Woke: Cthulhu Awakens

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote his famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, in 1926 and saw it published in Weird Tales in the February 1928 number of that pulp periodical. The story pieces itself together through the gimmick of having its narrator, the nephew of a mysteriously deceased scholar of ancient Semitic languages, sort through his uncle’s papers – among which figure prominently a cache of documents under the label of “CTHULHU CULT.” In the last few years of his life Professor Angell had fixed his interest on this esoteric topic.  Evidence indicates that the cult, traces of which appear worldwide, dates back to prehistory; it also manifests its existence in the archaeology of historical religions, particularly those that center on human sacrifice.  The deceased scholar had concluded that the cult’s reality extends into the present and that, after a dormant period, it had resumed its activity.  As the reader makes his way through Lovecraft’s deliberately fragmented story line, he learns that Cthulhu, the entity whom the cultists worship as a deity, belongs not to the category of the supernatural (nothing in Lovecraft does) but rather to that of the superhuman in an implacably materialistic and Darwinian version of the cosmos.  In the immensely distant past, Cthulhu, one of the “Great Old Ones,” descended to Earth from a distant star and enslaved the primitive humanity through his faculty of telepathic manipulation.  A rival power, indifferent to humanity, checked Cthulhu and condemned him to hibernation in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the South Pacific.  In the final paragraphs of the story’s first section, the executor describes a sheaf of newspaper clippings that Professor Angell had collected.  These items, the narrator avers, “touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity,” which betoken Cthulhu’s return to potency.  As the nephew records: “A fanatic [from South Africa] deduces a dire future from visions he has seen; and “a dispatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some ‘glorious fulfillment’ which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March.”

Lovecraft despite his atheism and materialism exhibited a pronounced and admirable reactionary character. In his Weird Tales classic Lovecraft represents Cthulhu as appealing, through his long-range mesmerism, to people still living at the tribal level of cultural development, to the lower anti-social classes or proletariat, and to the power-seeking but mentally dim, criminal segment of humanity, on a platform of exaggerated resentment.  Cthulhu finds that degeneracy provides fertile ground for his agenda.  In the second section of The Call, for example, a certain Raymond Legrasse, Inspector of the New Orleans Police, narrates his encounter with a homicidal and orgiastic movement that has suddenly become active in the bayou country south of the city.  The local Cajuns “were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night.”  As Legrasse explains, “It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured.”  The Inspector organizes a raid, which interrupts a bloody rite in progress.  The raid takes many prisoners, whom it transports back to New Orleans for interrogation.  A cultist named Castro explains his convictions.  The rituals seek the resumption of “His rule of earth.”  In Castro’s deposition, “The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and levelling in joy.”  On that occasion “a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom” would ensue.  Cthulhu poses as the liberator of the oppressed; his program entails the transvaluation of all values, and adorns itself with the pleasing ensign of a Dionysiac egalitarianism.  Although Lovecraft would support the New Deal in the 1930s and make a case for socialism, at the time of the writing of The Call, as the left-leaning S. T. Joshi makes clear in his biography of the author, the regular contributor to Weird Tales roundly criticized the Russian Revolution and he rejected collectivism as a recursion to savagery.

Cthulhu pursues a globalist schedule that would bring all humanity under his dominion.  He works by bribery on the basis of psychotic resentment, offering to his minions the prospect of sexual abandon without consequence and the license to murder.  The four hundred foot tall squid-faced monster advertises his dark docket as a radiant future.  His followers will need to break a few eggs, but the omelet will justify itself deliciously.  It is in the nature of a fantastic imagination such as Lovecraft’s to penetrate into the remote spaces of the human condition and therefore to be applicable and relevant beyond its historical limitations.  The author of The Call only infrequently celebrated the higher or transcendent propensities of Homo sapiens, but as a student of baseness and cultural regression, he knew well of what he wrote.  The sheaf of documents inherited by Professor Angell’s nephew has a counterpart in the contemporary world.  Any Internet news-portal such as, say, the Drudge Report, will open through its hyperlinks a window on the Maenadism, entirely out of bounds, of the prevailing cultural, social, and political scenes.  That the hysteria and malice of the times stylize themselves as “Wokeness,” as the equivalent of an accession to consciousness, is all the more ironic given the Left’s actual lockstep ideological conformism and its actual restriction of expression to a rigorously limited set of accusations and denouncements.  Cthulhu only awakens to the degree that he can change humanity into a sleepwalking horde that has ceded its mental and moral independence to the calendar of its own servitude.  So-called comedienne Kathy Griffin presaged these (for the lack of a better term) developments back in May of 2017 when she appeared in photographs and a video clip carrying a simulacrum of the severed head of Donald Trump.  Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae undoubtedly lies beyond Griffin’s ken, but she might have been auditioning for the role of Agave who in a fever of religious inebriation rips the head of her own son from its body – all under the inspiration of that god of lynching, Dionysus.  But no – not auditioning for the role; rather, reverting under a self-granted license to the savage behavior of the original Dionysus Cult, of which the Cthulhu Cult is a literary representation.

