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H. P. Lovecraft, the Hall of Records, and Occult Mysticism

2/5/2014

40 Comments

 
The eBook for Cthulhu in World Mythology is now live and for sale at Amazon.com, and it will be other outlets soon, with a print edition to follow later in the month. As you get ready to read it, I thought I’d direct your attention to an interesting blog post over at A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere. It’s an elegantly written and thought-provoking examination of the connection between H. P. Lovecraft and occultism that I think, ultimately, comes to some incorrect conclusions.

But first let’s talk about some of what is very interesting in this discussion by “Tristan Eldritch.” Eldritch discusses the Theosophical concept of the akashic record and Edgar Cayce’s Atlantean “Hall of Records” and relates both to themes and ideas found in the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The akashic record is the imaginary recording of all universal wisdom somewhere in another dimension. The Hall of Records supposedly was a library hidden beneath the Sphinx.

Eldritch compares these storehouses of ancient wisdom to the records of the lost civilizations of the Cthulhu Mythos—the lizard people of the “Nameless City,” the Great Race of Yith in “The Shadow Out of Time,” and, I would add, the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madnesss, all of whom recorded their histories in great libraries of either books of wall carvings and murals. Superficially, the Shadow Out of Time seems to reflect Cayce in that the story concerns an underground chamber filled with prehistoric records, more or less exactly like the underground chamber Cayce thought had been made beneath the Sphinx in 10,600 BCE.

However, so far as I can tell, Cayce began speculating about the Hall of Records in the 1930s, while Lovecraft had developed his concept piecemeal over the preceding two decades. In “Dagon” (1917), Lovecraft first introduced the concept of ancient masonry bearing prehistoric records in an unknown script. It appears on a “Cyclopean monolith,” whose “writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like.” In “The Nameless City” (1921), this had become the reptilian people’s long halls covered in hieroglyphs and pictographs, something repeated in At the Mountains of Madness (1931). By the time of The Shadow Out of Time (1935), there was now a physical library of books.

In the earliest form, though, Lovecraft was not riffing on Theosophy as much as he was creating an aquatic analogue to ancient but very real bas relief carvings and their fictional counterparts. He specifically relates the ancient text of “Dagon” to what he had read in “Poe or Bulwer,” referring to very specific material: In Poe’s A. Gordon Pym, the characters discover “singular-looking indentures in the surface of the marl” later determined to be ancient Ethiopian writing. The idea of Antarctic carvings reappears, along with Pym’s infamous “Tekeli-li,” in At the Mountains of Madness. Bulwer’s Coming Race similarly features the idea of a visitor to a lost underground civilization delving into questions of linguistics through which the true racial history of the strange civilization is revealed.

The idea of such ancient libraries of wisdom, however, predated these authors. Poe derived his, in part, from an earlier story Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820) in which Capt. Adam Seaborn (probably a pseudonym for John Cleves Symmes) visits the hollow earth kingdom of Symzonia and, among other things, visits their great library containing all manner of histories. He has his own works translated and added to the library.

But these are mere late versions of a theme dating back to Antiquity. Euhemerus made use of the theme in his description of Panchaea, an imaginary paradise where he “learned” how the gods were really merely ancient human kings from a lost civilization: “In the middle of the bed, is placed a great golden pillar, whereon are letters inscribed, called by the Egyptians, sacred writing, expressing the famous actions of Uranus, Jupiter, Diana, and Apollo, written, they say, by Mercury himself. But this may suffice concerning the islands lying in the ocean over against Arabia” (Diodorus, Library 5.67). Herodotus similarly rhapsodized about the millennial records of the Egyptians, a theme reappearing in Plato’s Timaeus, in conjunction with Atlantis. Famously, Flavius Josephus described the pre-Flood pillars of stone and brick set up in Egypt to record all the wisdom of the earth. The Nephilim, the children of Seth, had “inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind” (Antiquities 1.2.3). Lovecraft would have known all of these stories, in addition to some version of the common Arab legend that the last pre-Flood king of Egypt had his priests write “on every surface of the pyramids, the ceilings, foundations, and walls, all the sciences familiar to the Egyptians. They drew the figures of the stars; they wrote the names of the drugs and their useful and harmful properties, the science of talismans, mathematics, architecture—all the sciences of the world—and it was all laid out very clearly” (Al-Maqrizi, Al-Khitat, ch. 40). To this we can also add, though likely not known to Lovecraft, references to lost libraries of sacred wisdom in the books of Enoch and Jubilees—the “heavenly tablets” that recorded prophecies of the Flood (1 Enoch 106:19) and the secret knowledge of the “books of my forefathers” (Jubilees 21:10).

