Abraxas & the Outer Gods
The Religion of the Future & its Antidote in the Abyss
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 some day the piecing 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.
This first paragraph of the Call of Cthulhu by Howard Phillips Lovecraft might just as well be commentary on the fall of man.
Lovecraft wrote at the time of a titanic shift in the collective unconscious. The very fundament of human identity was fragmenting and thrown into question as our perception of both the universe and our place therein was radically disrupted.
The Copernican revolution ultimately did little but wound the pride of the Christian imagination. The revelation of the depths of time, the magnitude of space, the desolation and depravity of the first world war and the cosmic indifference which these realities appeared to imply was a darkness so deep that we still stumble from the vertigo.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the theological riddle posed by the cosmos and the archaeological record was abruptly and explosively amplified by the horrific mechanized sacrifice of forty million human beings. This terrible void at the edge of reality would have seemed infinitely inscrutable to the Christianity it confronted, which history will say was still in its youth.
The things the sciences disclose are so upsetting to our deepest spiritual longings and spiritual intuitions that many to this day still flatly deny them. Those who cannot erase the dread with denial self-medicate with artful, analgesic distractions.
It is for these reasons that H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most relevant and important writers of our time. He gave form and voice to the monsters which came of age at the turning of the last century and from whose gaze the world still hides its face. And uniquely, he let them speak in his stories not as human envoys, but as themselves.
It is the most vivid and comprehensive portrait to date of the “gods” who reign in the darkness which pre-modern man could not willingly imagine. Lovecraft’s map of his inner world is a vast, prototypical image of an alien and heretofore inconceivable state of consciousness into which the whole modern world has been initiated.
The Outer Gods
At the summit of Lovecraft’s diverse pantheon are the entities known as the “gods of the outer hells,” often shortened to the outer gods.
The outer god is an important symbolic specimen as it is the apotheosis of the alien.
Their multitude is never numbered. Descriptions are deliberately nebulous. Their incomprehensible intentions and cold disinterest in humanity mirrors the enormity and forbidding silence of the unveiled cosmic void. It marks a stark departure from all of man’s most ancient intuitions.
Even the most malignant of demons were portrayed as positively obsessed with humanity. Although this may very well be the truth, it does resemble a kind of narcissism which flatters itself with fantasies of cunning, malicious enemies tormented by envy. There is a secret compliment in hatred. Lovecraft humbly imagines no such hatred among the outer gods to whom we are each truly, pathetically unimportant.
It raises an interesting theological question: are fallen angels actually concerned with human life in any way we can understand, or is their apparent malice simply an artificial approximation? Perhaps their view of us is totally impersonal and utilitarian and the appearance of malice is a projection.
The inside of their subjectivity is most assuredly beyond our comprehension.
Lovecraft’s pantheon represents the strangest genus of deity hitherto imagined, and the influence of what they represent upon contemporary civilization does, in my estimation, make them worthy of that designation.
Three make it onto every list enumerating the outer gods (and these are probably the only three to whom that status is proper).
The first is called by Lovecraft: the blind idiot god. “The mindless entity, Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the center of chaos.” Who dwells “beyond angled space.” Impossible geometry is a recurrent theme in Lovecraft’s work suggesting realms beyond measurable order, definition and form.
Azathoth is a symbol of the primordial abyss, making it an elaborated equivalent of Leviathan. Descriptions of Azathoth strongly resemble the description of Abraxas given by Carl Jung in the Seven Sermons to the Dead.
This is a god whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it. We name it by its name Abraxas…
Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible…
It is the monster of the under-world, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy…
It is the brightest light of day and the darkest night of madness. To look upon it, is blindness. To know it, is sickness. To worship it, is death. To fear it, is wisdom.
It is hard not to see a resemblance to “that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which bubbles and blasphemes at the center of all infinity… whose name no lips dare speak aloud and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space.”
Lovecraft was consciously an atheist. But psychology assumes divinity and if the conscious mind denies the existence of the divine, the unconscious corrects by deifying itself. By assuming divinity. Azathoth is a god image of the lowest possible resolution: pure, incoherent will. The god of the godless universe.
Lovecraft illuminates this situation and makes it visible, but this deified unconscious works invisibly through the unexamined motives of many. The blind idiot god is worshipped only in secret, but his followers cover the world.
