“Cthulhu Gnosis”: Monstrosity, Selfhood, and Secular Re-Enchantment in Lovecraftian Occultural Practice

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Woodman, Justin. 2021. “Cthulhu Gnosis”: Monstrosity, Selfhood, and Secular Re-Enchantment in Lovecraftian Occultural Practice. In: Bernd-Christian Otto and Dirk Johannsen, eds. Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration, and the Power of Imagination. Leiden: Brill, pp. 289-313. ISBN 9789004465992 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

Taking as its focus contemporary Chaos magical practice, this paper interrogates the occultural uses of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s fictional “Cthulhu Mythos”, initially exploring the development of forms of “Lovecraftian” esotericism by way of a) themes of epistemological and ontological indeterminacy, and b) forms of secular re-enchantment, which are equally evident in Lovecraft’s fiction and in the theory and practice of Chaos magic and its historical antecedents. This is contextualised by way of ethnographic vignettes drawn from the author’s research amongst “The Haunters of the Dark”: a sodality of UK-based Chaos magicians who employed Lovecraft’s fictive universes as the basis of their magical practice. Practitioners’ accounts of the application of Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” as a process of “becoming monstrous” are subsequently theorised as an interiorization of alterity and uncertainty, by way of an experiential self-identification with Lovecraft’s imaginary monsters – employing the fiction of the “Cthulhu Mythos” to facitliate guided visualisations, esoteric dreamwork and ritualised possession - to attain “Cthulhu Gnosis”: the production of altered states of consciousness, wherein “The Haunters of the Dark” encountered and internalised the worlds and entities of Lovecraft’s fiction as a means of reconstructing and reshaping selfhood in ways receptive to the shifting and alienating social, economic and cultural topographies of modernity. These occultural deployments of Lovecraft’s fictional monsters are thus framed as forms of re-enchantment responsive to a perception and experience of modernity (and its attendant secular cosmologies governed by seemingly vast, inconceivable and inhuman forces of transnational consumer capitalism) as having itself become monstrously ‘Lovecraftian’.

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Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004466005_014