Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work will be placed in relation to the decadent horror fiction of Arthur Machen who shared Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s ambivalence towards paganism. While religion was often Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s whipping boy, what he called his “artificial pantheon and myth-background” of alien gods and the secret cults formed around their worship, which became conventionally known as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” also uses imagery adapted from a Gothic iconography of surviving pagan religions emerging out of the nineteenth-century. Check out the Lovecraftian Mythos Respect Thread for the detailed analysis of the cosmology and powers of the Outer Gods, Elder Gods, Great Old Ones, and many other races.In ‘A Confession of Unfaith,’ Howard Phillips Lovecraft remarked that he was a “genuine pagan” in his youth, having acquired from his “intoxication with the beauty of Greece” a “half-sincere belief in the old gods and Nature-spirits.” His discovery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic tales darkened the mythological faith of his childhood with “the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!” 1 He elsewFhere declared his uncompromising aesthetic distaste for the “ humanocentric pose,” or the “primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.” 2 This “primitive myopia” for him was valueless in the cosmic scheme of things, referring to the irrational superstitious tendency of all religions and mythologies to project human finitude and egotism onto the universe, animating it with a moral realm of supernatural agencies as protection from a meaningless existence.The Lovecraftian Mythos is widely considered as one of the most powerful fictional franchises of all time, because of its enormous cosmology which is embodied as well as transcended at the same time by a virtual omnipotent, Yog-Sothoth, who in turn happens to be just a mere part of the all-powerful Azathoth's dream along with everything else.Īs for powers and abilities, even the entities who are infinitely inferior to the Outer Gods posses various notable powers such as Conceptual Manipulation, Acausality, Higher Dimensional Manipulation, Higher Dimensional Existence, Reality Warping, and so on. He emphasized the point by stating in the opening sentence of the story that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Power Lovecraft broke with other pulp writers of the time by having his main characters' minds deteriorate when afforded just a mere glimpse of what exists outside their perceived reality. While these monstrous deities have been present in many of Lovecraft's published work, the first story to really expand the pantheon of Great Old Ones and its themes is "The Call of Cthulhu," which was published in 1928 and because of it, Cthulhu also became the most well known entity from the mythos. For example, Lovecraft made frequent references to the "Great Old Ones", a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and have since fallen into a "deathlike sleep".
#CALL OF MYTH LOVECRAFT SERIES#
Lovecraft’s greatest contribution to supernatural literature: a series of stories that evoked cosmic awe and terror through their accounts of incomprehensibly alien monsters and deities, and their horrifying incursions into our world.Īn ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete and total irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors. The Lovecraftian Mythos, also known as the Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H.
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