Lovecraft, Jung's Black Books and Dark Gnosis - pontos fathom podcast - EP01
Welcome to pontos fathom press first episode of the pontos fathom podcast - EP01 Lovecraft, Jung's Black Books and Dark Gnosis. The world is not as it seems. But is there a way to know the world at the crossroads of the imagination of fiction, the psychological discovery of the unconscious, and notebooks from the dreamlands? In this episode, we introduce the series with a look at Jung's Black Books and the works of H.P. Lovecraft in knowing the world in shadows. Is this the fallen Gnostic world or simply our fears in discovering what lay in our own unconscious. Thanks for watching and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
MY PATREON https://www.patreon.com/pontosfathom
welcome everyone to pontos fathom press this is the first of our first of a podcast first episode of a podcast i'm going to do basically it's pontos fathom podcast episode one and the topic here today is jung it's black books and h.p lovecraft and this idea of dark gnosis i think this starts out of my interest in notebooks of writers let's call the notebooks of writers so the idea is if you even if you look at jung's for first of all so if as you guys know hp lovecraft is a 20th century horror writer quite famous i'm sure everyone who clicked on it knows him but if you don't know he's behind the cthulhu mythos and his dreamlands mythos so that's lovecraft jung young it's hard to s up in a short short sentence here but just the idea of carl jung a 20th century psychologist who looked into things like the archetypes of the self did lots of exploration into complexes and the idea of leveraging things like alchemy and the imagery of alchemy in therapy just to name a few things he also came up with lots of things very brilliant thinker and one thing that was interesting about jung just to go into it is that his writing as we have presented for example here are some of his texts that i've worked through like his ion is quite famous or his psychology and alchemy or his mysteri conjunctionis these were his publicly written books that dabbled into this kind of gnostic area in that he was looking for archetypes back through history and learning how some of these images and dream images would recur in his patients and also in our lives you know things like anima and animus and sort of how the not only the personal unconscious but this collective unconscious in our shadow are sort of these ideas to explore within our our self.
so all of those writings of jung were very polished right jung wrote those with a very clear idea as how they could be applicable either in therapy or as an orange philosophy of psychology but behind those books you know in his early experiences he had created notebooks and these are some of his notebooks here these are his black book notebooks you can see these are great editions seven volumes of his black books these notebooks of jungs were chronicling like a journal some of his experiences he had and many of those experiences went on to form his insights that led to his later works now jung had collected these black books in a book called libra novus which is the red book which was jung's sort of digesting down of all of his notes and producing some kind of work out of it but the black books are sort of like in the raw form they're the notebook form and in many ways i want to parallel some things about hp lovecraft that seemed to resonate with me in the idea in this idea so part of the idea of a black gnosis will start with the idea of what's the gnosis first of all and i think i want to kind of preface that with you know the the statement that we know that the world is not always what it seems right the world's not what it seems and this is clear to us in many ways when we first have realizations when horrible things happen when when lies are found out right whether they're individually or on a societal level or when societies sort of travel down a wrong path and you know look at things like the look at things like the atomic bomb scare after world war one in the cold war and how that was sort of a path or look at things like the inquisitions or crusades how we go down these paths and it leads to these other things and then afterwards when we look back we say wait how did why did that happen you know how did this how did world war ii happen how did these things happen right? how did people sign up for this this this kind of experience?
