All Tentacled Horrors Are Created Equal

Is Cthulhu a child of the enlightenment?

It seems like a goofy question. The Enlightenment, as we're all taught in school, brought us reason, science, and democracy. It banished superstition and darkness from the universe and flooded the dim places with enlightening light. Cthulhu, on the other tentacle, is a nightmarish squid thing from the howling outer void—a Cyclopean monstrosity that can not be contained in the feeble postulates of Euclid or the ratiocination of Hume. The Enlightenment supposedly gave man the ability to separate what is from what is not. Cthulhu is one of those things separated, and banished gibbering from the cold logic of fact into the tenebrous nonentity of fiction.

But while Cthulhu is structurally separate from Enlightenment values, biography and history muddy the sharp lines with more obscure geometries.

Cthulhu was first introduced in the "Call of Cthulhu" a 1926 story written, obviously, some years after the Enlightenment. More, H.P. Lovecraft, the man who famously invented Cthulhu, was a thoroughgoing, post-Enlightenment rationalist and skeptic. "I certainly can't see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete skepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable.," he wrote. "All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist."

Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi notes that Lovecraft's rejection of religion was based especially in his study of anthropology; books like The Golden Bough convinced him that there were entirely unspiritual explanations for the development of religion.

You might think that Lovecraft put aside his skepticism when he wrote his horror fiction. But in fact he did the opposite; his stories are infused, and powered by, his rationalism. The opening of "The Call of Cthulhu", for example, is a poetic evocation of a godless universe. "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." That's a statement of Lovecraft's rationalist atheist beliefs repurposed as an introduction to cosmic horror. Reason provides the ground for nightmare.

Scientific nightmare is the essence of Lovecraft's whole unique approach to horror. "The Call of Cthulhu" unfolds slowly, with meticulous detail and attention to evidence and reason. The narrator of the story, Francis Wayland Thurston, is, he informs us repeatedly, a skeptic, who prides himself on his "rationalism" and his attitude of "absolute materialism." He is in other words a man like Lovecraft who has learned the lessons of the Enlightenment, and grounds his judgment only on careful study of solid evidence.

Lovecraft's goal in "The Call of Cthulhu" is to slowly, methodically, and carefully provide that evidence. Thurston is the grand nephew of George Gammell Angell, a Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown. Thurston finds the first hints of the Cthulhu cult in Angell's scholarly papers. These in turn lead him to other suggestive details; poets who dream of phrases and images attested in the anthropological record, artists who go insane around a particular date each year.

More, and especially, Thurston cites other scholars. He discusses at length the testimony of a policeman at the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society, and the response of Princeton Professor William Channing Webb. These men of good reputation and keen observation conclude that they have heard the same strange words uttered by "Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans."

"Esquimau" is a racist slur, as for that matter is "mongrel Louisianans." Lovecraft's personal racism is well attested—his most infamous poem is a vicious racist diatribe titled "On the Creation of N------." (Lovecraft spells out the slur.) This racism wasn't just an unfortunate sidenote to Lovecraft's writing; it was part of his rationalism, and essential to his craft.

Lovecraft uses the scientific cataloging of parallel rituals in Louisiana and the Arctic, a la Frazier, to lend his story verisimilitude and force. He uses race science and racism in the same way. As Jamelle Bouie explains, "Race as we understand it—a biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of domination—is a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery."

Part of rationality for Enlightenment thinkers, and Enlightenment heirs like Lovecraft, was the rational anthropological and biological categorization of human beings into superior and inferior races. Serious scientists were racist scientists.

Lovecraft, therefore, demonstrates his rationalism, and the scientific truth of his story, by carefully marking virtually every character in the book on the basis of racial inferiority or superiority. The people who keep Cthulhu's rituals alive are all supposedly primitive, undeveloped; they come from all parts of the world, but are linked in retrograde monstrosity. In addition to those "Esquimau" there is also "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes," and "negroes and mulattoes" who are "Degraded and ignorant."

As a contrast to this anthropological degenerate rabble, Lovecraft gives us Gustaf Johansen, "a Norwegian of some intelligence." Johansen is a sailor on the ship that actually encounters Cthulhu, and the Norwegian's whiteness and genetic superiority are meant to underline the truth of his account. Anthropologists are needed to interpret the words and testimony of Black and native peoples, but the final, convincing evidence comes from a white European, who bears the Enlightenment's heritage.

This is a work of fiction, obviously; Johansen doesn't exist, much less Cthulhu. But Lovecraft's understanding of what is credible and reasonable is telling—as is his understanding of what is neither of those things. "The Call of Cthulhu" is structured around a central tension between reason and materialism, associated with white scholars and scientists, and superstition and chaos, associated with non-white people, wherever they are found on the globe.

This division is anthropological, biological, and instinctual—Johnansen and his shipmates are moved to genocidal fury when confronted with Cthulhu's human mixed race minions, and Lovecraft presents this fury as natural and good. "There was some peculiarly abominable quality about [Cthulhu's followers] which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry." Ingenuous race war; who among us would not murder people of color if the opportunity presented itself?

Johansen's innocent orgy of killing is supposed to be a mark of his superior whiteness and instinctual understanding of the good. But it's notable that this vision of Edenic violence almost exactly mirrors Lovecraft's description of the coming of Cthulhu and the summoning of the Great Old Ones. Like Johansen, Cthulhu's followers embrace murder without culpability, and destruction as a duty. Killing is a kind of sacrament, which is the logic of genocide.

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

The word "holocaust" there is especially unsettling in retrospect. Lovecraft imagines a non-white amalgam of racial impurity which threatens violence and must be cleansed. Reason sees its shadow and feels such terror that it rushes forth to slaughter everyone who is not white.

Lovecraft's rationalism isn't a footnote to his racism, or to his horror. Rather, the rationalism gives meaning and solidity to the racist horror—and vice versa. The mechanisms of science and evidence and rationality are enlisted to make the story of terrors seem credible. And, by the same token, the evocation of slimy, unregimented horrors illuminates the value of the great white race and its eugenic rationality. Thurston writes in anguish that before the events of the story, "My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were." [italics in the original]

Cthulhu, lurking in deep R'lyeh, is a cipher for the horror that chitters and oozes when white rationality fails. He rises from the deeps to send men scurrying from the lesser races back to the safety of enlightenment.

So is Cthulhu a child of the Englightenment? The answer is, "yes." The Enlightenment vomited up Cthulhu and his dreaming, right alongside Lovecraft and his. Noble rationality requires something to be more noble than; Jefferson needs Sally Hemings, or he’d have no way to know the heights to which reason had carried him.

To categorize and understand requires the existence of something that is categorized and understood—and what if those anthropological oddities somehow wish to categorize and understand themselves? "What has risen may sink and what has sunk may rise." You can't have light without a dark to stick it in, as Arlo Guthrie memorably explained. The Enlightenment makes its own monsters, and claims they sleep in the deep. But Cthulhu's right here, looking murder out of a rational man's eyes.

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I’ve been rereading some Lovecraft, and remembered this piece I wrote some years back on my Patreon. I thought I’d share it here.