Eighty-some years after his death, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has become at least a fairly well known name in the world of horror. When I was younger, he remained a fairly obscure writer whom I treasured as a personal discovery and evangelized to those whom I thought might appreciate his vision. His name now seems to be a matter of general knowledge, especially with prominent figures like Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro citing him as an inspiration. For those who may not know the name, he was a 20th century author of primarily short science fiction and horror stories which depicted the universe in an altogether new way.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926

A mistake to which I think that I am especially prone is that I anthropomorphize the universe, turning its grandeur into something altogether human. The temptation to look up to the night sky and say, “I am of the universe! Is the universe not like me?” is so very enticing. I have often described myself as a pantheist, but I already know that, even if I am correct in principle, the manifestation of my thought as an anthropomorphic universe is erroneous. Nietzsche warned against this:

Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a “machine” does it far too much honor. The Gay Science §109, 1882, translation Kaufmann

I must admit that I cannot help but see my reflection in the night sky. It is far too tempting a thought, to see such grandeur and to think, “This is of my own essence. It must be.” And I don’t think that I am entirely wrong, only that my sense of scale is wrong, for my own size in relation to the space between just one star and the next is so vanishing as to hardly be worth consideration, and what of the universe I may in fact contain may well be its coldness, its vacuousness, its hostility. This rejection of the notion of the universe as having been made for us, as framed by both Lovecraft and Nietzsche, is particularly Satanic.

Lovecraft’s time was one in which we were first beginning to understand the true scale of the universe. Up until the early 20th century, it was widely believed that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entirety of the universe, and even that notion — a hundred billion or even hundreds of billions of stars spanning over 150,000 light years — was intimidating and difficult for the human mind to grasp. It had been suggested that certain “nebulae” such as Andromeda weren’t galactically-local nebulae at all, but rather galaxies of their own. The notion was widely considered absurd, and not without good reason: for Andromeda to be its own galaxy, it would have to be over a million light years away, a staggering distance. After Edwin Hubble confirmed exactly this fact in 1925, we were presented with a new and altogether horrifying picture of the cosmos, in which the island universe that dwarfs us by some twenty orders of magnitude is itself little more than an ember floating in a void of incomprehensible proportions which only exacting statistical measurements would describe as being anything but empty. I think that someone who truly comprehended the scale of the universe and the profundity of its emptiness might find their sanity compromised as a result, and this was a major theme in Lovecraft’s work.

As to Nietzsche, for those unfamiliar with his work, I recommend some immediate research into one of history’s greatest and most influential thinkers, but also as a quick primer (so you can get back to this essay with all the minimally-necessary details) my recent essay “Satanic Meditations on Nietzsche”. In the briefest and most oversimplified terms, Nietzsche argued for the path towards escaping the yoke of religious nihilism and living as a free spirit.

Nietzsche’s views on science were complex and even somewhat contradictory. He clearly valued scientific rationalism, but did not seem to think that it led us to knowledge of what is objectively true, nor that any such path was possible. He argued, rather, that it is scientific rationalism that produces our most useful errors, things which may not be exactly true but which nevertheless work well enough to keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Nietzsche explicates this view in several places, but probably most centrally in The Gay Science:

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny… thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. §110

I don’t know if Lovecraft had read Nietzsche; I haven’t found any evidence that he had (at the time, Thomas Common’s translations of Nietzsche into English were still not widely read), but he at least understood what Nietzsche had written of in the first of his above quotes regarding the hostility of the universe, from §109, and also wrote of our ultimate inability to comprehend the true nature of reality, as Nietzsche described in the above quote from §110. Lovecraft’s stories described the universe as a hostile and alien place, in which humans are anomalous, barely even a joke in a vast void inhabited by godlike beings so remote from our understanding as to drive minds into irredeemable madness. Lovecraft created a mythos of these beings (as well as monsters, alien and extradimensional locations, and eldritch mythical books concerning these things) and encouraged his fellow writers to include these elements in their own stories. This became the Cthulhu Mythos, named for one of Lovecraft’s most famous inventions, an alien being of incredible power and incomprehensible horror who sleeps, dead but dreaming, somewhere in the ocean, awaiting the alignment of the stars that will free it from its tomb.

I read Lovecraft voraciously in my younger years, eventually covering almost everything that he had written, including many of his collaborative works with other writers and whatever work I could find of those who had themselves delved into the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ll note that, when I first read Lovecraft’s works, I was naive enough to only notice his racism and not be disgusted by it. I said that it was “the product of his time” as if that excused anything. And he was worse than his time in any case. His best stories are polluted by it. How he could think that we are different from each other to such a degree as would be worth even a second’s thought in the face of the kind of cosmic horrors that he spoke of will ever remain a mystery to me.

The philosophy of Lovecraft’s work was essentially nihilistic: nothing was ever gained from his protagonists’ learning of the truth of the cosmos; they only ever died or went insane, and Lovecraft proposed no remedy to the meaninglessness of our existence in such an alien and hostile universe. What I think that Lovecraft missed was that the cosmic horror of reality makes human existence on Earth all the more remarkable and potentially far more meaningful, so long as we are intent on making meaning for ourselves. A Satanist should strive to see the world for what it is, and not what they might wish it to be, but I don’t believe that, in having done so, we have to resolve ourselves to madness, death, and a meaningless existence. If the cosmos is indeed as Lovecraft suggested, and as our scientific explorations indicate (excepting, perhaps, the presence of elder gods and great old ones), then a pantheist view would have to see God as something likewise alien and hostile to life. Satan, in this view, would be the life force opposing the destructive chaos of the universe. Satan would be the active and creative principle and the symbol of the struggle to survive and prosper within a universe that seems very much to not want us here. Satan becomes our luminary when we take such a view of the cosmos and then choose to follow Nietzsche’s advice: to acknowledge the universe for what it is, in all its horror, and then affirm life.

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