The Hellier Lovecraft Connection
Part 4: Putting It All Together
I’ve written several love letters in the past, published here, that bridge the gap between gaming and gnosis. I’ve also written about the many esoteric notes that the documentary series, Hellier, hits during their investigation but misses, due to the crew just not being aware of this detail or that. But now I bring to you a breakdown of what might be my personal grand unification theory. All my favorite shit rolled into one ambitious study: Gaming, Hellier, the occult, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Because I can’t just can’t be concise about this stuff and Substack eventually drops a gavel and tells me to cut the shit and get to the point, I’m going to break this up into several parts.
Part 1: Delta Green
Part 2: The Whisperer In Darkness
Part 3: Crowley, Lovecraft, and Grant
Part 4: Putting It All Together
Important note: I am in no way associated with the Hellier production, Planet Weird, etc. I’m just a fan with a substack and too much time on their hands. These articles are in no way endorsed by the Newkirks.
Part 4: Putting It All Together
Lovecraft wasn’t exactly known for caves. His best-known work concerns the settings he was most familiar with: seasides and port towns. So the connection that I’m trying to make here may seem remote at best but in the previous article about The Whisperer In Darkness, you have to admit that for a 90-page story that ends with a dude running away in terror, there’s more than enough to disqualify them from being mere coincidences. Not to put too fine a point on it but let’s review:
Desperate letters from a person under siege by an unearthly force that they lack the language to properly explain.
The things are very hard to capture proof of in any meaningful way.
They communicate in colors and feelings. Recall Dana and the God Helmet?
Holy shit! They’re coming for me.
Radio silence.
New correspondence from an entirely different person who thinks it’d be just great if you looked into all this weirdness. Here’s some clues to help you, by the way.
Be careful of who you talk to. I think the locals are in on it.
Canisters. Cans.
Maybe some kind of nefarious plot? Question mark?
CRAZY BUSINESS HAPPENS!
And in the first part of this series, I point out that from any-given bystander’s point of view, these similarities are numerous enough and close enough to strike a chord that seems like plagiarism. But the point that I’m trying to make with all this is that by the criteria of the third article, plagiarism is the furthest thing from the truth. The missing piece in the ongoing Hellier fascination is the Lovecraft connection.
What are the forces they’re dealing with? Who are the hidden personalities? Why can’t they find any trace of the folks who may or may not be allies? The Hellier mystery is a triangle and no symbol could be more apropos.
Hellier
Hellier starts off as something that is very much its own thing. Cave Goblins, from the border with West Virginia and all along the southern tier of Kentucky, are a sort of local legend in a state that is loaded with crazy and sometimes troubling local legends. The David Christie emails are certainly not the first time that the goblins have made an appearance in Kentucky as The Hopkinsville Goblin Attacks are a much better-known phenomenon. But the story moves in a remarkably different direction, becoming much more than another cryptid documentary with the introduction of Terry R. Wriste.
Hellier To Crowley
All of a sudden, we’re talking about Aleister Crowley and The Book of the Law. Hellier takes on an occult dimension that I don’t think anyone was expecting. When the second season rolls out, we’re in extremely strange territory, chasing Indrid Cold, speculating on what the nature of Terry Wriste might be if the anemic trail of clues he left aligns so closely with the anemic trail of clues left behind by Indrid Cold. Everyone starts running words and phrases through the UFOnaut Cipher, there’s Pan, Green Man allusions, and a more than substantial potential that communities around these caves may be working with the dark forces that lie within. The latter part is a subject of the documentary that Planet Weird is obviously hesitant to pursue and will likely never follow up on but it plays a significant factor in the final episodes of the second season.
Crowley to Lovecraft
As Greg and company figure out in the proceedings of their document, magic is the key to cracking the mystery but what magic will do it and do you even want to open the door? Going back to the Whisperer In Darkness, once Wilmarth starts receiving type-written letters from Akeley, the tenor of the conversation changes and as we later learn it’s because they’re not really from Akeley, they’re from the Mi-Go, trying to manipulate Wilmarth into doing what they need him to do. I can’t help but notice the shift in tone of communications in Hellier once Wriste becomes the sender. Folks of the Paramuseum discord all seem to move in unison on the idea that Christie and Wriste are the same person and that they are likely not a person at all but something else. That may be but my point remains: the emails may have come from a force that’s not human and needs human intervention in order to fully open the door. Not exactly new information there. Discussions of the show frequently go to places with panicky people advising them to ditch the investigation, altogether because, like I said of the Mauve Zone, there be dragons. But if they must, and I honestly hope that they do, the key to moving forward and finding more answers lies in working what Kenneth Grants calls The Necronomicon Gnosis.