These are just some of the precedents for the Hall of Records, not counting the buried library of “wisdom” of the Lost Tribes Joseph Smith claimed to have unearthed from Hill Cumorah.

Therefore, Eldritch errs in seeing Lovecraft, in discussing his pre-human bas reliefs, as working in an occult tradition derived from a deep love of mysticism. Instead, Lovecraft had developed his ideas in stages, proceeding logically from one development to the next, drawing on literary models that stretch back to the very dawn of literature. If Lovecraft’s ancient wall murals are mystical, than so too must be Poe’s and Bulwer’s mysterious writing.

And here is where my biggest disagreement with Eldritch lies: He sees Lovecraft as a mystic, one whose rational mind was in conflict with a subconscious exploration of the supernatural. He even goes so far as to compare Lovecraft’s stories with drug trips and shamanism—noting but downplaying that the similarities relate to the common stock of imagery created by altered states of consciousness, accessible to Lovecraft through his intense dreams. Eldritch seems to want to see Lovecraft as an unintentional prophet, but there is no reason to impose an ideology of belief onto Lovecraft’s art. Paradoxically, he also wants to see Lovecraft as enacting a Freudian drama created by his parents’ sad ends, and that this led him to throw a blanket of cold materialism over his wild “mystical tendency.”

Instead, this is an imposition from an occult worldview, made famous by Kenneth Grant’s occult vision of Lovecraft, that takes the fact that later readers saw mystical truths in Lovecraft as evidence that such truths were either intentional or genuine. Instead, Lovecraft’s error was in creating his fictional world too well, drawing on ancient precedents in a way that married their power to modern science. Lovecraft was once termed “atheism’s mythographer,” and that is perhaps the best description I can offer—a storyteller who captured the tension between the ancient and the modern, the eternal and the changing, in a fictional form that reflected and refracted what Joseph Campbell would shortly thereafter call “the power of myth.” While just as potent, the difference is that unlike Carl Jung’s archetypes or Campbell’s monomyth, Lovecraft meant for his work to represent an intellectual attempt to play with the ideas of mythology and the occult, not to actually be a myth or an occult experience.

To read Lovecraft only in light of Theosophy and Edgar Cayce and mysticism is to misunderstand him, for his stories use those colorings on a spine derived from the Classics, who give the stories their form and substance. Lovecraft himself made this painfully obvious when he likened Cthulhu to Polyphemus, signaling that the section of “The Call of Cthulhu” in which the sailors visit the god’s tomb had its model in Odysseus’s adventure in the Cyclops’s cave, not in a shamanic journey to union with the divine.

40 Comments
Lost Books
2/5/2014 05:32:31 am

Book of Jasher (Old Testament); lost Arabic manuscript of Kyot (Wolfram Von Eschenbach's "Parzival"); Chrétien de Troyes claimed he wrote "Perceval, the Story of the Grail" from a source given to him by Philip, Count of Flanders. Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain" was derived from a lost book. Pedigree is everything.

Reply
tacitus
2/6/2014 12:46:41 am

As I understand it, in the medieval European world making up your own stories was not acceptable. So authors would often make up fake sources for their stories. That doesn't mean that there not real lost books, but I suspect some of these "lost" books never existed. In fact I think the Perceval book was specifically mentioned as an example to this.

Reply
Irna link
2/5/2014 07:50:37 am

Hi Jason, I read a few pages of your book in the Amazon preview, and anticipate hours of delightful reading with it!
However, aren't you afraid that you may end in creating an entire new string of pseudoarchaeological fantasies that wil live for ever on internet? After all, there are already many people who believe that the Necronomicon is a real book, so why not a real Cthulhu! :)

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
2/5/2014 07:58:32 am

Irna -

Too late!

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2012/09/was-cthulhu-a-king-of-atlantis.html

Reply
Irna link
2/6/2014 08:51:11 am

"And whatever you do, don’t let her see Cthulhu in World Mythology. I shudder to think what she would make of my parody."

