(image: John Coulthart, "The Call of Cthulhu")
The presence of mythical-religious themes in the work of the "cosmic Poe" - as Jacques Bergier defined it - is of interest not only from a literary point of view, but also with respect to the relationship between modernity and this type of knowledge. As is now known even to non "experts", Howard Phillips Lovecraft defined himself as a Β«absolute materialist and mechanistic[1]Β persuaded that the world was the mathematical sum of physical impulses governed by chance and deriving human aspirations to mere fantasies. Yet, behind this profession of faith - which too many have stopped at when questioning the Loner of Providence - there is much more. For example, the fact that he had studied and therefore well knew the ancient myths of the West, Greco-Roman but also Germanic and Norse. Well, how are these interests related to yours World vision? Why should an enthusiastic follower of science and technology be passionate about those myths that the same followers of the Goddess Reason often relegate to expressions of a convoluted and premodern, "infantile" humanity? The contradiction, in reality, is only apparent.
It is the author himself who clarifies it, in one of his many letters, stating that these «traditions on which the entities and events of experience are to be measured are the only thing that gives them the illusion of a meaning [...] in a cosmos that at its root is all without purpose: for this I practice and predict a conservatism extreme in art, society and politics, as the only way to escape [...] the desperation and confusion of a struggle without guidance or rules in a chaos not hidden by veils» [2].
In one of his very few autobiographical essays the Providence writer is even clearer, declaring himself a "materialist with classic and traditional tastes","enthusiastic about the past, its vestiges and its manners"And fully convinced that"the only valid concern for a man of common sense in a purposeless cosmos is the achievement of intellectual pleasure, supported by a vivid and fertile imaginative life» [3]. Even more explicitly, he adds: "Loving the illusory freedom of myth and dream, I am devoted to escapist literature; but loving in equal measure the tangible anchorage of the past, I dye all my thoughts with the shades of antiquity» [4]. Clearer than thatβ¦
It appears that in the Worldview Lovecraft's contrast, on the one hand, with the disenchanted awareness that the world and the entire cosmos are nothing but battlefields of superhuman entities, which do not consider man except to subjugate him; on the other hand, that a redemption from this state of necessity is linked to the myth, understood as a rebellion "against the rigid and ineluctable tyranny of time and space " [5], against the «prosaic laws of nature» [6]. An authentic out of time, in short, to put it in the words of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, who moreover on several occasions, as in the closing of Myth and reality, entrusted the role of the fantastic literature modern myth. Theses that would have been signed by giants such as Ernst Jünger or Joseph Campbell, even reaching Ray Bradbury⦠But that's another story.
Scientist and mythographer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft elaborates a complex system of divinities and sub-divinities, each of which has a range, one status and a very precise function, also on the basis of a certain esoteric heritage to which it had access in some way. In spite of his materialist profession, wrote the political scientist Giorgio Galli some time agoΒ [7], Lovecraft was affected by a certain esoteric vein, which crossed all of Western culture - emerging, in a karstic way, in authors above all suspicion, combining with areas of interest, with contingent historical conditions, but without exhausting themselves in them - and somehow directed its production, without himself being fully aware of it.
The background to the Lovecraftian pages is therefore a cosmogony and a theogony, together with a large group of divinities: benign, like the Elder Gods, among which we find Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, but also terrible, the Great Old Ones. By creating them, Lovecraft reverses the pattern of classical religions, in this case monotheistic (his aversion to Christianity was known, but the discussion could be extended), placing in the higher spheres chaotic entities, completely devoid of intelligence and purpose. If the Cosmos of monotheisms is governed - simplifying - by a providential "benign" design, the apex of Lovecraftian theogony is a blind and seething chaos, located in a universe far from ours, which has no other purpose than to perpetuate itself. What about man, the cardinal element of every "traditional" religion? A simple accident, completely negligible.
Which, at this point, are the gods who populate the Lovecraftian sidereal abysses, evoked in what has become one of the most famous pseudo-biblia, the infamous Necronomicon - Al Azif β written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred? A first inventory (also including some toponymic indications) is contained in The one who whispered in the darkness: Β«The Great Cthulhu, TsathogguaΒ [8], Yog-Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L'mur-Kathulos, Bran and the Magnum Innominandum» [9]. Let's analyze, in a nutshell, some of them.