so with lovecraft's writing what i think is interesting about lovecraft is lovecraft was not an occultist at all lovecraft was a strange character he definitely was a creative character inspired by his imagination and his dreams and it tended toward a dark side right lovecraft definitely like to explore some dark thoughts i mean maybe we can just jump into like a famous a famous passage when he talks about in the in the classic call of cthulhu right he says 355. lovecraft here says this is like a great one that says the most okay let's read this from the call of cthulhu of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival a survival of a hugely remote period when consciousness was manifested perhaps in the shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods monsters mythical beings of all sorts and kinds and this is quoted by an algernon blackwood and then the call of cthulhu starts with this paragraph a couple paragraphs that i'll just kind of skim because i think it takes us to where i'm going the most merciful thing in the world i think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far the sciences each straining in its own direction have hitherto harmed us little but someday the piercing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age 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 that would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism but is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when i think of it and maddens me when i dream of it that glimpse like all dread glimpses of truth flashed out from accidental piecing together of separate things in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor i hope no one else will accomplish this piecing out certainly if i live i shall never knowingly supply supply a link to sohidius a chain so i like this piece because it's although it's fiction there's something about it that's probing a dissatisfaction and a question of things are not as they seem and it's a play on things or not as they seem and yet there's something coming through that's why i've called this episode black gnosis now i want to juxtapose this with a a little passage from jung in this is his black book it's the second of the black books here which i think is actually the first of his older age just a a quick note here that i thought was nice is this is written in 1913. now jung says a huge task lay before me i saw its enormous size and its value and meaning escaped me i got into the dark and i groped along my path that path led inward and downward my soul my soul where are you do you hear me i speak i call you are you there i have returned here i am again i have shaken the dust off all the lands from my feet and i have come to you again i am with you after y long years of wandering i have come to you anew shall i tell you everything i have seen experienced and drunk in or do you not want to hear all about the noise of life in the world but one thing you must know the one thing i have learned is that one must live this life this life is in a way the long sought after to the unfathomable which we call divine and he goes on to say give me your hand my almost forgotten soul so in and then i want to just i have a bookmark here for another passage again that's my soul i will continue my stories it seems to be the next step one must know how to do the next steps regardless of the scornful laughter that the devil set up below the heart those cowardly ear whisperers and two inch high poison mixers i carry my burden and end myself a burden mockery and whip and torment of the cross so listen my soul regardless of the scornful laughter of the devils i continue talking to you i think further back to my 19th year of age when a dream decided upon my career choice first i saw in the dense undergrowth of a solitary region a quiet dark water a pond and in the middle swam the most fantastic of animals roughly comparable to many colored jellyfish this animal aroused in me the highest intellectual curiosity so that i awoke with a pen a pounding heart and soon thereafter i had a second dream i was in a dark forest a small hill like a charcoal kiln i had poked my foot and discovered it to be the greatest surprise the bones of prehistoric animals which also lay spread the curiosity these dreams motivated me to the study of the natural sciences that led me to medicine my foot hesitates to follow you into what midst and darkness does your path lead must i also learn to do without meeting or is there a supreme meaning is that your meaning my soul look at how limp i am after you on crutches of understanding forgive me my light i am a man and you stride like a god what torture so just a quick note there just a little resonance there about the maybe it's a psychologizing of lovecraft right he's just looking into those you know even freud called dreams he compared it to the river archeron right the river of the underworld so we could just superficially let's just call it a a an unconscious using the notebook as a way of gnosis and that notebook where you pour out these thoughts whether under the guise of fiction writing and imagination in the case of lovecraft or in the in the guise of sort of journaling in case of the black books you know soul searching right but oddly enough if we go back to the question of or the statement that the world is not as it seems suddenly there seems to be a blending of these two things right there's a blending of the work that's done in dreaming the work that's done in journaling the work that's done in perhaps remote viewing imagination right all of these places where when we go into the mind and look not only do we see things of fancy and things of imagination but there seems to be this sort of a fearful note in there somewhere right and this is where that black gnosis comes from and i think it goes you know going back to the gnostics i don't know if everyone is familiar i'm sure if you're clicking you probably know but there is in a nutshell that the gnostics were let's say pre and contemporary with the dawn of christianity and they had various schools of thought around how the world was formed that