138 years ago today, a person was born who would make a significant, if not seminal, contribution to the so-called “weird” tale. That person was William Hope Hodgson. In this series of articles we will examine some of the inspirations and influences in his works, specifically, the one work which is considered his flawed but darkly brilliant “masterpiece”, “The Night Land” which I was fortunate to have first read in 1990 and realized, even then, the sub-conscious connections with the planet Mars and the mysterious landscapes of Cydonia.

The Night Land: A Love Tale stands today as one of the weirdest of love story’s ever communicated in the English language. Certainly the weirdest I have ever read.  It was written probably between the years 1905-06, but not published until 1912, and it truly is, in the words of H.P. Lovecraft, “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”¹⁾See Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.  An online version can be read here. Its profoundly disturbing images arise, seemingly, from a deep well of inspiration derived both from antecedent literature and the archetypal unconscious…and maybe something else? Of all these the “something else” sharing a “common surface” ²⁾”Common surface” is used here deliberately and is essentially a shorthand for what is called the “Topological Metaphor“. See Dr. Joseph P. Farrell’s various works including Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas (with Dr. Scott D. de Hart), Feral House, page 60 et seq., Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Feral House, pages 46-48 where the discussion of Bruno’s “vast astral memory machine” is central to the topic. Cf. also The Giza Death Star Destroyed, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005, pages 196-245 et seq. with the other two is the most difficult and challenging case to make, but we will explore all three areas in this article series.

The Night Land is narrated through the bizarre literary device of an observer who, almost “Matrix” like, is outside the conventional space-time reference frame in which a man (called “X”) ³⁾So named from The Dream of X ;Donald M. Grant (1977) Illus. Steven E. Fabian who ostensibly is from the 17^th century, “remembers” or prophetically anticipates the future in which the same man, “X”, is remembering that 17^th century past while in the future. But this is no ordinary future. Its a vision of things to come eons from now, when the sun has died and the face of Earth is a desolate cold wasteland beset with unholy evils who can neutralize your immortal soul. This night dark dead world planet’s surface is completely overrun with monsters save within an enormous fracture in that surface, a thousand mile long, over 100(!) mile deep canyon⁴⁾Perhaps actually 200 miles! Hodgson says at one point “…the dead starkness of the world, where did be—mayhap two hundred great miles above us—snow and the eternal desolation of a lost world, that did once be the lovely world of the olden days…” See page 172 The Night Land, Vol 2, Ballantine edition, (1972).   where the air pressure at the bottom of it allows for the last remnants of the human race, in a vast almost 8-mile high pyramidal arcology (pressurized at the upper levels), to survive. Unfortunately, many unspeakable evils have made their way into the canyon. The “Mighty Pyramid” the “Last Redoubt” is under a siege, a siege of millions of years in the making, and the unspeakable evils from unnamable abysses have slowly and patiently awaited the final death of the “Earth Current”, which will ultimately spell the doom of the human race. The story confronts the reader like a nightmare vision with it’s constant refrain of “Memory-Dreams” within the context of a dying universe and gives us, in a suitably dream-like inchoate way, a sense of what it would be like to live in a world that is going to die without the resources to restart the technological impulse or remember how that technology was first created hundreds of thousands and even millions of years in the past. All of this macabre phantasm is permeated with strange technological mechanisms, occult abilities of telepathy, soul-destroying powers and disturbances or “ruptures” in the dimensions of the “Aether” and framed by its weird dream-like memories of a landscape so “Boschian” in texture as to make us wonder if Hodgson was attempting a literary twist on the “Garden of Earthly Delights” with a new Adam and Eve at the end of the world…

 

 

It’s fair to say that ideas and concepts can arise in authors’ minds from what has been already comprehensively formulated by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell as Mythological “Archetypes”⁵⁾Dr. Carl Jung adopted the term archetype from classical sources such as the Hermetica. See The Hero with a Thousand Faces p.19, fn; Bollingen, 1968 ed. or as Manly Palmer Hall would sometimes frame it, the “Universal Mind”. Where those images of the “Collective Unconscious” actually come from will be subject to some examination herein, but it is also apparent that Hodgson was working within two main themes inspired by a reading of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and a third more obscure theme from Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds each element tied by the contrasts of Strength and Beauty, courage and innocence, Good and Evil. The contrasts may at times have been fumbled a bit in the writing, but the overall impact is successful. In order for us to fully realize the effect Hodgson was attempting to convey, we have to first invoke some of the motifs that might have gone into the influencing of this incredible vision of a dying universe, such as the mystery of time itself. How that vision fits into an archetypal anamnesis memory/remembering model will follow in due course.

Part 2