Fiction as 'religion'

[hopfrog]

Some times, forgetting that I am LDS, I proclaim that Shakespeare is my God. (Streisand, though a lesser deity, is still Celestial...)

[Frater_Tsalal]

Quote Originally Posted by hopfrog

(Streisand, though a lesser deity, is still Celestial...)

Amen!

[Souphead]

Since this thread seems to be back alive and there have been a few comments about music, what about the Rock Opera Tommy by The Who? Based on the teaching of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba, as the album progresses, it tells a story and it seems that in the end, Tommy reaches some sort of spiritual awakening. I'm referring to the album rather than the film that seems to make it some sort of sham religion. I guess I was too young at the time but did the album inspire any sort of religious awareness - at least beyond everything else that was happening in the late sixties? Souphead.

[Nemonymous]

Cross-reference with my ongoing review of XX here: XX by Rian Hughes | THE DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS

[Unwary Traveller]

I've been reading through your venerable thread with interest Nemonymous, it's a topic that fascinates me and this response has turned out to be very long so I'll split it in half.

I was looking at some of your "gestalt real-time reviews" trying to get a sense of your overall viewpoint:

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A constructive congeries of the conceits, coronas, coincidences, conspiracies, confirmation-biases and connections in imaginative fiction. the retrocausal palimpsest, the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist, the ultimate clinching happiness or serendipity where we would otherwise expect a clinging sadness intent...on creating patterns and gestalts, previously trying to tie the inferred author to his masthead by his own knots I publicly observe the fiction for what it is, as I read it, hopefully drawing out things within it, found within it as placed there either preternaturally or deliberately The only way not to escape but to remake this world is via the preternatural power of literature. Collecting the threads together strengthens them

As I understand it, you are interested in drawing out connections and meanings within and between works of fiction, but I'm curious to know what you mean by "the preternatural power of literature" and if it has a direct connection to your idea of "fiction as religion."

A couple of phrases you quote in your reviews particularly resonated with me -
"firing up my sense of strange revelation" (Ligotti - Dream of a Manikin)
"I felt phantasy growing on me, and some glamour of the infinite" (Arthur Machen - The Three Imposters)

The idea of literature, particularly weird literature, as a 'gateway to the numinous' fascinates me, and from post #3 in this thread (depending what exactly you mean by the 'noumenon' here) I get the sense this may partly be what you have in mind by "fiction as religion:"

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I'm indeed talking about fiction - written *as* fiction with no aim to become a 'religion' by the author but fiction aspiring *in itself* to become empowered-spirituality. This power of 'suspension of disbelief' - that only fiction supplies - can be harnessed to make a difference mentally and physically upon some as yet undiscovered plane that my own 'chasing the noumenon' is about.

I've been reading the Library of Wales edition of Machen's The Hill of Dreams. By chance I flipped to the notes at the back, and there was an entry on the word 'glamour.' I've encountered this word before in the works of Algernon Blackwood to describe a mystical or magical quality to reality, in the sense of "seemingly mysterious and elusive fascination or allure; bewitching charm" (Collins Online Dictionary). The notes to The Hill of Dreams say that (according to the OED) the word derives from "grammar," which originally meant knowledge of latin, but came to mean knowledge in general including magic and astrology. The note ends by describing this glamour as a "magical, occult element which is etymologically at the very core of language itself."

In The Hill of Dreams Machen (through his character Lucian) writes about the capacity of language "...when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions" which are also capable of conveying something more: "...he who reads wonderful prose or verse is conscious of suggestions that cannot be put into words...the world so disclosed is rather the world of dreams"

I think Machen's use of language in describing the 'tavern scenes' in the same chapter (IV) are an example of this 'glamour' at work in literature; it conveys a magical quality not just through what is explicitly described, but through the use of language itself - in fact much of the book is suffused with this quality.

Glamour is perhaps at the more subtle end of a spectrum which leads through the numinous into the "mysterium tremendum" at the other (I should read Otto's The Idea of the Holy but I find this to a be a very useful summary - http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/en.../numinous.html).

I originally encountered these ideas about the numinous through some of Matt Cardin's writings, in particular an excellent post on the Teeming Brain blog about the demonic divine, which I'll mention again below. I also enjoyed this interview with Matt which gives some context to the ideas behind To Rouse Leviathan- https://www.sublimehorror.com/books/...use-leviathan/, a collection which is a collision of sorts between weird fiction and these religious ideas of the numinous.

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I just began to realise, first in college and then decisively in my twenties, that what drew me to religion was the same thing that drew me to horror. They both inflamed my native philosophical and spiritual bent by generating a sense of the numinous...

Richard Gavin also has some interesting things to say about the intersection of horror and the numinous / mystical. This is an interesting quote from something he wrote for the Teeming Brain: https://www.teemingbrain.com/2012/10...es-from-hades/

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I suggest that the roots of what we call Horror — both the emotion and the force that begets it — bore far deeper. In fact, I suggest that they form a ligature that hooks us up to more primal levels of being. Horror is the drama of the abyss, the cinema verite of the subconscious. It is the nightmare expressed, trawled up from that seething marsh of illogical action and taboo form, and given heft. It is the genre whose very nature shocks our preconceived reality constructs.

And there is an interesting response here by Richard Gavin on the question "What does cosmic horror mean?" - https://lovecraftzine.com/2016/05/13...ters-weigh-in/

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In my own fiction I strive to create feverish yet earnest reportage of my impressions of the Hidden Real that haunts us all. As an author of this very specialized form of horror, I aim to convey the ineffable, to speak the unspeakable, and it is my hope that my readers are able to experience not just the terror but also the profound beauty that I myself experienced through these visions, these vibrant experiences.

