. Roka is also the author of “Shaggoth: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust!” (2015).

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

“Dreams of a Thousand Young” (2014) by Jennifer Brozek

Visit Assam, India, where a British dilettante wakes up one morning covered in bruises and welts, with a dead man in her bed and o memory of what happened in the last 24 hours. Her only clue is a trashed invitation to the exclusive Black Ram Club.
—back cover, Jazz Age Cthulhu (2014)

Jennifer Brozek knew what the readers wanted, and determined to give it to them, good and hard. Mythos fiction as a self-defined genre may be something that Lovecraft and his contemporaries created in the 1920s and 30s, but generations of fans have read through everything they could get their hands on and still clamored for more. The form and tropes of the fiction have progressed, passing through pastiche into a rarified species of fiction—one with its own language of tropes, intimations, and old familiar horrors. Such is “Dreams of a Thousand Young.”

Brozek’s novelette reads like an adventure for the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, too pulpish for real horror but hitting its marks. Attention is paid to the accuracy of the setting, the characterization of the British Colonial atmosphere, marked with the unsubtle distinctions of class and ethnicity. There is action and excitement, a new cult and and an old favorite horror, a bloody-minded nun and a penchant for Elder Signs as prophylactic device that August Derleth would have approved of. And there is a beautiful woman who was at the center of a ritual and who may now be quietly gestating something inhuman.

As with “The Thing from Lover’s Lane” (1996) by Nancy A. Collins, Brozek’s achievement is one of execution and characterization. Lady Helen Keeling is the viewpoint character, and the story rises and falls on how believable and compelling her views are. Rather than the fainting Gothic heroine or the prim and virginal British lady, Keeling is…complicated. Not a slut, but far from innocent; genuinely a victim, but determined not to play the victim; born along by the course of events, but taking her own active role in things as well.

“Dreams of a Thousand Young” is reminiscent of “ALL THIS for the GREATER GLORY of the 7th and 329th CHILDREN of the BLACK GOAT of the WOODS” (2012) by Molly Tanzer; not because of any inspiration Brozek took, but simply because both authors were working from similar sources. The cults and mythologies of Lovecraft and his contemporaries were often ambiguous, tenuous, sometimes contradicting. Cults didn’t always have names, robes and hoods were optional and often absent; sorcery, sacrifices, and summonings were undefined in capabilities and requirements. The roleplaying game was always much more concrete, defining spells and the names of critters—it is no surprise that the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath which appear in both stories are strongly inspired both in name and appearance by the critter of the same variety in the game.

It is very weird to consider that today some writers are drawing on, not the original fiction by Lovecraft and his contemporaries or even the second wave of fiction by the next generation of writers like Ramsey Campbell or Brian Lumley, but from reference materials derived from those previous works. When writers don’t go straight for Lovecraft and Derleth, but reach for The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia or S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, the stories that result are no longer pastiche in any real sense; the stylistic aspects of the individual original authors is lost. The material has been through too many hands and minds, a lot of the odd details are smoothed out, and the result is strangely—consistent.

Which is what many readers want from their Mythos fiction.

So Jennifer Brozek gave it to them, with skill and craft.

“Dreams of a Thousand Young” was first published in Jazz Age Cthulhu (2014). It has not been reprinted.

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

“The Thing from Lover’s Lane” (1996) by Nancy A. Collins

Lovers’ Lane was really an old logging road on the side of Goat Hill, which overlooked Misty Valley. On a clear night, you could look out and see the entire valley spread out, with the lights of the town reflected in the Miskatonic River, which wound through the center of the village like a dark ribbon.
—Nancy A. Collins, “The Thing from Lover’s Lane” in Tales Out of Dunwich 163

The Dunwich Horror took place in 1928. H. P. Lovecraft never lived to see the decades tick by, highways springing up, World War II, rock & roll, young men with greased-back hair and black leather jackets taking cheerleaders in bobby socks up to Lover’s Lane…

“The Thing from Lover’s Lane” is a projection of Lovecraft’s Mythos into those decades he never lived to see, and is pitch-perfect in how the characters react, their views and voices in terms of the era. The plot itself is straightforward, almost familiar in its beats. How many times have readers come across a Mythos-related pregnancy? “The Dunwich Horror” by H. P. Lovecraft, “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens, “Prey of the Goat” (1994) by Margaret L. Carter, “The Devil’s Hop Yard” (1978) by Richard Lupoff & “The Cry in the Darkness” (2011) by Richard Baron—and so many others. Female characters have been impregnated by Mythos entities almost since there was a Mythos—before that even, if you count Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal”. Yet old familiar themes can still be potent, in the right hands.

The novelty may have worn off, but Nancy Collins handles the execution with characteristic skill. How would a 1950s community respond to such an event?

Principal Strickland says that having a girl in—well, in your condition, is bad for morale. Carol Anne—you’re the Homecoming Queen! What kind of standard are you folding up to the other girls? If you keep the baby, I’m afraid you won’t be allowed back into class come the new school year!
—”The Thing from Lover’s Lane” 178

The desire to save face—either through a “therapeutic abortion” or discreetly sending Carol Anne off to a home for unwed mothers where she can give birth and put the child up for adoption—is almost comic compared to the reality of the situation. Carol Anne’s own agency in the matter is strong (“I don’t care! I’m not giving up my baby!”) despite her mother’s pleadings (“Carol Anne—what will people think?“)…or is it?

It wants you to think I’m the father! That way it’s safe for it to be born!
—”The Thing from Lover’s Lane” 180

Most Mythos stories don’t discuss the ugly details of these sexual encounters with Mythos entities, much less their aftermath. Rape is not pleasant, and was not for Carol Anne; humans have had means for dealing with unwanted pregnancies and children for thousands of years, and in recent decades knowledge of and access to birth control and abortion have become more widespread. Collins, working in a contemporary setting, had to acknowledge that Carol Anne had options—and she did.

Narrative impetus in this case is that Shub-Niggurath’s thousand-and-first young must be borne. So Carol Anne’s agency had to be subverted, and her victimization in this story is one of the nastier cases in any Mythos story. All she wanted was to have a little fun at Lover’s Lane with her boyfriend, and because of that she was raped, knocked up, faced the social stigma of being an unwed teenage mother in ’50s America…and, ultimately, died giving birth. The story is almost a 1950s fable, to scare girls away from following in her footsteps. Collins goes into far greater detail about the horror Carol Anne suffers at each step, leaving only the erotic details off the page.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Sex and horror go together; titillation and terror are both states of excitement, and sex elicits a thrill to many readers. Pregnancy especially has its place in the horrors that women feel—and for many Mythos stories the result is almost routine: of course sex leads to pregnancy. Maybe the mother will die in childbirth, or maybe it’ll only be the spawn that the heroes have to deal with. The mother herself rarely gets much attention. Here, at least, Nancy Collins does not ignore or downplay the suffering of Carol Anne, nor does she seek to make it erotic. “The Thing from Lover’s Lane” is determined to retain the horror of the events, above all else…and it does it well.

Nancy Collins’ “The Thing from Lover’s Lane” was first published in It Came from the Drive-In (1996), and nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, but did not win. The story was republished in the author’s collection Avenue X and Other Dark Streets (2000), and Tales out of Dunwich (2005). It has also been released as an ebook: “The Thing from Lover’s Lane: A Mythos Tale” (2012).

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos

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)