The mind is a wonderful thing to waste. In an idle moment, for some unknown reason I found myself wondering whether the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the occultist Aleister Crowley ever got together or otherwise communicated with each other, since they were contemporaries. So, I looked it up online—and then, still being a writer of sorts despite my recent dearth of output, I got an idea for another little short story, this time in a Lovecraftian vein. I present it below for your entertainment.

MYRTA

I recently came across an intriguing and overlooked series of correspondences in the H.P. Lovecraft letter archive at Arkham University in Massachusetts whilst researching a tangentially related topic. This discovery has profoundly changed my life, though whether for better or worse remains to be seen. Should the latter turn out to be the case, I will now chronicle my endeavor for posterity, from the relative safety of my hideout.

On a whim, I decided to visit Arkham whilst on sabbatical from my post in London. I had recently read of a possible connection between H.P. Lovecraft, the well-known writer of weird cosmic horror fiction, and the occult philosopher and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley, founder of the religion of Thelema. Although Lovecraft and Crowley were contemporaries, there was no substantiated evidence that the two men had ever met, corresponded, or collaborated in any way. Even so, rumours had been propagated by a Crowley disciple, a man named Kenneth Grant, who in his writings postulated a mystical link between the bigoted religious skeptic and the purveyor of religious ‘magick’. He contended that Lovecraft may have been an unconscious channel for the same cosmic forces invoked by Crowley, since Lovecraft was known to have dreamt about his cosmic entities before writing of them.

As a fan of Lovecraft’s tales with a morbid interest in Crowley as well, I wanted to see for myself whether there was any factual basis for Grant’s assertion. I found that there were indeed no documented occurrences in the Lovecraft collection of any direct correspondence or collaboration between Lovecraft and Crowley. And while some have insinuated that Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon, may have drawn inspiration from Crowley’s texts, Lovecraft himself insisted that the Necronomicon was his own invention, and I initially found no evidence to the contrary. I also saw no indication that Lovecraft directly influenced any of Crowley’s writings, including his Thelemic The Book of the Law. After all, philosophically speaking, the two men were diametrically opposed, so this made sense. Lovecraft considered religion and mysticism irrational, while Crowley embraced esotericism and magick.

But there was an indirect connection between the two through a third party, a mutual acquaintance named Myrta Alice Little. She was a novice writer who was part of an amateur press scene of the time in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It is unclear whether she ever became involved in occult practices (her only published work being a children’s Christmas pageant), but her having met both men in a literary setting led to speculation that she could have been a bridge of some sort between them.

I have not yet researched Crowley’s correspondence, though I hope to one day should circumstances permit (and if I am still of this world). I would need to travel to a university in Texas to accomplish that, and I will not budge from my isolated cabin here in the wilds of New Hampshire at least until this missive is complete. But I have already recovered enough incendiary information from the Lovecraft archive to put my life at grave risk, as you will soon see.

Although Lovecraft did not correspond with Crowley, he did do so with Miss Little—and based on what I read in the letter collection, she in turn apparently corresponded with Crowley, on matters of mutual interest to both men. In point of fact, the three of them seem to have devised a grand plan of sorts, from what I could gather (more on this later). Nonetheless, the content of the letters that traveled among them (at least in the ones I saw between Lovecraft and Miss Little) appeared to be innocuous at face value, and in truth rather mundane—but I discovered that there were layers of further communication beneath the surface that required more than simply reading between the lines.

How do I know this, when no one else in the world does despite all the research that has been done on the writings and lives of these men? I noticed that, unlike the many other letters in the Lovecraft collection, the ones that passed between Lovecraft and Miss Little contained what at first glance appeared to be elaborate scribblings in the margins, not unlike the artistic flourishes that monks applied to the religious texts they were charged with copying centuries ago before the invention of the printing press. I further found that these scribblings, which were dismissed as mere ‘doodles’ by other researchers, were in fact coded communications.

The language in which they were written was neither secretarial shorthand (which was my first thought, having never learned it myself), nor any known language of our modern era, nor an encrypted version of any such. On a hunch, through an academic friend of mine I was able to gain access to an artificial intelligence (that is to say, a ‘chatbot’) that had been trained on Egyptian hieroglyphics and other dead languages, such as those of ancient Mesopotamia. Upon scanning photocopies of the letters in question, this is where I ‘hit paydirt’, as the Americans say, the mystery language turning out to be a variant of Akkadian (which includes Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian dialects).

Since Lovecraft and Miss Little were known to have been acquainted, Lovecraft having visited with her even outside of their literary circle and recounting their meeting in his essay The Haverhill Convention, I was expecting to perhaps be presented with a translation of banal ‘words of love’ or something to similar effect. But what I instead received was a series of dire revelations, of which only myself and my collaborator were aware. When I learned of this unfortunate man’s untimely and unnatural death shortly thereafter, that was when I went into hiding.

