HP Lovecraft - Atheism's Mythographer

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Interesting article I found which I thought I would share with everyone here:

“To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law — to be linked with the vast outside — to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and ultimate — surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!”
- H. P. Lovecraft, ” The Whisperer in Darkness”
I: FROM BEYOND

My hometown is not that much different from the rotting and moldering sinkholes that Providence author H. P. Lovecraft invented to house his horror stories. Like the fictional Arkham and Innsmouth, Mass., my city boasts a diseased downtown of crumbling buildings and indifferent shopkeepers peddling strange wares. And since many of the people here are unnaturally white from the non-existent upstate New York sun, it has never been too hard for me to imagine the reptilian cast said to give Lovecraft’s gloomy coastal townspeople the “Innsmouth Look.”
I first discovered Lovecraft when I was a kid reading an anthology of horror stories with the un-horrifying title of 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories. I instantly loved his fiction, but I have to confess that his archaic and adjective-filled stories made me think the 1920s pulp-writer was one of the 19th century authors in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. Since Lovecraft liked to think of himself as an old gentlemen from ages past, nothing would have pleased him more.
Lovecraft’s brand of horror was a unique blend of the traditional monster story and modern philosophy in the Neitzschean bent. He created a universe filled with dread monsters lurking just outside the known world, ever-ready to break through and take over. His stories of a vast, impersonal cosmos with little thought or mind for the puny likes of man transformed the weird tale into a story of cosmic horror. The endless swarms of mighty chaos are ruled by Azathoth, the demon-sultan, who Lovecraft says is “encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.”
“Although cast in vaguely theistic form,” says Joseph Morales of Psychozoan magazine, “with a personal name and titles such as ‘daemon sultan’ and ‘Lord of All,’ Azathoth is a sort of anti-god. That is not to say that he is a devil either. Rather he is cast as an idiot, whose pointless noodlings on the flute accidentally give rise to whole universes.”
The nuclear chaos sprawling at the center of infinity is similar in form to, and in fact predates by nearly three decades, the Big Bang of our generation. Like the scientific explanation for the origins of the universe, Lovecraft’s Azathoth has neither a master plan nor any concern for his creations.
“Lovecraft’s description of Azathoth,” Morales says, “makes use of our childhood image of a God in charge of all things, but then subverts that image by investing it with the most essential attribute of the mechanistic-materialistic worldview: a total lack of conscious purpose.”
Lovecraft’s tales of ancient gods generated by a primal chaos in a universe without purpose strike close to the post-modern crisis of man’s place in a materialist universe where pure reason concludes that the gods of religion seem to have abandoned man to the wrath of science.
“For Lovecraft,” author Erich Davis says, “it is not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but reason with its eyes agog. By fusing cutting-edge science with archaic material, Lovecraft creates a twisted materialism in which scientific ‘progress’ returns us to the atavistic abyss, and hard-nosed research revives the factual basis of forgotten and discarded myths.”
The key to the abyss in Lovecraft’s world was Science itself. It was through science that the well-spring of horror arose, and this is what captivated the minds of those who read him. Lovecraft introduced a new brand of horror that dispenced with the supernatural as an opposition to the natural order.
In a letter, Lovecraft wrote, “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 measurable universe.”
This is why Lovecraft’s monsters are so frightening at a level beyond horror-movie “Boo!” factor.

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More can be read HERE (http://www.templeofdagon.com/mythos-studies/jason-colavito-atheisms-mythographer/).

[diome]

Interesting.:) I had always thought to have read somewhere that Lovecraft was into occultism. And most people into occultism are also religious in some way - certainly not the traditional christianity of course, but not atheists either.

Lovecraft's stories are very upper class, male only stuff (I can't remember if he ever mentions women), but I've liked them nevertheless. He's such an unconventional horror writer I think, though of course a horror classic nowadays.

[Yazman]

Yeah, Lovecraft was an atheist which is pretty cool.. primarily he was a fucking brilliant author though, one of my all time favourites. Just about everything he wrote was amazing!

A lot of it freaks me the fuck out sometimes though, lol.

[x359594]

I had always thought to have read somewhere that Lovecraft was into occultism.

He despised occultism. The confusion may come from the fact that his bogus book the Necronomicon was believed real by some occultists and was later used as the title of various occult bibles.

This is also of interest:

As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened,
greedy nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their
eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human
sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exulting sheer
acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-
materially shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-
cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes, and revel in
mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is
synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or
that rational planning of resource-distribution contravenes some vague
and mystical "American heritage") utterly contrary to fact and without
the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the
Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one reserves for the
dead.

H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume V, pp. 293-294.

[IcarusAngel]

I've read some of his stories from "Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre" and they're pretty good. He tended to focus on the psychological factor of horror and set up eerie times and places for his characters. The last stories I read were "The Outsider" and "The Vault," which are both great, and before that I read "The Rats in the Walls." More Annotated works of HP Lovecraft has the Herbert West: Reanimator story that was made into a movie loosely based on it.

His writing focuses on the basic tenants of grammar with a heavy emphasis on adjectives and you'll often find similar descriptions of things and characters in completely different stories. Unfortunately, some stories also include racial descriptions of Africans and epithets, like a cat named "Nigger man" and so on.

[Das war einmal]

I've read some of his stories from "Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre" and they're pretty good. He tended to focus on the psychological factor of horror and set up eerie times and places for his characters. The last stories I read were "The Outsider" and "The Vault," which are both great, and before that I read "The Rats in the Walls." More Annotated works of HP Lovecraft has the Herbert West: Reanimator story that was made into a movie loosely based on it.

His writing focuses on the basic tenants of grammar with a heavy emphasis on adjectives and you'll often find similar descriptions of things and characters in completely different stories. Unfortunately, some stories also include racial descriptions of Africans and epithets, like a cat named "Nigger man" and so on.

True, still its not phrased over and over again and considering for that time, it was common, so you should take that into perspective. Lovecraft is the creator of legendary creatures and myths and an inspiration for writers like Stephen King. In many music and literature writings, games and movies, the Cthulhu mythos is mentioned.

If you happen to posses an Xbox (regular or 360) you should try and get 'Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of The Earth' which is one of the best Cthulhu based games I have played yet. The scare factor is very high. This game is also available for the pc btw.

[x359594]

Unfortunately, some stories also include racial descriptions of Africans and epithets, like a cat named "Nigger man" and so on.

Lovecraft was a racist and a reactionary until the early 1930s when he did a complete about face as can be followed in his letters. One of his correspondents was James F. Morton a Socialist Party stalwart who argued him out of his pseudo-scientific defense of racism and conservative politics, so that by the end of his life he called himself a socialist and renounced his former racist views.

Lovecraft apparently didn't think his fiction would long survive his own early death, one reason why he never bothered to revise the racist elements out of his earlier fiction.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I knew about Lovecraft's racism, although I didn't know that he eventually abandoned it. Although it makes sense considering he married a woman of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. He was also horrified by anti-Semitic violence in 1930s Germany.

[Yazman]

I knew about Lovecraft's racism, although I didn't know that he eventually abandoned it. Although it makes sense considering he married a woman of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. He was also horrified by anti-Semitic violence in 1930s Germany.

It was actually the events that occurred in nazi germany that gave him a "reality shock" so to speak and eventually turned him off of racism.