HP Lovecraft and Theosophy

10 May 2012, 0123 EDT

Some years ago I finally got around to reading Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology. Reading Goodrick-Clarke’s description of various forms of esotericism and mysticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and specifically Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement, drove home the degree to which H.P. Lovecraft‘s writings — and, by extension, basically all modern horror — are a product of that milieu. Indeed, it isn’t much of a surprise that horror, fantasy, and science-fiction writers (and not a few conspiracy theorists) have been mashing up Lovecraft and Nazis for decades.

But what really struck me is the degree to which Lovecraft’s mythos amounts to an inversion of theosophic doctrines and those of cognate intellectual currents. After all, such movements promise that decoding esoteric knowledge will lead humanity to a central, enlightened, and powerful place in the universe. In Lovecraftian writings, doing so reveals the insignificance of mankind and generally results in insanity, death, and other bad stuff. So Lovecraft provides a critical reading, of sorts, of these ideas; one with a rather ironic “reveal”: the mystical energy beings coming through that portal you invoked are going to eat your brains.

Daniel Harms has a nice essay on this subject.

No good reason for this post. I’ve been playing Elder Sign on the iPad and reading Charlie Stross’s Laundry books, so I’m in a Lovecraft frame of mind.

Speaking of Stross, he recently posted an essay on the death of SF as a genre. I think he’s got it backward — genre will become more important in a world of rapidly expanding reading options, information overload, and targeted marketing. But he’s right that the intertext of SF is likely to change… but he’s also overestimating the degree to which most consumers of the genre partake in that intertext.

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Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.