Is Cthulhu* Racist?

Considering that some of our work uses/adapts characters and concepts created by H P Lovecraft, and that him and his work have been the subject of much controversy in recent years, we’ve decided it would be a good idea to explain where we stand in the whole Is The Mythos Racist discussion.

First, to put things in perspective, let us remind you, dear reader (or indifferent void), Lovecraft was born in 1890 and died in 1937. This means that anyone who believes that he was too racist for a man of his time because he was prone to go on racist rants to his friends and family and preferred to avoid contact with the types of people he hated, clearly missed a few things, namely that whole Holocaust business. Anyway, like we wrote in the introduction, this isn’t about whether Lovecraft was racist – he obviously was – but whether, like some have argued, the Cthulhu Mythos itself is racist. We do agree that making the World Fantasy Award trophy in the likeness of Lovecraft rather than one of his eldritch tentacled creations was a bad idea. However, we found the slew of denunciations of Lovecraft’s work spawned by that situation a little bit too enthusiastic in their refusal to separate art from artist and their willingness to declare a creative universe that inspired many of the most prominent SFF authors irredeemably racist. Some said the real problem was that by the time Lovecraft’s sins became known, his influence was already too widespread (because if this hadn’t been the case, we could’ve burned his books?). Others went as far as comparing Lovecraft’s descriptions of his inhuman creations with how murderous racists talk about black people. Authors who believe the Mythos is racist, and yet still look to it for inspiration, weighed in and explained that the best approach was to point out its racist core, confront it, and subvert it (like N K Jemisin's The City We Became, which was reviewed here). Because apparently not using the Mythos as inspiration isn’t an option? (Is someone forcing these people to martyr themselves by not only reading an author they either hate or at least have some very conflicting feelings about, but also using his creations in their own work?) (And doesn’t this essentially guarantee that one of the adjectives used to describe their work will be “Lovecraftian”? That’s awkward…)

All you have to do is read Lovecraft’s own stories and the biography by L Sprague de Camp written in 1975, to know that some of the statements being made about his work by the people who believe the Mythos is racism-based are objectively wrong. Like the notion that all the cultists are POC – The Call of Cthulhu is notably the only story in which that happens. The Dunwich Horror, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Dreams in the Witch House, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward all feature white cultists and students of forbidden lore. In fact, the great majority of his stories – like Herbert West- Reanimator, The Lurking Fear, The Picture in the House, The Alchemist, or The Cats of Ulthar – have white villains. Oh, and that whole he’s a white supremacist hero bullshit that also keeps popping up? What happened was that a white nationalist publisher, Counter-Currents Publishing, created the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature with a trophy designed by an artist accused of being a white nationalist and Holocaust denier. This took place in 2015, as a response to the change of the World Fantasy Award trophy. Was Lovecraft really a symbol for white supremacists before the award change? This looks less like Nazis celebrating one of their own and more like they saw an opportunity to troll the woke crowd.

As for the belief that the aliens in Lovecraft’s stories may represent POC (or, more accurately, if we take into account the many groups of people he railed against, anyone who wasn’t an educated Anglo-Saxon), we’re not buying it. Cthulhu and his buddies are ancient, much more powerful, and intelligent than humans, builders of massive cities, have been on Earth since before Humankind and could wipe us all out if they wanted. The Deep Ones/human hybrids are immortal and have preternatural abilities. Inferior breeds they are not. Then there’s the way he wrote about them. In At the Mountains of Madness, Dyer and Danforth feel sympathy and kinship for the Old Ones, while in The Thing on the Doorstep the real villain isn’t Ephraim Waite’s Deep One wife or their half human daughter, Asenath, but white Ephraim himself ('what devilish exchange was perpetuated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed half-human child at his mercy?'). His writing also makes a distinction between being non-white and eldritch cosmic monstrosity. In The Call of Cthulhu, he adds 'peculiarly abominable quality' when describing the racially mixed crew of the Alert to signal that there was something else at play. Medusa’s Coil, his last (awful) collaboration with Zaelia Bishop, makes it even clearer: Marceline being half black somehow horrifies the narrator more than the fact that she was part eldritch horror. In The Dreams in the Witch House, he takes care to mention that the Black Man, an incarnation of Nyarlathotep, though he has (literally) black skin, doesn’t show 'the slightest sign of Negroid features'.

