entirely safe and fun

giddy giddy.

What greeted me in my Amazon orbit today: New Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, dropping 9 Sept. The Ninth is a Tuesday, and the book is 2″ thick in hardcover, so there goes that Tuesday. If you see me in person or on the Internets, I do not want to know anything else about it, OK? I have seriously injured men for less.

For the uninitiated: Stephenson is a super-excellent science fiction writer who has written the best works in a handful of subgenres (techno-thriller: Cryptonomicon, cyberpunk: Snow Crash, retro-scifi/steampunk: The Diamond Age, alternate history: The Baroque Cycle). Whatever he’s doing, I enter into reading it with the very highest of expectations. It goes without saying that I recommend his earlier works (from Snow Crash onward and including the psuedonymous, collaborative techno-thrillers Cobweb and Interface) and that you could do a lot worse, come September, than having Anathem queued up.

“From such churches, owls… make their paradises.”
Photo by michelphoto53, cc-by license

Some unordered thoughts on the topic:

• More and more material keeps popping up on Google Books: Bladé’s Contes Populaires de la Gascogne republishes the chapter from the Quatorze Superstitions on the Mass of Saint Sécaire. A generous sampling of Gareth Medway’s Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism is available online — this is a breezy, skeptical look at the topic, despite the rather sensationalistic title.
• I called the Saint Sécaire contre-messe “peculiar” when compared to other accounts of black masses. Just to be clear, the chief peculiarity is the matter of the host; in other reports, the host at a black mass is a fully consecrated one, stolen from a “legitimate” church. This tradition calls for a purpose-made black host, which, as Bladé might have said, is «quelque chose de bien plus rare». Which is a more complete reversal of the sacrament?
• Boingboing had an article today pointing to a master’s thesis, by a certain Cecile Dubuis, on libraries and the occult, which I’ve begun reading. Synchronicity indeed.
• Everyone’s favorite occultist/creepy uncle, Aleister Crowley, wrote a short story inspired by the Mass (creatively entitled “The Mass of Saint Sécaire”). I’ve acquired a copy and am considering my options for making it available. For the record, Crowley cited Bladé’s Quatorze Superstitions — his scholarship was at least impeccable, even if his prose wasn’t. That said, the plot would be of interest to fans of (say) White Wolf’s Mage roleplaying game: a grasping woman conspires with a corrupt priest to have the mass said for a soldier who campaigns in Africa. Nothing appears to happen at first, but eventually the soldier sickens and dies — coincidentally? — of the then-new-to-science tropical disease trypanosomiasis, which (of course) the doctors can’t do anything about. Good times!

“…only in a ruined or deserted church…”
Photo by Steve Roe, cc-by-nc-sa license

I suspect that many reader’s of James Frazer’s omnibus The Golden Bough were, like me, arrested by his description of a peculiar black mass tradition:

Gascon peasants believe that to revenge themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a mass called the Mass of Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them; that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o’ love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.

And now, every time I think of an owl, it is one of Frazer’s, moping and hooting among the blackened, bare rafters of a burnt church. They just don’t do scholarly works like that any more.

But where, precisely, did he find out about this Mass? The widely available single-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough lacks a scholarly apparatus, and the multi-volume Bough is six feet of shelf and a hundred pounds. An interested scholar is forced to simply search the Net for mentions of the spurious Saint Sécaire, and until very recently, the search was not rewarding.

Then, just in the past few weeks, Google Books came to the rescue by digitizing C. J. S. Thompson’s Mysteries and Secrets of Magic (1973). Thompson referred directly to Quatorze Superstitions Populaires de la Gascogne (1883), by the Gascon ethnographer Jean-François Bladé, and that was the break I needed. The book was published as a scholarly edition of 50 copies 125 years ago, so calling it a “break” is a bit of a misnomer. The inter-library loan search was undoubtedly the most difficult I’ve ever undertaken. But in the end, I chased down a copy in the Cleveland Public Library — Special Collections, in fact, completing the Lovecraftian superfecta of a rare antique book, written in a language other than English, detailing a forbidden ritual, held in an inconveniently-located library.

And so it is, through the magic of scanning (thanks to Rhonda Green at CPL), that I was able to (finally) check the original source — Bladé had his account from “the late Cazaux,” one of his informants, apparently a man well-known to his family. One wonders whether the late Cazaux withered away, the doctors unable to diagnose or treat him… anyway, for your enjoyment, please find a scan of the (signed!) title pages, and of the relevant section of Quatorze Superstitions, in French. My translation of the section is also available, and I’ve been at work on the Wikipedia entry.

Why “Dante,” anyway? Punam and I had a big piece of paper stuck to our wall, and we just wrote down names we liked over the course of a month or so, reading combinations out loud until we settled on “Dante Quinn” as being euphonious, pronounceable by everyone, and having appropriate meanings, referents, and connotations — “Axel Wiley,” for instance, sounded like a comic-book supervillain and so got a pass… for this child. Because we didn’t really settle on it until the very last second, I never had an answer for people who asked me what we’d call him, so I came up with a little joke to put it off: “Well, we’re going to wait for an omen at his birth. If the sky opens up, turns red, and rains blood, we’ll name him Joe, just like his uncle!”

I don’t have an Uncle Joe, so there’s a second, Wodehousian, joke in there, so subtle it’s not quite even funny.

Fast forward to today. I went to Safeway to pick up cannelloni makings this afternoon and was greeted by the Sun pictured above, with Dante and his grandma Krupa, prominently featuring what day but Dante’s birthday! It lacks the drama of the Johannine (the Divine-ine) nightmare in my joke, sure, but it has a certain class nonetheless. Cayce and the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Any rate, new pix of the boy are up, tagged with “day thirteen”. There are some really cute ones in there!