For fiction that itself evokes the numinous, I think Lovecraft does this well. Despite being an athiest, or perhaps because of it, I think part of his vision was to capture that magical sense of the numinous in his writings, without venturing into religion or traditional forms of the occult. There is a febrile quality to some of his fiction which I think helps to evoke a sense of everyday reality breaking down, revealing things which should not be.

Ligotti is an interesting case. I'm thinking of two stories in particular where the text itself is presented as having some kind of power to act as a revelation of, or gateway into, a horrific ultimate reality. The narrator of "Nethescurial" speaks of a manuscript which contains "an account of a horror which is both his own and that of the whole human race" which in turn overtakes the narrator. (Incidentally, that description could equally apply to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race which if not "fiction as religion" is perhaps "philosophy as horror.") In "Netherscurial, the "terminal events of this nightmare" include this utterance: "Nethescurial is not the secret name of the creation."

"Vastarien" has the search for a book that is "not about something, but actually is that something". The narrator seeks a "disastrous enlightenment" through "rites of salvation by way of meticulous derangement." The book which is not about something, but actually is that something, would presumably be an examplar of "fiction as religion" if it was possible to create it.

Those two Ligotti stories both have a kind of "personal apocalypse" of the type described by Matt Cardin in this entry on his Teeming Brain website - https://www.teemingbrain.com/2013/07...emonic-divine/

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The major theme that I have pursued in my books and other writings is the complementary nature of the divine and the demonic. Or rather, it’s the truth of the divine demonic or demonic divine, that searing fusion of the horrific with the beatific in a liminal zone where supernatural horror and religion are inextricably merged with each other, and where it’s not just the conventionally demonic that is the source of deepest dread and horror, but the very divine object itself: God, the One, the Ground of Being. If God is or can be the ultimate horror, then the experience of religious illumination or spiritual awakening is inherently dangerous, since it constitutes a true personal apocalypse, a removal of reality’s obscuring veil that can be experienced not just as a wonderful liberation but as an awe-ful nightmare.

With Ligotti, there is no rapturous wonder in the experience of the numinous; the moment of revelation opens up a nightmare realm of infinite horror.

Lovecraft also conveys this sense of the ultimate reality being something terrifying in his stories, but there is also room for an almost mystical sense of wonder - fabulous cities basking in glorious sunsets, and the feeling of "adventurous expectancy" he tries to create. I think this is closely related to the numinous, the attempt to create a suspension of disbelief, to convey a heightened sense of wonder, to present a world in which awe-inspiring revelations could shatter your worldview at any moment.

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Although I gave some examples of authors when setting up this thread in 2006 (to run alongside the 'Magic Fiction' thread), I think underlying it all in my mind was the ability of fiction as a general phenomenon to be close to the human longing (conscious or sub-conscious) for a sort of religion, indeed closer than any religion so-called. (post #38)

With general fiction, I suspect part of the appeal of epic fantasy, even Harry Potter, or films/TV such as Star Wars or Star Trek, is to provide a world which the reader can "believe in" in a way which perhaps makes them a kind of secular replacement for religion to an extent. The world of Narnia or Tolkien's Middle Earth can be interpreted as Christian allegories written by believers, but I think these other fictional worlds also provide a kind of idealised struggle of good vs evil in which good ultimately triumphs, life has meaning, there is an implicit code to follow to be a good person, magic or magical technology is real and so on. I don't mean that people literally think of Harry Potter as Jesus or believe these worlds actually exist, but that they inhabit these fictional worlds and take meaning from them in a way which has some similarilities with the way people take comfort and meaning from bible stories or religion in general.

In these fictional worlds, there is less emphasis on evoking something through the language itself, and more about "world-building," where if it's done well, the reader becomes fully absorbed in the writing and ends up "inhabiting" the fictional world within their own mind, as though they have gone through the wardrobe into Narnia with the characters of the book.

There are also books where words themselves become part of the plot, such as The Raw Shark Texts, Pontypool Changes Everything, House of Leaves. You have fiction such as Mother Horse Eyes appearing in random message board threads with a bizarre science fiction theme that is only later confirmed to be intended as fiction, and a work such as Philip K. Dick's VALIS which is hard to classify but could possibly be classified as "fiction as religion" or perhaps "religion as fiction." I think semiotics got mentioned somewhere in this thread which is why I mentioned the Pontypool book - I've not read it but the film is an interesting watch in the very niche "semiotics and zombies" sub-genre.

[Unwary Traveller]

To return to the numinous and the idea of fiction in itself as "empowered spirituality," I think Machen's The Hill of Dreams is a very good example of this. The book attempts to evoke mystical feelings, a sense of the numinous, and at the same time is about the struggle of the main character to achieve this as a writer, to express "those mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into the written word". Although Machen was religious, traditional religion doesn't really intrude into this work; he seems to be trying to evoke a more general sense of the mystical or numinous.

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Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature; it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words. ...And yet there was something more...besides the sensation...there were the indefinable inexpressible images which all fine literature summons to the mind. ...he who reads wonderful prose or verse is conscious of suggestions that cannot be put into words, which do not arise from the logical sense, which are rather parallel to than connected with the sensous delight. The world so dislosed is rather the world of dreams...a world beyond all expression and analysis, neither of the intellect nor of the senses. (110-111) ...the first lines of a book should whisper things unintelligible but all significant. Such lines as: Bottomless vales and boundless floods, ⁠And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods, ⁠With forms that no man can discover ⁠For the dews that drip all over; had for Lucian more than the potency of a drug, lulling him into a splendid waking sleep, every word being a supreme incantation (132-133)

The lines Machen quotes from Poe's "Dream-Land" make me wonder about the difference between poetry and prose to evoke the kind of "mystic fancies" Machen talks about. There is perhaps another discussion to be had about evoking the sublime vs the numinous in literature.

The overall effect Machen is going for is a kind of heightened mood, an almost drug-like effect achieved through the use of language. It is clear The Hill of Dreams is influenced by De Quincey, especially in the way that isolated scenes from life gather potency and meaning through the dreamlike reveries of the author, as though you are "under the influence" of language, consuming literature as if it were an opium dream.

