H. P. LOVECRAFT: Prophet of Humanism - Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Critical Essay

When one encounters the name Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the first thing--if anything--that comes to mind is liable to be the word horror. And that is as it should be, since H. P. Lovecraft (or HPL, as he was and remains known) was first and foremost a writer of what he called weird fiction, most of it published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales during his lifetime (1890-1937). He is universally recognized as Edgar Allan Poe's greatest successor, and many consider him Poe's superior. As fellow fantasist Fritz Leiber pointed out, Lovecraft effected a Copernican revolution in the writing of horror fiction, combining the classic Gothic style and diction of Poe with the new terrors unleashed by modern science. Indeed, it is difficult to categorize HPL's work as either horror or science fiction, since it somehow seems to make each integral to the other.

One of Lovecraft's greatest creations was a vast system of artificial mythology, modeled variously on ancient Greek myth, modern Theosophical lore, and the Pegana tales of Lord Dunsany. According to this mythos, human beings are late arrivals in the cosmos and on planet Earth, both of which were ruled for aeons by massive superhuman, utterly unhuman beings collectively known as the Great Old Ones. Most are described as vaguely octopoid in design. With the passing of ages, these entities retired to hibernation or exile, but the time nears when they will return and take what is theirs once more. These revelations are usually uncovered by a scholarly protagonist who realizes, to his peril, that the claims of ancient scriptures and grimoires have a terrible basis in hitherto-unguessed scientific and historical fact.

Lovecraft's myth cycle, and especially the tales in which he set it forth, are powerfully effective for many readers, usually adolescent males who carry the interest in Lovecraft into adulthood and often into scholarly study (myself among them). So effective are these fictions that even in HPL's lifetime many readers felt sure he was the unwitting mouthpiece for actual occult entities, that his Cthulhu Mythos (as his disciple August Derleth dubbed it) was fact. And indeed one might be forgiven for inferring that Lovecraft was some kind of occultist. Some researchers even today try to document their assertion (totally groundless) that Lovecraft was connected--like Arthur Machen, whose work he admired--to the Order of the Golden Dawn. But Lovecraft disdained any and all credence in the supernatural.

Even as a boy HPL had thrown over the Baptist beliefs of his parents and stopped attending his Providence, Rhode Island, Sunday School. He playfully embraced classical paganism for a time as an extension of his precocious interest in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aneid. After that, under the spell of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, young Howard declared himself a devout Muslim, again a youthful pose, and took the name Abdul Alhazred, a name he would later use for the mad author of his fictitious Necronomicon, a potent book of magic and forbidden knowledge which many readers still insist existed outside of HPL's imagination.

What an irony that some of his most ardent fans insist on seeing Lovecraft as an occultist when he in fact advocated naturalism, being a mechanistic materialist, rationalist, and atheist! He crossed swords in his letters with religious friends and colleagues, albeit in a cordial manner. He had early on been a fiend for science, producing his own amateur chemistry and astronomy magazines at the tender age of nine. He read ancient and modern philosophy, biology, and psychology and was remarkably erudite despite his never having finished high school. And he dismissed Jehovah as having the same degree of reality as his own fictitious god Yog-Sothoth.

So how did Lovecraft reconcile his interest in supernatural horror fiction with his strictly scientific view of the world? Actually, there was no gap to bridge. On the one hand, Lovecraft held that it is the unbeliever in the supernatural who is liable to be the most effective horror writer, not the believer, since only the unbeliever, the strict rationalist, would find a supernatural occurrence truly flabbergasting, genuinely horrifying, subverting his or her most dearly held convictions. The believer in the supernatural would, deep down, take even an epiphany of the devil as a comforting event, since it would at least vindicate belief in supernaturalism!

On the other hand, there is a direct continuity between Lovecraft's scientism and his mythology, as Dirk W. Mosig has made clear in "H. P. Lovecraft: Myth-Maker" (in S. T. Joshi's H. P Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, Ohio University Press, 1980). Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, on the narrative level, appear to be gods and/or extraterrestrials, neither of which Lovecraft accepted as real. But on a deeper level it is fairly clear that Lovecraft uses his titans Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, and others to symbolize the indifferent, inexorable forces of the cosmos which blindly produced Homo sapiens and will finally unknowingly destroy them again. Mosig quotes Lovecraft as explaining:

   All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws
   and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the
   cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of
   time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic
   life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a
   negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

Lovecraft's most potent symbol for the purposelessness of the cosmos, despite its scientific laws, is the Chaos Sultan Azathoth. As Azathoth says in Lovecraft's "Sonnet XXII" from Fungi from Yuggoth:

   Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
   Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
   Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
   But only Chaos, without form or place.
   Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
   Things he had dreamed but could not understand
   While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
   In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
   They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
   Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
   Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
   Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
   "I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
   As in contempt he struck his master's head.

In his stories, as in reality, it is hapless scientific delving which has disclosed the perilous and tenuous position of humanity in the scheme of things. For example, in "The Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft writes:

   The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
   human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of
   ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that
   we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,
   have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
   dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and
   of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
   revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new
   dark age.