:D

Jason Colavito link
2/5/2014 08:05:00 am

I certainly hope that all of the jokes in the text should make it obvious that it isn't serious. One of the footnotes is to Prof. Peabody's last lecture--an episode of Night Gallery!

It's certainly true that there will be people who won't get that it's humor (even though it's classified as "parody"), but I tried to embed enough signposts in the text that anyone who tried to confirm the "facts" would quickly discover they aren't true.

My inspiration was Robert M. Price's "Critical Commentary on the Necronomicon," which to my knowledge hasn't spawned any claims that he wrote a genuine exegesis on Abdul Alhazred.

Reply
Irna link
2/6/2014 08:48:59 am

Never underestimate the credulity of some people, as I myself did when I indulged myself in writing an April fool ridiculing the Bosnian "pyramids" a few years ago... To this day I find elements of my April fool re-emerging time and again on the internet :)

Jason Colavito link
2/6/2014 08:52:54 am

You and I are in good company. Lovecraft's fiction was mistaken for fact and launched a whole branch of "Magick." When Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery," people actually wrote to the New Yorker asking which town it took place in so they could go to view the stoning. Worse: Heaven's Gate took Star Trek for revelation. Sadly, you can't control what other people are going to do; more than a few people who don't know me have already mistaken my book for a serious exploration of mythology.

An Over-Educated Grunt
2/5/2014 08:08:00 am

It's a little strange to me that anyone would read Lovecraft and go "hmm, dream-quest," since the most cohesive body of his work is very clearly, very explicitly set in a fictionalized but recognizable New England. I can buy the argument that he's sublimating a mystical tendency under his rational side, but the rational side comes through so very strongly that it swamps the mystical side pretty heavily. Even in his dream-works, Lovecraft's protagonists retain their "realistic" behavior; there are no men who suddenly discover flight or any other wish-fulfillment powers. My takeaway is that Lovecraft's man is fundamentally rational, even in the face of the completely irrational - see the line from "Call of Cthulhu" about being unable to collate the contents of the mind. Even his monsters are creatures of this world, poorly though humans may understand them.

Anyway, it's good to see you out of the SWamp.

Reply
Dave Lewis
2/5/2014 11:49:48 am

To Jason Colavito:

Before I ran across this blog the only other person I was aware of who wrote about HPL was S.T. Joshi. I think I have one of his books somewhere but must admit I've never read it. Could you give a brief summary of Joshi's take on HPL?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
2/5/2014 12:10:04 pm

I would risk oversimplifying Joshi's views, and I also have to disclose that he and I have exchanged emails on occasion. Joshi tends to see Lovecraft primarily as a philosopher whose medium happened to be weird fiction, and he tends to over-emphasize the supposed philosophical rigor of Lovecraft's work, often at the expense of the entertainment value of it. He sees Lovecraft as almost unique in literature, when the difference is more of degree than of kind. He also tends to think the Lovecraft's life and letters are worthy of as much or more study than Lovecraft's fiction.

I disagree to the extent that I don't feel that Lovecraft wasn't nearly so deep or rigorous as Joshi argues, and his understanding of many issues was rather superficial. (Cf. Mark Twain's more incisive and, yes, deeper views on many of the same issues.) Instead, it is the fiction that creates the resonance because Lovecraft was able to use symbolism and mythology in a way his non-fiction prose could not.

Reply
Dave Lewis
2/5/2014 01:12:16 pm

Thanks for the info.

If HPL saw himself as a philosopher do you think he would have allowed his writings to be published in pulp mags like Weird Tales? I guess a possible answer to that is "Philosophers have to eat, too!"

J.A.D
2/5/2014 03:04:38 pm

S.Freud + J.M Keynes must be name-dropped. If this is like
the interface in time where the Apollo cult rationalism of the
Enlightenment has to give way to the Sublime Unconcious
of the Romanticists as Edmund Burke resurrects the Pagan
essay by Dionysus Cassius Longinus, if Lovecraft was about
to explore the dark recesses of our Ids, the Victorians have to
react to Freud and Darwin, as they accept we all dream and
can have very primal nightmares. The past has a great and
terrible wisdom. Mortals were warned not to go into the realms
of the Gods & Goddesses, but then who were these exagerated
beings? Did Newton dispel all ancient spell-force, and if not
was the sum of the past always greater than the present? If
there was a core "nugget" of astronomy bordering on physics
inside all alchemy and astrology texts and as living beings are
spatially tied into the universe, where actions at a distance do
affect us, can we be torn apart by unseen eddies and currents,
unseen forces? He is asking questions of identity & perception
beyond the five senses. Myths and legends often have a real
core, and if ley lines are real, there is a grid, a network for all
living beings, his New England then is connected to elsewhere
and the ancient past of humanity bites the present beings on
the derriere often. Keynes's essay on Newton the last Magus
springs to mind. Sometimes the irrational is even found inside
the more sane members of the erudite few of an Enlightenment.