You mentioned "the human longing for a sort of religion" and also harnessing the power of suspension of disbelief "upon some as yet undiscovered plane that my own 'chasing the noumenon' is about."

I think religious texts and some fiction (such as Machen's Hill of Dreams) both try to access a sense of the numinous which exists as a kind of latent feature of the brain, and that this underlying neurobiology may help to explain religion (a religious person might argue the opposite way, that this biology is inbuilt by the creator to allow us to experience religion).

A very good book on this topic is The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience by Kevin Nelson. In the UK it is titled "The God Impulse." Basically the book discusses near-death experiences, the mystical aspects of those experiences, the underlying neurobiology, and uses this to discuss the mystical experience in general. It's a good book which takes mystical experiences seriously within a rational scientific framework, without needlessly attacking the views of anyone more religiously or spiritually inclined.

At the end of the book he talks about mystical experiences on psilocybin (magic mushrooms) which have been the subject of some scientific study. He speculates:

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What if we had a drug which acted on a specific part of the brain and caused us to experience the miraculous? Or imagine another drug, more refined than psilocybin, which precisely stimulated the mystical, bringing us to a state of 'oneness,' or even closer to God than we can now imagine.

There's a drug known as 5-MeO-DMT which is increasingly touted as a route to very powerful (maybe too powerful) mystical / spiritual experiences of oneness and God - in whatever sense - but I think the author here underestimates the power of psilocybin. With the right dosage, I've found that magic mushrooms very reliably produce powerful mystical experiences, even in someone like me who started taking mushrooms as an athiest with zero interest in spirituality (I'm still an athiest but I think I intuitively understand certain aspects of spirituality / religion better now).

One key aspect of the mushroom experience at higher doses is precisely the sort of "suspension of disbelief" which is sought by fiction. There is a looming sense of the numinous - you may start out on the basis that you are "just taking a drug," but the experience takes on a profound level of meaning, with the sense that reality is breaking down and revealing its true nature, either through a mystical or religious experience, a deep sense of awe, or a far more unsettling feeling that something terrible is being revealed to you. This extract from Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature" describes the sensation well:

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A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint... of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Ultimately I would have to regard this type of experience as delusional (although it does give me a healthy respect for Buddhist ideas about consciousness), but viewed purely as an experience it is still incredible. I find it fascinating that the experience of meaning and significance is something that can be ratcheted up by purely chemical means. Delusions are a form of storytelling, and to experience this kind of thing with a pen in your hand produces some interesting results.

I'll quote (and link) a couple of "trip reports" that I posted years ago on "The Shroomery," a message board about magic mushrooms. Despite the increasing scientific interest in psychedelics and some changes recently to the legal status of mushrooms in certain areas of the US, there is rarely any emphasis on using psychedelics as a creative tool or inspiration, certainly not for writing. It is sometimes assumed that you cannot write on high doses, but as long as the dose isn't too excessive, outside of the actual peak of the trip you can; in fact you may feel compelled to write.

In the first report, an unexpectedly strong trip results in a very powerful sense of the presence of a wrathful God, and insane religious revelations are mixed up with the imagery from a visit to the zoo earlier in the day - https://www.shroomery.org/forums/sho...umber/20842042. Thirty minutes in, and things have already taken an unexpected turn:

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My limbs feel spare. As I write a forest seems to grow around me. I scan up the words into another world. I see the dark of a museum. Strange tastes and sensations. I close my eyes and there are things coming at me. We’ve been here before. This is very strong. I don’t think we’ll be back for seconds. I’ve left boxes of sclerotia on the side and it seems like food for animals in the zoo. When I try to settle to write it’s like being inside a Disney ride. A loss of control. Sweating zebras. When there is a zoo inside of your brain.

After two hours:

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If you take enough drugs God will reveal himself to you and you will believe. Nothing else really matters. The End. Religious delusions. Mania. Insanity. Trans – dimensional voyaging. The light in the ceiling began to glow like a star and kept changing color and if you ever wanted a sign from God that is what it would look like. So this is the end. Good. When you have found what you are searching for the only thing to do is to go home. Tell me I am insane and I only tell you – you have not faced this. This is wrong, This is zoo. This is how it started. This is where it all ends. There is a monster that lives in the zoo and that monster is God. You can argue with him but he will destroy you. It all makes sense. Except where it doesn’t.

The second report shows more of a turn towards fiction, where I stop trying to accurately record the trip itself and let the force of its imagery and my racing, disordered thoughts coalesce into some sort of loose narrative based around the repeating phrase 'burn everything' and imagery from a voodoo exhibition in a museum I'd visited. The experience felt more like writing down phrases which were appearing in my subconscious, rather than thinking them up. https://www.shroomery.org/forums/sho...umber/15968914

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I need to sleep but if I do so it will be in a world of darkness and voodoo where armies stumble through the blackness with automatic weapons and mysterious ideologies. To bury yourself. To find a hidden civilization. To die in your dreams. Too scared to sleep. Too tired to run. I'm hallucinating movie concepts. How can something feel so evil? Earthlights. Nocturnal tunneling in the cavities under the floor. To be targeted by concepts. Laser-guided sentences and precision weaponry. I need to accept defeat. I need to sleep. I'm trying to turn down my hallucinations with the radiator thermostats. Out-numbered and out-gunned. An attack force of air-brushed air forces and 1000lb ideologies. The nuclear weaponry of an out-of-control hallucination. When sleep feels like death. ...This is terrible but I like it. Burn everything. I am unspeakably evil, unhinged and hallucinating. Not safe for work. Not safe for children under 5. Contains small parts that may become lodged in the jet engines and crash your hallucination into the sea. Do be careful. And try to keep up. This is where we excel. In the dimensions under the sea. Where the grammar and verbs coalesce and cool into dangerous new hallucinations. Where the synapses snap and the dendrites die and the axons give up and come back tomorrow. Burn everything. My hallucinations are unprincipled and there is only one instruction. Down here we are to BURN EVERYTHING.

