On pain of sickness

My entire household has come down with what was, at first, persistent coughs. This drove us into the industrial, medical complex, where a really, very nice doctor diagnosed two ear infections, a sinus infection, and bronchitis for myself. While we were there, they also gave us an invisible party gift: a violent twenty-four-hour stomach flu.

The kids and wife had it in succession, slept for a day or so, and were back at it. The pharmiko-potions prescribed by the really, very nice doctor began working, and then the flu turned its eyeless head and looked at me.

I had all these fantastic plans to blankly stare at social media and drink rum with the saints on my shelf, maybe watch some Dave Chappelle… Alas, this bug took its turn in my body, and instead, I was literally transported out of time into a plane of pain and suffering. This flu had me so violently ill that literally, in the middle of a wave of nausea, my thoughts turned towards the shamanic initiatory experience. I felt like this must be what it is like to be magically initiated, truly initiated. I went to bed after the first wave with these thoughts in my head.

As I lay in this twilight realm, this living Hellraiser mattress scene, my thoughts inexplicably turned to every gross food item I had eaten in my life and every gut-churning quick rollercoaster motion and looking over the parapet wall of a high building I had ever experienced. It was ludicrous; it was as if the virus had not only control of my body but was attacking my mind as well, using it to initiate the next attack quickly. Not wanting to experience a repeat (at least not so soon) of the violation that had just occurred, I focused my thoughts on the only thing I could think of that calmed both my mind and body: an ice-cold glass of water. My thoughts would move away from my psychic glass of water, and I would bring it back into focus. I managed to lie comfortably for quite a while. The next wave and the one after that were inevitable, but the timeless space in between was more comfortable.

In my late twenties, I was given the opportunity to ingest peyote and spend an evening on Papago ruins next to the Salt River near Tempe, Arizona. That wasn’t my first psychedelic experience by any means; my troubled twenties were full of them, but it promised to be a more profound one due to the setting and the sacredness of the vehicle. From what I understand, most people react somewhat similarly to what I’ve just described as the gate they walk through leading to the realm of Mescalito. For whatever reason, that wasn’t the case for me. The others who partook of the sacrament had this reaction, and I sat on the sidelines, watching their initiation, while I passed into the diamond-shaped atom twilight unaffected. The experience stuck with me for years, and it was the first one of these experiences where I felt the presence of the ally inside the molecule, where a conversation took place between something other than myself. I always thought, however, in the back of my head that somehow I hadn’t gotten it quite right.

It took me longer to recover than the other members of my family. I remained weak; my head fogged, my body ruined. This period, maybe more than the event itself, felt like what a psycho-magical initiation was supposed to be. A slow building back to a healthy state, similar to the one you lived in before but certainly different. I can’t shake the feeling I had while in the grips of these violent ‘waves’ that I was being permanently altered both physically and psychically.

I can’t count how many times, in the grips of other molecules, I’ve been broken down to an emotional speck, heard voices in Flatland, have been altered psychically. These were never really accompanied by a physical ‘altering,’ though. I’m convinced now that this is what is required to be truly initiated. For many cultures, the physical altering is all that is required and is the catalyst for the psychic component of initiation. American Indians have known this for thousands upon thousands of years. Fasting, exposing oneself at a young age to the extremes of nature, the becoming of a creature that the Great Spirit, the Creator, as my late Ojibwe mentor would say, Gichi-Manidoo, becoming a creature that Gichi-Manidoo can take pity on, to become a pitiable creature worthy of help, these are individuals experiencing initiation.

This is not what thousands of youths today eating ‘E’ at Coachella or Burning Man are achieving. This is not a modern experience. I know now, that’s the point.

I was privileged to study under a Bad River Ojibwe elder during my undergraduate education. Primarily, my studies were linguistic, but with language, you cannot avoid culture. My teacher, I’ll call him Buck here, primarily because there are traditional taboos for speaking an individual name after they walk on, or rather, there is a need to change how their name is said, but also it is a bit too painful to say his name out loud for me still. All last year, as I was learning about Western magic, I saw so many parallels to what I learned under Buck or what he forced me to learn. You see, when I came into his class, I still possessed a fairly hardcore materialist mindset. Part of that setting of the mind was a mission to maintain an anthropological detachment to the cultural portion of the language I was learning and the people I was learning about. That didn’t quite work out for me, and I can look back now on more than a few opportunities that I missed while operating under these illusions, opportunities for growth and connection.

