N'wraenomicon

I'm not sure where I'm going with this line of thinking yet. I mostly just need to scribble some notes down so I don't lose this if it does end up leading somewhere. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is also the key to the gate. For a while, when I first started reading Mythos stories, I had a hard tike distinguishing between Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth in my mind. Names, descriptions, roles they play in things...it was all too similar. Which one is asleep and has no clue that any of this is really happening, but also the only reason it's happening is because he's asleep and dreaming it? (That's Azathoth.) And which one is a lot like the sleeping one, but does know it's happening, knows why it's happening, kind of seems to be the Overseer of everything, and got Old Man Whately's daughter pregnant - possibly with more of Old Man Whately's help than I want to know? (That's Yog-Sothoth). Eventually, I started thing of them as being sort of like ...

There was weird work to be done tonight. I don't talk too openly about these things. I talk more openly, and in other places, about my worship practices. There are parts that are too private, too intimate, so I don't open up about all the details. I will talk pretty openly about worship, though, and one reason is that talking about it is part of those practices. Magical practices, though? I learned a long time ago that there are good reasons for keeping quiet that aren't about asking, "But what would people think?!" I'm not concerned about the opinions. I'd be a lot quieter about a lot more things if that was the case. Unless certain things were constructed for being made public, though, there is vulnerability in revealing too much. As a side note, I will say here that the pictures I take are not of the actual practices. Social media culture, algorithms, marketability...it all encourages us to share what we're doing. Sometimes it's bett...

I usually include black and white photos, if I am including one at all. This one needs to be shown in color, though. I worked on this for about a week and a half. I didn't plan it out. I sat down with my pens, turned on the Ah Pook the Destroyer Silver Key album, and let it all flow. I thought about the fact that ink is liquid. Water. This both is and is not my usual style. I do this kind of work only in black ink. Colors are used for other kinds of work. Something kept nudging me to put the colors in, though, and I did. Then I added the white highlights. I have no reason other than it felt like I was supposed to. The tentacles, web, scales, stars, growing spiral of leaves or feathers...berries? What is it? I don't know. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's everything. It is, apparently, something swirling around in my unconscious mind, so Azathoth dreamed it.

After I started giving serious thought to creating a Silver Key, a key found its way to me. Of course it did. Keys like to find their way to me. Always have. This one is actually a key I've wanted for many years. I spent a lot of time as a child reading books about Harry Houdini, watching David Copperfield specials, and dreaming of someday being an apprentice to Blackstone the Magician. This is a particular type of key I eventually gave up on the idea of ever having. It had to be the right one , and after that hadn't happened for a long enough period of time, I thought it just wouldn't. Randolph Carter lost his key after he'd been an adult for too long. Maybe I found mine. I'm still going to make that very special key for very special uses. This one is special in its own ways, and not just because of the particular things it was specifically created for. Groups of occult practitioners can sometimes get a bit aggravated about wanting people to understand ...

I'm in the process of reading all the Randolph Carter stories again. I know he's pretty much accepted as being Lovecraft's insertion of himself as a character, but I like Randolph Carter a lot more than I like Lovecraft. Maybe because he is "just a chatacter". We know nothing more about him than we needed to know for the stories being told. There's also the fact that the whole Silver Key thing really resonates with me. Keys have always been very magical objects to me, going all the way back to my early childhood. I simply cannot remember a time when keys weren't fascinating and, somehow, sacred. Combine that with a lot of me seeing things in those stories as being useful to refocus as metaphors for things I have experienced, and it's probably not really a mystery that Randolph Carter is an important character for me. The key is a very important object. I would say I'm considering making my own key, but I know I'm past "considering". T...