H. P. Lovecraft: Master of Horror Stories, Or Conspiracy Historian?

H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937.

www.hplovecraft.com...


Howard Phillip Lovecraft is considered by many to be the grandmaster of the modern horror story. His enormous body of work has covered almost every plot we see in horror movies, and he has inspired generations of authors.

One of his continuing storylines involved something called the Cult of Cthulu. A secretive cult who worshipped a race that once ruled the earth. This cult's main goal was to bring about the return to primacy of this race who now resides on a distant planet.

His stories outline ancient families with dark ties to a race of reptilian beings who live under the sea or under the earth. They meet together with strange rites to bring back Cthulu. Some stories have the race of reptilians, trying to bring about the return of the race that lives on said planet.

It has always been fascinating to me how close some of the more far out conspiracy theories macth the writing of H. P. Lovecraft. Mysterious reptilians, seemingly sadistic aliens, rich bloodlines attempting world domination. Could it be that Lovecraft was really writing about the real world embellished with fictional trappings?

The theories about a planet X fit in nicely with Lovecrafts planet that holds the ancient race that once ruled the earth. In some tales these beings are interdimensional and completely invisible to us, just as no pictures of aliens exist.

Could Lovecraft have been writing about the Illuminati bloodlines in stories of families with terrible occult powers and dealings with the reptilians?


This could all be explained away as just modern conspiracies borrowing from Lovecraft, but since this particular forum is for speculation, could it indeed be possible that Lovecraft was indeed writing about the real world?




[edit on 28-10-2005 by LeftBehind]

You can probably tell by my handle that I am an HPL fan.

I considered posting about HP, but was afraid there wouldn't be enough material, or interest.

The copy of the necronomicon published in the early 80's as a paperback went on at great lengths in the preface to show the links between Lovecraft's "Ctulhu mythos" and the Cosmology of ancient Sumer.

More than one of his stories hinted about atomic weapons.

So, was he "channeling" the truth? Or was he just plugging into man's deepest fears? Or have conspiracy theorists (perhaps subconsciously) copied his works???

H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Ambrose Bierce, among others, seem to show a little more cohesiveness in the fantastic mythos displayed in their writing than most authors can be seen as having done.

Did they know something we do not? Are the stars soon to be right for Dread Cthulhu to rise from his house at deep R'Lyeh?

Lord, I hope not... but their ideas of a race of wholly inhuman entities inhabiting a spacetime parallel to our own are certainly very interesting, and more than a little disconcerting.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate, Yog-Sothoth is the gate, Yog-Sothoth is the key and the Guardian of the gate...

Paralellogram, is that a "thumbs up" signal, or an attempt at making the voorish sign?

One of my favorite websites for this topic is www.geocities.com...

a great commentary on the Nec', as well as a whole river of emails from people who swear it's "reall." Really.

If HPL knew something, what would it be?

IMO - the greatest writers present truth in story form - and the true conspiracies often require science fiction to contain the allegory. Lovecraft falls in this group, methinks.

Great thread.

HP Lovecraft is a wonderful horror writer. Yes, at times his writing is clunky and over-written but he had a remarkable gift for scaring the pants off me! At the Mountains of Madness is my personal favourite although there are many many more that are equally brilliant.

Anyway, one of the things that he did remarkably well was to intermingle fact and fiction in such a way that his tales of powerful gods rising from the depths of the oceans gained much more credibility in the eyes of the reader. Also, he made it all sound so believable. The Cthulu mythos gives me the chills to this day as he managed to tap deep into my subconscious and write about those horrors that man was not meant to know...

Personally I don't give a lot of credence to the idea that Lovecraft was in league with the Illuminati, not least because David Icke says so and I would be reluctant to believe the sky was blue if Icke said it was.

I still remember the shock in the archaeological community when Irem/Ubar was exacavated in Saudi and Qatar.

First, the The Qur'an mentions this "city of pillars (or towers) destroyed by Allah" in the Arabian Peninsula.

HPL made Irem one of the center-pieces of his stories about the Nec'.

Then, references to Irem/Ubar were found in the Ebla tablets, a vast cuneiform library from Syria discovered in 1974

In 1984, NASA shuttle photos were being used to map the desert floor of Arabia. IR photos showed several cities buried in the sands, one of which was surrounded by towers. I can remember holding my breath while reading about the verification of both the Qur'an and HPL's forshadowings, 50 years after he wrote his works, and 12 centuries after Muhammad.

[edit on 29-10-2005 by dr_strangecraft]

I read a bit of Lovecraft years ago and thought his stuff too strange for my liking.

I'd always wondered who Cthulhu was! Thought maybe it was some Adult Swim cartoon character or something (no, I don't watch a lot of TV except Weather Channel and my son's Bob the Builder DVDs).

