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Near the beginning of Professor Barton
Levi St. Arrnand's thought-provoking study The Roots of Horror in H. P.
Lovecraft, the author remarks that "[Carl Gustav] Jung is uncannily
relevant to an understanding of the place and meaning of horror in Lovecraft's
fiction. . . ." (p. 8). As if his own study did not admirably document this
assertion, we will furnish further confirmation of it here. St. Armand notes a
parallel between one of Jung's own dreams and the main sequence in "The
Rats in the Walls" that is so startlingly close that, were it not for other
obstacles, one would have to posit literary dependence. In the present notes, we
want to focus on another arresting Jung-Lovecraft parallel. In fact the very
chill of surprise discovery one feels upon reading the parallel materials side
by side is itself reminiscent of our theme --- the shock of unearthing artifacts
from a prehuman era. We will observe the surprising similarities between dreams
recorded by Jung on the one hand, and scenes in Lovecraft's fiction on the
other. In light of these affinities, the significant divergences of
interpretation supplied by both men will seem all the more striking.
Eureka!
The recording and interpretation of
patients' dreams played quite as important a role in Jung's version of
psychoanalysis as it did in that of his estranged mentor Freud, though the roles
were very different. Freud tended to see dreams as Morse Code tappings from the
repressed libido in the subconscious, while Jung viewed them as reflections of a
set of "archetypes" --- basic categories and images passed down via
racial memory and forming a vast pool of instinctual lore. This he called the
"collective unconscious". It might be thought of as a sort of
psychological version of Plato's "realm of forms". These archetypes
surfaced in modern dreams as well as in ancient myths and fairy tales. Jung was
particularly fond of researching the role of the archetypes in various branches
of arcana, including ancient Gnosticism and medieval alchemy. In fact, their
psychological relevance led Jung to take these branches of occultism with more
than a historian's seriousness. Freud once sarcastically recalled the good old
days of his acquaintance with "Jung at a time when this investigator was a
mere psychoanalyst and did not yet aspire to be a prophet. . . ." (A
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 280). Indeed, one might be
tempted to dub Jung the only respectable occultist!
Yet wherever his theorizing began to
slip into genuine occultism, it ran up against the skepticism of his colleagues.
Besides the disdainful words of Freud quoted immediately above, another sample
of this scholarly caution was the cool reception met by Jung's speculations on
"synchronicity", a postulated principle of "acausal
connection" that would account for the astonishingly "meaningful
coincidences" we all experience at one time or another. Despite the
apologetical efforts of Ira Progoff (Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny),
this notion is still not taken very seriously by anybody except dyed-in-the-wool
occultists. At any rate, it is in Jung's tract Synchronicity, An Acausal
Connecting Principle that we find the dream accounts which concern us.
In one of them, "The dreamer was
walking in a wooded mountain region. At the top of a steep slope he came to a
ridge of rock honeycombed with holes. . . . [He entered] a cave, at the back of
which a cluster of columns could be seen in the living rock. On top of each
column was a dark brown human head with large eyes, carved with great care out
of some very hard stone, like lignite. . . . The dreamer could hardly believe
his eyes at first, but then had to admit that the columns were continued far
back into the living rock and must therefore have come into existence without
the help of man. He reflected that the rock was at least half a million years
old and that the artifacts could not possibly have been made by human
hands" (Synchronicity, pp. 87-88).
Much the same astonishment grasps the
explorers in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, when they discover
the deserted city of the Old Ones in Antarctica. "To form even a
rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent
maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of
fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and
lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive
person. . . ." (At the Mountains of Madness, p. 54). "There
could now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had
built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's
ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical
steppes of Europe and Asia" (p. 55).
In the short tale "Dagon" a
sailor, cast adrift, seeks refuge on an island just pushed above the ocean
surface by volcanic disturbances. Once ashore, he espies "an object that
gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was
merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of
a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work
of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with a sensation I cannot express; for
despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at
the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that
the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the
workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures" (Dagon
and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 5-6).
Note that in all three scenes, a human
observer is amazed to find architectural specimens which definitely evidence
intelligent design, though they are of such great age that the architects cannot
have been human. In the case of Jung's dream record, there is art as well as
architecture, i.e., the sculpted heads. Now we may proceed to another set of
parallel vignettes which center more on such prehuman artistry than
architecture.
Jung's "dreamer was in a wild
mountain region where he found contiguous layers of triassic rock. He loosened
the slabs and discovered to his boundless astonishment that they had human heads
on them in low relief" (p. 87). Lovecraft's Antarctican explorers find
themselves facing an analogous aesthetic anomaly. "The sculptures in the
building we entered were [carved] perhaps two million years ago --- as checked
up by geological, biological, and astronomical features. . . . One edifice hewn
from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly fifty million years ---
to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous --- and contained bas-reliefs of an
artistry surpassing anything else . . . that we encountered" (p. 56).
Interestingly, both narrators find samples of a particular kind of carving,
bas-reliefs; and both note the age of the rock in terms of geological chronology
--- "triassic", "Eocene", "Cretaceous".
Probably the most shocking prospect of
all would be the discovery of actual prehuman writing or inscription. We find
something like this in Jung's account of a friend's dream. A woman who had
listened to a discussion on the theme of "self-subsistent meanings"
heard someone present remark, "The geometrical square does not occur in
nature except in crystals." The same night she had this dream: "In the
garden there was a large sandpit in which layers of rubbish had been deposited.
