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I’ve done a fair bit of work along these lines, 2-3 years in a group dedicated to working with the Great Old Ones. Activities ranging from the full Dennis Wheatley black robes, incense, candles and bloodletting, through to crazed ecstatic possession rites in the woods at midnight. It was an interesting time.
As far as working with ‘fictional’ entities goes, if you call to the Great Old Ones – you do get a response back from something. There is definitely something there that responds strongly to being approached in these terms, something that is happy to be addressed as ‘Cthulhu’ or ‘Azathoth’.
From my experience of working with the Great Old Ones, they seem to be more primal and cosmic in nature, than ‘evil’ or actively malevolent. I think that some of the horror associated with Lovecraftian contact experiences comes from the fact that they are so far outside of human experience for us to be able to process what is happening. Their nature is so vast and irreconcilable to our human perspective that it throws up feelings of horror. When confronted with something so big and unfathomable, the psychic censor kicks in and pulls us back from the brink by flooding the nervous system with fear.
Working in these territories over a prolonged period of time, seemed to throw up something that could well be considered a very primal religion, worshipping what are essentially the primal forces that bind the universe together. Cthulhu could be seen as a personification of the unconscious, the ocean of dreams, the back brain, seat of reptiles, lizards and snakes, memories of dinosaurs in the DNA. Azathoth as blind, nuclear chaos, the unfathomable energy of the universe, communion like trying to relate human consciousness to the experience of a Sun going supernova.
You’re working very directly with the principles of the universe. If, say, the classical pantheon were Windows XP, working with the Great Old Ones is like DOS. You’re in there working with the hard coding of the universe. Heavy gear, but I began to find that the lack of an anthropomorphic aspect actually cuts both ways. You’re getting very close to some of the primal processes of things, without much of a filter. The Great Old Ones seemed like the processes themselves, rather than personifications of those processes, if that makes sense.
I had some extraordinary experiences and learned a lot from this area of work, but it began to feel a bit like magical tourism. Because the Great Old Ones are so cosmic in nature and so removed from human concerns, it can be very difficult to relate the material you receive to any obvious practical use. It’s high-risk occultism, with much potential for sanity loss, but it’s so large scale and abstract that it’s not easy to find a solid application beyond exploration into the unknown. Calling on the Great Old Ones to find your missing guitar would be like trying to run a cable from the Sun to light your cigarette. At the end of the day, I just wasn’t sure what to do with any of this stuff, as powerful and fascinating as it was.
I think there are possibilities for working practical sorcery with some of the lesser races, the Deep Ones, Shoggoth, etc… all of which is very much within the tradition of the Lovecraftian sorcerer, such as Jebediah Orne and his crew. I haven’t done much exploration into this side of things, but I can see how it might work and be very effective. There’s probably a lot of potential for things to go badly wrong though, so I'd certainly recommend a bit of caution to anyone walking into these areas. |
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Only thing scarier than a blank surface is a paisley carpet IMO, but if I remember to go outside and look at the sky I'm never afraid. Maybe that wouldn't apply if I've just been reading about horrors from between stars though..)