Jenn knit the squat, repulsive idol, no doubt inspired by “an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.” She survived to take the photo, sanity just barely intact. Now she wants to be rid of it – you can help!

What thing is this, pausing before a cyclopean door?

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
- H P Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu

Available now on Etsy, courtesy of our friend Jenn — an awesome knit finger-idol of Cthulhu, sure to provide hours of sanity-ripping fun! Buy it and make regular sacrifices, and you might even be eaten last!

Or: i catched u a mummy mouse but i mummy eated it

We made a trip down to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose this weekend. They’ve got a fine and accessible presentation there of some neat artifacts, with a helpful yet unintrusive curatorial narrative. In particular, the exhibit of non-tomb-related items is excellent, counteracting the usual perception created in Egyptian collections that the ancient Egyptians had nothing else to do but prepare for death (a perfect real-world example of sample bias). Adding to the allure, they have several remarkably pretty formal gardens on the grounds. Be aware that you’ll have to deal with a lot of stairs if you go, so the museum isn’t wheelchair-accessible.

All of that being said, this is what I have to offer you. It is a sad commentary on the memetic power of the internets that after everything that we saw and learned, and with all the things I could have photographed thanks to the Museum’s enlightened policy, the one thing I couldn’t resist sharing was a lolcatterized feline mummy, made from a noisy phonecam picture.

When I came to the Valley, I didn’t expect to get much use out of my impractical (but, I hope, tasteful!) philosophy education. But in fact, my cow orkers have a delightfully high density of interest in the metaphysics of ethics. Behold my whiteboard:

What Kant didn’t say is that a universal moral rule should be at least as tasty and nutritious as pure evil.
Also, for the record, I misspelled “flocculates” in my contribution.

The Temple of Dagon has opened its Lovecraft Archive in observation of the 70^th anniversary of the death of seminal horror author H. P. Lovecraft. All has transpired as it was prefigured in a previous post. As Lovecraft himself had it, “Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, [kept] alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow[ed] forth the prophecy of their return.”

Thanks to Aleister at the Temple for making such an important primary collection available. If you’re approaching Lovecraft as a new reader, I recommend starting with one of the classic tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, such as “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” (an especially well-executed work of dark fantasy), “The Shadow Out of Time”, The Whisperer in Darkness, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, or “The Dunwich Horror”. The last is a special, sentimental favorite of mine because it is obviously the most direct inspiration for the Chaosium role-playing game “The Call of Cthulhu”, and because it inspired me to write a campaign of my own (recasting the premise of “TDH” into a body horror/cyberpunk millieu) for that game. I envy new Lovecraft readers their fresh eyes — maybe enough to steal them, adding them to my merely human pair of eyes in imitation and celebration of the Great Old Ones… At any rate, enjoy!

Photo: Michael Stevens, CC by-nc-sa
The 70^th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death, which puts the quietus to the copyright dispute over his oeuvre, and probably moves the stars to rightness besides, is approaching.

On CNN.com’s front page this morning, there was a curious headline: “Providence: Following the Footsteps of a Horror Icon.” First, a moment to entertain an unthinkable thought, but then dismissal. Maybe it was because Stephen King or whoever had spent a little time there, because it couldn’t be that the foundational horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a following among… travel writers? But in a moment of sanity-blasting revelation, I saw that the AP was indeed putting out a location piece on Lovecraft’s place in the history of Providence, RI; whatever the city thinks of him, he thought highly enough of it to have “I AM PROVIDENCE” carved into his headstone.

In the time I allot myself to write a blog posting, it’s hard to sum up my feelings about this article. Lovecraft’s stories have given me a great deal of pleasure over the years, and at some level I’d like to see more interest in his work in the literary mainstream so that more people might share that pleasure. But part of his work’s appeal is that it impels so many subcultural currents, in a way that might be imperiled by more general appreciation. “The Call of Cthulhu” is a great novella, as good as anything in the form, but perhaps more critical is that the idea of Cthulhu has taken on a life of its own, as a shared signifier of a taste for weirdness, a high-fidelity signal of participation in a rich, shared imaginary universe.

By “participation,” I mean not merely “consumption” but “creation.” It is said of the Velvet Underground’s album The Velvet Underground & Nico that everyone who bought it started a band. Similarly, Lovecraft seems to disproportionately attract creators, provoking even productive ones (e.g. Stephen King, a vocal Lovecraft admirer) to pastiche. During his life, and in the near century since his death, the universe he created has been further populated those who loved him and his stories. The Temple of Dagon, over there on my blogroll, is just one easily-accessible manifestation. Even the less-talented and less-motivated are often stirred, like the dreamers moved to nightmare by Cthulhu’s call. I’ve been there myself, writing several scenarios for the Lovecraftian horror role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu, and frequently drawing on the idiom in much of my writing and design. My unease at a wider popularity for Lovecraft might be from a selfish desire to see him best beloved by those most likely to expand on his legacy, who will tell me more stories the way that HPL might have.

As a happy postscript, the 70^th anniversary of Lovecraft’s death is coming up on 15 March, and with it an end to the acrimonious copyright dispute that has marred, however slightly, his otherwise sterling literary estate. His entire body of work will pass uncontroversially into the public domain, and presumably live forever (and now indisputably legally) on the Internet and its successors, or at least until the stars are right and the earth — and all of existence — cleared for its true masters. I urge raising a glass not just to HPL’s memory, but to the shared memory he created for us all.

I decided I’d take a shot at lolcattery, Creative Commons style. Thanks to viciousv for the excellent by-sa source material.

Puppy thinks that flame war time is the best naptime.

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