54 - HP Lovecraft Fanaticism

Spectral Skull Session

HP Lovecraft has been declared the 20th century’s greatest horror writer by Stephen King, and influenced countless movies and video games. This episode explores Lovecraft’s influence with a focus on groups of people who regard him as a source of positive insight into the occult and esoteric. Dane reviews the themes of Lovecraft’s fiction, including the dangerous nature of knowledge, the subjectivity of knowledge, dysgenic horror, scientific occultism, and the Lovecraft mythos. British warlock, Aleister Crowley, seems to have borrowed from Lovecraft as evidenced by their use of similar terminology. The Crowley acolyte, Kenneth Grant, maintained that Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon is a real book that can be accessed through dreams. Dane argues against this on the grounds that Lovecraft wrote letters in which he insisted the Necronomicon was fiction. Even if the Necronomicon were real, Dane questions why anyone would want to communicate with Lovecraftian entities since those who do so in Lovecraft’s works tend to meet abysmal fates. Next, Dane discusses Jason Covalito’s book "The Cult of Alien Gods" which argues that the entire Ancient Aliens movement can be traced back to the French counter-culture of the 1960s through the editors at the Planete magazine and their book "Morning of the Magicians." Lastly, Dane discusses the Church of Satan whose own interest in Lovecraft is mitigated by their disbelief in supernatural entities. With all these different groups of people taking Lovecraft seriously, Dane sets out to explain why Lovecraft has such an effect on people. He posits that Lovecraft mastered the art of realism and cites scholar S.T. Joshi’s view that Lovecraft’s stories can be seen as incantations. Dane maintains that Lovecraft may be seen as unusually skilled at the art of making fiction seem real, a magical, if not necessarily supernatural skill. The episode ends with Dane refuting the objection that we ought not read Lovecraft because of his racism. Dane argues that Lovecraft grew out of his racism through real-life experiences and relationships, demonstrating the redemptive virtue of openness to experience. Shunning Lovecraft for being problematic would undermine our own open-mindedness. The listener is encouraged to find out for themselves if they enjoy Lovecraft, but to take care because this man’s writings have an established track record of making some people loosen their grip on reality.