Let’s run some UFOnaut ciphers on Mythos entities.
Nyarlathotep = 155 = “be thou Hadit”
Fuck me, this one hits so hard. Hadit is the voice of the second book of Liber AL Vel Legis and is one of the primary godforms of Thelema. Hadit is visually represented by the winged sun in the Stele of Revealing that is often associated with Horus. In practical magical terms, Hadit is an expression of mankind’s perfect inner self and as a single point of infinite possibility in spacetime. Some folks call this chaos, the uncollapsed wave of probability. Quantum superposition. Hadit is:
…the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star…
In the process of researching, meditating on, and writing these articles it occurred to me in the framework of Necronomicon Gnosis that Aiwass was likely Crowley’s personal experience with Lovecraft’s Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep. Setting aside the many faces of Nyarlathotep and referring only to Lovecraft’s original characterization:
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh.
Nyarlathotep goes around to all these rotten cities and performs tremendous acts of magic and uses strange technologies to entrance the people who end up following him like a messiah until they forget about the world around them and cease to be. Of course, in Lovecraft’s opinion, this was horrible but in a Thelemic sense, it sounds like he’s describing Crowley, or at least Crowley following the apocalypse of Aiwass and the ultimate goal of gnostic ascension.
In the final pages of The Whisperer In Darkness, Lovecraft suggests that the being that wore the face of Akeley was Nyarlathotep. In his many forms, Nyarlathotep is a sort of Lovecraftian Satan. It fucks with mankind simply because it can and gets a lot of yuks from it and since Hellier makes a lot of noise about troublesome trickster spirits, no spirit in the Mythos is as troublesome or trickster as Nyarlathotep. In Patrick Harpur’s crucial book of parapsychology theory, Daimonic Reality, one of the ideas he comes to about why these forces do the things they do is simply because they can.
Other notable 155 phrases: my chosen ones, mysteries, lord of Thebes, the knowledge, I am stronger, joyous death is, Ra Hoor Khu is with, abomination, I am powerful, God enthroned, is of the moon.
Lastly, this 155 phrase should raise eyebrows of anyone familiar with the Hellier legacy: RED INK AND BLACK
Ink and Black is a phrase that comes up a lot in Hellier. It appears in the earliest emails to Greg from Terry Wriste and then Karl finds the phrase while reading Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts toward the end of the book where Allen published an interview he did with Wriste. The subject of the conversation at this point is about how Wriste claimed to have found Indrid Cold using the cipher and met him and Allen asks him if he was a black man, to which Wriste replies in the affirmative. But they clarify a bit and mean that Cold was a man of dark complexion which I think is consistent with Woodrow Derenberger’s original description of Cold, as well. Lovecraft describes Nyarlathotep in the poem as a man of swarthy complexion and Derenberger described Cold as a man who used all sorts of crazy-ass technologies, some of which appeared to be like magic. He also told Woodrow that he
came from a country far weaker than yours
…as though this was some kind of reassurance that he meant no harm or meant to lull Derenberger into a sense of security. But Cold was always hanging around, smiling, being a gigantic weirdo.
Either Indrid Cold is an avatar of Nyarlathotep or Wriste is.
Yog-Sothoth = 108 = “Purple”
This one’s not terribly chock full o’ mysteries but it’s the second time that the word purple shows up in a cipher return. I didn’t include it in the Nyarlathotep one because the returned phrase was “purple is” and on the surface that doesn’t seem important or make much sense but I’ve made a lot of hay about Grant’s Mauve Zone and it struck me as significant that the Mauve Zone, being a sort of place between the places was worth mentioning since mauve is a light purple color and Yog-Sothoth, a mighty god-being on its own is a sort of gatekeeper that opens the way to the ultimate truth, Azathoth
Other notable 108 phrases: I am above, of the world, is the lord, whom I send, mistake, old time, is pure, a mask of sorrow, veiling, of the khu, all tongues, soul to me
Cthulhu = 81 = “To lie”
About Cthulhu, Lovecraft famously wrote:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The most notable other 81 return from the cipher is the Khephra which was Crowley’s read on Khepri, an Egyptian sun god that was subordinate to Ra. Khepri’s appearance wasn’t a giant fish man or anything. He was actually a scarab or a dude with a scarab for a head who rose and fell with the sun. I feel like I’m reaching a bit with this one but not by much since there’s a lot going on here about stars, rising and lying in wait. There’s also the fact, again, that Cthulhu wasn’t one of the Outer Gods but was a subordinate to them.
