Friday, December 07, 2007
Lessons from William Hope Hodgson and the mushroom people
I discovered yesterday from Dave Sindelar’s fantasy film research website www.scifilm.org and his friends, that one of my favorite old monster films that I remember seeing when I was a kid was based on story by a pre-WWI (in fact he died in it) British fantasy horror author whom H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) greatly respected, both being very connected with a genre of occult sci-fi writers that I’ve been researching with ambivalent fascination. I’m ambivalent because I find gothic/cosmic horror to be transparently manipulative but also worth appreciating for its early psychic insights, rather akin to the dream interpretation of nightmares. The film I saw was translated as "Attack of the Mushroom People", which may sound silly but the Japanese title is "Matango", and it was released in 1963, the year I was born. That is regarded as one of the worst years ever for film, and even though a few cool things like "The Outer Limits" series and the playful Czech fantasy "Cassandra Cat" came out in 1963 I’m inclined to agree. The author in question was William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), and the original story was "The Voice in the Night" first published in 1907 about some people shipwrecked on an island where a fungus grows over everything, fusing animal vegetable and mineral into a grey mass, stripping the survivors of their humanity. Now since I’ve always liked mushrooms, and I’ve even had positive dreams of communicating with a giant godly fungus living in the Earth, I see in Hodgson his symbolism for fears of losing the ego to the soul energy which pervades and connects all things, making us actually not human. Researching more, I found that Hodgson is verbose with awkward gothic romantic writing styles, but he was fairly succinct in symbolism as I understand it.
Two of Hodgson's greatest novels are essentially the same imagery. "The House on the Borderland" (1908) is a fragmented multi-layered account of a man having an out of body experience that shows his house is really surrounded by gods and monsters, with a great abyss of pig-like demons below. Then he is inexplicably fast-forwarded in time to the end of the universe, when the Earth is falling into green suns at the center of the galaxy. There’s also a recurring theme of a ghostly lover who warns him to protect the house, and he has a sister who thinks he is crazy because she apparently doesn’t see what he sees. In "The Night Land" (1912), a man who is grieving about his dead lover is transported in dreams or visions to a far future time when Earth is dying and the sun has gone out. The man lives in a giant pyramid outpost called the Last Redoubt with millions of other psychic humans, while outside gods and monsters run amok. The man is the future reincarnation of the narrator, and he telepathically senses that the reincarnation of his lost love is safe in another fortress, so he journeys to retrieve her across a hellish landscape that is reminiscent of Heironymous Bosch. Hodgson has a literary almost cultish following that hopes to rekindle his fame much as fans have done for Lovecraft. Points for Hodgson include his fertile imagination and early attempts at meta-fiction, points against include his archaic language and romantic babbling. His time travelling and end of world themes have been compared and contrasted to H. G. Wells (1886-1946), whom Hodgson would have read along with many Victorians. While Wells strove for straightforward narrative and scientific explanations for metaphors of his own society, Hodgson formulated a gothic spiritualism which merged and transcended religion and science to comment on what appear to be very personal psychic states. Like Lovecraft especially as seen in his early Oz-like masterpiece "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927), many of the weirdest episodes in Hodgson's epics are probably attempts to incorporate his own night dreams.
It seems clear to me that what most literary historians miss is the deeper understanding that such authors are chipping away at their terror of penetrating the astral realms around and inside us, where indeed many monstrous thought-forms and pragmatic taciturn higher beings are living out their own largely incomprehensible existences. The more futuristic and phantasmagoric the imagery, the more the inner senses are tuning away from the physical world into the astral plane, as lensed through the author’s own present hopes and fears. Hodgson’s house and Last Redoubt represent his physical home, his body, his incarnation here on Earth, which his idealized guide is indeed encouraging him to protect (Hodgson later volunteers for dangerous military duties and dies young). The longed-for separated spirit lover is the spiritual self whose beauty comes from the soul, so the journey to regain her is one of soul-retrieval. The end of the world is the end of the ego personality’s reign, both feared for its potential to release monsters of the subconscious into the judging mind, and desired as the path to reunification with spiritual wholeness. Undoubtedly the multitude of bizarre adventures and creatures were symbols of specific events and feelings in Hodgson’s life, most now lost to history and to his responsibility to interpret his own dreams and imagination.
