¿LAS PIRÁMIDES SON OBRA DE UNA SUPERCIVILIZACIÓN?

Se usaron bloques de 100 y hasta 200 T. traídos de una cantera a 30 km. Están alineadas perfectamente con los puntos cardinales y el Cinturón de Orión. Los egipcios de esa época ni siquiera conocían el Hierro.

SOLUCIONES

Tú no puedes solucionar unos problemas con el mismo nivel de CONSCIENCIA que los creó. -Albert Einstein

EL HOMBRE QUE PIENSA POR SÍ MISMO

El hombre más peligroso para cualquier gobierno es el capaz de reflexionar... Casi inevitablemente, llegará a la conclusión de que el gobierno bajo el que vive es deshonesto, loco e intolerable. -H. L. Mencken

ESTRUCTURA SOCIAL PIRAMIDAL

Nuestro mundo está organizado de tal modo que una pequeña élite controla al resto a través de una jerarquía de jefes sobre otros jefes hasta llegar a los obreros en la base. El nivel de conocimiento separa a unos niveles de otros. -David Icke

GOBIERNO MUNDIAL O NUEVO ORDEN MUNDIAL

El objetivo de las élites es crear un gobierno mundial dictatorial, fascista, donde el Estado Policial es omnipresente y las libertades individuales no existen. -David Icke

NEGACIONISMO O ESCEPTICISMO CÍNICO

Condenar algo sin investigarlo previamente es la cota más alta de la ignorancia. -Albert Einstein

MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN

La Opinión Pública lo es todo. Si está a tu favor, nada podrá salir mal. Si está en tu contra, nada podrá tener éxito. El que moldea la Opinión Pública tiene un mayor poder que el que hace las leyes. -Abraham Lincoln

RESPONSABILIDAD PERSONAL

Tú debes convertirte en el cambio que quieres ver en el mundo. -Mahatma Gandhi

EL PODER DE LA PROPAGANDA

Debe hacerse tan popular y tan simple que hasta el más estúpido la pueda entender. A la gente se la puede convencer de que el Paraíso es el Infierno, o a la inversa, de que la vida más horrible es el Paraíso. -Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"

REPETIDORES

La mayoría de la gente es OTRA gente. Sus pensamientos son la opinión de otros, sus vidas una imitación, sus pasiones una cita de un libro. -Oscar Wilde

CREENCIAS

En religión y política, la gente casi siempre las adquiere, sin examinarlas, de autoridades que tampoco las han examinado y que, a su vez, las han adquirido de unos terceros cuyas opiniones no valen UNA PUTA MIERDA. -Mark Twain

PIRÁMIDE DE PODER

Es fácil que una pequeña élite controle a una amplia mayoria a través de estructuras jerárquicas donde cada uno se está en su sitio sin moverse y sin interesarse nunca por nada. -David Icke

DEBER

La cobardía pregunta si es seguro, la conveniencia si es cortés, y la vanidad si es popular. Pero la Consciencia pregunta si es JUSTO. Y siempre llega un tiempo donde uno debe tomar una postura que no es nada excepto JUSTA. -M. L. King

911 WAS AN INSIDE JOB!!

¿El atentado del 11-S fue ejecutado por el Gobierno en la Sombra de EEUU a través de infiltrados y aliados al más alto nivel en el ejército, los servicios secretos y los medios de comunicación?

¿MAGOS NEGROS CONTROLAN LA ECONOMÍA MUNDIAL?

¿El Dinero es el único Dios de este mundo porque lo controla TODO? ¿Los banqueros son los nuevos sacerdotes? ¿Los símbolos sagrados y ocultistas en los billetes atraen energías adecuadas a los fines de este clero?

¿EL 11-M FUE UN GOLPE DE ESTADO A FAVOR DEL PSOE?

Hay hechos documentados de sobra que demuestran que ciertos policías, miembros del servicio secreto, periodistas y jueces trabajaron para "dar un golpe de estado mediático" mintiendo, destruyendo pruebas o creando pruebas falsas.

¿ESTAMOS SOLOS EN EL UNIVERSO?

¿Otras especies y civilizaciones nos visitan con frecuencia? ¿Algunos son benéficos, otros son malvados, y la mayoría parece neutral o indiferente? ¿Los gobiernos cierran beneficiosos tratos mientras lo niegan todo?

¿NUESTRAS ÉLITES NO SON HUMANAS?

Con fama de endogámicos, herméticos, arrogantes, de "sangre azul", ¿nuestros líderes y reyes pertenecen a una raza distinta, con amplios y ancestrales conocimientos sobre la Realidad y lo Oculto?

¿NUESTROS POLÍTICOS SON TÍTERES?

¿Gente tan increíblemente estúpida e incompetente trabaja para "Amos Ocultos" que mueven sus hilos y a los que deben pagar los favores recibidos? ¿El "juego político" es una farsa para anestesiarnos?

¿SUPERTECNOLOGÍA EN LA ANTIGÜEDAD?

Es un hecho científico demostrable que ESTO no lo pudieron hacer tipos con lianas, troncos y herramientas de bronce. Tampoco podemos reproducirlo con nuestra tecnología actual.

lunes, 19 de agosto de 2013

Necronomicon -- shedding some light on Lovecraft's sources

Fuente:

http://www.esotericarchives.com/necronom/necronom.html

Información:

Necronomicon -- shedding some light on Lovecraft's sources

Joseph H. Peterson, © 1995, 2003.

Synopsis:

If we examine H. P. Lovecraft's use of the name "Azathoth", I believe we can shed some light on his probable source of information on the Necronomicon, namely John Dee's partial English translation.
Notes:
American author Howard P. Lovecraft was known for featuring sinister ancient texts in his horror fiction. His biographers have documented some of his texts as genuine, such as Borelli's De Motu Animalium and Johann Trithemius' Polygraphia, (Oppenheim, 1518). Lovecraft apparently was familiar with some of the texts only through secondary sources. Such is thought to be the case with Raufft's De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis which Lovecraft almost certainly learned about through Calmet's Dissertation upon the Apparitions of Angels, Daemons, and Ghosts, ... (London, 1759).1 Still other texts mentioned in his stories are generally regarded as Lovecraft's own inventions. Many of his stories draw on a common 'mythos' which he associated with the prototypical evil book, the Necronomicon. However, it is not entirely clear whether he was drawing on original source material, secondary sources, or his own imagination for this mythos.1. See William Scott Home, 'The Lovecraft "Books": Some Addenda and Corrigenda' in The Dark Brotherhood and other pieces (Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1966, pp. 134-152). Calmet's book has recently been republished in abridged form as The Phantom World (Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2001).
I believe one key to understanding Lovecraft's Necronomicon mythos can be found in his 'History of the Necronomicon,' where he states that "a translation made by Dr. Dee was never printed."22. August Derleth, Dark Brotherhood, p. 263.
John Dee (1527-1608), perhaps best known as Queen Elizabeth I's scientific advisor, left an enormous literary output, much of which was never meant to be published.3 Dee assembled one of the most impressive libraries of his time, many of his volumes being rescued from then-recently-defunct Catholic monasteries. Even in his own time Dee had a reputation for being involved with sinister magical practices. Indeed much of his library was kept secret and separate from his public library because it was dangerous to possess such texts. Fortunately, many of the original volumes from Dee's bibliotheca externa, as well as his secret occult library, have been identified through the meticulous research of Julian Roberts and Andrew Watson.4 This was largely possible because Dee usually left copious notes in the margins of his books, including some very characteristic symbols.53. William H. Sherman, John Dee, The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1997, pp. 116-117).

4. Julian Roberts and Andrew Watson, John Dee's Library Catalogue(Oxford, 1992).

5. For example, a bracket shaped like a face used to indicate alchemical passages. Dee also used a symbol described by Sherman as his 'ladder symbol'; this is seen in the margins of a 13th century manuscript of Liber Iuratus (Sloane Mss. 313) which identifies it as coming from Dee's secret library.
Dee apparently regarded the Necronomicon, or Ars Necronomica ('The art of controlling [spirits of] the dead') as an extension of Ars Pyronomica ('the art of controlling the fire'). The latter is an obscure alchemical process; in the terminology of spiritual alchemy it refers to controlling one's astral body.Josten explains the latter in his introduction to Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica:
"In another dark passage, which alludes to the philosophers' mercury and its replacement by the Sun, i.e., gold, Dee asserts that this operation (which is the final stage in the transmutation of metals) can no longer be performed in the present age, as it was in the past performed by some great experts, unless indeed one let the work be governed by a certain soul which has been severed from its body by the art of controlling the fire (ars pyronomica), a work very difficult and fraught with dangers because of the fiery and sulphurous fumes which it occasions [Ibid., f. 14v; below, p. 165.]."6
6. C. H. Josten, A Translation of John Dee's "Monas Hieroglyphica", Ambix, Vol. XII, 1964, p. 100-101.
The passage Josten refers to is from Dee's Theorem XIII:
"In our present age we cannot perform this, unless we let this golden work be governed by a certain soul that has been separated from [its] body by the art of controlling the fire [ars pyronomica]. This work is difficult, and also very dangerous because of the fiery and sulphurous fumes which it occasions; but surely that soul will be able to work wonders, tying, no doubt, with bonds that cannot be loosed, Venus and indeed Mars to the disk of the Moon (or at least to that of Mercury), and producing -- in the third place (as they will have it) (to complete our septenary number -- the Sun of the philosophers."7
7. Dee's preface to his Monas Hieroglyphica, in Josten op. cit., p. 165.
It is hard to imagine that Dee regarded ars necronomica any less dangerous than ars pyronomica.
It is not know when or where Dee acquired a copy of the Necronomicon, but it is probably the book he refers to in his Mysteriorum Libri (or magical diaries) as "my Arabik boke." This would place it in his hands in 1583.8 This coincides with the probable date of his translation, since the manuscript contains some notes in Edward Kelley's handwriting (folio 74r) which refer to Singilla, a spirit who is only mentioned once in Dee's Mysteriorum Libri, i.e. in an "action" dated Apr 18, 1583.9 The incomplete state of the translation can be explained simply by the fact that the work was interrupted by the disappearance of the book.10

Edward Kelley's scribblings in Dee's manuscript.

8. On Dee's "Arabik boke", see Peterson, John Dee's Five Books of Mysteries (Red Wheel/Weiser, 2003, p. 15, 40, 353). It was prized by Pontois and described as having "cost Doctor Dye £ 600 ready money as he the deponent did hear himself the said doctor afferm." It somehow disappeared in 1583, and Dee asked the spirits for help in recovering it. It was eventually recovered in 1595 "by gods favor."

9. Peterson, op. cit., p. 356. It is also possible of course that Dee wrote the text much earlier, and Kelley only picked a convenient blank spot between chapters to write.

10. It is also damaged in many places due to careless handling by successive owners, including a maid who used pages under pies and tore out strips to light fires and such. We know this because of the account of how Ashmole came to possess Dee's stash of private occult writings, which is bound with Sloane Mss 3188 in the British Library.
It is this incomplete and fragmentary nature of Dee's manuscript which gives us a clue to Lovecraft's sources. While HPL consistently uses "Azathoth" to refer to a demon of chaos, a comparison of the fuller Latin text of the Necronomicon with Dee's manuscript shows that there are actually two separate beings with similar-sounding names ("Az" and "Aza-Thoth"). This is not at all apparent from the Dee manuscript alone.

Latin manuscript of Necronomicon, ca. late 14th or early 15th century.

