Horror logo

That is Not Dead...

On the Anniversary of the Death of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1890-1937.

By Tom BakerPublished about a year ago 11 min read
2

"Nyarlathotep...the Crawling Chaos...I am the last....I will tell the audient void." --H.P.Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep.

His dour image remains to us as much of an enigma as the searing, maddening, alien intelligence that burned behind it. H.P. Lovecraft, the Great Panjandrum of Occult Horrors from beyond the stars, the strange seer of visions who fathered a brand of intercelestial, gothic surrealist nightmare that has come down to us today as an entire subgenre all its own--the "Cthulu Mythos," so called because of the many-tentacled horror rising from the brackish waters of an unforgiving, eternal ocean; who sleeps and dreams, buried in his underwater home of R'lyeh, vast sarcophagi of non-Euclidean angles and stinking, miasmic funk of forty thousand dead, and rotting creatures. Lovecraft, the writer, conceived of Great Cthulhu emerging once more, to plague the world again, to reclaim, for the Ancient Ones, the "Great Old Ones," tiny, insignificant MAN; whom one day, Idiot Chaos would "blow Earth's dust away."

At the center of Lovecraft's sprawling, decaying cosmos was the blind, idiot flute player, Azathoth. His emissary, Messenger, the strange gaunt one "to whom the fellahs bowed," NYARLATHOTEP. Leading to pathways strange, batrachian, and old as the immemorial birth of the stars, Nyarlathotep could be called by the power of those same blasphemous, arcane, and cursed tomes: the Unaspreichleichen Kulten of Von Juntz, De Wormis Mysterious, and, of course, first and foremost, the hideous and unmentionable NECRONOMICON of the "Mad Arab," Abdul Alhazred. The blasphemous book is held at the library of Miskatonic University, in fabled Arkham, home of the Wizard Whately, and the heart of cosmic darkness

In Lovecraft's fictional universe, which was brought forth we surmise by non-fictional and actual occult forces, Cthonic forces buried deep within the "angled spaces between" (Lovecraft admitted to writing some passages while still amid a half-waking or trance-like state) the ancient forces of interdimensional horror, those "Shamblers from the Stars", lurk just beyond the veil of human comprehension, waiting, "'till the stars are in alignment", to return once more, and claim puny man for their own. Their hideous grotesqueness is enough to drive those unfortunate enough to encounter them into the waiting arms of a mental asylum.

Both of Lovecraft's parents died of insanity. It was this creeping horror of degeneration that must have drawn him to Poe (Whom he referred to as his "god of fiction"), to the melancholy "House of Usher", and to write such ghastly and immortal tales as "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"--tales replete with the suggestion of "decayed lines"; exposing his horror at the idea of degeneracy, miscegenation, and incest. (Lovecraft has been scorned, somewhat unfairly, as, by modern standards, an extreme racist and xenophobe; as well as an anti-Semite. This is despite the fact that his wife of two years, Sonia Haft Greene, was Jewish, as were most of his close literary circle of friends after he moved, for a short period, to New York. No one ever accused HPL of any cruelty, abuse, or anything besides holding extreme beliefs, most of which were somewhat common for the era.)

He might have felt his blood to be tainted by some streak of alien monstrosity. Born in 1890, raised by a mentally-ill mother, his life was that of a solitary and reclusive, and eccentric man, an awkward and perpetually malingering hypochondriac who felt himself hideously ugly, terminally ill, and vastly intellectually superior to most other young men of his milieu. (Which, to be truthful, he was.)

He failed to graduate high school but was one of the world's great auto-didacts, who taught himself Latin and Greek and read voluminously from dusty and worm-eaten volumes that belonged to his grandfather. Lovecraft revered the England of the Eighteenth Century, often signing his voluminous correspondence as "Granpa Theobaldus." His penpals included such fellow literary mavericks and horror pioneers as Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Robert Bloch, who would go on to author Psycho. Lovecraft wrote so many letters to so many people they were eventually edited and collected into several volumes. The high school dropout could expound on philosophy, history, literature, culture, and art--he had a brilliant, troubled mind, one that eclipsed his literary peers, whom he encouraged to use his various inventions, such as the fictional cursed books of arcane lore, the various names of hideous, extraterrestrial deities; weaving the mythological threads that would, in the ensuing decades come to bear strange fruit.

