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
Essentially then, the words of the Necronomicon open a portal through which the outside/old ones arrive(s), the words of Lovecraft open a portal through which the Necronomicon arrived. Fear¹⁵ of course it's a horror story is the coincidence intensifier which creates the space of loss within which an interpretation arises functioning as the act of them stepping through closer to reality, an intensification. Magic words arranged in such a way to make manifest.¹⁶
At this point it behooves to define an additional element of the above definition, which while appearing less esoteric is surprisingly no more obvious, culture. Shulamith Firestones is excellent
“Culture is the attempt by man to realize the conceivable in the possible.''¹⁷
but she provides us more than just this in her Two modes of Cultural History; the feminine aesthetic and masculine technological modes of production. The dynamic between which gives birth to culture. With the first all limitations are denied and an ideal world is created, corresponding to the subjective, wishful, fantastic and emotional. This encompasses religion, art, and philosophy. This was the mode that dominated early history, reaching its height in the Renaissance before man's fear of the dark feminine forces of nature receded allowing the objective, rational, mechanical sensibility of the technological mode to dominate.¹⁸ While “-ghosts, mental telepathy, Methuselah’s age- remain to be realized…"¹⁹ the scientific revolution and its consequences remain undeniable. But as a result the aesthetic mode has been relegated to the outside. Seen as less valuable despite empiricism remaining a means to actualize the ideal.
What makes lovecraft's texts unique is that they often chart the movement of a character enraptured by the technological mode into a relation where they succumb to the aesthetic mode. When the outside arrives in Lovecraft the feminine aesthetic mode penetrates the masculine technologic mode creating a rupture, and a true merging of the two. An introduction of the aesthetic mode through a positive space created by the unbelievable through horror. A merging of the two modes that arrives through the dark illuminating the elements of reality that have always been fantastical. A rebirth of a religious sensibility in a culture dominated by the realism of the technologic.
‘’The merging of the aesthetic mode with the tecnologic mode will gradually suffocate ‘pure’ high art all together. The first breakdown of categories, the remerging of art with (technologized reality), indicates that we are now in the transitional pre-revolutionary period, in which the three separate cultural strains, technology(‘applied science’), ‘pure research’, and ‘pure’ modern art, will melt together- along with the rigid sex categories they represent.’’²⁰
The Necronomicon is at the center of Lovecraft culture old ones arrive though it just as the bible rests at the center of christianity. Most Cultures are oriented around arts, artists, foundational texts or magic books because these use their members to bring themselves closer to reality.²¹
¹363
²The author in the past writing the book read in the present about the locks in a fictional future both act with time traveling potential on the fictional quantity of the lock which has a double action as the old one which captures the imagination in order to actualize itself. Coincidence intensifier?
³xP
⁴As chance the ends are the means as well as the justification for them
⁵ Here attached to hermaeus mora a daedric prince who utilizes the desire for knowledge to capture the actions of individuals for their purposes.
⁶Again written by an individual of dubious reality
⁷Desire to know more?
⁸even providing a supplement for 777.
⁹ (Kadmon 2018)
¹⁰ (Kadmon 2018) translations by
¹¹ (Lutece 1889)
¹² (Kadmon 2018)
¹³Hebrew for morning star
¹⁴(Belanger 2021) 191-2
¹⁵In this case though other things can do it
¹⁶13
¹⁷(Firestone 2003) 154
¹⁸ (Firestone 2003)156-8
¹⁹ (Firestone 2003) 155
²⁰ (Firestone 2003)170 “many artists have made the mistake … of trying to annex science, to incorporate it into their own artistic framework, rather than using it to expand that framework.” 169
²¹ Is it any wonder so many founding fathers were masons?
Belanger, M. 2021. The Dictionary of Demons: Names of the Damned.
Firestone, Shulamith. 2003. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kadmon, Baal. 2018. Belial: A History.
Lutece, R. 1889. Barriers to Trans-Dimensional Travel.