Finished reading: The Pseudonomicon by Phil Hine 📚 Phil repeatedly emphasizes that encountering the Great Old Ones is a two-way process. Opening a gateway is easier than closing it, and conventional magical systems cannot contain these entities. The crucial implication for Project Martense is that the invasion is not a failure of the ritual. It is the ritual’s success.
I am presently immersed in the deeper and more obscure researches attendant upon Project Martense. My notebook is chock-full of disparate ideas, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know things will start clicking into place. One idea that’s lodged itself into my grey matter is the possibility of rendering the repulsive seductive. Whether this curious aesthetic perversion shall ultimately find expression in my forthcoming tale of the arcane, I cannot presently say. But should it fail to secure a place therein, I have little doubt that it will insinuate itself into some later and perhaps still more questionable undertaking.
I’ve been perusing Etsy for Lovecraft-related merchandise and came across some wonderful stuff. Take this brass pin of Cthulhu, for example. There is something almost perversely elegant about the little emblem. I might readily wear it to my place of employment, where my unsuspecting associates would admire its curious workmanship, never suspecting the blasphemous cosmic implications concealed within its polished contours. I’ve added it to my shopping cart, where it lies like the dread, sleeping god itself.
Cthulhu is Lovecraft’s most recognizable creature from his weird fiction. Hell, there are adorable plushies of the tentacled Great Old One! But Azathoth, the blind idiot god, is the real shit. I can’t help but feel that having a statue of the Daemon-Sultan on my nightstand would inspire me, if not dragging me one step closer to gibbering insanity. The only thing saving me from certain doom is that this artifact is sculpted from resin, which I cannot abide. I prefer something more substantial to capture the likeness of the Lord of All Things. Bronze, perhaps.
Take this wall relief plaque of the formless protoplasm of a Shoggoth, for example. It’s cast in solid stone-like statuary-grade gypsum cement. It looks like it has heft. And while I suspect it would shatter into a million pieces if I dropped it, I find it more desirable than some 3D-printed trinket.
Whether any of these eldritch objects shall ultimately pass into my possession remains a question for another hour. I have, for the present, more urgent and sinister matters to occupy my faculties.
The researches of Project Martense beckon anew, and I must return to the study of Phil Hine’s The Pseudonomicon in hopes of dark revelation. As Hine himself opines, “Gods do not, generally, have a lot to say, but what they do say, is worth listening to.”
I cannot help but wonder whether the greater peril lies in hearing such utterances, or in discovering, at some unguarded moment, that one has begun to understand them.
I’ve been using Field Notes note books for years. I never thought I’d use them to actually add to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos canon.
I think the tweezers in the Victorinox Swiss Army knives are useless, but today they came in handy. Twice!
Watched: Godzilla Minus One 🍿 Purchased this flick for research for Project Martense. Dutch camera angles! Kaiju emerging through clouds of smoke and debris!
Finished reading: The Dark by Ellen Datlow 📚 Ghost stories about sadness and loneliness. At least in this collection of stories.
Listening to Hate To Go - Take Out Or Delivery by Ministry, their final album. I saw Ministry during their The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour and it ranks as one of the best concert’s I’ve ever seen.
Listening to Too Dark Park by Skinny Puppy. This album still delivers the goods with songs of societal collapse. And Jim Cummins cover art is a Lovecraftian delight.
Director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Norseman, Nosferatu, and the soon-to-be-released Werwulf) makes movies to do his homework. Eggers uses filmmaking as an intense historical and folk-culture research project, obsessively burying himself in manuscripts, archaic dialects, and regional lore to recreate the past. I get it. I write stories so I can do homework.
Last night I wrote notes for PROJECT MARTENSE, which meant doing a deep dive on Azathoth. Who is Azathoth? He’s the supreme deity in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I know, I know, you thought it was Cthulhu. So did I. Azathoth is the blind idiot god, the primordial chaos beyond angled space, in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void. Kind of hard to crochet a plushie out of that.
I copied down Lovecraft’s various descriptions of Azathoth, and I gained a new appreciation for the man’s skill as a writer of cosmic-horror. Check out this sentence:
There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Wild, right?
As I mentioned, I’m still in the note-taking phase, jotting down ideas and lines of dialogue here and there, but I’m thrilled to be playing in Lovecraft’s dread universe. One thing is for sure: I know the occultists in my yarn will jam on drums and flutes during their ritual to summon Azathoth.
Finished reading: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord 📚 Everything I know about The Society of the Spectacle and Situationist International I learned on the streets, so I’m glad I finally read the source material.
Watched: Blood on Satan’s Claw 🍿 Watching this classic folk horror flick for Halloween.
My Halloween Show from way back! 1993! Digitized from a cassettte. Enjoy 🎃
Finished reading: Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow 📚 A mixed bag, but there are some juicy stories in this collection. My favorite was by Michael Shea. Savored his words.
I’ll purchase any release from The Other Forms of Consecrated Life. They’re that kind of a label. Looking forward to listening to this latest album from The Penitential Station.
I’m still in the research phase of Project Martense and came across a YouTube video about Phil Hine’s The Pseudonomicon, hosted by AI using two voices. I think it’s a Google product. Normally, I would stop listening to something like this within the first few seconds, but I couldn’t because the AI-generated voices make the wild topic of using H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in Magick rituals banal.
I began Project Martense this week in earnest.
I’m still waiting for ideas and themes to come together, but so far I know it’s about H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, kaiju, the complete and utter destruction of New York City, and the apocalypse. Great fun!
During the weekend I’ve been researching how chaos magicians incorporate the Cthulhu Mythos into their rituals. First, who knew? Secondly, there are far more articles, essays and books out there about the topic than I expected (see below).
I’ve been test driving the Offprint app to convert the online articles I came across to ePub to read on my Kindle and so far it’s working like a charm. I use Instapaper to read articles on my Kobo but I’m durned if I can figure out how to get my highlights saved to my Obsidian notes, so using Offprint with my Kindle seemed like they way to go. Except I can’t save the highlights from the articles I read only Kindle to Obsidian, either. Curses! If you have advice on how to achieve this on either my Kindle or Kobo without a subscription I would really appreciate it.
Articles
Books
Essays
Finished reading: The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot by Frank Miller 📚 While not at the eye watering detail of Hard Boiled, Geof Darrow kicks kaiju ass illustrating this kinetic comic! Well worth the re-read.
Some bands I can only listen to in the fall. Play them for me in the spring or summer, and they sound ridiculous. Pretentious, even.
But once the temperature drops, the days get shorter, and everything starts dying? Suddenly, they’re brilliant.
So, naturally, I’ve been listening to a steady diet of Misfits, Samhain, and Rudimentary Peni (especially Cacophony), which might be one of the most perfectly autumnal records ever made).
I asked my buddy Keith what he listens to when the season turns, and he came back with Danzig, Mercyful Fate, Type O Negative, HIM, early Cradle of Filth, Amebix, Death in June, and The Devil’s Blood.
Apparently, autumn has a very specific soundtrack, and much of it involves corpse paint, questionable religious imagery, and folk who probably own too many candles.
What bands only make sense to you in the fall?
Finished reading: Practical Magick Ancient Tradition and Modern Practice by Mitch Horowitz 📚
Finished reading: Hard Boiled by Frank Miller 📚 I haven’t read this since it was released in 1990. God Lord, what an experience! It’s a cyberpunk Where’s Waldo chock-full of ultraviolence, pornography, urban decay, and pop culture, illustrated by uber maximalist Geof Darrow. There’s so much detail that I’d need a magnifying glass to take it all in, and each page was nearly headache-inducing. Can’t wait to read it again!