The Necronomicon, in a short section cataloging various demons, clearly names Az as the "blind demon":
"The blind demon Az sits on the throne of Chaos. It is he who swallows everything, and when in the end he finds the world is nought, he eats himself.Asto-vidad is the evil flyer who seizes the life; as it says that, when his hand strokes a man it is lethargy, when he casts it on the sick one it is fever, when he looks in his eyes he drives away the life, and they call it death. The demon of the malignant eye is he who will spoil anything which men see, when they do not say 'in the name of Yog-Sothoth.'
....
With every one of them are many demons and fiends cooperating, to specify whom a second time would be tedious; demons, too, who are furies (rabei), are in great multitude it is said. The demons of ruin, pain, and decrepitude, producers of vexation and bile, revivers of grief, the progeny of gloom, and bringers of stench, decay, and vileness, who are many, very numerous, and very notorious; and a portion of all of them is mingled in the bodies of men, and their characteristics are glaring in mankind." - (Book 1, ch 28; pg 110 ff of Dee's Ms.)
Later, this demon is mentioned as a sole companion of the 'Evil One' after other evil spirits have been conquered:
"Then two fiends (diaboli) remain at large, the Evil One and Az." - (Book 1, ch 30; Dee Ms. pg 128.)
This being is wholly distinct from Aza-Thoth, who seems to be some kind of legendary king and sorcerer who has both human and demonic ancestry:
"Aza-Thoth was the son of Khrutasp, son of Zainigau, son of Virafsang, ... son of Druiaskan, son of the Evil One." - (Book 1, ch 31; not found in Dee Ms.)
He currently lies bound but will eventually break free and lay waste to the earth, as seen elsewhere in the Necronomicon:
"After the apostate shouts like this, and because of it, Aza-Thoth stands up before him, but through fear of the likeness of Fraidaun in the body of Fraidaun, he does not first remove those fetters and stake from his trunk until the Evil One removes them. And the vigor of Aza-Thoth increases, the fetters being removed from his trunk, and his impetuosity remains; he swallows down the apostate on the spot, [here Dee's manuscript, pg. 233, breaks off] and rushing into the world to perpetrate evil, he commits innumerable grievous sins; he swallows down one-third of mankind, cattle, sheep, vegetation, and commits grievous devastation." - (Book 4, ch 3.)
This person seems to be the same as 'Aza-Citra', because on the next page of the Latin codex we read:
"And, afterwards, when the twelfth millennium comes, through Hucedar-mah the creatures become more progressive, and he utterly destroys Aza-Citra."
This also may provide a clue as to the meaning of his name, since *Aza-Chithra can be translated 'Spawn of Az', if we assume Middle Persian loan words in Alhazred's (lost) Arabic original.
Finally, there's another interesting allusion to Aza-Thoth in a passage which Alhazred uncharacteristically wrote in the first person (the Medieval Latin seems to be a little faulty here too):
"When I issued from the sweat, and raised my eyes, I saw the world when it was dark as night; on the whole earth were snakes, scorpions, lizards (stelliones), and noxious creatures of many kinds; and so the other kinds of quadrupeds stood among the reptiles; every approach of the whole earth was as though not as much as a needle's point remained, in which there was no rush of noxious creatures. There was the coming of a planetary star (?) into planetary conjunction, and the moon and planets in fours and fives; many dark forms with the face and curls of Aza-Thoth suffered punishment in company with certain aliens; and I was amazed at calling the wicked out. Lastly, he (the Evil One) came up to the fire, and mingled darkness and smoke with it." - (Book 2, ch 2; pg 162 of Dee's Ms.)
I believe this is strong evidence that HPL did not have access to the fuller text as preserved in the Latin edition, and most likely had only seen Dee's manuscript.
:-) JHP 

Dee's translation of Necronomicon


Seal of Cthulhu



IV. EL NECRONOMICON: UN COMENTARIO - por Robert Turner

Fuente:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/necronomicon/necronomicon_esp3c.htm

Información:

IV. EL NECRONOMICON: UN COMENTARIO
por Robert Turner
Me sentí interesado por primera vez en el Necronomicon hace algo más de cinco años después de que el tema llamase mi atención a través de un encuentro casual con las dos obras extrañamente inspiradoras deHoward Phillips Lovecraft. Todo empezó cuando un amigo me hizo llegar un ejemplar de The Hounter of the Dark(1). Con la primera lectura rápida quedé fascinado por la idea de que Lovecraft quizá había basado su enigmático libro de magia en algún texto mágico auténtico. Durante las siguientes semanas leí la colección completa de los escritos de Lovecraft, acumulando un archivo de detalladas notas relacionadas con el llamado Mito Cthulhu. Poco a poco me fui dando cuenta de que existía un hilo de continuidad que discurría a lo largo de toda la estructura, que unía los principales conceptos mitológicos y mágicos para formar un conjunto completo. Los libros de magia de la antigüedad, la tradición de brujería de Nueva Inglaterra, la magia de Oriente y de la Europa medieval, resultaron ser las características imperantes del arcano de Lovecraft, hábilmente integradas y ensambladas bajo un título único: “El Necronomicon”.



Lovecraft atribuye el origen del libro a Abdul Alhazred, un loco poeta árabe del Yemen que se dedicó a escribir la obra en el año 950 de nuestra era, en Damasco. Se dice que el texto árabe original del,0ecronomicon ha pasado por varias traducciones, pretendiéndose que la última de ellas es una española del siglo XVII y atribuyéndose una versión inglesa al celebrado filósofo y mago isabelino, Dr. John Dee(1527-1608).



Desde la muerte de Lovecraft en 1937, han visto la luz varios manuscritos que pretenden ser el Necronomicon, siendo el más prometedor de ellos el descubierto por L. Sprague de Camp en el norte del Iraq(2). El códice de Camp fue desenterrado en las tumbas de Duria y estaba escrito totalmente en los caracteres crípticos del antiguo duriano (una forma poco corriente del sirio), considerado durante algunos años por muchos ocultistas como el verdadero Necronomicon. A pesar de que la reciente labor de investigación realizada por Carl Tausk en Viena ha demostrado otra cosa, se ha comprobado que el texto (AL AZIF) contiene fórmulas mágicas y saber antiguo que lo relacionan con una tradición similar si no idéntica.



Durante algún tiempo busqué en vano un patrón mítico básico que reflejara con un alto grado de precisión los conceptos incorporados a los Mitos Cthulhu. Sentía instintivamente que las leyendas de cualquier cultura deben contener la clave de lo que esperaba fuese la verdadera interpretación de estos asombrosos misterios. Ninguna parecía llenar el marco por entero, ya que a todas ellas o bien les faltan detalles y antigüedad, o bien están completamente oscurecidas por un impenetrable velo de racial simbolismo indígena. Necesitaba algo que estuviese más cercano a la fuente, un mito de creación realmente antiguo, algo primordial y libre de elaboraciones perturbadoras.



Como de costumbre, la respuesta que había estado buscando apareció indirectamente y de una forma por completo inesperada. Mientras leía el ensayo crítico de Colín Wilson sobre H.P. Lovecraft en The Strength to Dream(3) me encontré con una referencia a The Call of Cthulhu y el siguiente comentario:

“...el relato parece pertenecer más bien a la Doctrina Secreta de Madame Blavatsky con sus mitos de la Atlántida y Lemuria”.
¡Era esto! Mi proceso mental funcionó, más o menos, de forma:
Blavatsky = la Doctrina Secreta = The Book of Dzyan, el libro más antiguo del mundo.
La vasta obra de Madame BlavatskyThe Secret Doctrine (4) es, de hecho, y en general, un comentario ampliado del libro de Dzyan que, a su vez, se cree que es un extracto fragmentario del Maní Loumbourm, el gran depositario de escrituras sagradas y secretos mágicos atribuidos a los dzugarianos, una raza hace mucho tiempo desaparecida que una vez habitó en las regiones montañosas del norte del Tíbet.

Un examen del texto reveló lo que yo había estado buscando. Se trataba de una serie de versos o “estrofas” narradas en términos bastante abstractos y, sin embargo, puros, acerca de cómo una vez la Tierra estuvo poseída por extraños seres caóticos e increíbles monstruos que, se afirmaba, habían traspasado la brecha desde otros universos en tiempos incalculablemente antiguos. Las estrofas continúan relatando la forma en que estos “otros” entes fueron finalmente expulsados del universo manifiesto por Ia intervención de Fuerzas aliadas a la causa del Orden.


En varios de sus cuentos, Lovecraft hace referencia al Libro de Dzyan y a fragmentos tales como:

“...las llamas vinieron... Rodearon a las Formas que tenían dos y cuatro caras. Combatieron contra los Hombres-Cabra y los Hombres con Cabeza de Perro, y los de cuerpo de pez... (Ellos)... poseyeron a los gigantes animales hembra. Y les engendraron razas mudas... Engendraron monstruos. Una raza de monstruos cubiertos de pelo rojo ensortijado andando a cuatro patas... Construyeron ciudades gigantescas de tierras raras y metales... Tallaron sus propias imágenes, a Su imagen y semejanza, y las veneraron... vinieron las primeras grandes mareas. Se tragaron los sietes grandes islas, las serpientes que volvieron a descender, que hicieron las paces con el Quinto, que lo enseñaron e instruyeron...”
(extracto de las estrofas 2, 8, 11 y 12).
En estos fragmentos llaman la atención por los grandes paralelismos con los mitos que rodearon la llegada de los Grandes Antiguos a la Tierra, sus actos de creación, batallas con otras formas primarias y la alianza final con el Engendro Cthulhu. Las estrofas 11 y 12 tratan de la expulsión final de los Grandes Antiguos por parte de los Dioses Mayores:
“Todo lo sagrado fue salvado (las criaturas naturales de la Tierra j, y lo no sagrado fue destruido (sus formas fueron dispersadas al vacío). Los color de Luna» se marcharon para siempre”(5).
Por tanto, en el Book of Dzyan sentí que había descubierto un telón de fondo mitológico algo fragmentario pero adecuado a los Mitos Cthulhu. Se dice que en el Necronomicon figura un patrón fundamental estrechamente relacionado con el cuerpo del Saber Mayor.


Mi siguiente tarea consistió en considerar el posible contenido del infamante texto de Al-hazred. Aunque en principio el libro árabe debe considerarse como básicamente nigromántico y relacionado con la evocación de entes malignos, caos, oscuridad y desorden, algunos elementos redentores hacen sentir su presencia a través de la coexistencia de fórmulas dedicadas a subyugar a los poderes demoníacos. Esto último podría indicar un alineamiento con los trabajos tradicionales de magia que constituyen el Ciclo Salomónico, y fue a estos a los que dirigí mi atención.



El texto original del Necronomicon, conocido como Al Azif, se cree. que fue escrito en el siglo X árabe. Por tanto, limité mi línea de investigación inicial a los libros de magia que se sabe han existido en este período histórico. En la supuesta era de Alhazred hay tres tratados mágicos principales con sus correspondientes derivados que. caracterizan el estilo del ocultismo de aquella época: en primer lugar, el célebre Kitab-al-Ihud(6), un misterioso manuscrito árabe del que se dice fue presentado al rey Salomón por el Demonio Asmodeo; después, las primeras versiones árabes del notable Key of Solomon, que más tarde tuvo una importante influencia en el renacimiento europeo de la magia; y en tercer lugar, la más curiosa compilación de escritores hebreos y arameos (con notas marginales en árabe), The Sword of Moses(7).


