For anyone interested: there is a post on deep-dwellers and the 13th Warrior (based on Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead), the Mistmare and Aer in the archive:
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004299.html

Also on Pazuzu:
http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003889.html

Plus, some excellent comments by Craig and Thistle.

And this post at Undercurrent:
http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/archives/000346.html

Sorry to psychologize this, but in the spirit of recent events, I might mention I was thinking of the article "THE DEEP DWELLERS" as a mythological rendering of a society where resentment is generalized. Following O'Keefe, the first magical act is not a witchcraft, but the accusation of witchcraft. Only once a witch is identified and named can countermagics (black magics, really the first magics) be proscribed and mobilized. "Witches" pop up wherever traditional reciprocal relationships of a milieu are in decay. Where I refuse another the respect and dignity traditionally afforded them, the easiest thing to do to justify this treatment is to point the finger at them and accuse them of being the source of the misery I perceive within them. ("I" here is a general "I.") The crux here is that their "misery" itself may be wholly illlusory but merely something I have read into their ambiguous presence. In response, I dedice to "give them something to cry about," thus affirming my suspicions.

The meat of the article occurs under the heading "Perspectives," where Mott enumerates the characteristics of the deep dwellers (whose very existence might be read here as a generally introverted relationship with the Milieu). I won't recount the whole list, but summarize a little. Their inhumanity, immortality, secrecy, noxiousness makes it impossible for them to be dealt with directly. There is here an air of utter authority which cannot be petioned by any (conventional) means. Yet their possession of "superior technologies" and the coveting of these technologies (for survival in the face of their telepathic onslaught) makes necessary some kind of engagement, either violent or magical. Moreover, their telepathic mind control faculties provide the justification for engagement: they started it without lifting a finger. Their intercourse with surface dwellers, their interbreeding with "us" evince the trace memories of a former state of reciprocity, a memory which will not be erased by time or willful ignorance.

The accusation of witchcraft is most often meant to offload the psychic pressure brewing in individuals and institutions as a result of their own accelerating disconnection from society (both the Inquisitional and Protestant witch hunts occured at times when respective authorities were in the process of rapidly centralizing capital). "I only did to them what they told me in my dreams they were going to do to me (because of what I was already doing to them to keep them from doing it to me)." (Listening to an audio rendering of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths recently, I learned that all the gods' most strident oaths are made at the river Styx, the river of forgetfulness.)

As more and more real capital finds its way into the "hands" of corporations (corporate nonpersons, legal fictions) and capital itself becomes more abstract and speculative, resentment becomes generalized precisely because no one person is any longer left holding the bag. There's no person left to blame, nobody left to point the finger at. Utopianism, the desire to extract just enough resources from the system in order to escape the system, actually feeds the system (the system feeds on hunger). Scarcity as self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hence O'Keefe's and Ellul's contentions the West is a magical, not religious. society. There is little any longer except battles between sorcerors. "Every man for himself and God against all."

Entombed deep in stygian forgetfullness, Cthulhu is an introverted God and a God of introverts; unconsciously, remotely programming global strife, calling forth a condition of universal individuated exile; a face with uncountable tendrils, each reaching into nothingness.

If you enjoyed The Deep Dwellers, check out the entire book for more detail:

http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/caverns

Related website:

http://home.earthlink.net/~mottimorph/SubterraneanIntro2.html

Wm. Michael Mott,

Thanks very much for the links and additional information ... very much appreciated.

hope to see you around. Thank you.

Good point made!

Good point made!

Hi. May be this is BAD, but is something different: