An unofficial transcript of the podcast episode by Alexis Kennedy and Lottie Bevan.

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LB: Hello and welcome to Episode 4 of Skeleton Songs.

AK: “FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE”

LB: Now, that took us about a hundred tries, because Alexis has a very bold baritone voice, um, and we were trying to get the, the equalising right on this audio, so I hope you all appreciate how much energy went into that first two experience of this episode.

AK: I had to do about five different spooky voices before we found one that didn’t overload the mic.

LB: Yeah, good thing it was spooky!  Um, so we thought about doing this episode about disease and plague and then we realised that was a stupid idea because everyone’s had enough of disease and plague and we’re all cooped up in our houses, and we’d rather think about something else.  So, we are talking about forbidden knowledge today, which is rather a specialism—

AK: FORBIDDEN knowledge…

LB: (Laughs). Yeah, careful.  This is rather a specialism of yours, AK.

AK: It is, it’s, it’s, um, one of the things that I’ve, that, that I’ve come back again and again to, is I’ve been, I’ve done a lot of text-based games, thinking about text-based games, they tend to be quite allusive… you often make the best use of text when you’re talking about things that you can’t draw outright, um, and…

LB: Which is why you give me such difficult art directions…

AK: Yes, I’m sorry about that, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, over the years I’ve given about four different artists instructions to, to do at least fifteen nonexistent colours.

LB: (laughs)

AK: But one of the, er…

LB: One of my art directions at the minute is, um, the notion of obscurity.  So…

AK: Just do a question mark!

LB: (groans)

AK: There you go!

LB: Agh. 

AK: Art directions.

LB: Sorry.  Go on.

AK: Anyway, um, so the thing about forbidden knowledge is, is from a, an authorial point of view, it’s both difficult and convenient because you—so there’s two kinds of forbidden knowledge, uh, really, there’s knowledge that’s ipso facto dangerous, because it drives you mad or it does something even worse to you, and there’s knowledge that’s dangerous because of what you can do with it.  And, and the consequences that might arise from that.  And often the two overlap, of course.

LB: So give us an example of, of both.

AK: Yeah, so, uh, the classic example of knowledge that’s dangerous because of what you might do with it is, uh, good old Dr Faustus.  Or, uh, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus by…

LB: Um, in my notes it is “TOTHLADDoF”, which is the, uh, “The Tale of the History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus”, I believe?

AK: That sounds about right.

LB: Or something?  But you could, um, kind of make it up in Elizabethan times, you could be like, “Ah, it’s that play about the guy!”, and be like, “Yes, I’m gonna see that one, I like the bit with the dog!”

AK: So I did, I think my life would have been very different, um, if— if I hadn’t done the A Level texts I did.  Um, one was Dr Faustus, uh, and one was The Tempest, ah, both of which are, deal closely with Elizabethan ideas about, uh, the occult.  Um, and both of which are some of the most quotable plays ever to grace the English language.

LB: They’re sooo good.  I would like it known, as a point of fact, that Marlowe is at least the equal of Shakespeare.

AK: Tsk.

LB: Putting that out there!

AK: I mean, he did die mysteriously early and maybe Shakespeare saw him as a threat…

LB: I wouldn’t put it past Shakey.

AK: So the— what I was gonna say, actually, about Marlowe is, is, a, a lot of folk are aware that there has been persistent rumours about him being a spy.  Ah, and these seem to have arisen because he was excused for absence from College because he had been, um, the Privy Council said, or, or the Cambridge, uh, authorities said, I forget which— er, ‘engaged with business of benefit to the country’, without specifying what…

LB: I mean, that is… almost explicit, really, isn’t it?

AK: Well… yeah, but it might also be that he was tutoring someone important.

LB: That’s true.

AK: And that might also explain why he seemed to be spending a lot more money than he could, um, on a scholarship.

LB: Mmmm.

AK: But here’s the thing: the reason that he had to excuse himself, ah, for his absences, is because there were rumours he was going to the English college at Reims in France, and, ah, if he had been going there, it could only have been to become a Roman Catholic priest.

LB: (Gasp!)

AK: Which in, you know, Elizabethan times…

LB: Not Christopher!

