Genesis of a (Fanboy) Cosmogram
Jun. 17th, 2019 04:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mesosylvaniaFor the past 6 months, I have been entranced by John Michael Greer's 7-book Weird of Hali series, of which 5 have been published-the rest on their way by the end of 2019.
These books take H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (or "Yog-Sothothery" as he himself called it) and turn the premise on its head: the eldritch gods, obsessed occultists, and deranged cultists are actually the good guys, and the bad guys are the purist, progress-oriented rationalists. And the books are great fun!
But look a little closer... The books are written by a renowned thinker and practical occultist, so their power is presumably much more than your average speculative fiction.
First off, the Great Old Ones (the monstrous godlike beings in Lovecraft's works, and later writers within his Mythos universe), are actually the old gods of nature. And whether or not they existed before Lovecraft wrote his books, they seem to be actual gods that can be prayed to, invoked, and learned from.
Greer contributed much in this area, in ways that I probably don't even know about right now. For starters, he created a balanced system of the core dozen or so gods, and aligned them to the Tree of Life, that venerable Cabalistic map of the cosmos. Here's a link to his Eldritch version of the Tree of Life: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/44066.html
The Tree of Life is just one way of mapping and exploring the universe of our experience- and one that uses space as a metaphor. Another one is the Wheel of Life, in JMG's The Druid Magic Handbook, my current system of magic study- which uses time, and the cyclical passage of the seasons as a metaphor.
There are more, though maybe thought of and used in different ways. Here are a few that I personally think might be at least somewhat analogous:
In that light, I've been mulling over a uniquely eldritch system of magic ever since learning of the fact that this is indeed possible, and not just another wistful yearning of a fantasy novel nerd that the magic within his beloved books is actually real!
Now, as I've mentioned here before, I'm just a novice, and very behind on my meditation practice, at that. So, any of my musings here should be read in that light. I'm waiting to complete my coursework in the Druid Magic Handbook before I move on to anything else. Due to the flexibility of that system, luckily I have been able to invoke the Great Old Ones as part of my daily magical practice, until I (or perhaps JMG himself) can create an eldritch system to my liking.
That being said, I love thinking and brainstorming Things like this, and one consideration for an eldritch magical system is what cosmogram it uses (if it specifies one at all). One option would be to use the Tree of Life, making for a Cabalistic, and perhaps even Golden Dawn-derived system. That would be interesting, however I haven't studied a Golden Dawn system, and I'm not sure that I'd like to spend several years studying that following the several years I've already committed to with the DMH/Dolmen Arch course.
Another option is to heavily tweak the DMH system, which uses the Wheel of Life, essentially creating an eldritch druid system (which would be canonical within the Mythos, since there is a story about Shub Ne'hurrath-worshipping druids). Again, this would be awesome, and I'm essentially doing this to some extent, by invoking Great Old Ones, and attributing the Great Old Ones to Stations on the Wheel, among other things.
However, this isn't ultimately satisfying to me. I want a system that speaks its own language, rather than speaking another language in an eldritch accent. So, I thought to myself- what is a symbol I can use from the Haliverse (this is a fan-invented namename JMG's inverse Mythos) that I can turn into a systematic cosmogram?
Then it hit me. The Great Earth.
The Great Earth is a new creation by JMG, which basically contends that the Earth of the Haliverse is actually a 3D slice of a greater Earth, existing within 4 spatial dimensions. (See the Weird of Hali book series, and this post on the Solar System Heritage website, and scroll down to JMG's comment called "Expanding the Earth") Each 3D cross-section or "slice" is a unique world of its own, with essentially inifite possible slices between the two "ends." Incidentally, the sky color of each Slice/world is different. Also, the slices near the middle are larger, and towards the ends, are smaller, just like a cross-section of our own Earth would be. But what are the "ends"?
The extra dimension requires two new directions- anth and ulth. And the Great Earth has an anthern pole and an ulthern pole- these are the "ends" of the Great Earth- the ulthern pole is Carcosa, the realm of The King in Yellow- the King of the Great Old Ones, and the anthern pole is R'lyeh, the realm of Great Cthulhu, The High Priest of the Great Old Ones.
And this is roughly the information that JMG had divulged so far about the Great Earth, so I'll be adjusting what follows as new info comes in.
