Comics are Magic Part 7: The Book of Vishanti

Fictional books have a special sort of attraction. Who wouldn’t want to peruse Borgesian infinite libraries, or wander through the halls of unwritten books stored in the library of the Sandman (Alice’s Journey Behind the Moon by Lewis Carroll, anyone?). Perhaps the most mysterious of such book is the Necronomicon.. It’s a truism to note that much of H. P. Lovecraft’s lasting influence is the deep mythology woven into his work. The Cthulhu mythos has outlived its creator (or  medium? host-body?!), becoming a source of inspiration for numerous other writers as well as practising magicians. Chaos magicians such as Phil Hine have worked the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu mythos into their magickal rituals, while Kenneth Grant, former secretary of Alisteir Crowley, argued for a fundamental magical reality to Lovecraft’s fictions that even the author himself was unaware of.

At the heart of the Cthulu mythos lies the Necronomicon, a magical grimoire written by  the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, a worshipper of Cthulhu and Yog-Shoggoth.  Containing an account of the Old Ones, their history, and various  means for summoning them, the Necronomicon had a complex history, as outlined by Lovecraft himself in the History of the Necronomicon. Despite Lovecraft’s private protestations that the book was a product of his imagination alone, the Necronomicon has been remarkably persistent in manifesting itself in the “real world” too. If you were to visit the University Library of Tromsø, Norway, for instance, you would find listed a 1994 version of the Necronomicon, attributed to one Petrus de Dacia, although the document is ominously listed as “unavailable”. Or you might be able to track down one of the 348 editions published by Owlswick Press in 1973, written in the  indecipherable, apparently fictional language known as “Duriac”. More easily available is what has become known as the “Simon Necronomicon”, a translation of the “real” Necronomicon by the pseudonymous Simon. The blurb rightly warns the reader that this is indeed, “potentially, the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World“. Also easily available is 1979 Necronomicon edited by George Hay, with an introduction by noted occult scholar Colin Wilson.

The Necronomicon is not above intruding on universes other than our own either, having made several appearances in both the Marvel and DC Universes. There is even a comic book about how the Necronomicon came to be written. But while the Necronomicon is perhaps the most legendary fictional (OR IS IT?!) book in Western literature, there is only one book of true magical power and import in the world superhero comics; The Book of Vishanti!

Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave

Hello Humans.

Here to introduce this post is Pinhead from Hellraiser:

In a throwaway aside in his review of Brian Yuzna’s From Beyond (1986) in this month’s Sight and Sound the ever-incisive Kim Newman writes:

From Beyond is worth revisiting for its ambitious themes-it takes the torch from Videodrome and passes it to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, prompting sociopsychological musings on why exactly cosmic horror in the 80s was always yoked to sadomasochistic dress-up.

Naturally I thought, “Somebody need to write about that! I’m going to do it right now!” Several thousand words later I never really pinpointed why the 80s were especially conducive to the conjunction of sadomasochism and cosmic horror, or even if that’s really the case upon closer inspection. However, I do think Kim Newman’s on the money in as much as there remains a good case to be made for establishing a connection between cosmic horror and S and M. Both, I want to argue, offer ‘limit experiences’ that mirror one another as in the alchemical rule that the microcosm (human body) is a mirror of the macrocosm (universe). The bondage practitioner and the protagonist in cosmic horror are both taken to extremes of experience that open up new forms of consciousness. The article concludes by arguing that such “limit experiences” need not always end in evisceration as they do in many horror films. There are also narratives in which the iconography of fetish clubs (if not the practice) is adopted as a form of liberation from threats to reality, as in The Matrix and Return of the Living Dead 3.

Before reaching that final destination though we must embark upon a strange journey that takes in H.P. Lovecraft, Michel Foucault, Hellraiser, Nietzsche, Alisteir Crowley, and the X-Men and more along the way. It is also a companion piece of sorts to my previous post Posthuman Ecstasy: Long Live the New Sex which also dealt with new forms of posthuman sexuality in horror films.