When Lovecraft's protagonists recoil from the terrible truths they have stumbled upon, they stand for the affronted conventionalists and religious believers who still balk at the revelations of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. When one considers today's creationist and New Age movements, one can conclude that Lovecraft's prediction of a new dark age of anti-science superstition is well on its way to fulfillment.

Lovecraft scholars know quite well how great a debt HPL owed the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, from whom he derived the fundamental notion of creating one's own myth cycle. But it has seldom been remarked how Lovecraft's very use of such sham supernaturalism was foreshadowed in Dunsany's tales, especially "The Sorrow of Search," in which the atheist Dunsany sets forth in limpid scriptural prose the futile ironies of the quest for religious faith. I believe that both Dunsany and Lovecraft understood what many religious believers and rationalist critics of religion have alike failed to grasp: that the magical charm of religion is, at bottom, a matter of imagination and aesthetics. That once one knows this, one can feel free to rejoice in the imaginative dimension, gaining from it the aesthetic fulfillment religion offers but without making the sacrifice of the intellect that religion imperiously requires. This is why the mythic fictions of both Dunsany and Lovecraft possess genuine mythic depth and power, all the while inculcating rationalsm and atheism.

This is a lesson I believe many humanists and Unitarians could stand to learn. Joseph Campbell learned it, though perhaps many of his enthusiastic fans, like Lovecraft's own, have missed his point. The much-vaunted "power of myth" is the depth with which it speaks of the human reality, not of superhuman realities, in which Campbell seemed to believe no more than Lovecraft did. The sterility many find in humanism and rationalism doesn't come from a lack of religion but from a fear of poetry, myth, and the imagination. Yet it is these things which form the sugar that helps the strong medicine of naturalistic pragmatism go down.

Lovecraft scoffed at the notion that humankind is central in the scheme of things--a belief held in different ways by religious people and by some who would call themselves humanists. He considered humanity no more important in the big picture than the vanished pterodactyl. Something of an existentialist, HPL rejected the notion of any objective meaning inherent in the universe. He rejected the whole Platonic tradition, preferring the Atomists and certain of the Pre-Socratics. This meant, among other things, the impossibility of deriving ethics from ontology, from any doctrine of what is truly real. Lovecraft instead derived ethics from its companion branch of philosophy, aesthetics. One ought to show compassion and to behave respectfully because this behavior is most conducive to the noble--that is, the beautiful--life.

Is there a purpose to human life that obliges us to keep on living, not to commit suicide? No, there isn't. But that doesn't mean there isn't a powerful reason to keep going, and that is simply to enjoy the captivating beauty all around us. Scientific curiosity stems from the awe and wonder we feel contemplating nature. And awe and wonder are aesthetic emotions. (This is essentially the same conclusion reached, after a period of existential despair over the lack of God, by Woody Allen's character in Hannah and Her Sisters: "Don't you want to be a part of it all?")

In fact, one of Lovecraft's major goals in writing tales such as "The Shadow out of Time" was to create the momentary illusion of a suspension of natural laws which so strictly limit human knowledge. It is, again, a matter of aesthetic fulfillment. And once again we are brought back to that dimension of human nature that humanism sometimes appears to neglect: the rich nourishment of the imagination offered by the great creations of the human imagination: art, poetry, sculpture, drama, literature. Lovecraft wasn't particularly optimistic about human destiny, nor did he cherish many illusions about human godlikeness. He was nonetheless a humanist, and I think a major voice of humanism, in that, on the one hand, he clearly recognized the limits of human knowledge, and, on the other, he knew how to transcend them in the only possible way, on the sky-soaring wings of the aesthetic imagination.

Robert M. Price holds doctorates of philosophy in both the New Testament and systematic theology from Drew University. He is a member of the Jesus Seminar, editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism, and author of the book Deconstructing Jesus.

RELATED ARTICLE: Lovecraftian Influences and Events

H. P. Lovecraft's "weird fiction" was more than horror/science fiction; its influence permeated the arts and literature in a profound way and has continued to wield this power right through to our current culture. A perusal of one of the many websites devoted to Lovecraft (wwwhp.lovecraft.com) gives evidence of this. Here are just a few of the people and genres influenced by HPL.

Authors

* Robert Bloch: probably best known for Psycho, began writing Cthulhu Mythos tales in his late teens; modeled a character in "The Shambler from the Stars" after Lovecraft; best "mythos" work is "Notebook Found in a Deserted House."

* Clark Ashton Smith: incorporated numerous Lovecraftian elements into his fiction and poetry (and Lovecraft returned the favor); also created many Lovecraft-related paintings and sculptures.

* J. Ramsey Campbell

* Lin Carter

* August Derleth

* Robert E. Howard

* Stephen King

* T.E.D. Klein

* Henry Kuttner

* Frank Belknap Long

* Brian Lumley

* Colin Wilson

Comics and Cartoons

Comic adaptations of Lovecraft's works have been around since 1950. For a complete list of these works, see Brian Lingard's H. P. Lovecraft in the Comics as well as go to www.hplovecraft.com on the Internet.