J.A.D
2/5/2014 03:37:31 pm

http://philosophynow.org/issues/11/Burke_Kant_and_the_Sublime

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/summary/v062/62.2ryan.html

http://www.amerindianarts.us/articles/concept_of_the_sublime_as_an_aesthetic_quality.shtml

If Lovecraft is into Philosophy, despite the middle-brow to low-brow stage that he utilizes to quest at the conventional wisdom,
his stories read differently if he agrees more with Aristotle than
Plato. If he agrees with Plato that an archetype is connected to
other archetypes as there is an abstract but real plane that
exists, we have the potential for a Hall of Records, or even an
omniscient & omnipresent Creator being. Aristotle was more
empirical. Toss in Mani the Persian, and a Manichean war
between Good and Evil becomes very real. Aristotle & Freud
in tandem with Darwin & Laplace = you resurrect Descartes's
mechanized universe. Is his hero going to a real place as if
into a wormhole as modern physics hypothetically assumes
or is he just a Great Ape in one spot tripping his brains out
on pre-LSD lysergics due to moldy bread or things similar?
Mushrooms + exotic toads, is all succinctly inside a human
skull + brain or was travel elsewhere possible? Are ancient
monoliths time portals? Call it woo-woo or UFO time, but you
can leap from Lovecraft into Charles Fort without giving Jules Verne a nod. Usually to read I. Asimov or A.C.Clark you must
bow down to Jules Verne. Lovecraft + H.G Wells lets you leap
to Harlan Ellison directly as you bypass the M.I.T & Cal-Tech
worshipped 50s era Great Triumvirate of 20th Century Sci-Fi!




J.A.D
2/5/2014 03:50:02 pm

Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein are the three...
http://www.sfandfantasy.co.uk/php/the-big-3.php
H.G Wells, H.P Lovecraft and Harlan Ellison
half explain this dude's UFO ideas... i feel!
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/giorgio-tsoukalos.html
i had to namedrop Charles Fort to be grounded.

J.A.D
2/5/2014 04:14:40 pm

either Randolph Carter = John Carter and you can morph the
time-trip of Edgar Rice Burrough's hero into where Randolph
Carter goes, or the opposite is true. First half of the essay is
vintage hippie era 60s counterculture ramblings as if Yellow
Submarine was top of the pop charts as in Yesterday. The
2nd half has Jason's name as a kudos and settles down
nicely. It is apt and on the money. It is succinct & sci-fi aware,
as William Burroughs meets up with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Uncle Ron
2/5/2014 02:12:08 pm

Jason - your remarks above, "I disagree to the extent that I don't feel that Lovecraft wasn't nearly so deep or rigorous as Joshi argues..."

Reply
Shane Sullivan
2/5/2014 03:27:55 pm

Yay! I've been waiting for Cthulhu in World Mythology for months. I just have to decide whether I want to read it on a device (which I hate doing), or if I want to wait for the print release...

Reply
J.A.D
2/5/2014 04:27:09 pm

link to Joshi's take on HPL --- the dude could get depressed
as in deeply as in long time-frames &medically. GOTO bio!!!

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/lovecraft.html

Reply
J.A.D
2/5/2014 04:31:36 pm

Hugo Gernsback by 1930 publishes HLP in Amazing Stories
GOTO 1/4th of the way down on the Scriptorium web-page

Reply
J.A.D
2/5/2014 04:36:13 pm

QUOTE

"What did Lovecraft mean when he wrote:

I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups – (a) Love of the strange and the fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities. (SL 1.110)

