“I called to remembrance the brasen Lyons, in Salomons Temple, which were of such fierce countenances, as that they would bring men to forgetfulness…”—From Hypnoteromachia Poliphili
“the flood of the First Noah took place on Mars. The garden (of Eden) was located in the Northern Hemisphere not far from the polar regions…The waters rushed down into the conduits and drowned all the original Adam-II people there.”—From “The Sky People” (originally published in 1961)
“…as I stood there in the vast embrasure, I had also a knowledge, or memory, of this present life of ours, deep down within me; but touched with a halo of dreams”—From “The Night Land”
A symbolic representation of the compounds of the human soul as illustrated in the “Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum Et Theosophicum” by Georg Von Welling
“For all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding. A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been.”–China Mieville writer of the New Weird genre
The Night Land, a weird alchemical blend of the eschatologies depicted in The Time Machine and the drama of cosmic angst playing out in The War of the Worlds, confects an occult and symbolically analogical landscape of the human psyche.
One of the keys perhaps in understanding the metaphysics behind the nature of the soul as conceived in Hodgson’s literary formulations and even just the basic concept of an “Electric Circle” in The Night Land in the first place, is, as we hinted previously in this series, probably found in Marie Corelli’s 1886 novel, A Romance of Two Worlds.
Although it is outside the scope of this series to get heavily into the literary influences involved behind Hodgson and Lovecraft, it is, as was indicated in part 1, a necessary query into the workings behind the subconscious and any possible connection to an anamnesis of a cataclysmic end to a pre-historic Martian civilization. If there were ever such a civilization, given all the other possibilities we are exploring here at Suburbs of Heaven, it would pervade the entire solar system, not just Mars. Continue reading Dwellers on the Threshold:The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 4-The Call of the Muse→
“Watcher of the South East” Artwork by Steven E. Fabian. Published in “The Dream of X”
Spirits of earth and air, Ye shall not thus elude me: by a power, Deeper than all yet urged, a tyrant—spell, Which had its birthplace in a star condemn’d, The burning wreck of a demolish’d world, A wandering hell in the eternal space; By the strong curse which is upon my soul, The thought which is within me and around me, I do compel ye to my will. Appear!–From Lord Byron’s “Manfred”
The Night Land, mixing supernatural and science-fiction elements, blends technological and supernatural worlds in a weird topological landscape of meaningful and meaningless images where the mind, scared of its own shadow, fills in the rest. Then, proto-typically stirring the same cauldron from which the macabre cosmic images of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu would be steeped in, The Night Land set the stage for the 20th century’s “Dying Earth” theme. Continue reading Dwellers on the Threshold:The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 3–Invoking the Muse.→
“Two-faced Janus, you who know the things that have already passed and the things to come, and who can see the grimaces behind you just as well as those before, why do they fashion you with so many eyes and why so many faces? Is it because your image teaches men to have kept an eye open all around them?”–Alciati Emblematum, Emblema XVIII
“But the Great Spy-Glass…had eyes of it upon every side of The Mighty Pyramid, and did be truly an Huge Machine”–From The Night Land
“Time-released aspirin…”–Richard C. Hoagland
Fear of the deep future (or the deep past) suggests a morally ambiguous universe that goes on without us. All activity within it continues without a care for human dreams or aspirations to heaven or a damning to hell. Grinding all into entropic detritus time with it’s continual unending and unforgiving forward motion invokes a sense of despair. It’s one thing that we die but, if meaning itself dies, this conjures up more complex ontological problems drowned by a simple one: that there is no meaning, the unknown rules supreme and that we exist in the deep past of some unholy future. Continue reading Dwellers on the Threshold: The “Night Land” and the “Anamnesic Imagination” Part 2–Janus and Time.→
