When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro...

   I love wild speculation. I also love speculation that has the slightest glimmer of the possibility of being true.
  One example is the many occult students and writers who follow the path blazed by Kenneth Grant regarding my favorite writer H.P. Lovecraft. Namely that Lovecraft was not just a fiction writer but an occultist who was either consciously or unconsciously revealing occult truths in his work.
Grant speculates where Crowley was trained and immersed in Ritual Magick and secret societies, Lovecraft was a 'natural' or unconscious occultist. Or he may have even been in contact with a group but kept that hidden.
   All of Lovecraft's known voluminous correspondences and journal entries bespeak of his strictly materialist views and his disdain for spiritualism (ala Houdini) and Theosophy. However this hasn't  prevented any number of authors and bloggers from speculating that Grant was right. This mostly consists of examining the lives of Aleister Crowley and Lovecraft to see if their paths crossed. (They had the potential when both were in New York City for a brief time in the 20s). Or if they were just aware of the others work. (Lovecraft may have been aware of Crowley, as he was aware of Theosophy, no evidence Crowley knew about Lovecraft's work.)
  Many others have written their own grimoires based on Chaos Magick workings with the Great Old Ones (Lovecraft's creations). To be fair, some of those are written from the point of view that Lovecraft was a materialist but that the fervent following of his creations has established them as egregores, capable of action in the material world.
   The ones who feel there's more to Lovecraft and his creations than meets the eye includes the aforementioned Grant, Empire of the Wheel author Walter Bosely and the prolific Peter Levenda, who may or not be the author behind the nom de plume 'Simon' author of the 'real' Necronomicon.
By way of explanation, the Necronomicon is fictional grimoire created by Lovecraft.
   Anyway, I'd like to quote from Levenda's excellent work, 'The Dark Lord':
"In 'The Call of Cthulhu' Lovecraft reveals that the rituals required to summon the Great Old Ones involve orgies by people who are of mixed races ... This conflation of unbridled sexuality and exotic races and ethnicities is a common theme in colonialist literature and was a feature in the castigation of the practice of Tantra in India by the British colonizers."
  Why mention this? Well does anyone recall this scene in EWS?

Ok, now the initial scene involved synthesized music being played over an Orthodox Romanian rite played backwards. Once the orgy starts, Harford walks through the mansion to Indian music. The original scene called for a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita read in Hindi, that was later removed due to complaints from the Indian community.
   Also, we all know that the Somerton Mansion where the orgy takes place was shot in the old Rothschild Mansion, Mentmore Towers, right? Well, half right. The exterior was Mentmore Towers, the interior was Elveden Hall. To quote the Wikipedia entry for Elveden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elveden_Hall): 



"In 1849, the Maharajah Duleep Singh, ruler of the Sikh Empire and owner of the famous Koh-i-noor diamond was exiled to England, having been removed from his kingdom by the British East India Company.
The Maharajah purchased the 17,000-acre (69 km2) Elveden Estate in 1863 and set about rebuilding the country house and dressing it in an Italian style. However, he redesigned the interior to resemble the Mughal palaces that he had been accustomed to in his childhood. (emphasis mine)
Elveden Hall played host to a wide range of sporting activities but none rivalled the Maharajah's passion for shooting. His shooting parties were popular amongst aristocracy including Prince George, Duke of Cambridge."

Bizarre Tantric orgiastic rites filmed in a mansion that was used to housing parties of the elite? So was Kubrick a Lovecraft fan and believer? No. I'm not suggesting that, only that they arrived at a similar place by different routes. I believe, whether it is Satanic or Saturnian (as Weidner suggests, my suspicion is it's closer to Tantric) that Kubrick's Somerton group was in it for more than kinky kicks. I  believe they were 'feeding' something, invoking something... that would break through when the stars are right, as Lovecraft would say. That is one of my beliefs about the hidden meaning in Kubrick's films.  To summarize:

A. There is a hidden elite that the general public was not aware of in Kubrick's day. (They've at least heard about it now in the digital age)

B. That one of their goals is the emergence Artificial Intelligance

C. That this elite is in league with or serves another, non-human intelligence.

More on this later. Especially in regards to the Bear symbolism. Hint, like all of Kubrick's symbols is multi-layered. There's more to it than just Cold War symbolism.