HP Lovecraft, the "doors of perception" and the "cracks in the Great Wall"

How HPL analyzed in his literary production - and especially in "From Beyond" (1920) - the emergence of the irrational in the age of science and machines and anticipated the "psychedelic" suggestions on the pineal gland


di Renzo Giorgetti
taken from Antares, HP Lovecraft # 2 -
The cosmic horror of the Master of Providence n. 8 / 2014
image: Frank Utpatel,
i
llustration for "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
by HP Lovecraft Comic Art


The idea of ​​a further, different reality, extraneous to that commonly perceived - but no less real - is one of the peculiar characteristics of Lovecraftian thought., a theme that always recurs in his works, in the most varied forms. On this point, at least, Lovecraft is in tune with his own era, fully reflecting its anxieties and aspirations. In fact, in him we can find the reflection of a wider cultural movement, which is also a mental attitude as well as a sign of the times, the extreme point of a materialism which, despite having denied any possibility of existence to the invisible, at the same time experiences the discomfort of a lack and the presence of the inexplicable.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in a scenario of "death of God", after having conquered everything, rising almost to the rank of religion, positivist science must in turn stop, faced with the insoluble enigmas of the origin of matter and strength. In the end, the construction of a completely materialist-mechanistic system does not hold up, while the irrational re-emerges, even if by now changed in sign, almost always as a negative force. If a certain skepticism towards higher realities persists, a new interest is aroused in a supernatural that is more "close at hand", less spiritual, which often presents connotations of sinister, immediate response. There could be ghost stories but not saints, Chesterton summarized a few years later in his The Victorian age in literature (1913)

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"Metropolis", Fritz Lang, 1927.

The "cracks in the Great Wall" open, letting the influences of another reality, unknown, mysterious and not always reassuring, pass through. But the mental attitude remains a scientist, a positivist: we still try to explain the real in physical terms, measure, reproduce even the most irrational phenomena in the laboratory, because, if everything is part of nature, even the "supernatural" has the right to exist, but only as a phenomenon not yet explained .

Here the scientists devote themselves to spiritism and to the new (actually, very ancient) occult sciences. Extravagant inventions see the light: tools to analyze and observe the invisible, the ectoplasms, the "microbes of the astral". Crookes uses his tube to probe the new world [1], Thomas Edison invents a tool to communicate with spirits and two Dutch physicists - Zaalberg van Zolst and Matla - with their dynamistograph claim to analyze its chemical composition.

It is in this context that the Lovecraftian is born From beyond (1920), synthesis of an entire era, which manages to bear witness to the hopes and fears shared by many. In this story, still relevant today, just like the problems it faces, Lovecraft expresses one of the fundamental themes of his research [2]:

« What do we know about the world and the universe around us? Our sensory channels are very few and we have a very limited perception of the objects around us. We see things as we are allowed to see them and we cannot get any idea of ​​their absolute reality. With five very weak senses we pretend to understand an infinite and extremely complex cosmos; yet, beings endowed with stronger, deeper senses or capable of operating on another band would not only see things differently from us, but would be able to perceive and study worlds of life, energy and matter that they are close at hand and that our faculties do not allow us to discover. "

We can say that From beyond constitutes the anticipation, in full and in narrative form, of the famous theoretical enunciation that will be the incipit of The call of Cthulhu, regarding the island of happy ignorance in which man lives, unaware of the terrible forces that surround him; a basic theme of Lovecraftian production.

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The story itself is quite simple: a scientist manages to find, by means of a device of his own invention, the way to observe and interact with reality that surpasses that of the common five senses. And it is, of course, a disconcerting dimension, which puts those who perceive it in front of the awareness of the illusiveness of their perceptions, as well as of the certainties derived from them [3]:

Indescribable forms, alive or not, seemed mixed in a disgusting disorder and around familiar objects were whole worlds of unknown unknown entities. "

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“HP Lovecraft's From Beyond” by MTLyddon, via DeviantArt.

The dimension of men is invaded by hostile forces, which bring to it all their destructive potential. It is a topic that has already been addressed thirty years earlier by Arthur Machen, with its famous The great god Pan, and that the new discoveries of science and the theoretical models elaborated by it fail at all to exorcise. Far from it. The unknown re-emerges, opens up like a continent to be explored; the entities described in the story are not very different from those perceived in the experiments carried out in those years with the most varied means. But the opening is reciprocal, as it leaves the possibility of entry to beings who have a conflictual relationship with the human dimension. The ancient superstitions were not so absurd, but now the religion, secularized, is no longer able to keep at bay the forces that careless science has made penetrate.

What remains to be done? The escape, the madness, the return to the old certainties now broken are ways that show all their weakness, ineffective to regain the lost illusory tranquility. Only the so-called remains cosmic horror, understood as awareness of the new situation that has arisen, a desperation that does not return what has been taken away but can at least lead to the heroically dramatic satisfaction of having understood the true substance of reality. The two protagonists of From beyond, paying dearly for it, in a different way but always in the first person.