Griffin’s Grand Guignol seems to have taken place in a now remote past.  She actually suffered a rebuke for her gruesome simulation and had to make a token apology in public before her employers at CNN would readmit her to their broadcast venues.  Neither did Griffin’s stunt come out of a vacuum.  Since the 1970s Hollywood has made billions of dollars trading in horrific imagery in the description of which only the term sacrificial rightly fits.  The morally unformed adolescent audience has demonstrated an eagerness to draw sadistic enjoyment from scenes of simulated violence.  Film franchises like the Saw franchise, produced by Twisted Pictures, and the Final Destination franchise, produced by New Line Cinema, both of which enjoyed repeated success in theatrical release, work by the same formula.  The story sets up fall guys, invariably figures of resentment, whose revilement the direction carefully encourages, and in whose elaborate and bloody deaths the collective viewership experiences an evil pseudo-catharsis.  Seneca the Younger, in his Seventh Letter, warns his correspondent never to associate with crowds.  He gives an account of a gladiatorial spectacle in Rome, during which the authorities force condemned criminals to fight one another to the death or otherwise contrive to maim and kill them.  The paying crowd shouts for death and then applauds it.  No one dies during the production of a film, but the disgusting panoply of invidious retribution that the film depicts satisfies exactly the same base appetite as the actual gladiatorial display.  The emotions that the film arouses coincide exactly with those that accompany the public execution of a criminal or the sacrifice of a victim.  Saw and Final Destination date back to the early 2000s, but the trend that they represent is ramping up.  It is also politicizing itself in the manner of “Wokeness.”  The movie moguls at Universal Pictures have announced the release of a film entitled The Hunt for September.  In its scenario righteous liberals stalk and kill so-called deplorables, as Hillary Clinton named those whose convictions differ from the Left’s.

The modern world qualifies as Cthulhuesque in any number of ways.  In December of 2017 in San Francisco a “woke” jury acquitted an illegal alien whom prosecutors had accused of randomly and lethally shooting a young woman in the back.  Kate Steinle had been enjoying the tourist attractions on Pier 14 with members of her family.  The evidence against the accused, including a confession, appeared incontrovertible.  The outcome dramatically illustrated the transvaluation of values that liberalism wants to foist on North American society.  The jury nullified the prosecutorial case, dismissing evidence, including the confession, as irrelevant.  It endowed on the accused the protection against any guilty verdict inherent in his class identification: Illegal alien, of Mexican origin, and subject to deportation under the relevant laws.  The jury acted sacrificially in at least two ways.  It demoted the murdered woman to human insignificance by denying her implicit appeal for justice; that is to say – it acquiesced in, or worse, endorsed her violent and untimely death.  And it placed the accused, to employ the phrase that Lovecraft in The Call borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, beyond good and evil.  Of course, in doing so, the jury placed itself beyond good and evil.  It declared the advent of “killing and levelling in joy” that the cultist invokes in Lovecraft’s story.  The liberal sacrament of abortion entangles itself in the same transvaluation of values.  The governor of Virginia, advocating for a late-term abortion law, calmly discussed the latitude of the proposal.  A child having been delivered would still fall subject to euthanasia if after a discussion between the mother and her gynecologist or abortionist it fell out that the child remained unwanted.  Around the same time, the legislature of New York State actually passed a similar law, whereupon the Democrat-party governor, at least one of the state’s two Democrat-party senators, and numerous other legislators gathered in Albany publicly to express their pleasure on the bill’s passage.  The governor arranged for a skyscraper in Manhattan to be illuminated in honor of the event.  The justification of the modern version of child-sacrifice establishes itself on purely materialistic principles.  The child-in-the-womb is “not a human being”; it is a fetus, a “lump of flesh.”  It has no more right to its existence than Kate Steinle.

