CHAPTER FIFTY

H.P. LOVECRAFT

Erik Davis

H oward Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer principally

known for his weird iction, a British and American sub-genre of speculative
narrative that he helped both characterize and, as a critic, deine. In his tales, Lovecraft
blended elements of fantasy, horror, and science iction into a strikingly original,
infectious, and highly inluential narrative universe. Lovecraft’s weird iction is
characterized by a fascination with occult grimoires and forbidden knowledge; a
pantheon of bizarre extraterrestrial pseudo-gods who are essentially inimical to
human life; a nostalgic attachment to the history and landscape of New England; and
a heavily racialized concern with human degeneration and atavistic cults. In contrast
to the implicit supernaturalism of ghost stories or the gothic tale, the metaphysical
background of Lovecraft’s stories is a ‘cosmic indifferentism’ rooted in the nihilistic
and atheist materialism that Lovecraft professed at great length in his fascinating
letters. This lifelong philosophical stance led Lovecraft to embrace the disillusioning
powers of science, but also to pessimistically anticipate science’s ultimate evisceration
of human cultural norms and comforts. His weird tales were imaginative diversions
from this nihilism, but their horror relected it as well. Lovecraft’s literary vision was
also ampliied by the vivid, often nightmarish, and intensely detailed dreams he
experienced throughout his life. A crucial inluence on his iction, Lovecraft’s
dreaming can be seen as a phantasmic supplement to the reductive naturalism of his
intellectual outlook, lending his work an uncanny dynamism that helps explain its
continued power to stimulate thought, imagination, and cultural creation.
Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a privileged and pedigreed
New England family. For the rest of his life, he would remain under the spell of the
manners, aesthetics, and class attitudes he associated with that heritage. Lovecraft’s
father was committed to an insane asylum when the boy was less than three years
old, most likely due to tertiary syphilis. Lovecraft grew up an only child in a household
dominated by doting and indulgent women; alongside the pampering, he began to
experience recurrent nightmares peopled by terrifying ‘night-gaunts.’ When his
beloved maternal grandfather died in 1904, the family fell on hard times; for the rest
of Lovecraft’s life, with some exceptions, and partly due to his own hyper-sensitivity,
he lived on the margins of poverty. Through a precocious intellect, Lovecraft dropped

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out of high school, falling into a period of intense social isolation that was relieved
when he discovered the world of amateur journalism. In 1919, his psychologically
unstable mother was also committed to an asylum. Shortly after her death two years
later, Lovecraft met and eventually married Sonia Greene, an older Jewish woman
and the only obvious love interest in Lovecraft’s rather asexual life. His relationship
with Greene brought him to New York City for a few years but the marriage did not
last long and Lovecraft returned to his beloved Providence, where he lived with his
aunts. A teetotaler with a simple diet, he generally hewed to an ascetic existence, but
he traveled some and maintained an extraordinarily voluminous and thoughtful
correspondence with many friends and peers, including amateur journalists and
weird iction writers like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other members
of the ‘Lovecraft circle.’ He died of intestinal cancer in 1937 at the age of 46.
Publishing his iction chiely in Weird Tales, Lovecraft was not widely read during
his life, and his archaisms and other stylistic mannerisms turned off some pulp fans
just as they continue to challenge readers today. Drawing inspiration from earlier
masters of the weird tale like Poe, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and William Hope
Hodgson, Lovecraft wrote scores of striking short stories and novellas that, for all
their inconsistency and even contradiction, are held together by an enigmatic
intertextual web that includes the invented New England geography of ‘Arkham
country’; grimoire titles like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the dread Necronomicon;
a cosmology of multiple dimensions and recurrent Dreamlands; and a pantheon of
barbarously named beings like Cthulhu and Azathoth, who are generally known as
the ‘Great Old Ones’ or the ‘Outer Gods.’ During his lifetime, Lovecraft encouraged
members of his literary circle to contribute stories to what Lovecraft informally
called, after one of his principle beings, his Yog-Sothery. Following Lovecraft’s death,
August Derleth, who founded Arkham Horror largely to publish the work of his
friend and mentor, coined the term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ to describe this shared ictional
universe, which Derleth and others in the Circle continued to elaborate and extend.
Over time, thousands of amateur and professional writers across the globe would
come to do the same, as well as numerous ilmmakers, illustrators, sculptors, game
and toy designers, and comic-book artists. Lovecraft’s work has also spawned a
thriving and appropriately arcane domain of Lovecraft scholarship, and has even
been addressed by philosophers like Graham Harman and Gilles Deleuze. Arguably
the most unusual response to Lovecraft’s work, however, has come from occultists,
who have made his work perhaps the single most signiicant ictional inspiration for
contemporary magical theory and practice, particularly within chaos magic and
various left-hand and Thelemic currents.

LOVECRAFT’S REPRE S E NTATIO N O F THE O CCU L T

To illuminate Lovecraft’s ictional transformation of the occult, it is helpful to
conceptually distinguish two streams of lore and practice of the Western magical arts.
On the one hand, there is an elite stream of learned magic associated with literacy,
arcane knowledge, and to some degree fraternal orders—an ‘esoteric’ cultural
orientation that includes medieval monks as well as, for example, Victorian
Freemasons enthralled with Egyptian mysteries. On the other hand, there is the vast,
amorphous, and often highly localized body of folklore, seasonal ritual, herbcraft,

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hexing, and healing techniques associated with rural life or communities with low
degrees of social status and formal education. This ‘popular’ magical culture has in
many ways left scant traces in the historical record, which in turn has allowed scholars
and occultists alike to invent sometimes highly speculative accounts of its
characteristics—accounts that themselves sometimes become part of the occultist
milieu.
Lovecraft’s most extended engagement with the Western esoteric stream occurs in
his short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, written in 1927 but not published
until after his death. Relatively free of Yog-Sothery, the work also stands as Lovecraft’s
most thorough treatment of his recurrent theme of ancestral possession, as well as a
monument to the man’s love for the architecture and history of Providence. In the
story, we learn of the young Charles Ward’s obsession with and eventual resurrection
of his forefather Joseph Curwen, an eighteeth-century necromancer, alchemist, and
psychopathic murderer who discovered the art of using ‘essential Saltes’ to re-animate
dead shades. Though not as scholarly as many of Lovecraft’s heroes and villains,
Curwen is a man of education and high status. At one point we are given a brief
catalog of Curwen’s library, which includes books of occult and natural philosophy
by Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Trithemius, and Robert Boyle, as well as classic esoteric
texts like the Zohar and the Hermetica. Lovecraft’s regular inclusion of rare books,
as well as the narrative device of a young researcher studying his or his locality’s past,
helps set up his central concern with the ironic dialectics of forbidden knowledge.
Charles Dexter Ward, for example, is killed by the object of his genealogical research.
But perhaps the most succinct expression of this dialectic lies in the game play of
Chaosium’s highly successful Call of Cthulhu RPG franchise: the more a character
learns about the Mythos, the closer they come to going insane.
In his catalogs of grimoires, Lovecraft usually includes a copy of one of his most
famous ictional inventions: the dreaded Necronomicon, a book by ‘the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred’ concerning the lore and invocation of the Old Ones. By including the
Necronomicon alongside esoteric books, Lovecraft helped heed his own admonition
that, for a weird story to be effective, it must be devised ‘with all the care and
verisimilitude of an actual  hoax.’ Some readers, then and now, believed that The
Necronomicon was an actual text, and Lovecraft himself wrote a brief pseudo-history
of the book, which we learn was translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas, into
Latin by Olaus Wurmius, and later into an unpublished, fragmentary English edition
by the Renaissance mage John Dee. Despite his playful references to esoteric literature,
however, Lovecraft did not have enough respect for the occult to become a scholar of
it; in the mid-1920s, with his Yog Sothery already underway, Lovecraft admitted that
his knowledge of the history of magic was largely restricted to the Encyclopedia
Britannica. That said, Lovecraft did recognize that learned magic is in part characterized
by the intertextual web of referentiality that grows between largely inaccessible and
cryptically entitled books, a web that itself can be imaginatively extended. Alongside
the Necronomicon, whose name came to Lovecraft in a dream, Lovecraft’s Mythos
stories include references to many other invented grimoires, like the Book of Eibon
and De Veris Mysteriis, both of which, in a second-order instantiation of the
intertextual web, were concocted by other writers in Lovecraft’s circle.
Alongside Lovecraft’s inventive engagement with the esoteric occultism, he also
wrote obsessively about primitive or atavistic magical cults, often composed of rural,

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marginal or impoverished communities, in the West or abroad. One important

scholarly source for this vision was Margaret Murray’s 1921 book The Witch-Cult
in Europe, which also went on to play an important role in the establishment of
modern Wicca. Controversially, Murray argued that beneath the violent ecclesiastical
machinery of the European witch trials lay the remnants of an actual pre-Christian
fertility religion. For Lovecraft, who grew up 65 miles from the home of the Salem
witch trials, Murray’s vision of the ancient witch-cult—which included accusations
of child sacriice—gave him license to develop the theme of an archaic and savage
magical religion that continues to persist in modern times. Inspired as well by the
iction of Arthur Machen, who linked witchcraft with the fairy lore of the ‘little
people,’ Lovecraft also associated the witch-cult with pre-Aryan or ‘Mongoloid’
peoples, which he readily combined with his racist concerns with degeneracy and
immigrant populations. Examples of such cults in his iction include the mixed-blood
voodoo sect in ‘Call of Cthulhu’ and the Yezidi devil-worshippers in ‘The Horror at
Red Hook,’ a New York-inspired tale not usually classed with the Mythos.
Though Lovecraft separately re-imagined these two streams of elite and popular
magic, he achieved his unique vision of the occult in part by promiscuously
commingling them. In ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ for example, Wilber Whateley and his
isolated rural family are declared to be of degenerate stock, and practice strange
rituals on the sinister Sentinel Hill, topped by an altar-like stone and featuring caches
of ancient, possibly Indian bones. At the same time, Whateley needs to get the words
of one his invocations exactly right, so he travels to Miskatonic University in order
to compare their Latin edition of the Necronomicon to the fragmented Dee version
he possesses. In Lovecraft’s world, learned magic unleashes atavistic and prehistoric
powers rather than hierarchies of angels or devils; as such, he is able to depict an
ancient but vital left hand path that is free of Satanism or Christian demonology. On
the other side of the coin, Lovecraft’s primitive cults, including the sort of exotic
tribes that haunt the anthropological imaginary, are characterized by their ongoing
relationship with the ultimate forces of the cosmos. Lovecraft irst makes this ground-
breaking move in his famous 1928 story ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ wherein Lovecraft
reframes the primitive gods worshipped by voodou initiates and remote ‘Eskimo
wizards’ as extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional beings.
Later entering popular culture as Erich von Däniken’s ‘ancient astronaut’ theory,
Lovecraft’s atavistic science-ictional cosmology allowed his ictions to undermine
the progressive Enlightenment view of religious history popularized by Tylor and
Frazer while still upholding the scientiic course of civilization. The savage mysteries
that animate the most primitive human cults are no longer the result of ignorant and
neurosis but instead encode actual truths about the cosmos, including powerful
extraterrestrial entities and dimensions of reality—like Einsteinean space-time and
the non-Euclidean geometry used to describe it—that early twentieth-century
astrophysics is only beginning to understand. Lovecraft’s most explicit intertwining
of the witch-cult and weird science occurs in the 1932 story ‘The Dreams of the
Witch-House.’ At irst, the demonic characters that the folklorist Walter Gilman
glimpses in his nightmares and in the oddly shaped corners of his room seem unusually
traditional for Lovecraft: the evil witch crone Keziah Mason, her evident familiar
spirit, and a ‘Black Man’ who is possibly Lovecraft’s most unambiguously Satanic
igure. But Gilman is also a student of quantum physics and non-Euclidian geometry,

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and his nightmares also seem to take place within an ‘indescribably angled’
hyperspace. Within these seething abysses, Gilman regularly encounters a small
polyhedron and a mass of ‘prolately spheroidal bubbles’ that turn out in the end to
be none other than Keziah and her familiar. Lovecraft is thus able to ‘save the
appearances’ of supernatural folklore by superimposing them onto an expansively
naturalistic if no less disturbing cosmos.

THE OCCULTIST RE CE P TIO N O F L O VE CRAF T

From the time of Lovecraft’s death, his name and work was kept alive by August
Derleth and other members of the Lovecraft circle. But a mass Lovecraft revival would
have to wait until the 1960s, when his stories, along with work by his friends Robert
E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other weird iction writers, starting appearing in
affordable paperbacks designed to exploit the market for adult fantasy opened up by
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as well as, arguably, the growing use of cannabis and
LSD. Inevitably, the exotic aura of dark magic that suffuses Lovecraft and the best
writers in his circle fed into the ‘occultic milieu’ that characterized much countercultural
spirituality. The irst explicitly occult appropriation of Lovecraft’s iction can be traced
to the British magician Kenneth Grant, one of the most vivid and controversial igures
to emerge from the Thelemic current begun by Aleister Crowley, and the renegade
head of the New Isis Lodge and the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis. Writing for
Man, Myth and Magic in 1970, and two years later in his book The Magical Revival,
Grant argued that, through his remarkable dream life, Lovecraft was linked to actual
traditions of ancient and contemporary magic; in this view, The Necronomicon is a
‘real’ book tucked away in the akashic records that Lovecraft’s waking mind was too
hidebound and timid to accept. Grant was particularly keen on lining up curious
similarities between names and other elements of Thelemic and Lovecraftian lore, like
Yog-Sothoth and Crowley’s Sut-Thoth. In all this, Grant’s own degree of irony or
diabolic playfulness is, as ever, hard to assess. Given his lorid imagination and
parsimonious use of scholarship, Grant’s texts—which include ruminations on Bela
Lugosi—already scramble the borderlines between occult originality and iction.
The year 1972 also saw the publication of Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals, a
companion text to the Church of Satan leader’s popular The Satanic Bible. The book
includes two Lovecraftian rites written by LaVey’s deputy Michael Aquino, the
‘Ceremony of the Angles’ and ‘The Call to Cthulhu.’ In his introduction, Aquino
legitimizes the occult appropriation of Lovecraft along much less supernaturalist
lines than Grant, emphasizing instead Lovecraft’s own amoral philosophy and the
subjective, archetypal, and possibly prophetic power of fantasy. This argument
accorded with the language of ‘psychodrama’ that LaVey himself offered as non-
supernatural explanations for the transformative power of blasphemous ritual. As a
pragmatic corollary to this constructionist view, Aquino developed a meaningless
ritual language for his rituals, a ‘Yuggothic tongue’ based on the alien speech
Lovecraft provides in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Whisperer in the Dark.’ The
eficacy of such guttural and semantically empty speech is also described by Grant in
his discussion of the Cult of Barbarous Names.
Within the Church of Satan, LaVey founded an informal ‘Order of the Trapezoid’
whose name was inspired in part by Lovecraft’s story ‘The Haunter of the Dark,’

