In Robert Anton Wilson’s and Robert Shea’s classic SF-psychedelic trip of a trilogy, Illuminatus!, no less a literary giant than H P Lovecraft warns that, just because Santa Claus isn’t real, doesn’t mean that people won’t celebrate Christmas. Had he not succumbed to cancer at a young age, Lovecraft would have seen his fictional warning bear real-life fruit.
Lovecraft, who wrote that his first statement of scepticism was realising at five-years-old that Santa Claus was indeed not real, never made a secret of the fact that his literary cosmology was entirely fictional. Neither Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath (now deceitfully re-named by woke gaming companies to “Shub-Gorath”) nor the dread tome of sorcery the Necromicon ever existed. Lovecraft would tell anybody who listened that he made them up.
Some people just never listen.
Have you ever tried to summon a Lovecraftian monster in a grimy London basement?
In the second half of the 1950s, 30 people thought it was a good idea – if you believe Aleister Crowley’s secretary, who led them. They hoped their ritual would work and that the Outer God known as Yog-Sothoth would just appear in front of them.
The gentleman orchestrating this damp subterranean pantomime was Kenneth Grant, a devoted disciple of Crowley who had spent his youth absorbing the by-then geriatric Beast’s esoteric ramblings in a Hastings boarding house. Having inherited his master’s taste for the theatrical, Grant set up his own lodge beneath a London furrier’s establishment, determined to channel stellar currents from Sirius. When Crowley’s official heir threw him out for heresy, Grant simply ploughed ahead, constructing an entire occult edifice upon the then-obscure pulp yarns of an impoverished Rhode Island gentleman.
To any rational observer, Lovecraft was an unbending materialist who spent his spare hours debunking fortune-tellers and ghostwriting tracts against superstition for Harry Houdini. The dread Necronomicon was concocted as a literary MacGuffin, its mad author Abdul Alhazred born from an adolescent fondness for The Arabian Nights, and its contents sustained by a circle of pulp scribblers who playfully cross-referenced each other’s invented grimoires. Like his close epistolary friend, Robert E Howard, who invented an entire History of The Hyborian Age for fun and as a placeholder for his tales of Conan and Kull, Lovecraft wrote a fake history of the fictional grimoire as an in-joke.
In it, he explains that the book’s original Arabic title, Al Azif, means that nocturnal sound made by insects supposed to be the howling of demons.
Lovecraft spent his final years answering letters from gullible fans with the patient, explicit reminder that he had made up the entire pantheon out of his own imagination. But occultists, like conspiracy theorists, possess an extraordinary talent for treating an author’s firm denial as the ultimate confirmation of cosmic conspiracy.
Grant wrote that his lodge had grown up “for purposes of traffic with the Outer Ones.” In 1971, he spelled out what that had to do with Lovecraft in an article for a magazine called Man, Myth and Magic. “Few know that Lovecraft dreamed most of his tales,” he wrote.
That much is true. Lovecraft was, by his own account, an extraordinarily prolific and lucid dreamer. Many of those dreams became the basis for stories, including several Dunsanian fantasies based entirely in “Dream Land”. But according to Grant’s tortured logic, Lovecraft’s admitted nightmares were not the mere firing of synapses, but involuntary psychic wireless signals beamed from the outer cosmos. The Providence recluse had tapped into genuine extra-dimensional abominations, Grant insisted, but his frail rationalist mind had repressed the horrifying truth. Under this delightfully unfalsifiable theory, the harder Lovecraft insisted that Cthulhu was a fiction, the more certain the mystics became that he was unconsciously channelling ancient monstrosities.
By the late 1970s, this elaborate delusion escaped the confines of esoteric periodicals and invaded high-street bookshops. A Manhattan outfit produced a mass-market paperback edition of the Necromicon under the pseudonym ‘Simon’, brazenly lifting Mesopotamian exorcisms, inverting their intended purpose and serving them up to suburban adolescents as an ancient gateway to madness. Subsequent decades witnessed the rise of ‘chaos magicians’ and so-called cultists in north London woods, chanting blasphemous syllables above bookshops and convincing themselves that play-acting in a trance was communion with preterhuman intelligences.
Awesome cosmic intelligences that, had they actually read Lovecraft, they’d have been warned would drive them mad if they ever really encountered them. Or maybe that ship had already sailed.
It is the supreme, unintended joke of 20th-century literature: an austere, tea-sipping sceptic living in genteel poverty writes lurid tales to pay his gas bill and generations of credulous bohemians promptly turn his ghost-stories into a full-blown liturgical religion. If Howard Phillips Lovecraft were alive to witness this earnest congregation chanting his made-up nursery words in damp cellars, he would scarcely know whether to offer a bitter laugh or despair entirely at the irredeemable credulity of mankind.
