When the Stars Are Right: Towards an Authentic R'lyehian Spirituality
“You can take your head apart with this book if you like, but you will never get it back together again. Unlike the sophomoric tattoo-parlour-flash of Carroll, the lunatic-trickster Bertiaux, or the almost-brilliant Grant – not to mention the gaptoothed carny antics of LaVey, whose Aynrandian quotes are eagerly nodded along-to by Creationist tea-partiers – Jones is not so easy to dismiss.
You have already passed a gate, by possessing this book and by reading thus far in its introduction. There’s a specific resonance or remnant of reminiscence that’s curiously cavorting about your cortex, the drumming of dreams in the distant dark. Give in. As Thompson said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Time to correlate your contents and get your HR Giger counter ticking.”
– Jordan Stratford, from the Foreweird
Yog-Sothoth... Nyarlathotep... Shub-Niggurath...
CTHULHU.
The Great Old Ones: hideous monster-gods from beyond Time and Space. Ancient, eldritch horrors that populate the pantheon of weird-fiction writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s increasingly popular milieu, his so-called Cthulhu Mythos. Some claim that they are merely fiction, while others have convinced themselves that Lovecraft somehow intuited their objective existence. When faced with the weird, chimerical potency of the Great Old Ones, whether they are approached through fiction, magical practice, or, say, a table-top role-playing game, neither viewpoint really seems to satisfy. The Great Old Ones are protean, nebulous, unimaginable... and impressively persistent in their psychological and spiritual presence.
In When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality, author Scott R Jones deftly breaks down the barriers between the rational and the irrational, between the bright logic of our daytime intellect and the fearful non-Euclidean symmetries of our darkest dreams. In the process, the truth of the Great Old Ones is revealed in all its cosmic resonance.
Beyond reason... beyond madness... beyond the unspeakable... lies the Black Gnosis: a new mode of being, a spirituality that anticipates a new appreciation of humanity’s place in an increasingly dire and indifferent cosmos. When The Stars Are Right asks the reader a simple question: “Are you keeping it R’lyeh?” The answers may surprise you.
When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality by Scott R Jones, with an introduction by Jordan Stratford (Living Gnosticism: An Ancient Way of Knowing and A Dictionary of Western Alchemy) and interior illustrations by Michael Lee Macdonald, is available in print and electronic book formats from Martian Migraine Press.
Contents:
- Foreword (by Jordan Stratford)
- Sunken Bells in the Deep: An Introduction
- H P Lovecraft: An Acknowledgement, A Dismissal
- The Deadly Light: Examining the Great Old Ones
- The Prolonged of Life: Meditations on Yog-Sothoth
- Telling the Audient Void: the Voice of Nyarlathotep
- The Conqueror Womb: Parsing Shub-Niggurath
- A Certain Sort of Men: Dagon & the Deep One Aesthetic
- On Cthulhu
- The Cthulhusattva Vow
- A Tour of R’lyeh
- The Black Gnosis
- Beating Nietzsche’s Horse: Notes on the Black Gnosis and Mental Illness
- Beyond the Strange Angles
- Chilling in the Ghetto with the Deep Down Homies
- My Own Private Necronomicon
- The Wisdom in the Clay
- The Unbearable Strangeness of Being: Sex and the R’lyehian
- Through Sunset’s Gate: Death and the R’lyehian
- Afterword: Yes, Meridian, There Is A Great Cthulhu