Corrupt

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 - 1937)

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 light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

This paragraph from Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" is highly representative of his ideas and views on life, which were suprisingly critical and clever considering the common opinion many people have of him as just a writer of horror stories. Perhaps primarily known for the literary invention of cosmic horror and Necronomicon (the book that drives most people insane when they read it), Lovecraft's weird stories offer far more than the usual horror literature (which is regulary turned into laughably bad B-horror movies). In many of his stories, Lovecraft not only expressed the intense terror of weird tales, but included a context comprised of his main views on life, which provide insightful and sharp criticism of modern society as well as ideas on how to change it for the better.

Introduction

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20th, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He came from a long line of English settlers; his mother could trace her ancestry almost to the Mayflower, while his father's surname, Lovecraft or Lovecroft, could be traced back to the 15th century. Lovecraft's father died when he was eight, and the death of his maternal grandfather, who was a great influence on him and who introduced him to the old tales of Gothic horror, soon followed. In the beginning a well-to-do family, his mother and his two aunts were forced to move from his ancestral home due to the mismanagement of his grandfather's business. All of this was a great trauma for Lovecraft who even considered suicide for a while. He was exceptionally intelligent and a voracious reader who early and quickly familiarized himself with such classics as the Illiad and the Odyssey, Arabian Tales, horror literature and science.

His greatest influence on writing was, unsurprisingly, Poe, a master of American literature in his own right. Being relatively uninterested in official and ordinary education because of his intense reading pursuits, Lovecraft ended up never receiving a diploma (due to the nervous breakdowns he suffered at that time), which later served as a great shame and disappointment in his life. After living a rather lonely hermit's life for several years, Lovecraft started to read popular pulp magazines of that time, which proved to have a great impact on him later. He was annoyed at the baseness and limits of typical romance stories that could be found in those magazines, and after several critical letters he sent to the magazine and the following criticism of him by the supporters of those type of stories, Lovecraft attracted the attention of the chairman of United Amateur Press Association who, impressed with Lovecraft's intellect and arguments, asked him to join the organization. Lovecraft accepted and found a new way of expressing his creative energy, and left the depresseve state he was in for some time. Lovecraft started to write stories as well as poems and essays that were periodically published in various pulp magazines. Lovecraft was never a professional writer, however, and he lived off his small inheritance as well as from revision work and ghost writing for other authors.

The death of his mother in 1921 severly affected Lovecrat's already frail health and again pushed him on the brink of suicide. Soon after that he met Sonia Green, a woman of Ukranian-Jewish ancestry, at an amateur journalist convention. They later married, eventually moving with her into New York. Lovecraft's two aunts were not happy with this marriage probably because of her racial heritage. The marriage itself was not to last thanks to the many difficulties that awaited the young couple, perhaps mainly affected by Lovecrat's inabillity to find work and adapt to the crowded city of New York. He continued to write his stories, moving from the early macabre stories to the so called "dream cycle stories" inspired by the writer Lord Dunsany. However, only with his "cosmic horror" stories did Lovecraft found his own unique style. Despite the increasing quality of his writing, and a vast correspondance with other authors with whom he not only discussed weird literature but also his scientific, religious, political and philosophical views, Lovecraft's stories were rarely published. He died in 1937 from intestinal cancer (caused by malnutrition) and was buried in Swan Point Cemetery. A separate marker was erected only recently with the line "I Am Providence."

