Post by I AM the Way on Oct 5, 2006 14:12:37 GMT -6
H. P. Lovecraft and the Myth of the 20th Century
God and Anti-God
by Joseph Morales
Consider, if you will, the God of Genesis:
God created the heavens and the earth in the very beginning. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Trans. George M. Lamsa)
In the time of our ancient forebears, the universe was a relatively small place, and the earth, the central point about which all heavenly bodies revolved. On earth, Man was supreme among all living things. In Heaven, a much more vastly powerful God ruled, but even he made humanity the center of his attention, and promised eternal life to those who obeyed his commandments.
For many, that is still the universe we live in (except that the earth is understood to be a center of interest or importance rather than of physical location). But well before the beginning of this century, scientific progress had seriously undermined the roots of all such faith. Astronomy and physics had shown the greater predictive value of Kepler's model, which placed the sun at the center of a solar system in which planets moved with elliptical orbits. The sun itself had been relegated to the stature of a fairly average star among an unimaginably vast number, all separated by immense expanses of cold and empty space. Geology had shown the earth to be whole orders of magnitude older than permitted by Biblical accounts. Paleontology had established the existence of a long series of different species that appeared at intervals, rather than in a single creation as required by Genesis. Adam Smith had proposed that economies could regulate themselves through the force of supply and demand, thus permitting order to arise without being imposed from above by any central authority. Darwin had applied similar thinking to explain the origin of species as a matter of mutation and natural selection rather than conscious forethought. Medicine had long exceeded prayer as an effective cure for illness, and neuroscience, still in its infancy, was already showing how the faculties traditionally ascribed to spirit each depend on the intact functioning of particular regions of that grey pulpy organ called the brain.
Of course, none of this logically excludes the possibility of a divine being who designed the world or who takes a central interest in our affairs. But such a being, if He exists, becomes necessarily much more inscrutable than He was before; for if humanity is central to his plan, we cannot understand why He created so much empty space around us, and so many other suns similar to our own. And if He controlled the origin of life, and humanity was its goal, it is hard to understand why He strung out the process over so many billions of years.
Many can shrug these considerations off as due to our own limited understanding, which is inherently unable to fully grasp the ways and means of the Creator. But to someone of scientific education and rationalistic bent, as H. P. Lovecraft surely was, the conclusion was obvious:
The actual cosmos of pattern'd energy, including what we know as matter, is of a contour and nature absolutely impossible of realisation by the human brain; and the more we learn of it the more we perceive this circumstance. All we can say of it, is that it contains no visible central principle so like the physical brains of terrestrial mammals that we may reasonably attribute to it the purely terrestrial and biological phenomenon call'd conscious purpose; and that we form, even allowing for the most radical conceptions of the relativist, so insignificant and temporary a part of it . . . that all notions of special relationships and names and destinies expressed in human conduct must necessarily be vestigial myths. —H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 20, 1929; quoted in S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
But understanding is notoriously different than feeling, and Lovecraft was in the final analysis an artist rather than a scientist, despite his initial ambitions to be an astronomer. The result was a myth of his own, with a result exemplified by his description of the primal entity Azathoth:
That last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. —The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The concept is spelled out further in a sonnet from his Fungi from Yuggoth sequence:
XXII. Azathoth
Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master's head.
Although cast in vaguely theistic form, with a personal name and titles such as "daemon sultan" and "Lord of All," Azathoth is a sort of anti-god. That is not to say that he is a devil either. Rather he is cast as an idiot, whose pointless noodlings on the flute accidentally give rise to whole universes. Lovecraft's description of Azathoth makes use of our childhood image of a God in charge of all things, but then subverts that image by investing it with the most essential attribute of the mechanistic-materialistic worldview: a total lack of conscious purpose.
It is of course well-known that Lovecraft created an artificial mythology as a backdrop to his stories, and his plots often center on religious cultists such as the Starry Wisdom Sect or the Esoteric Order of Dagon. August Derleth captured this aspect of Lovecraft's work in his atmospherically-coined name Cthulhu Mythos. Derleth has been taken to task for applying this name to a body of stories rather than their background lore. But I like Derleth's usage because it foreshadows my thesis, which is that Lovecraft's stories have an actual religious value for modern readers.
To explain what I mean by this, I must first digress a bit and discuss the nature and functions of myth.