My interest in weird fiction is partly derived from psychedelics - from my perspective they seem to be on the same wavelength. I would view psychedelics as a way of exploring the unconscious, and I think the relationship to the numinous is something that psychedelics, weird fiction and religion share in different ways. It's certainly an interesting experience to suspend your disbelief in what you are writing. Years after those early experiences, my trip journals are more like story fragments, and I've started to write weird / horror short stories. Some of them have at their core some fragment of a psychedelic experience dressed up into a fictional narrative, which gives the paradoxical result that the mundane details of the story are fiction and some of the weird element is taken directly from a journal.

For me, "fiction as religion" is the story that unfolds as you encounter the numinous under the influence of psilocybin, one that you write as you are experiencing it. I think the best weird writers such as Lovecraft or Machen are able to induce the strangely heightened mood of this type of experience, at some level, in the reader, which makes the possibilities of weird fiction fascinating to me.

[A Defrocked Academic]

Thank you for these thoughtful posts. Thanks are also due to Nemonymous for starting the thread.

The overall effect Machen is going for is a kind of heightened mood, an almost drug-like effect achieved through the use of language. (Unwary Traveller)

This brings to mind a quote from one of Ligotti’s interviews: “For me reading acts as a sort of a mild recreational drug, a diversion and not much more.” (The Grimscribe in Cyberspace, 2000)

Burn everything. My hallucinations are unprincipled and there is only one instruction. Down here we are to BURN EVERYTHING. (Unwary Traveller)

The focus on “burn[ing] everything” reminds me of Lovecraft’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”:

This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle that stood in his way.

One salient difference is that whereas in “Beyond…” the burning is to take place above, within your psychedelic experience, the burning is to take place below. The powers of the luminous entity described in “Beyond…” may derive from the “sense of soaring outward from all temporal, spatial, and material limitations” found in Lovecraft’s personal experience of sehnsucht.

The world of Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth can be interpreted as Christian allegories written by believers, but I think these other fictional worlds also provide a kind of idealized struggle of good vs. evil in which good ultimately triumphs, life has meaning, there is an implicit code to follow to be a good person, magic or magical technology is real and so on. I don't mean that people literally think of Harry Potter as Jesus or believe these worlds actually exist, but that they inhabit these fictional worlds and take meaning from them in a way which has some similarities with the way people take comfort and meaning from bible stories or religion in general. (Unwary Traveller)

I was surprised to find that this is the first mention of Tolkien in this thread. Tolkien’s work seems to be an obvious example of literature that is not explicitly about religion but still offers a metanarrative similar to that provided by religion. This allows some readers to “take meaning from” his fiction in much the same manner. On the other hand, excluding Tolkien from the discussion might also be justified in light of the strong influence of Catholicism on his work:

“The Lord of the Rings” is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out practically all references to anything like “religion,” to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism. (The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, Letter 142, 2 December 1953)

This means that Tolkien’s legendarium can be viewed as an example of an established religion influencing fiction rather than fiction as “empowered spirituality” in the sense of Nemonymous’s original post. To connect to another thread, this relationship has recently been illuminated with the publication of The Nature of Middle-Earth. Appendix I of TNoME goes into detail on the correspondences between Catholic teachings and the metaphysics of Middle-Earth.

But things are not so clear cut. Tolkien’s fiction has religious underpinnings but his books are not necessarily read or interpreted as Christian texts. A parallel can be drawn to the sacred music of J.S. Bach, which has been noted to evoke something akin to a spiritual experience in the non-religious, even when removed from its original context.

The literary effects achieved by Tolkien can be viewed in a similar light. One example is the evocation of sehnsucht with religious undertones found in The Fellowship of the Ring:

But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise. (FotR, Book 1, Chapter 8)

The image recurs in the finale of The Return of the King:

And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back […] (RotK, Book 2, Chapter 9)

There is also the vision of holy dread which concludes the Akallabêth:

And tales and rumours arose along the shores of the sea concerning mariners and men forlorn upon the water who, by some fate or grace or favour of the Valar, had entered in upon the Straight Way and seen the face of the world sink below them, and so had come to the lamplit quays of Avallónë, or verily to the last beaches on the margin of Aman, and there had looked upon the White Mountain, dreadful and beautiful, before they died. (The Silmarillion: Akallabêth)

Through the medium of Tolkien’s fantasy world, these images are made accessible to the secular reader.

Regardless of the status of Tolkien’s fiction, his notion of sub-creation also appears relevant to the general thrust of this thread:

We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

An essential power of Faërie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy’ […] This aspect of ‘mythology’ – sub-creation, rather than either representation or symbolic interpretation of the beauties and terrors of the world – is, I think, too little considered. Is that because it is seen rather in Faërie than upon Olympus? Because it is thought to belong to the ‘lower mythology’ rather than to the ‘higher’? (On Fairy-Stories)

We will revisit the concept later in this post.

It seems fitting to turn from Tolkien to the relationship between language and magic, another topic that has been discussed in the thread. Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and it can be argued that language, although an ancient and familiar technology, is an excellent example of this principle (the “third law”) in action.

The status of language as an instinct or innate characteristic of human beings vs. a form of tool or cultural activity has been the subject of intense discussion and is, indeed, one of the major issues that divide the discipline of general linguistics. I will take the position that language is a tool that presupposes – but should be considered separate from – the physical and mental endowment of humans (see Daniel Everett’s Language: The Cultural Tool for a popular defense of this view). The role of language as a form of technological magic can thus be said to fall within the scope of Clarke’s third law.