Philosophy

Science and Religion

Lovecraft was interested in science from an early age, especially in chemistry and astronomy. Influenced by the atomism of Democritus, Darwin's evolution theory and the nebular hypothesis of Laplace, Lovecraft adopted views of mechanistic materialism and atheism. In his stories he often employed the theme of potentially disturbing scientific discoveries with the 18th century positivism (for explanation). Perhaps his stance can be best expressed with an excerpt from one of his letters written when Lovecraft became familiar with Einstein's ideas of matter and energy:

The truth is, that the discovery of matter's identity with energy – and of its consequent lack of vital intrinsic difference from empty space – is an absolute coup de grace to the primitive and irresponsible myth of "spirit." For matter, it appears, really is exactly what "spirit" was always supposed to be. Thus it is proved that wandering energy always has a detectable form – that if it doesn't take the form of waves or electron-streams, it becomes matter itself; and that the absence of any other detectable energy-form indicates not the presence of spirit, but the absence of anything whatever. (Selected Letters 2.266-67)

Lovecraft continued to familiarize himself with an increasing number of other scientific theories, always critically questioning and wrestling with them, never accepting them blindly. Scientific discoveries were sometimes mentioned in his stories ("Whisperer in Darkness") but the real importance of science in Lovecraft's life and writing is that it provided him with a firm view of the universe and he believed that any literary work, even fiction and poetry, must derive from it. With his developing views of science, an obvious hostility to religion soon occured, with Lovecraft accusing it of making false claims about the world. This hostility increased over time as religion continued to brainwash people with their view of the world in sharp contrast to scientific evidence. However, this does not imply that Lovecraft was overjoyed with scientific discoveries. He rather resigningly accepted them, and with them also the view that would serve as the foundation for his cosmic horror, a view of humanity and the world's utter insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things; that is, we live, we die and that's it. Lovecraft, recognized that this in itself is somewhat of a cage for a man - this rigid cosmic reality with its laws - so he searched for an escape from it. This escape was realized by the weird fiction and his imagination, and not in reviving various religious beliefs.

The general revolt of the sensitive mind against the tyranny of corporeal enclosure, restricted sense-equipment, and the laws of force, space, and causation, is a far keener and bitterer and better-founded one than any of the silly revolts of long-haired poseurs against isolated and specific instances of cosmic inevitability. (...) The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality – when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt – as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (SL 3.295-96)

This explains Lovecraft's dealing with science and religion, accepting one and discarding the other, while weird literature would serve as a sort of integral part of cosmic reality, showing the horrors of the inconcieveable vastness of space (from the limited perspective of a human) and our insignificance in it. At the same time, it served as an escape from humanity's dreary reality through imagination.

Tradition

In a cosmos without absolute values we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort, pleasure, and emotional satisfaction. What gives us relative painlessness and contentment we may arbitrarily call "good," and vice versa. This local nomenclature is necessary to give us that benign illusion of placement, direction, and stable background on which the still more important illusions of "worthwhileness," dramatic significance in events, and interest in life depend. Now what gives one person or race or age relative painlessness and contentment often disagrees sharply on the psychological side from what gives these same boons to another person or race or age. Therefore "good" is a relative and variable quality, depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, and individual temperament. Amidst this variability there is only one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working pseudo-standard of "values" which we need in order to feel settled and contented – and that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally and pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of "lostness" in endless time and space. (SL 2.356-57)

Tradition is for Lovecraft a crucial thing, because it enables us to find a place and meaning in this world. We need it because otherwise we would be completely lost when faced with the black dephts of the universe. Even though we are completely irrelevant in the cosmic ways, tradition allows us to be relevant in our world, creating values and ways of life that construct a sort of protective sphere of purpose in which we can function as limited beings. The sense of "lostness" of which Lovecraft wrote happens to people who live in a society without tradition, and these people are not only subsequently lost in their world but are increasingly deluded and confused, much like the people of modern society today.

