Great ideas for a site. I wonder whether your lionization of Lovecraft as 'the archetype of a hyperstitional practitioner' doesn't say more about your own prejudices (Miskatonic University indeed!) than anything else. Fogive me for defending Tolkien, but by your own criteria:

1. Tolkien's fictional system is massively collectivized: Ignoring the use of the entire Tolkien universe in spin-off games, films, etc. I would argue that the constant use of the trilogy format in fantasy literature is a direct consequence of LotR.

2. Even ignoring all the idiots out there learning elvish, orcish, etc. The fact that there are other idiots deploying elvish magic (the most well known probably being the Knights of Elrond) and who knows what else from the Tolkien universe, surely puts him up there with HPL in the hyperstitional archetype stakes.

I'd like to betray my own prejudices and suggest Michael Moorcock as an archetypal hyperstitionalist bacause of his opening up of the Jerry Cornelius stories to anybody who wanted to write them, and the entire Chaos Magic thing, which would never have got off the ground without Elric yelling "Blood and souls for Arioch!" Also, Enid Blyton for the fact that her stories are re-written constantly to suit the times (no more gollywogs,etc.), and David Tibet's championing of Noddy as gnostic icon.

However, I guess the real Hyperstional archetye (at least in modern literature) would be Sherlock Holmes, who has been written about by many people since Conan Doyle, is believed to be a historical character by some, and has led to vast numbers of people being unable to distinguish 'deduction' from 'induction'.

>>> However, I guess the real Hyperstional archetye (at least in modern literature) would be Sherlock Holmes, ...

Perhaps some misunderstandings about Hyperstition. You can check the polytics section.

>>>Tolkien's fictional system is massively collectivized...

but it remains strictly as a type of racial collectivity (promoted by the political segregation of boundaries as racial fronts), its population dynamics anthropomorphically avoids to dissolve into a micro-population (or rather contagious population) which Lovecraft pushes toward a bacterial omega (perceiving population as epidemic and boundaries as zones of involuntary communication and not national frontlines). The recent semi-Tolkienian videogame series Warcraft3 is a remarkable example of how Tolkien’s collectivity is itself a repression toward epidemic populations of hyperstition and its particles. Mere COLLECTIVITY is not enough for a work to be hyperstitional.

>>>However, I guess the real Hyperstional archetye (at least in modern literature) would be Sherlock Holmes, who has been written about by many people since Conan Doyle

Again, Sherlock Holmes is the advertiser of the same macropolitical collectivity in fiction that tries to avoid all hyperstitional particles in real. it’s rather oversimplifying to consider Sherlock Holmes as a hyperstitional entity just because he has been conceived as an actualized entity. Holmes imperial body always remains intact when it traverses zones of fiction to real or the other way around.

“Doyle’s stories abound with threats to this national body. British literature of the 1980s often conflates biological and political threats, and Doyle, a doctor who had fought in South Africa, allows the two merge in Holmes’s adventures. When foreign germs and poisons are manipulated by vengeful malefactors in his fiction, the biological dangers are not a metaphor for political threats; they ARE political threats.” (Laura Otis, Membranes: metaphors of invasion in nineteenth-century literature, science and politics)

Many thanks for your comment.

Thanks for that; now I'm seriously confused. My main point about Holmes was tied to 'the practical deployment of the fictional system', i.e. the so-called science of deduction has been abstracted from the books and is explicitly taken up everywhere from police forces to murder mystery dinner parties. You would need to convince me why this differed in kind from the deployment of the Cthulhu mythos by various occult groups.

Whilst being extremely keen on Lovecraft for all sorts of reasons, I find myself resisting the claims you make for him here. You say of Tolkien:
'but it remains strictly as a type of racial collectivity (promoted by the political segregation of boundaries as racial fronts)'
I would suggest this applies equally to HPL. One only has to think of the constant references to various racial types, 'superstitious primitives' and so on. Although perhaps I am misunderstnding you.

I don't think I agree with this: 'Lovecraft pushes toward a bacterial omega', although I'd rather you explained it to me before I said anything else. I'm assuming that you are arguing for some form of contagion escaping via Lovecraft's fictional system.

Incidentally, I am certain that anything to do with Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian OTO is all about molar control than molecular contagion.

>>>You would need to convince me why this differed in kind from the deployment of the Cthulhu mythos by various occult groups.

The piece is not mine ... think we should wait for Linda to answer this.

>>>I would suggest this applies equally to HPL. One only has to think of the constant references to various racial types, 'superstitious primitives' and so on. Although perhaps I am misunderstnding you.

Well, I don’t think so ... while in HPL’s works, ‘collectivity’ may look racial but it’s absolutely contagious; populations and races agitate across a ‘Holocaust of Freedom’ (My favorite term from HPL) and this makes their races travel as particles (The old ones, infected vegetables, humans, etc.) rather than assemblages of entities (you can follow this line through works by Deleuze and Guattari and even Erik Davis on Lovecraft) ... in Lovecraft’s works everything has already started its journey to a kind of strategic parasitism mostly functioning on the side of a sinister germinal epidemic (I’d like to call it Germinal Death rather than Germinal Life). While in mere racial collectivism survival means an economical self-appropriated openness toward neighbors or the known outside (the architects of the racial boundaries) and its responsibility is to assemble a survival economy for the system to live as a race, but in contagious populations as in Lovecraft’s works, every population is already a feeding-ground for the Outsiders and things roaming in the Outside by becoming a strategic host for the incoming participations (pests, infections, diabolic particles, etc.) from the outside on its body and chemistry.