Este último texto debe considerarse el más adecuado como adición al Necronomicon. La fecha de Sword of Moses no se ha establecido de forma positiva, aunque tenemos pruebas de su existencia a principios del siglo XI, según se menciona en la correspondencia entre ciertos supuestos magos que vivían en la ciudad tunecina de Kairouan y el jefe Haya Gaon de la gran escuela de Babilonia. Este último murió en 1037(8). En el mismo contexto que The Sword of MosesGaon se refiere a otros dos libros de hechicería: The Great and SmalI Heavenly Halls y The Lord of the Law,
“llenos de nombres y sellos tan terroríficos, que han tenido espantosos efectos sobre los que no tienen nombre y del uso de los cuales se han sobrecogido los anteriores a ellos...”.
Los conocidos “libros negros” titulados Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses(9) son mencionados por Lovecraft en sus relatos. Si se considera la relación entre estas obras (basadas en versiones latinas alteradas deKey of Solomon o ciertos textos hebreos poco conocidos,’, The Leyden Papyrus(10) (un antiguo libro de magia egipcio que se considera que forma parte de un todo con el Eigth Book of Moses y The Sword of Moses(que se cree contiene el Ninth and Tenth Books (11) de la serie) surge con fuerza un sistema mágico estrechamente relacionado con el Necronomicon.


El contenido de la serie mosaica de libros de magia trata casi exclusivamente de la magia maligna. El siguiente ejemplo extraído de The Sword of Moses es típico por las diversas maldiciones de muerte que se incluyen en los textos:

“Yo te llamo, espíritu maligno, espíritu cruel espíritu despiadado. Yo te llamo, espíritu malo, que te sientas en el cementerio y te llevas la curación del hombre. Ve y coloca un nudo en la cabeza de 0N, en sus ojos, en su boca, en su lengua, en su garganta, en su tráquea; pon agua ponzoñosa en su vientre...”(12).
Otras fórmulas místicas revelan la forma de hacer saltar montañas en fragmentos, pasar a través del fuego sin quemarse, producir ceguera y hablar con la muerte. Abundan los sellos mágicos y personajes místicos junto a innumerables encantamientos compuestos casi por entero de palabras desconocidas apenas pronunciables y nombres como “Kso’ppghiel N’mosnikttiel y Skd Huzi”(13) ; nombres muertos pertenecientes a otras épocas remotas y completamente extintas que se reflejan en el título Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names.


Además de la influencia de los antiguos textos mágicos, es evidente que la concepción de Lovecraft del Necronomicon y de los Mitos emparentados con él deben mucho a las tradiciones ocultas de tiempos más recientes. Hasta ahora no he podido trazar, con un mínimo de certeza, la exacta naturaleza de la evidente conexión de Lovecraft con el moderno Esoterismo Occidental, pero parece bastante verosímil que se haya establecido a través de la comunicación con los escritores Algernon Blackwood y Arthur Machen. Tanto Blackwood (1869-1915) como Machen (1863-1947) eran Iniciados en la Orden Hermética del Amanecer Dorado (una fraternidad mágica que floreció en Inglaterra con el cambio del siglo) y ambos eran adeptos a la corriente del saber oculto tan poderosamente ilustrado por Lovecraft.



Muchas de las bárbaras evocaciones y nombres de particular estructura gramatical que tanto abundan en los Mitos Cthulhu pueden ser seguidos hasta un origen parecido al de aquellas extrañas entonaciones llenas de trabalenguas, conocidas por los ocultistas con el nombre de enoquiano, la columna vertebral del sistema de magia del Amanecer Dorado. Las Invocaciones Enoquianas (o Claves) tuvieron su origen en los experimentos ocultistas del Dr. John Dee y su principal vidente Sir Edward Kelly, las cuales están anotadas en la vasta obra de Dee: Liber Mysteriorum (14).


Los cuarenta y ocho(15) encantamientos mágicos, recibidos a través de médium en el año 1584, están escritos en un idioma extraterrestre de una compleja estructura gramatical y se cree que con su empleo, el hombre puede pasar más allá de la esfera de las limitaciones físicas, convocar espíritus para que cumplan sus órdenes y aprender todos los misterios del tiempo y el espacio. La referencia de Lovecraft a la traducción inglesa que el Dr. Dee hizo del Necronomicon en The Dunwich Horror, asumió de pronto una nueva y apasionante importancia en mis investigaciones al descubrir en la Colección Harleian de Manuscritos del Museo Británico una carta escrita a Dee por un erudito desconocido (fechada en 1573) que se refería a “la ciudad de Donwiche” {la antigua forma de escribir Dunwich) (16) parcialmente sumergida en el mar(17}.

Desde luego, esto último podría parecer casual, pero si se considera el hecho de que la traducción del Necronomicon de John Dee sólo aparece en The Dunwich Horror y que la ciudad de Dunwich en Inglaterra está casi a la misma distancia de Londres que su doble ficticio del norte de Massachusetts lo está de New London, Connecticut, aproximadamente 120 km. en cada caso, va perfilándose un patrón definido. ¿Es el Dunwich del cuento de Lovecraft una reconstrucción, una réplica geográfica de aquella ciudad de Inglaterra que mereció el interés del misterioso Dr. Dee? ¿Fueron las veladas referencias de Dee a ciertos elementos extraños hallados entre las ruinas de la antigua Dunwich lo que excitó la curiosidad de Lovecraft?

En la antigüedad, Dunwich fue llamada Sito Magnus por los romanos, el Lugar del Amo, una región rica en tesoros arqueológicos. Los documentos posteriores de Dee dan cuenta de un misterioso sepulcro descubierto en Dunwich después de la demolición de la ruinosa iglesia de San Juan. La tumba contenía una gran piedra curiosamente conformada a semejanza del cuerpo humano. Dentro del hueco interior de la piedra yacía un cadáver vestido extrañamente que, al ser tocado, se deshizo inmediatamente’ en un fino polvo(18).


Es extraño observar que, incluso hasta hoy en día, al muerto de la antigua Dunwich continúa negándosele la paz en su tumba, ya que los persistentes estragos del mar profanan los pocos cementerios de la ciudad que han quedado. De la pared del acantilado a menudo caen a las olas esqueletos humanos acompañados algunas veces de una lluvia de huesos(19). 

Tanto Dee como Lovecraft sostuvieron que en algunas regiones de la Tierra confluían perturbaciones elementales y campos de energía misteriosa. Dunwich parece que exista simultáneamente en los planos de la realidad y de la imaginación, y cada aspecto evoca una “atmósfera” común de “cosa diferente” al enlazar las mentes de dos hombres separados en el tiempo por un lapso de más de tres siglos.


Cuanta más evidencia obtengo, más convencido estoy de que Lovecraft estudió, efectivamente, transcripciones de diversos escritos de Dee junto con textos de un significado mágico general, los cuales pudieron haberle sido transmitidos por Blackwood o Machen durante los primeros años de este siglo, y que el Necronomicon se refiere a diversos textos relacionados entre sí y no a una obra única. Textos paralelos a muchos de los más importantes libros mágicos pueden hallarse tanto en la Biblioteca del Congreso como en la famosa colección de la Universidad Brown, en donde Lovecraft pudo haber estudiado mientras daba forma a sus Mitos Cthulhu. Pero además de su conocimiento de los textos mágicos existentes, Lovecraft demuestra algo más: hay indicios de un claro acceso a secretos “Interiores”, secretos que durante su vida permanecieron sin revelar a nadie excepto a un selecto grupo de Altos Iniciados.

En su novela The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Lovecraft emplea con gran efecto el simbolismo de Caput y Cauda Draconis, la Cabeza y la Cola del Dragón Luna, combinado con una fórmula de transformación mágica de naturaleza notablemente similar a un rito alquimista realizado por los magos del Amanecer Dorado. A pesar de que Lovecraft no era un Iniciado en el estricto sentido de la palabra, es evidente que se había ganado la confianza de los que lo eran, según se demuestra en el ejemplo anterior y en tantos otros dispersados por toda su obra.


Kenneth Grant, jefe del OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) y autor de varios libros sobre tradición mágica, también sugiere que Lovecraft tenía un contacto específico con las escuelas de misterio occidentales y argumenta que:

“Lovecraft empleaba la ficción para resaltar conceptos de realidad que, en su época, se consideraban demasiado fantásticas para ser presentadas en cualquier otro medio”(20).
Además, Grant da a entender que Lovecraft nunca fue del todo consciente de las fuerzas exteriores que influenciaban sus escritos, y empleó la última parte de su vida intentando vanamente negar su existencia. En conjunto, yo me sentía inclinado a estar de acuerdo con el concepto de los Mitos Cthulhu de Kenneth Grant, ya que muchas de sus ideas reflejaban casi exactamente las mías. La principal diferencia entre los puntos de vista de Grant y los míos reside en nuestras respectivas aproximaciones al Necronomicon, porque a pesar de que Grant cree que los Mitos son válidos en su aspecto oculto, considera que el Necronomicon es ficticio, una invención de la fértil imaginación de Lovecraft.


El propio Lovecraft admite y revela que muchas de las destacadas características de los Mitos Cthulhu le fueron transmitidos por medio de sueños, sueños recurrentes de sorprendente claridad y continuidad.



Muchos ocultistas creen que los sueños de esta naturaleza son el medio que tiene la mente subconsciente para registrar contactos astrales. El fluido etéreo de la Luz Astral es considerado una sustancia semimaterial dotada de una gran plasticidad; un archiva natural que envuelve la Tierra y retiene en su estructura la marca de cada suceso, pensamiento, palabra y acto que se ha producido desde la formación del planeta. La tradición oculta sostiene que este depósito de información, conocido en Oriente como Registros Akashicos, puede ser accesible a voluntad por aquellos que poseen la necesaria habilidad síquica y que, asimismo, pueden manejarse para que proporcione imágenes efectivas mediante la aplicación de la necesaria química mental. Las imágenes de los entes así formados se consideran “Elementos Artificiales”, criaturas formadas por la mente, dotadas de identidad propia y capaces de una existencia indefinida dentro del continuo espacio-tiempo.


Además, una vez se ha creado una tal forma, se cree que proporciona un punto de intersección entre planos, a través de los cuales, cualquier fuerza parecida puede tener acceso a nuestra particular parcela del Cosmos. Por tanto, ¿es qué Lovecraft pobló el Plano Astral con los entes de los Mitos Cthulhu por medio de la referencia subconsciente a los registros Akashicos y, al hacerlo, proporcionó una “puerta de acceso” a través de la cual las mentes de los Seres Exteriores pudieran volver a manifestar su influencia? Los ocultistas sostendrían como cierto que si los Grandes Antiguos estuvieron efectivamente en la Tierra, la Luz Astral debe de haber retenido un registro de su historia y que cualquiera que se arriesgara a hurgar en estos principios podría animar, tanto consciente como inconscientemente, formas astrales estáticas mediante el proceso de constante meditación.

Una vez establecidos, los entes astrales de esta naturaleza aumentan en poder y vitalidad en proporción directa a la cantidad de energía mental enfocada sobre ellos, hasta que, finalmente, alcanzan una etapa de desarrollo que les permite obtener un cierto grado de acción automotivada. Al igual que la histeria en masa de las multitudes, lo que empieza como un pequeño chorro crece rápidamente hasta convertirse en un furioso torrente.