Political Views

Lovecraft's political viwes changed as he has changed himself and gained new experience and perspectives in life. In his youth, because of his affection for English culture and history he lamented the separation of the United States from the Crown, but later in life became a socialist who supported the reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One thing never changed, however: culture, the core of his political beliefs. Culture was strengthened by his aristocratic upbringing and his distrust for democracy, which was only further propelled by the Depression and the things that followed it. He wrote in one letter: "All I care about is the civilization – the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men." This meant that everything that was in contrast to culture and civilization that could damage its development in any way had to be discarded. For Lovecraft, the worst things of that sort were capitalism and democracy, which joined forces in the early 19th century and led to the crushing of the high culture of the past, a culture supported and maintained by the aristocracies:

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence and sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, and other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved and crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial and commercial-satellitic greed and callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort and smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, andc.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress and speech and external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop and the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, and mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – and they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature and art lost most of their market; and writing, painting, drama, andc. became engulfed more and more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (SL 5.397-98)

This lack of culture is the most obvious in modern society where the commercialization of almost everything has occured. This is what Lovecraft noted even then: a culture of entertainment created specifically for the consumers, who, in their mindless state, consume and destroy everything in their path like a plague of locusts before moving on to the next shiny product that hits the shelves. However, Lovecraft's letter above doesn't mean that he was naive enough to dream for some sort of resurrection of aristocracy; he realised that times change, and people with it, and that the past cannot be brought back to life. What was needed was the realisation of the old values in a contemporary time, and this for Lovecraft meant socialism, which is for him just like aristocracy:

..".a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system...a set of qualities, however, whose merits lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, and just as achievable through socialism as through aristocracy. (SL 5.321)

Socialism would bring basic economic rights, unemployment insurance, and shorter working hours. Lovecraft believed that the work vital to the society could be done by a small number of people, which would eventually lead to the division and assignment of working hours to the population at large who would do what little work remained. Lovecraft imagined that people with great amount of free time would pursue educational and aesthetic purposes, which would elevate the level of general culture. These utopic imagination of Lovecraft's seem very naive when contrasted to his previous statements about his distrust of the mob and mechanization, which proved to be a very accurate prediction of modern society:

Granted that the machine-victim has leisure. What is he going to do with it? What memories and experiences has he to form a background to give significance to anything he can do? What can he see or do that will mean anything to him? . . . What has heretofore made life tolerable for the majority is the fact that their natural workaday routine and milieu have never been quite devoid of the excitement, nature-contact, uncertainty, non-repetition, and free and easy irregularity which build up a background of associations calculated to foster the illusion of significance and make possible the real enjoyment of art and leisure. Without this help from their environment, the majority could never manage to keep contented. Now that it is fading, they are in a bad plight indeed; for they cannot hope to breast the tide of ennui as the stronger-minded minority can. There will be, of course, high-sounding and flabbily idealistic attempts to help the poor devils. We shall hear of all sorts of futile reforms and reformers – standardised culture-outlines, synthetic sports and spectacles, professional play-leaders and study-guides, and kindred examples of machine-made uplift and brotherly spirit. And it will amount to just about as much as most reforms do! Meanwhile the tension of boredom and unsatisfied imagination will increase – breaking out with increasing frequency in crimes of morbid perversity and explosive violence. (SL 2.308-9)

It seems as if Lovecraft, although aware of the things to come, never lost his hope and somewhat tried to comfort himself and others with the idea that the necessary changes could somehow still be achieved.

Racialism

Lovecraft has been presented for a long time as a typical racist, with various "social crusaders" often citing examples from his stories. There has been little research, however, to understand the context and time in which Lovecraft lived and how it contributed to his racial views. Some have ignored it, like his friend August Derleth who published and expanded upon Lovecraft's stories, while other fantasy authors like L. Sprague de Camp simply judged him based on the most obvious examples, never bothering to search further. From the astounding number of letters Lovecraft wrote it can be said that his racial views remained monolithic and unwavering, never showing the flexibility of mind as did his views of science and other areas. Lovecraft had negative statements about Jews and people of Eastern Europe and firmly believed that blacks and Aborigines were biologically inferior to all other human races; as for the others, Lovecraft expressed no thoughts of inferiority, but believed that interbreeding with them would produce cultural uniformity (heretogeneity) with catastrophic effects on world culture:

No settled and homogeneous nation ought (a) to admit enough of a decidedly alien race-stock to bring about an actual alteration in the dominant ethnic composition, or (b) tolerate the dilution of the culture-stream with emotional and intellectual elements alien to the original cultural impulse. Both of these perils lead to the most undesirable results – i.e.,the metamorphosis of the population away from the original institutions, and the twisting of the institutions away from the original people.....all these things being aspects of one underlying and disastrous condition – the destruction of cultural stability, and the creation of a hopeless disparity between a social group and the institutions under which it lives. (SL 4.249)

These predictions were never as true as they are in modern society, where "multiculturalism" (which is another name for introducing throngs of foreigners as a cheap working force) has led to a lack of the unique cultures that previously adorned every nation; a uniqueness which made the world different and interesting in the first place. Lovecraft's obvious and blunt racism was common for the time when the immigrants came en masse in search for work, disturbing established society and culture. Lovecraft's life in New York enhanced his fear of the upcoming doom of English culture thorugh excessive interbreeding and miscegenation, which was expressed in many of his stories like "The Lurking Fear," "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Lovecraft, however, seems to have valued the merits of individuals, never descending completely into racial generalization; for instance, he had several Jewish friends and was married to a woman of Jewish ancestry.

Art

Aesthetics and Cosmic Realism

The central point of Lovecraft's aesthetic theory is non-commercial expression. From the earliest beginnings of his writing, Lovecraft used methods of capturing moods, images and all other underlying ideas that are within the artist and encompass the process of creation (that is, the writing itself). Lovecraft was opposed to overt didacticism, and wasn't really interested in involving himself actively in the publishing side of business; indeed, he was mostly reluctant to approach the publishers with his stories, or to diversify his market for that matter. If Lovecraft deemed his stories or novellas like the Case of Charles Dexter Ward as not good enough, he wouldn't prepare them for publication, which can seem to us as a mistake, considering the fact that publishers were usually more open to publish novellas than short stories. As of today, however, most of Lovecraft's work has been published and translated into about fifteen languages.

The thing that has put Lovecraft above the other weird fiction writers is the notion of cosmic realism and human insignificance within it. The relationship between humans, their emotions, laws and interests become insignificant in the cosmos, so human notions and perceptions like morality, good and evil, civilization and technology are not important in Lovecraft's stories because the temporary existence of the human race is completely meaningless in the vast universe. This crossing to the Outside, as Lovecraft described it, leaves humans and their world behind:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and the local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. 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. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold. (SL 2.150)

Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" from 1926 signifies the introduction of Lovecraft's unique contribution to horror in Yog-Sothothian pseudomythology. Stories before this one were mainly inspired by Poe's "macabre" stories and the "dream stories" of Lord Dunsany. "The Call of Cthulhu," however, denotes the moving from the world to the whole of universe as a foundation of the stories, introducing its mysterious and terrifying nature, with beings of incomprehensible mind and motivations, beings of devastating effect on the human limited and puny mind. Never before the writings of Lovecraft had humans appeared so small and insignificant in relation to beings like Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth or Cthulhu, beings whom humans with their limited perception would call "evil," but it would be better said that they're mostly uninterested in humans and their petty interests.

Yog-Sothothian Pseudomythology

The main characters in Lovecraft's stories are often educated, intelligent and cultivated individuals, like Randolph Carter or Charles Dexter Ward (or they are unnamed). These qualities, however, often cannot save them from the unspeakable alien influences or cosmic forces that they encounter in their quest for forbidden knowledge. The cosmic characters in Lovecraft's fiction include a loosely connected pantheon of unpercieveable beings like the Outer Gods, the most powerful beings in the universe, the Old Ones, beings of less power than the Outer Gods, Elder Things, a highly intelligent and technologically advanced alien race who were eventually destroyed by their brutish Shoggoth slaves, and more. Lovecraft emphasized their ominous and terrifying role in his stories by giving very little information about them, because their true motivations and purpose are utterly beyond human reach and comprehension.

