Recent years have seen the appearence of several 'Necronimica', books from various sources each purporting to be renderings of the dreaded tome itself! They have ranged from Sumerian scribblings to ye writings of Dr. John Dee (now reincarnated as Robert Turner, apparently). Also, following August Derleth's attempt to cohere the Cthulhu Mythos into an identifiable cosmology, several occultists (notably Kenneth Grant) have attempted to work the Great Old Ones into an 'identifiable' system of one kind or another.
While such attempts display the Western occultists' penchant for building up symbolic metastructures, I feel that such systemizations of the Great Old Ones are a misappropriation of Lovecraft's original sense of them. Their very nature is that they are "primal and undimensioned" - they can barely be perceived, and forever 'lurk' at the edges of awareness.
The most powerful energies are those which cannot be clearly apprehended or conceived of. They remain intangible and tenuous. Very like the feeling of awakening from a nightmare terrified, but unable to remember why. Lovecraft understood this very well, probably because most of his writings evolved from his dreams.
The Great Old Ones gain their power from their elusiveness and intangi-bility. Once they are formalised into symbol systems and related to intellectual metasystems, some of their primal intensity is lost. William Burroughs puts it this way:
"As soon as you name something you remove its power... If
you could look Death in the face he would lose his power
to kill you. When you ask Death for his credentials, his
passport is indefinite." - The Place of Dead Roads
Primal Speech
The Great Old Ones can be thought of as primal archetypes of experience, represented in various creation myths as the Giants or Titans. Differing orders of deities throughout history reflect the development of human consciousness - the evolution of a psychocosm. From the zoomorphic animal-human deities of the Pagan Aeon to the Monotheist deity as a reflection of the state's ideal citizen. The Great Old Ones have little, if anything in the way of human attributions; no distinct spheres of influence or human morality. Lovecraft made it very clear that the Great Old Ones have their own purposes, and those that summon them, do so at their peril.
The Great Old Ones are atavisms of the pre-human strata of consciousness, dim perceptions of the era when the primitive 'dragon brain' was the seat of awareness. In his writings, Lovecraft continually alludes to the non-conceptual nature of the Old Ones, and to the primitive methods of summoning them to Earth - blood sacrifice, incense, sexual magick (espec-ially incestuous interbreeding) and Primal, or monstrous speech. All these methods act very powerfully upon the 'reptilian' areas of the brain; the activity of which governs the basic behaviour patterns - sex, hunger and the flight-fight response.
Of particular interest in Lovecraft's mention of primal speech; the kind of glossolalia which can be heard at both Revivalist meetings and Voudou gatherings. When ordered speech is replaced with gibbering, grunting and other non-ordered noises, then patterning, inflection and tone/volume become the means for carrying a message. In ritual, this deliberate 'blocking' of verbal communication with 'static' can be a powerful means of assisting others into a state of possession, during which the body is controlled by 'Nameless' Gods who can only gibber and flail 'their' limbs about - a state somewhat reminiscient of the floppings of lizards, actually Seeing someone in this state brings to mind Lovecraft's description of Azathoth as:
"a blind idiot god... the monstrous Nuclear Chaos."
The value of such an experience is debatable. Full possession by a deity appears to be rare in Western magick, implying as it does, a total disin-hibition which most people seem unwilling to tolerate. These rites of the Nameless Gods serve to hurl the consciousness backwards into a level of awareness where the sense of being an individual 'I' is blurred. Memories of such a state will, of necessity, be at best fractured, or even totally absent, a phenomena not uncommon with possession experiences.
To conclude then, the Great Old Ones can indeed be summoned, but the means of doing so requires an approach which is very different to the established styles of Western magick.
by Zebulon
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BRIGHT CLOUD WOMAN is the Tsimshian Goddess of salmon. She was married to Raven for a brief time, but when he blamed her for the way a comb that he had made from a salmon backbone tugged at his hair, she left him and took the salmon with her. Bright Cloud Woman had the ability to create salmon just by dipping her fingers into water, and to transform herself into fog. She is also known as SALMON WOMAN and FOG WOMAN, and legends of her are common to many West Coast native traditions.
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JURATE (pronounced YOU-rah-the) is the Lithuanian Goddess of the sea. She lived in a beautiful castle made of amber at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. One day, she learned that a fisherman, Kastytis, was catching her fish and taking them out of the sea. She went to his boat, prepared to yell at him, but he was so handsome that she fell in love with him. Jurate went every day to see her young fisherman, until Perkunas, the God of Thunder, found out about her relationship with a mortal. In a jealous rage, he sent a thunderbolt to shatter Jurate's castle, and had Kastytis chained to a rock at the bottom of the sea, where he drowned. To this day, when there is thunder over the Baltic Sea, you can still hear Kastytis' cries, and find pieces of Jurate's broken amber castle along the shore. Her name is also seen as JURATA and JURASMAT.
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I probably should have saved her for Earth Day or Mother's Day, but they're so far away! By my count, she has over 50 children, and I know I'm missing some.
GAIA is the Greek Goddess of the Earth, mother to all the Gods. In the beginning, there was only Khaos, the nothingness of space. From Khaos, there appeared Gaia (Goddess of the Earth), Nyx (Goddess of the night), Tartaros (God of the Underworld), Erebos (God of shadows and darkness), and Eros (God of sexual love). Gaia then created Ouranos (God of the sky), Pontos (God of the sea), and Ourea (God of the mountains). With Ouranos, Gaia is the mother of the twelve Titans: Theia (Goddess of sight), Rhea (Goddess of female fertility), Themis (Goddess of divine law), Mnemosyne (Goddess of memory), Phoebe (Goddess of light), Tethys (Goddess of nursing), Okeanos (God of fresh water), Koios (God of intelligence), Krios (God of constellations), Hyperion (God of observation), Iapetos (God of mortality), and Kronos (God of time).
Gaia and Ouranos also created the three Kyklopes and the three Hekatonkheires (each of whom had one hundred arms and fifty heads). Ouranos, ashamed of these monstrous sons, pushed them back into Gaia's womb, causing her much pain. In agony, Gaia gathered her sons together and begged them to help her. The youngest, Kronos, took the sickle that Gaia had made and castrated Ouranos with it. Some of the blood and semen sprayed on to Gaia, and she gave birth to the race of Giants, the Erinyes or Furies, and the Meliae or wood nymphs. Ouranos's testicles were cast into the sea, and from them Aphrodite was born.
Gaia's role as mother to the Gods was still not finished. With other fathers, she gave birth to Antaeus, Keto, Kharybdis, Kreusa, Erikhthonius, Eurybia, Mimas, Nereus, Pheme, Phorkys, Python, Sperkheus, Thaumas, and Typhon. Alternate names for Gaia include GAEA and GE.
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