En los tiempos modernos, la principal fuente de información en lo que se refiere al fenómeno de la Luz Astral debe encontrarse en los escritos del famoso ocultista francés Alphonse Louis Constant (18-10-1875), más conocido por el seudónimo de Elifás Levi Zahed.



Levi se refiere a la Luz Astral de varias maneras:

“el OD de los hebreos, el éter electromagnético, el cristal universal de visiones, que sigue la ley de las corrientes magnéticas y está sujeto a la fijación por una proyección suprema del poder de la voluntad, es la primera envoltura del alma y el espejo de la imaginación”(21).
Levi revela además que la Luz Astral es el hábitat natural de “aquellas larvas fluídicas conocidas en la antigua teúrgia con el nombre de “Espíritus Elementales”(22). La Ciencia Oculta sostiene que si entes no reprimidos formados en el pensamiento son atraídos por la fuerza de la vida de su creador como una aguja por un imán, tiene lugar, con infernal deleite, una absorción de sus energías espirituales hasta producir el completo agotamiento del fluido de su vida. ¿Estuvo Lovecraft poseído por envolturas misteriosamente animadas que buscaban su entrada desde el vacío?

El ataque psíquico de esta naturaleza se manifiesta, en primer lugar, por un estado general de hipersensibilidad mental, seguido de un sentimiento de conciencia extrañamente orientado que aumenta a medida que la víctima ajusta inconscientemente su proceso mental al de su compañero de alma no invitado. Se vislumbran mundos extraños, revelados por primera vez durante el sueño, que empiezan a manifestarse por encima del horizonte de la mente en vigilia; se producen formas agudas y peculiarmente distorsionadas de audición, así como una ampliación de la visión que conducen a la posibilidad de captar sonidos que están más allá del espectro normal y a un sentido no lineal, de la geometría del espacio. Todos estos elementos son primordiales en las estructuras de Lovecraft y se revelan en sus escritos en términos que no admiten duda. En la introducción de este libro, Colín Wilson hace referencia al estado de letargo físico casi permanente en que estuvo sumergido Lovecraft al final de su vida.

Sus tensiones mentales, así como una poderosísima sensación de opresión, estaban asociadas a extraños raptos de espíritu, visiones, sueños de paisajes imposibles e increíbles ciudades. En resumen, Lovecraft presentaba todos los síntomas tradicionales de un alma apresada en una trampa de las fuerzas del mal.


Es sabido que Lovecraft experimentaba una gran dificultad para retener el calor corporal, particularmente en la última parte de su vida, cuando su odio hacia las temperaturas a todas luces moderadas se convirtió en obsesión. ¿Otro síntoma de posesión demoníaca? Cito las palabras de Elifás Levi:

“Dichas larvas absorben el calor vital de las personas de buena salud y agotan rápidamente a los débiles. De ahí viene la leyenda de los vampiros, entes de terrible realidad que, como es bien sabido, se han manifestado de vez en cuando. Esto explica también porque en las proximidades de los médium, que son personas obsesionadas por las larvas, se produce un descenso de temperatura de la atmósfera(23).
Lovecraft estaba familiarizado con las obras de Levi, pero ¿le llegó demasiado tarde la comprensión clara de las palabras del Amo? En The Case of Charles Dexter Ward(24} leemos:
“Aquí, esto está escrito exactamente igual a como lo anotó la Sra. Ward de memoria, ni tampoco hasta entonces le había sido mostrada la autoridad en las páginas prohibidas de Elifás Levi; pero su Identidad era inconfundible, y palabras tales como Sabaot, Metraton, Almonsin y Zariatnamik transmitían un estremecimiento de espanto al investigador que había visto y sentido tanta abominación cósmica sólo a la vuelta de la esquina”.
Cabria preguntar: ¿por qué las obras de un cabalista cristiano como el venerable Elifás Levi son calificadas de “prohibidas”? ¿Había tropezado Lovecraft con la raíz de sus pesadillas y descubierto que “aquello que estaba a la vuelta de la esquina” era demasiado para ser soportado o tan sólo admitido por él mismo?


Es evidente que en los últimos escritos de Lovecraft prevalece un elemento de temor y que, rápidamente y en alarmante “crescendo”, se va perfilando el resurgimiento final de un enraizado horror, un horror de los que él mismo evocó tan convincentemente, a la vez que su incapacidad para controlar las fuerzas desencadenadas. Los términos “repugnante”, “escalofriante”, “prohibido” y “espantoso” se emplean con una frecuencia cada vez mayor a medida que el modelo de los Mitos se acerca a su conclusión. En su relato final, escrito en 1937, el año de su muerte, Lovecraft narra un cuento aleccionador sobre la difícil situación a la que siempre envuelven los impenitentes diletantes de las artes nigrománticas. La quema de libros prohibidos, la transfiguración del heredero del hechicero, la posesión de un alma por otra, todos son signos de advertencia que ponen de manifiesto el extremado peligro de los que, intencionadamente o no, pisan el camino de las tinieblas (25).



Cuando el panteón de entes que hay en el Necronomicon se contempla desde el punto de vista de lo oculto, debe presentar problemas de interpretación debidos a su misma singularidad. Los estudiosos del Sistema enoquiano no tendrán ninguna duda al encontrarse con dificultades similares e intentar establecer una correlación entre el extraño conjunto de espíritus de Dee y los que se citan en otros libros mágicos existentes. Los entes que están clasificados en el Necronomicon, al igual que los del sistema de Dee, pueden considerarse exteriores al tiempo reconocido para las tradiciones mágicas y cabalísticas, aunque en cierta manera, conectados con él.



Al tratar con las problemáticas fuerzas etéreas de esta naturaleza, siento que la mejor aproximación hacia la construcción de una jerarquía inteligible es a través de un cuidadoso examen de las correspondencias elementales atribuidas a cada potencia mundial. Una vez establecida una tabla de relaciones elementales, el sistema puede elaborarse después con la adición de las referencias astrológicas y geográficas asociadas.



En un intento de clasificar la naturaleza de las diversas fuerzas nombradas en el presente libro de magia, presento la siguiente compilación para que sirva de ayuda a los estudiantes de los oculto:

LOS GRANDES ANTIGUOS


El Panteón en orden de presidencia

  • AZATHOT:
    La morada del Caos Primigenio en el centro del infinito, sin forma e incognoscible. El Primer Motor en la Oscuridad; la Confusión, el Demoledor del pensamiento y de la forma. La antítesis de la creación; el aspecto básicamente negativo del Fuego Elemental referible, astrológicamente, al arcaico Leo y, en la esfera terrestre, al Oculto Sur.
  • YOG-SOTHOT:
    El Todo-Uno, Co-regente de Azathot; el vehículo del Caos. La manifestación Exterior de la Elocución Primaria, la Puerta al Vacío, a través de la cual deben entrar “Los de Fuera”. La Exterior inteligencia activa de El, el que nunca quedará encerrado en la impenetrable oscuridad. La positiva manifestación del Fuego, marcado en el firmamento por el Signo dei León, pero más particularmente por la estrella conocida por los antiguos Arabes como Al Kalb al Asad, y por los romanos como Cor Leonis, el Corazón del León, que está dentro del pecho del celestial animal. En el mundo, su situación cardinal es la del Sur inmediato.
  • NYARLATHOTEP:
    El Caos reptante, el Eter que media entre los diversos aspectos de los Grandes Antiguos. El receptáculo de su Voluntad combinada. Su mensajero y siervo, capaz de existir en cualquier figura y forma, en cualquier región del tiempo y del espacio. Astrológicamente relaciono a Nyarlathotep con la Vía Láctea, esa mística franja de nebulosa luminosidad que se extiende a través de los cielos con una inclinación de 63º con respecto al ecuador celeste y que indica el círculo de nuestra galaxia. Los antiguos acadios atribuían a este torrente de pálida luz a su Mito de la Gran Serpiente, y los polinesios la llamaban el largo y azul tiburón comedor de estrellas. En la India se la conocía como Nagavithi, el Camino de la Serpiente.
  • HASTUR:
    La Voz de los Antiguos. El Vengador y Destructor, el Caminante sobre el Viento (el Wendigo de la tradición de los indios pieles rojas). El que no debe ser nombrado. En la esfera de los Elementos Hastur está asignado al Aire, el Elemento de con tienda, y entre las constelaciones, indicado por el Signo de Acuario, un asterismo dedicado a regir el Trígono Etéreo. En el aspecto terrestre, Hastur está asignado al Este.
  • CTHULHU:
    Señor de los Profundos, Inicia dar de Sueños. Cthulhu está representado entre los Elementos por el Agua y, astrológicamente, por la forma del Escorpión, conocido por los acadios como Girtab, El Agarrador o Aguijoneador, ante el cual hay que inclinarse. Geográficamente, Cthulhu está referido al Oeste, el lugar de la muerte en la religión de los antiguos Egipcios.
  • SHUB-NIGGURAT:
    El Gran Macho Cabrío Negro de los Bosques con un Millar de Jóvenes. La manifestación Terrenal del Poder de los Antiguos. El Dios del Aquelarre de las Brujas. La naturaleza Elemental de Shub-Niggurat es la de la Tierra, simbolizada por el signo de Tauro en los cielos y, en el mundo, por la Puerta del Viento del Norte.
LOS DIOSES MAYORES


Aunque en el texto del Necronomicon se presuponen varios seres benignos, sólo se cita de forma explícita el nombre de Nodens, el Señor del Gran Abismo. El hábitat natural de los Dioses Mayores se considera que está en una región próxima a la estrella Betelgeuse, en la constelación de Orión. En el gran almanaque de los astrónomos árabes, conocido por Tablas Alfonsinas, posteriormente traducido por entendidos europeos como Los Libros del Saber de Astronomía (26), Betelgeuse se presenta de varias maneras:

  • Al Mankib, el Hombre
  • Al Dhira, el Brazo
  • Al Yad al Yama, la Mano Derecha (del Gigante)
Es interesante observar que Machen se refiere al Señor Nodens en su Great God Pan como un dios con una mano de plata, haciéndose eco de la última de estas designaciones árabes.
Los Dioses Mayores se revelan en la tradición antigua como los protectores de la raza humana, y su gran relación con la humanidad se corrobora después por su signo, que es una forma de Pentagrama Resplandeciente, el Signo Mayor. El Pentagrama es reverenciado por los ocultistas como la Estrella de los Tres Reyes Magos, el símbolo del Hombre, el Microcosmos, divinidad que se manifiesta en forma humana. Mágicamente, se considera que el hombre es una criatura formada por los cuatro elementos Fuego, Aire, Agua y Tierra mediante el poder del Espíritu, el quinto de los elementos, o Elemento Oculto, simbolizados por los cinco puntos del Pentagrama. Por tanto, puede deducirse que el poder del Signo Mayor sobre los Antiguos reside en la relación con una raza de seres henchidos de los cinco Poderes Universales, como oposición a la constitución unielemental de sus agresivos rivales (los Antiguos).

En su libro The Syrius Mystery(27), Robert Temple sugiere que la raza humana pudo haber sido introducida en los beneficios de la ciencia y la civilización por seres venidos de un planeta del sistema planetario de la estrella Sirio. Sirio está en la constelación del Can Mayor y está muy cerca (aparentemente) del “Talón de Orión”, cuya estrella principal es Betelgeuse, en la región de los legendarios Dioses Mayores. ¿Puede representar esta teoría y los paralelismos similares que se reflejan en tantos mitos antiguos la aparición de borrosos recuerdos raciales conectados con la génesis del hombre? ¿Y si fueron efectivamente los Dioses mayores los misteriosos progenitores del hombre?