The most powerful of the Outer Gods is Azathoth, also known as Blind Idiot God, Daemon Sultan or Nuclear Chaos. Azathoth is pure shapeless chaos, residing in the centre (nucleus) of the Universe. The horde of his amorphous creatures constantly dance around him, accompanied by the incomprehensibly vile drumming and sounding of the daemonic flute held in nameless paws. The purpose of this dancing, like the nature of Azathoth himself, is unknown. Another Outer God is Yog-Sothoth, known as The Key and the Gate, The All-in-One and 'Umr at-Tawil. Yog-Sothoth rules all time and space, and one of its many forms is conglomeration of iridescent glowing bubbles. The nature of this being is only hinted in the story "The Dunwich Horror":

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

The Old One known as Cthulhu, priest of the Gods, came from the stars when the Earth was young and dwelled in the city of R'lyeh (which sank under the ocean). The horrific appearance of Cthulhu is seen as "a pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings..." and "..a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." The purpose of Cthuhlu is given in the "The Call of Cthulhu": when the stars are aligned, Cthulhu will revive the Old Ones who will continue their reign on Earth. After the city of R'lyeh sank beneath the ocean Cthulhu could only influence the dreams of the humans cultists above, who worshipped it and prepared for its coming. The messenger of the Outer Gods is Nyarlathothep, the Crawling Chaos. Only he interacts intelligibly with humans, disguising his true form with many faces (often described as a tall, lean black man). Lovecraft also briefly mentiones the enigmatic Shub-Niggurath, The Goat With the Thousand Young and High-Priest-Not-to-be-Described, who lives in a monastery in the cursed plateau of Leng. Lovecraft very effectively used these beings by avoiding direct explanations and shrouding them in mysterious myths and legends, and some readers even thought that these legends were based on real facts (like they thought the same of Necronomicon). This shows just how potent, strong and believeable Lovecraft's fiction is.

Scientific Framework

Atmosphere

Another strong point of Lovecraft's weird fiction is his description of not only the vastness of the universe, but the detailed topographical areas of our earthly world. This seemingly paradoxical realtionship has a purpose, along with his diminution of human characters: the creation of that special mood and atmosphere in which limited human characters are suddenly contrasted with otherworldy things, which leads to such an effective way of describing their great fear and insanity:

Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately – with a careful emotional "build-up" – else it will seem flat and unconvincing. Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel. (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 113)

Essays

Another interesting thing about Lovecraft was his involvement not only with weird literature, but also with essays, poems and an astonishing correspondance with other authors, like Robert Bloch (Psycho) or Robert E. Howard, creator of the famous Conan the Barbarian stories. Thanks to the unbelievable amount letters Lovecraft has written during his life (ca. 100, 000!), he not only explained his views on the world, but exchanged ideas with other authors, helping them on more than one occasion with his useful advices. Lovecraft's essays of note include "The Supernatural Horror in Literature" (history and the most important authors of weird fiction) and "How to Write Weird Literature," which offers an interesting view on the method Lovecraft used for writing his stories. His travel essays offer us a description of different towns and places in America (also dispelling the common image of Lovecraft as a hermit - in reality he traveled a lot) with his typical nostalgic-critical perspective.

Themes

Nostalgia

In many of Lovecraft's stories nostalgia is a constantly reccuring theme. Lovecraft often described colonial architecture and countryside, contrasting it with the decay of the modernization and industrialization, decay propelled by democracy and capitalism (which he considered the two greatest causes for the corruption of culture and civilization). His nostalgia and resentment of the modern times were further fuelled by his time spent in New York, his subsequent inability to become accustomed to the way of life there, as well as hordes of immigrants who were arriving as a cheap labour force. As a result his prose could be classified as antiquarian, often using archaic words and spellings (lanthorn, compleat) but also introducing some new ones (eldritch, cyclopean). It is in stories like "The Street," "He" and "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" that Lovecraft expresses his nostalgia for the past and criticizes modern times. This is especially visible in the story "The Silver Key":

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order.