A lot of fantasy authors are basically just endlessly dumping out their next step in spiritual evolution, which they keep almost taking then withdrawing from to record in images as entertainment. A long drawn-out tentative initiation of the consciousness into astral mastery is the basis for many hefty tomes. "Night Land" was 500 syrupy pages long, which is still nothing compared to say Tolkein’s "Lord of the Rings" saga, or Stephen King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus of personal kitchen-sink escapism called "The Dark Tower" in seven volumes. Note the recurring themes of apocalyptic journey from a home that is realized to no longer be safe, into a decaying center (often literally a tower), with macho heros battling monsters to rescue feminine symbols of transcending goodness. Fans eat it up, and commercial success rewards the longest franchise rather than the most direct enlightenment potential. So we can expect the sci-fi fantasy landscape to remain littered with the gargantuan wreckages of timidly expanding consciousnesses for quite some time to come.
Let's enjoy such "fictions" for what they, but not kid ourselves that there isn’t so much more to be discovered ahead, in higher planes and higher tales of teaching gods and fabulous non-horrific journeys. Most people just don’t yet know how to write or read about such things as forms of entertainment. What, no villains, no monsters, no deadly suspense, only patient loving cosmic guides through veils of ignorance? Another name, Geoffrey Hodson (1886-1983), is someone to look to for inspiration, as he was one of the great theosophists to work with and write about the elemental and angelic kingdoms. These include the inter-dimensional beings commonly called fairies and the like, who are expressing eagerness to work with more humans in order to stabilize the planet’s ecosystems and restore heaven on Earth. Now there’s your ego apocalypse, an end of bad days that would be most welcome if only more people understood their relationships to non-physical realms more positively than the horror sci-fi tropes allow. I'm trying, are you?
Recent "fantasy" novels I find truly groundbreaking remain scarce and obscure, but I would strongly recommend Summer With the Leprechauns: A True Story (1997) by Tanis Helliwell and Portals and Corridors: A Guide to Hyperspace Travel (1999) by Monica Szu-Whitney. These wisely connect the subjective and objective, plus offer many supremely spooky weird scenes to prove that progressive cosmic storytelling need not be dull or tame. To support the appreciation of such materials there are many esoteric reports and studies including those by Kurt Leland (especially regarding dreams, spirits, and higher realities), Robert Monroe (1915-1995) and his influential astral travel experiments, classic theosophist C. W. Leadbeater (1854-1934) whose handy book The Astral Plane sensibly and fascinatingly categorizes astral denizens and creatures, or, for even more of the vintage flavor, mystics like 18th century theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) whose best non-physical dimensions decriptions can be found in books like Heaven and Hell and the fantastically titled The Earths In Our Solar System: Which Are Called Planets, And The Earths In The Starry Heavens, Their Inhabitants And The Spirits And Angels There From Things Heard And Seen, which is something like Gulliver's travels through astral space. The collections Conversations With Angels: What Swedenborg Heard in Heaven and Debates With Devils: What Swedenborg Heard in Hell are handily visionary. Someone like Hank Wesselman may represent a new age analogue of Hodgson, since Wesselman has written a series of post-apocalyptic journey books, romantically tinged, based on his shamanic mind travels into a future self beginning with Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future (1996).
Further research: http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightwells.html compares Hodgson and Wells, http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightsoul.html defends Hodgson's psychic soul cosmology, and http://alangullette.com/lit/hodgson/ links to Hodgson stories you can read online.
Two of Hodgson's greatest novels are essentially the same imagery. "The House on the Borderland" (1908) is a fragmented multi-layered account of a man having an out of body experience that shows his house is really surrounded by gods and monsters, with a great abyss of pig-like demons below. Then he is inexplicably fast-forwarded in time to the end of the universe, when the Earth is falling into green suns at the center of the galaxy. There’s also a recurring theme of a ghostly lover who warns him to protect the house, and he has a sister who thinks he is crazy because she apparently doesn’t see what he sees. In "The Night Land" (1912), a man who is grieving about his dead lover is transported in dreams or visions to a far future time when Earth is dying and the sun has gone out. The man lives in a giant pyramid outpost called the Last Redoubt with millions of other psychic humans, while outside gods and monsters run amok. The man is the future reincarnation of the narrator, and he telepathically senses that the reincarnation of his lost love is safe in another fortress, so he journeys to retrieve her across a hellish landscape that is reminiscent of Heironymous Bosch. Hodgson has a literary almost cultish following that hopes to rekindle his fame much as fans have done for Lovecraft. Points for Hodgson include his fertile imagination and early attempts at meta-fiction, points against include his archaic language and romantic babbling. His time travelling and end of world themes have been compared and contrasted to H. G. Wells (1886-1946), whom Hodgson would have read along with many Victorians. While Wells strove for straightforward narrative and scientific explanations for metaphors of his own society, Hodgson formulated a gothic spiritualism which merged and transcended religion and science to comment on what appear to be very personal psychic states. Like Lovecraft especially as seen in his early Oz-like masterpiece "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927), many of the weirdest episodes in Hodgson's epics are probably attempts to incorporate his own night dreams.
