When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R'lyehian Spirituality by Scott R Jones

Author:Scott R Jones [Jones, Scott R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Martian Migraine Press
Published: 2014-03-18T23:00:00+00:00

Beating Nietzsche’s Horse:

Notes on the Black Gnosis and Mental Illness

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. –- R D Laing

It’s important to make a distinction between the essence of what the Black Gnosis is and the effects, behavioural changes and symptoms arising from common mental illness. Though the two states share certain similarities, and the behaviours of R’lyehians and the mentally ill can seem, on the surface, to be drawn from the same pool, the two states of being could not be more different. This difference arises in approach, and in the choices made once one has passed into the Black Gnosis and, necessarily, gone beyond good and evil, as per Nietzsche.

We’ve all met them, of course, those hapless souls haunted by Nietzsche’s ghost. The Overmen (and sometimes women, though tellingly not often) of the coffee shop and the kitchen party. Burdened by their less-than-comprehensive understanding of his philosophy, and in their insistence on moving beyond what they perceive to be good and evil, they trap themselves in a bitter and ineffectual mental space. They imagine themselves free, and noble, but that imagining is as far as it goes. Often, these faux-Nietzschian’s are in it for far less noble reasons, utilizing the man’s work as a justification for any number of poor behaviours, sad transgressions of a perceived status quo, executions of awkward dance moves around hated morals that they cannot move beyond except through soft-headed pseudo-rebellions.

But who among these are truly game to go where Nietzsche went, in the end? Who will find themselves in the middle of the street, their arms wrapped around the foaming neck of a beaten horse, their minds bleeding away into the ether with the sorrow and the horror of it all? For that was the philosopher’s end, his breaking point, right there. A point followed by a malingering period of penning mad letters to friends and family, and eventually death in a sanitarium.

Sad, deluded Overfolk! Here then is the punch line to your favourite quote: at the critical moment, Nietzsche blinked.

He blinked, and in so doing, missed the one action of the Abyss that the R’lyehian, the cultivator of the Black Gnosis, waits for with gleeful anticipation: that sublime moment when the Abyss gazes back... and winks.[35]

We are, as Lewis Carrol’s Cheshire cat affirms, “all mad here”[36]. The very fact that you are here speaks to this essential truth. To choose to incarnate in the first place is to choose to enter into suffering and death, joy and weirdness. Life is an acquired taste, to be sure, and will defend its own viewpoint. Life will rally any number of apparently rational arguments against the supreme irrationality of itself. To the death, usually.

So, we are here, alive and mad and standing before a miserable horse in the street. What’s to be done about it?

The difference between a mentally ill person and their insanity, and a R’lyehian and

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