The connection between language and magic(k) is also one of the major interests of Alan Moore, who was mentioned earlier in the thread:

Basically, I have understood that art and magic are precisely the same thing. […] If you happen to live within a worldview that supposes our entire neurological reality to be made up of words, and happen to believe that certain intense forms of language might therefore be capable of altering that neurological reality, then picking up a pen or sitting down at your keyboard feels like a very different proposition.

Moore’s views are reflected in his work. Providence (2016, issue 9, page 31) contains a passage which brings up the magical nature of everyday language. The remarks are attributed to “Randall Carver” (Randolph Carter), but we can assume that Moore is using the character as a mouthpiece.

[…] Randall, for example, expressed the opinion that the origins of so-called “magic” may lie in the advent of language and writing. He explained that the ability to record observations and to transmit thoughts to other people, often over quite substantial distances of space or time, would seem of supernatural provenance to those who did not yet possess the concept of written communication. He went on to point out that if we should for some reason remove the verbal elements of magic (grimoires, magic words, spells, incantations, curses and “angelic” languages), there’s next to nothing left. Rather than using this argument to disparage magic as being no more than a pretentious form of literature, however, Randall seemed to be suggesting that even quite ordinary, everyday commercial writing was an act of sorcery, no matter how debased, misunderstood or ineffectual, and that as such any book might harbour unforeseen and even dangerous magic consequences. [… He] pointed out the multitude of advertising slogans that adorn our hoardings and street corners these days, subtly persuading us to find one product more attractive or familiar than another. [… It] seems that words and books, demonstrably, can change our world by changing our perception of it; can precipitate it to another state entirely.

The passage is discussed in the excellent “Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence”, one of the creators of which is TLO member Ancient History:

Whether by employing magic or by other less contentious means, it seems that words and books, demonstrably, can change our world by changing our perception of it; can precipitate it to another state entirely” is a statement that can be read on several levels. As a fictional character subject to Moore’s script, it is a literal truth for Robert Black. For the reader of the comic, reading something can absolutely change their perception of things. Likewise, the whole of issue #9 (and arguably all of Providence) deals with the question of perception, with what Black both sees and does not see, and what the comic reader sees and does not see. This may also be a subtle reference at Grant Morrison, who famously wrote the series The Invisibles as a magickal symbol.

Although these are valid observations, I do not believe that the passage in question has anything to do with Grant Morrison. The issue of the relationship between language and our perception of the world far transcends individual works of fiction. As noted by Carver/Moore, the capacity of everyday language to transform our (mental representations of the) world is so integrated into our daily lives that its significance can be difficult to fathom. Consider the following: “I hereby pronounce you man and wife”, “We’re not your real parents”, “You’re fired”.

The philosophy blogger ScholarLost has described this aspect of language better than I can:

[…] The semantic layer of the world is the aspect of the world that is what things mean, or what things are “about” (this is known as intentionality, and is related to what Teilhard de Chardin called the Noosphere). It can be difficult to understand this, because for many of us, it is inseparable from our everyday experience of the world. As an example, I see before me a coffee cup. Part of what that cup is, part of what makes it a cup, is that I see it as such – I think the word “cup” when I try to name it, and I see its form as related to a particular function – getting coffee into my mouth. […]

[…] So we have a layer of learned and discovered meanings for things, generated in concert with others, often relating to the development and refinement of our ability to use language, and this semantic layer is often the means through which we both see and interact with the world. This makes the semantic layer an incredible source of power – to be able to name things, to give them their functions, and their meaning is to do nothing less than to condition what people see as possible, and to be able to pattern what gets recognized as real. […]

ScholarLost also relates the reality-shaping power of language to Tolkien’s notion of sub-creation:

We talk this semantic world into existence, and arrange our lives according to its horizons. This is related to what Tolkien called “subcreation,” though he only suggests this goes on inside the work of the artist or writer. We live in stories, and they are often not stories we have had much part in framing. Disenchantment is itself a spell, the weaving of a story-world in which our own sense of meaning and our own stories are cosmically unimportant. It is quite a tale, which, if internalized, just might convince people to abandon their own sense of meaning, their own horizons, or at least treat them as modest and secondary epiphenomenon to the “real” story of cosmic meaninglessness. […]

The post is worth reading in its entirety. And on that note of “cosmic meaninglessness”, I will let Thomas Ligotti have the final word with his personal take on the spiritual potential of literature:

Attempting to read your favorite author when you've got a bad headache or the flu is good way to verify the limits of literature. It's really not much help—just a way for people who are in reasonably good health to pass the time. In other words, I am definitely not a believer in literature as a form of magic or means of personal salvation. (The Grimscribe in Cyberspace, 2000)

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Unwary Traveller]

Thanks Defrocked Academic, interesting stuff.

By some serendipitous coincidence, I opened up my copy of Dorothy L. Sayers 1928 anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror recently, to be greeted with a fitting quote by Arthur Machen:

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Man is so made that all his true delight arises from the contemplation of mystery, and save by his own frantic and invincible folly, mystery is never taken from him; it arises within his soul, a well of joy unending.

That piece by Scholarlost is very good. Some passages that stood out:

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Magic, Imagination, Enchantment; whatever we call it, it seems to be returning to those parts of the world that have tried to drive it out. * In this time and place, reading Tarot is seen as a magical practice, and reading a novel is not, but that is a matter of history, not metaphysics. My calling in the realm of faerie is to break down the way we distinguish between the enchanted and the disenchanted; or rather, relocate it. Practices are not themselves enchanted or disenchanted. Enchantment is a relationship, an openness to the awe and wonder of the universe. It is a sensitivity to the numinous. * The semantic layer is where the ideas, concepts, and meanings for everything we encounter lives, and it is usually invisible to us, because (to borrow a turn of phrase from Lee Shulman3) the semantic layer is not something we look at, it is something we look with. The given-ness of meaning in the semantic layer is often helpful. It would be very difficult to live in the world if we had to constantly figure out what things were, and what they were for. * Disenchantment is the systematic limitation of experience to the allowances of a worldview that is rationalistic, physicalist, and meaningless.

