Julianus reviews Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone by W H Müller in the Bkwyrm archive.
It seems that “W.H. Muller” is German for “Kenneth Grant.” In fact, Herr Muller has with typical Teutonic thoroughness surpassed his predecessor in the Art and Science of Magical Obfuscation, a feat I had heretofore considered impossible. He does so simply by writing a book about the Profound Insights of “America’s Secret Alchemist,” H.P. Lovecraft. That’s right: he really does believe that H.P.L. was a Practicing Occultist and that the Lovecraft Circle was a group of High Adepts! Even Grant knows that Lovecraft was a “mechanistic materialist” who viewed the Supernatural as no more than fiction-fodder at best, as even a cursory glance at his published correspondence shows, but Herr Muller has apparently ignored all this and forged ahead like the Prussian Infantry through Alsace-Lorraine. The book itself is a Vast Muddle of Mystical Verbiage that draws on Sufism, Theosophy, Rene Guenon, Robert Graves, and others to create a bizarre Syncretic Symbolism from “Phonetic Encodings” in Lovecraft’s work. The Linguistic Fog is comparable only to the work of Kenneth Grant, and it is truly strange that Herr Muller nowhere acknowledges his debt to the Typhonian Titan. The scholarship in this book is just amazing: he can’t even keep Lovecraft’s different stories straight, let alone anything else. Further, it appears that Herr Muller either wrote this in English or translated it himself as the text is riddled with Typos, Errors of Grammar, Awkward Phases, and Excessive Capitalisation after the German Manner that make this a Chore to slog through even beyond the other faults.
So, if you are having withdrawal symptoms while waiting for Beyond the Mauve Zone to find a publisher, this is Just the Book for you!