was a little different than genesis you know like a so i think of a biblical genesis or creation myths in general the the creation myths and they were different depending on the gnostic schools they tended to do more with higher levels of you know so for example in the bible book of john we have the logos and the christ is called the word and even in the gnostic writing we have the logos which is sort of like the god above the gods and then as that descends through the layers of the archons if you guys are familiar with aeon bytes channel you know he talks there's a lot of guests on there talking about gnosticism and and the archons right so descending through the archons we come down finally to the earth which is sort of like the dense red reduced state of what used to be spirit now it's been condensed down into matter right so this kind of dreaming and imagining of the gnostics also had flavors of it in which there was a sort of a dark presence right so the black gnosis of gnosticism could be that the world isn't created by a by a kind god but by a demiurge you know they called that demiurge had different names and narcissism but the demiurge was sort of like the mad creator of the world and so that everything in the world kind of is bound by this madness right so anyway to get to to sort of go back to the original premise dark gnosis really just is talking about the knowledge that sometimes feels fearful especially when we look at how our minds like lovecraft says are unable to correlate all of their contents or with jung who correlates the idea of it's a journey into the blackness and they're in the underwater imagery and again there's underwater imagery in call of cthulhu too with the underwater imagery of cthulhu dreaming under the ocean right these are great psychological topics so in that blending space you know i i go to august maldenhauer's genealogy of cthulhu which is published by pontos fathom press you know this is a similar idea there's notebooks and the notebooks are purporting the idea that lovecraft is actually describing something as real right something that's real right so so here's just some quotes from those it says and wave upon wave upon wave populating and depopulating the earth and concepts that humanity has no sensitivity to like the tides of life and the procession of the equinoxes of consciousness and all these things for which we have no language cthulhu knows for he has lane dreaming waiting influencing and he knows that which is unknowable and what chaos to men may only be a song of a higher order a call of cthulhu that no human mind could hold unless it could surrender to madness or transform or learn to keep that which the human mind could never hold stored in that place of dreaming that place where things that cannot live are allowed to dream from the tomb of death and the tomb of death that cthulhu fashioned for himself is known as relia the sunken city beneath the ocean the city that will rise from the abyss when the stars are right real yeah the city of non-euclidean architecture that drives men to madness at its site linked to lemuria or atlantis it is perhaps both and yet again neither and still a third relia cthulhu had untold ages to fashion its structures and byways some of its stones tomb formed from the thoughts and dreams of ages upon ages of racist past some of the metal-like works of relia are made in the cthulian sounds of an infinite churning of the reliant language itself compare to the tower of babel of the bible multiplied by the library of babel in borges relia is in some ways the infinite churning of the bottomless language that is relien itself even now cthulhu's thoughts echo out these reliant texts that are the vibration aurelia itself and then there's a great quote here there's a letter you know lovecraft describes cthulhu as octopus dragon man perhaps there's something here that we can focus on for the moment lovecraft mentions in a letter to august durlith he says all my stories unconnected as they may be are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this whole world was inhabited at one time by another race who in practicing black magic lost that foothold and were expelled yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again so you know this is similarity to biblical patterns and and topics of this sort and and you know really in a way also that underwater world is something that jung came to take inspiration from in his journaling book let's call it his dream work you know so this was the raw dream work of jung that led him to come up with a very elaborate map of the human psyche right so the human psyche for jung or the self as he would call it in the bigger picture has the conscious and the unconscious and then within the unconscious we have a thing called the shadow he had things like anime animus which are these different persona in the collective unconscious you know so say the aspects of communication the feminine the masculine different kinds of archetypes that we actually all participate in in in our being who we are but also the idea that one could through dreams and through shadow work could access those levels right so again this is a gnosis pulling up from under the ocean rising up from under the ocean so in a way i know there's been several books over the years written about this and maybe i'll do some follow-up videos with these not to talk about some people's interpretation of lovecraft but i really just wanted to focus here on that idea of black gnosis and the idea that the notebooking itself could could reveal to us more insights and how the world is not as it seems i've got this other page held out here that it's another dream's vision of jung and he's talking about what am i going to write everything is dark in front of me no shape no bright no dark it is the gate to darkness who enters there must grope what is closest he must feel his way from stone to stone no clear thought comes towards him one has to sample them all valuable and worthless must be embraced with the same kind of love because the world of darkness our values are suspended because in this world of darkness