The Primitive Mind
In his famous essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft had this to say about the continuing appeal of the weird tale:
. . . all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulphs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.
Compare this with Joseph Campbell's explanation of the continuing importance of myth in general:
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. The light-world modes of experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the biological prehistory of our species . . . The opening of the eyes occurred only after the first principle of all organic being ("Now I'll eat you; now you eat me!") had been operative for so many hundreds of millions of centuries that it could not then, and cannot now, be undone—though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us to regret the monstrous game. —Creative Mythology
Campbell and Lovecraft may seem like strange bedfellows. In temperament they were surely opposites, with Campbell's complacent humanism and reverence for the touchy-feely aspects of human thought standing in stark contrast with Lovecraft's skeptical bent and pessimism about human nature. However, the differences are not as great as you might suppose. Campbell, while working in the humanities, was a stalwart believer in the scientific method and the need to accept scientific discoveries and incorporate them into our worldview. And Lovecraft's fascination with mythology extended to the actual practice of pagan worship in his childhood; even as an adult he read classics of comparative mythology such as Frazer's The Golden Bough.
Speaking of Frazer, Campbell has the following to say about his work:
When reading the great and justly celebrated Golden Bough of Sir James G. Frazer, the first edition of which appeared in 1890, we are engaged with a typically nineteenth-century author, whose belief it was that the superstitions of mythology would be finally refuted by science and left forever behind. He saw the basis of myth in magic, and of magic in psychology. His psychology, however, being of an essentially rational kind, insufficiently attentive to the more deeply based, irrational impulsions of our nature, he assumed that when a custom or belief was shown to be unreasonable, it would presently disappear. And how wrong he was can be shown simply by pointing to any professor of philosophy at play in a bowling alley: watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins. —Joseph Campbell, "The Impact of Science on Myth" in Myths to Live By
But why should mythic or magical thinking be so persistent among modern, educated people? Are we dealing with a faculty that is simply a throwback, something that was useful once but is now no more useful than an appendix? Or is it possible that we are dealing with a useful and indeed essential aspect of human cognition?
Organizing Reality
In the same essay, Campbell goes on to characterize C. G. Jung's view of the importance of mythology:
Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with [our] inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the milleniums. Thus they have not been, and never can be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analagously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit. —Joseph Campbell, "The Impact of Science on Myth" in Myths to Live By
Now, Jung was not what you would normally call a scientific thinker. Certainly he had a thoroughgoing credulity toward psychic and occult phenomena that would have struck Lovecraft as childish. One somehow also doubts that Lovecraft would have accepted the idea that the subconscious could be wiser than our rational, analytical mind.
However, you don't have to go quite as far as Jung did in order to see something of positive value in mythic thinking. One of the most influential writers in the field of cognitive science, Edward de Bono, has this to say in his book The Mechanism of Mind:
These creative and combining properties of the memory surface result in an artificial world that is derived from the actual world but is not parallel to it. In this artificial world the information is organized with greater clarity and greater convenience. If no framework exists to do this, then one inevitably evolves. It may be necessary to create special systems of anthropormorphic gods to organize the information of the seasons, of the weather, of the behavior of the crops. These organizing patterns which exist on the memory surface are myths. Myths are more necessities than conveniences.
Well, perhaps de Bono is going a bit beyond what has been definitely established through neuroscience. It is a field of science that is yielding exciting discoveries every day, yet no one could say at this time that we have any more than the barest outlines of how the brain manages to bring forth a world out of the cascade of data that is continually fed into it. An entire recent book on the neuroscience of dreaming (The Dreaming Brain, by J. Allan Hobson) managed to almost entirely evade the question of what dreams are for, what they actually accomplish for us that makes them worth having. Yet a phenomenon so nearly universal in mammals, and involving a considerable expenditure of energy, could surely not have evolved unless it provided some substantial survival advantage.
Mythic thinking has an obvious kinship with dreaming, involving storylines full of fantastic elements and suspensions of ordinary reality, yet still mysteriously pregnant with the subjective feelings of meaning and relevance. If I may be permitted to speculate, it seems to me that the role of dreaming and myth is the assimilating of conscious knowledge and experience to a deeper level where our instincts reside. It is these instincts that actually drive our behavior, and knowledge that is not assimilated to that level tends to remain irrelevant to our everyday conduct. I am proposing that Lovecraft's Mythos serves precisely this type of function for us, even though Lovecraft himself did not design it for this purpose.
