Terrible Old Man
Worm That Gnaws
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Messages
- 12
Has anybody else noticed the quite subtle yet surprisingly strong anti-Christian theme in HPL's writing? Though I haven't read it, I'm aware of a recent book collecting HPL's atheist non-fiction writing, but I'm talking about his fictional stories.
Firstly, I could be wrong about this because I'm not intimately familiar with everything HPL ever wrote - I don't see much point in tracking down every last scrap of juvenilia, revision, posthumous "collaboration" which is 99% the work of August Derleth, and other lesser material. But I've read all his major stories, and I can't think of a single instance where a priest or similar person gains any special advantage over the powers of evil by virtue of his Christian faith. Which, given that in the tales just about every other form of magic works to at least some degree, is quite odd.
More importantly, consecrated ground isn't an obstacle for mythos critters; indeed, it positively attracts them! Burying grounds have always been a standard setting for horrors, because, hey, they're full of dead bodies. But HPL's bogeymen seem to have a special interest in infesting the church itself. Every time anyone enters a church - certainly every time that it matters to the story that they do - some horrible cult has invariably taken it over. In Lovecraft's universe, you never go to church unless you want your soul to be eaten by seething abnormalities that should not be...
A particularly good example is the church in The Haunter Of The Dark, which is taken over by the Starry Wisdom cult, and when they are forced to leave by what threatens to become a lynch mob (curiously leaving all their treasured cult objects behind - maybe they were in fact lynched?), the building is simply ignored for several decades, even though for most of that time the remains of a missing person are rotting in the middle of the floor!
The point is, the cultists casually displace the Christians, just as they do in Innsmouth, but when they leave, Christianity is seemingly impotent to reclaim the church, even to the extent of entering the building to destroy evil, dangerous books and objects sitting in plain sight, and give a decent burial to any dead bodies that might be lying around! It is made absolutely clear that the local population puts equal or greater trust in rustic Italian lucky charms than they do in crucifixes, which they carry only because every little helps. And whenever they see the abandoned church, their instinctive gesture is not the sign of the cross, but some other "cryptic" and doubtless pagan gesture which they clearly think has greater protective power.
As for Father Merluzzo, the best he can do is "to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could". This is of course utterly useless, and fails to contain the horror in the steeple - actually, since they all apparently know the creature to be allergic to light, he would have been far better employed organising everyone to bring lanterns and so on that wouldn't blow out in the thunderstorm! They're called storm lanterns - he must have known about them! I suppose it could be argued that the climactic thunderbolt represents Divine Intervention, but if so, God carelessly or capriciously answered their prayers too late to save Robert Blake, the only person who was genuinely threatened.
It's true that in some stories, Christians have, at some time prior to the events in the tale, executed witches and warlocks for being manifestly abhorrent in some foul fashion involving dead babies or something. But in these instances, the law-abiding majority are Christian by default, and they accomplish their goal by virtue of numbers and force of arms, not by being especially holy. And of course, the deceased magus invariable fails to stay permanently dead. For example, in The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, the Christian mob fails to permanently put paid to Joseph Curwen, whose sorcery utterly outwits them. He is only destroyed when Dr. Willett, a man who relies on learning and intelligence instead of faith, turns his own magic against him.
Much the same happens in The Dunwich Horror, except that at no point do any Christians make the slightest attempt to deal with a family who are blatantly trafficking with the Devil in the worst way. Presumably the local priest just hides behind closed shutters like everybody else, until the learned professors from the big city show up and deal with the problem in a way which will actually work.
But it gets even more subversive! Consider Azathoth. Although descriptions of him vary - the prose poem of that name makes him sound quite pleasant - the usual version depicts him as a blind idiot who happens to rule the Universe. Lovecraft is basically telling us that God Almighty, far from being omniscient, can't see what you're doing because He has no eyes, and wouldn't care if He could because He has no brain either.
In other words, the "God" who rules absolutely everything is indistinguishable from pure chance, except that he/she/it enjoys listening to drums and flutes being played badly by yetis forever (so Azathoth, though blind, isn't deaf, though he's probably tone-deaf). Which is an odd touch, until you remember the equally peculiar Christian emphasis on God's throne being surrounded by hosts of angels singing the same song for all eternity - apparently it consists basically of "Holy! Holy! Holy!" (unless Derek and Clive are correct in their daring hypothesis that the Heavenly Host are eternally crying with knob-ache). It's exactly the same concept, taken to its illogical conclusion - Azathoth is a blatant and far from subtle parody of Jehovah.
And what about Nyarlathotep? He's some sort of extension of Azathoth - his "soul and messenger" - who is sometimes described in similar or identical terms, as a blind idiot, but who is usually at least partly humanoid, and quite often unique among the Great Old Ones in that you could sit down with him and have a rational conversation, and maybe not even know who - and what - he really was.
Basically, he's a scaled-down humanoid avatar of Nyarlathotep apparently created to interact with the world of men. Once upon a time he lived as a man in the Middle East, where his enormous charisma - even animals loved him - vast wisdom, and the many wonders he displayed caused the locals to worship him as a divine king, until eventually he gleefully abandoned them to a terrible fate. And one day he will come again to do the same thing to all of us. But in the meantime, he walks among us in many different forms, inflicting all manner of small-scale madness and disorder upon us while he awaits the day when the world dies screaming in glorious full-blown chaos!
Now, who is that a merciless parody of? (Clue: Try and think of somebody famous who got nailed to something.)
Bearing in mind that Lovecraft privately believed all religion to be a pernicious waste of time, but in those days couldn't really work such a theme explicitly into his fiction if he wanted it to actually be published, did he not only invent a world where the only gods that truly existed were hideous, uncaring monsters, the worship of which didn't really get you anywhere, but also slip in the most blistering critique he could get away with of real-world religion? What does everybody think?
