What’s Hidden Behind the Veil: Monsters of H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares brought to reality

I grew up with a Christian background, which I still find useful.  Religion is for the most part good if it helps nurture along values that are positive.  But as a tool for historical reverence, religion is all about revising history to match whatever provided text is important to the cult in question—and over time, I have come to realize that much about history has been erased or distorted due to the rise and fall of Christianity.  Of particular complaint for me is the North American origins and actual history of the human race.  One of the most important books I have ever read was Forbidden Archaeology which chronicled the many relics of excavations that have been repressed from the historical record due to academic revision driven largely by government necessity and religious preservation.  To my mind the actions in the Bible are only lily pads of history with many more extending into the distant past, and there is archaeology to confirm it—so needless to say once you read Forbidden Archaeology it forces you to look at everything with a new lens toward reality.

And I’m far from alone.  A few years ago I was being criticized for my lack of involvement in a church of which I answered that I considered religion to be like a pair of shoes I wore when I was a child.  I’m happy to have had those shoes on my child-like feet.  But as an adult, my feet outgrew the shoes and I needed something that fits better—and currently no religion offers a shoe big enough to fit my very large feet.  I might keep my old shoes tucked away in a box thankful for the memories, but they would be of no use to me now as a fully grown adult.  To say that I’m an atheist would be completely inaccurate—it’s not even a category that applies.  Rather, I am part of a movement that is redefining religion and making new shoes for people to wear—intellectually and this is a movement that is picking up a lot of steam.

So it was much to my amazement that I ran across H.P. Lovecraft after falling in love with the board game Arkham Horror.  I never planned to like the game that much, but once I discovered that it was about monsters from other dimensional realities trying to come into the world of our own recollections and that it dealt with many different parallel worlds I started thinking more seriously of the writer H.P. Lovecraft who wrote pulp horror stories during the Roaring Twenties and was then considered a crack pot lunatic—a child of two parents who ended their lives in insane asylums.  Lovecraft was a young man haunted by terrible monsters in his dreams for his entire life, and he dealt with the beasts through literature.

Coming out of a heavily Christianized turn of the century with do-gooder progressives making their mark against the world of capitalism Lovecraft was way ahead of himself in his writing. He was essentially writing about the types of things that the modern David Icke is saying—that the monsters that haunt us are not of the type seen in Casper the Friendly Ghost.  They are ancient beings once considered gods that still haunt us through the mysteries of quantum mechanics.  They are like those in Poltergeist who bend dimensional reality to suit their needs, or like the Sumerian terrors in Ghostbusters who were able to come and pillage our planet in whatever form we feared the most.  Those films had fun with a subject matter that ultimately points back to the work of H.P. Lovecraft as he was clearly the start of a new way of looking at the things that terrify us from mysterious realms.  Most human beings seek to throw those gods into a religion hoping to appease to their sensibilities and give us luck at navigating their perilous objectives—but to those whose feet no longer fit in the confines of religion, something much deeper is needed.  For them, Lovecraft is becoming a literary giant a 100 years after his death.

Even before Forbidden Archaeology about a decade before that book was published I learned about the ancient city of Cahokia just outside of St. Louis.   I was stunned to learn about it being so large and having pyramids nearly the size of those in Mexico and Egypt and that they had such an advanced culture prior to the settling of America by Europeans. I wrote a screenplay about the place which won some awards, and no matter who ran across that story as I was shopping it around, nobody had ever heard of such a thing, yet the remains are right off the major highway that passes east to west straight into St Louis.  If science and politics were able to contain such information that was right out in the open, what were they really hiding, because experience said that they were hiding quite a lot?  When I was a kid, 10 to 15 years old I was a subscriber to Biblical Archaeology Review—so I knew quite a lot about various dig going on around the Holy Land.  But there was always a layer of haze over the reports that always bothered me.  Much of that cleared up as Forbidden Archaeology blew the doors off all the suppressed discoveries of the last century.  One of the great gods of worship at Cahokia was a thing called Bird Man.  I couldn’t help but wonder if Bird Man was the same thing that people in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia—several hundred miles up the Ohio River from Cahokia called the Mothman.  After the popular film drove me to read one of the scariest books I’ve ever read in The Mothman Prophesies I realized that something very dark and sinister was going on behind the thin veil of historical documentation. My family actually went on Mothman hunts as I was determined to catch one and discover what it was all about.  What I learned was that the Mothman likely was not a creature of four dimensional realities, but something else.  That something else is the kind of monster that David Icke has been talking about—and in fictional literature, H.P. Lovecraft.  CLICK TO REVIEW.

My wife and I this past week celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary and we enjoyed it by buying two new expansions of the Arkham Horror game and a giant New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft book by Leslie S. Klinger.  Yes we had dinner, but the best parts of our evening was in hunting new H.P. Lovecraft material.  As crazy as H.P. Lovecraft seemed during his time in the 20s, in hindsight he obviously understood what was going on as the popular show Ancient Aliens and other fresh explorations into our hidden human history are paving the way to validate work that Lovecraft did that seemed like fantastical fiction at the time—but today is perhaps a bit too real.  For a family like mine that has spent time chasing UFOs, hunting Mothmen and climbing around in some of the most haunted corridors of our reality—mostly finding nothing literally, but a lot peripherally—Lovecraft is our idea of a great date night.  But I can’t help but wonder if his musings were not more historical than fiction.  My current leanings say the latter more than the former—and it takes removing the confining shoes of religion to actually wade into those depths.

It isn’t surprising that Lovecraft is making a comeback.  I have been shocked by how many people now read his stuff when at the time of his death he was mocked by critics and was penniless at the age of 46.  Today, it’s a different story.  More and more people are realizing that they have been lied to by their government schools, their political structure, and their religions—and they are dusting off those old books to see what people were saying before the progressive purge of the Twentieth Century wiped everything out and revised history to the sentiments of the radicals vying for power. But that time has come and went now, and H.P. Lovecraft is emerging from the hidden depths of our own thought into history.  His musings reflect my own, that somewhere hidden in our mythologies are historical truths long suppressed by the orthodox shaped by modern religion.  And in those stories is a key to the gates of knowledge and it is there that humanity must go to discover our next step.  But For that next step, we will need new shoes—and that is my current obsession. For those new shoes I will need some of the leather processed by H.P. Lovecraft—and working that leather is proving to be an interesting endeavor to say the least.

Rich Hoffman


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