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Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, known to her
followers as "HPB", was co-founder with Colonel Henry Steele Olcott of
the Theosophical Society, a genteel and pretentious cult of the nineteenth
century that survives today in several insignificant splinter-groups. Quite a
dynamic and colorful figure in her day, Madame Blavatsky managed to synthesize
an occult metaphysics that has fueled the imagination of generations of those
who, in Ouspensky's phrase, are "in search of the miraculous". But our
interest in her stems from a rather different agenda. As Lin Carter notes,
"Madame Blavatsky is really quite an important personage in the history of
fantasy. In the course of two interminable and all but unreadable tomes of
spurious occult lore --- Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine ---
she codified fugitive and unattached morsels of legend, theory and nonsense into
a systematic prehistory of the world" including a superbly "gaudy
cosmology". "This system, percolating down through sensational
popularizations and Sunday supplement articles, was adopted lock, stock and
barrel by writers for the fantasy pulp magazines, who are thus greatly in her
debt." (Preface to Clark Ashton Smith, Poseidonis, p. 3.)
Fritz Leiber ("John Carter: Sword
of Theosophy", in DeCamp (ed. ), The Spell of Conan) traces HPB's
influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Lin Carter names H. P. Lovecraft as
another of her debtors. Robert Turner (writing in The Necronomicon, The Book
of Dead Names, pp. 66-67) also discerns theosophical currents in Lovecraft's
Cthulhu Mythos. HPL certainly did borrow from HPB, but to our knowledge, no one
has yet demonstrated the real extent of that influence. In the present article,
we will show that several obscure passages in Lovecraft's work can be elucidated
by reference to the lore of Theosophy.
Encountering Theosophy
In his book Occult Philosophy,
Marc Edmund Jones comments with some irony that despite Lovecraft's total
disbelief in the occult, "His Cthulhu mythology is a complete and
thoroughly rounded out job of invention, actually much more convincing than
Leadbeater and Besant's presumably literal account of remote things in Man,
Whence, How and Whither" (p. 89). He makes reference to Charles G.
Leadbeater and Annie Besant, two of the principal leaders of Theosophy after
Madame Blavatsky's death. Jones's statement is all the more ironic since HPL's
"Cthulhu mythology" may be shown to derive, at least in some details,
from the self-same Theosophical system.
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,
Lovecraft reveals his acquaintance with Theosophy. "I've . . . been
digesting something of vast interest as background or source material --- . . .
i.e., the Atlantis-Lemuria tales, as developed by modern occultists &
the[o]sophical charlatans. . . . What I have read is The Story of Atlantis
and the Lost Lemuria, by Scott Elliott [sic]" (Selected Letters,
vol. II, p. 58). Writing to Willis Conover, Lovecraft is even more frank.
"The crap of the theosophists, which falls into the class of conscious
fakery, is interesting in spots" (Lovecraft at Last, p. 33).
However, it appears that Lovecraft's
explicit familiarity with Theosophy was somewhat limited. In a second letter to
Smith, he mentions several new (Theosophical) mythologoumena and bemoans his
ignorance of their source.
[E. Hoffmann] Price has dug up
another cycle of actual folklore involving an allegedly primordial thing
called The Book of Dzyan, which is supposed to contain all sorts of
secrets of the Elder World before the sinking of . . . Atlantis . . . and . .
. Lemuria. . . . It is kept at the Holy City of Shamballah, and is regarded as
the oldest book in the world --- its language being Senzar (ancestor of
Sanscrit), which was brought to earth 18,000,000 years ago by the Lords of
Venus. I don't know where E. Hoffmann got hold of this stuff, but it sounds
damn good" (Selected Letters, vol. IV, p. 155).
If he didn't know the origin of this
material, at least he suspected, and correctly. In a letter to Price, he asks of
this legend cycle, "What --- if any --- special cult (like the
theosophists, who have concocted a picturesque tradition of Atlantean-Lemurian
elder world stuff) . . . cherishes it?" (Selected Letters, vol. IV,
p. 153) In a disarmingly frank statement, which we may suspect was intended as a
knowing "wink" to the reader, Blavatsky herself had declared,
"The reader is . . . invited to regard all that which follows as a fairy
tale, if he likes. . . ." (An Abridgement of 'The Secret Doctrine',
p. 17.) Lovecraft, in effect, accepted this invitation.
The Book of Dzyan
In many of his tales, Lovecraft has a
protagonist stumble upon a secret cache of musty occult books, among which are
usually to be found, The Book of Eibon, Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis,
D'erlette's Cultes de Goules, Von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten,
and of course the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. Occasionally, there are
substitutions or additions to this checklist. One such optional item is The
Book of Dzyan. In "The Haunter of the Dark" Robert Blake finds a
copy among the books in the Starry Wisdom library.