So how do you create a cosmogram with this info?
Well, first, infinite worlds are a bit much to deal with- I mean, the map's not the territory, so there should be some simplification involved. So, let's reduce the infinite number of worlds. But to what number?
The Tree of Life most commonly used, as well as the Wheel of Life as used in the DMH, both have a total of 33 elements.
The Tree has:
-10 Spheres
-22 Paths
-Da'ath (neither Sphere nor Path)
The Wheel has
-8 Stations
-24 Paths
-The Central Grove (not a Station, nor a Path, but is represented by an Ogham few, like the Paths)
So, ideally I'd like there to be 33 elements in the Great Earth cosmogram—then it will align more with these other systems, giving more options for borrowing and comparative experimenting.
So, instead of making infinitely thin slices of the Great Earth, I imagined thicker colored bands as the Slices. The connections ("Paths") would be represented by the borders between the Slices, as well as other lines as necessary. Since the diagram is actually a 2D depiction of a spherical 3D diagram, the connections between adjacent Slices are actually 2D planes, so rather that calling the connections between the Slices "Paths", I've been calling them Membranes, which is also a deliciously organic term-- perfect for the Haliverse!
To decide on numbers, I had to tweak and test; initially I thought that each world only directly contacts its anthward neighbor and it's ulthward neighbor, but the numbers just weren't working out. Once I made the number of Slices 9, and created a Membrane between each Slice and between every third Slice, the numbers worked.
I also intuited that there exists a "Center" to which each Slice can directly connect to. This Center would correspond to Nodens.
So, each Slice connects to 3 other Slices (except for Carcosa and R'lyeh, which only connect to 2 each), plus the Center. So, that comes to:
-9 Slices
-23 Membranes (for each Slice, this includes connections with the neighboring Slice(s), a connection 3 slices away (similar to the every other Station connections on the Wheel), and a connection to the a Center)
-The Center
So, how to start naming the slices? Well, our Earth should be on there, and while I should note that our Earth isn't central to the Great Earth- we humans need to remember that we aren't the center of everything- I hesitate to leave Earth off, or arbitrarily make Earth closer to R'lyeh or Carcosa. So I'm left with making Earth the central Slice. I'm tentatively okay with this, given that our experience is central to us, even if it's emphatically NOT central from the point of view of the wider universe. And this also matches some themes from ritual magic study, where you as an individual are working to place yourself at the center of the universe, symbolically.
So, here's where we're currently at:
What about the other Slices? Well, Carcosa and R'lyeh are both cities and realms mentioned in the Mythos, and other authors consider them to be, or have been, cities or places on Earth proper.
And what if they were? I'm mean, the Great Earth should rhyme with itself, shouldn't it? Remember, these worlds aren't different planets in our universe, they are realms that make up a greater fourth dimensional whole. So why shouldn't R'lyeh exist as a sunken city on Earth, AND an entire Slice/world on Greater Earth? Precedence for this: places exist in the Dreamlands AND on physical Earth within the Haliverse (though there is a specific explanation for that).
The Earth locations are simply the most pure distillation of the Slice's energy that has been experienced on Earth thus far, and the qualities, inhabitants, cultures, etc of those Earth locations correspond to similar ones on those other Slices.
So, we could end up with something like this:
Carcosa - white sky {=Canon} (corresponds to solar current?)
Mu - brown sky
Lemuria - red sky
Hyperborea - violet sky
Earth -light blue sky {=Canon, obviously}
Atlantis - indigo sky
Valusia - yellow-orange sky
Leng - silver sky
R'lyeh - green sky (corresponds to telluric current?)
Other options:
-K'n-yan (but it's kinda creepy...)
-Hyboria
-Thuria
-Sarnath
-Lomar
Where to go from here? A lot of meditation and brainstorming, not to mention praying to the Great Old Ones, in order to get a better idea of what the various Slices and Membranes mean, and what their correspondences are, for sure.
Ideas:
These books take H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (or "Yog-Sothothery" as he himself called it) and turn the premise on its head: the eldritch gods, obsessed occultists, and deranged cultists are actually the good guys, and the bad guys are the purist, progress-oriented rationalists. And the books are great fun!
But look a little closer... The books are written by a renowned thinker and practical occultist, so their power is presumably much more than your average speculative fiction.
