HP Lovecraft & His Pal C'Thulu | with Slick Dissident, Mario Garza, Juan on Juan, & Kayleigh B
Get ready to release the Kraken tonight as we crack into the deranged skull of H.P. Lovecraft and decode his C'Thonic mythology, it's cultural influence, astrological significance, and symbolic strangeness. This super-panel live stream starring Slick Dissident (Gabriel), Juan from The Juan on Juan Podcast, Mario Garza from Symbolic Studies, and astrologer Kayleigh Berkana, might just leave you feeling the aybss staring back.
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In this episode
Core themes
Juan Ayala's Portrait of Lovecraft
Juan Ayala sets the stage by calling Lovecraft one of history's most prolific letter writers, with estimates he puts at 75,000 to 100,000 letters, many as long as books, written by a man Juan describes as a virtual hermit who never really held a job. Juan traces the mythos to a childhood obsession with the Arabian Nights, which he says inspired the alter ego Abdul Alhazred, supposed author of the Necronomicon, and to a grandfather's library said to hold the Picatrix. He names Lovecraft's racism plainly while crediting his reach into films like The Thing and Color Out of Space, plus video, card and board games.
Pluto as Lovecraft's Planet
Kayleigh Berkana comes at Lovecraft through Pluto, a planet she says astrologers tie to darkness before deep transformation and rebirth. She recounts Percival Lowell's search for a Planet X beyond Neptune and Clyde Tombaugh's discovery on February 18, 1930, noting that Lovecraft, a keen student of astronomy who wrote for journals, lived until 1937, and she places the discovery in Cancer near Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Gabe says the first recorded hint of Pluto fell on Lovecraft's nineteenth birthday, the panel notes a feature on Pluto named for Cthulhu, and Gabe frames the coming American Pluto return to its 1776 position as the scale of the spell.
How Occultists Adopted the Mythos
Mario Garza argues that however Lovecraft's work came to be, he was tapped in, updating an older pantheon for modern sensibilities, and that his influence runs through an underground of black magical books and groups. Mario says he found a reverence for the north, the North Star and Ursa Major that goes largely unnoticed, and that some Lovecraftian groups vet initiates by whether their psyche survives a ritual, while others treat the North Star as an astral gateway out and back. Pointing to the steady stream of rituals, spells and new versions of the Necronomicon, he says he doubts people would keep doing this if it did not work.
Fiction, Fear and the Dreaming God
Gabe floats the theory that the whole Lovecraft web may be the largest black magic LARP of all time, run by masters of fiction, while Chance questions the idea of entities outside reality and frames Mark Passio's notion of cosmic abandonment as a perspective gap that nature's symbolic correspondences can close. The panel turns to Azathoth, the blind idiot god whose dream is said to be our reality, and the conversation reads this as fictionalized pop gnosticism, suggesting that people who crack open expanded consciousness while carrying fear and impurity find that fear amplified back at them.
Taking Back the Power From Fear
The closing strand turns from horror to agency. Gabe says horror fans tend to adopt a passive posture while he steers his imagination, and he reads the image of Andrew Jackson slaying the many headed bank monster as a way of stirring inherited fears of financial collapse. Kayleigh counters that anyone can read a chart but no chart shows the human soul or its willpower, and Chance closes by arguing that believing in any boogeyman greater than our divine spark only breeds bigger ones, insisting we are the imagination that dreams reality. In a last exchange, the panel weighs Lovecraft's line that fear is the strongest emotion against love.
Quotes
“Lovecraft is in everyone's hearts even if you don't know who he is. He has influenced modern pop culture, literature, on the levels, I say, even of William Shakespeare.”
“If you pay attention to nature and we learn these symbolic correspondences and we recognize the amazing mystical architecture of how everything is connected, then it seems like maybe we weren't abandoned.”
“Regardless of how Lovecraft's work came to be, we know that he was tapped in, and so he kind of updated an older pantheon for modern sensibilities.”
“The theme of Pluto in astrology is all about the dark, the deep transformation and rebirth, sure, but the darker side first, before that transformation occurs.”
“What I'd like to just put in people's minds is maybe all of this is the first and largest black magic LARP of all time.”
“That was the one thing that Lovecraft really put into perspective: the indifference, that we're just a speck of nothingness in this vast ocean of the universe.”
“I'm in control of my imagination. I'm steering this ship, and I'm not letting anybody try to put me in a state of fear.”
“There's this reverence and this nod to the north and the North Star and Ursa Major that I think goes really, really under the radar.”
“If we ever believe that such a boogeyman exists, there will always be a bigger one than that one, and then a bigger one than that one.”
“Anybody can look at a chart, but the one thing that you'll never see in the chart is the human soul, their individual willpower and their soul.”
“I like to keep it anagrams because anagrams are objective truth. You don't leave any letters out, you use all the letters, and it says something crystal clear.”
“We are the source, we are the imagination, we are God, the God that dreams reality into existence, all of us.”
Gabriel, known on air as Slick Dissident, co-hosts InnerVerse's Vibe Rant show and is a longtime recurring guest on the podcast. He teaches occult symbolism and tarot on his YouTube channel, ranging across the Major Arcana, the esoteric Enneagram, mythology and archetype, mystic linguistics, and the symbolism hidden in popular film. He is best known for Tarot-tories, his own system mapping the 22 Major Arcana and zodiac archetypes onto the geography of the United States.
See all Gabe episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