God and Anti-God
by Joseph Morales
Consider, if you will, the God of Genesis:
God created the heavens and the earth in the very beginning. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Trans. George M. Lamsa)
In the time of our ancient forebears, the universe was a relatively small place, and the earth, the central point about which all heavenly bodies revolved. On earth, Man was supreme among all living things. In Heaven, a much more vastly powerful God ruled, but even he made humanity the center of his attention, and promised eternal life to those who obeyed his commandments.
For many, that is still the universe we live in (except that the earth is understood to be a center of interest or importance rather than of physical location). But well before the beginning of this century, scientific progress had seriously undermined the roots of all such faith. Astronomy and physics had shown the greater predictive value of Kepler's model, which placed the sun at the center of a solar system in which planets moved with elliptical orbits. The sun itself had been relegated to the stature of a fairly average star among an unimaginably vast number, all separated by immense expanses of cold and empty space. Geology had shown the earth to be whole orders of magnitude older than permitted by Biblical accounts. Paleontology had established the existence of a long series of different species that appeared at intervals, rather than in a single creation as required by Genesis. Adam Smith had proposed that economies could regulate themselves through the force of supply and demand, thus permitting order to arise without being imposed from above by any central authority. Darwin had applied similar thinking to explain the origin of species as a matter of mutation and natural selection rather than conscious forethought. Medicine had long exceeded prayer as an effective cure for illness, and neuroscience, still in its infancy, was already showing how the faculties traditionally ascribed to spirit each depend on the intact functioning of particular regions of that grey pulpy organ called the brain.
Of course, none of this logically excludes the possibility of a divine being who designed the world or who takes a central interest in our affairs. But such a being, if He exists, becomes necessarily much more inscrutable than He was before; for if humanity is central to his plan, we cannot understand why He created so much empty space around us, and so many other suns similar to our own. And if He controlled the origin of life, and humanity was its goal, it is hard to understand why He strung out the process over so many billions of years.
Many can shrug these considerations off as due to our own limited understanding, which is inherently unable to fully grasp the ways and means of the Creator. But to someone of scientific education and rationalistic bent, as H. P. Lovecraft surely was, the conclusion was obvious:
The actual cosmos of pattern'd energy, including what we know as matter, is of a contour and nature absolutely impossible of realisation by the human brain; and the more we learn of it the more we perceive this circumstance. All we can say of it, is that it contains no visible central principle so like the physical brains of terrestrial mammals that we may reasonably attribute to it the purely terrestrial and biological phenomenon call'd conscious purpose; and that we form, even allowing for the most radical conceptions of the relativist, so insignificant and temporary a part of it . . . that all notions of special relationships and names and destinies expressed in human conduct must necessarily be vestigial myths. —H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 20, 1929; quoted in S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
But understanding is notoriously different than feeling, and Lovecraft was in the final analysis an artist rather than a scientist, despite his initial ambitions to be an astronomer. The result was a myth of his own, with a result exemplified by his description of the primal entity Azathoth:
That last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. —The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The concept is spelled out further in a sonnet from his Fungi from Yuggoth sequence:
XXII. Azathoth
Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master's head.
Although cast in vaguely theistic form, with a personal name and titles such as "daemon sultan" and "Lord of All," Azathoth is a sort of anti-god. That is not to say that he is a devil either. Rather he is cast as an idiot, whose pointless noodlings on the flute accidentally give rise to whole universes. Lovecraft's description of Azathoth makes use of our childhood image of a God in charge of all things, but then subverts that image by investing it with the most essential attribute of the mechanistic-materialistic worldview: a total lack of conscious purpose.
It is of course well-known that Lovecraft created an artificial mythology as a backdrop to his stories, and his plots often center on religious cultists such as the Starry Wisdom Sect or the Esoteric Order of Dagon. August Derleth captured this aspect of Lovecraft's work in his atmospherically-coined name Cthulhu Mythos. Derleth has been taken to task for applying this name to a body of stories rather than their background lore. But I like Derleth's usage because it foreshadows my thesis, which is that Lovecraft's stories have an actual religious value for modern readers.
To explain what I mean by this, I must first digress a bit and discuss the nature and functions of myth.
The Primitive Mind
In his famous essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft had this to say about the continuing appeal of the weird tale:
. . . all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulphs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.