Today the Drudge Report carries the headline “Shock: Epstein Found Dead in Cell.”  But who is shocked?  Under the reign of Cthulhu, as Castro puts it in The Call, the liberated humanity will replace “laws and morals” with “ecstasy.”  And it will murder to ensure its liberation. Twenty-First-Century North American society (one wishes to avoid the word civilization) has achieved the dubious distinction of being the first fully pornographic society.  The simulated violence of Hollywood summer fare is one kind of pornography; the other, more obvious kind enjoys a currency just as pervasive.  It appears that the contemporary North American elite classes, as much as the lower classes who at once envy and imitate them, organize their lives on the basis of a perpetual orgy.  At the very least people aspire to a perpetual orgy.  Abortion serves the orgy by eliminating its consequences in case the prophylactic measures fail.  A pornographic society can only morph into a sterile, self-terminating society.   The notion that avoiding offspring makes life happier now circulates widely.  Epstein left no offspring; he and Harvey Weinstein, producer of the nihilistic Crying Game (1992), and those like them want only a steady stream of attractive femmequins from orgasmic intercourse with whom they would satisfy their addictive demand for self-generated endorphins.  (Headline at Drudge: “Epstein Needed Three Orgasms a Day.”)  No doubt a regressive fetishism plays a role: In the pornographic scheme, the older man dominates the younger woman; his obsession with feminine adolescence signifies a failure to develop morally into a genuine adult.  The pornography industry, which is thoroughly entangled with “mainstream” Hollywood, with Hollywood’s political connections on the Left, and with the actual cynical misogyny of that same Left, sacrifices young women.  Rather surprisingly the thesis that pornography constitutes a lower stratum that (pardoning the expression) thrusts itself upwards into the elite layers of society plainly structured the morally acute first season of HBO’s drama-series True Detective (2014), reproducing the plot of Lovecraft’s Call in a contemporary setting. That season of True Detective was a rare exception to the almost universal nihilism of contemporary entertainment.

As Cthulhu awakens and his psychic radiations reach the susceptible, people convince themselves that they have become visionaries and prophets.  Visionaries and prophets qualify, however, as standouts and eccentrics.  Cultic activity always exhibits a mimetic character, a trend towards homogeneity, to which telepathy, as a metaphor, speaks – hence the extreme narrowness of “woke” discourse, as demonstrated by the so-called debates of the large coterie of Democrat-party candidates for the presidential nomination in 2020.  They raise their hands on cue.  They all say the same thing, the only difference being that they try in succession to say it in more extreme terms.  They appear to respond to remote control.  One of them, Marianne Williamson, gives off a strong aura of Theosophy, and poses as a guru or priestess.   Like every spokesperson for every dark psychic force of collectivized hatred, Williams believes that words – or “wonkiness,” in her terminology – are insufficient.  The situation calls for action: “If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”  Williamson frequently invokes “love,” but her words just quoted, which blatantly demonize the duly elected president, imply something sinister.  Very likely Williamson’s hatred, which she projects on the deplorable bearers of tradition that stand as blocking agents between her prophecies and their realization, surpasses that of the other candidates.  She only dissimulates her hatred better than they do.  The Left reveals its theosophical religiosity in other ways.  When President Trump delivered his State of the Union Address in February, many congresswomen on the occasion wore the white robes of the secret Lemurian colony that theosophical speculation places inside Mt. Shasta in the Cascade Range. Those clueless women, including the New Spice Girls, resembled the Californian mystics who await a “glorious fulfillment” in The Call, which however never comes.