They were the black, forbidden things
which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in
furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal
secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time
from the days of man's youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was.
The "big five" are listed.
"But there were others he had known merely by reputation or not at all ---
the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan. . . ." In
"The Diary of Alonzo Typer", said diarist recounts how "I learned
of The Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the Earth. . . .
" Lovecraft's successors continued to use the book in this kind of setting.
In The Lurker at the Threshold, Derleth's narrator recalls that "I
dipped into [the] strange and terrible pages" of the usual Mythos
grimoires, plus "the Book of Dzyan, the Dhol Chants, and the Seven
Cryptical Books of Hsan. I read of terrible and blasphemous cults of
ancient, pre-human eras. . . ."
What was this Book of Dzyan?
Could it live up to the shudder some reputation thus established for it? On the
very first page of The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky describes it as
"An ancient manuscript --- a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to
water, fire, and air, by some specific unknown process. . . . " (p. 1.)
The name itself, "Dzyan", seems to represent the Sanskrit dhyana
("meditation"), the root of the Chinese Ch'an and the Japanese Zen.
As DeCamp says, it is pronounced something like "John". Furthermore,
Tradition says that it was taken down
in Senzar, the secret sacerdotal tongue, from the words of the Divine
Beings, who dictated it to the sons of Light, in Central Asia, at the very
beginning of the [human] race. . . . The old book, having described Cosmic
Evolution and explained the origin of everything on earth, including physical
man, . . . goes no further. It stops short . . . just about 4989 years ago. .
. . (The Secret Doctrine, vol. 1, p. xliii)
More about these "Divine
Beings" and "sons of Light" presently, but for now suffice it to
note the close parallel between Lovecraft's reference to Dzyan in one of
his letters quoted above, and this quote from The Secret Doctrine.
Apparently, Price had quoted this text pretty much verbatim, as did HPL when he
in turn related the material to Smith.
In fact, no such book exists. Or, one
might better say, it is a pseudepigraph. Interested readers may obtain a copy of
the text for themselves, but its origin is considerably more recent than that
claimed for it by Madame Blavatsky. DeCamp points out the dependence of part of Dzyan
on the Rig Veda's "Hymn of Creation" (Lost Continents,
p. 60). Rene Guenon traces it to fragments of the Kanjur and Tanjur texts of
Tibet (Robert S. Ellwood, Jr., Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern
America, p. 129). Finally, Gershorn G. Scholem makes a good case for the
origin of Dzyan being an Aramaic kabbalistic text, the Sifra
Di-Tseniutha, to which Blavatsky actually referred, transliterating its
title as "Sifra Dzeniuta", a form even closer to "Dzyan" (Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism, pp. 398-399).
The resultant Book of Dzyan or Stanzas
of Dzyan (HPB used both titles interchangeably) was the core of the
encyclopedic work The Secret Doctrine. The latter, in fact, purports to
be but a massive commentary on the former. And though it is there made the
centerpiece of a confusing jungle of obtuse speculation, the allegedly
primordial text could hardly have accounted for the flabbergasted trauma of
Alonzo Typer: "what I read will cloud and make horrible whatever period of
life lies ahead of me."
Shamballah
In the letter quoted above, Lovecraft
refers to "the Holy City of Shamballah". Despite his manifest
enthusiasm for "that Dzyan-Shamballah stuff", the mythical city
appears but once in his fiction. We must refer again to "The Diary of
Alonzo Typer", where the narrator recounts: "I learned of the city
Shamballah, built by the Lemurians fifty million years ago, yet inviolate still
behind its walls of psychic force in the eastern desert." The business
about the Lemurians represents creative license, but the rest of the passage
does stem from theosophical beliefs about the lost city.
Shamballah, the prototype for the
fictional "Shangri-La", was believed by Theosophists to be "the
spiritual center of the world and the original source of the secret doctrines of
Theosophy" (Edwin Bernbaum, The Way to Shambhala, p. 20). Certain
highly advanced "Masters" or "Mahatmas" (notably the Tibetan
supermen Kuthumi and Morya El), from whom Blavatsky, A. P. Sinnett, and other
early Theosophists claimed to receive telepathic revelations, were believed to
dwell there. Surely these Masters supplied the prototype for "the undying
leaders of the [Cthulhu] cult in the mountains of China", mentioned in
"The Call of Cthulhu" just a line or two before an explicit reference
to "the speculations of theosophists".