God I love HPL. Genius of the first order truly. I love "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "At the Mountains of Madness" (especially the connection to Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"), but for some reason especially like "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" with its unabashedly wild surrealism. What did Lovecraft know? A lot it seems, whether as a product of education or unbounded imagination or (most likely) the combination of both he knew a great deal and I suspect more than he ever said. It may have no relevance but his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, his mother's father, was a big time Freemason. He pretty much owned the town of Greene, Rhode Island and founded the Ionic Lodge No. 28 in 1870. If I recall correctly HP's father died or left when he was young and his mother’s wealthy family raised him.

Someone mentioned Ambrose Bierce. Now what he may have known is a really interesting question. And what was Robert W. Chambers up to? Ever read "The King in Yellow"?

Originally posted by Cicada
God I love HPL. Genius of the first order truly. I love "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "At the Mountains of Madness" (especially the connection to Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"), but for some reason especially like "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" with its unabashedly wild surrealism. What did Lovecraft know? A lot it seems, whether as a product of education or unbounded imagination or (most likely) the combination of both he knew a great deal and I suspect more than he ever said. It may have no relevance but his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, his mother's father, was a big time Freemason. He pretty much owned the town of Greene, Rhode Island and founded the Ionic Lodge No. 28 in 1870. If I recall correctly HP's father died or left when he was young and his mother’s wealthy family raised him.

Someone mentioned Ambrose Bierce. Now what he may have known is a really interesting question. And what was Robert W. Chambers up to? Ever read "The King in Yellow"?

Cicada, I noticed a certain Lovecraftian quality to your Halloween writing entry on the short story forum, Temple of the Surgeon, and suspected you were influenced by the great man.

Some have certained speculated that Lovecraft knew a lot more than he was letting on, but as I said earlier, one of the most interesting aspects to his writing is that intermingles fact with fiction so you are constantly left wondering if the most outlandish aspects of his work could actually be true...

I love Lovecraft and Howard and all the rest -- read all that I could get my hands on when I was young. Earlier this year, we visited Cross Plains where he lived his life, and looked at some of the material in their Robert E Howard collection. Nifty stuff.

What most of you don't seem to be aware of is that he was writing during the great era of travel writing. A lot of books available then have vanished (I tried to find the Frank S Buck books in writing about superpredators and couldn't find a thing.) He loved to read pulp magazines that produced the same kinds of stories that he wrote. More importantly, Lovecraft corresponded with a lot of the other old horror writers and they critiqued each other and occasionally used pieces of each others' mythos as a tribute or as a joke:
www.hplovecraft.com...

In one of his stories, writer Clark Ashton Smith (a friend of his) shows up as an evil priest of something or another.

If you're attuned to science fiction, you can actually see this same sort of thing going on in scifi and horror for decades. I know of a number of books where writers have "tuckerized" their friends in or have made oblique references to another writer's work.

Originally posted by Cicada
Someone mentioned Ambrose Bierce. Now what he may have known is a really interesting question.

Bierce wrote several stories along Lovecraftian lines; my favorite is probably 'The Damned Thing', which features an invisible otherworldly force much like the monstrosity in The Dunwich Horror, et al.

The most interesting thing about Bierce was the shady circumstance surrounding his disappearance. Any theories on where he may have gone and why, and what prevented him ever having returned?

Incidentally, his "The Devil's Dictionary" is one of my favorite works by any author you care to name.

And what was Robert W. Chambers up to? Ever read "The King in Yellow"?

'The Repairer of Reputations' is one of my favorites, and Chambers' writing has the same eerie ring of truth about it that Lovecraft et cetera maintained in their work.

Who is to say that humanity is alone in this universe, and that our method of experiencing space-time is the only possible one? Not many authors have addressed this question, but the ones that have certainly did a good job of making me stop taking reality for granted.

[edit on 30-10-2005 by The Parallelogram]

Horror is really damn hard and most modern era authors butcher the process as badly as a teenage victim in a slasher movie. HPL never insults the reader's intelligence and that respect is a very important component of what makes the work so successful. Here's a man who set his work's atmosphere so successfully that decades after his death people are still debating, lovingly debating, where the line in his fiction is drawn. I'll instantly cop to any detection of Lovecraft influence. I really don't think any one interested in the medium has any business not paying attention to the work of the master, as important to his genre as Tolkein. The interaction of Lovecraft and his circle only gives the soup a more interesting flavor.

Byrd, thank you for the link. I know I've read this article. One has to wonder about the perceptual qualities of neurosyphilis and how that relates to the inevitable fate of so many of HP's characters. The article's emphasis on the relationship between HP and his grandfather is interesting, the fostering of a love of weird stories of gothic variety, and an early introduction to Arabian fantasy and world mythologies. HP's precocious genius already had all the pieces of the esoteric puzzle and he knew in what form to properly utilize them. Astronomy and poetry became the two great balances of his formidable imagination. What lies between those two realms?
The copyright issues around much of HPL’s work are still in debate but different from nation to nation. Certainly his earliest work is free and available to the public, and all of his works can be obtained with a quick search. Numerous printings of his stories can be bought used for as little as a penny and almost any library should have something available (it does seem to be frequently stolen though). HP himself was extremely generous about sharing his work and as the artist his attitude should take precedence.