AK: And there were— there, there were rumours about connections, er, between him and Catholicism, I’m not clear if he was a practicing Catholic or not, all through his life until his untimely death, down the road from where we live in, in, in Deptford Creek, ah, but Roman Catholic doctrine was forbidden knowledge, as far as the regime of Queen Elizabeth was concerned.  And Elizabeth and her, um, spymasters were extraordinarily paranoid, ah, because they needed to be, because, er, England, ah, was a country ruled by a woman, unheard of…

LB: Boooooo!

AK: With a…

LB: Madness!

AK: …tenuous claim to the throne, um, and it was one of the rare non-Catholic countries.  And people kept thinking Elizabeth’s gonna marry somebody and it would fall into the hands of all of their opponents, so, so there really were constant plots against her life, and against the throne, and of course, every other country that was, ah, thinking of invasion or usurpation was Catholic, so it tended to be associated with Papist plotting, and when, you know, the beginning of Faustus, um, Marlowe— Faustus himself, rather— does a, sort of, tour through the different disciplines, ah…

LB: Yes!  And he says, “That’s boring!  I’m bored of maths, I’m bored of philosophy…”

AK: Yeah, divinity…

LB: “I’ve cov— I’ve conquered everything, it’s a solved problem, um, and the only thing left for me, I think, is magic and necromancy.”

AK: Yes.  “’Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me”, I think is the phrase.  And that’s, uh…

LB: [Oh, he’s?] so good!

AK: And that’s, of course the thing about forbidden knowledge, is that it’s, it’s, if, you know, we’re monkeys— if you give a monkey a box with a button on it, and a sign saying ‘do not press this button’, there’s only one thing the monkey’s going to do.

LB: I mean, it’s interesting you bring up monkeys, ‘cause I will come back to that.

AK: Oh, really?

LB: Remember that, listeners, yeah.

AK: But this was, ah, in Mr Eaten, the storyline I wrote for Fallen London, it initially was a sort of casual joke, but then it sort of spiralled out of control.

LB: We should say, for listeners who have not played Alexis Kennedy’s entire oeuvre, Fallen London is his first game, and it’s a browser-based RPG, set in an alternate spooky version of London which has been stolen by bats, and it’s full of Victorians doing fun things.

AK: Anyway, nobody’s going to listen to this thing who don’t, you know…

LB: We’ve gotta shill the products, babe!

AK: Yes, that’s true.  OK.  Well, it’s not our product anymore.

LB: We’ve gotta shill your legacy, babe!

AK: Fair enough.  Anyway: um, that’s probably too loud, sorry if I must have just shouted in your ear…

LB: (laughs)

AK: So, forbidden knowledge is, is, is innately appealing, and, er, this is is, this is one of the things about it, it’s, it—it’s seductive.  And, ahh… do you think we’ll ever get through a podcast without mentioning Lovecraft at least once?

LB: No.

AK: Lovecraft obviously, um, ah… his whole stock in trade was forbidden knowledge.  And that, of all the other writers, uh, who worked in the mythos, that sort of thing, and I said earlier, it’s both difficult and convenient to have forbidden texts.  Because you— it’s very hard to quote bits of it, because inevitably people say, “Well, it’s not that spooky”.

LB: Mmm.

AK: It’s like, if you have a poet in your story who’s, who’s extraordinarily talented, good luck writing, ah, the output of an extraordinarily talented poet, you have to refer to…

LB: Or, or, or the classic example of, of the horror villain, you know, a lot of people do a lot with shadows and, and suggestion, rather than showing you the guy in a scary suit, because it might be frightening for some people…

AK: Exactly.

LB: … but then some people, well, they’re not arachnophobic, or they, they’ve seen a guy in a scary leather mask with a chainsaw before, so they’re like “Nyeh”, whereas if you say, like, “it’s the scariest thing ever”, and leave it to the imagination, then of course, what more fertile soil is there?

AK: There’s the, the, the quote I keep coming back to, which I’ve heard attributed to Iain Banks, although, um, it, it’s disputed, um, to the effect that the, the writer has access to the greatest special effects budget ever devised…

LB: (chuckles)

AK: Which is the human imagination.  And this is the thing about text-based games, is that if you are trying to make a game scary with sound and visuals, you can absolutely do it— I’ve been terrified witless by, by games and films and visuals and sounds.  But you have access to a particular kind of intimation, um, and implication…

LB: Mm.

AK: Ah, with, um, with, with text, um, and I—I noticed when I started looking at this, there’s a bunch of tools that keep coming up.  So one of the ones, one of the ones that I’ve used all the time, is that if you are lucky enough to work in a game-mechanical framework, you can use game mechanics to emphasise how freaking scary the secret is.  So, in Fallen London, you start out with whispered secrets, and then it goes up to cryptic clues, and then appalling secrets, and there’s a hierarchical taxonomy until you get up— all the way up to, I think, searing enigmas.  And… it’s never clear what these things actually contain, or are, they’re used interchangeably, but the fact that a searing enigma sells for an awful lot more than [a] whispered secret, and can be used to unlock certain things, gives it a certain gravitas you don’t get just from the image of a flame.  And the same thing, of course, in Cultist Simulator, that you get um, seven or eight different kinds— levels of, of lore, from, like, hinting fragments all the way up to the Names of, of major entities.  So: um, that’s one of the approaches, but obviously, Lovecraft couldn’t do that, and obviously you do a lot of work with evocative titles, and you do a lot of work by using languages that are not necessarily, um, immediately comprehensible to people who are reading it, so, good example: Cultes des Ghoules, that’s French, so it sounds, ah, fancy…

LB: Yeah.

AK: …if you’re an English speaker…

LB: Yeah.

AK: Because the French sound fancy to us, and…

LB: Mais oui!

AK: …heh, and, um, ah, so that’s, that’s one, one [inaudible].  Another thing is the intertextuality.  So there’s a couple of things that crop up here.  One is that, once you’ve got a book referenced, you can use it in other places, and people can feel the pleasure of nodding knowingly, or recognising, oh yeah, that thing, that’s, that’s dangerous, and the other thing is that, um, that’s often used across stories, one of the hallmarks of Mythos work, is that everybody’s, you know, Bloch and Derleth and, all the way up to the present day, people like Ramsey Campbell, um, is he still writing?  Anyway, but, but decades of people, ah, can reference those books, and participate in the mythos. I’ve li—

LB: I’ve listened to a lot of, um, Lovecraft audiobooks, and the, the phrase that particularly sticks out in my mind forever, is the constant ref— er, reference to, um, the curséd Necronomicon by the Mad Arab Al-Azim (sic).

AK: Yeah.

LB: Um…

AK: And again…

LB: That’s exactly right, and…

AK: Um, a made-up Arab name, and the phrase “the mad Arab”, rings rather less, ah, clearly in—

LB: Well, I actually have a point to make, ‘cause again, that’s something that I’m gonna talk about when we talk about my, ah… chosen text for today’s episode.  But, but, I think it’s worth stating, because obviously there are a bunch of, um, worldviews expressed by gothic literature that we no longer agree with!  Which is fine, but I think it’s very important that we recognise that, firstly, that doesn’t, um, negate any other interesting creative aspects of the work, so just because somebody said something that we no longer think is a cool thing to say, um, we, we shouldn’t just discard the entire work, firstly…

AK: Mhm.

LB: …and secondly, I think it’s important to recognise that, within gothic literature specifically, there are a couple of tropes at play here that are not just, basically, racist and a bit weird.

AK: Yeah.

LB: So there’s the concept of the Other, which is why we want to reference something outside of the reader’s common knowledge, well, so we want to say it’s from France or it’s, um, Arabia, or it’s from the East, because a lot of the readers will think “Ooh, that’s interesting, I don’t know anything about that”, and therefore be more open to thinking yes, this is a magic…

AK: Hmm…

LB: …kind of, forbidden text I haven’t heard of, whereas if you say it was, you know, Mrs Thrumb’s diary, then everyone’s like, “Well, she doesn’t sound very spooky, ‘cause I live next to someone called Mrs Thrumb”, um, there’s also, ah, orientalism, which, ah, has fallen out of favour, again, but at the time was not just about saying “Look over there at those funny people doing strange things”, it was actually a lot of excitement about this opening, um, and burgeoning understanding of the East in the Western consciousness.  So it’s not as simple as just saying, a bunch of people said some stuff that now we think is racist, I think actually there’s a lot of interesting framing stuff going on within these stories.  I’ll get off my soapbox now and back to you.

AK: I think, it’s, ah, since you mentioned Lovecraft, er, I— I read, when I was writing that piece on my influences the other day, um, a really entertaining column in a Jewish magazine, Tablet, I think?  Um, called, it’s a regular column called…

LB: It’s so good.

AK: Antisemites We Love.