Whether these are really to be "dissociated," and whether they make up the totality of Lovecraft's thought and personality (he wrote this in 1920), is to be wondered. Later he confessed, acutely, that his very love of the past fostered the principal strain in his aesthetic of the weird – the defeat or confounding of time. In any case, the traditional image of Lovecraft – the one we think of when we see Virgil Finlay's exquisite portrait of him as a periwigged gentleman – as the eighteenth-century fossil completely ignorant of and hostile to the twentieth century has, since the publication of his letters, been shown conclusively to be false. Anyone who reads of Lovecraft's careful dissection of the political scene prior to the 1936 election – he was a pronounced New Dealer – will know that he was no "stranger in this century," as the "Outsider" says of himself. Even his fiction, if read carefully, can be seen to be more than the escapist dreams of a doting antiquarian: superficially we have things like the discovery of Pluto cited in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930) or the then still controversial continental drift theory in At the Mountains of Madness (1931); more profoundly we have Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg recurring in significant fashion in the later fiction, or the transparent metaphors for humanity's future aesthetic, political, and economic development in the alien civilizations in "The Mound" (1929-30), At the Mountains of Madness, and "The Shadow out of Time."
This does not mean that Lovecraft abandoned his love of the past; it is simply that he justified it more rationally. Lovecraft's prose style, for example, always bore traces of his early absorption of the Augustans; but in later years he could defend eighteenth-century prose (quite rightly) precisely because it was more natural and direct than either the floridity of Carlyle or the "machine-gun fire" of Hemingway: UNQUOTE

Reply
j.a.d
2/5/2014 04:41:19 pm

HPL quote from Joshi's essay ((((drumrolls))))

I refuse to be taken in by the goddam bunk of this aera just as totally as I refused to fall for the pompous, polite bull of Victorianism – and one of the chief fallacies of the present is that smoothness, even when involving no sacrifice of directness, is a defect. The best prose is vigorous, direct, unadorn'd, and closely related (as is the best verse) to the language of actual discourse; but it has its natural rhythms and smoothness just as good oral speech has. There has never been any prose as good as that of the early eighteenth century, and anyone who thinks he can improve upon Swift, Steele, and Addison is a blockhead. (SL 4.32-33)


IMOHO Lovecraft is not Hunter Thompson, he prefers the older
and often more sublimely literate prose, he needs a foundation.
He is not being a relativist, he tends to slowly build to a climax.

Reply
JAD--- these wonderful HPL quotes are halfway down Joshi's Scriptorium page
2/5/2014 04:47:36 pm

Lovecraft's hostility to religion – for the principal reason that it made false assertions as to the nature of entity ("The Judaeo-Christian mythology is NOT TRUE" [SL 1.60]) – seems to have increased with the years, to the point that he expressed contempt that orthodox religionists would continue to brainwash the young into religious belief in the face of such massive scientific evidence to the contrary. And yet, the findings of modern science did not lead Lovecraft to waver on the issue, as when he spoke of

. . . the new mysticism or neo-metaphysics bred of the advertised uncertainties of recent science – Einstein, the quantum theory, and the resolution of matter into force. Although these new turns of science don't mean a thing in relation to the myth of cosmic consciousness and teleology, a new brood of despairing and horrified moderns is seizing on the doubt of all positive knowledge which they imply; and is deducing therefrom that, since nothing is true, therefore anything can be true.....whence one may invent or revive any sort of mythology that fancy or nostalgia or desperation may dictate, and defy anyone to prove that it isn't emotionally true – whatever that means. This sickly, decadent neo-mysticism – a protest not only against machine materialism but against pure science with its destruction of the mystery and dignity of human emotion and experience – will be the dominant creed of middle twentieth century aesthetes, as the Eliot and Huxley penumbra well prognosticate. (SL 3.53)

Lovecraft's ultimate position (derived, as much of the above quotation was, from Joseph Wood Krutch's The Modern Temper) was one of resigned acceptance of the truths of science – the truth that the world and the human race occupy an infinitesimal and unimportant place in the cosmic scheme of things; the truth that one lives and dies and that's the end of it. When Lovecraft sought freedom from the constraining bonds of reality, it was not the fact-repudiating freedom of religious belief but the imaginative freedom of weird fiction. It was precisely because Lovecraft felt the universe to be an unswerving mechanism with rigid natural laws that he required the escape of the imagination:

The general revolt of the sensitive mind against the tyranny of corporeal enclosure, restricted sense-equipment, & the laws of force, space, & causation, is a far keener & bitterer & better-founded one than any of the silly revolts of long-haired poseurs against isolated & specific instances of cosmic inevitability. But of course it does not take the form of personal petulance, because there is no convenient scape-goat to saddle the impersonal ill upon. Rather does it crop out as a pervasive sadness & unplaceable impatience, manifested in a love of strange dreams & an amusing eagerness to be galled by the quack cosmic pretensions of the various religious circuses. Well – in our day the quack circuses are wearing pretty thin despite the premature senilities of fat Chesterbellocs & affected Waste Land Shantih-dwellers, & the nostalgic & unmotivated "overbeliefs" of elderly & childhood-crippled physicists. The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality – when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt – as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (SL 3.295-96)

But if Lovecraft's "love of the truth" led him to embrace scientific facts (as he saw them), however unpalatable and destructive of human self-importance they were, his "love of the ancient and the permanent" allowed him to evolve an ethic that placed tradition at its center.

In a cosmos without absolute values we have to rely on the relative values affecting our daily sense of comfort, pleasure, & emotional satisfaction. What gives us relative painlessness & contentment we may arbitrarily call "good", & vice versa. This local nomenclature is necessary to give us that benign illusion of placement, direction, & stable background on which the still more important illusions of "worthwhileness", dramatic significance in events, & interest in life depend. Now what gives one person or race or age relative painlessness & contentment often disagrees sharply on the psychological side from what gives these same boons to another person or race or age. Therefore "good" is a relative & variable quality, depending on ancestry, chronology, geography, nationality, & individual temperament. Amidst this variability there is only one anchor of fixity which we can seize upon as the working pseudo-standard of "values" which we need in order to feel settled & contented – & that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our ance

Reply
j.a.d
2/5/2014 04:52:29 pm

of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of "lostness" in endless time & space. (SL 2.356-57)

This seems a little self-serving – there is no reason why everyone should feel the sense of tradition so strongly that its absence would breed a feeling of "lostness" – but it accounts both for Lovecraft's gentlemanly deportment and for many of his political views. His politics became radically altered in the course of his life – he began as a naive monarchist who lamented the American Revolution and the split with England, and ended as a confirmed socialist who wished FDR to proceed even more rapidly with reform – but there are points of contact all along the way. Lovecraft's aristocratic upbringing never left him, and his suspicion of democracy actually became more pronounced as events following the depression compelled him to adopt socialism. At the heart of Lovecraft's entire political philosophy was the notion of culture – the massed traditions of each race, society, and region. "All I care about is the civilisation – the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men" (SL 2.290) – men, one supposes, like Lovecraft. What this means is that anything that stands in the way of the flowering of a rich and harmonious culture – for Lovecraft it was principally democracy and capitalism – must go. The conjoining of these two forces in the early nineteenth century actually led to the shattering of that high level of culture maintained by the aristocracies of the past:

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved & crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercial-satellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – & they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (SL 5.397-98)

The answer was not some rearguard resurrection of the aristocratic principle – Lovecraft was realist enough to understand that this was not possible in the America of the 1930s – but socialism. Aristocracy and socialism were really mirror images of the same thing:

. . . what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system...a set of qualities, however, whose merits lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, & generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, & just as achievable through socialism as through aristocracy. (SL 5.321)

Socialism would mean such basic economic rights as old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and – a vital issue for many economists and lawmakers of the 1930s, but one ultimately rejected by Roosevelt and subsequent administrations – shorter working hours so that all who were able to work could have a chance to do so. Lovecraft came to this position because he felt that the dominance of the machine in his day had made it possible for all needed work to be done by a very small number of people; working hours would therefore have to be arbitrarily reduced to spread what little work there was to the populace at large. For Lovecraft this would have an added benefit: the increased leisure time accruing to all individuals could then be used for increased educational and aesthetic purposes, with a resulting rise in the tone of general culture. Lovecraft seemed genuinely convinced

Reply
j.a.d
2/5/2014 04:58:31 pm

of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of "lostness" in endless time & space. (SL 2.356-57)