According to indigenous Tibetan legend,
Shamballah is a hidden, ageless kingdom surrounded by a ring of impenetrable
mountain peaks. It is ruled by a line of righteous philosopher-kings who
preserve Buddhist culture and doctrine against the day when the outside world
will have sunk completely into the mire of warfare and materialism. At this
time, a messianic king will lead his army forth from the hidden city to destroy
the wicked and establish a golden age (Bernbaum, p. 4).
Tibetans believe that Shamballah is
somewhere north of Tibet, in the Kunlun Mountains, or in Mongolia, the Sinkiang
Province of China, or Siberia. Others suggest the North Pole or even another
planet! Historians and mythographers, on the other hand, have suggested that if
the legend has any basis, Shamballah may correspond to the Tarim Basin, West
Turkestan, the ancient Kushan Empire, the Greek Kingdom of Bactria, theYarkand,
Kashgar, or Khotan oases, or, finally, the old Uighur Kingdom of Khocho [=
"Tcho-tcho"?] in the Turfan Depression beneath the Tien Shan Mountains
(Bernbaum, p. 46). Probably the most attractive guess, however, is that of
Idries Shah, who believes that "it could be derived from Shams-i-Balkh, the
Bactrian Sun Temple, the ruins of which can still be seen at Balkh near the
northern frontier of Afghanistan" (J. G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a
New World, p. 26).
What of HPL's reference to
"inviolate . . . walls of psychic force"? Shamballah is often
represented in Tibetan Buddhist lore as a symbol for the object of spiritual
quest, like "the Celestial City" in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.
Those who are unworthy can never find their way to Shamballah. To them, the city
will remain invisible because their bad karma will "have created illusions
that obscure [their] vision and prevent them from recognizing or seeing the
Kingdom" (Bernbaum, p. 39). Lovecraft apparently had something like this in
mind.
Incidentally, quests for Shamballah
were not restricted to the realm of legend. Artist and occultist Nicholas
Roerich, to whose "strange and disturbing Asian paintings" HPL refers
in At the Mountains of Madness, undertook the journey in 1934. But he
returned home empty handed. Even though Roerich had founded his own theosophical
cult, the Roerich Foundation, he mustn't have had the spiritual wherewithal
needed to penetrate that karmic curtain.
The Lords of Venus
In the same context with The Book of
Dzyan and the lost city of Shamballah, Lovecraft makes an enigmatic
reference to "the Lords of Venus". ("I'm quite on edge about that
Dzyan-Shamballah stuff. The cosmic scope of it --- Lords of Venus, and all that
--- sounds so especially and emphatically in my line!") (Selected
Letters, vol. IV, p. 153.) In the letter to Smith, he says the Senzar
language, in which Dzyan was written, "was brought to earth . . . by
the Lords of Venus." In "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", he says that
The Book of Dzyan "was old when the lords of Venus came through
space in their ships to civilize our planet." Finally, in "Through the
Gates of the Silver Key" (rewritten from "Lord of Illusions" by
E. Hoffmann Price, who "turned him on" to "that Dzyan-Shamballah
stuff" to begin with), we read that "The Children of the Fire Mist
came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man." These "children of the
Fire Mist" correspond to the "Lords of Venus", but all this is
going to take a bit of explaining.
The basic cosmological doctrine of
Theosophy is that universal history may be divided into an infinite series of manvantaras,
or cosmic-evolutionary aeons, separated by pralayas, or age-long periods
of dormancy. At the start of each manvantara, Being-itself (Brahman),
symbolized as Primordial Fire, begins to differentiate itself into individual
beings. The first of these are seven solar deities, also called "Sons of
the Fire Mist" because of their immediate derivation from it. (Secret
Doctrine, vol. 1, p. 86.) The term also refers to "a group of
semi-divine and semi-human beings" who incarnate these mighty entities on
earth. They "become, from the first awakening of human consciousness, the
guides of early Humanity. It is through these 'Sons of God' that infant humanity
got its first notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual
knowledge" (Ibid., pp. 207,208). "It was they who imparted Nature's
most weird secrets to men, and revealed to them the ineffable, and now lost
'word'" (Secret Doctrine, vol. 2, p. 220). This last is undoubtedly
the "Elder Lore" mentioned by Lovecraft.
But where is the connection to Venus?
In Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, the author,
an orthodox Theosophist, explains that these primeval guides of humanity came to
earth from Venus, whose cycle of evolution was advanced beyond that of earth. In
fact, humanoid life on earth (on Lemuria, to be exact) was barely sentient. The
Venusian Lords of the Fire Mist educated humanity in the first instance by
psychically occupying their bodies and, as it were, "getting them used
to" housing real intelligence, which they would then begin to develop on
their own, by a kind of metaphysical Lamarckianism. How could the Venusians do
this? They were "endowed with the stupendous powers of transferring their
consciousness from the planet Venus to this our earth" (Scott-Elliot, p.
