Bill Schoebelen: Part 1

William Schnoebelen is a voice I dare say you've never heard. Chrispy has attended lectures, read books, and watched his videos for years. Through his voice, you will hear a great story teller with a unique and startling way of looking at HPL.

As much as I respect everyone, Schnoebelen's 1993 interpretation of HPL is far off the mark, historically. Mythically, it is spot on the way most understand ol' Ech Pi El.

In a series, we will look at the text in "Lucifer Dethroned" (hereafter LD) which is Schnoebelen's autobiography. For brevity's sake, I will reference it here, and you will know it is the book.

"{Aleister} Crowley's gods are supposedly outside our universe. They are Transyuggotian (from beyond Yuggoth, an occult term for the planet Pluto), to use the term from occultist/author H.P. Lovecraft". p. 206 LD.

If you've followed any of Chrispy's blogging and deconstruction, you know that HPL was an atheist and did NOT believe in any magic or supernaturalism at all. His poem Fungi from Yuggoth was a mythic experiment. Lovecraft believed there was a 9th planet based on his understanding of mathematical astronomy, but it was decades before Yuggoth was identified with the late-in-life revelation that Pluto existed.

There is some minor evidence that Crowley MAY have read some snippets of Lovecraft or heard of him through secondary or oral conveyance in science fiction fandom. Most of it comes from the mysterious author Simon of the pseudonymous Necronomicon. (See more click here) The truth is that Crowley worked in his own self-serving and ego-centric world and needed no help from a scribbler from Providence. Had Crowley heard much of HPL - which is tenuous - it would have been a few years after HPL died and too late to incorporate in Crowley's long life's work.

Remember, HPL was very obscure, and save for Weird Tales (Henneberger, Farnsworth), and Houdini (who died in 1926), he was virtually unknown by 1937. It was his dear friends who kept his works alive.

However, through Derleth's pronounced dualism and syncetic construction of a Mythos pantheon, others began to take tangents and create a far more "Mythos" world view. This is quite apparent in almost all popular American interpretations of the Mythos - and in many cases a sectarian cultism has grown to include the Mythos in qabbalism and magick.