This seems a little self-serving – there is no reason why everyone should feel the sense of tradition so strongly that its absence would breed a feeling of "lostness" – but it accounts both for Lovecraft's gentlemanly deportment and for many of his political views. His politics became radically altered in the course of his life – he began as a naive monarchist who lamented the American Revolution and the split with England, and ended as a confirmed socialist who wished FDR to proceed even more rapidly with reform – but there are points of contact all along the way. Lovecraft's aristocratic upbringing never left him, and his suspicion of democracy actually became more pronounced as events following the depression compelled him to adopt socialism. At the heart of Lovecraft's entire political philosophy was the notion of culture – the massed traditions of each race, society, and region. "All I care about is the civilisation – the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men" (SL 2.290) – men, one supposes, like Lovecraft. What this means is that anything that stands in the way of the flowering of a rich and harmonious culture – for Lovecraft it was principally democracy and capitalism – must go. The conjoining of these two forces in the early nineteenth century actually led to the shattering of that high level of culture maintained by the aristocracies of the past:

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved & crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercial-satellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – & they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (SL 5.397-98)

The answer was not some rearguard resurrection of the aristocratic principle – Lovecraft was realist enough to understand that this was not possible in the America of the 1930s – but socialism. Aristocracy and socialism were really mirror images of the same thing:

. . . what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system...a set of qualities, however, whose merits lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, & generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, & just as achievable through socialism as through aristocracy. (SL 5.321)

Socialism would mean such basic economic rights as old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and – a vital issue for many economists and lawmakers of the 1930s, but one ultimately rejected by Roosevelt and subsequent administrations – shorter working hours so that all who were able to work could have a chance to do so. Lovecraft came to this position because he felt that the dominance of the machine in his day had made it possible for all needed work to be done by a very small number of people; working hours would therefore have to be arbitrarily reduced to spread what little work there was to the populace at large. For Lovecraft this would have an added benefit: the increased leisure time accruing to all individuals could then be used for increased educational and aesthetic purposes, with a resulting rise in the tone of general culture. Lovecraft seemed genuinely convinced

Reply
jad
2/5/2014 05:04:34 pm

deleat this one, too

Abbreviator
2/5/2014 05:03:15 pm

J.A.D.

Your comments can all be condensed into a couple of paragraphs.

Your comments totalled a number of 2,732 words that were unnecessary

Reply
jad
2/5/2014 04:59:43 pm

of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally & pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of "lostness" in endless time & space. (SL 2.356-57)

This seems a little self-serving – there is no reason why everyone should feel the sense of tradition so strongly that its absence would breed a feeling of "lostness" – but it accounts both for Lovecraft's gentlemanly deportment and for many of his political views. His politics became radically altered in the course of his life – he began as a naive monarchist who lamented the American Revolution and the split with England, and ended as a confirmed socialist who wished FDR to proceed even more rapidly with reform – but there are points of contact all along the way. Lovecraft's aristocratic upbringing never left him, and his suspicion of democracy actually became more pronounced as events following the depression compelled him to adopt socialism. At the heart of Lovecraft's entire political philosophy was the notion of culture – the massed traditions of each race, society, and region. "All I care about is the civilisation – the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men" (SL 2.290) – men, one supposes, like Lovecraft. What this means is that anything that stands in the way of the flowering of a rich and harmonious culture – for Lovecraft it was principally democracy and capitalism – must go. The conjoining of these two forces in the early nineteenth century actually led to the shattering of that high level of culture maintained by the aristocracies of the past:

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved & crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercial-satellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – & they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (SL 5.397-98)

The answer was not some rearguard resurrection of the aristocratic principle – Lovecraft was realist enough to understand that this was not possible in the America of the 1930s – but socialism. Aristocracy and socialism were really mirror images of the same thing:

. . . what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system...a set of qualities, however, whose merits lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, & generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, & just as achievable through socialism as through aristocracy. (SL 5.321)

Socialism would mean such basic economic rights as old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and – a vital issue for many economists and lawmakers of the 1930s, but one ultimately rejected by Roosevelt and subsequent administrations – shorter working hours so that all who were able to work could have a chance to do so. Lovecraft came to this position because he felt that the dominance of the machine in his day had made it possible for all needed work to be done by a very small number of people; working hours would therefore have to be arbitrarily reduced to spread what little work there was to the populace at large. For Lovecraft this would have an added benefit: the increased leisure time accruing to all individuals could then be used for increased educational and aesthetic purposes, with a resulting rise in the tone of general culture. Lovecraft seemed genuinely convinced

Reply
jad
2/5/2014 05:03:07 pm

Yikes! deleat this posting...
i went too overboard.

