# H.P. Lovecraft and God **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [June 10, 2022, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948 "2022-06-10T02:09:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/1 "2022-06-10T02:09:25Z")
In any of his mainstream mythos stories, does Lovecraft mention the Judeo-Christian God at all, even if only to scoff that He’s merely human wishful thinking? ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/2 "2022-06-10T02:16:10Z")
The Christian clergy all get run out of town and/or murdered in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/3 "2022-06-10T07:09:59Z")
[The HP Lovecraft fan wiki has an entry for God (Abrahamic)](https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/God_(Abrahamic)) that includes what appears to be every reference to God in an HP Lovecraft story. The vast majority appear to be people using it as an exclamation, but there is one story, “Dreams in the Witch House,” where the villain is repelled by a crucifix. Notably, the HP Lovecraft fan wiki does not have an entry for Jesus. Generally speaking, the idea that there is no purpose to humanity, nor any cosmic being that is invested in our well-being, is central to the aesthetic of Lovecraft’s work, but he doesn’t “rub it in,” so to speak. He doesn’t usually do things like include a character who’s a priest, just so the monster can demonstrate how ineffective his faith is, or have a villain monologue about how foolish Christians are for believing in lies. Churches are often fronts for more sinister organizations, or still follow pagan practices, but that’s more rooted in Lovecraft’s anti-immigrant bias than anti-Christian sentiment. ---
**Author:** ![MrAtoz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/4 "2022-06-10T12:18:59Z")
In his letters, Lovecraft often described himself as a “mechanistic materialist.” Mechanistic referring to the philosophical stance that everything that happens can be explained by purely physical causes, and materialism being the belief that physical matter is all that exists, and everything that seems “spiritual” is the result of matter interacting with other matter. Our thoughts and feelings, for example, are by-products of our brain’s biochemistry, and nothing more. He did not believe in any traditional God. While he did occasionally express some impatience with people who had not yet accepted this obvious truth, he didn’t really let that leak into his stories, as **Miller** says. It’s left implicit in the underlying assumptions of most of his work, wherein the fundamental idea is the basic _indifference_ of the universe (symbolically represented by the various Old Ones and other creatures). It’s not that Cthulhu and his ilk are _evil_, exactly. Rather, they hardly even notice us at all, and don’t really give us much thought when they do, which in Lovecraft’s aesthetic was infinitely more terrifying. But he lets you come to that conclusion yourself, rather than explicitly holding up Christianity or any other religion for ridicule. One of the criticisms that people often make about the work of August Derleth, the founder of Arkham House and probably the person most responsible for keeping Lovecraft’s work in the public consciousness after his death, was that Derleth’s own stories introduced “good guy” Old Ones, cosmic beings who had humanity’s best interests at heart, and who could be called upon to counter the “bad guy” Old Ones. That sort of dualism is fundamentally alien to Lovecraft’s conception of the universe. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/5 "2022-06-10T12:58:04Z")
Lovecraft may never have mentioned Jesus, but have a look at Randall Garrett’s Lovecraft pastiche _The Horror out of Time_ someime (It appeared in F&SF in 1978, but has only been reprinted a handful of times). [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?49975](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?49975) ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/6 "2022-06-10T15:50:29Z")
No luck finding the actual text online; what does Garrett have to say? ---
**Author:** ![ParallelLines](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/parallellines/32/3575_2.png) [@ParallelLines](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParallelLines)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/7 "2022-06-10T17:38:11Z")
For the record though, Dreams in the Witchhouse wasn’t released with HP’s permission per my understanding. He finished it and had Derleth review it, with Derleth finding it flawed, which HP agreed with. Derleth submitted it for publishing without HP’s knowledge and thus some consider it to be ‘unfinished’ in terms of story balance. I actually like the story (and there is a awesome Rock Opera version of it), but feel it was as written, a bit too close to a ‘commercial’ version of a Mythos story. The Black Man is a very clear stand in for Satan, the Witch is mostly a witch with a Mythos gloss, the familiar is the same. The visions, the math and greater world all feel very mythos-y though. The majority of Fanwank is that the cross remains valueless in the Mythos, but the Witch of the story, having been interrogated and likely tortured by Christians prior to her escape, flinches away from the association, but would have been right back to her filthy evil if she hadn’t immediately been strangled to death . ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/8 "2022-06-10T19:07:20Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > No luck finding the actual text online; what does Garrett have to say? I’m not surprised. I saw it in the original issue of _Fantasy and Science Fiction_, and I’ve never seen the volumes reprinting it. As I recall, across the gulf of over forty years, the story is told in the style and voice of a typical Lovecraft hero, who finds himself in the center of worship of an alien cult and comes upon one of the cult’s idols, which he describes with increasing agitation and despair (indicated in part by the text lapsing _into italics and then ITALICS IN CAPITAKL LETTERS!!_ And exclamation points! (To be honest, Lovecraft wasn’t so awful about this, but pastiche writers, even August Derleth, tended to overdo it) It quickly becomes evident that the image the narrator is describing is, in fact, a cross with a figure of Christ crucified on it. So evidently our narrator isn’t really a human being. A pretty trivial idea, actually. I’d considered something of the sort myself. I haven’t read enough of Garrett’s stuff to say if this is above or below his usual calibre of writing. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2022, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/h-p-lovecraft-and-god/965948/9 "2022-06-10T20:19:05Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > No luck finding the actual text online; what does Garrett have to say? > **[Fantasy & Science Fiction v054n03 (1978 03) (Lenny Silv3r) : Free...](https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v054n03_1978-03_Lenny_Silv3r/page/n111/mode/2up)** > > Fantasy & Science Fiction v054n03 (1978 03) (Lenny Silv3r)