Welcome to Metaphysics of the Real. This is your host, Oliver St. John. Sophia is our Guiding Light.
The first part of this episode is a reading from my book, Advaita Vedanta—Question of the Real. It may seem strange to begin a book that serves as an introduction to Advaita Vedanta Non-dualism, which is primarily a Hindu darshana, with a critique, albeit a brief one, of the corrosive influence of Western philosophy. So far as nihilism goes, while there might be very few persons that would declare it as a ‘path’, a way that they follow, our purpose is to show that nihilism in a very general sense arises inevitably from the humanism that now dominates the world, in spite of its pretence of being rational and its claim to support individual self expression while crushing all difference—and all opposition to its uniform values. The second part is a reading from my recently published book Dreaming Thelema and Magical Art and focuses on one of HP Lovecraft’s most compelling and prophetic tales, Nyarlathotep.
The music Nightjar (Return) was composed and played on the guitar, five-string electric bass and Egyptian drum by myself, Oliver St. John.  

Metaphysics of the Real, Episode 5 Part One: Nihilism and the Western Malaise
Nihilism, viewed one way, is an affliction of will, although Sri Shankaracharya put it less delicately as a matter of simple ignorance. The nihilist affirms his own existence, saying, ‘I am a nihilist’, and at the same time denies that existence through self-identification with ‘nothing’. This self-contradictory point of view arises in one sense from narcissism. Denying the Self, the Real, is the last resort of the small self, the ‘me’, when faced with the impossibility of the narcissistic attitude, which is one of pleasure taken in egoistic self-absorption, and which does not last owing to the impermanence of body and mind upon which it depends. The poet, novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde illustrated this form of self-obsession, so particular to our times, in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian, the subject of the portrait, sold his soul so he could stay looking as youthful as he did when his portrait was first painted. As a consequence of living out the decadent theories he had learned from a mentor, he became increasingly morally degenerate. While Dorian showed no visible signs of ageing, the portrait not only aged but also revealed corruption, vanity and cruelty.
The nihilist often begins as an idealist and it has no doubt been well documented in psychological studies how this becomes thwarted so the person turns inward, not in meditation but in vain excesses of self-hatred. For example, here is a statement typical of one that has sought refuge from despair in the deeper despair of nihilism:
“I have lost all hope and faith in the world and in humanity. Now there is nothing; nothing at all.”
Hope and faith in the world and humanity is the exact reverse of all true spiritual wisdom since time immemorial. So long as we seek happiness in external things, thought to be apart from the Self, we are doomed forever to disappointment.
Tradition has it that if we are kind to humans and other creatures in so far as that is possible and put our faith in God, then we will not be disappointed and we might stand a chance of at least gaining some peace of mind. Oscar Wilde seemed to be showing there are consequences for rejecting this simple exotericism. Existentialism nonetheless puts across the aggressively anti-spiritual notion that there is nothing beyond human existence—by which is meant our experience of that existence or of ‘the world’ within strictly limited transactional reality. It did this in powerful ways, through literature, art and later, popular music and fashion. At the same time some existentialists fully admitted the absurdity of the premise. 
However, the absurdists, having fully accepted the existentialist postulate that existence precedes essence, really believed that life itself is without meaning, not suspecting that their idea of ‘life’ was built upon a mistaken notion, an idea not based on reality but on an empty nothing. ‘Existence precedes essence’ is the total reversal of metaphysical doctrines of the Real. What was meant by ‘existence’ is not the equivalent of the Sanskrit sat, from sat-chit-ananda: being, consciousness and bliss, which is the nature of Brahma, the supreme principle. Existentialism reduces being to common, ordinary human experience and is strictly limited to that, admitting nothing beyond. At the same time, the existentialists wanted to have it that existence, understood in that way, has no conditions, which is certainly absurd! A limit is placed on the universe then this universe is imagined as having no limits. The problem there is that to transcend ordinary human tendencies a superhuman effort is needed, all the more so when it is seen that the effort is to be made from within the strictly limited human domain—even if this is imagined as being unlimited! If existence precedes essence, then we must know that the idea of essence here has nothing to do with the Sanskrit purusha, or Atma, as all that has been rejected. It means in this context essential human nature. Finding this depends on extracting an essence out of a being that has no essence other than what can be produced by its own will and actions. Man becomes a faulty demiurge, given an impossible task to perform. Ignorance cannot remove ignorance. Consequently, subsequent existentialist novels and plays often dealt with failure and despair, the inevitable result.