H P Lovecraft was a precocious child who, after becoming fascinated by Greek mythology, wished to be a faun, and imagined he was growing horns (though, to his great disappointment, the matching hooves never materialized). He grew up surrounded by books and spent a lot of time reading. His grandfather liked Gothic novels and other fantastic literature and used to delight him with weird tales. His father became ill when he was only a toddler and they barely spent time together. His mother praised her only son greatly, even as she said he was incredibly ugly, and slowly went mad, claiming there were invisible monsters all around. Coincidentally, or maybe not, The Dunwich Horror’s Wilbur Whateley lives with a mother who believed he was meant for great feats, and a grandfather who has a massive collection of old books that his precocious grandson begins reading at a young age. Wilbur is described as goatish, and his unknown father turns out to be the powerful cosmic entity, Yog Sothoth.

Both of Lovecraft’s parents died mad, without reaching old age, in the same hospital years apart, which makes it natural that inherited traits, especially family madness, was a source of fear in his stories. Delapore from The Rats in the Walls can’t escape his, no matter how rationally he tries to deal with the situation and ends up in a mental institution. Arthur Jermyn kills himself after finding out the source of the family madness and peculiar appearance. In The Lurking Fear, the Martense clan, which was already off before, ends up reduced to an inbred cannibalistic nightmare. The Shadow over Innsmouth is somewhat more optimistic and sees his protagonist embrace his non-human side (though since the Deep Ones engage in human sacrifice and Cthulhu’s plans involve world domination and mass destruction maybe he shouldn’t). This could be Lovecraft’s way of putting a positive spin on his feared future of mental and physical decay – see? you’re not really going mad, you’re just descended from a powerful race that predates Humankind! (Also, when we examine Lovecraft’s ethnocentrism it’s clear that he wanted to be on the winning side and what’s more powerful than the mighty Anglo-Saxon race? Eldritch cosmic pre-human races that could wipe us all out, naturally) Lovecraft seemed to be less interested in genealogy in real life than his characters, though, for when he found out he had a Celtic ancestor, he laughed about it and ended up changing his opinion on Celts (yes, he hated them, too) (also, does this mean the Deep Ones are Celts?).

After reading Arabian Nights as a child, Lovecraft became fascinated with medieval Islam, and used to cosplay as an Arab named Abdul Alhazred. He read Edgar Allen Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, H G Wells, Jules Verne, the Bible, Greek and Roman classics, Gothic authors, and the genre that would make him famous – weird fiction. Books like Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned with its sightings of strange creatures and alien matter, and Margaret Alice Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, which mentions the existence of a worldwide ancient underground cult, were sources of inspiration though he didn’t really believe their findings. He became interested in astronomy at a young age and had a true horror of seafood. He feared change of any kind, was suspicious of modern inventions, and had already considered suicide twice in his youth. He didn’t believe in the supernatural and disliked religion. Recurrent themes in the SFF stories he read were unexplained phenomena, lost civilizations, supernatural creatures, and aliens. We can find signs of the things mentioned in this and previous paragraphs all over Lovecraft’s work. To reduce everything to He Was A Racist! is a very limiting interpretation. Did Lovecraft’s racism fuel his fear of the unknown or did his fear of the unknown fuel his racism? Given what we know, we believe the latter to be the correct answer.

The weirdest thing about this discussion is how people keep bringing up The Horror at Red Hook as evidence that Lovecraft’s entire work was racist. That short story really does have racism at its core (and it’s also shit), but crucially it’s not part of the Cthulhu Mythos. But hey, if the Mythos Is Racist crowd really wants to bring up non-Mythos stories, we see your The Horror at Red Hook, and raise you The Doom That Came to Sarnath, a story from the Dream Cycle. It presents the humans as the villains who, generations later, get some serious payback for destroying the alien city of Ib and exterminating its people for no other reason than they were different. The city of Sarnath grows in size and importance, but it can never escape its bloody, genocidal foundation. The narrator remains pretty neutral throughout and the motivations of the men of Sarnath are completely devoid of any sense of heroics or nobility. So, if Lovecraft wanted his readers to root for the humans, he certainly didn’t show it.