Azathoth = 73 = “is no god”
I talk a good deal about Azathoth in part 3, linking it with the gnostic Demiurge, the false god at the center of creation. It thinks it’s God because it has no reason to think otherwise but the central knowing of gnosticism is that even though it created us, we are not actually of the Demiurge. The divine spark within us is sourced from the true God across the abyss and for as long as we remain either ignorant or in denial of this, we keep reincarnating as stupid dumb baby on this living hell planet. Lovecraft’s read on The Demiurge was Azathoth if we’re following the logical thread I’m laying out and the key difference here is that Azathoth doesn’t really think it’s anything. It’s blind and sleeping but it creates as it dreams. One way or the other, we’re talking about the gnostic Demiurge and in spite of its own feelings about itself, it’s not God.
Other notable 73 phrases: by Aiwass, power, a curse, thy will, damned, cast down, Ra’s seat, forge, of lust
Lovecraft to Hellier
The Hellier story reveals itself in the same terms and timing as Albert Wilmarth’s adventures in Vermont in The Whisperer In Darkness. The goblins don’t look anything like the descriptions of the Mi-Go but that’s not the point. Richard Shaver wrote about cave monsters from beyond as well and just like I’m insinuating here, he dressed up something that he found to be terrifyingly real as fiction and where most people hand-wave Shaver as a lunatic, it has to be noted that none of the people of Lovecraft’s Mythos that tangle with the blasphemous beyond ever end up in a good place. Things didn’t exactly work out for Wilbur Whateley or Asenath Waite, after all. And those being fictional characters is entirely beside the point since just about everyone who made it their business to deal directly with the paranormal in this world have also fallen into ruin for their attempts to pull back the curtain. Folks who have made it a point to work the extrmely Lovecraftian Voudon Gnostic Workbook of Michael Bertiaux have also gone notoriously bananas in the process.
There’s a troubling number of loose ends from start to finish in Hellier. I suppose that’s to be expected in a documentary about a phenomenon that can never be conclusively proven to be true and the “no goblins, one star” meme is just a fact of the paranormal but the finale of the document in its current form suffers from the distinct feeling that there’s avenues to be explored still but no wind in the sails. Everyone seems to recognize this but can’t quite make a connection that’ll lead to the next part. The suggestion at the end of the series is that everyone just has to play the waiting game and hope that Terry surfaces somewhere and sends a new email. It’s like they have a puzzle with only two thirds of the pieces. But I’m here to tell you that the last third of the puzzle lies in a mystical examination of H.P. Lovecraft by way of Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian current.
I’ve always wondered what the use of having access to the Mauve Zone would be or why someone would want to actually go there but it brings me back to some of the topics I’ve read about in Patrick Harpur and Jacques Vallee and being that I’m a magician with a heavy investment in Kabbalah I’ve spent some time wondering where these nasty trickster spirits come from because they’re not terribly compatible with the Sephiroth. But if the Qliphoth were to provide some sort of origin for them and the Mauve Zone were to be a means that connects the Tunnels of Set to this world, then all of a sudden things start to make sense in a weird way. If you don’t mind me patting myself on the back, I feel like I may have found a consistent means to magically meet these troublesome forces on their turf. Parapsychologists, demonologists, and exorcists have always been at a disadvantage because there’s no unifying framework to push back on these forces with and we all have to hang out and hammer on whatever door to the subtle realms we can find with crude blunt instruments.
Throughout Hellier there’s a good deal of talk about liminal spaces being the places where strangeness tends to occur and I can’t help but make a mental connection between Grant’s Tunnels of Set and the physical cave tunnels that Hellier’s goblins emerge from. You can’t find the Goblins in the caves because they’re not really there. But the Mauve Zone, being a sort of intermediary frontier, assisted by rituals performed on this side to open a door could bridge the two places and allow something to pass through. Why? Who the fuck knows, man? Aliens are weird.
No more Hymns to Pan. Set aside the feeling that evoking the forces from a series of pulp fiction short stories is ridiculous and take it as seriously as Grant did because you’re not really evoking Nyarlathotep when you do so. You’re evoking the spirit that came to Crowley and Lovecraft, simultaneously, in that form and while one of them thought it was fake and made a great monster in a poem, the other regarded it as an avatar of his Holy Guardian Angel and you really only need one of them to take it seriously in this case.
The way forward lies in The Necronomicon.