The point I was trying to articulate in the last post is closer to this. When then shaman travels to other worlds, these worlds may well be accretive formations of pneuma based on his environment. The spirits are the local animals etc. These worlds are real and can be travelled to. The point of pneuma as a theory is that the accretions once made are not simply accessible by one individual, they have autonomous existence. Nevertheless these shamanist upper and lower worlds are accreted to certain vectors in the shaman’s world. These worlds do no whisper sinister secrets or at least if they do, the shaman knows what to listen to and what to avoid. The point being there is wisdom and power that is beneficial to the community in these worlds.

Writers like Rickert and Kingsley identify presocratic thinkers like Parmenides as half shaman, half priest type figures. They represent a transitional stage that still has access to the other world, before Plato placed reason as the source of wisdom. Thought in this way, Parmenides did not think his writing up, he accessed his ideas from the other world, and, if we are to believe Kingsley, inaugurated the west itself through the ideas he accessed through visions. The connecting wisdom then became lost and we are now adrift (I am not commenting on the correctness or otherwise of this pronouncement).

The Lovecraftian connection is that the realm of strange shining cities and books of odd symbols is the same place the shaman and the presocratic priest/shaman accessed. The King in Yellow’s home is exactly such a world. The ‘weirdness’ of these worlds possibly comes from their (as stated) being accreted to ideas outside of religion. That is, their presentment as places of other dimensions or worlds that are simply absolutely other gives them a feel that no living hermeneutic category understands adequately (other than weird).

When the Gods are real, the Gods can manage these realms. When they are not, then alien forces appear. As the alien forces appear it becomes harder to access them as sources of wisdom, for they may appear as strange and terrible and sinister as Hastur himself.