I took three formal semesters of Ojibwe (prior to being asked to join the local language community round table), Buck’s normal two semesters, and a hard-won third semester of independent study. Each semester, at some point, Buck would roll out this ancient videotape of Jim Jackson speaking on the Ojibwe Vision Quest and other spirito-cultural subjects. While Jim Jackson’s videos aren’t available widely, another fellow whose talks are more widely available goes by the name of Larry Gibag. Gibag’s teachings are authentic and very much in line with what I learned from Buck and the community at the Congregation of the Great Spirit. There is a lot of resonance here with some of the things taught in the Hygromantiea around magical timing and when to pick specific herbs.

On pain of sickness and fasting, let us move to examine the Lovecraft tale for this piece, Pickman’s model. From what I understand or have come to understand, Pickman’s Model is a fairly infamous short story and one beloved by many a Lovecraft scholar. This was my first read-through of it (or the first that I remember, anyway), and its differences from Lovecraft’s other work are palpable.

This is one of the few tales where Lovecraft speaks on visual art. I had previously seen him only as a man of letters. It’s clear that his cultural DNA extended to the visual as well. As I’ve done before with the authors (both real and unreal) that Lovecraft mentions, I’ll record those artists that he invokes in Pickman. Here he makes mention of Fuseli, Dore, Sime, and Angarola as being analogous to the infamous Pickman.

Sidney Sime is of particular interest. He was Lord Dunsany’s primary illustrator. It makes sense that Lovecraft would be a fan since he took so much literary influence from Dunsany. Sime’s illustration, ‘The Ultimate God’ has become a strong favorite of mine with its strong resonation with my primary ally, Sante Muerte. Anthony Angorola, an Italian immigrant who studied in Chicago and was a contemporary of Lovecraft, is also of keen interest. There is not much of his work online, but if you can find a copy of ‘The Kingdom of Evil’ by Ben Hecht, you can view some of his illustrations.

Pickman’s Model has the familiar anonymous narrator speaking of the antagonist to a compatriot whilst getting quite drunk through the course of the narrative. The first bit that I picked up on in the story follows:

“You know,” [Pickman] said, “there are things that won’t do for Newbury Street — things that are out of place here, and that can’t be conceived here, anyhow. It’s my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won’t find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn’t Boston — it isn’t anything yet because it’s had no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they’re the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove, and I want human ghosts — the ghosts of beings highly organized enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw.”

I found this to be a really curious exploration of ‘spirits of place’ in an urban context that I had not yet seen Lovecraft explore. The idea of the urban environment’s ‘attracting local spirits’ makes a kind of intuitive sense to me. Probably because I tend towards an ecological model of the spirit world; that is, I see spirits as part of the overall natural world and not distinct from it (and therefore somehow above the way the rest of the natural world works). A modern city, a suburb, or any recently built series of wooden and concrete white ape caves takes a while to attract wildlife back into it. They take time to adapt to the new surroundings, carve out ecological niches, and learn how to take advantage of them. What Lovecraft is getting at above, I believe, is more of the same. Spirits of place, local spirits, exist in the world but stay away from our newly constructed environments. It takes time for them to expand their spirit ecology niches back into the spaces that we’ve claimed.

The narrator’s description of Pickman and his conscious choice to live in older and ostensibly ‘harder’ parts of Boston reminds me quite a bit of Austin Spare. While there isn’t a way to connect a direct vector between Spare and Pickman at the time the story was written, it is difficult not to see it when we view the tale in a more modern context.

Lovecraft names the infamous Cotton Mather again, referencing his work, Magnolia and Wonders of the Invisible World. This quote I found interesting:

“[Cotton] Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony...”

It leads my thoughts to how witchcraft can be used to free one from the mundane and how the mundane is viewed as a type of prison.

The narrator shifts from recounting his adventures with Pickman to quoting directly the man’s own thoughts:

“There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers — and I tell you, people knew how to live and how to enlarge the bounds of life in the old times! This wasn’t the only world a bold and wise man could know — faugh!”

Which I view as more criticism of the materialist mindscape and championing of the ‘Other,’ those that see past society. I think Lovecraft, even though he was so proper and allegedly part of proper society in Providence, was really deeply a member of the counter-culture and identified much closer with the marginalized than those critics that take his prose in a modern, decontextualized sense would have you believe. and then, the most interesting part of Pickman’s model, shifting back to our narrator and his description of Pickman’s paintings:

“There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith used to free the blood. The backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels, ancient paneled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favorite scene.” against these backgrounds, we are described what Lovecraft labels as ‘Changelings,’ Dog-man hybrid beings evolved from mortal children stolen as infants, their evolution coming from feeding on bodies and from the liminal places, as described in the quote above, that they live.

The Necronomicon Files by Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III contains an essay entitled ‘Lovecraftian Magic - Sources and Heirs’ that speaks to Lovecraft’s Changelings when referencing how A Thousand and One Arabian Nights was a great influence on the author:

“What would Lovecraft have learned from such studies? He would have learned about a fascinating menagerie of Islamic genies and monsters: a sub-species of djinn known as the ghoul that dwells in cemeteries and festered places and eats human flesh, an Arab werewolf (or perhaps were-hyena) Called the Qutrub that is a man or woman who transforms into a beast at night and eats corpses.”

Gonce goes on to call out Pickman’s Model specifically and the Qutrub as the likely source for the Changelings, but in the same breath, he quotes Lovecraft as being relieved that his personal studies moved from the world of the Arabian Nights and into a more Graeco-Egyptian context. This makes me wonder if Lovecraft wasn’t also exposed to beings such as Hermanubis and the other cynocephalic creatures and Gods in the Graeco-Egyptian world. I find that Lovecraft’s Changelings are the strongest thread we can pull on when baking Pickman’s Model into our new model of Lovecraftian magic, of Lovecraft’s oeuvre as a grimoire.

Pickman himself is too strong an archetype to ignore, and I find that he resonates the most with one of the most powerful and primal trumps, The Magician. Ettellia’s ‘Le Magician Ou Le Battler’ combines the qualities of the Magician and the Fool. The keyword for both the upright and the reversed on this card is the same, Maladie, bringing us full circle with the themes in this week’s exploration. Maladie, from late 13c. Old French means ‘sickness, illness, and disease.’ It is also related to the PIE root, *ghabh-, which means to give or receive and by extension from PIE is related to the words inhabit, exhibition, exhibit, and binnacle, or ‘little dwelling place.’ Pickman, the artist, is banned from exhibiting his work and is described as inhabiting a squalid and dark dwelling deep in Boston’s North End.

Pulling meaning from Benebell Wen’s Holistic Tarot we find that this card represents creative power and the ‘limitless capabilities of the mind when it is concentrated’. That is another apt description of Pickman. He is a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, or in Pickman’s case, the mundane and the fantastic. Benebell mentions that the Magician is an individual that ‘can grasp the knowledge of the universe.’ Pickman and his knowledge of the world of the Changelings, the greater chaos spirits that visit him in his subterranean studio, and how one needs to find both the physical and psychic limits of experience to gain such knowledge and apply it, is such an individual.

In the fading light of understanding, I saw that initiation—through sickness, spirit, or art— can carve deep into our beings. Like Pickman, the artist shunned for his grotesque truths, I navigated the shadowy corridors of the unseen. The journey, marked not by the clarity of day but by the ambiguity of twilight, revealed my true self, shaped by trials and revelations akin to the strange figures in Pickman's paintings. I was left not with answers but with a profound sense of the depths I had plumbed and the mysteries that remained.

The essence of this journey mirrored in Lovecraft's tales, was not in the arrival but in the transformation along the way. The sickness that ravaged my body, akin to the psychic metamorphosis of Pickman's model, revealed more than the eye could see. It spoke to a deeper change, a reshaping of the soul's fabric. In the quiet aftermath, as we pieced together our fragmented selves, we found that what we had lost in physical strength, we had gained in more elusive wisdom—a knowledge whispering of worlds beyond, of truths too vast for the uninitiated mind. This is the same result of extreme fasting in the wilderness, of begging for pity from the Great Spirit.

in the final revelation conjured by my violent shamanic flu, much like the Magician in the Tarot, I grasped the true extent of transformation. The journey mirrored that of Pickman, the artist in Lovecraft's tale, who, like the Magician, wielded his brush to manifest hidden realities. Each stroke on the canvas was a testament to the Magician's principle: the power to bring the ethereal into the tangible world. My ordeal, akin to Pickman's descent into the macabre, was not merely a struggle but a profound act of creation, bridging worlds. In this melding of the mystical and the mundane, I find the initiation complete, akin to Pickman, who transcended the boundaries of the known, my spirit now bears the indelible mark of the Magician's transformative wisdom, or at least, its beginnings.