First off, the Great Old Ones (the monstrous godlike beings in Lovecraft's works, and later writers within his Mythos universe), are actually the old gods of nature. And whether or not they existed before Lovecraft wrote his books, they seem to be actual gods that can be prayed to, invoked, and learned from.
Greer contributed much in this area, in ways that I probably don't even know about right now. For starters, he created a balanced system of the core dozen or so gods, and aligned them to the Tree of Life, that venerable Cabalistic map of the cosmos. Here's a link to his Eldritch version of the Tree of Life: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/44066.html
The Tree of Life is just one way of mapping and exploring the universe of our experience- and one that uses space as a metaphor. Another one is the Wheel of Life, in JMG's The Druid Magic Handbook, my current system of magic study- which uses time, and the cyclical passage of the seasons as a metaphor.
There are more, though maybe thought of and used in different ways. Here are a few that I personally think might be at least somewhat analogous:
- Three Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds of some shamanic cultures
- Yggdrasil connecting the 9 Realms of Norse Cosmology
- the seven heavens, purgatory, Earth, and the nine hells of classical Christian thought
- the seven chakras corresponding to the seven planes of Yogic thought
- Perhaps there is an even broader connection here between energy center systems and cosmographic worlds of existence.
In that light, I've been mulling over a uniquely eldritch system of magic ever since learning of the fact that this is indeed possible, and not just another wistful yearning of a fantasy novel nerd that the magic within his beloved books is actually real!
Now, as I've mentioned here before, I'm just a novice, and very behind on my meditation practice, at that. So, any of my musings here should be read in that light. I'm waiting to complete my coursework in the Druid Magic Handbook before I move on to anything else. Due to the flexibility of that system, luckily I have been able to invoke the Great Old Ones as part of my daily magical practice, until I (or perhaps JMG himself) can create an eldritch system to my liking.
That being said, I love thinking and brainstorming Things like this, and one consideration for an eldritch magical system is what cosmogram it uses (if it specifies one at all). One option would be to use the Tree of Life, making for a Cabalistic, and perhaps even Golden Dawn-derived system. That would be interesting, however I haven't studied a Golden Dawn system, and I'm not sure that I'd like to spend several years studying that following the several years I've already committed to with the DMH/Dolmen Arch course.
Another option is to heavily tweak the DMH system, which uses the Wheel of Life, essentially creating an eldritch druid system (which would be canonical within the Mythos, since there is a story about Shub Ne'hurrath-worshipping druids). Again, this would be awesome, and I'm essentially doing this to some extent, by invoking Great Old Ones, and attributing the Great Old Ones to Stations on the Wheel, among other things.
However, this isn't ultimately satisfying to me. I want a system that speaks its own language, rather than speaking another language in an eldritch accent. So, I thought to myself- what is a symbol I can use from the Haliverse (this is a fan-invented namename JMG's inverse Mythos) that I can turn into a systematic cosmogram?
Then it hit me. The Great Earth.
The Great Earth is a new creation by JMG, which basically contends that the Earth of the Haliverse is actually a 3D slice of a greater Earth, existing within 4 spatial dimensions. (See the Weird of Hali book series, and this post on the Solar System Heritage website, and scroll down to JMG's comment called "Expanding the Earth") Each 3D cross-section or "slice" is a unique world of its own, with essentially inifite possible slices between the two "ends." Incidentally, the sky color of each Slice/world is different. Also, the slices near the middle are larger, and towards the ends, are smaller, just like a cross-section of our own Earth would be. But what are the "ends"?
The extra dimension requires two new directions- anth and ulth. And the Great Earth has an anthern pole and an ulthern pole- these are the "ends" of the Great Earth- the ulthern pole is Carcosa, the realm of The King in Yellow- the King of the Great Old Ones, and the anthern pole is R'lyeh, the realm of Great Cthulhu, The High Priest of the Great Old Ones.
And this is roughly the information that JMG had divulged so far about the Great Earth, so I'll be adjusting what follows as new info comes in.
So how do you create a cosmogram with this info?
Well, first, infinite worlds are a bit much to deal with- I mean, the map's not the territory, so there should be some simplification involved. So, let's reduce the infinite number of worlds. But to what number?
The Tree of Life most commonly used, as well as the Wheel of Life as used in the DMH, both have a total of 33 elements.