Esto representa mi concepto inicial del Necronomicon, un libro de escritos y viejas tradiciones que existen principalmente a un nivel subjetivo, aunque en paralelo con varios importantes textos místicos. Un libro de magia compuesto por diversos elementos que yace secretamente enterrado en los oscuros recovecos de la mente humana. Un patrón arquetípico que subraya y mitifica un conjunto da datos mágicos y mitológicos aparentemente inconexos. 

Así las cosas, dejé descansar el tema totalmente desprevenido contra el giro sin precedentes que iban a tomar pronto los sucesos, los cuales alterarían radicalmente mis conclusiones previas sobre los que, seguramente, deben ser 1os textos mágicos más controvertidos y enigmáticos.



Mientras estaba recopilando material para un libro sobre los documentos inéditos de John Dee, encontré un manuscrito críptico del siglo XVI conocido como Liber Logaeth o The Book of Enoch (28). El manuscrito consistía en 101 cuadrados mágicos sumamente complicados, 96 de los cuales constaban de 49 x 49 celdillas y 5 de 36 x 72 celdillas. Todo el conjunto estaba adornado por una serie muy confusa de letras (en alfabeto latino) y números en un orden absolutamente aleatorio. Quedé totalmente desorientado sin saber qué hacer con este manuscrito de Dee tan particular, el cual llevaba el título de Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus, el Sexto Libro de los Santos Misterios(2S). Las diversas referencias al Liber Logaeth en las obras publicadas establecían que Dee empleó el libro a modo de sistema de índice cruzado que le permitía formar otra serie de cuadrados mágicos conocidos como las Tablillas Enoquianas. Si esto era así, ¿por qué esta complejidad? La suma total de las letras de las Tablillas Enoquianas es sólo de 644, por lo que parecía absurdo que fuese necesario un sistema cruzado con más de 240.000 letras solamente para su formación. No, debía de haber otra explicación. El mismo Dee dejó muy poca información en su Sexto Libro Sagrado, aparte de decir que contenía “El Misterio de nuestra Creación, la Edad de muchos años y el fin del Mundo” (30) y que la primera página del libro representaba el caos.



Se me ocurrió que el conjunto podría haber sido en algún tipo de código o sistema cifrado isabelino. Si era así, presentía que no había ninguna probabilidad de que yo fuese capaz de desenmarañar algo de una complejidad tan extraordinaria sin la ayuda de un experto en criptografía. Entonces recordé el éxito del Dr. Donald Laycock, un filólogo australiano que había empleado un ordenador en un esfuerzo para probar la validez del lenguaje enoquiano de Dee. Laycock después de una reunión para beber unas copas en el Club de las Artes Teatrales de Londres, me había explicado, hace algunos años, la elevada concordancia que había observado con su ordenador. Sin embargo, el problema presente era bastante distinto al que fue resuelto por Laycock, porque ahora se trataba de un intento de descifrar un código desconocido sin emplear ni un fragmento de información concreta como guía.



Comuniqué mi apuro en una carta que escribí a Colín Wilson, el cual me respondió poniéndome en contacto con David Langford, un joven experto en ordenadores, el cual me ofreció entusiásticamente su ayuda en el asunto. Pronto se puso en evidencia que David Langford era la persona completamente idónea para la compleja labor que había que desarrollar, no sólo porque tenía acceso a uno de los más sofisticados ordenadores que había disponibles, sino también por sus considerables conocimientos sobre las técnicas isabelinas de cifrado, ya que era investigador de la criptografía baconiana (de Bacon). En su momento le transmití una copia fotográfica del Liber Logaeth de Dee y esperé impacientemente los posibles resultados. Como David Langford ya trata adecuadamente en este libro el laberinto del programa del descifrado, pasaré rápidamente al sorprendente y totalmente inesperado resultado de este trabajo.


Durante los meses en que las páginas del misterioso manuscrito de Dee estuvieron sometidas a un examen metódico y cuidadoso, entre David Langford y yo se cruzó un voluminoso acopio de correspondencia, y los trozos de cada nueva información se analizaron uno por uno como parte del inequívoco e increíble patrón que iba surgiendo lentamente. Desde luego, el manuscrito se había escrito expresamente en clave, con una clave de gran complejidad, y quienquiera que codificara originalmente el manuscrito, dio unos increíbles rodeos para guardar el secreto de su contenido. Las razones para unas precauciones tan elaboradas eran muy fáciles de adivinar, ya que el texto montado, aunque algo inconexo y sin título, podía ser nada menos que un resumen de aquel Necronomicon tan difícil de conseguir. Los nombres de los entes, los lugares y los conceptos mitológicos resultaban casi idénticos a los dados por Lovecraft.


La pregunta era: ¿cómo podía compararse tan estrechamente la descripción de Lovecraft del Necronomicon con nuestro texto recién descubierto? Era inconcebible que antes se hubiese hecho un descifrado del criptograma de Dee sin la ayuda de la moderna cibernética, a menos que alguien, por una casualidad extremadamente remota, hubiese dado con las claves ocultas para su interpretación. Por otra parte, el texto codificado de Dee podía haberse extraído de un manuscrito anterior, un ejemplar del cual podía haber llegado a poder de Lovecraft. Quedan muchos problemas por resolver; si hubiésemos descubierto ciertos fragmentos del verdadero Necronomicon, también hubiera sido perfectamente posible que existiesen traducciones árabes, griegas, latinas y españolas del texto mencionado por Lovecraft. Si así fue, ¿cuál habría sido su suerte? Creemos que nunca sabremos todas las respuestas y, por ahora, no podemos hacer otra cosa que presentar al mundo los frutos de nuestras investigaciones con la esperanza de que algún día otros puedan aportar las piezas finales del rompecabezas metafísico y se complete la historia del enigmático Necronomicon.



En los mitos de cada raza y clima encontramos la huella de los personajes extracósmicos que pululan por las páginas del Necronomicon. En el Himalaya, la leyenda del Hombre de las Nieves sigue viva y continúa siendo resucitada incluso por los más prosaicos miembros de las expediciones montañeras. ¿Es qué desde la prehistoria de la Tierra aún vagan monstruos alienígenas por las silenciosas cimas, se esconden bajo los océanos, o deambulan en la noche por lugares desolados? 

En un antiguo tratado hindú conocido por Rigveda, leemos acerca de Dasyu y Dasala Gente Oscura, los enemigos sobrehumanos de la especie humana que viven bajo tierra; sobre extraños prototipos de la prehistoria descritos como gigantes “altos como montañas”, demonios “como árboles que andan”; y también sobre Rakshasas, el de la cabeza de tigre y el feo Vaitikas, con un ala y un ojo.


El mito peruano habla de los Guachineslos Oscuros o los sin rayo: los habitantes de la Tierra primitiva. La leyenda de los pieles rojas conserva religiosamente a CamazotzSeñor de los Murciélagos, una espantosa criatura híbrida con alas parecidas al cuervo y serpientes saliendo de su cara. En 1686, Robert Plott registra la aparición de luces globulares en el cielo, lluvias de piedras marcadas con trazos lineales, extraños sonidos llevados por el viento que desafían todos los intentos de explicación racional, y el nacimiento de niños “de ningún sexo” con varias cabezas(31). Más recientemente, Charles Fort, un maestro del siglo XX sobre fenómenos inexplicados nos informa a través de sus escritos de que:
“los demonios han visitado la Tierra” y continúan haciéndolo. Durante toda su vida, Fort recopiló más de 40.000 notes sobre temas que van desde guijarros negros no meteóricos que cayeron sobre Wolverhampton, Inglaterra, en el año 1858(32), hasta relatos sobre extrañas ciudades y criaturas con alas de tres metros de largo “andando de forma patosa sobre pies palmeados”(33).
¿Es el hombre, en realidad, el más antiguo o el último de los amos de la Tierra? Quizá sabremos pronto las respuestas, ya que durante las últimas décadas, la Tierra parece que está siendo visitada repetidamente y cada vez con mayor frecuencia por misteriosos intrusos. Desde lugares de Virginia Occidental continúa informándose sobre el Hombre Mariposa, un humanoide oscuro y con alas; monstruos y serpientes de mar llenan los océanos y los lagos; los encuentros OVNI se han convertido en un acontecimiento casi diario, ¿Qué significa todo esto? ¿Es qué la humanidad ha sido de pronto víctima de la ilusión, la histeria y el autoengaño a una escala hasta ahora sin precedentes, o estamos quizá asistiendo a un retorno gradual a aquellas fuerzas que una vez inspiraron a un loco árabe a cantar, bajo una Luna en cuarto creciente, un extraño y raro pareado?


Eso que no está muerto, que puede permanecer eternamente, y con desconocidos eones(34) incluso la muerte puede fenecer.




NOTAS:
(1) The Haunter of the Dark and other tales of horror, H.P. Lovecraft, Gollanez, 1966. (2) Publicado en facsímil con el título Al Azif, con una introducción de L. Sprague de Camp, Owlswick Press, Filadelfia, 1973.
(3) The Strength to Dream, Colín Wilson, Gollanez, 1963.
(4) The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky, 3 vals., The Theosophical Publishing House, Londres 1928. (5) The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky, vols, 1 y 2. Ver también: Man, the Measure of AlI Things, Sri Krishna Prem y Sri Madhava Ashish, Rider, 1969; Man Son of Man, Sri Madhava Ashish, Rider, 19l0. (6) Ver Oriental Magic, Idries Shah, Rider, 1956.
(7) The Sword of Moses, M. Gaster, Samuel Weiser, Nueva York, 1970.
(8) Ibíd, p. 15.
(9) Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, anónimo, editado en EE.UU.
(10) The Leyden Papyrus {conocido por el Papiro Mágico Demótico de Londres y Leiden}.
(11) The Mystery of the long lost 8th, 9th& 10th Books of Acoses, H. Gamache, Sheldon, EE.UU.
(12) The Sword of Moses, M. Gaster, p. 51.
(13) Ibíd, p. 17.
(14) Ver Manuscritos Sloane 3188 y Apéndice Cotton XLYI (Partes 1 y 2), Biblioteca del Museo Británico, Londres.
(15) Algunas veces se añade una invocación sin numerar que hace un total de 49.
(16) La antigua capital de East Anglia, situada entre Southwold y Sizwell en el condado de Suffolk.
(17) Ver Manuscritos Harleian 532, Museo Británico, Londres.
(18) Ibíd.
{19} Ver A guide to Dunwich, Jean J. Carter.
(20) Cults of the Shadow, Kenneth Grant, Muller.
(21) The Story of Magic; Elifás Levi (Trad. por A.E. Waite), Rider, 1963.
(22) Ibíd, p. 104.
(23) Ibíd, p. 106.
(24) The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, H;P. Lovecraft, Panther, 1963.
(25) Ver The Evil Clergyman, H.P. Lovecraft, 1937.
(26) 0. de T. En castellano en el original.
(27) The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, Sidgwick and Jackson.
(28) Manuscritos Sloane 3189, Biblioteca del Museo Británico, Londres. (29) También llamado Liber Mysteriorum l& Sancti) Parallellus 1Yovalisque: El, Sexto Libro de los Misterios y los Paralelos de la primera tierra Sagrada sin cultivar.
(30) Ver A True and Faithful Relation of what passed far many years between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (Ed. Meric Casaubon, 1659), Londres.
(31) The Natural History of Staffordshire, Robert Plott, 1686.
(32) The Book of the Damned, C. Fort.
(33) 0ew Lands. C. Fort.
(34) 0. de T. Entre los gnósticos, cada uno de los Genios Creadores emanados de la Divinidad Suprema. 

