HP Lovecraft

Although Alan Moore has criticized the occult appropriation of H.P. Lovecraft in interviews, this article contends that this is precisely what Moore has done in his graphic novel Providence (illustrated by Jacen Burrows). This article analyses the role of dreams in the occult appropriations of Kenneth Grant and other ceremonial magicians and compares them to the occult treatment of dreams in Providence. Where Grant maintained that Lovecraft made contact with real occult entities in his dreams and wrote about them in his fiction, in Providence Moore represents Lovecraft’s dreamworld as a real occult realm that has been repressed by human reality. And while Providence is a fiction, it illustrates Moore’s thesis that writing is magic and that there is no difference between fiction and reality, in that it presents Lovecraft’s fiction as being inexorably accepted as real and this catalyzes an occult apocalypse.

In his publication "Die Physik der Finsternis" (in German) the author postulates a 3rd Millennium Cosmology and sheds revolutionizing lights on Jewish mysticism and rabbinical Kabbalah.

Proceeding from his groundbreakuing discovery of the concealed meaning of the Three Mother-Letters and their fundamental connection with Special Relativity, he can open up breathtaking views onto dimensions of existence that have been subject to persistent tabooing for many thousands of years involving the biblical Kings of Edom, Daath and the mysteries of the Sitra Achara and the principal doctrine of Shabbataism, that is  Two Lights Cosmology developped by Nathan of Gaza, but also, and prominently, the occult messages embobied in the works of the famous American writer HP Lovecraft centering around a mythical race of divine beings.

All these threads the reader finds combined in more than 350 pages of "Die Physik der Finsternis". Apart from that, his book also provides hitherto unexplained details of tantric, auto-erotic techniques in close connection with all the mentioned subject-matters.

O presente artigo procura analisar a obra de H. P. Lovecraft e suas diversas investidas em outras mídias após sua morte. O autor experimentou nos últimos dez anos, uma espécie de renascença cultural, que começou a legitimá-lo como artista digno de figurar no cânon da alta literatura, além de ser considerado um dos mestres do gênero do horror. Desse modo, ao investigar as razões desse surpreendente renascimento de Lovecraft na esfera da chamada "alta cultura" (literatura, artes, filosofia), estaremos ao mesmo tempo buscando as motivações de seu interesse no âmbito da cultura popular e midiática, estudando as formas e apropriações como seus temas, ideias ou mesmo obras foram absorvidos pelos meios de comunicação contemporâneos.

Lovecraft is notorious for his ruins: Cyclopean and/or non-Euclidean, they typically contain horrors from the depths of time, lying in wait for some foolish adventurer to unleash them upon the present. Sometimes these places are set-dressing, but in a few notable instances Lovecraft utilizes the notion of the ruin itself to evoke horror. In both the novella At the Mountains of Madness and the short story “The Shadow out of Time,” Lovecraft uses the image of the ancient ruin to evoke the terror of deep time: the idea that the scope of history is far larger than we can comprehend, and human civilization is so small within that scope as to be insignificant. Magnifying the de-centering effect of Lovecraft’s timescales, the denizens of these ruins don’t stay in the past, but explode into the present, and consequently effect the collapse of any construction of time. Scholars of Lovecraft have argued that the purpose of this temporal collapse is to amplify the effects of deep-time horror: not only are we insignificant within history, but history itself is only an illusion. We can take this line of thinking further by examining several scenes from classical poetry which utilize a remarkably similar technique. Caesar’s tale of Troy in Lucan’s Pharsalia IX, Julia’s necromantic fury and Caesar’s invasion of Rome in Pharsalia III, and Erichtho’s prophecy in Pharsalia VI each use the visual touchstone of the ruined city to trouble the boundaries between the past, present, and future. By so doing, both texts bring the fear of the Other into a de-centering model of world history, and evoke parallel senses of insignificance and terror.

O presente artigo procura analisar a obra de H. P. Lovecraft e suas diversas investidas em outras mídias após sua morte. O autor experimentou nos últimos dez anos, uma espécie de renascença cultural, que começou a legitimá-lo como artista digno de figurar no cânon da alta literatura, além de ser considerado um dos mestres do gênero do horror. Desse modo, ao investigar as razões desse surpreendente renascimento de Lovecraft na esfera da chamada “alta cultura” (literatura, artes, filosofia), estaremos ao mesmo tempo buscando as motivações de seu interesse no âmbito da cultura popular e midiática, estudando as formas e apropriações como seus temas, ideias ou mesmo obras foram absorvidos pelos meios de comunicação contemporâneos. Palavras-chave: Lovecraft. Cultura midiática. Cultura popular.

O presente artigo procura analisar a relação entre horror e religião na obra de H. P. Lovecraft e suas articulações por meio de outras mídias e no campo da cibercultura. O autor, que não gozava de muito prestígio no passado, tem penetrado cada vez mais no atual cenário tanto em âmbitos considerados eruditos quanto em âmbitos considerados massivos ou populares. Desse modo, ao investigar as razões desse surpreendente renascimento de Lovecraft na esfera da chamada alta cultura (literatura, artes, filosofia), buscaremos ao mesmo tempo as
motivações de seu interesse no âmbito da cultura popular e midiática e estudando as formas e apropriações como seus temas, ideias ou mesmo obras foram absorvidos pelos meios de comunicação contemporâneos.

Nei mesi scorsi, su queste pagine, ho cercato di spiegare cosa determini l'esiguità di motivi eerie nel cinema di fantascienza [1]. Su una linea di ragionamento non troppo dissimile, vorrei ora occuparmi di un'altra mancanza, o per essere più precisi di una certa difficoltà e di un certo fallimento. Mi riferisco ad un tema che potrà forse apparire settoriale: il risultato deludente, e in generale lo scarso successo al quale vanno incontro i tentativi di portare sullo schermo le opere dello scrittore americano Howard Phillips Lovecraft. [...]

The strange fiction of author William Hope Hodgson remains influential – echoes of his work can be seen in the works of HP Lovecraft, who went so far as to describe Hodgson’s 1908 novel, The House on the Borderlands, as “…a classic of the first order” and it is through Lovecraft that Hodgson’s cosmic horror has entered the mainstream consciousness. All this despite Hodgson becoming obscure following his death at the Battle of Ypres in 1918. In that sense, Hodgson deserves some attention, given that he was one of many notable authors who died in a war that celebrates its centenary this year. However, Hodgson’s relevance to this symposium is that he not only spent his formative years as a seaman – quite literally running away from home to join the merchant navy – but continued to reference his experiences and knowledge throughout his work, examples of which I refer to as Maritime Horror. Here, the sea is both threat and source of threat, be it in the form of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the sleeping Cthulhu lurking under the Pacific, or Peter Benchley’s Jaws. In Hodgson’s case, this resulted in a wide range of stories with self-evident names such as The Haunted Jarvee, featuring his paranormal investigator Thomas Carnacki, and The Ghost Pirates, as well as other stories such as The Thing in the Weeds, The Derelict and The Voice in the Night, later filmed as the Japanese horror film Matango. The aim of this paper, then, is to demonstrate that the study of Hodgson’s marine horror narratives has value, in that they both reflect popular understandings of the sea and what it represents, and subvert them, as Hodgson’s level of understanding and the detail he employs demonstrates a fascination, as well as dread of the oceans.