One of HPL's most famous essays, free for open publication under Canadian copyright law:

Supernatural Horror in Literature



[edit on 30-10-2005 by Cicada]

Now. Back to the root idea of this thread.

I do believe, based on personal knowledge, that Lovecraft was familiar with a lot of medieval and renaissance works on demonology. Not all of the titles he mentions are fictitious, and several that are point in the directions of extant works. Here are some genuine works that I think Lovecraft was familiar with:

The Magus (Francis Barret 1801).
Focuses on demons with bizarre human forms, and the names and signs that summon them. His idea of what the devotees of Ctulhu perform in order to summon the Beast are strongly reminiscent of this work.

Demonolatria Libri Tres (Nicholas Remy aka “Remigius”,1595)
French “witch-finder” who was responsible for the deaths of over 900 persons during his career. His explanations of the appearance of Satan, and of the ways he attempts to make pacts with women, appear in some passages almost word for word in HPL’s “Dreams in the Witch-house.” I think HPL even mentions it by name in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Numerous other genuine works are mentioned in the course of outlining the publication for Necronomicon, but I suspect (after reading the conclusions of more serious researchers) that HPL was doing some serious name-dropping without actually having read the actual works. The two I have listed are ones I believe he read, because the substance of the material appears in his own works.

An additional one, that I am unsure of (can’t read my own notes!) is “Remarks on Alchemy,” by “A. E. Hitchock, 1865” (the actual year was 1857.) which is a Lovecraftian reference to an actual book. I am not sure if HPL actually read the book or simply listed it among the others.

Certainly HP's knowledge of all things "weird" were encyclopedic and it can be assumed that he was familiar with many esoteric materials and cognizant of the patterns of symbolism employed by them.

Before this thread I had never given much thought to the relationship between Lovecraft and Houdini. Another fascinating compatriot of Houdini was Manly P. Hall. One has to wonder at the conversations that these three individuals might have had.

On his headstone it says: "I am Providence"


This doesn't just mean that he was buried in Providence Rhode Island, it is more importantly significant to the fact that he was a PROVIDER.

Provider of what though? Through his "fiction", HP Lovecraft successfully published knowledge of these cults and beliefs to be distributed amongst society, to be known amongst people. He was PROVIDENCE of this information.

Lovecraft is the King. What more is there to say. I loved his stuff and Edgar Rice Burrows, Robert E Howard, Heinline, Etc. Those were the Golden age of sci-fi and Horror.

Now Lovecraft can join the ranks of the "immortal ones". He was def. "enlightened" with knowledge. This knowledge provides food for cults to feed off of. For us to ponder off of. For us to be " knowledgable" of.


[edit on 083030p://111 by LiquidationOfDiscrepancy]

Very interesting post.
I'm a big ol Lovecraft fan, myself.

I was really rather supried to uncover how much of what his stories contain is base on existing myths and ledgends. Reaaaaaally old stuff.

Then there's the pofetic bits that very few people seem to notice.

Take his "mad god at the center of the universe". During his day, there was nothing known about black holes. We've since discovered their existance and are now only barely begining to to get an idea of what they are. However, it's not commonly accepted that in the very center of our universe is a mega-hole that fostered the Big Bang and subsiquent existance of everything.

Mathmaticly speaking, that mega-hole IS the chaostic god in the center of the universe.

A little side note: It's interesting to note how much of an impact Lovecraft has had on modern productions that people never assosiate with his work. Take note of Halflife 2's story line. Very Lovecraft (if you are a fan of his writings, but haven't played that game, you definatly should).

Originally posted by BitRaiser
Very interesting post.
I'm a big ol Lovecraft fan, myself.

I was really rather supried to uncover how much of what his stories contain is base on existing myths and ledgends. Reaaaaaally old stuff.

Then there's the pofetic bits that very few people seem to notice.

Take his "mad god at the center of the universe". During his day, there was nothing known about black holes. We've since discovered their existance and are now only barely begining to to get an idea of what they are. However, it's not commonly accepted that in the very center of our universe is a mega-hole that fostered the Big Bang and subsiquent existance of everything.

Mathmaticly speaking, that mega-hole IS the chaostic god in the center of the universe.

A little side note: It's interesting to note how much of an impact Lovecraft has had on modern productions that people never assosiate with his work. Take note of Halflife 2's story line. Very Lovecraft (if you are a fan of his writings, but haven't played that game, you definatly should).

HL2 does have a Lovecraft type ending! Just realized that!

Isn't that weird dude? Gman is such a freak! I just remember beating that game really late at night, and I was just watching the ending like

Know what I mean?