In one of these layers she discovered thin, slaty plates of green serpentine.
One of them had black squares on it, arranged concentrically. The black was not
painted on, but was ingrained in the stone, like the markings in an agate.
Similar marks were found on two or three other plates. . . ." (p. 87).
Returning again to Lovecraft's
Antarctican archaeologists, one of them radios this message back to the camp:
"Have found peculiar soap-stone fragment about six inches across and an
inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation --- greenish,
but no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity.
Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off. . . . Small, smooth
depression in center of unbroken surface. . . . Groups of tiny dots in regular
patterns" (p. 17).
In "The Shadow out of Time",
another explorer makes a similar discovery in the Australian wilderness. "I
came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3x2x2 feet in size and
weathered and pitted to the very limit. . . . [W]hen l looked close enough I
could make out some deeply carved lines despite the weathering."
"Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilization
older than any dreamed of before. . . ." "I have some knowledge of
geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me.
They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a
queer sort of cement or concrete. . . . It is a matter of hundreds of thousands
of years --- or Heaven knows how much more. I don't like to think about it"
(pp. 404-405).
Finally, in "The Challenge from
Beyond", Lovecraft discusses "those debatable and disquieting clay
fragments called the Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in
southern England. . . . Their shape and markings were so queer that a few
scholars hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures about them and their
origin. They came, clearly, from a time when no human beings could exist on the
globe --- but their contour and figurings were damnably puzzling" (n. p.).
Parenthetically, Lovecraft's mention of
"artificiality" does not seem intended to imply that the fragments
were a hoax like the discoveries of the "Piltdown Man" (from which the
name "Eltdown Shards" was derived) and the "Cardiff Giant".
Lovecraft uses the regrettably ambiguous term "artificiality" to
suggest, as the context indicates, that the clay fragments were, notwithstanding
their prehistoric antiquity, baked and carved plates rather than natural fossils
of some kind. In other words, they were "artificial" in the sense of
being genuine "artifacts".
Again, the similarities between Jung's
and Lovecraft's accounts are surprising. In all cases, blocks or tablets are
unearthed which bear markings on them traced there by no human hand. But this
very similarity brings to our attention an equally important difference between
the versions of Lovecraft and Jung. In the former, the inscriptions are the work
of prehuman hands, whereas in the latter they have been put there by no
hand at all.
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?
All of Jung's examples seem to use the
prehuman age of the artifacts to underline the fact that humans cannot have
fashioned them. And besides human beings, no one else is in view. This is
important, because Jung believes that the dreams all illustrate "the
presence of a formal factor in nature. They describe . . . the meaningful
coincidence of an absolutely natural product with a human idea apparently
independent of it" (p. 88). According to Jung's theory, synchronous events
(such as precognitive dreams) are psychic flashes which illuminate the
archetypal structure of meaning resident in the universe as a whole.
For Lovecraft, things are (or at least
seem to be) altogether different. His prehuman artifacts were not made by any
hand, but they most definitely were the work of intelligent claw, tentacle, or
pseudopod. The idea here is that "man is [n]either the oldest [n]or the
last of earth's masters". The discovery of prehuman or nonhuman intelligent
races is envisioned as having the same kind of effect as the discovery that the
earth is not the center of the universe. Just as the medieval church was shaken
by this catapulting of the earth to an insignificant niche on the periphery,
Lovecraft believed that humanity's ultimate insignificance in the face of kalpas
of cosmic history would be made mercilessly clear by such discoveries as he
described. Note the profound shock and fear produced in Lovecraft's characters
by these revelations.
Seen this way, Lovecraft and Jung could
not be further apart in their interpretation of the imagery of prehuman
artifacts. Jung affirms a universal meaning structure, while Lovecraft
nihilistically champions humanity's insignificance as a mere collection of
cosmic flotsam. But there is another way to read Lovecraft's own images. In At
the Mountains of Madness, the narrator mourns the death of one of the
recently-revived Old Ones with a kind of grudging admiration for the weird
aliens. "God, what intelligence and persistence! . . . Radiates,
vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn --- whatever they had been, they were
men!" (p. 90). In "The Shadow out of Time", the narrator, a
psychic hostage of the Great Race, tells how he fellowshipped and conversed with
the rest of the captive-intelligences, minds kidnapped from various expanses of
past and future, from this planet and that. (There is even one of the
Antarctican Old Ones on hand!)
In both cases the idea is that there is
indeed a continuity between all the races --- that of the very intelligence
whose presence in ancient alien life-forms was supposedly so horrifying. The
differences of physiology and even of planetary origin are seen as purely
secondary and superficial, and all intelligent entitles are seen to be
fundamentally of the same stock. This is explicit in At the Mountains of
Madness ("They were men!") and implicit in "The Shadow out of
Time". Thus, Lovecraft has restored humanity (or at least intelligent life)
to an effective centrality in the cosmos. As Emil Brunner stated, it is the
capacity to encompass the world in thought, and no mere spatial coordinates,
that give humanity its centrality, a centrality which withstands any Copernican
revolution (The Word of God and Modern Man, p. 33). Far from showing
humanity to be a meaningless ephemera. Lovecraft winds up extending this
epistemological centrality backward and forward throughout eternity. On this
reading, Lovecraft has come awfully close, even if unwittingly, to Jung's
conception of a pattern of meaning throughout the universe.
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