The most powerful and terrible is certainly Azathoth, "Prime mover in Darkness". Unknowable and amorphous blind entity that hurls curses, gurgles and boils at the center of the universe, constitutes the pulsating core of the entire cosmos, its dark root. It could be, the writer darkly suggests, curiously overturning CalderΓ³n de la Barca's motto, that the universe itself is only his dream - according to this obscure hypothesis, we would be nothing more than the product of the nocturnal delirium of a headless and superhuman being, who, once awakened, could even (which is not such an extravagant hypothesis from the Lovecraftian point of view) make the decision to destroy everything.
We now come to Cthulhu, the most popular deity in the Lovecraftian universe, who resides in the sunken city of R'lyeh, which he himself founded with his progeny, long before humans populated the Earth. Yes, because that small planet that the latter believe to be their exclusive property in reality is not such, also and above all because it is not excluded that, waiting for a certain stellar configuration, he may return there with very unpleasant consequences for their "magnificent" destinies. and progressive ". Satisfied certain cosmic conditions, vaticina Lovecraft in what is the most famous story of him, The Call of Cthulhu, of 1926, the priests of the god, of whom the world is full, "they would have stolen the Great Cthulhu from the tomb and he would have awakened His subjects and regained the dominion of the Earth [β¦]. The Great Ancients, liberated, would teach man new blasphemies, new ways of killing and taking pleasure, and the whole Earth would be burned in a holocaust of ecstasy and license.» [10].
The name of Yog-Sothoth, "the key and the keeper of the Threshold" [11] from which one day the Other Beings will return, "congeries of iridescent spheres, yet stupendous for the malice they emanate» [12] it is central to it The case of Charles Dexter Ward, written in 1927 but published in 1941, in which the protagonist is replaced by his ghostly double, an ancestor evoked by terrible necromantic practices. Entity indecipherable by human categories, it is «borderless: All-in-One and One-in-All; not a simple creature of the space-time continuum, but akin [...] to the ultimate force that has no boundaries and surpasses fantasy and science [...], and which the gaseous intellects of the spiral nebulae denote with an untranslatable Sign» [13].
Messenger of the Gods is Nyarlathotep, the creeping Chaos - apart from Dagon, he is the first alien divine entity to appear in the corpus Lovecraftian - protagonist of the eponymous tale of 1920. Azathoth's servant, wanders the Earth in human form, sowing madness among men and manifesting himself on several occasions as a magician dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh, ready to bewitch the masses with electric games. Perhaps it will not be useless to remember that he was the object of one of the most terrifying dreams that HPL had at the age of ten, and which he described fully in a letter of his in 1921 to his friend Reinhardt Kleiner.
It remains to mention Hastur, Chtulhu's half-brother, He who Must Not Be Named, the Voice of the Ancient Ones (already present in The king in yellow of Chambers of 1895, from which comes, among other things, also the Yellow Sign evoked in the aforementioned fragment of The one who whispered in the darkness) and Dagon β whose name takes up that of a deity of the Semitic-Mesopotamian area β whose events are narrated in the story of the same name, published in the columns of the amateur magazine The Vagrant in 1919. Also remains Shub-Niggurath, the only female demon of the pantheon Lovecraftian, "wife" so to speak of Yog-Sothoth and "mother" of Nug and Yeb, the Black Goat of the woods with a thousand cubs, for the creation of which Lovecraft was inspired by The Great God Pan of Arthur Machen and whose cult Β«it is one of the most horrendous traditions inherited by the human race from pre-human times» [14].
These few hints are enough to outline Howard Phillips Lovecraft's alien religion. Not at all accustomed to cults that are too benevolent towards man (modern, we might add), he elaborated a mythography in which the inhabitants of the sublunary world and their conquests -Β science, technology, progress and so on β are nothing but atoms placed before the unfathomable depths of the Gods. The only salvation envisaged is the most total ignorance of the reality that surrounds them, since any of their efforts leads, at best - let alone the others! - to death.