There are some elements here that make me think of a YouTube video I was watching today, containing some short clips of talks by Terence McKenna in relation to his idea of a "heroic dose" of psychedelics (I assume this is related to the idea of the "Hero's Journey" - it always puts me in mind of some Tolkienesque quest into the unconscious). I think the use of psychedelics, and the increasing interest in them, is partly related to this desire for a sense of magic and re-enchantment. The linking of enchantment to awe, wonder and the numinous also makes sense in the context of psychedelics, and reading through Otto's The Idea of the Holy, his conception of the numinous is very close to my experience of psychedelics.

Part of your quote by Alan Moore, where he posits "a worldview that supposes our entire neurological reality to be made up of words" makes an interesting contrast with McKenna, who talks about the very inability of language to convey certain aspects of the psychedelic experience, a place where the 'semantic layer' runs out of concepts. In McKenna's words:

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And yet if you take anywhere above 25mg of psilocybin, I think the strongest wayfaring soul reaches for the brake pedal somewhere in there. It's amazing how we just skim the surface of this, and we can't go very deep because language fails, I mean most of you who have done committed doses know that you go into a realm where it gets weirder and weirder and weirder, and then finally the very machinery of explaining to the observer what is happening begins to melt, and then you are there with 'it' for a while, and then you descend out of that, and the language mechanism reactivates and says, you know, "We are now leaving the utterly unspeakable behind" and so it's an extrordinary thing. I mean the motivation of my career, I guess, is I just can't believe how this much strangeness could lay that close to the surface, and the enterprise of human history be conducted for 10,000 years, with people running around *trying* to do weird things, writing polyphonic music, and the rudolphene chord (?) and Hieronymus Bosch, and right under the surface, just a Niagra of peculiarity and strangeness that makes no sense to me when I put on the hat of a biologist. Why should an advanced animal, of some sort, have this curious relationship to an invisible river of imagery running collectively through the brains of all and each. What is that about? And the beauty of it, in Blake's word the futurity of it, the fact that in the glistening of the flowing waters of the unconscious, you glimpse not only the square-topped towers of Ilium, and the ruins of Carthage and Petra and all that, but you also see the intimations of some kind of magnificent future. Is it in the imagination? Is it directly ahead in the time stream? Is it lost in dream? The whole circumstance of being alive and being a self-reflecting thinking human being, is just too peculiar for words.

In the context of this thread, the idea of language 'failing' within the mystical domain is pertinent; a restatement of the idea of the "ineffable." He is also suggesting that society tends to look in the wrong places for its enchantment and weirdness, when there is a vast domain of strangeness right there within the mind, open to be explored through psychedelics. (Incidentally, he refers to something which sounds like "the Rudolphene chord" - if you know what he actually says at that point, answers on a postcard...)

In the same video McKenna, like Machen, talks about cultivating a sense of mystery, a sort of "psychedelics as religion" which makes an interesting comparison with the concept of "fiction as religion." There is the contrasting view of language as something which ultimately breaks down within the mystical / enchanted / numinous domain, or as something which can have a role in creating it.

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We have to begin to cultivate a sense of mystery, a sense of living without closure, because that in fact is how the world is; the world is a mystery, it's not going to yield to the fragile constructs of the human mind, some portion may be rationally apprehendable, but the basic facts of the matter are that we do not know where we come, nor why, nor where we're going, nor according to what plan, and instead of seeking a flawed communication with the intentionality of deity, I think the psychedelic religious agenda (if that's how you want to think of it) is a more modest one, it's the cultivation of a sense of wonder in the presence of something which obviously cannot be encompassed by the human mind.

Earlier in the thread Nemonymous comments: "There is nothing spiritual beyond fiction. That's my belief. The rest is speculation".

Meanwhile over on the Shroomery message board, the spiritual and mystical loom large, and people sometimes get more than they expected. I liked this comment from a user called Solarshroomster:

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I just don't think I was prepared for the cognitive dissonance of the mystical domain actually being a real thing.

I think the key thing here is that whatever this visionary, psychedelic realm turns out to be - perhaps pure psychosis and delusion - it is a case where "the medium is the message." You can disenchant the explanation of the experience into neuroscience and so on, but you are still left with the experience itself, something so far beyond our conception of what should exist, even within the mind, that it feels like a meeting with one of Lovecraft's "eldritch abominations," McKenna's "utterly unspeakable." Any dregs of sense you can bring out of a heavy trip are likely to be trivial, nonsensical or delusional, like the protaganist of a Lovecraft story left raving and insensible by the things he has seen, but it is the very existence and accessibility of this realm of consciousness, in all its enchantment and strangeness, which is the real revelation, "a well of joy unending."

I'll link the McKenna video here. He was a thought-provoking and entertaining speaker - even when he talks nonsense, it's usually very lyrical and engaging nonsense:

Channel: Soul Synergy
Video: Terence McKenna - A Heroic Dose (Psychedelic Notes: Part 2)

Terence McKenna - A Heroic Dose (Psychedelic Notes: Part 2) - YouTube

[A Defrocked Academic]

Quote Originally Posted by Unwary Traveller

(Incidentally, he refers to something which sounds like "the Rudolphene chord" - if you know what he actually says at that point, answers on a postcard...)

It's "The Rudolfian court". The court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II appears to be associated with polyphonic music as well as with the occult, but I don't know which of the connections is being referenced here. Maybe both?

[Unwary Traveller]

Ah, the Rudolphine court. I found an abstract of a thesis on the University of Michigan website about the 'polyphonic mass ordinary':
Polyphonic Settings of the Mass Ordinary At the Court of Rudolf II (1576-1612) (Austria)

**

I've been thinking a bit more about the literary approaches of Dunsany, Machen, and Lovecraft in relation to this thread.