The second outer god is Yog-Sothoth, the All-in-One and One-in-All. It is described as knowing all things past, present and future, apparently observing all that was is and will be from far outside.
The epithets given it are: the Key and the Gate, the Lurker at the Threshold and the Opener of the Way. All cast it as a threshold god. Both the bridge to and guardian of cosmic secrets — the forbidden knowledge which is enlightenment and madness.
This would position Yog-Sothoth as a dread eldritch mystagogue, again, linking it very visibly to Abraxas. It is an embodiment of Lovecraft’s view of knowledge in general.
In all of his fictions, characters who come to “know too much” either go mad or meet untimely and unpleasant ends. The correlation of the mind’s contents and piecing together of dissociated knowledge is precisely what the mind does under the influence of psychedelics, and calls to mind Jung’s famous warnings regarding these drugs: “beware of unearned wisdom.“
This wariness of knowledge saturates the popular imagination, particularly in the world of conspiracy theories. It feels viscerally dangerous to know things — so much so, that even the unfounded belief that one does can cause paranoia.
The paranoid truther illustrates all the more clearly that the horror of cosmicism is more psychically potent and persuasive to the senses — indeed, more numinous — than scientific optimism or comforting interpretations of the spiritual. Despite our longings, it is the emotional reality. This is why so many say they want to believe in God but are not able to. They believe too strongly in the outer gods.
Contemporary Christianity feels like a daydream in the midst of this vast and visceral terror which now encompasses and contains it. The terror feels bigger. Realer. If modern man is to sincerely believe, he requires a God who for him encompasses the void rather than the inverse. The Christian martyrs were not afraid of death. They knew in their hearts that death had been conquered. Who today can say the same?
The third of the three — Nyarlathotep — the servant and messenger of the outer gods is most relevant to us.
Lovecraft’s prose poem which first describes the god recounts that he “came out of Egypt,” assuming the form of a man who “was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh.” Who “said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet.”
Nyarlathotep first came to Lovecraft in a nightmare, described as “the most realistic and horrible I have experienced since the age of ten.”
In the dream, he received a letter which read:
Don't fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterwards. I am still shuddering at what he showed.
It is exactly this numinous potency which the void seems to possess which gives it a darkly seductive allure. Horror is exhilarating and exhilaration is wonderful.
I had never heard the name NYARLATHOTEP before, but seemed to understand the allusion. Nyarlathotep was a kind of itinerant showman or lecturer who held forth in public halls and aroused widespread fear and discussion with his exhibitions.
These exhibitions consisted of two parts—first, a horrible—possibly prophetic—cinema reel; and later some extraordinary experiments with scientific and electrical apparatus.
In Nyarlathotep, a connection to Egypt is explicitly traced. Curiously though, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth both allude — knowingly or unknowingly — to the Egyptian god Thoth, the patron of writing, mathematics, magic and science. These certainly unconsciously motivated linkages are as persistent as they are enigmatic.
Ineluctable Egypt
The beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.
- Revelation 11:7-8
Egypt Biblically represents a state of spiritual bondage and idolatry. The connection between it and the outer gods is fitting given that Egypt is such a popular site for visitation by “ancient aliens.”
The intuitions behind the ancient astronaut hypotheses are right. They point to the eruption of something in the collective unconscious which is ancient and yet alien and which we feel to be powerfully concentrated in Egypt.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, two others were poised to perceive these strange gods through the keyhole in which the bomb was soon to turn. Both would come into contact with these outer depths through an Egyptian connection and both would prognosticate the dawning of a new age.
One would glimpse these things with wisely measured caution, the other as a communicant in the mysteries of the outer gods.
The Seven Sermons to the Dead was privately published in 1916 in the midst of the first world war, of which Jung had received a premonition.
In October [1913], while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood… An inner voice spoke. "Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it."
The seven sermons, in which Abraxas was vividly described were attributed to the Gnostic teacher Basilides of Alexandria, “the city where the East toucheth the West.”
This city was the cradle of the ancient heresy whose mother was Egypt.
Aleister Crowley would receive the Book of the Law even earlier in 1904 while in the city of Cairo. This Thelemic “holy book” which proclaims that “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” attributes its three chapters to the Egyptian deities: Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
Crowley of course asserted that the “true will” was the will of God in a human being, but it is self-evident that he was not referring to any god we would call by that name.