Satan, God, H.P. Lovecraft and Other Mephitic Models: An Interview With Paul Laffoley - Red Ice Creations

Fuente:

http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/02feb/paullaffoley.html

Información:


Satan, God, H.P. Lovecraft and Other Mephitic Models: An Interview With Paul Laffoley2006 02 04
By Robert Guffey | paranoiamagazine.com

"Lucifer is this creature who, having received an infinite revelation, believed he was God. That's the first sin of pride. It's also a moment at which the first transsubstantiation occurs. … He becomes a humanoid, but he has an infinite number of physical senses."
"Where Heaven and Hell are, who the hell knows that now? Because we've got so many dimensions going. I don't think one person could ever make a total theological statement about that."

On Valentine's Day, 2004, I attended Paul Laffoley's slide show at Melrose Light Space, a hip art gallery tucked away unobtrusively on the second floor of a Hollywood strip mall, the entire bottom floor of which was populated by abandoned store fronts. The slide show represented an overview of Laffoley's idiosyncratic paintings stretching back well over thirty years. Each slide invariably triggered in Laffoley's mind a fascinating five-minute long monologue about the unusual circumstances under which the painting was conceived and the metaphysical and/or scientific theories that inspired it. Eighty slides were included in the show. By the end of the evening, Laffoley had discussed only about half of them.

Later in the evening, I asked Laffoley what exact percentage these paintings represented in terms of his entire corpus of work. He replied, "About ten percent." This suggests, of course, that he's completed somewhere around 800 paintings in his lifetime, the most celebrated of which have been featured in over 300 exhibitions both nationally and abroad. This would be an impressive body of work for any artist, but particularly for someone whose paintings are as rich in detail as Laffoley's.

Laffoley, an architect by trade, aspires to create paintings that meld both the Dionysian (the purely emotional) with the Apollonian (the purely rational), thus managing to capture the anarchic spirit of a Jackson Pollock within the grid-like confines of an architectural blueprint - a blueprint conceived in the mind of a mad genius obsessed with building only the impossible. Such "impossible" projects include a fully functional time machine called the "Geochronmechane," an interactive painting called the "Thanaton" that helps the viewer project his etheric body into the astral realms, a single family farm designed to resemble the ten Sephiroth and twenty-two paths of the Kabala (complete with trees growing upside down beneath the ground in order to replicate the dark side of the Tree of Life), an immense spherical house composed of genetically-engineered vegetation, and a Christian fundamentalist theme park built in the shape of the Star of David.

After the show, I accompanied Laffoley back to CSU Fullerton where he was serving as the visiting Artist-in-Residence. During the car ride we touched upon numerous other impossible topics. These topics happened to include Laffoley's most important influences, his pantheon of "mephitic models": Paul Laffoley, Sr., R. Buckminster Fuller, Orfeo Angelucci, Leon Theremin, Nikola Tesla, Richard Upton Pickman, H.P. Lovecraft, and Satan himself.

The interview concluded in Laffoley's temporary studio in Santa Ana where he was hard at work on his latest painting, "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The Grand Central Art Gallery in Santa Ana specifically commissioned the painting in order to include it as the centerpiece of their ambitious "100 Artists See Satan" exhibit, which ran from July 3rd to September 19th in 2004. (The painting can be seen at: http://www.grandcentralartcenter.com/gcacPages/Artists/


Our conversation about the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft at the very end of this interview occurred while Laffoley was putting the finishing touches on the marginalia that surrounds the painting. Pickman's central images, interpreted by the artist Arnold Clapman, had yet to be included.


Paul Laffoley
RG: Robert Guffey

PL: Paul Laffoley

RG: During your lecture I noticed a lot of the references you made to certain esoteric scholars. More than once you mentioned Manly P. Hall [author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages and numerous other works of occult philosophy] and C.W. Leadbeater [author of The Hidden Side of Freemasonry and other Theosophical texts]. You mentioned Theosophy a lot as well. How did you first come upon these alternative systems of thought?

PL: To me they were part of what growing up in New England was all about.

RG: Were there a lot of people in New England who were into C.W. Leadbeater?

PL: Sure, yeah. My father knew all about this stuff. I owe a lot of what I'm doing, I think, to him. I'm sort of continuing my father's work.

RG: What did your father do?

PL: He was a banker. He was the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, the head of the trust department, and he taught classes at the Harvard Business School. And he was a member of the Harvard Faculty Club, which I am, too, because what I did is... I have the same name as my father, only Jr. So I kept paying the bills, and now they must think there's a prof walking around that's 130. I like going there to eat. It's nice.

RG: Your father was a medium, wasn't he?

PL: Yes. Of course, I didn't know him when he was extremely young. I was born rather late in his life, in his mid-40s. And so what he did up until the time he was 15, I think probably from age 12 to 15, my grandfather made him demonstrate mediumistic powers at the Exeter Street Theater, the first Spiritualist church in the United States. It's near Coply Square. The Exeter Street Theater is the place where William James found Leonora Piper, the medium he called the White Crow. The one that wasn't a phony. In other words, the exception to the rule.

At 15 he revolted against his father like any teenager, and said, "I'm out of here! What are you doing to me?" He thought he wouldn't be involved in that kind of stuff for the rest of his life. He just wanted to make money. He was one of those people who took over the family responsibility. His own father was pretty irresponsible with money and borrowed from people all the time.

You know, he was always saying I'd end up like my grandfather. Okay. My grandfather was an architect, I'm an architect. It's true, certain characteristics are similar. But anyway, my father became super-responsible. You know, he was the kind of person that absorbs all responsibility in the family, and then everybody else can act like a child in relation to him. So then, when he reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance; he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.

He was always upset that my mother didn't want to live in New York. Because he said he wanted to live in a hotel and not have to mow the lawn and all that. In other words, he never liked sports clothes, he always liked to be dressed up formally, 24/7. And he drove big cars and, you know, just loved to act the banker. He was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they knew nothing about it.

He developed inventions too. And this was the time just before the patent office would allow ideas and systems to be patented. When computers came along it was possible to patent ways of using them, what we now call programming. Before that it had to be a gizmo, a gadget that you could put on a table. Now, of course, that's untrue. And today the patent office is obsolete. You just take whatever you do, tool up, and start production for six months. At the end of the six months you put the data on all the computer inputs all over the world and you got your business. You can make all your money, and then people can steal it, but by then it doesn't matter because you've made the money up front and you avoid wasting money in lawsuits. He had all these kinds of ideas years ahead of others.

But he had this quirky thing of not believing in gravity. And giving me a constant headache about that one. He would say if I showed any interest in gravity, I was becoming a dupe of the system. He could see indications I was beginning to believe in it.

RG: What indications?

PL: Well, I would say, "Why don't you actually take some courses in physics instead of saying this?" But he would never do it. Businessmen for some reason or other, think, because they're successful in a single direction, that they know everything. You know what I mean? You ever meet people like that?

RG: Yes.

PL: The Babson Institute, which is now an actual university, was started by this guy who also had a problem with believing in gravity. And so he started the Babson Institute in New Boston, New Hampshire, which then moved to Gloucester. Each year they have a competition of one thousand dollars for one thousand words of an essay on gravity. That's the way they do it. Stephen Hawking won it one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because … when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control. He was afraid of being out of control. Forms of energy from nature gave my father trouble. He refused to believe he was going to die. He had these weird delusions. It's amazing. Along with all the great thoughts, he had all this funny stuff.

So, as a kid, I was getting information in areas that no one else was getting. I think that was one of the reasons my mother didn't want me to go to school too soon. Because I would be beaten to a pulp, you know, if I walked down the street and said there was no such thing as gravity. Kids would say, "Oh yeah? I'll show you gravity," and a rock would drop on your head.

RG: Did your dad have an alternate theory of gravity?

PL: Yes. In other words, he thought it was like a push, which is very similar to certain things that Descartes thought about, such as his vortex theory. My father would conclude his dissertations by saying, "Of course, Einstein never believed in gravity. It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe that an attraction at a distance was a reality.

RG: You know, Jonathan Swift didn't believe in gravity either. He said that Newton had discovered levity, not gravity.

PL: Yeah, all this stuff worked into the mix. You know, in the suburbs, most people believe in gravity, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.

RG: Of course.

PL: And so, to have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because, when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell him, "Don't start with the gravity stuff." And then he would invariably do this and the guests would look at each other and say, "Well, I think it's time to go now."

RG: So was that the only taboo subject he was into?

PL: No, no, there were other things. But this was the big one. He felt passionately invested in the concept.

RG: Have you come to the conclusion that he was right?

PL: Well, I met a guy who had the same theory and wrote a book about it. His name is Walter C. Wright Jr. His book is called Gravity Is a Push. I wrote to him and told him about my father, and he said he wished he'd met him. My father died quite a while ago. This guy has a more cogent presentation than my father did about it being a push. But he had the same basic belief, that the idea of magnetism attracting something was not the reason why the effects of what we call gravity occur.

RG: There's this eccentric guy who used to be in Mensa. His name is Ralph René, and he wrote a book [The Last Skeptic of Science] that had a whole chapter on that exact theory. It's the kind of book that's bound with masking tape. But, you know, it seemed plausible.
PL: Yeah. My father was an extremely brilliant man. I consider him a genius, and so he probably could have joined Mensa. But why? I got in it with a 79 I.Q. and the first day I said, "I'm getting the hell out of here quick!" They're all losers. All they do is talk about their IQ. [Laughs]

RG: In your lecture you mentioned the medallion you were given as a child, the one with the swastika and the Star of David on it.
[In his essay "Disco Volante," Laffoley writes that he had been "regaled since 1947 by stories of riding in flying saucers by the man who came to cut our bushes at my family home in Belmont, Massachusetts" (Laffoley 24). This man was named Giuseppe Conti. On Laffoley's fifteenth birthday, Conti gave him a medallion composed of a swastika circumscribed by a Star of David. Conti claimed the medallion was extraterrestrial in origin. Ten years later, the medallion was stolen from Laffoley on the streets of Paris by a man who identified himself as "Claude Vorilhon." Laffoley wouldn't see the medallion again until the mid-'90s when he happened to come across a photograph of UFO cult leader Claude Vorilhon in a book entitled Kooks by Donna Kossy. In the photo, Vorilhon is wearing the very same medallion around his neck. Laffoley believed the medallion's symbol represented "the reconciliation of opposites."]

PL: Yes, right.

RG: And you tied that into the reconciliation of opposites. It sounds like your father was a kind of yin-yang situation as well. He was working at Harvard, but meanwhile he was a medium. He was straddling two worlds.

PL: Yeah. He knew Gardner Murphy, who went to Topeka, Kansas to be the head of a psychical research thing. But at the time that he knew him he was a graduate student at both Columbia and Harvard and worked with the American Psychical Research Foundation in New York. And so they got together and put Troland's notes together [L.T. Troland, a Harvard psychology professor who performed a number of experiments involving telepathy in the 1920's]. He was doing four volumes. The final one was the ultimate theory of mind and matter, how they connected. And they took these notes and kind of buried them at the Harvard Graduate School of Design library. That's basically the only reason I wanted to go there. I really wanted to study with Bruce Goff [one of the masters of "organic architecture"] at the University of Oklahoma, but I said if I can find those notes I'd have a leg up on the future. I found shards of them, and people say that if they're not just dust, which could be by now, that they must be in Brockton, Massachusetss in a permanent archive someplace. It would take some doing to unravel what he was going to write. But my father said he did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of consciousness.