our values are suspended a mountain is the smallest nothing and a grain of sand contains the kingdom and then he says in this these notes from jung to talk on the psychology of the unconscious to the zurich psychoanalytical society he says here for the primitives there exists an intimate relation with reality which leads to a big specification of perception this intensive connection with reality appears to us as concretism i.e for example that the man has killed a rabbit is expressed through he one animated arrow etc shot rabbit hence instead of the concept man a specific image there's not a simple plural but the numerical origin value is obviously not arithmetic but mystical it is a character of quality this is the way an immense complication of a language emerges there must always be for animals the following information position in space distance direction needs the addition of like for example not animated upright wooden i eat bread equals i am breading or something similar depending on the type of food so this concretism sort of tied to an enormous importance of dreams and there is no difference between dream and experience so the origin of the subjective prevails over the object so this is an interesting and interesting detail going this direction is when one dreams it's almost like a real experience right so lovecraft has a nightmare of neurolethotep okay and you know let's if we go to that neolitho tip it's it's an interesting dream he has where he dreams of this ancient god right and this is the kind of spinning something out of the mind out of the depths of the unconscious it says right here this neolithotep the powerful prose poem was written early in december 1920. because i kind of see that they're both around the same period too lovecraft was writing this in 1920. this was 1913 it goes on through 1919. it appeared under the united amateur for 1920 november the quasi-egyptian god neolithotep makes a striking debut here and this tale seems symbolic of the ultimate generation of the world in the universe like the statement of randolph carter the story is largely based on a dream a dream so striking that lovecraft wrote the first full paragraph of the tale before he was entirely awake now we can't help it we're going to read that neo lethal tip the crawling chaos i am the last i will tell the audit audit void audient void i do not recall distinctly when it began but it was months ago the general tension was horrible to a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger a danger widespread in all embracing such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night i recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared conscientiously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard a sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places there was a demonic alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered fearsomely and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of god or forces which were unknown and it was then that neural that took that that neolithotep came out of egypt finally i got it right who he was none could tell but he was of the old native blood and looked like a pharaoh anyway so that's the that's the dream inspired so who is this character or who does he symbolize again in the idea of darkness it's no different than the gnostics themselves they have an experience and then they go on to explore the experience right so the notebook jots down the experience and now the notebook becomes the evidence right jung's notebook is revisited when he makes his read books but not only that it's revisited to create his whole body of work where he sees feminine figures and he goes on to just describe the anima right we'll go into more in the the young black book so just take a pause here maybe this is a good place to stop if you guys like what i'm doing here this is my first episode of the pontos fathom blog if you check down the links below i have a patreon i'm going to be continuing to do this this month i'm going to be doing lovecraft i will do another lovecraft session with jung i'll also be talking about necronomicon and how it ported you know how it works with the pikatrix and dr john d who lovecraft calls out by name it's a topic that lots of people have discussed but let's go through and compare those books and also shout out here to the august moldenhauer catholic journals out of lovecraft providence links to these books in the description this is largely the topic today is some of the topics explored in the genealogy of cthulhu it's a text that is found like a notebook and the notebook is reproduced and the notebook purports connections to reality and love class like is there really something gnostic in this you know and i think from there we could go into again the psycho analysis of realia which we'll talk about script like john d's angelic script there are instances of some necronomicon script here that we'll explore which should be interesting in context and finding the archaeology of yog solo thought i will do i'll do a video as part of pontus fathom books where i review our our books i will do a video about this series and then i'll do a one by one video to talk about those books if people are interested help support the channel you can also become a patreon member and support the channel please let me know your thoughts which topic you'd like to see me do next also interested in your feedback what do you think of the concept of the intersection of imagination dreaming and remote viewing perhaps as a kind of a black gnosis to uncover the world not being what it really is give me your thoughts and would love to have a conversation with all of you so as i build the channel we'll get into some live streams and and we can share information we can do so now like in the by doing the comments and over at patreon let me know you're interested and i'll talk to everyone soon thanks a lot for watching and i'll see you in the next episode we'll keep going down the lovecraft rabbit hole with psychology and narcissism and you can follow the link over here see you in episode two thanks bye
Comments
Post a Comment