He was not a believer in supernatural forces, scoffing, at astrology, and holding a long-running battle against an astrologer in a local Providence newspaper. His preferred reading, beyond a long succession of gothic horrors stretching back into the late Eighteenth Century, was the dream-like aery fantasies of Lord Dunsany. Bearing the burden of his reclusive nature, but bursting with the prowess of the most gifted of gifted writers, he turned to amateur journalism (the precursor to self-published "fanzines") as an outlet for his awkward loneliness, isolation, and need to express himself in both poetry and increasingly grim prose.

He lived in his ancestral home until it became necessary for him to be uprooted, to "lose his station" (Lovecraft affected the pose of a retired Victorian gentleman) and be moved to a part of his beloved Providence, Rhode Island, teeming with the foreign and Asiatic immigrants that Lovecraft detested, seeing them as an encroaching plague upon the fair and tottering old city he so loved, as an antiquarian who raged bitterly that the foul "yellow menace" was blotting out the genteel Yankee history of the crumbling, archaic city fast-disappearing beneath demolition and new development. He was 4F when it came time to be drafted; this may have had some influence on his later attitudes.

When young, he dressed twenty years behind the times, a fusty, awkward "old man" among roaring youth. He met Sonia Greene through amateur journalism, and, though she was Jewish, he had no qualms about falling in love with her. Moving to New York, the two lived together as man and wife, pursuing their literary interests together, with a circle of Jewish literary figures including Samuel Loveman, with which HPL was particularly close. His repellent, reactionary political and personal philosophy subsided somewhat.

With wife Sonia Greens, circa early 1920s.

Alas, the couple eventually separated; not, as it were, because of any racial animus, but simply because HPL was one of those poor, alien souls who would never be able to fully function in a workaday world. It was too much for him to man the counter of Sonia's hat shop, and his only real income was selling stories to fast, flashy, disreputable "pulp fiction" rags, the most famous of which, Weird Tales, published much of the literary legacy that has come down to us. It was an appalling publishing ghetto for a man touched by the hand of genius, but it was all he had.

He wrote stories, ghost-wrote, for Harry Houdini, and rewrote stories for other fledgling authors for small amounts of money. He writes rapturously of returning to Providence from hated New York, but in later years went on antiquarian travels to places such as Quebec, of which he wrote a detailed travelogue.

Lovecraft's chief vehicle for publication were the disreputable "pulps". This is the cover for Weird Tales,, April 1924.

So far, I am taking notes on the life of a man; but, have I burrowed deep enough into who that man was? Could anyone have truly known what possessed that haunted and haunting, gaunt visage, that face that modern cultural icon Stephen King once wrote, "Bore the look of a man that has seen into dark and troubling things"? (Not an exact quote, but you get the idea.)

As a child, he saw "fauns and satyrs" playing in the garden, built altars in his bedroom to Zeus, and first began his long trek through life and a world that could scarcely accept him as he was. A figure as lone and solitary and alienated as any he ever wrote of.

In the story, "The Outsider," he writes:

I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

There was no escaping the ancestral curse of his "decayed line," his self-deluded dysmorphia, and his sense that he was born into a time that he did not belong. His novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, deals with a young man dipping into sorcery and black magic, who becomes possessed by the spirit of his fiendish, ancestor. Lovecraft may have been so possessed.

As a child, not only did he see his greek monstrosities cavorting in the garden, he had other, darker, and far more authentic supernatural occurrences troubling his sleep. "Night Gaunts," he called them; others, such as paranormal investigator Heidi Hollis, refer to them as "Shadow People." They precede sleep paralysis and occult molestation; some even claim "alien abduction." Lovecraft claimed them as dark entities with no faces and horns, with "black membranous wings" and what Anton LaVey might have called "the bifid barb of Hell" for tails. (LaVey wrote his own "Call to Cthulhu" ritual for his 1972 book, The Satanic Rituals. The Unholy Father of modern Satanism admitted to being highly influenced by HPL and other Weird Tales and pulp writers.)