Crowley, like Nyarlathotep, came out of Egypt a magician and transgressive spectacle. He would view the first world war as a necessary and violent breakdown of outdated religious and social structures, marking the transition to his “Aeon of Horus” which would displace the “Aeon of Osiris” and its repressive ethos of guilt and self-sacrifice with individualism, the true will and liberation from traditional morality.
In Magick in Theory and Practice, he wrote:
There is a Magical Operation of maximum importance: the initiation of a New Aeon. When it becomes necessary to utter a Word, the whole planet will be drenched in blood. Before man is ready to accept the Law of Thelema, the Great War must be fought. This Bloody Sacrifice is the critical point of the World-Ceremony of the Proclamation of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, the Lord of the Aeon.
Again, Lovecraft sees the same coming very clearly in the Call of Cthulhu:
When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals…
Those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth.
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.
Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
In 1945, the Trinity Test confirmed and unleashed all the cosmicist nightmares of Lovecraft, opening as he prophetically anticipated, those “terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein.”
Just five months after Trinity, a trove of Gnostic codecies were unearthed in the Egyptian town of Nag-Hammadi.
In the United States, an Egyptian obelisk, the Washington monument, stands 555 feet tall in Washington D.C.
Upon the American dollar is a seal depicting a pyramid with the eye of providence at the top. The eye is associated with the all-seeing eye of God, and in freemasonry it is a symbol of the “Great Architect of the Universe.”
This title would seem to link the god of Masonry to the Gnostic demiurgos (craftsman) and the Egyptian god Ptah, who is ultimately the namesake of Egypt itself.
Ptah is a likely prototype of the demiurge if Plato acquired some of his ideas from the Heliopolitan priesthood under whom he reportedly studied.
The Oscar statuette, as I have mentioned elsewhere, bears a very striking resemblance to effigies of Ptah. It makes the cinema reel of Nyarlathotep all the more intriguing.
Egypt seems to have become a symbolic repository for Christian shadow material. As a prototype of the kingdom of the Beast, it naturally becomes a nuclear center of the adversarial counternarrative and a lightning rod for this Antichristian psychic charge.
The exact nature of the connection is debatable. All that can be said for sure is that Egypt consistently appears to be related to these uncanny forces streaming out of the unconscious which possess an at once primordial and exotic character.
The Antediluvian Religion
These are the twins: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were launched in September and August of 1977 respectively. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first artifact to enter interstellar space followed by its sister which crossed the heliopause in 2018.
The image above and on the left shows a pair of scientists fixing a disk to Voyager 1.
This is the gold-plated record which encodes a compilation of photos and sounds of Earth and its inhabitants. It also encodes music spanning multiple cultures and eras and greetings in 55 languages. The stated purpose of the record is to communicate with any intelligent extraterrestrials which might encounter or intercept the craft.
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
- President Jimmy Carter (as recorded on the golden record)
The cover displays detailed, mathematical and pictographic instructions for decoding the message as well as the location of the Earth relative to several pulsars which the aliens could identify by their periodicity.
The renowned astronomer, Carl Sagan, led the team who created the record, and his wife, Ann Druyan was the project’s creative director. According to Druyan: “the entire Voyager record cost $18 000 to produce.“
Adjusted for inflation, this would be something like $94 000 today. And of course, as mentioned, they plated the record in gold making it a kind of Egyptian “sun disk.”
These objects are fractions of motes of dust and are presently hurtling into interstellar space at insignificant velocities in the direction of nothing in particular. Both will come “close” to our nearest celestial neighbors in about 40 000 years.
Hurling golden artifacts covered in sigils into the heavens to communicate with nondescript entities while being sketchy on the details looks more like ritualism than serious science. This is so absurd that it becomes pathetically adorable. Like a child leaving a toy in the woods for imaginary friends.
It makes sense of course, just not the kind it thinks it makes.
Carl Sagan was also a cosmicist as his sermon on the “pale blue dot” makes abundantly clear; but of that Soviet-style, Star Trek, uncanny-valley-optimist flavor. This is a sect that schismatized from the One True Cosmicism of Lovecraft due to their heretical doctrine that if nothing is sacred, everything is. They still eagerly await the second coming of “Imagine” by John Lennon.
Out of this sect comes most schools of modern atheist thought, and from thence, most of contemporary leftism as well.