If we pick up any book on existentialism we will probably find the academic view is that it is something ‘historical’, especially after the end of the twentieth century and ascendancy of the post-industrial era. However, it has become so deeply absorbed into the collective mentality that it no longer matters whether the philosophy itself is even discussed any more.
Ironically, while Jean Paul Sartre and his friends declared open war on all tradition, seeing it as ‘conformist’, the result of the ‘lowering of the sky’ to exclude everything from the universe of a supra-human order was to pave the way for conformity to a degree never seen before. Uniformity is by now the substitute for true unity, which must always depend from a spiritual and natural order.
See ‘Uniformity against Unity’, Thunder Perfect Gnosis.
Nihilism is a philosophical term; Sri Shankaracharya gave it as an example of ignorance fourteen centuries ago. Shankaracharya and his various commentators within the discipline of Advaita Vedanta have pointed out that a certain interpretation of Buddhist texts carries the danger of nihilism. They were referring to the Shunyavada void theory, which declares the absolute non-existence of all things whatsoever. Buddhism is a heterodox darshana or school of thought and did not last very long in India, relatively speaking. It went out into the world and proliferated elsewhere. Eventually Buddhism—albeit in a neutered form—became very popular with atheistic psychologists and other material reductionists of the West. The avatara Sri Shankaracharya—considered a Jagatguru or ‘world teacher’, not only a teacher to India—was unambiguous in what he wrote. If he was not in fact denouncing Buddhism he was certainly denouncing an interpretation of it that even then was leading some to nihilism through mistaken denial of the Atma-Brahma principle. On empirical grounds alone there is very good reason for retaining reservations about Buddhism, especially the Westernised forms of it. We have encountered persons throughout our lives that adopted the erroneous void notion. Some of them even thought it represents Advaita Vedanta, so deepening the confusion further. Many of these fell to nihilism, and subsequently to despair and even clinical depression. And all for nothing.
Nihilism really means the denial of the true Self because the ego sense of ‘me’ is self-evident. Obviously the self exists otherwise who is asking the question or having the thought of nihilism? There is an implicit contradiction in the self-negation. Who is the ‘I’ in this that likes and dislikes things? Who or what is the ‘I’ that chooses things and that can affirm and deny them in one breath? Even confusion itself must be separate from the Self. It is no more than an object created by the mind, as is nihilism.
Nihilism is a thought comparable to a tiny drop in the great ocean of Brahma. It is like a bubble appearing on the surface of the sea for a moment until it is gone, dissolved back into the water. Shiva drank up all the poisons of the world and turned them into nectar. Christ did the same thing, dying to the body and living in spirit forever for all those that follow him. Kali drinks up all the blood of the universe. This has to be dwelled on constantly and then peace of mind will come—and even much more.
Spiritual practice is indispensible and before it is possible we must relinquish all attachments to philosophy in the conventional meaning of that—which should really be strictly limited to the Western philosophers although it is is erroneously used to describe ancient doctrines and their various interpretations. We hope it is fairly obvious we are not making prescription to cure the social and other ills that afflict our civilisation as it nears the end of its time. Non-dual yoga and its preparatory means such as the yoga of the sage Patañjali, which we have written of elsewhere, will only be taken up seriously by a small minority of spiritual seekers. It is those whom we are addressing.
After a short break, we will resume with Nyarlathatep.

Metaphysics of the Real, Episode 5 Part Two: Nyarlathotep.
