A new book, seemingly coming from an occultist perspective, Dark Magic: H.P. Lovecraft, Starry Wisdom and the Contagion of Fear…

explores the contagious qualities of Lovecraft’s tales, with their embedded sense of dread and their dismantling of human reason, and how they have propagated in the near century after his death … the infectious qualities of Lovecraft’s ideas are seen to parallel virology, mass infection, and the fraying state of the human psyche during times of pandemic.

Which blurb leads me to coin the new word “cultifectious”:— the quality had by a certain type of culture that is highly infectious and communicable, but not mere mass-market pop-fluff or some passing propaganda of-the-moment. It carries within it a complex nexus of elements that organically connect things usually divided — low and high culture, the deep past and the cosmic future, or ancient and modern science. Its infectiousness thus comes partly from being connected to ‘the genuine’ at both ends of one of those divisions, and by bringing these lightly into play with each other. Because it has something genuine woven through it, it may be difficult to make into a mass audience commodity unless brutally shorn of many of its intrinsic qualities. Instead it persists and spreads among initiates as a potent ‘cultic’ form of culture. It does not usually, however, gather about it the more oppressive hierarchical apparatus of ‘a cult’ in the religious sense. It naturally fascinates, rather than ponderously recruits.