RG: So when you grew up in this environment with your dad, you must have thought all this was normal.

PL: Yeah, that's the point.

RG: Was there a certain point when you realized it wasn't normal?

PL: I'd say it was the day at school when they asked me to talk about gravity.

RG: [Laughs] Oh, I see.

PL: And I said, "I don't have to do it because it doesn't exist."

RG: During your lecture you mentioned Buckminster Fuller [U.S. inventor, mathematician, philosopher, author of Critical Path and other books, perhaps most famous for inventing the geodesic dome].

PL: Yes.

RG: How did you meet Fuller?

PL: At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff. So Fuller was down in Pennsylvania, then he'd come up and go to his island in Maine. He wanted to remain a New Englander. He taught from '48 to '49 and '50 at Black Mountain College. That's where he met Kenneth Snelson. Fuller kind of stayed a Yankee right in the New England area. So it was pretty easy to get him to come on over, and we would have lectures at the Harvard Science Center. He always liked to say that he got kicked out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out once, but he kept coming back. What it was, he never got past his freshman year, because the guy was an insane womanizer and he did parties every night, never studied anything, never took a note, didn't care about anything and just had a blast. So they said, "We gotta let you go. You get zeros all the time." Today it wouldn't even matter, because they don't care if you can read. So he was quite willing to talk. He'd talk at the drop of a hat.

I learned to talk in front of people by listening to the way he did things. Because he would give lessons in how to lecture. He would say, "Never take a note, just stand up and start babbling. And then eventually you're going to be able to make some coherent statements, and so it's like you're vamping. And then people will gradually start to listen to you when this spot of logic shows up in this torrent of verbiage. Just keep on talking." And he could do four, five hours straight where some people would leave, eat, get a snooze and come back and he's still going. He was like a fireplug. I started modeling myself on him, like with the hair. I reached an age where I sort of, kind of, looked like him a little bit, you know? I thought it was great.

We would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. Fuller loved to go there. Because it was like transporting a lot of the people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Florence. So we're just talking to ourselves again, but in another venue.

I would have private conversations with him. I once had an argument, for four hours, about the existence of the Mobius strip. Because he believed in the Klein Bottle, you see. And I said, "How in hell can you claim to believe in the Klein Bottle and think that the Mobius strip is dubious?" He said, "Well, it's a torus." I don't know what he had in his mind as a mathematical background, because I don't think he got topology. Because, in other words, the Mobius strip didn't have angles in it. The tetrahedron was his big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles. And I said, "Well, why do you believe in the Klein Bottle?" He said, "Because I can imagine it." I said, "You don't have to imagine a Mobius strip. It's right there in front of you!" But he couldn't see how that could involve a cross cap, meaning something that couldn't be reduced to a two-dimensional surface. Which it does. It's because he was thinking that the matrix was the thing that a fly could walk over the edge of, like a torus. It's not. The Mobius strip is only an analog for the reality of what it is. And then he says, "Like a shadow... shadows don't exist, they're the absence of light." He was quite a Newtonian in certain ways. But he was an excellent inventor and kept people on their toes.

RG: You know, supposedly he once told Marshall McLuhan that during questions and answers, he would wear earplugs in his ears so he wouldn't hear the questions.

PL: [Laughs] I think that's true, because he would pretend to be deaf at the right times.

RG: Earlier I brought up those weird metaphysical charts I always see in Theosophical and Masonic books....

PL: Yeah. Yeah.

RG: Did they inspire you to adopt your style?

PL: I think it wasn't that I was inspired so much. I was corroborated by them.

RG: I see.

PL: In other words, as an approach to spiritual realms. I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically. And so it meant that you had something that could move from the ideal into the real. Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.

I actually challenged The Theosophical Society on their concept of planes of reality. I said, "What you're doing is, you're stacking two-dimensional surfaces in three-space. And you are not going into any other dimensions at all." And they were furious, because they thought I was attacking Madame Blavatsky. They're ideologues in terms of the way they present the material. That's one of the reasons why, when they teach their courses, you only get a smidgen of stuff and you have to keep coming back every week. They won't do an overview. Because they're trying to bypass your conscious critical faculties by leaking the information slowly.

RG: At what point did you adopt that style? Did your style just come full blown or was it a small, gradual progression?

PL: I've kind of always done diagrams. It helped me think. I hear some guy teaches a course in diagrammatic thinking now; he's written books on it and stuff like that, and so it was kind of natural for me. Because it was a way in which words naturally fitted into something that's visual. I was always interested in doing that.

RG: Were you ever interested in comic books?

PL: Oh yeah. How that came about was… from the fact that I went to a progressive school. I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly. I could do Superman, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, this kind of stuff. And kids would give me their lunch money to have these things.

I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me." I could draw, and I knew these people couldn't. You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!

So eventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found out about that. Well, they eventually did and they said to me, "You're out of here!"

At that point I was sent to the regular public schools until I had to go to Belmont Hill. Because I wasn't doing anything. The public school was nothing, just a total waste of time. So anyway, I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that. So to answer your question, I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings.

RG: Is that because you were asked to do it, or because you wanted to?

PL: I think it was because the kids asked me to do it, and reading comic books, I could imitate the styles quite easily.

RG: Your paintings do look like full comic book pages sometimes, with panels stacked on top of each other.

PL: Sure, yeah.

RG: In your lecture you mentioned Orfeo Angelucci [author of The Secret of the Saucers, Amherst Press, 1955], which is strange because he's a very obscure figure, even among UFO people.

PL: Yes, I know. I first heard of him from Giuseppe Conti who gave me some books by him. When I was in New York working for Kiesler [Frederick Kiesler was a pioneer of "organic architecture," whose most famous building is arguably the "Shrine of the Book" in Jerusalem], at night I listened to Jean Shephard who lasted from 1957 until 1976 and then went off the air. But also I was listening to Long John Nebel. Now, Long John was what Art Bell and George Noory do now.

RG: Sure.

PL: But Art Bell didn't do it till like 1985. Long John I think went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing. And it was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out, you know, and then this beautiful lady…. So he went through the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of stuff. A whole raft of things.

You know, Long John would sometimes hold his interviews in the Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue… You'd go in there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate, pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was the place where Woody Allen would go. A classic place. Around the corner is the Russian Tea Room, which is now out of business. Which is awful. I remember going in there and seeing the ballerinas trotting in there like they were prize horses, with their hair, their sunglasses. Really amazing. They were all White Russians. This is where Theremin [Leon Theremin, Soviet physicist who invented the first electronic musical instrument in 1920] met a lot of people, and where the KGB eventually picked him up. People thought he was dead, but he was actually in a gulag.

RG: I wanted to talk to you about Theremin. Before we do that, though, I wanted to ask, was there something about Orfeo that resonated with you more than any other contactee story?

PL: Well, I mean… I thought George Adamski [author of Flying Saucers Have Landed, British Book Centre, 1953] was actually a fraud. Looking at him, I found him repulsive. In other words, he didn't have the wide-eyed, innocent look that Orfeo Angelucci did. I mean, I liked Orfeo's name! I mean, Orfeo! Orpheus. And Angelucci, of course, from the angels.

RG: Yes, Carl Jung was impressed by that.

PL: I know it. He put him in his last book [Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959]. He said Orfeo had made up a new bible.

RG: I was just reading your essay about The Day the Earth Stood Still. You go into Theremin quite a bit. Is there something about Theremin that particularly inspired or influenced you?

PL: Well, I think it was because Tesla [Nikola Tesla, Croatian-born electrical engineer who invented the first AC induction motor in 1888] and Theremin were part of what made up the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu was actually a European among the Americans. In the story the landlady says, "You're from far away from here." He says, "How did you know?" And she says, "I can always tell a New England accent." And in the story, the boarding house is on Harvard Street, all this kind of stuff. And so the person who wrote the story said that Klaatu came from Europa, the fourth moon of Jupiter, which is now being investigated for life. There's water and ice on it and that kind of stuff.

RG: You mean in the original short story? ["Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates.]

PL: Yeah. You have to read the story to get a lot of the stuff that is implied, but doesn't show up, in the movie. You know, they made a lot of technical errors. Like Klaatu was in 309 at Walter Reed, and then he says he's in 306. They just let that slip through in the movie, and I'm saying, what's going on? And there are other funny things like that. But I always thought of Klaatu, like, he was 78 years old and he looked 35 and he said the life expectancy was 130 on his home planet. Both Tesla and Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff. They were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all of the stuff you associate with living in Europe. So I began to analyze the movie and said it was really made out of these two characters who were brought together. That made it fascinating to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind of stuff.

RG: Klaatu barada nikto.

PL: Yeah, right. At one time I could reel off things that he says in front of the interrossitor, the device on the ship. And then, of course, he uses the Theremin thing. He doesn't touch anything. He just has his hands come near it, which is the way you play the Theremin. With one hand you raise the pitch and with the other hand you change the volume. You didn't actually touch the thing. So he's doing that, opening the doors, running the whole ship that way. And then in the scene where Klaatu gets brought back to life, Gort brings him into the flying saucer. He lays him down in this thing, and there are like zap rays coming from the feet to the head. Well, Theremin actually tried to make somebody come back to life. He had a lot of friends and one of them died. He was very lonely after she died, and so he started to concoct this gadget that would bring people back to life. And that gadget was the model for the revival of Klaatu in the movie.

RG: Did Robert Wise or the screenwriter actually say that the movie was based on either Tesla or Theremin?

PL: Well, they're dead now. But I think anybody who would be able to come up with that kind of a movie has got to have a breadth of knowledge that's pretty wide. He's casting his net over a big water, and so you wouldn't even dare attempt something like that, that would have that impact, unless you had a lot of knowledge. I saw it the first day it came to the RKO Keith Memorial Theatre on Tremont Street when I was, like, eleven years old. Because I'd had the experience with Giuseppe Conti, I said, "My God, that's my movie!" I kept seeing it everywhere I could. Then finally, when VHS and DVDs came out, I got that. And I keep watching it all the time.

RG: A few years ago I read Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney.

PL: Yeah. Good book.

RG: Somewhere in the book Cheney says that when Tesla would write out a blueprint or a diagram, it was as if he were tracing an image that was already there.

PL: Oh yeah. He'd do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts were wearing out. Now, that's inner visualization and a half! And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions.

RG: Wait a minute. You're saying that he would dream of the engine, one he hadn't built yet, and then he'd…?

PL: Set it in motion, come back, see where the machine had worn out over time. All in his head. Yeah.

RG: And do you think it was entirely intuitive on his part, or did he know exactly what he was doing?

PL: I think he was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static. You know, in terms of space. He was thinking of parts actually moving, like exchanging positions in space through time. This would go over here, then that would go over there, and then something else would happen.

RG: Do you think he was a contactee, like Orfeo?

PL: A lot of people claim that. He said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist. In other words, he was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.

RG: I was reading S.T. Joshi's biography of Lovecraft. He said that the original story "Nyarlathotep" might have been based on Tesla. Because, of course, Nyarlathotep first appears in the story as this kind of odd person who's doing weird experiments with electricity on the stage. They were contemporaries, weren't they?