This article is from our book Magical Art and Dreaming Thelema. The writings of H.P. Lovecraft are littered with references to ancient doctrines, though according to what he said in his letters he had no intention that any of it might be taken seriously. When the orientalist Kenneth Grant read material like The Call of Cthulhu (1926), he saw the universe mapped out in a way that might in some ways supersede the usefulness of magical grimoires. Nyarlathotep is heavy with the weight of ‘forbidden knowledge’. A person might easily be driven insane if they were to catch merely one glimpse through a glass but darkly, as it is put in the biblical book of 1 Corinthians, 13: 12:
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Nyarlathotep (1920): “Nyarlathotep … the crawling chaos … I am the last … I will tell the audient void …
“I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top.
“Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf.
“I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.”
The Haunter of the Dark (1936): “What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets … The long, winging flight through the void … cannot cross the universe of light … re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron … send it through the horrible abysses of radiance.”
In The Haunter of the Dark, the narrator proclaims: ‘Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man?’ This tells us that the consciousness behind the form adopted is not human and not of this earth, in other words, is a supra-human or at least non-human intelligence. Furthermore:
“Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws.”
The ‘suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness’ are precisely what Grant referred to when he said that the powers of evil conceal ‘unknowable concepts of Nothingness, Inner Space, Anti-Matter, and the ultimate horror of Absolute Absence’. Nothingness obviously does not exist in nature or the Absolute but it can in a certain sense symbolise evil as the annihilation of the soul, which is always the hidden agenda in postmodernism. Inner Space is merely a trite New Age reductionism of the Hindu Seat of Brahma. Anti-Matter is a theory of conventional science that will no doubt by replaced by something equally nonsensical, if that has not already been done. There is of course no such thing as ‘Absolute Absence’, as we hope by now to have made very clear, but it suited Grant’s design and the postmodernist agenda if his readers might be persuaded that it was in some way reflective of authentic ancient doctrines.
Azathoth may be construed as ‘Mighty Thoth’, a reference to the ancient Egyptian Logos, and the supreme sacerdotal authority within that tradition. The name may also be construed as the formulaic Azoth, an alchemical term figurative of the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all things. Lovecraft seems to be alluding to the Greek God of All, Pan—the Piper at the Gates of Dawn—or the Egyptian Khem-mentu, the black land itself—which he regarded with horror.
Scripture fully supports both the symbolic and factual reality of avatars, who are usually divine consciousness or otherwise perfected consciousness descending into human form then reascending. The avatara is absolutely integral to the Hindu doctrines, for example. This is incomprehensible to the modern mentality and so we have had for a long time now sensationalists gathering spurious evidence to prove that extraterrestrials visit the earth in flying saucers or some other spacecraft, and that spacemen were thus worshipped as Gods, for example. The empty projections only serve to demonstrate that writers of such junk literature are completely unable to grasp that primeval civilisations were not interested in documentary facts, or if they were, they would never have thought it worthwhile to carve them in stone. The language of the ancient mysteries is symbolic. That does not mean to say that symbolism does not coincide with historical ‘fact’, but the kind of facts the moderns love so much are invented, not real at all. 
Celestial or supra-human intelligences have their counterpart in the hidden places of the earth, as can be seen by the study of some of the better grimoires, such as that of Three Books Concerning Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa. The Spirit of Saturn, for example, though not composed of Adamah (clay or dust) is really a type of earth elemental. According to the book of Genesis, 6: 4:
There were giants in the earth [Adamah] in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God [Beni ha-Elohim] came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
The corrupt scripture of the apocryphal Book of Enoch tells how the sons of the Elohim descended to the earth and gave knowledge, and taught magical arts and alchemy to the daughters of Eve. One is reminded of the alchemical maxim: Visitae Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidum.
The alchemical formula of VITRIOL may be elucidated and expanded thus: ‘Go ye forth into the hollow hills of the earth; by rectification thou shalt discover the secret stone of the wise.’ The hollow hills are the hidden recesses of earth, which in other symbolism is the cave within the heart, or centre of all. The word translated as ‘giants’ in the Bible means ‘high, noble, lofty, elevated’. The text is a fragment of a lore that was ancient even when the scriptures were first written on tablets and parchment. The race referred to precedes that of mankind.