Reply
Abbreviator
2/5/2014 05:04:17 pm

Yeah, give us all a rest from your boring waffle

J.A.D
2/5/2014 05:08:19 pm

short version --- he is as sublime
as LONGINUS, BURKE + KANT
and dies of intestinal cancer in
1937 as a rabid New Dealer. clever
dude. compelling intellect. agreed. was
once as "tony" Tory as Edmund Burke.

Reply
jad
2/5/2014 05:11:03 pm

H. P Lovecraft's "leisure time" is where THORSTEIN VEBLIN
meets up with JARED DIAMOND's GUNS, GERMS & STEEL.

Reply
JAD
2/5/2014 05:22:56 pm

Jason's discontent about how history horrid SW is being
on AU and how it "dumbs down" the mass culture more
than BILL AND TED's EXCELLENT ADVENTURE is epistomologically pure HPL as in this longish quote.
SW had no idea of how SO CRATES his rants sound.
HLP is not K. Marx but both are prosepoem turgid in a gravitas!

Bourgeois capitalism gave artistic excellence & sincerity a death-blow by enthroning cheap amusement-value at the expense of that intrinsic excellence which only cultivated, non-acquisitive persons of assured position can enjoy. The determinant market for written, pictorial, musical, dramatic, decorative, architectural, & other heretofore aesthetic material ceased to be a small circle of truly educated persons, but became a substantially larger (even with a vast proportion of society starved & crushed into a sodden, inarticulate helplessness through commercial & commercial-satellitic greed & callousness) circle of mixed origin numerically dominated by crude, half-educated clods whose systematically perverted ideals (worship of low cunning, material acquisition, cheap comfort & smoothness, worldly success, ostentation, speed, intrinsic magnitude, surface glitter, &c.) prevented them from ever achieving the tastes and perspectives of the gentlefolk whose dress & speech & external manners they so assiduously mimicked. This herd of acquisitive boors brought up from the shop & the counting-house a complete set of artificial attitudes, oversimplifications, & mawkish sentimentalities which no sincere art or literature could gratify – & they so outnumbered the remaining educated gentlefolk that most of the purveying agencies became at once reoriented to them. Literature & art lost most of their market; & writing, painting, drama, &c. became engulfed more & more in the domain of amusement enterprises. (SL 5.397-98)

The answer was not some rearguard resurrection of the aristocratic principle – Lovecraft was realist enough to understand that this was not possible in the America of the 1930s – but socialism. Aristocracy and socialism were really mirror images of the same thing:

. . . what I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system...a set of qualities, however, whose merits lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, & generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, & just as achievable through socialism as through aristocracy. (SL 5.321)

Reply
Only Me
2/5/2014 06:28:56 pm

I beg everyone's pardon for being so blunt, but...

Can someone please translate whatever the fuck J.A. was trying to say? My eyes simply couldn't handle the wall of text, nor could I understand the excessive name-dropping and references.

I apologize if I unintentionally insulted anyone, but sweet momma of mashed potatoes! I require organized thoughts, clear transitions and at least an idea of the relevancy to the topic.

Reply
Matt Mc
2/6/2014 12:17:33 am

I agree Only Me, it is hard to read, very hard.

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
2/6/2014 12:28:54 am

Only Me, Matt -

It's not helped by the way the comment system chops it at however many characters. He did put in a conclusion post above. Basically what he said was:

- Lovecraft was a talented amateur of a thinker.
- He combined a secular approach to life with a fantastic imagination that allowed him to tap the Burkean sublime.
- His positions evolved over time, so that he came to condemn organized religion, and ended life as a Roosevelt man despite having been very conservative earlier in life.

J.A.D. -

I don't know if anyone else is seeing this, but it's difficult for me to read many of your posts that don't have large cut-paste blocks of text, because it looks like you're hitting the carriage-return key for line breaks. Whatever flaws Weebly might have, and I'm sure we've all seen them before, it does text wrapping just fine, so you don't need to keep putting in spurious line breaks.

Reply
Matt Mc
2/6/2014 12:35:01 am

Thanks Grunt

Only Me
2/6/2014 03:38:04 am

Yes, thank you, Grunt. Much simpler to understand!

Dave Lewis
2/6/2014 06:25:48 am

I don't have a clue either!

Reply
john
2/6/2014 05:31:54 am

Did you ever read the old UFO Roundup site? They would occasionally have some great tie-ins with Lovecraft. For a sample see http://ufoinfo.com/roundup/v11/message1103.shtml

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