Nate Cull
HP Lovecraft and Theosophy
https://web.archive.org/web/20140815171353/http://www.crypt-of-cthulhu.com/lovecrafttheosophy.htm
found via another fascinating little potted summary of the general family relation between Masonic and Hermetic and Theosophical groups in the 19th/20th centuries:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6jcta6/the_twin_peaks_concept_of_the_black_lodge_is/
Nate Cull
by the way, if you're interested in a search for the 'strange and terrible pages' of the actual Book of Dyzan (such as it may have been): best guess, as far as I can parse from this website, is that it would be located within the Tibetan Tantric Buddhist sub-tradition.
and I think 'Dyzan' comes out mostly as just a really bad Victorian translation of 'Zen'?
Nate Cull
also:
Nate Cull
and immediately I find myself in a new sub-rabbithole: the idea (which heavyweight Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem believed) that 'the Book of Dzyan' might be the Sifra di-Tzeniuta, from the Zohar.
which is less interesting in itself, to me, than the whole thing about the academic Kabbalah studies pendulum tilting away from Scholem's frankly weird belief that Moses de Leon just faked all the multiple documents in the Zohar.
https://www.davidhalperin.net/sifra-di-tzeniuta-the-book-of-concealment/
Nate Cull
The reason why I find this fascinating is that I think there's good reason to believe that some of the weirder parts of early Christian Gnosticism (or is it Gnostic Christianity?) were drawing from existing Jewish tradition.
And/or, from direct spooky contact with the wibbling wossnames of beyond, because today's chatty ghosts seem to present a world-picture that resembles some of those old Zoharic speculations. A sort of cosmic layer-cake made out of consciousness and a few lumpy bits.
Nate Cull
Also: that painting on the cover of Whitley Streiber's Communion must have been pretty good, because it scared a LOT of people in exactly the same way it scared young teenage me. (and still scares 40-something me)
I wonder why that is.
It's not, when I force myself to look at it, a particularly "scary " face. I've seen plenty of fictional alien faces. But somehow.... a deep, automatic, 'ick no creepy' reflex.
what is up with that?
Nate Cull
It's not even *grey*! Which is really funny. The prototypical Grey Alien image, the one which pretty much launched the phenomenon, isn't grey.
Nate Cull
also, here's that 2016 paper about the authorship of the Zohar that Halperin linked, which I think is really cool to see the scholarship starting to open up like this
Nate Cull
I find it really fascinating that in Jewish Kabbalistic thought, 'Judgement' is a *female* quality while 'Compassion' is a male quality.
I can understand, I think, how the metaphysics of this works (ie: male represents unity, female multiplicity)
but it's still startling to a 21st century Western mind, where we've been trained to think of men as archetypically violent and women as archtypically merciful... and of Jewish culture as being patriarchal in a way we think we understand.
Nate Cull
It should probably also worry me that I now find a statement like this perfectly normal
but seriously, the 'six + 1' structure is pretty central to Jewish thought, six days of creation plus Sabbath, so
Nate Cull
I kinda wanna know what the six are though! Cos everyone's got an idea and they're all different! You'd think this would have been a very important bit of data to preserve but whoops!
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