![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lovecraft And Priestcraft
A friend of a friend is frightened of demons. He puts it down to being a fan of Lovecraft's. And he puts the Lovecraft thing down to his good, old-fashioned Catholic education.
I can't be doing with Lovecraft. I find him completely over the top. He doesn't frighten me because I don't believe in his mythos.
Maybe you need to have been brought up as a certain kind of Christian- traditional Catholic or hell-fire Protestant- to find Lovecraft frightening.
I was brought up as an Anglican with an elusive God who "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform" and so the spook stuff that ruffles my feathers is the hinty, blink-and-you'll-miss-it English ghost story, as purveyed by the likes of M.R. James and Robert Aickman.
I can't be doing with Lovecraft. I find him completely over the top. He doesn't frighten me because I don't believe in his mythos.
Maybe you need to have been brought up as a certain kind of Christian- traditional Catholic or hell-fire Protestant- to find Lovecraft frightening.
I was brought up as an Anglican with an elusive God who "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform" and so the spook stuff that ruffles my feathers is the hinty, blink-and-you'll-miss-it English ghost story, as purveyed by the likes of M.R. James and Robert Aickman.
no subject
During the time he was brooding and planning this project, we began to have cockroaches invade our house, and he did some research and came home with sulphur candles that he'd bought at the drugstore, so he said. He lit them all over the house, and they exuded the most hellish stench. Our cottage seemed (I expound the obvious here) to be overtaken demonically, what with my husband coming his hair down into a point over his forehead and reading The Golden Dawn and talking about his plans, while the house reeked of sulphur.
I began to be terrified and jumpy, unsure if my husband was overtaken already by a demon or whether the babies and I would be--he looked so odd with his pointy hair...
He told me he would be driving down to Atlanta and joining his friends to raise a demon in October. Naturally. I dreaded being alone in the house, with the closets still smelling (and they probably still do) of sulphur...
Close to Halloween, he told me that the plans to cast their spell were off. He didn't explain. I believed everything he said in those days, and I was utterly relieved, because I thought he really could have done it, and maybe brought something unholy home with him.
Now I know that he'd probably made up the entire story.
God, those were dark days. The cockroaches were with us until we moved, and the house still carried its sulphurous odor in deep closets.
I took the children and left him soon afterwards, leaving him and his Golden Dawn books behind in Florida, in a cottage infested with palmetto bugs, which are cockroaches that can fly.
no subject
Your husband's Golden Dawnery was a pose (all magicians are bullshitters) but not only a pose. He probably did manage to attract those cockroaches to himself.
The strongest countercharm to any spell is to laugh at it. Fanatics of every stripe hate humour because it has the power to blow their "reality" to bits.
no subject
If there are demons, does that mean there is "good" versus "evil"? (Perhaps that is too simplistic.) If so, I hope the good side protects my sad, crazy ex-husband from himself.
no subject
Some of them may not be terribly kindly disposed towards us, but I doubt that they're "evil" in the full Miltonic sense of the word.
no subject
Which brings up a point, the personal god, the god who "walks with me and talks with me while the dew is still on the roses."
I wonder sometimes What I am praying to, because I do pray, often, but I am long past God as a male hovering over my head with a hand to His ear, waiting for my requests (my letters to Santa).
I feel I have wrecked my religious life, in that I think of God now in terms of quantum physics and Jung's acausal events, and I don't have a clue what I'm doing anymore.
I sing in the choir and don't think about it, but when (as now, when my sister-in-law is very ill with ovarian cancer) things get rough, I want a "skin face" to tell me not to worry, so I seek out the Something that's waitinf for me in the garden by the rose bushes. Sometimes I almost believe Something's there and caring about me, and then I think, cynically: oh, really?
no subject
I'm confident that there's a life after death. And if there isn't, well, I won't know anything about it, will I?
But these days I don't worry about theology. It's too much like chasing one's own tail. All one ever gets from it are bafflement and frustration.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Ancestral memory perhaps? Haven't the Irish/Scots been Catholic for many many generations now?
no subject
no subject
But before fifteen I couldn't read him at all. Too scary.
no subject
no subject
And now I find lovecraft comforting -- even his most intentionally horrific stories read more like fantasy for me, like tolkein or something. Innsmouth and Arkham are as romantic and strange for me as Lothlorien.
no subject
no subject
There's another friend of the same friend (see above) who reckons Lovecraft is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
I'm beginning to feel I ought to tryhim again...
no subject
When they broke out into the underground vista, it was thrilling!
Most ghost stories of that time (I'm thinking now of Blackwood and of a new favorite, M.R. James) tend to set up a wonderful idea and then chew it to death in long conversations...James in particular jumps over plot points as irrelevant when the transition could have been fun, and also has mysterious references that are never mentioned again, most frustrating: in one I read last week, a grave was surrounded by a high hedge so that no one could go through, but he never explained why.
no subject
The BBC did a series of film adaptions of M.R. James short stories. They're worth seeking out. The best of them is probably O Whistle and I'll Come to You.
no subject