Firstly, I could be wrong about this because I'm not intimately familiar with everything HPL ever wrote - I don't see much point in tracking down every last scrap of juvenilia, revision, posthumous "collaboration" which is 99% the work of August Derleth, and other lesser material. But I've read all his major stories, and I can't think of a single instance where a priest or similar person gains any special advantage over the powers of evil by virtue of his Christian faith. Which, given that in the tales just about every other form of magic works to at least some degree, is quite odd.
More importantly, consecrated ground isn't an obstacle for mythos critters; indeed, it positively attracts them! Burying grounds have always been a standard setting for horrors, because, hey, they're full of dead bodies. But HPL's bogeymen seem to have a special interest in infesting the church itself. Every time anyone enters a church - certainly every time that it matters to the story that they do - some horrible cult has invariably taken it over. In Lovecraft's universe, you never go to church unless you want your soul to be eaten by seething abnormalities that should not be...
A particularly good example is the church in The Haunter Of The Dark, which is taken over by the Starry Wisdom cult, and when they are forced to leave by what threatens to become a lynch mob (curiously leaving all their treasured cult objects behind - maybe they were in fact lynched?), the building is simply ignored for several decades, even though for most of that time the remains of a missing person are rotting in the middle of the floor!
The point is, the cultists casually displace the Christians, just as they do in Innsmouth, but when they leave, Christianity is seemingly impotent to reclaim the church, even to the extent of entering the building to destroy evil, dangerous books and objects sitting in plain sight, and give a decent burial to any dead bodies that might be lying around! It is made absolutely clear that the local population puts equal or greater trust in rustic Italian lucky charms than they do in crucifixes, which they carry only because every little helps. And whenever they see the abandoned church, their instinctive gesture is not the sign of the cross, but some other "cryptic" and doubtless pagan gesture which they clearly think has greater protective power.
As for Father Merluzzo, the best he can do is "to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could". This is of course utterly useless, and fails to contain the horror in the steeple - actually, since they all apparently know the creature to be allergic to light, he would have been far better employed organising everyone to bring lanterns and so on that wouldn't blow out in the thunderstorm! They're called storm lanterns - he must have known about them! I suppose it could be argued that the climactic thunderbolt represents Divine Intervention, but if so, God carelessly or capriciously answered their prayers too late to save Robert Blake, the only person who was genuinely threatened.
It's true that in some stories, Christians have, at some time prior to the events in the tale, executed witches and warlocks for being manifestly abhorrent in some foul fashion involving dead babies or something. But in these instances, the law-abiding majority are Christian by default, and they accomplish their goal by virtue of numbers and force of arms, not by being especially holy. And of course, the deceased magus invariable fails to stay permanently dead. For example, in The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, the Christian mob fails to permanently put paid to Joseph Curwen, whose sorcery utterly outwits them. He is only destroyed when Dr. Willett, a man who relies on learning and intelligence instead of faith, turns his own magic against him.
Much the same happens in The Dunwich Horror, except that at no point do any Christians make the slightest attempt to deal with a family who are blatantly trafficking with the Devil in the worst way. Presumably the local priest just hides behind closed shutters like everybody else, until the learned professors from the big city show up and deal with the problem in a way which will actually work.
But it gets even more subversive! Consider Azathoth. Although descriptions of him vary - the prose poem of that name makes him sound quite pleasant - the usual version depicts him as a blind idiot who happens to rule the Universe. Lovecraft is basically telling us that God Almighty, far from being omniscient, can't see what you're doing because He has no eyes, and wouldn't care if He could because He has no brain either.
In other words, the "God" who rules absolutely everything is indistinguishable from pure chance, except that he/she/it enjoys listening to drums and flutes being played badly by yetis forever (so Azathoth, though blind, isn't deaf, though he's probably tone-deaf). Which is an odd touch, until you remember the equally peculiar Christian emphasis on God's throne being surrounded by hosts of angels singing the same song for all eternity - apparently it consists basically of "Holy! Holy! Holy!" (unless Derek and Clive are correct in their daring hypothesis that the Heavenly Host are eternally crying with knob-ache). It's exactly the same concept, taken to its illogical conclusion - Azathoth is a blatant and far from subtle parody of Jehovah.
And what about Nyarlathotep? He's some sort of extension of Azathoth - his "soul and messenger" - who is sometimes described in similar or identical terms, as a blind idiot, but who is usually at least partly humanoid, and quite often unique among the Great Old Ones in that you could sit down with him and have a rational conversation, and maybe not even know who - and what - he really was.
Basically, he's a scaled-down humanoid avatar of Nyarlathotep apparently created to interact with the world of men. Once upon a time he lived as a man in the Middle East, where his enormous charisma - even animals loved him - vast wisdom, and the many wonders he displayed caused the locals to worship him as a divine king, until eventually he gleefully abandoned them to a terrible fate. And one day he will come again to do the same thing to all of us. But in the meantime, he walks among us in many different forms, inflicting all manner of small-scale madness and disorder upon us while he awaits the day when the world dies screaming in glorious full-blown chaos!
Now, who is that a merciless parody of? (Clue: Try and think of somebody famous who got nailed to something.)
Bearing in mind that Lovecraft privately believed all religion to be a pernicious waste of time, but in those days couldn't really work such a theme explicitly into his fiction if he wanted it to actually be published, did he not only invent a world where the only gods that truly existed were hideous, uncaring monsters, the worship of which didn't really get you anywhere, but also slip in the most blistering critique he could get away with of real-world religion? What does everybody think?
