The Pseudonomicon

Introduction

Magic is not something that can be confined. It quickly spills out into other life areas, occasionally catching the unwary off guard, propelling the practitioner into a liminal space of heightened sensibility and awareness of other presences, other possibilities. The realisation that "everything is alive and significant," as William S. Burroughs put it, is only a breath away. To enter the faery realm takes but a single step. Magic is not something which one merely 'does.' It's personal, up-close. It twists you and skews your perception of the world, tipping you into a world of signs and portents. A territory of fathomless symbol; of mysteries lurking in the shadows. The magician is hypersensitive to the sudden implosion of significance, which is at times a blessing, and at others, a curse.

How do we gather meaning from this magical world of signs? What makes one experience valid and another not? Despite the claimed empiricism of modern magicians, this is not a rational process. Once we enter the domain of magic, rationality becomes a limited tool, and it's often difficult to communicate to someone else just why an experience is significant, even between those who share similar perspectives. For me, significance is characterised by a degree of gnosis or revelation. It is an experience which impels me to action, be it reflection, consideration or the opening up of a new area of exploration. What is important is that it is a personal truth — something that 'feels right.' Which is not to say that it cannot be questioned. It is important to challenge, whilst at the same time cherish such experiences. For the curse of this sensitivity to significance is obsession. It's all too easy for the magician to drown in an ocean of heightened meaning, to the point where every chance encounter is a meeting with an inner-planes adept; where every song lyric has a personal message aimed at you; where every animal is a familiar spirit and all your friends were magicians in a previous incarnation. Everything becomes significant, not merely personally, but also on a cosmic scale. In such ways are fanatics born; those who have stopped enjoying magic, and suffer from it instead.

The fictional territories of H.P. Lovecraft — the haunted hills of Dunwich, the woods of Arkham, the deep ocean and the maze-like urban areas portrayed in "The Horror at Red Hook" or "Pickman's Model" — are replete with a sense of lurking presences, of a hidden sentience which pervades the atmosphere. His descriptions of places and settings combine the precision of dreams with a degree of ambiguity that allows the reader to fill in the gaps, as it were. His protagonists enter these territories as outsiders, only to become gradually (and shockingly) aware of what is hidden there, until the full significance of the reality of the Great Old Ones impacts upon them, changing them forever. They enter a world from which there is no turning back, bowed down by secrets which cannot be shared by others who have not experienced the revelation, or taken fully into the world of the outer beings and their allies.

Lovecraft's lore is a territory of hints and come hithers. The ultimate revelations suffered by his narrators are never clearly stated, the 'forbidden books' found in shadow-shrouded libraries never reveal the truth, leaving only clues and giving rise to more questions. The landscape of signs remains mysterious, and we have to make our own meanings rather than looking them up in a handy reference work.

Thus The Pseudonomicon — a jumble of tentative postcards from my own excursions into the Lovecraftian imaginary.