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which features a ‘shining trapezohedron’ used by an extinct cult called the Church of
Starry Wisdom. The Order of the Trapezoid would later become the supreme
executive body of Aquino’s Church of Set, where the Lovecraftian current was
interpreted in part as a force of apocalyptic subjectivity. Other notable Lovecraftian
orders over the decades have included the Lovecraftian Coven, founded by Michael
Bertiaux, a practitioner of ‘Gnostic Voudon’; Cincinatti’s Bate Cabal; and The
Esoteric Order of Dagon, a Thelema- and Typhonian-inspired sect founded by Steven
Greenwood, who in the 1960s became magically identiied with Lovecraft’s ictional
hero Randolph Carter. Lovecraftian magic has also became an important, almost
signal leitmotif for chaos magicians, whose ‘postmodern’ (and largely left-hand)
approach to the contingency of traditional occult systems is resonantly afirmed by
the adaptation of a ictional and profoundly anti-humanist cosmology that has the
additional feature of being concocted by a philosophical nihilist.
Having achieved an intertextual virtual reality, The Necronomicon eventually
manifested in the physical world of publications as well. In 1980, Avon Books—who
also published LaVey—released a version of Alhazred’s book by the pseudonymous
‘Simon.’ Emerging from Herman Slater’s New York occult bookstore Magickal
Childe, Simon’s text, which has never gone out of print, is a practical grimoire
featuring a ictional frame and rituals that mash up Sumerian lore and European
Goetic magic. Less popular was the Necronomicon published by George Hay, a
hodge-podge that includes literary essays, fabricated translations of John Dee, and an
introduction by Colin Wilson. The most faithfully Lovecraftian version of the
Necronomicon was arguably written by Donald Tyson and published by Llewellyn
in 2004. Tyson has since become a one-man font of Lovecraftiana, including spell
books, a Tarot deck, and an intelligent literary biography that combines sober critical
analysis with a Jungian and paranormal twist on Grant’s strategies of legitimization.
Regardless of such strategies, the occult appropriation of Lovecraft can be traced
in part to the intertextual and metaictional dynamics of the texts themselves. The
central theme that Lovecraft critic Donald Burleson identiies as ‘oneiric objectivism’
is itself the central vehicle for occultist legitimization; from this perspective, occultists
impose a second-order level of objective dreaming to the textual circuit that Lovecraft
himself established between his actual dreams and his ictional worlds. Occultists
could certainly be accused of turning Lovecraft the writer into something he’s not
and would moreover abhor. The irony, however, is that this supernaturalist
overwriting of the author’s materialism is itself inscribed in Lovecraft’s iction,
which—unlike the detective iction it occasionally resembles—usually encourages the
reader to piece together the horrifying cosmic scenario long before the bookish and
blinkered protagonists put the pieces together. In a larger sense, occultists might
simply be seen as culture makers who have, like thousands of writers, accepted
Lovecraft’s invitation to play the game of imaginatively co-creating the Mythos. In
the occultist version of the game, however, players risk the element of verisimilitude
that Lovecraft himself saw was a key element of the ‘hoax.’ And like the empty
networks of referentiality that undergird the substance of occult literature, such
games may have a life of their own.

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REFERENCES AND F U RTHE R RE AD ING

Burleson, D. R. (1991) ‘On Lovecraft’s Themes: Touching the Glass,’ in S.T. Joshi, ed., An
Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft,
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: Rutherford, New Jersey, 135–47.
Davies, O. (2010), Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Davis, E. (1995), ‘Calling Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft’s Magickal Realism,’ Gnosis 37, 56–64.
Joshi, S.T. (1982), A Subtler Magick: the Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft, Wildside
Press: Gillette, New Jersey.
——(2001), A Dreamer & A Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time, Liverpool University
Press: Liverpool.
Lachman, G. (2001), Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of
Aquarius, Sidgwick & Jackson: London.
Price, R. (1985), ‘H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos,’ Crypt of Cthulhu 35, 9.
Tyson, D. (2010), The Dream World of H.P. Lovecraft, Llewellyn: Woodbury, MN.
Waugh, R. H. (1994), ‘Dr. Margaret Murray and H.P. Lovecraft: The Witch-Cult in New
England,’ Lovecraft Studies 31, 2–10.
——(2006), The Monster in the Mirror: Looking at H.P. Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press: New
York.

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