The Night Gaunts whisked him to fantastic heights, jagged black peaks of fantasy and nightmare, on astral or aerial voyages into the heavenly abyss. He spent his life a rationalist, a materialist; an atheist. He never disclaimed the reality of his Night Gaunts. Was he a man possessed?

"Dreamer on the nightside: H.P. Lovecraft circa 1935.

He wrote the opening lines of "Nyarlathotep" while in a state he described as a half-waking state between wakefulness and dreaming, deep slumber. He was seemingly marked out, as many mediums are, to stride through the world alone, gathering few friends, ignored, obscure, unable to connect to a world that seemed as bizarre and barren to his 18th Century mind as the surface of some Martian colony might appear to an interstellar explorer. He lived with the soul of an ancient seer animating his tall, gaunt frame. This is the same confusion so many feel when their past life regression overtakes the linear time frame of the NOW. He was, to quote Robert A. Heinlein, a "stranger in a strange land."

We contend that HPL was a medium, a vehicle; an instrument to convey the messages "from beyond," those psychical "calls to Cthulhu" that resonates throughout the subconscious of those who are attuned, who can attune, to the unheard roar of the ages. It is not that these forces care about, "Earth's dust." They are the idiot forms of primal Chaos, the Cthonic forces whose concern for man does not exist, because they are old and fathomless and beyond description, swirling in the infinitude of SPACE and TIME. Lovecraft didn't live to see Robert Oppenheimer's invention of the ages, the Atom Bomb that will one day "sweep Earth's idiot dust away." But had he lived, he would have perhaps finally understood what he was REALLY writing about, for all those years.

(It is said that Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad-gita upon the successful completion of the first atomic test at Trinity Test Site (apt name). "I am become SHIVA, destroyer of worlds..." (Bhagavad-gita 11:33). A slight misquote, Lovecraft would have understood this regardless as "Time I Am, the destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people." Call to Cthulhu, indeed. Arjuna, by the way, in the Gita, goes on to exclaim that he sees "all the worlds" rushing into Lord Krishna's fiery mouths", Krishna presenting himself here in the "Universal Form." The destructive hunger of all-pervading Vishnu is a metaphor for Time itself.)

Good night, Dark Dreamer, the strange vessel that communicated the "Truths too terrifying and maddening to know." You will always, to THIS AUTHOR at least, throw a shadow across the face of the ages, having stirred the psychic cauldron of what Clive Barker has called a world of "terror, wonder, and delirium." But did you ever understand yourself? Were you an alien behind your own eyes, in your skull? Were you the creator of dread Cthulhu, or His Instrument? Were you simply taking dictation?

I want to close with a passage from HPL's incredible poem "Nemesis," written in 1917:

I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,

When the sky was a vaporous flame;

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

Perhaps though, it would be even more fitting to end with:

"That is not dead, which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons EVEN DEATH MAY DIE."

In Pace Requiescat.

"I Am Providence": H.P. Lovecraft's headstone.

Suggested Reading.

De Camp, L. Sprague. Lovecraft: A Biography. New York, Doubleday, 1975.

Hollis, Heidi. The Hat Man. Level Head Publishing, 2014.

Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society). The University of Pennsylvania Press, Philidelphia, 1989.

Joshi, S.T. Lovecraft: A Life. Necronomicon Press, 1989.

Keel, John Alva. The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. West Warwick, Rhode Island, 1996.

Long, Frank Belknap. Dreamer on the Nightside. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 2019.

LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Rituals. New York, William Morrow, 1976.

celebritiesvintagesupernatural
2

About the Creator

Tom Baker

Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments (2)

Sign in to comment
  • Randy Wayne Jellison-Knock7 months ago

    Thoroughly enjoyed "The Fungi from Yuggoth" as well.

  • I won't say this was a beautiful tribute, but rather an excellent one. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Find us on social media

Miscellaneous links

  • Explore
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Support

© 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.