Weirdness has become universal.  Recently from Drudge: “Snake-like UFOs seen across US”; “the Pentagon finally admits it investigates UFOs”; and “scientist warns the world to ‘think twice before replying to alien signals from outer space.’”  Or again at Drudge: “Study Finds Rise in ‘Doomsday Prepping’ Due To Mainstream American ‘Culture of Fear.’”  At American Thinker, word comes of how “leftists doxx and threaten [a] Dayton nurse who saved lives for appearing in picture with President Trump.”  The ugly neologism doxxing refers to a type of conspiratorial Internet-mediated attempt to call down public wrath on someone who has done something conspicuously at odds with “Wokeness.”  Doxxing is not a witch-hunting gesture; it is a witch-burning gesture – undertaken by cowards who want a remote mob to do the Bacchic dirty-work for them.  The theoretician of religion René Girard wrote of the sacrificial crisis, a social phenomenon in the inherently unstable societies of the archaic world.  The signs of the sacrificial crisis are, among others, undifferentiation, or a migration towards sameness, as when all the Democrat-party would-be presidential nominees raise their hands at the same time and then try to restore their difference from one another by the vain gesture of out-rivaling their rivals in the extremity of their commonly held extreme position; and a panicked search for poisonous guilt in the form of perpetrators on whom the community might blame its plight.  Also: Signs in the sky, as mentioned above. Since an egalitarian society forms the goal of the Left, and since equality forms the opposite of difference, the emptiness of the program becomes clear.  For its part the destruction of the perpetrator, actually a victim, aims at the resolidification of the deliquescent community.  As the High Priest said on the Day of Calvary, and as the ubiquitous “Trolley Problem” claims, “It is better that one man should die than that the whole community should perish.”

The single most essential and characteristic gesture of the contemporary Left consists in that obnoxious doxxing.  Earlier in this year, a Pennsylvania legislator, State Representative Brian Sims, took it upon himself to try to doxx teenage girls of a Christian persuasion who were quietly demonstrating outside a Planned Parenthood facility in a Philadelphia suburb.  According to a Newsweek story (5/7/19): “One video from April 18 shows Sims approaching one woman and what appears to be three teenage girls while they protest on the street.  He then offers to donate $100 to any of the online viewers who can help him identify the protesters, a practice known as doxxing.”  What does Sims’ behavior mean?  It means that he is confident that he can muster a mob to harass these girls and prevent them from pursuing their quietismatic opposition to the Left’s chief sacrament.  And he feels no compunction in doing so. If the girls succeeded in their passive persuasion, children who might have undergone abortion would enter the world through birth.  As everyone knows, life would be happier if there were no children.  The Wikipedia page on Mr. Sims lists no offspring – and indeed no spouse.  Moreover, if there were no babies born, there would be no white supremacists born – and soon everyone would be reveling in gaiety.  A short while later everyone would be dead.  In the Gospel of John Christ says, “I am the life and the way.”  Life – not death.  The way – not the impasse.  Yet for the Left, which yearns for the epistemological confusion that reigned in a licensing mode before the Gospel revelation, and that permitted “do what you will,” the impasse is that very Christ, that very Cross on Golgotha.  Lovecraft would never have applied the adjective Satanic to his literary invention of Great Cthulhu, but literate people can perceive the identity.

Lovecraft redeems himself ironically through the colossal contradictions, unsuspected by him, in his – smug – atheism and materialism.  In an early essay from sometime in 1919 on the topic of “Idealism and Materialism,” the shy and lonely man from Providence writes that “religious persons will assure you that they know their faith to be true by means of sensations and intuitions too deep to be expressed.”  Clearly Lovecraft had not taken into consideration the words of Paul. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (Chapter 11), Paul defines faith as, “the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not.”  No trace of Gnosticism contaminates this minimalistic definition, nor does Paul elaborate it, otherwise he would destroy its tenuous minimalism.  Later in his essay Lovecraft borrows the cliché that “many a man in bedlam has the certain belief that he is Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon.”  He omits Christ.  Amusingly, the Bedlamite Democrat-party candidates for the presidential nomination in 2020 like to quote Scripture, and to lecture the deplorables about Christian doctrine, especially the Buddha-Judge from South Bend.  It is as though every man or woman of them, he or she, stood boldly before the Pharisaical crowd that wanted the sanction of reb Yeshua to doxx to death Stormy Daniels — or rather to stone to death the woman taken in adultery — and like Jesus designed cleverly to subvert, and indeed succeeded in subverting, the mob’s sacrificial impulse.  As Seneca wrote: Stay away from crowds. But the Democrat candidates are a crowd — or rather they are part of a larger, increasingly frenzied crowd.  The ones casting stones, and wielding bicycle chains, and beating up homosexual dissidents who refuse to get with the program, and slandering half the population with the libel of waaaaycism, adhere, not to the renunciation of witch-burning, but to its opposite, the Left’s brutal neo-Jacobinism, with its Cthulhu orgies and its heads on pikes.

Let us add this: We refer to the ones who have saved up their own shit; who have canned their shit in mason-jars; who have masked themselves to confront others; and who, finally, have hurled their shit, in confrontations that they have provoked, at those who exercise the temerity to disagree with their Gnihilistic arrogance.