Up to this point we are given a general framework, which can also be valid for other tales of Lovecraftian production. But the discussion on this particular story becomes more interesting in reference to some "technical" notes: for example, considering the nature of the instrument used to get in touch with the "other world". It is a machine, an artificial instrument built with scientific criteria, according to the dictates of the old science that we wanted to overcome. Here too the "spirit of the times" is well represented: Lovecraft knew the Crookes tube (explicitly mentioned in one of his stories a few years later) as well as the Tesla coil (almost in the same days the story is written Nyarlathotep, with his allusions to the "imposture" of static electricity).

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But occultism is also moving in a similar direction. Let's take for example Les microbes de l'astral by Marius Decrespe [4]. In this book (which Lovecraft probably did not know), after a treatment as scientific as possible of the invisible world, instructions are given for the construction of an apparatus similar to that of the Lovecraftian tale. The components are as follows:

«1 ° an electrostatic machine or a Ruhmkorff coil, together with its battery; 2 ° a large metal reflector, with a focal length of about one meter; 3 ° a massive magnetized steel bar or, better, a powerful straight electromagnet, which presents at the negative pole a disk with an opening, placed horizontally, perpendicular to the bar; 4 ° a magic lantern [ie a projection lamp]. "

The project continues with the description of the various parts and the indications for the correct functioning of the machine as a whole. The whole thing is much more detailed than Lovecrat's vague hints of chemical batteries or huge clusters of light bulbs.

What we want to point out is that in Lovecraft's story there is something more, which detaches him from the most common points of view of the time and leads him, with Machen, to decidedly more original perspectives. In a short passage we find an important hint [5]:

"Have you ever heard of the pineal gland?" Endocrinologists make me laugh, as stolid as i am reached Freudians ... that gland is the most important of the sense organs, and I discovered it. It can be compared to a much more perfect sight and it transmits visual sensations to the brain. "

If our thoughts immediately turn to Descartes and his theory on pineal gland as a link between res cogitans e res extensive, the references to endocrinologists suggest an interest linked to the immediacy of scientific information and to the most topical research on these issues. As we have already had the opportunity to deal with elsewhere, on some topics Lovecraft anticipated the times (such as, for example, on the dinosaur egg: the idea of ​​writing a story on this subject came to him while the expedition that would have discovered the first fossil eggs, hitherto unknown, was underway ). The same, in our opinion, can be said about the pineal gland.

In 1931 a molecule known as dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psychoactive substance with high hallucinogenic power [6]. Obtainable from herbs or plants, it is also produced by the human body, in the hours of sleep, precisely by the pineal gland. But to define this substance simply as a hallucinogen could be an understatement, given that it was used in ritual contexts, for the so-called shamanic journeys, as a key to access other worlds, a useful tool not for an escape from reality but for a more complete vision, beyond the limits of the common human sensory [7].

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Just like the Lovecraftian machine, which has as its purpose - note - not the action on the environment in order to make invisible realities perceptible to the ordinary senses, in the most objective way, but the mutation of the perceptive apparatus to go beyond one's own senses and reach a vision of reality that is as "total" as possible. We are no longer faced, therefore, with objective scientists who look under the microscope, but with experimenters who change themselves, opening the "doors of perception" towards an unknown that is not an illusion but the unveiling of hidden realities. It is an advanced conception, which detaches Lovecraft from his era, bringing him once again to the forefront, forerunner of discourses that will find their relevance only much later.

And this not only in the "good", but also in the "bad". If it is certain, in fact, that the manipulations of the sensory do not produce simple hallucinations but also provide the keys to access different dimensions, not reserved exclusively for man, it will be even more true - and here the Lovecraftian tale is very clear - that these new worlds are not always beneficial, the expansion of consciousness also taking place towards regions unsuitable for the human mental constitution (as well as contact with the inhabitants of the same). The unknowns are considerable and the encounters in favor of man are by no means taken for granted.

Except that, while the shamans knew well how to act, the men of modernity, once again, with their "experimental" and scientist attitude, yesterday as today, run risks that they are hardly able to understand. The universe, as Lovecraft rightly points out, is not a habitat totally friendly in which it is possible to make excursions to your liking. The bad end made by some "prophets" of the exploration of these new worlds (including Terence McKenna, a great supporter of the DMT) is just a further confirmation of what has been said so far. All the optimism of the so-called "psychedelic culture" is already in fact dismantled in this short story of 1920, which, if properly considered, would certainly have helped to avoid deleterious illusions and confusions.

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Note:

[1] Strange fate that of the Crookes tube. Born to investigate the world of the invisible, it then changed, until it became a cathode ray tube and finally a television, a window to other worlds as well as a crack in the great wall ultimate.

[2] Howard Phillips Lovecraft All the tales 1897-1922, edited by Giuseppe Lippi, Mondadori, Milan 1989, p. 151.

[3] Ivi, p. 155.

[4] Marius Decrespe, Les microbes de l'astral, Chamuel, Paris 1895, pp. 93-94.

[5] Howard Phillips Lovecraft, op. cit., p. 153.

[6] Richard HF Manske, A synthesis of the methyltryptamines and some derivatives, in Canadian Journal of Research, 1931 (5), pp. 592-600.

[7] For an in-depth analysis, cf. Rick, MD Strassman, Dmt: the spirit molecule - a doctor's revolutionary research into the biology of near-death and mystical experience, Park Street Press, Rochester 2000.