LB: (laughs)

AK: Um, er, and the subtitle’s like, you know, “People who hate us, but we still think are interesting”.

LB: (keeps laughing)

AK: Um…

LB: That’s the coolest thing ever!

AK: I, uh, I recommend it, but, I mean, forbidden knowledge, I think, you know, there’s a, a meta thing, but what I was gonna say is, is, a lot of these invented books, because— you, you can do a couple of things: you can reference real-world occult authors— I’ve got a reference to a Robert Fludd, F-L-U-D-D, in, um, Cultist, er, but you, you tend to run out of road fairly quickly, because those are obviously the authors everyone else shares.  There are only so many real-world occult authors.  So what people often did was make up names that are often quite silly jokes.

LB: (chuckles)

AK: So, the…

LB: Like what?

AK: Cultes des Ghoules, the author is… the Comte Derleth.

LB: I don’t understand. 

AK: August Derleth.

LB: (gasp!)

AK: And it wasn’t, it wasn’t actually Lovecraft, I th— who, uh, who invented it, it was, er, I think Robert Bloch, when I was looking at it earlier?  Um, and apparently Derleth actually claimed to have invented it later, and there was some dispute about it, but Lovecraft really liked it, and he used it in his stories in turn, and, and this is the way these things get, get passed around— The King in Yellow, I think, is one of the most celebrated and delightful horrible examples…

LB: I still need to read that!

AK: The—

LB: I’m embarrassed to say that I basically came to it via True Detective.

AK: Well, that’s, so that’s, that’s the thing, there’s this fantastic lineage of The King in Yellow— Carcosa and the Lake of Hali, well, Hali is a proper name, were names used in, in Ambrose Bierce’s short story in the 1880s, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”, which is definitely gothic, but is in, in no way Lovecraftian.  And Robert Chambers, who wrote the short story (sic) “The King in Yellow” and used the King in Yellow in a bunch of, um, his other short stories, as a concept and reference, he just liked the names Carcosa, and Hali, and I think Hastur, so he used them, and then a whole bunch of other writers used it and picked up on it, it was the idea of the play that’s too dangerous to perform or read, um, is uh, obviously very compelling, and, ah, one of the things Chambers does brilliantly is use fragments from it.

LB: Mmmm.

AK: So you can rely— you know, obviously the bits that are off stage are more horrifying, although the bits we see are quite scary.  Ah, and, ah, it, it showed up in a bunch of other people’s work, and then finally showed up, you know, where a lot of people saw it, in True Detective, and also the Mysterious Package Company whose services we avail ourselves of…

LB: You do love the mysterious package company…

AK: did a, a King in Yellow package.

LB: And I think that’s, you know, a great example of what you were saying about, um, what you were talking about earlier, that I, for example, have not read The King in Yellow, but I’m aware that, when his name is invoked, that what it basically means is this forbidden text that will drive me mad if I see it performed, or, or, or delve into it.  And that’s kind of the power of it— it’s not actually about the content, it’s kind of transcended what the play itself is…

AK: Yes!

LB: And it’s become a sort of reference point for a bunch of other literature and a bunch of other stories.

AK: And that’s one of the less obvious ways in which, from an authorial point of view, this kind of stuff is useful— because it takes attention away from what the book actually contains…

LB: Mm, and what it means instead.

AK: Exactly, and the significance in it.  So sometimes this is really blatant and quite annoying— Michael Moorcock, who wrote, as far as I can tell—

LB: You’re not a fan, are you?

AK: No, I am a fan, I’m a huge—

LB: Are you?

AK: Well, I’m a huge fan, but the thing is, you can be a huge fan of a lot of Michael Moorcock, uh, and still not like a lot of other Michael Moorcock, because he…

LB: Yeah.

AK: …basically wrote most of the heroic fantasy of the 20^th century, um, before lunch as far as I can tell— insanely productive, very, very varied, very varied in quality, and, ah, one of his tropes is, um, forbidden knowledge which is snatched away from our— er, explorer’s or hero’s hands at the last minute, so, I think Elric tracks down the Dead Gods’ Book, which contains all the knowledge of previous ages, and obviously when he opens it, it’s rotted to dust, and it’s the, you know, it’s just, there’s jewels in the cupboard but it’s full of dust, and, and I think…

LB: [That’s nice?]