The Tree has:
-10 Spheres
-22 Paths
-Da'ath (neither Sphere nor Path)
The Wheel has
-8 Stations
-24 Paths
-The Central Grove (not a Station, nor a Path, but is represented by an Ogham few, like the Paths)
So, ideally I'd like there to be 33 elements in the Great Earth cosmogram—then it will align more with these other systems, giving more options for borrowing and comparative experimenting.
So, instead of making infinitely thin slices of the Great Earth, I imagined thicker colored bands as the Slices. The connections ("Paths") would be represented by the borders between the Slices, as well as other lines as necessary. Since the diagram is actually a 2D depiction of a spherical 3D diagram, the connections between adjacent Slices are actually 2D planes, so rather that calling the connections between the Slices "Paths", I've been calling them Membranes, which is also a deliciously organic term-- perfect for the Haliverse!
To decide on numbers, I had to tweak and test; initially I thought that each world only directly contacts its anthward neighbor and it's ulthward neighbor, but the numbers just weren't working out. Once I made the number of Slices 9, and created a Membrane between each Slice and between every third Slice, the numbers worked.
I also intuited that there exists a "Center" to which each Slice can directly connect to. This Center would correspond to Nodens.
So, each Slice connects to 3 other Slices (except for Carcosa and R'lyeh, which only connect to 2 each), plus the Center. So, that comes to:
-9 Slices
-23 Membranes (for each Slice, this includes connections with the neighboring Slice(s), a connection 3 slices away (similar to the every other Station connections on the Wheel), and a connection to the a Center)
-The Center
So, how to start naming the slices? Well, our Earth should be on there, and while I should note that our Earth isn't central to the Great Earth- we humans need to remember that we aren't the center of everything- I hesitate to leave Earth off, or arbitrarily make Earth closer to R'lyeh or Carcosa. So I'm left with making Earth the central Slice. I'm tentatively okay with this, given that our experience is central to us, even if it's emphatically NOT central from the point of view of the wider universe. And this also matches some themes from ritual magic study, where you as an individual are working to place yourself at the center of the universe, symbolically.
So, here's where we're currently at:
What about the other Slices? Well, Carcosa and R'lyeh are both cities and realms mentioned in the Mythos, and other authors consider them to be, or have been, cities or places on Earth proper.
And what if they were? I'm mean, the Great Earth should rhyme with itself, shouldn't it? Remember, these worlds aren't different planets in our universe, they are realms that make up a greater fourth dimensional whole. So why shouldn't R'lyeh exist as a sunken city on Earth, AND an entire Slice/world on Greater Earth? Precedence for this: places exist in the Dreamlands AND on physical Earth within the Haliverse (though there is a specific explanation for that).
The Earth locations are simply the most pure distillation of the Slice's energy that has been experienced on Earth thus far, and the qualities, inhabitants, cultures, etc of those Earth locations correspond to similar ones on those other Slices.
So, we could end up with something like this:
Carcosa - white sky {=Canon} (corresponds to solar current?)
Mu - brown sky
Lemuria - red sky
Hyperborea - violet sky
Earth -light blue sky {=Canon, obviously}
Atlantis - indigo sky
Valusia - yellow-orange sky
Leng - silver sky
R'lyeh - green sky (corresponds to telluric current?)
Other options:
-K'n-yan (but it's kinda creepy...)
-Hyboria
-Thuria
-Sarnath
-Lomar
Where to go from here? A lot of meditation and brainstorming, not to mention praying to the Great Old Ones, in order to get a better idea of what the various Slices and Membranes mean, and what their correspondences are, for sure.
Ideas:
- 9 Slices correspond to 9 planets (Mercury, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune), presumably opening up whole realms of astrological magic and lore.
- A symbol that can be used- 9-pointed star
- 23 Membranes plus the Center correspond to number of Elder Futhark Runes
- 33 elements of system correspond to 33 letters in Aklo abugida writing system
- each of the 9 Slices correspond most strongly with a Great Old One?
- Cthulhu for R'lyeh, King in Yellow for Carcosa. Nodens for the Center. Nyarlathotep for Earth? Tsathoggua versus Yhoundeh for Hyperborea? Or if Atlanteans were sorcerors, maybe Tsathoggua for Atlantis?