The object of the Lovecraftian myth is therefore the modern world, Faustian and anthropocentric, in all its tragic grandeur - it is against it that Lovecraft mobilizes his theogony. This demiurge of cosmic spaces, Orpheus of the fourth dimension, fully lived the so-called Sunset of the West by Spengler β whose main work he read, even claiming to have anticipated his thesesΒ [15]Β - but he did not give up, seeing in the elaboration of myths capable of transfiguring the crisis of his own time the only way to stop this decline - as did other narrators, like Tolkien in his legendarium and JΓΌnger in his novels, such as Heliopolis e On the marble cliffs. Since, if human literature (too human) to denounce to the bitter end what we are, to glimpse the tragic greatness of Western destiny requires a superhuman, abysmal point of view.
Delivering the illusions of modernity β its dogmas, its egalitarianism, the cult of progress at all costs, savage industrialization, unbridled capitalism, excessive faith in rationality β to the return of the Great Cthulhu, Lovecraft, admirer of science and technical but at the same time conservative e anti-modern, an esthete unable to meet the gaze of the Medusa of the present without having recourse to the mirror of the Myth, revealed the crisis of the West, but at the same time its greatness. Which, after all, is the same.
Note:
1. Letter to Donald Wandrei dated 21 April 1927, in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The horror of reality, edited by Gianfranco de Turris and Sebastiano Fusco, Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome 2007, p. 85.
2. Ibid.
3.Howard Phillips LovecraftΒ Speak HPL. An autobiographical sketchin Lovecraft's word, edited by Pietro Guarriello, La Torre Publishing Company, San Marco Evangelista 2012, p. 113.
4. Ibid.
5. Letter to Herald S. Farnese dated 22 September 1932, cit. in Necronomicon. Story of a book that doesn't exist, edited by Sergio Basile, Fanucci, Rome 2002, p. 68.
6.Howard Phillips Lovecraft Some notations on a Non-entityin Lovecraft's word, cit., p. 84.
7. See Giorgio Galli, Esotericism, culture and politicsin Antares, No. 05/2013, Occult modernity. Apart from the various considerations made on several occasions on the hypothetical but very likely astral wanderings of Lovecraft, we also remember that he was an admirer of writers such as Arthur Machen (1863-1947) and Algernoon Blackwood (1869-1951), who were part of theHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. See Magical Teachings of the Golden Dawn, edited by Sebastiano Fusco, Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome 2007. On the Lovecraftian judgments regarding the two, cf.Β Howard Phillips Lovecraft Horror theory, edited by Gianfranco de Turris, Edizioni Bietti, Milan 2011. These details are certainly not enough to make Lovecraft the "initiate" who It was not, it could never have been β which does not detract from dismissing these interests of his and the readings relating to Β«pacottigliaΒ», as Valerio Evangelisti does in his introduction to The case of Charles Dexter Ward (Bur, Milan 2007), is completely misleading to understand the narrative and the fantastic universe. On the other hand, we do not even believe that mentioning and investigating Lovecraftian esoteric origins is equivalent to diminishing, "albeit unintentionally, the writer's dimension", as Evangelisti always writes in the cited introduction. As if there was a contradiction between these aspects ...
8. This toad-headed, amorphous, semi-divine creature created by Lovecraft's friend Clark Ashton Smith is mentioned in both the Necronomicon both in another pseudo-biblium Lovecraftian, i Pnakotic manuscripts.
9. In All the tales 1927-1930, edited by Giuseppe Lippi, Mondadori, Milan 1991, pp. 259-260.
10. In All the tales 1923-1926, edited by Giuseppe Lippi, Mondadori, Milan 1990, p. 167.
11. The Dunwich Horrorin All the tales 1927-1930, cit., pp. 212.
12.Β Horror in the museumin All the tales 1931-1936, edited by Giuseppe Lippi, Mondadori, Milan 1992, p. 440.
13. In ibid, p. 473.
14. Letter to Henry Kuttner of April 16, 1936, cit. in Necronomicon, cit., p. 80.
15. See in this regard the masterful study of ST Joshi HP Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, Starmont House, 1990.
Andrea Scarabelli (1986) directs the magazine Β«AntaresAnd the series Β«l'ArcheometroΒ». He collaborates with the J. Evola foundation. He writes in various magazines, print and otherwise, and blogsΒ Current and outdated on IlGiornale.
https://eliaspallanzanivive.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/lovecraft-e-la-gnosi-uno-spunto/