107). The "space-ships", then, are an addition by Lovecraft, since
Theosophy's Venusians had no need of them.
If HPL did not retain Scott-Elliot's
idea of mind-projection across space in connection with his "Lords of
Venus", he did make use of the notion elsewhere. The Great Race of Yith in
"The Shadow Out of Time" had projected their minds across time and
space to inhabit the cone-shaped monstrosities of prehistoric Australia, much as
the Theoaophical Venusians had incarnated themselves in the equally repugnant
Lemurians. We may strongly suspect that the whole idea of the former was derived
from the latter. In one letter, Lovecraft remarked, "Some of these hints
about . . . the shapeless monsters of archaic Lemuria are ineffably pregnant
with fantastic suggestion. . . ." Whence these hints? "What I have
read is The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. . . ."
Specifically, Lovecraft must have had in mind Scott-Elliot's reference on p. 87:
"Somewhat before the middle of the Lemurian period . . . the gigantic
gelatinous body began slowly to solidify. . . ." So "The Shadow Out of
Time"'s idea of advanced intellects from outer space teleporting to earth
to inhabit primitive, gigantic, rubbery bodies seems to stem from HPL's reading
of Scott-Elliot. He even supplies a fairly clear hint in this direction in that
very story. As the narrator pours over ancient texts in order to reconstruct the
history of the Great Race, he notices that "A few of the myths had
significant connections with other cloudy legends of the prehuman world,
especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part
of the lore of modern theosophists."
From the Theosophists, too, Lovecraft
seems to have derived his ubiquitous references to "cyclopean" ruins,
denoting the past dominance of gigantic alien races, such as those just
described. In "Out of the Eons", a "gigantic fortress of
Cyclopean stone" is attributed to "the alien spawn of the dark planet
Yuggoth, which had colonized the earth before the birth of terrestrial
life." In "The Call of Cthulhu", Wilcox dreams of "the damp
Cyclopean city of slimy green stone. . . . The size of the Old Ones [who
built the city of R'lyeh], he curiously declined to mention." In The
Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph Carter wonders at "the vast
clay-brick ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered." He
"did not like the size and shape of the ruins. . . . And what the structure
and proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily
refused to conjecture."
The Theosophists were not so reticent
as Wilcox and Carter, however. Madame Blavatsky declares that "cyclopean
ruins and colossal stones [are] witnesses to giants. . . . We say that most of
these stones are the relics of the last Atlanteans" (Secret Doctrine,
vol. 2, p. 341).
Scott-Elliot attributes them to the
earlier Lemurians: "They learned to build great cities. These appear to
have been of cyclopean architecture, corresponding with the gigantic bodies of
the race" (The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, p. 101). They
were between twelve and fifteen feet tall.
Versus Theosophy
Up to now we have treated Theosophy
only as a source of raw materials used by Lovecraft in his fiction. But
occasional references to Theosophy per se imply that he used the cult
itself as an image of some kind. We will conclude our consideration of
"Lovecraft's use of Theosophy" with a brief survey of four such
quotes. In "The Call of Cthulhu", the well-traveled sailor Castro
tells what he knows of Cthulhu and the Old Ones. His story "savored of the
wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing
degree of cosmic imagination. . . ." In the same story, the narrator
describes a file full of data that will eventually disclose the truth about
Cthulhu. "The other manuscript papers were all brief notes . . . some of
them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliott's
[sic] Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria). . . ." In "Out of the
Eons", an eccentric curator is described in these terms: "A smattering
of theosophical lore . . . made Reynolds especially alert toward any eonian
relic like the unknown mummy."
In all these instances, the
implications contain a dim hint of an archaic truth terrible in its reality. It
is as if to say that the Theosophists have only a small part of the truth, and
that their little knowledge is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. In fact,
HPL's narrator says as much in our fourth quote (again, from "The Call of
Cthulhu"): "Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the
cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They
have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not
masked by a bland optimism." There is, so to speak, indeed something at the
end of the rainbow, only instead of a pot of gold, it is a bottomless pit. In
their occultist optimism, Theosophists had postulated the ancient origin of
humanity amid alien super-intelligences. So glorious an origin seemed to imply a
bright destiny for the race. But Lovecraft's "cosmic futilitarianism"
led him to repaint the picture in darker, pessimistic hues. As depicted in At
the Mountains of Madness, the genesis of the human race was a breeding
accident in the laboratories of the star-headed Old Ones. The resultant vision
is one of absurdity. Lovecraft has represented precisely what fundamentalist
"creationists" see as being at stake in their quixotic crusade against
Darwinism: if man's origin was random, so is his meaning, and so will be his
destiny.
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