AK: …I remember reading that as, as a teenager, I mean, like, have, haven’t we seen this before, and can’t we just see what’s in the frickin’ book…

LB: (laughs)

AK: …one time, but of course it’s not about the book…

LB: No, [you can] understand…

AK: …it’s about the quest for the knowledge.  But I was gonna say, um, because I know people will be thinking of this, the idea of forbidden and dangerous knowledge, once computers and software came into play, or once, especially, people started thinking of consciousness as analogous to computers, it shows up everywhere in science fiction— Stephenson, and Egan, and all sorts, but probably the single most influential example of it, um, was the basilisk.  Er, so Dave Langford, who’s a, I think, venerable is a fair word, um, he’s, he’s, he’s an author and a sort of, um, presence in fannish culture since, since, mm, I was a kid, very, very funny, also wrote some really chilling short stories about the idea of a fractal pattern that can crash the human brain, so if you look at it you die.  And…

LB: Amazing.

AK: …one of the nastiest stories he wrote about this concerns a member of an extreme-right organisation who started spraying this on walls, in places where immigrants…

LB: Oooh…

AK: Gather.

LB: Oh!

AK: Yeah.

LB: Okay.  That’s horrible.

AK: Yeah.  Er…

LB: And there’s also that story, forgive the couple-speak, that we listened to in the car, “The Ten Thousand Names of God”, by…?

AK: Yes, let’s come back to that, actually, because that’s very relevant, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the, um, knowledge that’s dangerous because of what you do with it, rather than—

LB: OK.

AK: Yeah.  But, ah, [unintelligible], Clarke.

LB: Clarke.  Good old Clarke.

AK: But the thing— so, so, I’m sure anybody who has any familiarity with genre stuff had already thought of a bunch of other mind viruses and, and, um, things, but, um, the nice thing about the Langford idea, of the basilisk, is, a lot of authors recognise the influence, and people like Greg Egan  and Ken MacLeod and, um, er, Charles Stress, all have, like, um, er, the Langford, er, Brain Hack and the Langford Dead Parrot.

LB: Really?

AK: Yes.

LB: That’s really nice…

AK: His, his concepts in their stories.  So it’s, it’s, it’s the modern-day successor to the Comte Derleth.  And, and all Lovecraft’s equally nerdy friends all passing around each other’s names, putting them in stories, and my own contribution to this is a tiny silly one, um, not to, to mythos, but obviously when I wrote Cultist Simulator, a lot of Kickstarter…

LB: Which is, again, if you haven’t played it, we should, just, say to listeners…

AK: It’s a game, it’s good…

LB: Ack, my god, this is why I do the marketing— it’s not just a game, it’s a PC game about Lovecraftian demise and madness and apocalypse and yearning set in a 1920s alternate, kind of, reality where you can scratch away the skin of reality and get at the bones of the true world, but it will drive you mad and kill you.

AK: All that stuff.  Er, and…

LB: Alright, which one’s more evocative, which will make you buy this game?

AK: Er, so, my, my mother actually was one of the Kickstarter backers.

LB: Right.

AK: Um…

LB: Good old Penny.

AK: People have wandered by about the, um, Book of the White Cat.  Er, which is a story, is a text about a blind white cat who used to whisper secrets to Penelope of Gordion, and the reason that’s in there, is that Penelope is my mother’s name, and, ah, she had a much-beloved, er, glaucomic white cat called Matty [sp?], who died, um…

LB: During development.

AK: Er, yeah.  Yeah, during the [end of?] development, so I wanted, the Book of the White Cat specifically memorialises my mother’s white cat Matty.

LB: Aww…

AK: But do you want to talk about your chosen text?

