Fred Phillips
1278 Grand Concourse
Bronx, N.Y., 10456

To write enlightened literary criticism of horror literature is at once a
deliberate project and a labor of love.  My mad cousin's "Notes on Witchcraft"
were handed to me while I was still trying to major in English at downtown
Hunter; what an amazing transformation, what a profound effect the literature
of H. P. Lovecraft had on me.  The "Notes" are simply a list of book-titles,
names, words & phrases which my cousin jotted down while he was reading the
works of Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, & Algernon Blackwood, everything he couldn't
understand.  He wanted definitions for things like "Unaussprechlichen Kulten"
by von Junzt; Iren, City of the Pillars; halidom, coelenterates, "batrachian
people of Ponape" &c.  Three years ago, I began to seek definitions for these
strange & exotic terms, and discovered that the definitions required additional
definition, ad infinitum.  I began digging into witchcraft; this required a
broader background in theology, and of course, cultural anthropology and
classical archaeology.  The latter led me into ancient history, art history,
and even a side excursion into the classical literary criticism of Aristotle,
Horace and Longinus.  I decided to change my major from English to
anthropology.  I began to lay in dozens of secondary sources in linguistics,
paleontology, evolution and its impact on theology, folklore of the Middle
East, and dozens of novels & anthologies of horror literature, epic fantasy,
sword-&-sorcery, classical fantasy, and books on strange sects and cults.  I
beefed up my mythology section immensely...  I stopped reading fiction
completely, except for fantasy & horror.  I wished desperately that August
Derleth of Arkham House Books, which is the sole source of Lovecraftiana, and
virtually has a corner on the horror/fantasy market, would issue "The Shuttered
Room" again, and a collection of HPL's poetry, which is among some of the
finest I've ever read.

What it amounts to is that I'm taking the long way around, trying to gain
enough of a background as an antiquarian to produce enlightened literary
criticism of Lovecraft's horror literture, & perhaps eventually of horror
literature in general.  It is, as Heinlein says, akin to "swatting a mosquito
with an ax," but I cannot see anything obtaining from such an ambitious task
except profit:  if not in material, then perhaps in intellectual terms.  My
cousin insists, for instance, that he saw photographs in some unnamed copy of
the National Geographic of a sacrificial pool up in Macchu Picchu, the lost
city of the Incas, on the Urubamba River, which Lovecraft mentions in one of
his stories....  There is one incantation from "The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward", the "pythonicum salamandrae", of which Haywood P. Norton, one of our
eminent authorities on the occult, was able to give me only a fleeting, cursory
translation.  I am unsatisfied; I'm sure my cousin would have wanted to know
whether the "pythonicum" is actually an extant diabolical incantation, or
whether Lovecraft, as he was perfectely capable of doing, simply invented it
for the purpose of his novel.  I myself suspect the latter theory, although it
would not susrprise me to learn that HPL had obtained the Church's permission
to go rooting about in one or another of its restricted grimoires; from the way
he wrote, and according to his obviously superior intelligence, and enviable
classical education, he appears to have been quite well steeped in the lore of
language, history, and science, well enough to be able to rattle off an
incantation in Latin off the top of his head, if need be, to suit a particular
story.  I'd do it myself if I had the Latin... why not?  Once you start plowing
through encyclopedias of witchcraft & black magic, you become familiar, after a
while, with the standard types & varieties of demonological incantations; any
one could do it.  The church doesn't like it, and who can blame them?  Yet I've
only met one person who purports to take that sort of thing seriously, and she
is as mad as a hatter -- madder.  ...Father B, who asked me not to use his
name, translated the "AILA HIMEL ADONAIS ZEBAOTH CADAS YESERAIJE HARALIUS"
incantation as "a filthy corruption of a passage from the Book of Isaiah",
saying it was not in Hebrew, but in Aramaic.  According to the good Father, the
incantation reads, "HAIL TO THEE, O LORD OF THE FLIES (ZEBAOTH; BEELZEBUB,) WHO
CALLS UP THE YETZER-HARA (FLAME; SPIRIT; ESSENCE) OF THE SOUL."


      [pp. 50 - 53, "Your 5 Cents Worth," Letter #3, NO-EYED MONSTER #13, Winter
                                                               1967/Spring 1968]