Crawling out from Chaos:

A New Look at the Old Religions in H. P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos

Dennis P. Quinn Cal Poly Pomona

H.P. Lovecraft

1890-1937

Livy (59 BCE - 17 CE)

Kenneth Grant

1924-

Kenneth Grant, Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis

Lovecrafts great contribution to the occult lay in his demonstration indirect as it may have been of the power so to control the dreaming mind that it is capable of projection into other dimensions, and of discovering that there are doors through which flow in the form of inspiration, intuition and vision the genuine current of creative magical consciousness, Grant, Outside the Circles of Time.

Anton La Vey

1930-1997

Anton La Vey
Devoted a chapter to The Metaphysics of Lovecraft, Satanic Rituals (1972) His fantasies may well have been a conscious projection of the idea expressed so eloquently by Charles Lamb in his Witches and Other Night Fears: Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition-but they were there before. They are transcripts, types-the archetypes are in us, and eternal. One cannot help speculating upon a reality suggested by the fantasy-the possibility that the Old Ones are the spectres of a future human mentality. It is as the result of such speculation that The Ceremony of the Nine Angles and The Call to Cthulhu are presented. One emphasizes potential: the other reflects the dimness of an almost forgotten past.

Darrick Dishaw aka Venger Satanis

High Priest of the Cult of Cthulhu

Frater Tenebrous
Although he outwardly espoused a wholly rational and skeptical view of the universe, his dream-world experiences allowed him glimpses of places and entities beyond the world of mundane reality, and behind his stilted and often excessive prose there lies a vision and an understanding of occult forces which is directly relevant to the Magical Tradition. Fra. Tenebrous, Cults of Cthulhu: H.P Lovecraft and the Occult Tradition (Daath Press 1987)

Tenebrous, cont
Lovecrafts occult experiences, disguised as fiction, reveal the intrusion of forces in complete sympathy with those archetypes and symbols brought through by Blavatsky and Crowley, whilst in contact with astral entities from beyond. He had become the receiver and transmitter of hidden knowledge, though in Lovecrafts case, the process was intuitive rather than conscious. The internal self-division thus engendered may have been the root cause of Lovecrafts mental and physical peculiarities; or it may have been that these very traits, which set him apart from the rest of society, made him the ideal focus for the channeling of these ultra-mundane forces (ibid).

Lovecraft for the Chaos Magician

Erick Davis, writer on Chaos Magick discusses how this practice gravitates towards the Black, not because he desires a simple Satanic inversion of Christianity, but because he seeks the amoral and shamanic core of magical experience--a core that Lovecraft conjures up with his orgies of drums, guttural chants, and screeching horns, alluding to the rites in the Cthulhu story.

Where did Lovecraft get the idea of the rites of Cthulhu?

Lovecrafts Romanophilia
Rome is a subject which has fascinated me uncannily since I first heard much of it around the age of six. From the moment I picked up any idea of its nature, history, and characteristics, and held in my own hands the actual Roman coins (about two dozennow in my possession [Dec. 1933]) of my grandfathers collection, I have had the most persistent sensation (out of which occultists would make a case of metempsychosis, and of a pseudoscientist one of hereditary memory) of some ineluctable connection with the ancient Respublica (SL 4.332)

Lovecrafts Romanophilia cont.

It is utterly impossible, too, for me to regard Rome in a detached way. As soon as I get behind the age of the Saxons on England, say 450 A. D., my sense of personal connection with my own bloodancestors of the north utterly vanishes giving place to a natural and unshakable feeling of being a Roman (ibid).

Lovecrafts Romanophilia cont

In school I took Latin as a duck to water, but found all other languages alien and repellant. French seemed to me a pitiful decadenceproduct; German a hateful tongue from across the Rhine-Danube frontier. Greek I liked and respectedbut I found it difficult, and tended to translate it mentally into Latin. Nor have I ever quite ceased to have Roman dreams of the most puzzling vividness of detail (SL 4. 334).