LB: Yeah, this is somebody that I’ve mentioned in Episode 1, actually, but I will shut up about him eventually, um, this is Sheridan Le Fanu again, the Irish writer at the end of the 19^th century, and I think one of my favourite gothic stories ever is his short story “Green Tea”.  Now, this brings about the monkey trope, and the orientalist/othering trope, and, um, I just think it’s a really brilliant example of forbidden knowledge in a short gothic text.  So the essential, um, premise, and, um, if you don’t want to know the, the plot, then skip ten minutes ahead?  Um, it revolves around a, er, English priest called, ah, Mr Jennings, who’s a reverend, not a priest, sorry— I don’t really know the difference— um, and he ends up going to see a doctor, Dr Hesalius, which is a recurring character and motif in Le Fanu’s work, and I think in a couple of other, kind of, occult referential works, because he’s kind of like Van Helping, he’s a sort of occult-aware medical practitioner who’s got a lot of history dealing with this sort of stuff.  And, um, he has developed this intense kind of nervous, um, disorder, which all started four years ago when he was writing, um, a tract on religious metaphysics.  And he stayed up very late at night, er, writing this, as a solitary pursuit, and he started off, um, drinking black tea, while he was working on this, and then he ran out of black tea, and he started drinking green tea.  Now, um, this seemed to help him, uh, come up with ideas and concepts better than black tea, so he kept drinking it, he drank a lot of it, and, um, on an omnibus home one night, he spots, um, on the floor of this empty dark bus, these two dots of light, red light, and as he goes up closer to the red lights, he sees they are not lights, but in fact the eyes of a small black monkey that is grinning at him from the floor of this bus.  And, being an Englishman, he pokes it with his umbrella, which is our first response to everything… 

AK: (laughs)

LB: Um, and the umbrella goes straight through.  But he can still see the monkey.  So this obviously really creeps him out, I mean, he’s a religious chap, and, and I’m fairly certain that most, kind of, certainly domestic forms of Christianity are not pro-all the spooky things that you can put an umbrella through, um, so he gets off at the next stop, but the monkey begins to follow him.  And from that point on, the monkey is his constant companion, even though nobody can, can see it other than he.  Um, and for the first year or so the monkey’s fairly, kind of, he’s just there, he’s not particularly troublesome, um, but, you know, he causes this guy some, some, um, alarm, that he sees this spectral monkey, and over time it gets a little bit more malignant.  So, it disappears for a bit, during which Jennings prays profusely to God to try and make sure it doesn’t come back, but in fact he does come back, and he comes back with a vengeance, and he starts doing things like, um, sitting on the reverend’s Bible while he’s giving sermons, so he can’t see the words properly, which is actually a trope that actually Faustus uses.

AK: Yeah.

LB: Um, the idea that there is some sort of demonic entity stopping you seeing the word in the scripture of God, um…

AK: The opposite of forbidden knowledge, really, there.

LB: Well, it’s forbidden by devils, and that’s another thing that…

AK: Yeah.

LB: …that, that Faustus deals with, and I’ll come back to after this.  But he starts doing that, and then he disappears for three months, and he comes back and he’s really horrible, and he actually starts, um, poking Jennings every time he tries to pray, so he’s not allowed to pray anymore, he can’t do his sermons anymore, and eventually he starts hearing the monkey’s voice in his head, and he starts seeing the monkey even when his eyes are closed, which I think is really horrible, ‘cause that kind of feels like it’s coming to him, rather than it is now external.  And the voice in the monkey’s head is blasphemous and it tells him to hurt himself and hurt others.  Um, and this is the point at which Jannings, um, Jennings, sorry, goes to Dr Hesalius and says, “Help”, and Hesalius listens to all of this and, and you know, understands it, and goes away to come up with a, with a plan of attack, um, but that night he’s called back in an emergency call to the reverend’s house, and the reverend has ultimately cut his own throat.  So the story ends in tragedy, umm, and Hesalius, er, recounts it in the framing narrative at the end of the story, um, as “the process of a poison that excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates the cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior.  Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance”, and I love that characterisation…

AK: Mmm…

LB: …because not only is it quite medical, which suits the character, and is kind of an interesting take on it, but it implies that there is some sort of inevitability about this realm of the supernatural or the forbidden, that has been introduced, um, you know, dangerously, or prematurely, to the individual, and I think that’s where we have this, kind of, strong spiritual and religious link to the occult, certainly in this context, because what we’re saying is, there is a world after death, there is a world of hell, there is a world of something beyond the mortal realm that we experience in our daily lives, but if you delve too, too greedily and too deep…

AK: Mm.

LB: … if you uncover that too early, or without the proper sanctions by whatever god you happen to believe in, then there will be some sort of Faustian comeuppance.  Um, and all of that is in, like, 20 pages.  Not bad!

AK: There’s… that, that’s… did Le Fanu have either a, a, a drug problem or mental health issues, d’you know?  I’m not being mean but…

LB: (laughs)

AK: But the idea of this, this monkey that accompanies you and sometimes goes away and sometimes comes back, and it speaks to you…

LB: Oh, I didn’t even…

AK: It does sound like it references a bunch of other stuff, potentially.