It seems clear to me that what most literary historians miss is the deeper understanding that such authors are chipping away at their terror of penetrating the astral realms around and inside us, where indeed many monstrous thought-forms and pragmatic taciturn higher beings are living out their own largely incomprehensible existences. The more futuristic and phantasmagoric the imagery, the more the inner senses are tuning away from the physical world into the astral plane, as lensed through the author’s own present hopes and fears. Hodgson’s house and Last Redoubt represent his physical home, his body, his incarnation here on Earth, which his idealized guide is indeed encouraging him to protect (Hodgson later volunteers for dangerous military duties and dies young). The longed-for separated spirit lover is the spiritual self whose beauty comes from the soul, so the journey to regain her is one of soul-retrieval. The end of the world is the end of the ego personality’s reign, both feared for its potential to release monsters of the subconscious into the judging mind, and desired as the path to reunification with spiritual wholeness. Undoubtedly the multitude of bizarre adventures and creatures were symbols of specific events and feelings in Hodgson’s life, most now lost to history and to his responsibility to interpret his own dreams and imagination.
A lot of fantasy authors are basically just endlessly dumping out their next step in spiritual evolution, which they keep almost taking then withdrawing from to record in images as entertainment. A long drawn-out tentative initiation of the consciousness into astral mastery is the basis for many hefty tomes. "Night Land" was 500 syrupy pages long, which is still nothing compared to say Tolkein’s "Lord of the Rings" saga, or Stephen King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus of personal kitchen-sink escapism called "The Dark Tower" in seven volumes. Note the recurring themes of apocalyptic journey from a home that is realized to no longer be safe, into a decaying center (often literally a tower), with macho heros battling monsters to rescue feminine symbols of transcending goodness. Fans eat it up, and commercial success rewards the longest franchise rather than the most direct enlightenment potential. So we can expect the sci-fi fantasy landscape to remain littered with the gargantuan wreckages of timidly expanding consciousnesses for quite some time to come.
Let's enjoy such "fictions" for what they, but not kid ourselves that there isn’t so much more to be discovered ahead, in higher planes and higher tales of teaching gods and fabulous non-horrific journeys. Most people just don’t yet know how to write or read about such things as forms of entertainment. What, no villains, no monsters, no deadly suspense, only patient loving cosmic guides through veils of ignorance? Another name, Geoffrey Hodson (1886-1983), is someone to look to for inspiration, as he was one of the great theosophists to work with and write about the elemental and angelic kingdoms. These include the inter-dimensional beings commonly called fairies and the like, who are expressing eagerness to work with more humans in order to stabilize the planet’s ecosystems and restore heaven on Earth. Now there’s your ego apocalypse, an end of bad days that would be most welcome if only more people understood their relationships to non-physical realms more positively than the horror sci-fi tropes allow. I'm trying, are you?
Recent "fantasy" novels I find truly groundbreaking remain scarce and obscure, but I would strongly recommend Summer With the Leprechauns: A True Story (1997) by Tanis Helliwell and Portals and Corridors: A Guide to Hyperspace Travel (1999) by Monica Szu-Whitney. These wisely connect the subjective and objective, plus offer many supremely spooky weird scenes to prove that progressive cosmic storytelling need not be dull or tame. To support the appreciation of such materials there are many esoteric reports and studies including those by Kurt Leland (especially regarding dreams, spirits, and higher realities), Robert Monroe (1915-1995) and his influential astral travel experiments, classic theosophist C. W. Leadbeater (1854-1934) whose handy book The Astral Plane sensibly and fascinatingly categorizes astral denizens and creatures, or, for even more of the vintage flavor, mystics like 18th century theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) whose best non-physical dimensions decriptions can be found in books like Heaven and Hell and the fantastically titled The Earths In Our Solar System: Which Are Called Planets, And The Earths In The Starry Heavens, Their Inhabitants And The Spirits And Angels There From Things Heard And Seen, which is something like Gulliver's travels through astral space. The collections Conversations With Angels: What Swedenborg Heard in Heaven and Debates With Devils: What Swedenborg Heard in Hell are handily visionary. Someone like Hank Wesselman may represent a new age analogue of Hodgson, since Wesselman has written a series of post-apocalyptic journey books, romantically tinged, based on his shamanic mind travels into a future self beginning with Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future (1996).
Further research: http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightwells.html compares Hodgson and Wells, http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightsoul.html defends Hodgson's psychic soul cosmology, and http://alangullette.com/lit/hodgson/ links to Hodgson stories you can read online.