Compare this with Joseph Campbell's explanation of the continuing importance of myth in general:
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. The light-world modes of experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the biological prehistory of our species . . . The opening of the eyes occurred only after the first principle of all organic being ("Now I'll eat you; now you eat me!") had been operative for so many hundreds of millions of centuries that it could not then, and cannot now, be undone—though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us to regret the monstrous game. —Creative Mythology
Campbell and Lovecraft may seem like strange bedfellows. In temperament they were surely opposites, with Campbell's complacent humanism and reverence for the touchy-feely aspects of human thought standing in stark contrast with Lovecraft's skeptical bent and pessimism about human nature. However, the differences are not as great as you might suppose. Campbell, while working in the humanities, was a stalwart believer in the scientific method and the need to accept scientific discoveries and incorporate them into our worldview. And Lovecraft's fascination with mythology extended to the actual practice of pagan worship in his childhood; even as an adult he read classics of comparative mythology such as Frazer's The Golden Bough.
Speaking of Frazer, Campbell has the following to say about his work:
When reading the great and justly celebrated Golden Bough of Sir James G. Frazer, the first edition of which appeared in 1890, we are engaged with a typically nineteenth-century author, whose belief it was that the superstitions of mythology would be finally refuted by science and left forever behind. He saw the basis of myth in magic, and of magic in psychology. His psychology, however, being of an essentially rational kind, insufficiently attentive to the more deeply based, irrational impulsions of our nature, he assumed that when a custom or belief was shown to be unreasonable, it would presently disappear. And how wrong he was can be shown simply by pointing to any professor of philosophy at play in a bowling alley: watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins. —Joseph Campbell, "The Impact of Science on Myth" in Myths to Live By
But why should mythic or magical thinking be so persistent among modern, educated people? Are we dealing with a faculty that is simply a throwback, something that was useful once but is now no more useful than an appendix? Or is it possible that we are dealing with a useful and indeed essential aspect of human cognition?
Organizing Reality
In the same essay, Campbell goes on to characterize C. G. Jung's view of the importance of mythology:
Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with [our] inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the milleniums. Thus they have not been, and never can be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analagously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit. —Joseph Campbell, "The Impact of Science on Myth" in Myths to Live By
Now, Jung was not what you would normally call a scientific thinker. Certainly he had a thoroughgoing credulity toward psychic and occult phenomena that would have struck Lovecraft as childish. One somehow also doubts that Lovecraft would have accepted the idea that the subconscious could be wiser than our rational, analytical mind.
However, you don't have to go quite as far as Jung did in order to see something of positive value in mythic thinking. One of the most influential writers in the field of cognitive science, Edward de Bono, has this to say in his book The Mechanism of Mind:
These creative and combining properties of the memory surface result in an artificial world that is derived from the actual world but is not parallel to it. In this artificial world the information is organized with greater clarity and greater convenience. If no framework exists to do this, then one inevitably evolves. It may be necessary to create special systems of anthropormorphic gods to organize the information of the seasons, of the weather, of the behavior of the crops. These organizing patterns which exist on the memory surface are myths. Myths are more necessities than conveniences.
Well, perhaps de Bono is going a bit beyond what has been definitely established through neuroscience. It is a field of science that is yielding exciting discoveries every day, yet no one could say at this time that we have any more than the barest outlines of how the brain manages to bring forth a world out of the cascade of data that is continually fed into it. An entire recent book on the neuroscience of dreaming (The Dreaming Brain, by J. Allan Hobson) managed to almost entirely evade the question of what dreams are for, what they actually accomplish for us that makes them worth having. Yet a phenomenon so nearly universal in mammals, and involving a considerable expenditure of energy, could surely not have evolved unless it provided some substantial survival advantage.
Mythic thinking has an obvious kinship with dreaming, involving storylines full of fantastic elements and suspensions of ordinary reality, yet still mysteriously pregnant with the subjective feelings of meaning and relevance. If I may be permitted to speculate, it seems to me that the role of dreaming and myth is the assimilating of conscious knowledge and experience to a deeper level where our instincts reside. It is these instincts that actually drive our behavior, and knowledge that is not assimilated to that level tends to remain irrelevant to our everyday conduct. I am proposing that Lovecraft's Mythos serves precisely this type of function for us, even though Lovecraft himself did not design it for this purpose.