Carl Sagan was consulted by Stanley Kubrick during the pre-production of 2001: A Space Odyssey regarding the depiction of the aliens in the film. In his own book the Cosmic Connection, he wrote:
The number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of Man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve again anywhere else in the universe. I suggested that any explicit representation of an advanced extraterrestrial being was bound to have at least an element of falseness about it, and that the best solution would be to suggest, rather than explicitly to display, the extraterrestrials.
This was probably the best decision for the film, but it reveals Sagan as a true believer in the outer gods. We are relatively low, in his estimation, on the Platonic hierarchy of form and quite far from its center. Our humanity is not inevitable but improbable. The logical conclusion is: everything human is more or less arbitrary. It is only from here that one can entertain the notion of human obsolescence as the transhumanists do.
This anti-anthropocentrism is the nuclear center of cosmicism. It attacks the image of God which is why it is atheistic, anti-human and particularly, instinctively anti-Christian.
Sagan shared Lovecraft’s opinion that religion was an obstacle to scientific and social progress and makes it clear in his novel, Contact. The story is in many ways a variant on the same emerging myth as 2001.
In it, aliens send a coded message to Earth, providing technical instructions which allow humanity, ultimately, to commune with the outer gods. Even Sagan depicts the alien contact taking place through a visionary experience stimulated by the alien machine. This again reveals even hard-bitten empiricists like Carl Sagan to be receptive to this “psychic” component of the alien archetype.
We can see this religion of the Great Old Ones who speak to the sensitive among us trying to retrocausally astroturf itself out of such stories.
This mytheme appears in the channeling of the Council of Nine at the Esalen Institute (notably attended by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry) as well as the emerging cultism of “CE-5,” which is based around the idea that one can contact extraterrestrials through meditative practices.
The fiction of Lovecraft like 2001 depicts primordial contact between humans and extraterrestrial mystagogues who impart esoteric and technical knowledge. They also interbreed with humans creating hybrid offspring.
The book of Enoch describes something very similar — human contact with fallen angels who impart esoteric and technical knowledge. They also interbreed with humans creating hybrid offspring.
How on the nose can you get?
The Thanatoids practice that antediluvian religion of the outer gods. That of the lost civilization which made contact with the Enochic Watchers of old. Which has survived whether in whole or in part, by transmission or ancestral memory into the present.
It’s not hard to understand how this primordial cultism could re-emerge. Repressing the natural spiritual impulse completely will inevitably cause a fully unconscious and extremely primitive religiosity to take shape in the deep background of the mind.
Everything which came out of Christian civilization to oppose it will fall under the sway of this, then congeal and harden into it.
This is one reason for the centrality of Egypt, which is a symbolic echo of antediluvian civilization. Thus, the Israelites pass through the Red Sea which closes behind them drowning the Egyptians. Like the Flood of Noah, it is a prototype of baptism and an image of the bottleneck we are approaching.
The Simulation
We are today convinced that we live in a kind of artificially mediated dream — a simulation. This is a direct consequence of the revelation of the cosmic void, which is a real thing and neither good nor evil. All of history prior to this revelation took place “inside” of that dream, but up until recently, we remained unaware of it the same way a fish is unaware of the water in which it swims. This was our “placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity.”
Science and the titanomachies of the twentieth century undeniably illuminated the fact that the dream had an exterior. That there were things it did not and could not encompass. That our world was in fact encompassed by those very anomalies which it was unable to contain and which periodically breached its interior. These intrusions were experienced as invasions from the outer darkness.
These are hitherto imperceptible and incomprehensible regions of imaginal space to which consciousness has been forcibly exposed by the fruit of knowledge. This thundering chasm and the horrors glimpsed therein terrify us so deeply that perceiving our nakedness, we rush to cover ourselves.
This retreat leads to the atrophy of the moral and spiritual faculties and emboldens the darkness which begins to advance, penetrating deeper into the dying dream, closing in and bearing down on its frightened, insensitive prey.
We cannot face the exterior, yet the interior feels unreal and not quite right. We try to ignore it and we drink deep of the electric dreams trickling into the airwaves from the outer hells. Our atmosphere pulses with messages flickering into our minds from the nameless ones hidden in high places.
The sight of our planet, the trenches, the gulags and the bomb expose our frailty; unbearably deficient reflections in Azazel’s mirror. Thus, we fortified the dying world, entombing ourselves in a hardened fortress of oblivion that we might blot out the memory and dream an empty numbness from which we hope to never awaken.
We drown what we know with entertainment, hedonism and frivolities. We embrace our insignificance in order to conceal it from ourselves, too frightened to surpass the weaknesses the light so painfully exposed. And so we flee from that deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
The Face of the Deep
In spite of ourselves and opposite to this instinct is a paradoxical obsession with the great abyss. Like so many objects of infatuation, it is attractive precisely because of its exotic indifference. Certain individuals in whom this drive is strong are compelled to seek out the novel intensities which seethe and writhe in the primeval void.
We flirt with it in secret, but hide this fascination from the light of day. It is this push and pull of inner disunity, of passion and condemnation which warps the personality into something truly alien and grotesque.
The void, like Nyarlathotep is that seductive paradox that torments the deeply divided soul: “horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful.“
“We have such sights to show you,” is the famous exclamation of the cenobites in Hellraiser. The self-proclaimed: “explorers, in the further regions of experience. Demons to some, angels to others.“
They are the twisted condition which awaits those lured in by unrestrained passion before the right time. Those who do not flee, but “go mad from the revelation.”
The Labyrinth of the Cenobites was partly inspired by the art of M. C. Escher and uses the same alien geometry to which Lovecraft continually refers. There they practice of an extreme sadomasochism, venturing into incomprehensible sensations beyond pleasure and pain.
This is their worship of the god of “flesh, hunger and desire” whom they call Leviathan, alluding again to that primordial abyss which Azathoth also represents.
Lovecraft imagines a powerless humanity at the mercy of relentless, incomprehensible omnipotence. The modern conspiracy theorist does not simply imagine this, but actually assumes such a situation a priori. Revealing again that in the modern West, cosmicism is the default position.
This is not to say that what is discovered is illusory — it is often very real. But what pulls one into these revelations are the very same archetypal forces which pulled the conspirators into the outer gods’ service in the first place.
The aliens are indeed already here.
If horror or conspiracies are not your flavor of cosmic dread, perhaps it is serial killers who today attract endless fascination — even flights of romantic fantasy — among people who can never satisfactorily account for this.
If not that, perhaps the world of unashamed vulgarity in popular culture and pornography which are increasingly indistinguishable. The immodesty of contemporary culture stems from a wish to regress. To return to ignorant nakedness.
We do not really desire evil for evil’s sake. But we do desire that passion and potency which evil summons in abundance. We long for the “the effective itself” which dwells in the abyss and which Jung symbolized in Abraxas. This longing is what attracts people to strong, brash personalities like Tyler Durden from Fight Club which brilliantly and intentionally depicts Jungian shadow dynamics.
We seek the highest good that feels real to us and Durden is real — viscerally real. Far more real than the broken promises of modernity with its stiff, anxious manners and golden-calf ideals.
Modern people love “biblically accurate angels” (which are not really accurate) because fear reminds us that we too are real — and we need the reminder.
The gentle winged humans on old stained glass windows are now for Grandmas and Christmas cards. We cannot imagine the gods of the outer hells fearing them. They are “too good to be true.” We today, love the terror that “be not afraid” implies.
We desire deeply that good should be more frightening than evil, not less.
It is never clear where the abyss ends and our authentic selves begin. We love what many before us called “the Devil’s music” and inwardly snicker despite ourselves at the thought of saints thwarting demons with their chastity. Nothing sexy about that. The void is sexy though, and it’s precisely because it shouldn’t be.
Every heart draws a line somewhere and says: “if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.” And we draw this line whether or not we dare to see it.
I do not say these things to be scandalous, but to be honest. It does me more harm than good when I think in euphemisms and tell myself I am something I’m not.
Paradoxically, one’s innermost nature becomes far more receptive to correction after this line is acknowledged and we forgive the one who drew it.
I depicted this void in the cosmogram to encompass it. It was my attempt to imagine a God who could make the bottom of the deep submit. That is why it is so dark compared to traditional Christian images — it is wrought from the gold of Egypt.
Happy Halloween.
Related posts:
I perceive something of a confession in all of this. I am no priest, though.
Wishing you well, sincerely.
The medicine turned to poison, life turned to death, and beauty turned into a light that exposes your hideousness.