u/Metalworker4ever

A Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder by James De Mille

Published posthumously in 1888. The very first Canadian genre novel.

A group of friends on vacation at sea pick up a cylinder floating in the ocean. Inside the cylinder on a kind of papyrus is a manuscript that tells of the adventures of one Adam More. Then you get into his story occasionally interrupted by the friends who discuss various things like the wildlife and the religion of the lost paradise Adam discovers.

So in Adam’s story. Basically he gets lost at sea and enters caverns in Antarctica that lead into the inner earth where he finds a lost paradise. Full of strange creatures and a strange people called the Kosekin. They are a cannibal death cult of sleep paralysis hags who prefer to live in darkness and by and large have opposite values to ours. The friends end up interpreting their customs as an example that all religions are really evil at their core. This seems to be the author’s own belief. He has a kind of conversion where, judging from previous novels of his that express a belief that to die is a blessing like Martyr of the Catacombs, he now believes death should be avoided because the afterlife is hostile.

I’m -hoping- this book can be my phd thesis if I ever get in

A quote from the book,

"Why not a scientific romance?"
"Because there's precious little science in it, but a good deal of quiet satire."
"Satire on what?" asked Featherstone. "I'll be hanged if I can see it."
"Oh, well," said Melick, "on things in general. The satire is directed against the restlessness of humanity; its impulses, feelings, hopes, and fears—all that men do and feel and suffer. It mocks us by exhibiting a new race of men, animated by passions and impulses which are directly the opposite of ours, and yet no nearer happiness than we are. It shows us a world where our evil is made a good, and our good an evil; there all that we consider a blessing is had in abundance—prolonged and perpetual sunlight, riches, power, fame—and yet these things are despised, and the people, turning away from them, imagine that they can find happiness in poverty, darkness, death, and unrequited love. The writer thus mocks at all our dearest passions and strongest desires; and his general aim is to show that the mere search for happiness per se is a vulgar thing, and must always result in utter nothingness. The writer also teaches the great lesson that the happiness of man consists not in external surroundings, but in the internal feelings, and that heaven itself is not a place, but a state. It is the old lesson which Milton extorted from Satan:
"'What matter where, if I be still the same—'
"Or again:
"'The mind is its own place, and of itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven—'"

I only took one class in school on literature criticism and then did an MA in theology but want to enter an english PHD now. I want to study up on I guess Phenomenological criticism but don't know where to start. I guess one major one would be archetypal criticism? But I'm not sure if the numinous really classifies as an archetype. I have already chosen an obscure weird author to write about. I'll probably start with Northrop Frye. And I guess Heidegger.

I tend to read books and interpret them by connecting them to other books.

For example... I just finished my MA thesis comparing the theology of Rudolf Otto to the horror fiction and philosophy of H P Lovecraft. I argued that whereas Otto was duplicitous about the numinous and its connection to evil, Lovecraft - potentially influenced by Otto himself and I also argued evidence of this - is an author where this idea finds expression. Whereas Otto the theologian is a comitted Christian who restrains himself by emphasizing the goodness of the numinous, his analysis repeatedly connects the numinous to monstrousness. Lovecraft as I said was potentially influenced by Otto and as an atheist he doesn't have the same reticience and so he is able to give full expression to Otto's idea of the mysterium horrendum. It's something Otto relegates to a footnote. I developed this thinking along the lines of hypotext and hypertextuality.. I said Lovecraft takes that little mysterium horrendum idea and amplifies it throughout his fiction.

"Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse." - Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature.

Here you see the connection pretty clearly. Even without much knowledge of Otto basically the key Otto concept is the mysterium tremendum fascinans which compares to "When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded". Lovecraft sees Otto's connection between that and the unholy or monstrous, and raises the stakes. They lived at the same time. They were contemporaries. Otto was a hit and although Lovecraft wrote the 2nd most amount of letters of anybody who ever lived (second only to Voltair) and there is no evidence of Lovecraft saying he read him, I argue it is pretty clear there is evidence he could have discussed Otto quite deeply or maybe they were just part of the same zeitgeist. In any case, I am not the only one to make the connection.

In addition to all this, I analyzed this evil component of the numinous and compared it to the experience of sleep paralysis in the bible... a folklorist named David J Hufford wrote a pioneering book on sleep paralysis and called the experience numinous (the term Otto basically coined).

In terms of Lovecraft and his idea of religious experience causing insanity. This idea has currency too. Vipassana meditation is actually notorious for triggering psychotic episodes. David Kortava wrote an article for Harpers Magazine called Lost In Thought The Psychological Risks of Meditation about this very fact. Lovecraft's story the Shadow Over Innsmouth is like a counterpoint to Otto's impulse for comparative religion and warns of religious syncretism with eastern faiths.

I see connections like this between things that are not necessarily directly related to each other. I want to continue writing about the numinous and its connection to evil (a book on Otto by Melissa Raphael even quotes someone connecting the numinous to the Japanese atomic bomb blasts) and I'm looking for more or better traditions of literary criticism that can help me think it through.

I for sure thought this was going to be a hot legacy card. A staple in many lower tier decks that would boost their power level quite a bit… especially the deck I play, Eldrazi, where it will surely continue to be a playset. I bought these I think for $12 each and now from the same store only a few days later they’re $5

A few days ago I posted in the monthly publications thread. No answer. I messaged the moderators nearly 2 whole days ago. No answer.

So someone please answer me here.

I looked at the rules for contributing / promoting your own work and the way it sounds it is meant for fiction works. I just finished my masters degree in Theology and wrote a paper arguing Lovecraft was directly influenced by Rudolf Otto concerning his concept of the numinous evil. I also mention a critic who suspects roundabout the same. I think my thesis is really interesting it analyzes an aspect of both Otto and Lovecraft that are currently ignored. I'd like my thesis to actually make an impact and I was excited to see I could potentially share it here. I also wrote a separate article that is like a earlier version of my thesis but compares Otto with a different author, James De Mille, and likewise it's about something significantly ignored in De Mille scholarship and although I'm overally unsatisfied with this one I think I make an important point. Additionally, De Mille wrote what is probably one of the greatest Victorian poems ever and he is only ignored for being Canadian and not British. He is an author who deserves way more attention. Especially works that are not A Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder. Likewise, early Canadian fiction like this is woefully ignored because a group of critics from McGill in Montreal blasted any colonial literature and erased decades of Canadian culture from education.