Spooky

I have discussed elsewhere before the subject of magic and spiritual rituals as being "all in our heads." I will reiterate this idea: no things have a natural or inherited magical aspects, and those aspects are given to these things by our association with it. So, for instance, a pentagram is just five lines (literally means "five lines"), and it has no inherent or magical properties, except those we place upon it. The Pyramids of Giza are meaningless shapes, and the only power they have is the power we give them. These things naturally mean nothing. All the power and all the meaning in the world spawns from our own minds. In other words, we possess all the power and meaning we give the ordinary things that surround us.

I have spent a considerable amount of time lately contemplating what makes a place sacred. Is it ritual? Is it geometry? Is it a historical event, such as the burial place of Jesus Christ? Clearly we make places sacred, but how we make them sacred is variable. These places and things are only sacred by our own making. This is how Eliade delineates between the sacred and the profane. He illustrates that a rock is just a rock (profane), but can be made sacred by ritualized time and space (i.e. breaking from ordinary, profane time and space into an idea of authentic reality). So the rock in the Dome of the Rock is just a rock; nothing more. It is by myth and ritual that it becomes something more than just any old rock.

Recently I have revisited H.P. Lovecraft and I realized I was dealing with in Lovecraft the exact opposite of what I was contemplating with the sacred. Lovecraft take ordinary things, like his infamous New England settings, and turns them into terrifying, unholy, settings of unknown horrors. How does he do this? By taking ordinary things and transforming them through the meanings and association we possess in our heads.

Now, for Lovecraft, he focuses on New England, because that is where he lived, but this transformation into horrors and nightmares can be executed in any setting. Think of it as how Dante makes us think of who we might know and where they might be in Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell. In Dante's Divine Comedy, he places contemporaries of his in different layers of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; people who were well known, simple people he knew, mythic characters (such as Odysseus), and historical figures (such as Plato and Virgil). He does this so we might also think who we know and their placements in the afterlife. Just as Dante using primarily folks from Florence, his home town, Lovecraft uses New England. In a way, Lovecraft is encouraging us to think of where we live and how those places might hold occult, shadowy horrors. I for one can imagine horrors that lie hidden in small, country towns on desolate roads I have traveled in South Carolina.

I had not read much Lovecraft when I first moved to New England, and even then, New England towns seemed simply old, quaint, and charming. After living in New England for over a year I read more Lovecraft and suddenly found these towns I would take a train through to hold some dark secret. Obviously Lovecraft had an influence on me.

Like the sacred, Lovecraft uses certain realistic devices to create terrifying elements, often obscure and unknown traits, descriptions of foul odors, looming shadows, indescribable (often higher dimensional) geometries, mysterious sounds, and vague descriptions of cryptozoological creatures. What makes most of his creatures scary is not that they have many eyes, or no eyes, blobs, tentacles, slimy, bad smelling horrors. What makes them terrifying is that they are often creatures of some advanced race of earth spawned organisms, elder deities, or from outer space, and that they have the potential to destroy the human race, but don't care to. They use the humans when they see fit, often because some humans want their help, but generally they want nothing to do with us.

Why is that scary? Nothing is more terrifying than entities that don't want anything to do with humans. They're non-anthropomorphic, and we are anthropocentric. We can identify with Satan because he's trying to take us down with him. We can identify with evil gods, because they want to destroy humanity. But something that can destroy us, but is completely ambivalent toward us, that's even scarier simply because we cannot relate to them.

Lovecraft's universe is ultimately festering with human-ambivalent creatures, multi-dimensional places, dark planets, and wicked deities, and their interacting with ordinary places and things like quaint New England. He proposes a universe, not of wonder, but of unknown horrors beyond comprehension. Often protagonists in his stories are not trying to save the world from evil, but struggling to save their own sanity, and they often lose.

This post is not really meant to explain anything, but, rather, to explore the mental transformation of the ordinary into something sacred or unholy. Ultimately, the only difference between the sacred and unholy is with the unholy we who experience it are overwhelmed with paranoia.