Forbidden Knowledge

Lovecraft's cosmicism asserted not only the insignificance of human life compared to the universe, but the fact that the very knowledge of the Outer Ones (like Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath and the messenger of the Gods, Nyarlathothep) meant insanity and often a horrific end to the person who dared to inquire about things that were way beyond human perception. Such description of the terrors that are on the Outside emphasize what Lovecraft stated about man: "The Oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." By moving away from the predictable creatures of horror literature (ghosts, vampires, werewolves) and by linking human characters in his stories with unfathomable beings, Lovecraft raised the level of fear and dread to new heights. This is were the Necromonicon is particulary effective: by giving hints and allusions to the things beyond them, human characters are lured into searching for them because their curiosity is irresistible, which leads to confrontation and in many cases, their end.

Threats to Civilization

Closely connected with nostalgia, criticism and anti-modernism is this theme in Lovecraft's stories, inspired by the works of German revolutionary-conservative theorist Oswald Spengler and the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Slow decay and downfall of the modern West and, therefore, the loss of direction and purpose of society forms an important part of Lovecraft's stories as he once wrote: "It is my belief, and was so long before Spengler put his seal of scholarly proof on it, that our mechanical and industrial age is one of frank decadence." This decline often happens to individuals, and therefore to society itself. The educated, cultured and civilized characters in Lovecraft's stories are corrupted either by forbidden knowledge (or "evil influence" from human perspective, like in "The Call of Cthulhu"), interbreeding with non-humans (like in "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth") or by magic or alchemic influence ("The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). Certain communities or whole societies are destroyed either by war ("Polaris") or internal degradation ("The Lurking Fear") or, in most cases, through the corrupt influence of an underclass influenced by inhuman forces.

Sins of Ancestors

Lovecraft considered the bloodline of his characters a very firm and powerful link between them and their ancestors. The atrocities and crimes of the ancestors had a profound effect on their descendants despite the distance in place and time of the action. Examples of this influence can be seen in stories such as "The Rats in the Walls," "Arthur Jermyn," "The Lurking Fear," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Alchemist" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," with different crimes affecting the characters, some more horrific than others (like cannibalism in "The Rats in the Walls").

Howard Phillips Lovecraft - A CORRUPT Perspective

It remains an enigma how academic and critical circles still ignore Lovecraft and his writings (probably due to the general prejudice toward weird literature, which expresses unpopular and dark themes; or the criticism of his poor short stories, which seem to have unjustly put the others in bad light). Lovecraft's horror was imbued by aspects critical of modern society, and his grim (but often truthful) predictions in his letters prove the quality and sharpness of his mind.

Perhaps Lovecraft's greatest sin in the eyes of modern society is his racial attitude, still one of the most taboo themes. While it is true that Lovecraft frequently (but not completely) succumbed to generalizations and prejudice in relation to other races, his opposition to excessive immigration of other cultures and his criticisms of the capitalism, democracy and industrialization that support it ring true. The dangerous attitudes Lovecraft held are currently not welcome as they would shatter the illusions of freedom and equality, illusions which keeps this society alive.

Lovecraft rejected the brainwashing aspects of religion as well, seeing it as a tool for turning people into obedient sheep. A cold materialistic atheist, Lovecraft nevertheless differed from other atheists in that he realized the emptiness of that approach to life and the importance of tradition (which gives us a purpose in this world). He also escaped mere atheism through the powers of imagination, which he used to create the legacy he has left us. No wonder the inscription on Lovecraft's tombstone reads "I AM PROVIDENCE," for his ideas and views on life can serve as wisdom to shed light on these dark and chaotic times.

Written by Vatroslav Svarogich

Further Reading

H.P. Lovecraft Archive

Lovecraft Fan Site

The homepage for noted publishers of Lovecraft's work.

Justin Taylor's essay on Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu"