We know there is broad cynicism toward religion here; after all the Abrahamic (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) religions seem awfully simple and emotional. However, there is a whole world of spiritual belief out there which is not metaphysical dualism, neoplatonism, or universalism.

As a genre that is both passionate and logical, metal stands suspended forever between primitive pagan mysticism and modern scientific knowledge, sort of like Advaita Vedanta and other forms of philosophical religion. It can never participate in the illusion, but it seeks a truth beyond the visible.

If it has literary prophets, two of its most important are the Romantics who joined ancient occultism with modern science fiction to make a type of new mythology. The first of these, H.P. Lovecraft, created “cosmic horror” that was both atheistic and platonist:

Though Lovecraft separately re-imagined these two streams of elite and popular magic, he achieved his unique vision of the occult in part by promiscuously commingling them. In “The Dunwich Horror,” for example, Wilber Whateley and his isolated rural family are declared to be of degenerate stock, and practice strange rituals on the sinister Sentinel Hill, topped by an altar-like stone and featuring caches of ancient, possibly Indian bones. At the same time, Whateley needs to get the words of one his invocations exactly right, so he travels to Miskatonic University in order to compare their Latin edition of the Necronomicon to the fragmented Dee version he possesses. In Lovecraft’s world, learned magic unleashes atavistic and prehistoric powers rather than hierarchies of angels or devils; as such, he is able to depict an ancient but vital left hand path that is free of Satanism or Christian demonology. On the other side of the coin, Lovecraft’s primitive cults, including the sort of exotic tribes that haunt the anthropological imaginary, are characterized by their ongoing relationship with the ultimate forces of the cosmos.

Later entering popular culture as Erich von Daniken’s “ancient astronaut” theory, Lovecraft’s atavistic science-fictional cosmology allowed his fictions to undermine the progressive Enlightenment view of religious history popularized by Tylor and Frazer while still upholding the scientific course of civilization. The savage mysteries that animate the most primitive human cults are no longer the result of ignorant and neurosis but instead encode actual truths about the cosmos, including powerful extraterrestrial entities and dimensions of reality—like Einsteinean space-time and the non-Euclidean geometry used to describe it—that early 20th century astrophysics is only beginning to understand.

Lovecraft visualized the emergence of ancient creatures who existed in a state beyond death or life arising much like nature does: from the formless chaos. This contrasted the Abrahamic view of another perfect world but fit in more with the pagan outlook.

It turns out that J.R.R. Tolkien also had occult influences:

In the years since I first encountered The Notion Club Papers (NCPs) I have read much about some of the groupings that constituted White (Christian) Magic in England – and the various societies in a tradition that goes back to the Golden Dawn at the turn of the 19th-20th century, through Dion Fortune in the early-mid 20th century, and to Gareth Knight in the late 20th century and his death only a few years ago.

There are many indications that – even if not self-consciously so – the Notion Club, which seems to have begun as a literary club, has come to function, more and more, as a Magical Society – as its members develop methods for attaining the altered states of consciousness by which they become aware of, and influenced by, the society and events of a remote and indeed mythical past.

Since the magical techniques are described from a distinctly positive perspective, and in pursuit of aims of which Tolkien approved; it seems that Tolkien was implicitly (although he tended publicly to deny this) far more positive concerning the nature and possibilities of “magic” in the modern world, than might otherwise have been suspected.

His pagan leanings may have come in through the branch of Catholicism that favored philosophical and not theological Christianity, as filtered through the Golden Dawn and similar occult groups:

The Golden Dawn aspired to be not merely a complete academy of occult knowledge (as indeed the Theosophical Society had claimed to be) but also a forum for Mystico-Magical practise — which Magic was seen as being like that of Eliphas Levi. In the words of Stephan Hoeller, Magic in this sense is “an umbrella term for the growth or expansion of consciousness by way of symbolic modalities.” To impart both knowledge and practise, an elaborate system of grades was established; as the student ascended these grades, he or she learned ever more esoteric skills.

Ithell Colquhoun, a relative of Golden Dawn co-founder MacGregor Mathers, opines that “The Lord o f the Rings has a tinge of the Golden Dawn though this may be filtered through E.R. Eddison rather than Williams, since passages near the beginning of The Worm Ouroboros (1922) are so pervaded by the Golden Dawn atmosphere as to make one speculate on its author’s esoteric background” (Colquhoun,
1975, p. 234). But the well-known suspicion J.R.R. Tolkien had for Williams’ ideas in this area leads one to suspect a rather different source for the “tinge” Colquhoun detects.

Tolkien was a cultural Catholic, deeply read in both folk-lore and in pre-Reformation literature. These were themselves suffused, albeit more or less unconsciously, with the magical or Hermetic world-view, of which, after all, the Golden Dawn was only one exponent. (353-54)

In fact, his ideal dovetails with platonism and rejects neoplatonism, much as the monist pagans did:

Socrates’ pupil, Plato, developed the idea of the types or universals — such as “Man”, “Horse”, “King”, and so on — of which their concrete representations which we experience (and we ourselves) are mere shadows. These realities reside in some supernatural realm from whence they cast their shadows upon the Earth. While this theory could lend itself to a real dualism, its effect on philosophers whose psychology was influenced by Pre-Socratic attitudes often led such to consider reality as an interconnecting web of coherences and correspondences, the seen operating upon the unseen, and vice versa. Obviously, such an intellectual context lent itself to any number of religious and mystical beliefs; the obscurest maxims of the Hellenistic Mystery Schools could be considered expressions of wisdom by the most rigorous thinkers of antiquity.

The dualism implicit in Neoplatonism, which provided its main distinction from Hermeticism, was lacking in the Christian Neoplatonism of the Church Fathers. For them, as for later Christian philosophers, the Universals did not exist independently, but in the mind of God. This concept gave philosophical comprehensibility to various difficult doctrines. The Fall of Man, for instance, could be seen in terms of the falling of the whole Universal “Man”, in the persons of its then only two extant concrete representatives — Adam and Eve. This point of view, which saw the Universals as real and as the pattern from whence come all perceived physical things, is called “Ultra-Realism”. Under its influence were composed the Catholic and Orthodox liturgies, most pre-13th Century theological works, and the writings of Mystics of the same period. It is a mark of Ultra-Realism, in fact, that Mysticism (with its concomitant physical phenomena, bilocation, the stigmata, etc.,) and Theology — that is, the practise and the study of unity with God — were then considered inseparable.

What these philosophical developments meant concretely was the progressive separation of Christian Theology from Philosophy. (346-47)

This makes it unclear if Tolkien was even much of a Christian, so much as a generalized believer in the occult who found Christianity as his voice. It seems this duality lives on in metal, especially black metal, which is extremely realistic but also open to mysticism.

Tags: christianity, golden dawn, h.p. lovecraft, j.r.r. tolkien, magic, Occultism, Paganism