In this passage from Dunsany's story "The Relenting of Sarnidac," a character expresses the fear of disenchantment (mentioned in posts #47 & #48) in a world where religion threatens to be no more:

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"'Oh gods, rob not the earth of the dim hush that hangs round all Your temples, bereave not all the world of old romance, take not the glamour from the moonlight nor tear the wonder out of the white mists in every land; for, O ye gods of the childhood of the world, when You have left the earth You shall have taken the mystery from the sea and all its glory from antiquity, and You shall have wrenched out hope from the dim future. There shall be no strange cities at night time half understood, nor songs in the twilight; and the whole of the wonder shall have died with last year's flowers in little gardens or hill-slopes leaning south; for with the gods must go the enchantment of the plains and all the magic of dark woods, and something shall be lacking from the quiet of early dawn. "The Relenting of Sardianiac" In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (Joshi Ed.) p70

Dunsany is a fitting writer to explore in the context of 'fiction as religion,' as his technique was to invoke these feelings of enchantment through his writing, in stories where fictional gods are frequently present as a story element. Consider the terms used in that passage: romance, glamour, wonder, mystery, glory, hope, enchantment, magic. The speaker asserts that these things will no longer exist in a godless world. However, in Dunsany's prose in that passage, these qualities are actually being attached to features of landscape seen in particular conditions of lighting: temples, sea, cities, plains, dark woods, seen at twilight, night time, dawn, through mists or moonlight.

Lovecraft also used landscapes, especially fantastical landscapes, to invoke a sense of wonder and enchantment otherwise absent in his godless world of cosmic pessimism. About Dunsany he wrote:

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His prismatic cities and unheard-of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as well. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (Joshi Ed.) p91

In addition to landscape, the idea of "dream" was important to both Dunsany and Lovecraft. The sense of 'dream' used by Dunsany, although frequently referring to the actual dreams of sleeping gods, is perhaps closer to other meanings of dream such as "a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal" or "a person or thing perceived as wonderful or perfect" (OED). Dunsany's dream cities are ideal cities, perfect and inaccessible. Take the example of Sardathrion, from the story "Time and the Gods":

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...the gods dreamed marble dreams. And with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and stood up proudly between the river and the sky, all shimmering white to the morning. In the city's midst the gleaming marble of a thousand steps climbed to the citadel where arose four pinnacles beckoning to heaven, and midmost between the pinnacles stood the dome, vast, as the gods had dreamed it. ...Only to those to whom in lonely passes in the night the gods have spoken... hath it been given to see Sardathrion, to stand where her pinnacles gathered together in the night fresh from the dreams of gods. ...hidden in the desert's midst they find the valley at last and look with eyes upon Sardathrion. ...many that the gods have loved come to the marble city, but none can return, for other cities are no fitting home for men whose feet have touched Sardathrion's marble streets... It stands a city aloof. There hath been no rumour of it - I alone have dreamed of it, and I may not be sure that my dreams are true. "Time and the Gods" In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (Joshi Ed.) p49-50

Sardathrion is presented here both as a dream city of the gods and of the narrator. Despite the caveat "I may not be sure that my dreams are true" there is a sense in which the reality or unreality of Sardathrion within the story becomes irrelevant - once you have imagined this city from the evocative description, it exists as a kind of 'dream city' within the mind of the reader.

Lovecraft frequently borrows Dunsany's conception of dream cities and places in his writing, but he also talks of dreams almost in the sense of "lucid dreams" - his vividly realistic night time dreams of weird scenes, events and landscapes that are documented in his letters, and mentioned in Joshi's footnotes to the stories. Lovecraft's comments on Blackwood further elucidate his use of the term "dream."

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Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination. (87) Mr Blackwood achieves... a close and palpitant approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havock with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination. (89) The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (Joshi Ed.)

Lovecraft seems to use 'dream' in the sense of a vividly imagined place or story which evokes Lovecraft's feeling of 'adventurous expectancy', in which the barriers between memory, reality and imagination are blurred, as if stories were literal dreams that you could experience by reading them.

I've just started reading Machen's Far off things in the Joshi edited Autobiographical Writings. Machen is less preoccupied with the idea of dream - he takes his sense of enchantment from the landscapes of his childhood mixed with his religious outlook:

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But from very early years indeed I became an enchanted student of the daylight country, which, I think, for me never was illuminated by common daylight, but rather by suns that rose from the holy seas of faery and sank down behind magic hills. (24-25)

Like Dunsany, Machen sees enchantment in landscape and conditions of lighting, but his use of the terms 'faery' and 'holy' in addition to 'magic' to describe these scenes is significant. Both his religious beliefs and his interest in fairytales / folklore are reflected in his stories. On landscape specifically he says:

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I should put it thus: this group of pines, this lonely shore, or whatever the scene may be, has made the soul thrill with an emotion intense but vague in the sense in which music is vague; and the man of letters does his best to realise - rather, perhaps, to actualise - this emotion by inventing a tale about the pines or the sands. Such at all events was my state through all the years of boyhood and of youth: everything to me was wonderful, everything visible was the veil of an invisible secret. Before an oddly shaped stone I was ready to fall into a sort of reverie or meditation, as if it had been a fragment of paradise or fairyland. (34)

Machen clearly sees the world as an enchanted place (at least through the lens of his boyhood) in which the existence of God is experienced as a "sense of a constant wonder latent in all things" (34). Again the landscape seems key to the "intense but vague" emotion he is trying to describe. A general term I would use for this feeling of enchantment and wonder is 'heightened salience' - a quasi-magical feeling of deep significance and awe, equivalent perhaps to Lovecraft's "adventurous expectancy." I discussed this concept more fully in a post on the Andrew W.K. thread - https://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php...3&postcount=12.