LB: I mean, not to my knowledge, um, I— I’ve never heard about him having a, a, a mental health issue or a drugs problem, um, the, the major premise that I helpfully missed out of my summary is that, the idea that he drank the green tea, this kind of, er, exotic material, opened his inner eye and somehow enabled him to start seeing things that are already there, around us, that you can’t normally engage with…

AK: Mhm.

LB: Rather than… but then of course, because it’s gothic, it’s framed in, in a kind of slightly ambiguous way, like, was he going mad, was it sort of in his head…

AK: Yeah.

LB: Or was it some kind of external reality that we just can’t comprehend because it’s really spooky and we haven’t drunk green tea.  Um, but yeah, he’s a complicated guy— but some people think he was rubbish!  A lot of the reviews of the books at the time were like, “Well, he tries, but he’s not very adult…”

AK: I think a lot of really interesting writers…

LB: M.R. James liked him.

AK: Heh.. well, don’t know that I would trust M.R. James, but you know, like, Lovecraft as well, um, aside from the political angle, his prose style gets a lot of stick, um, and I think that’s unfair, but I can also see why…

LB: Well, it’s just stylistic, isn’t it?

AK: …because it is, it is, and you know, it’s…

LB: And of the time…

AK: …sometimes, it’s like watching a fricking snake getting dressed, it’s, it’s…

LB: (laughs) It’s a great characterisation!

AK: But sometimes it’s, it’s really effective.

LB: If anyone hasn’t read Lovecraft, he’s famously verbose, um, he, he loves using very long words when he doesn’t necessarily need to, but if you read any of his stories, the effect is, you kind of immerse yourself in this wordy soup, and then…

AK: Tone poetry.

LB: Tone poetry, yeah, and then, and then, and then, yeah, it all, it all works very well, and he obviously is brilliant at creating this atmosphere of creeping dread and, and boneless flopping things at the doorway, and it’s all very spooky.  Um…

AK: I wanted to, I wanted to fit in some nuclear secrets.

LB: Are we going to give the listeners the nuclear codes?

AK: Uh, we’re, they’re, they’re quite old nuclear secrets.  So this— this is, this is a couple of anecdotes, um, that, ah, tie together rather neatly, that I came across in different contexts in the past.  And one is that Einstein…

LB: Hooray!

AK: Who, you probably know, was a committed pacifist, nevertheless was encouraged by one of his, um, collaborators? Students? Leo Szilard, to, er, write with Szilard to President Roosevelt, um, in the, er, first half of the 20^th century, to say, to express his concern that Nazi Germany might develop a nuclear bomb, and to encourage Roosevelt to back research into, er, an American deterrent.  And, this is one of the things that is credited with kicking off the Manhattan Project, of course, it’s never possible to attrib— to understand exactly what went into a decision, but certainly the world’s most eminent physicist and one one of the world’s most eminent pacifists writing to a US President…

LB: You’d listen, wouldn’t you?

AK: Yeah.  Er, and Einstein in fact had, um, qualms the rest of his life, because obviously he felt he had some, er, share in the blame in the development of nuclear weapons, and things might have gone differently…

LB: That’s very difficult.

AK: But (sigh) it is what it is, and I think, um, nuclear secrets are, um, the closest thing we’ve got to real forbidden knowledge, um, in the post-industrial era.  Both because it’s been, er, the subject of an extremely intense intelligence activity, and because there is something uncanny about about it, from a, a sort of lay point of view.  I’ve— I…

LB: It feels like it’s, um, destruction on a totally different scale, and it feels, like, [entirely?] different…

AK: Yeah, because, because there’s this apocalyptic thing, and also because radiation…

LB: Yeah.

AK: …is frightening, there’s, you remember the…

LB: Yes it is.

AK:  Uh, the new game plus thing in Cultist Simulator, um, I deliberately reference a bunch of nuclear stuff, and there’s even a reference to Cherenkov radiation, in some of the special effects, basically people did pick up on.  Er, and, yeah… nuclear stuff is frightening, but the other… so, the, the, this, what I was saying at the beginning about, dangerous to whom?, because it’s— it might be more dangerous if you, if it hadn’t been developed, but obviously it’s extremely fucking dangerous.  But here’s a better example of dangerous to whom?: years on from Einstein writing this letter, of course, the US developed and dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan, killing an enormous number of people, um…

LB: I thought we were gonna cheer people up, in this current crisis [Covid].

