Lovecraft-- the name almost seems made up, bringing together a warm cuddly word in cognitive dissonance with a word related to unseemly doings, crafty doings, maybe even piratical and witchy doings. I loved Lovecraft after getting some of his short story books from my scholastic book club when I was in fifth grade. I bought and read the Lovecraft-inspired Necronomicon. I date my real involvement with the world of witchcraft from the time a local witchy person sat me down, pointed to that book, and showed me two points on a piece of paper: "here is how I do it:" drawing a straight line between the points, and "here is how that book does it:" drawing a hugely contorted squiggly wandering line between the two points. In other words, at that point I came to understand Lovecraft as art and not a real prescription for energy work, and thereby came to appreciate it as the wonderful baroque excessiveness that it is. I loved it even more for its persevering chaotic weirdness in the face of the bland, albeit more effective, simplicty of REAL energy work.
So I still get a warm place in the coldness of my Northern New York heart when I discover some new way to revisit my haunted-by-beasts-with-no-name childhood. Voila, the Lovecraft Tarot. I discovered it as a newly available choice at my preferred free online tarot reading site, Facade.Com, where they introduce this deck thusly:
- It is the deck of choice for explorers of the macabre, and for posing questions that should never be asked.
Now tell me, what ISN'T to like about that?
However, if you search for "Lovecraft Tarot" using the amazing Lovecraftian search engine (just introduced to me by my friend who I will pseudonymously call Al-Al) Cthuugle.Com, you will only get an EldritchDark.Com website with a Selection of Poems by Clark Ashton Smith In Castilian. Disappointing, if the only languages you know are English, German, Russian, Latin, Italian, and Croatian. I thought I had learned all the languages with grotesque, darkly fantastic and vaguely unsettling lyric poetry, but here they throw Castilian in my face.
I won't bore you my dear readers with the fantastic tale I was told about Howard Phillips Lovecraft by a childhood friend whose father worked on an expedition in South America to find the freak's body, except to say that Lovecraft may yet be alive. His body was never recovered. (I prefer not to believe the credible and popular tale of him dying in bed as a shut-in.) I will end with one of my favorite ever Lovecraft quotes which I never have enough opportunity to use:
- That is not dead which may eternal lie, and within strange eaons even Death may die.
