I’ve heard Robin Mckay claim “you wont get hyperstition until you get your head around Lovecraft.” So what is hyperstition and what does lovecraft have to do with it?
The ccru glossary defines it as an “Element of effective culture that makes itself real through fictional quantities functioning as time-traveling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to the old ones”¹ This is a bit cumbersome and esoteric for my tastes, so in the interest of clarity it’s more than worth breaking it down. The first bit is essentially fictions that make themselves real. Something which differs from fictions that become real in mechanism, as well as the way we construe it, rather than the result. For example: in ‘’The Evening the Morning and the Night’’ a character reads a science fiction novel involving the concept of palm print reading locks who then spends his time grinding away on this problem until he creates them. In this sense the fiction is made real by this man and we do not have hyperstition. On the other hand if we view the locks as using the man as a vehicle, through the capture of his imagination to actualize, themselves we easily arrive at hyperstition.² We are still lacking the mechanism with which the capture can take place.
The importance of Lovecraft is that his fictions provide both the example and the vehicle for this process which makes it for obvious reasons indisputably hyperstitious.³ So how does this capture take place?
The best place to begin to answer this is at an end, and not just because the end is what produces the attempt at realizing itself.⁴ Though with the mythos distributed so broadly throughout culture it is helpful to attack something more narrow to illustrate the action. The Necronomicon, the magic book within the books, is an excellent figure with which to sketch this study. Manifesting itself in ever iterating and invasive instances from the Evil Dead, to the Elder Scrolls series⁵ with several physical volumes bearing the title. One of the more interesting of which comes to us in the form of the Simon Necronomicon.⁶
Where Lovecraft excels most is world crafting, an art which arrives in his tales as an occurrence of actual places with fictional events, characters, and institutions which resonate with an eerie believability. In action this generally means taking a character who is well educated and placing them in a position with a slowly mounting oddity that eventually overpowers what can occur in ‘’reality’’. The onset of madness through horror. A movement from a grounded reality into a space where things that appear unbelievable can be taken as real. The Necronomicon itself is repeated throughout many of Lovecraft's stories without significant elaboration beyond that it contains the methods used to call the old ones.⁷
Echoing the process from which the universe in which it was conceived was constructed, Simon begins by enumerating his discovery of the book, historicizing it in sumerian mythology and attaching Lovecraft to Alester Crowley⁸, before beginning the text with the testimony of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, who authored the text. The entire book is done up in the style of occult books like The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and Ars Goetia, complete with rites, banishments, and seals used to summon the old ones.
Goetic deamons themselves seem to be of hyperstitional origin. Belial being a prototypical example. Initially a Hebrew adjective meaning worthless that is used significantly throughout the old testament. At some point though they make the jump to a noun, ending up in a position of opposition to god by their single mention in the new testament.⁹ There are a few factors that allow Belial's capture of the imagination on their journey towards actualization. In this case religious fervor played in the key of fear this second aspect is the chord which Lovecraft strikes. Fear of god, of punishment, of eternal damnation, of hell, of death. Psalms 18:5-6 rings as the likeliest culprit. “... the floods of Belial assailed me.” “the cords of Sheol surround me.”¹⁰ Sheol, being the place for departed souls of the dead, in such close proximity to Belial, the adjective, brings us Belial the noun through the second factor; the positive term of loss. From death arises the breath of life. Over the course of several copyings, readings, and translations the change takes root. Loss that takes place in the data transfer due to interpretation, a process which creates a space through which genesis arises to fill the hole.
“The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist…”¹¹
and in crept Belial, on the back of fear through a gap in a mind. A similar song can be played by Baal, reproducing into two additional and distinct entities as Belphegor and Baal Berith in the middle ages.¹²Lucifer himself rides through helal¹³ on the back of the fallen king of Babylon.¹⁴