A subtle distinction Machen makes in that passage is between realising and actualising this feeling of heightened salience. The OED defines realize (in the sense that seems to fit best here) as "cause (something desired or anticipated) to happen" and actualize as "make a reality of." It's tricky to discern what Machen intends by this distinction, but an earlier passage perhaps sheds some light. Here Machen presents an idea which seems close to the thrust of this thread's conception of "fiction as religion" - to quote Nemonymous in post #8 - "an internal cause-and-effect within the fiction itself, making the fiction not only *seem* real, but *be* real. Internally."

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...I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realise my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent. (30) I saw the lonely house between the dark forest and the silver river, and years after I wrote "The Great God Pan", an endeavour to pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that I had received. This, then, was my process: to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth; and as I thought over this and meditated on the futility-or comparative futility-of the plot, however ingenious, which did not exist in order to express emotions of one kind or another, it struck me that it might be possible to reverse the process. Could one describe hills and valleys, woods and rivers, sunrise and sunset, buried temples and mouldering Roman walls so that a story should be suggested to the reader? Not, of course, a story of material incidents, not a story with a plot in the ordinary sense of the term, but an interior tale of the soul and its emotions; could such a tale be suggested in the way I have indicated? Such is to be the plan of the "great" book which is not yet written." (31)

I surmise that the idea here is not that the story would describe and recreate (realise) in the reader these emotions, magical feelings of heightened salience (through descriptions which use terms already encountered such as romance, glamour, wonder, mystery, glory, hope, enchantment, magic, faery, holy), but that through the evocative description of landscape itself, these feelings would arise (actualise) within the reader as a reaction to the writing, just as if they had arisen from a real encounter with the scenes described. This would perhaps be close to the idea of "parthenogenesis of reality from art"given as a definition in post #10.

***

A theme which underlies this discussion of dreams, enchanted landscapes and stories is the relationship between the written word and the visual image. There is a two-way flow between visual imagery and the written word - an author's words may be describing a visual scene from their imagination, and the words in turn evoke a visual image in the reader (possibly a quite different image).

I think fiction which had the power to evoke both strong imagery and that numinous feeling of heightened salience, blurring the line between reality and imagination, would qualify as the 'magic spell' (post #3) of fiction as religion.

To return briefly to my pet subject of psychedelics (while hopefully remaining reasonably on topic), this interchange between words and visual imagery can become even more complicated if you write during a psychedelic experience (I'm referring specifically to mushrooms / psilocybin). You can be describing things you see (visuals, with eyes closed or open), but words and phrases themselves float up into your imagination, which in turn may generate imagery in the 'minds eye.' To write some kind of ongoing narrative while under the influence is partly writing down what you see, and partly seeing what you write. Focusing on some sort of vaguely coherent narrative influences the ongoing character, subject or interpretation of your visuals or visions (I'm thinking of 'visions' here as unusually vivid mind's eye imagery, as compared to the "miniature TV screen on the back of my eyelids" of closed-eye-visuals).

The character of this experience brings us back to Lovecraft's comment: "...how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination."

As an example, take this description of a scene hallucinated behind closed eyelids:

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Unfolding ribbons of dark red and white, sentient and strange, filling a palatial room. The word 'palatial' invokes the image of a mountain range, as though I am viewing my writing as merely marks on paper with no meaning.

Here the word 'palatial' scrawled on the page to describe a visual image, itself looked as though I had drawn a stylised image of a mountain range, purely through the shapes of my handwriting. This relation between word and image during a trip might be compared to this stock image of stylised buildings forming the word "Hotel" (or the word "Hotel" creating an image of some buildings, whichever way round you want to look at it) - https://www.alamy.com/letters-hotels...248925688.html

There is also the strange category of visuals which themselves contain word fragments. There is the indistinct but omnipresent "word soup" which covers walls, carpets and other surfaces with indecipherable glyphs or pseudo-alphabets. There are elaborate closed-eye visuals of letters and numbers flowing through machines that I like to call "alphabet grinders."

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Seeing rooms of words like an airflow experiment. A wind-tunnel of words. Crosswords and aerodynamics.

Sometimes these visual images evoke their own odd word choice and are marked with a heightened salience which seems unrelated to their abstract appearance, e.g. "dark algebra, fearsome in the tombs."

I think the unfolding process during a mushroom trip of the creation of a delusional mood with its suspension of disbelief, the arrival of weird imagery and weird words, the feeling of enchantment and awe at what is happening (heightened salience), can create a fertile ground for some interesting writing experiments at a suitable dose; they are called "magic" mushrooms for a good reason. Writing in this state can become very close at some points to "automatic writing" where you are writing down sentences which arrive fully formed in your consciousness in between states of reverie, and there is a strange mixture of both creating and experiencing something at the same time.

Rather than go off any further at a tangent, I'll link here to something I wrote a couple of years back called "Unwary Traveller" - the origin of my username. It starts off with a scene (experienced as a closed-eye visual) of a figure in a cloak who sweeps it over me, after which I am wandering in a forest, at night, alone... an unwary traveller. It was a very intriguing experience, somewhere on the borderlines between hallucination, delusion, imagination and artifice, where the folds of the curtains become the trunks of the trees, and the scenery rotates in the theatre of the mind...

The link to my "Unwary Traveller" story is here - https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=13333

It might seem an odd idea to try and write on psychedelics, but I like the idea of writing my way into another reality. Whether it works for the reader is another matter, but it can provide the kernel of a more conventional story. To use Lovecraft's phraseology, I do think psychedelics are "a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream" which work "enormous havock with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination." I discovered a sentimental aside in one of my trip journals which said "In those drugs you so solemnly forbid, are the dreams you once sought" and sadly, I do think as a society we have "lost the [silver] key to the gate of dreams."