Lovecraft, Genuine Pagan

"When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half-sincere belief in the old gods and nature spirits. I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo and Athena and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk. Once I firmly thought I beheld some kind of sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of `religious experience' as true in its ways as the subjective ecstasies of a Christian. If a Christian tells me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaethusa (Joshi, Lord of the Visible, 14).

Thesis: the ritual in The Call is structured upon Livys account of the Bacchanalia

Main Points
Explicit reference to the Bacchanalia in Lovecraft How Lovecrafts characters gain information about the cult Sounds at the ritual are similar Sex acts alluded to in both Importance of human sacrifice Kidnapping by the gods Similar philosophies espoused by the participants Inferiority of the cultists Promise of doom if left to practice their cult Arrest of participants and destruction of cult places Residual fears remain The November 3, 1927 Donald Wandrei letter

Lovecrafts reference to the Bacchanalia

It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire. Lovecraft possessed two copies of Livys works in his personal Library

Information gained through interrogation

Livy: Several initiates testified before magistrates Lovecraft: Detectives gain information through interrogation, though mainly from one man named Castro

Cultists feared angering the gods by revealing secrets

Livy: she stood in great dread of the gods, whose secret mysteries she was to divulge; and in much greater dread of the men implicated, who would tear her asunder with their hands if she became an informer. Lovecraft: Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract.

Use of Drums and Shouting in rituals

Both use percussion instruments in the ritual: Livy,Cymbals and Drums; Lovecraft, Tom-Toms Both emphasize loud noises

Sex acts at the ritual

Livy: When wine, lascivious discourse, night, and the intercourse of the sexes had extinguished every sentiment of modesty, then debaucheries of every kind began to be practiced, as every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment to which he was disposed by the passion predominant in his nature. Lovecraft: Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell.

Human Sacrifice
Both accounts stress throughout in many examples that that humans are taken as sacrificial victims for their gods

Victims taken by the gods

Livy: They said that those men were carried off by the gods, whom the machines laid hold of and dragged from their view into secret caves. Lovecraft: All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood.

Beyond the Laws

Livy: If any were less patient in submitting to dishonor, or more averse to the commission of vice, they were sacrificed as victims. To think nothing unlawful was the grand maxim of their religion. Lovecraft: The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Inferiority of the cultists

Livy: First, then, a great part of them are women, and this was the source of the evil; the rest are males, but nearly resembling women; actors and pathics in the vilest lewdness; night revelers, driven frantic by wine, noises of instruments, and clamors. The conspiracy, as yet, has no strength; but it has abundant means of acquiring strength, for they are becoming more numerous every day.

Inferiority of the cultists, cont

Lovecraft: Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.

Impending Doom
Livy. The evil increases and spreads daily; it is already too great for the private ranks of life to contain it, and aims its views at the body of the state. Unless you take timely precautions, Romans, their nightly assembly may become as large as this, held in open day, and legally summoned by a consul.

Impending Doom, cont

Lovecraft: This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Cultists executed or incarcerated

Livy: A greater number were executed than thrown into prison; indeed, the multitude of men and women who suffered in both ways, was very considerable. Lovecraft: Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest (47) were committed to various institutions.

Destruction of place of worship

Livy: A charge was then given to demolish all the places where the Bacchanalians had held their meetings; first in Rome, and then throughout all Italy; excepting those wherein should be found some ancient altar or consecrated statue. Lovecraft: The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.

Residual fears remain

Both Livy and Lovecraft leave a sense of heightened fear that the authorities must remain vigilant in order to insure the cult does not continue

Lovecrafts Letter to Donald Wandrei, November 3, 1927

Letter to Wandrei
Later edited and published as, The Very Old Folk (1940) Rejection of The Call of Cthulhu and Wandreis advocacy Roman Dream Links The Call of Cthulhu and Livy?

Conclusion
Lovecrafts debt to the Roman civilization and literature (or his understanding of it) is profound This has implications for occult followers of Lovecraft, but what?