AK: Ah, pffff…

LB: Are you gonna get that [unintelligible]…

AK: Have you read my work?

LB: …gonna be a bit with a clown…

AK: Ah, clowns are, clowns are not good [unintelligible]

LB: That’s true, clowns are banned, that’s correct.

AK: But, so, um, this ended the war, one way or another…

LB: Hooray…

AK: And whether or not it would have, the war would have ended anyway, is still the topic of, of debate, but, er, that is what, ah, pushed the Japanese Emperor at the time to surrender.  But, the, a lot of the establishment didn’t like the idea of surrendering, so Hirohito recorded his surrender speech, which is wonderfully called “The Jewel Voice Broadcast”…

LB: That is so cool.

AK: …on a phonograph record.  Um, and then, about a thousand army officers and right-wingers broke into the Imperial Palace, which obviously is not something that ever happened…

LB: Yeah…

AK: Trying to track down the broadcast and stop it…

LB: To stop it…

AK: Yeah.  But the Imperial Palace is very…

LB: That’s crazy…

AK: …complicated in its layout, and it was dark, so they all bumbled about tripping over each other and didn’t find it.

LB: (laughs sotto voce)

AK: And the Jewel Voice Broadcast was successfully smuggled out of the palace, according to Wikipedia, in a basket of dirty women’s underwear.  And I went looking for the original source of this, and, and it looks like this might be some slightly, er, original research or assumptions, but certainly it was smuggled out in, in a basket, under the noses, and it was broadcast, bringing the Second World War to an end, which was a positive outcome.

LB: What an amazing human, sort of, interaction with forbidden knowledge.

AK: Right?

LB: I wanted, I wanted to s— when you…

AK: What I was gonna say, there’s two things that particularly come in here: one is that part of the justification Hirohito gave for surrendering, he says that the enemy have developed this extraordinary new weapon…

LB: Mm.

AK: …which if it keeps being used, could lead to the extinction of human civilisation.

LB: Smart man. 

AK: And, you know, the [knowledge out of the box?] had to be stopped, and secondly, the story goes, the Jewel Voice Broadcast, the phonograph record still exists, but has never been played since that day.

LB: I like that.  

AK: You were going to say something.

LB: Oh, just, I, I think it’s nice to end, um, the podcast on another anecdote about humans interacting, you know, in reality, with this forbidden knowledge, and you were talking about, um, nuclear codes, as, kind of, a great example of modern forbidden knowledge, and one of my favourite facts, which I believe is actually true, about, um, how the, the British government works, is when we have a new Prime Minister, one of their first, um, acts is to write on a, on a physical piece of paper, in a letter, um, their orders if we end up in a nuclear apocalyptic situation, they, ah, they are meant to write their decision before they’re in the context of a nuclear apocalypse, about whether or not, basically, we fire nukes at anybody else, or what we do.  Um, and they place it in an envelope, and that envelope goes in the safe of the Admiral of the submarine corps of the Navy, and it is never opened unless there is a nuclear apocalypse or a nuclear emergency.  Um, so, so what had happened, seeing as fortunately we have not got to that point is, um, this letter keeps being removed unopened, destroyed, and replaced with a new letter every time we get this new Prime Minister, and I love the idea, even though it’s a very, very frightening situation and I hope we never open the letter, and I hope if we do it says “Don’t fire any more nukes”, um, but, but, I think that’s a great example of actually within the, the, the modern mechanism of, of the Navy nd the submarine and nuclear warfare and Prime Ministers, none of which are particularly spooky, um, we have this jewel of forbidden knowledge right there at the bottom of the sea.  Anyway, I think that’s enough, ah, about (inaudible) stuff.

AK: It is, I was gonna talk about the Insoll Codex, which is obviously great forbidden knowledge territory, but we’re out of time…

LB: I love that this is now a, this is, this is the monkey that haunts you, you’ve mentioned the Insoll Codex several times over our episodes, and we always run out of time.  So maybe eventually the monkey will catch up with you?  Maybe you’ll find some sort of redemptive arc which will remove the Insoll Codex from your life…

AK: It’s how monkeys do— maybe I’ll just cut my own throat?

LB: OK, well that is an awful way— I thought my story was a fun way to end the podcast, and now it’s really horrible again.

AK: Wish— wish them a spooky day.

LB: Have a safe and spooky day…