PL: Oh yeah, sure. Because Tesla lived to almost 1943, whereas Lovecraft died in 1937.

RG: It's fascinating when you consider that if Lovecraft had lived a normal life span, he would've been alive well into the 1960s.

PL: That's true.

RG: Which is amazing, when you think about what he might have been writing during the Vietnam War say.

PL: Right. Well, he might have been doing something else. I think he wrote himself out.

RG: Yeah?

PL: You know what I mean? In other words, he had already said what he had to say.

RG: Colin Wilson was talking about his last major story, "Shadow Out of Time," in this essay I just read, and he said that H.P. Lovecraft was still thinking of himself as writing supernatural horror stories even though he had obviously gone way beyond that. But Lovecraft had not reconciled that paradox yet. So Wilson thought his cancer was unconsciously brought on by his frustration of not knowing where to go next. When did you become aware of Lovecraft?

PL: When I was at Brown. In other words, I'd heard about him, but I didn't pay that much attention till I happened to go to a meeting about it. And then I got just totally turned on.

RG: And did you start reading him at that time?

PL: Oh yeah. I started with "Pickman's Model," because it was about Boston. I mean, what I loved about him at first is his sense of scholarship of an area, setting an environment, enlivening it. I think that's one of the secrets of writing. In other words, you've got a journey as the plot, but it has to be in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If you read "Pickman," in other words, they're winding their way through the Boston Streets and Lovecraft researched what was there. As a matter of fact, in 1927, when he came back, he was so disappointed, 'cause they had started to destroy a lot of those old houses from the 1700s that were in the North End. Of course, that was the place where Bostonians first landed and set up shop, because they could watch the Charles River and the Boston Harbor simultaneously, and then they dug all those tunnels so that the people could go underground from one house to another and watch who was approaching, in the dark, without being observed. Which, of course, was used later for the underground railroad, moving slaves up to Canada.

RG: When I was reading that Tesla book I was surprised to see that there's a man named George Viereck who has connections with both Tesla and Lovecraft. He hired Lovecraft to ghost-write for him, and he was also a fan of Tesla and was hanging around his lab all the time.

PL: Well, Lovecraft did work for Houdini too.

RG: That's right. He wrote "Imprisoned With the Pharaohs" for him. You know, if you read his story "Dreams in the Witch House" you can tell he's writing about what theoretical physicists now call hyperspace. Do you think he was just naturally attuned to his unconscious, or did he have esoteric interests he didn't like to talk about it?

PL: Oh, I think he knew the whole gamut. He just didn't believe any of it! He probably liked to use the esoteric stuff because he knew it would tick people off and freak them out.

RG: The painting you're working on now is about Lovecraft?

PL: It's called "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the story. Certain things about it many people don't realize. Pickman was a real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926. Now, there's a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the margins of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now.

RG: Well, we know he reappears in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath as a ghoul. So, let me get this straight, you're saying Pickman really lived in Boston?

PL: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. In other words, the reason why I found out about that is that I went to Brown University. I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking for sasquatch, this kind of stuff. I mean, these are really dedicated people when it comes to Lovecraft. But in the top floor of the John Hay Library, you have all of Lovecraft's archives. And messing around in there, I noticed, I said, what are these paintings? And the librarian told me, "Well, those are Pickman's paintings." I said, "I thought this was like something he made up, like The Necronomicon, that kind of stuff." And he said no, that the guy actually existed. He was a mediocre painter, living in Boston at that time, painting for the Boston Art Club, and places like that. We're not talking avant garde galleries here. But Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times. I mean, even New York isn't in any great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world. But at a certain point Pickman got this studio in the north end of Boston, which at that time was the first area where people lived when they first came to Boston. And the reason they did that, they were defending their position, and in order to really defend it, by 1700 they had dug underground tunnels all through that area so people could go up in a house and then not be seen by the enemy attacking them.

RG: I remember that from the story.

PL: The tunnels were used first in the Revolutionary War. The next time they were used is during the time of moving slaves from the south on big ships, and when they would land they'd instantly go down into those tunnels, until the slave ships that were trying to catch them, coming up from Chesapeake Bay or West Virginia, got tired and went away. And the story is... You've read the whole story?

RG: Sure.

PL: Eliot, the narrator, goes down into these tunnels with Thurber…

RG: Wait. Thurber's the narrator, who's talking to Eliot.

PL: Right, you're right. So Eliot brings him down and Thurber starts hearing rustlings and stuff down there. He's looking at these God-awful paintings, very realistic renderings of demons, as they're going deeper and deeper into the inner sanctum. And then suddenly Eliot disappears and Thurber grabs something that he thinks is a background shot of a photograph. When he gets home he realizes that this was actually the demon that Pickman had taken a snapshot of, and that he was using it to help him paint the thing from real life. And so I've always wanted to do a painting on this, but this has nothing to do with the fact that it's going to be in the Satan show. It's just that it's been on my mind for years, and this is a perfect time to do it.

Okay. Now, the thing is, once I discover that these paintings are actually in the John Hay Library, I ask them, "Can I come back and take pictures of them?" The guy says, "Absolutely not. This is like a museum. The only thing you can do is, you or a sketch artist can sketch these things, otherwise it'd be like going into a museum and borrowing stuff. You can't do that. The things would be ruined, taking them out of the case and all that kind of stuff." So I said okay. I got a friend of mine and said, "Let's go down and do some visualization of that stuff. That's how I got the things that're there [referring to a series of four sketches hanging on the wall of his upstairs studio]. Arnie Clapman, that's my friend's name, I hope he's going to come to the show, he decided to do the first sketch. So I'd say stuff like, "No, no, that's wrong, look at this here." So we were working these things out together to get a pretty good rendition of what they actually look like. There's quite a number of paintings that Pickman did. So I picked basically the four juiciest ones. They're not really the way they're described in the story, because Lovecraft's talking about something that almost sounded like Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell, you know, the dogs playing poker and this kind of stuff. In other words, that isn't what Pickman was all about. He was depicting the suffering of Satan, you see, through these demons. Because the whole theory of what Satan is, it's Lucifer, the highest of the seraphim, the bearer of God's light, who at a certain point comes to believe he is what is being revealed to him.

So, I began to realize that Lucifer is this creature who, having received an infinite revelation, believed he was God. So that's the first sin of pride. It's also a moment at which the first transsubstantiation occurs. And he becomes Satan, which is like... This was a flash, an instant. He becomes a humanoid, but he has an infinite number of physical senses, each of which are as different as eyes are from your ears. If you can imagine, we only have five or six senses, and we have trouble even distinguishing those when people are in synaesthesia. So he goes through all the seven deadly sins, right down the list, finally to wrath. He's lusting after knowledge in this way, and so he sees the universe as a non-supernatural example of cosmic art. Now, we know this is what Lovecraft was into. Because he kept talking about how he wasn't interested in religion. In a heaven state there is no religion, meaning that you're seeing the whole thing ... I mean, to worship something means that it's something beyond you, right? In other words, it's not being revealed to you.

So here was the situation. For years Lovecraft was defined as an atheist. Well, he wasn't saying anything about what he really was at all. He wasn't even an agnostic. That's exactly what the situation is, in other words, when you enter an eternal realm. You've got to know there is no religion. So it's literally a non-supernatural state of cosmic art. This is what this creature experiences, who then becomes Satan, and the moment he becomes Satan he's pulled back into eternity. He loses instantly, loses all these senses. And as it's happening he's going right down to wrath. And so what he's doing is, he's putting on a show that he isn't suffering.

Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.

RG: S.T. Joshi once said that Lovecraft was creating an anti-mythology, in the sense that he was turning basic theological concepts upside down and placing hell outside, in space...

PL: Yes, in an extraterrestrial realm. The thing is, where you gonna place it? From the time of Dante, when you have the Ptolemaic universe, you had God on the outside like a hypersphere, and then in the center you have the Earth, all the seven heavens and layers, and then you have the Mount of Purgatory and Hell right in the center, and here's Satan flapping his wings and he keeps making the lake of Cocytus ice so you can't get out. So, again, where Heaven and Hell are, who the hell knows that now? Because we've got so many dimensions going. I don't think one person could ever make a total theological statement about that. That, I think, is impossible, because then... The whole thing that Dante did was summed up in the medieval world. It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think if Joshi thinks Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology, that's where I would disagree with him.

RG: Do you think Lovecraft was actually an atheist or...?

PL: No no, no no no. I think he recognized what he was dealing with, he was dealing with demons. And he was dealing with creatures that're suffering. There's no way out of this suffering. I think... You know, Mick Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil." I think it was inspired by that. You don't know who's reading what, you know. It just comes out once in a while in the pop culture. And so, I would say that it's probably impossible for a lot of people to even think what Lovecraft's theological state was. He could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays.

I think that the phrase "a non-supernatural cosmic work of art" is what he would say that the devil had seen, or Satan had seen, in that instant. Like this orgasm of knowledge, where he sees the universe in a way that we can never see. But then that gets taken away. Of course, revelation is always taken away. So then he is thrust into some kind of outer space realm, like here [pointing toward the painting in progress]. In other words, he's recognized he's gone through R'lyeh, the Sunken City of R'lyeh, and then Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial, calls his band of worshippers home to recognize him as the anti-christ. This is all in The Necronomicon, something Lovecraft actually did make up.

RG: Well, you know, Colin Wilson claimed that Winfield Lovecraft, Lovecraft's father, was a Freemason, part of the Boston Freemasons, and speculated that The Necronomicon might have been real, something Winfield saw in the local Masonic Lodge and perhaps brought home with him one night. Young Lovecraft tiptoes downstairs and flips through a couple of pages late one night….

PL: Yeah, okay. I like Colin Wilson, mainly because he never went to school. When you don't go to school you can say anything you want like that and not have to worry. [Laughs] And I would bet that some of the things he's saying are correct. But how much, who knows?

References: Laffoley, Paul. "Disco Volante." The UFO Show. Ed. Barry Blinderman. Normal: University Galleries, 2000. 24-37.

Paul Laffoley was born on August 14, 1940. In 1962 he graduated from Brown University with honors in Classics, Philosophy and Art History. In 1963-64 he lived in New York where he worked with visionary architect Frederick J. Kiesler. At this time he was also hired to work on the design team for the twin towers of the World Trade Center. But he was fired at the behest of the chief architect, Mihoru Yamasaki, after having the audacity to suggest that bridges or walkways be placed between the towers to reinforce what he felt was a fragile structure. In 1964 Laffoley returned to Boston where he settled down in a small studio space now dubbed the Boston Visionary Cell. While living in this studio Laffoley has produced the vast majority of his paintings. His most celebrated work can be found in two books: Paul Laffoley: The Phenomenology of Revelation (Kent Fine Art, 1989) and Architectonic Thought Forms: a Survey of the Art of Paul Laffoley 1967-1999 (Austin Museum of Art, 1999). If you have any inquiries regarding Laffoley's work, please visit www.kentgallery.com.

Robert Guffey is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at California State University at Long Beach. His short stories, articles and interviews appear in such magazines and anthologies as After Shocks, Modern Magic, New Dawn, Paranoia, The Pedestal, Riprap, Steamshovel Press, The Third Alternative, and the 2004 compendium The New Conspiracy Reader. He is currently teaching English at CSU Long Beach. He can be contacted at rguffey@hotmail.com.





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