And now, since many people have already given their opinions on what concepts form the core of Lovecraft’s work, we thought it might be good to see what the man himself had to say about it:

'I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best – one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analyses. These stories frequently emphasize the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression'

From Notes on Writing Weird Fiction

'All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large'

'(…) the only “heroes” I can write about are phenomena. The cosmos is such a closely-locked round of fatality – with everything prearranged – that nothing impresses me as really dramatic except some sudden & abnormal violation of that relentless inevitability'

'Lost worlds have always been a favourite theme of mine'

'The consideration of boundless space and time is indeed the most thought-provoking feature of astronomical science. Humanity with its pompous pretensions sinks to complete nothingness when viewed in relation to the unfathomed abysses of infinity and eternity which yawn about it.'

'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents (…) but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open 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'

From The Call of Cthulhu

'Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walk alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.'

Necronomicon excerpt from The Dunwich Horror

What? You couldn’t find any racism? Sorry, not sorry. Oh, wait, there is that other Necronomicon excerpt from The Festival that reads 'things (that) have learnt to walk that ought to crawl'. In his biography, L Sprague de Camp refers to this as 'Nietzschean prose' and maybe he’s on to something. Alhazred is talking about giant maggots spawned by a witch’s corpse, but in view of Lovecraft’s personal beliefs, could it mean something else? Was the mad Arab’s magnum opus meant to be a supernatural Thus Spoke Zarathustra? After all, 'Alhazred' was Lovecraft’s alias, and the Old Ones are definitely a superior race beyond Humankind’s conceptions of morality and human notions of good and evil. Is the Mythos the ultimate expression of Lovecraft’s misanthropy and nihilism? And if so, does that make Cthulhu the Imperial Wizard of some cosmic Ku Klux Klan looking to eradicate all of Humankind? Dammit! Maybe we should cancel Tluhluh! Moving on…

And what about the question of whether Lovecraft could’ve changed his personal views? Again, let us remind you that H P died in 1937. His situation is a lot different than Roald Dahl’s, who was making antisemitic remarks in the 1980s, Dr Seuss’s, whose racist views seeped into his children’s books and caused the removal of six of them, written between 1937 and 1976(?!), for being too racist (the others are, too, but less obviously so), or even David Bowie’s, who went through a drug-induced Nazi phase in the 1970s and recorded a whole album, Station to Station, in character as the Hitler-admiring Thin White Duke. Also, that question is irrelevant for this discussion, but you know what? he did change. Though he had a relapse in the early 1930s, he finally gave up on his belief in an Aryan master race after reading The Science of Life by H G Wells, Julian Huxley, and George P Wells. After hearing a more detailed account of the Nazis’ brutality towards the Jews, he stopped supporting Hitler. Slowly, he lost his antisemitism and even began to see the positives in the mingling of different cultures. He still believed Black people were inferior, but now he settled on separatism and suggested that they could be given some states (fun fact: South Africa’s apartheid only ended in the early 1990s) (oh, and Black Americans were still being lynched in the 1950s). Looking back on his opinions, he acknowledged his ignorance and stupidity, and lamented that it had took him so long to see the light. Lovecraft, who read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, also believed that the American Far Right could try to stage a coup using a 'shrewdly organized fascist movement based on primitive emotional appeals' …

Look, we get that reading Lovecraft as anything other than an educated Anglo-Saxon is an unpleasant experience. Blame white privilege. However, contrary to what many have said, the evidence that the Mythos itself is racist is at the very least heavily contradictory. And to this bizarre notion that when using Lovecraftian creations there must be an accompanying antiracist manifesto denouncing the very person whose work is being borrowed, we say: nope.

* It seems one of Lovecraft’s given pronunciations of “Cthulhu” was “tluhluh” and whenever we read/write it that’s what we hear (e.g., No, Tluhluh, don’t do racism!).