I think in racial collectivism OPENNESS is perceived as ‘being open to’ or rather a liberal politics of survival which can’t go further than the survival of the race, system , etc ... every participation coming from this economical openness is a platonic methexis, a coordinated, preprogrammed journey to a healthy coexistence; but in contagious populations openness functions on two planes of communication simultaneously, ‘being open to’ and ‘being laid cracked and butchered open’ (what we can see in Lovecraft’s works through races) which bring the whole panorama to the fold of anti-survivalist participation between races and populations. You can read more on these two planes of openness and how the second plane (being laid open) gets virally epidemic (which results in border collapse and meltdown) by checking this out: http://www.cold-me.net/text/meal.html

or http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=396 (more technical)

>>>Incidentally, I am certain that anything to do with Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian OTO is all about molar control than molecular contagion.

Again, let’s wait for Linda.

Once again, thank you for your interest on the topic.

btw, have you seen Carpenters In the Mouth of Madness? although bound to B-movie production styles but, it is a little known masterwork (Linda has posted the pictures from the movie). It is very controversial and complex in the term of opening the hyperstitional elements of Lovecraft’s works and how they function when hit the outside of fiction.

Yes, I know the film well. Thanks for the links.

You're welcome ... also on economical and radical modes of participation: http://www.cold-me.net/text/asianpeace.html (endnote 12)

John's comments provide an excellent occasion to clarify the concept of hyperstition.

I must say, John, I am happy to be accused of prejudice against Tolkien! However, my disqualifying him from being considered a hyperstitional practitioner cannot only be attributed to my distaste for quasi-fascist Whimso-Fantasy.

It is precisely because Tolkien's work is Fantasy (in an almost ideal-typical way) that it fails to be hyperstitional. Lovecraft's fictions neither reflect the world (as does traditional representational realism) nor do they stand apart from the world (as does Fantasy). Rather, their practices of enfolding, embedding and implexing disturb the conventional relationship between fiction and the world.

Hyperstition involves the production of unbelief. No-one believes in Middle Earth. But those who 'believe' in Sherlock Holmes do not bring us any closer to hyperstition. Hyperstition doesn't invite or solicit belief. It problematizes it.

Deleuze and Guattari point to this when they write, in 'How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?' that '[i]n the course of Castenada's books, the reader may begin to doubt the existence of the Indian Don Juan and many other things besides.' (ATP, 161; emphasis added.) Castenada is another exemplary hyperstitional practitioner.

Moorcock is another interesting case, for the reasons John suggests: collective authorship, and also the implexing of real world figures and situations into the fictional world (and conversely, the incursion of the fictional world into the world of the actual).

Reza: apropos Sherlock Holmes - the racial themes you identify are undeniably a constant presence in Doyle's stories, but what of the 'heavily fetishized archaic terror mixed with extreme racial paranoia' Echidna Stillwell sees in Lovecraft's work (see http://www.ccru.net/occultures/cclub.htm)?

I will be taking up the case of Sherlock Holmes again soon in a post on Philip Jose Farmer.

>>> but what of the 'heavily fetishized archaic terror mixed with extreme racial paranoia' Echidna Stillwell sees in Lovecraft's work?

Yes, I’ve read the correspondences. Maybe you should read these two pieces ‘A Good Meal’ (or the Feeding Project) at cold me (http://www.cold-me.net/text/meal.html) and my correspondences with Nick Land about the AOE and Zoroastrians’ Demons-paranoia (http://www.cold-me.net/mb/messages/230.html for example) .... and maybe this one: http://www.cold-me.net/mb/messages/65.html

I don’t deny this excessive paranoia in Lovecraft’s stories which have already produces a surplus value. The strategic consequences of this excessive superfluous ultra-paranoia are partly un-known to Western occultural / hyperstitional polytics, yet Zoroastrianism as the germ cell of monotheism has understood it a long time ago. Call it Omega-degree of paranoia, the ancient Persian cult of Druj- (The Mother of Abominations) realized that radical openness (as the radical butchery of horror) can merely be triggered via ‘STRATEGIC’ communications with the avatars of Horror (Druj- or Mother of Abominations) ... the way(s) to Druj is unimaginably pestilential that one melts and evaporates before reaching the horror; to engineer an artificial route, one must take a twisting way, not merely survivalist (since any economical survivalism is not enough to tolerate this horror) but a type of ultra-endurance, an omega-survival to reach the end of darkness. The omega-survival can merely be maintained by such an excessive paranoia that cannot be distinguished from Schizo-singularities, a paranoia that one should call Schizotrategy. Schizotrategy as an autonomous nervous system of this extreme paranoia -- as the cult of Druj realized -- identifies openness (and its immanent horror) not as ‘being open to’ (or I’M OPEN TO) (what can hardly named paranoia) which is nothing but an affordance bound to economical survivalism but ‘being laid cracked butchered open’ which is achieved via a schizotrategic (omega-degree of paranoia) participation with the outside and inside. To reach this schizotretegic plane of openness, one must develop the terrible lines of artificial paranoia (overhealth) and disseminate it through boundaries, bodies, etc. ... strategically developing A Good Meal, a decoy, a prey and a receiver for the Xenosignals and hunters of the Outside; exotically attracting (seducing?) what Zoroastrians call Druj to rush in. A similar schizotrategic line used by the cult of Druj for permanently sabotaging Zoroastrianism and its monotheistic lineage. This Omega-degree of paranoia at the same time enables the emergence of a Xenochemical Insider (the Hell within) propelling its host toward radical openness of Horror. In the same way that the cult of Druj perceived this extreme paranoia as both an awakening and feeding ritual for the Mother of Abominations, Lovecraft intentionally or unintentionally (it’s a horrible naivety to speak about intention here since strategy hyperstitionally blackens everything) engineered similar schizotrategic lines within his works oozing to the outside inevitably.

The cult of Druj: “When it comes to darkness, one must think strategically.”