I did not figure anything out for a very long time.
I can blame this or that, but the greatest share of blame lies with THE NEW AEON. This is how it came in for me.
I am hale and hearty, if a bit off the map for a while, and would like to be friends again.
I bought all of John Michael Greer’s books for a long time, then my parents got sick and spent some years dying, I experienced domestic transformations, and moved. It didn’t occur to me that my focus on John Michael Greer was “off,” merely that I was not paying so much attention to the three books a year that were rolling out, nor do I think he should be personally hooted at — any more than usual — for everything that happens to his readers.
Now, I have read the first of the JMG Wyrd of Hali manuscripts, and taken a gander at a few pages of Lovecraft — it is on my device, for someday.
Upon first glance, let me say that what stands out to me is The Style. Lovecraft hails from the era I call Decadent Late Victorian, albeit stalwart, and nicely executed. Tight.
It is kind of irksome to speak thus of the ancient mysteries and Chthulhu even in art, outside of ourselves, and the spinoff writers can be neither fish nor fowl with respect to Goetic work of the grand old technique, while the new magic(k) is available as mass media where special effects stretch the limits of what the older workers would call reasonable, while magic still works!
And that is where we stand.
At the same time, do I want to physically acquire mole’s blood, the left wing of a goose, or virgin’s milk? No, I don’t. While a competent Hispanic or Afro-Hispanic worker could translate all of that into yerbas and get the job done with velas with the help of various off-label santos whilst referring to Encyclopedia of Natural Magic JMG.
And a worker of John Michael Greer’s Cabalistic Golden Dawn Circles of Power could work the entire situation in the Vibratory work of the Middle Pillar, eucharists of the planetary Angel, and shape-shifting of the animals in the spell, without hunting down a single mole, goose, or virgin.
I am not claiming to do those things, though I can see the practitioners of the PGM licking their chops — or most decidedly not. We need more layers in the magic, or we will have to Pay for It by messing up our lives. Also, miss cat starts her Hoodoo Rootwork Correspondence Course by asking students to formulate their magical ethics. Hmmmmmm.
Or by working appropriate grade (badge) materials, if GD presumptive.
But that is another mindset.
Lovecraft’s late Victorian literary style would appeal to the followers of Crowley, whose oeuvre is worked with somewhere in your city with great power every day of the week, so we can approach Lovecraft in that vein. Being a canny marketer, JMG no doubt knew that and sought to extend his career into the Thelema crowd while not making waves about either theology or magic.
Sehr gut.
While doing my earliest work in the Lemegeton, I was living in New York, and being an old practitioner of JMG’s work, no doubt was wired into the current, and there were issues with the theatre, so as I sought to write, I found that narrative was more available and science fiction beckoned.
So, with the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, I penned the accompanying piece that turned into a radio play that was then produced by a company located in Seattle, where I was now newly dwelling.
The whole question of Victorian literary style harks back to my training as a writer by having a Master’s degree in English and thereby reading the literary tradition of this language starting with Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, through Latin, and working my way up to the dawn of the present era, forty years ago, of course, but that is how the matter was approached, in the old style of just me, sitting at a scruffy desk. At Brigham Young University, where the laborious Fellows of Sober Scholarship read the canon but weren’t as conversant with the critics, who are the real stars now. I was a college English teacher for seven years. If you asked the me of that era to consider Victorian literature, I/she would say, the esoteric wing of Les Fleurs du Mal is not the best part of Victorian literature. It is an after-thought. Seek what ye shall find in the strong arm of the work. Tennyson would be my choice.
Painting of The Lady of Shalott
Anyone involved in the Thelemic/Scandinavian work should be aware of the pre-Raphaelite painters, for it is partly their style that came to be used in the filmed versions of The Lord of the Rings.
I do not claim to be that involved in the novel show The Wyrd of Hali, though I do respect the way in which it is a great magic(k) for those in the JMG egregore. I have my own writing to do, and do not wish, as Walter Pater would say, “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame” in the middle of more appendages than I currently possess.
Building the Underworld 