The architectural feats of the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians did not improve over the course of time—the finest examples are the oldest surviving. The level of work deteriorated over time, as the knowledge bestowed by the originators of the life-wave was forgotten.
The magical operations involving supra-human intelligences and earthly women—Yuggoth (union) and Shaggai (sexual intercourse)—made such an impact on early human life that they were still remembered in medieval Europe. The rule of Droit du seigneur (‘right of the lord’) gave the lord or nobleman to whom it belonged the right to sleep the first night with the bride of any one of his vassals. In Europe, though perhaps not in all cultures, this ‘right’ was only nominal, since it could be paid off and so was effectively only another means of subjugating and taxing the peasantry. However, it is the remembered echo of incredibly ancient events—the descriptive terms we use here are both literal and symbolic. Scattered shards of this knowledge survived in the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and scriptures such as the Bible and Apocrypha.
The word used for ‘earth’ in the book of Genesis 6: 4 is Adamah, the substance that the second Adam or the race of man was made from. Since the changeling progeny of transgressive copulation had the seed of the elder race within them, they retained the Gnosis. For this reason, biblical accounts tell of great misfortune accompanying this ‘infernal’ rite, even the eventual laying to waste and destruction of a race of humans.
In the book of Genesis, the iniquity of the earth and mankind—poisoned by the infernal progeny of the sons or demigods of the Elohim—is punished by God, who destroys humanity and all living creatures from the face of the earth. However, the rise and fall of Cosmic Cycles has no moral attachment other than what might be imagined by those who do not comprehend the doctrine. The well known biblical narrative of Noah and his Ark, which takes up the rest of Genesis 6, is a particular telling of the ending of a Manvantara and beginning of the next. The tale of Jonah and the Whale is identical in symbolism though it refers to an earlier cataclysm than that of Noah. Jonah is the seed principle of the total knowledge of the previous Manvantara. His disappearance in the belly of the whale, or the ark that sails across the waters of dissolution (pralaya) between cycles, is the interval between the ending of one cycle and commencement of the next. The biblical tales of Jonah and Noah have their counterpart in the Arabic tradition and concur exactly with Hinduism, where Vishnu appears to the Lord (Manu) of the next Manvantara in the form of a fish (nun, which also means a whale in Arabic).
The Gnosis can only be seen in negative terms from the point of view of the human ego. This is central to the more cosmic writings of H.P. Lovecraft, where the elder race mingle with human beings—a union that results in ‘hideous’ mutations. The spawn of Satan typically then rampages and destroys all in its wake, ever seeking to prepare the planet earth for its restoration to the elder race. In Nyarlathotep, the narrator tells us that,
“We drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them.”
The curious formations hint at angles of a geometry beyond that of Euclid, a subtle network that leads outside of time and space. These are ‘involuntary formations’, since the mode of apprehending the Gnosis is not ordinary thought. It is frequently intimated in Lovecraft’s stories that the strange paths have snares and traps set that can precipitate the schism of madness in the unprepared mind:
“One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.”
Although Lovecraft appears to have studied the books of the Qabalah lightly, if at all, his imagery nonetheless maps out some of the higher paths with uncanny accuracy. For example,
“As we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls.”
This is suggestive of realms beyond the Abyss of Da’ath, which marks the outer limits of human reason. Across the threshold lie supernal emanations or sephiroth called Kether, Chokmah and Binah, which together constitute the Crown of Wisdom and Understanding. The ‘hellish moon-glitter of evil snows’ is Kether, which corresponds in cosmological terms to the celestial North Pole. 
Beyond even Kether lies ‘the sightless vortex of the unimaginable’, for Kether, the first emanation in the Qabalistic cosmogony, is a veil upon the Infinite. What Lovecraft can also describe as an ‘unspeakable horror’ is termed AIN in the Qabalah, which only outwardly means ‘nothingness’, for in reality it is the supreme metaphysical reality, which is very far from being ‘nothing at all’.

That brings Episode 5 of Metaphysics of the Real to a close. The music Nightjar (Return) was composed and played on the guitar, five-string electric bass and Egyptian drum by myself, Oliver St. John.  
Sophia be-with-us forever.