How did ‘they’ learn of our findings? I do not know for certain, but I imagine computer hacking was likely involved. And I say ‘they’ because despite the wealth of disturbing information I uncovered, I do not know the name of the organization that Lovecraft, Crowley, and Miss Little seem to have founded (if it has one), nor the names of any of its current members. All I know is that there was (and still is, in my opinion) such an organization, with a guiding philosophy based on some kind of tangled permutation of Lovecraft’s cosmic mythos combined with Crowley’s Thelemic religion (perhaps à la Grant’s assertion?), plus various esoteric thoughts of Miss Little’s—and that its reach was to be global in scope. I have since learned that there are known groups such as the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Order of the Trapezoid that incorporate elements of both Lovecraft and Crowley in their magical belief systems, but it seems unlikely that these would be related to the joint creation of Lovecraft, Crowley, and Miss Little, being as visible as they apparently are.

To move on—among the revelations I discovered, the existence of this global organization, whatever it be named, is only the first one. Another is that there actually was a nefarious book titled Necronomicon, despite a copy of it having never been found by any academic researcher. However, it was not written exclusively by Lovecraft, but rather in concert by him and Miss Little. Furthermore, although Crowley claimed that his The Book of the Law was dictated to him by an inhuman intelligence he called his ‘Holy Guardian Angel’ Aiwass, that treatise was similarly generated by him and Miss Little. (With or without ‘divine’ intervention in both cases? Unknown.) And later on, yet another tome, whose title and whereabouts (and very existence) remain unknown, was supposedly created, by all three together in an attempt to reconcile their disparate worldviews and decide on their course of action. I conjecture that this book may serve as the manifesto of their secret mystical organization.

Thus it would appear that Miss Little may have been an important driving force, and possibly the most central one, behind all this. And in yet another revelation implied in the letters I read, she may still be living today, unlike her contemporaries, which I find disconcerting to say the least. Did she ascertain how to attain immortality through the spells that were reputed to exist in the Necronomicon, which was supposedly a book of the laws of the dead? Is she the leader of the global conglomerate that the three of them instituted, and that is likely even now attempting to reduce our world to anarchistic, unknowable chaos? Or is she herself an incarnation of one or more of the godly cosmic monstrosities posited by Lovecraft or the so-called guardian angels of Crowley?

Most disturbingly of all, whatever one chooses to call them, it is now apparent that those formerly hypothetical entities do exist—and that if they ever were indifferent to the trials and tribulations of humankind (like you and I are to the lowly ant), as Lovecraft maintained in his stories of existential dread, Miss Little and her ilk have likely been trying to wake them and utilize them to achieve their own ungodly ends, based on that chatbot’s translations.

It may have taken them a hundred years to do so (an infinitesimally minuscule blip in cosmic time), but I fear they may be finally succeeding. From the details I have been able to learn regarding my colleague’s demise, the manner of his death is reminiscent of the recorded actions of an entity known as Shub-Niggurath (the Black Goat of the Woods) and her violent minions from the Lovecraft mythos. How many of his and Crowley’s other malevolent deities from beyond space and time are being bent to the organization’s will and are fated to shortly materialize in our world? Or will it be one of the Great Old Ones who are reputedly already asleep and dreaming here on Earth that will come knocking at my door?

I must set this missive aside for now, as my ears are detecting an unnaturally ponderous sound originating in the nearby woods outside my cabin, and through my window I can discern a glowing mist emanating from some source just beyond the first tree line that is of a colour I have never before seen. Nothing has yet knocked at my door, so to speak, but perhaps I should do something—though where I could hide that would be any safer than my current position inside this cabin, I do not know. So, I will simply extinguish my light and try to somehow make myself inconspicuous. I did not kindle a fire today, so the fireplace is cold. Could I perhaps hide inside the chimney?

But wait—how can all of this possibly be true? It is beyond comprehension, at least to a sane person. Have I merely become a victim of unreasoning paranoia—or worse, been driven mad by the knowledge that I have unwillingly assimilated (or again, by ‘divine’ intervention)? What is to become of me, in any case?

I suppose that only time and the infinite cosmos will tell.

THE END

Though the above story is fiction, it was inspired by fact; and in fact, outside of the obviously fanciful elements of the tale, it contains a lot of facts. If you want to know more, there’s an abundance of information online about the relationship (or lack thereof) between Lovecraft and Crowley. And if you’re especially curious about Myrta Alice Little’s possible role in their literary lives, I learned that there’s a documentary film on the subject titled STRANGE MAGICK. It’s said to be highly speculative, but might prove entertaining (I haven’t yet watched it).

P.S. I did some questionable research for this post—so, a reminder to my heirs when the time comes: As I’ve said before, please clear the browsing history from my computer ASAP and don’t ask questions like, ‘Why in the world did he look up all this crazy, weird, perverted stuff?’ The answer to that kind of question is simply, ‘Because he was a writer.’ This also applies to related questions such as, ‘Why is there a human skeleton dressed as a pirate hanging by its neck in his basement?’ 😊