Events

* Heritage of Horror: The Tales of ri. P. Lovecraft by Wharf Rat Productions, a series of dramatic readings, October 1998.

* H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival held originally October 4-6, 1996, in Portland, Oregon; now held annually in mid-October.

* NecronomiCon is a convention honoring Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos in all forms, held during odd-numbered years.

* Providence Preservation Society Walking Tours conducted occasionally around Lovecraft's birthday (August 20) and Halloween (October 31).

Games

* Role-playing games are led by Chaosium's award-winning "Call of Cthulhu," set in Lovecraft's fiction and translated into many languages.

* Board and card games include Chaosium's 1987 "Arkham Horror" (a board game) and "Mythos" (a collectible card game); Atlas Games' 1998 "Cults Across America"; Dark House's "Dark Cults" (a beautifully illustrated card game); Steve Jackson Games' "Iliuminati" (a table top card game) and "Iliuminati: New World Order (a collectible card game version); and Pagan Publishing's "The Hills Rise Wild" (a miniatures game).

* Computer and platform games include I-Motion's three-game series Alone in the Dark and Prisoner of Ice and Shadow of the Comet; Monolith Productions, Inc., 1995 3-D horror game Blood; Konami's 1999 Castlevania 64 (released in 1987 as a series of platform games and now designed for Ninetendo 64); Electronic Arts/Eldritch Games' 1989 The Hound of Shadow; Infocom's 1987 The Lurking Horror; KAZe's Necronomicon (one of the "Digital Pinball" series); Id Software's 1996 Quake; Sierra Online's 1993 Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness; Millennium Interactive/Nova Spring's 1995 The Scroll; and MicroProse/Mythos Games' X-COM: Terror from the Deep.

Movies

* Bride of Re-Animator (1990), available on VHS.

* The Crimson Cult (1968), based on "The Dreams in the Witch House."

* The Curse (1987), based on "The Colour Out of Space," available on VHS.

* The Dunwich Horror (1970).

* From Beyond (1986), available on VHS.

* The Haunted Palace (1963), based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, available on VHS.

* Lurking Fear (1994), available on VHS.

* Monster of Terror (1995), also known as Die, Monster, Die!, based on "The Color Out of Space."

* Necronomicon (1993), an anthology of three tales--"The Rats in the Walls," "Cool Air," and "The Whisperer in Darkness," available on VHS.

* Re-animator (1985), available on VHS.

* The Resurrected (1992), based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, available on VHS.

* The Unnamable (1988), available on VHS.

* The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993).

Musical Artists

This is an abbreviated list. Many additional European, especially German, groups have been influenced by HPL.

* Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath: "Behind the Wall of Sleep" (1969).

* Blue Oyster Cult: Agents of Fortune: "E.T.I." (1976); Imaginos: "I Am the One You Warned Me Of," "Les Invisibles," "In the Presence of Another World."

* The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets: Gurgle, Gurgle, Gurgle: "Cthulhu Dreams": Hurts Like Hell: "Screams from R'lyeh" and "Chunk"; Cthulhu Strikes Back (1995).

* H. P. Lovecraft: H. P. Lovecraft: "The White Ship" (1967); H. P. Lovecraft II: "At the Mountains of Madness" (1969); At the Mountains of Madness (1988).

* Metallica: Ride the Lightning: "The Call of Ktulu" (1984); Master of Puppets: "The Thing That Should Not Be" (1986).

* Morbid Angel:Abominations of Desolation (1986); Altars of Madness (1989); Formulas Fatal to the Flesh (1998).

* NecronomicoN: Morbid Ritual (1991); The Silver Key (1996).

* Rigor Mortis: Rigor Morris: "Re-Animator" (1988).

Products

* Benway-Tanner Enterprises: "Lovecraftian trinkets and baubles," decals, rubber stamps, and license plate frames.

* Bowen Designs: Cthulhu statuette, H. P. Lovecraft bust.

* Lovecraft Draft Cider. Ltd.: Providence company that produces hard cider (ironic because Lovecraft was a tee-totaller).

* Daryl L Hutchinson: Lovecraft tarot cards. * Pagan Publishing: plush Cthulhu dolls.

Television Shows

* Babylon 5: the Pak'ma'ra is a race of creatures resembling Cthulhu.

* Dark Shadows: many episodes, particularly the "Leviathan" episodes (1969-1970).

* Monsters: episode 63 "The Space Eaters."

* Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: produced by Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert (responsible for "Evil Dead" films); Necronomicon figures prominently in "City of the Dead" episode.

* Night Gallery: episode 18 "Cool Air"; episode 7 "Miss Lovecraft Sent Me"; episode 17 "Pickman's Model"; episode 14 "Professor Peabody's Last Lecture"; episode 29 "The Return of the Sorcerer."

* The Real Ghostbusters: two episodes: "Collect Call of Cthulh" and "Russian About."

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