I’ve been reading L Sprague de Camp’s H P Lovecraft: A Biography (Barnes and Nobles Books, 1992), and it’s got me thinking about the spiritual challenges of modernity.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) wrote some of the most memorable horror stories of the early twentieth century, stories like The Call of Cthulu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Pickman’s Model. His fiction, which was populated by a kaleidoscopic array of insectoid and cephalopodic monstrosities, was tethered to a mythological back-story that ran something like this: The universe is full of unimaginably strange and terrible beings. Earth itself was ruled by such beings for many eons. Then, a cosmic catastrophe forced them to either leave the Earth or go into hibernation of several million years. During this brief intermission, the human race evolved and spread across the globe. A pathetically fragile and ephemeral species, humanity’s sanity depends upon its ignorance of the true nature of the universe. When “the stars are right”, the demonic titans will return, annihilate humankind, and re-establish their planetary dominion. Despite his often-purple prose, his aesthetic vision won him a cult following and strongly influenced the development of the horror genre in later decades. Writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker are indebted to Lovecraft, as are filmmakers like John Carpenter and artists like H R Giger.

As a staunch materialist, Lovecraft never believed that his stories had any grounding in fact. Bitterly opposed to mysticism and other “superstitions”, he would have felt right at home in CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). Even so, his extraordinary imagination was shaped by mythological yearnings. In a letter to a friend, he disclosed that “Once I thought I beheld some kind of sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of ‘religious experience’ as true in its way as the subjective ecstasies of a Christian. If a Christian tells me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen hoofed Pan and the sisters of Hesperian Phaethusa.”

Lovecraft never let these mythological inclinations interfere with his materialistic philosophy, which he summed up in an article entitled Idealism and Materialism: A Reflection. Lovecraft wrote that the materialist “sees the infinity, eternity, purposelessness, and automatic action of creation, and the utter, abysmal insignificance of man and the world therein.” His outlook was interwoven with chronic and crippling feelings of alienation and anxiety. By creating a literary mythology that symbolised his bottomless existential pessimism, Lovecraft unsuccessfully tried to balance his mythological needs with his materialistic intellectualism.

Karen Armstrong, the author of The Battle For God (Afred A. Knopf, 2000), would interpret Lovecraft’s malaise as an expression of the friction between logos and mythos that marks the modern age. According to Armstrong, logos and mythos are complementary ways of knowing that evolved to meet the needs of pre-modern, agrarian society. Logos is practical reason, the knowledge of cause and effect that allows us to succeed in our everyday lives, and that guides both science and politics. Mythos, on the other hand, is a form of psychological wisdom that uses systems of metaphor and ritual to help us manage our emotional lives. Armstrong writes, “When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the unconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behaviour.” Mythos was never intended to be read literally. Instead, mythos was understood allegorically, much like poetry. Similarly, the transformative power of mythic ritual, meditation, and prayer was understood in the same way as the power of music and art. Mythos was and is essential for managing the inner world. Without it, people become extremely vulnerable to Lovecraftian nihilism.

The shift from agrarian to modern civilisation is driven by the ascendancy of logos. Through ever-increasing efficiency and constant change, modernity overturns the predictable rhythms of agrarian society. Mythos, which evolved in harmony with these rhythms, is hard pressed to keep pace. For this reason, modernity is always accompanied by widespread anomie and dysphoria. It’s no coincidence that the European Enlightenment coincided with the bloody Witch Craze. As the old mythos was disrupted, the malignant psychological forces that it kept in check were catastrophically unleashed.

To deal with modernity’s challenges, some people try to turn mythos into logos--that is, to read myth literally and to use it as a blueprint for political action and scientific thought. This is the route followed by religious fundamentalists. Others, intoxicated by logos, try to eliminate mythos altogether. This path is taken by ardent secularists.

Fundamentalists and secularists share a common confusion: both read mythos literally, rather than allegorically. Thus, both agree that the story of Genesis is intended to be a literal account of actual events, rather than an allegorical parable designed to convey enduring truths about the human condition. Whereas fundamentalists passionately embrace this literalised mythos, secularists passionately reject it. Their conflict evolves in a symbiotic fashion. Secularists attack as dangerous superstitions the mythos that fundamentalists cherish, while fundamentalists mobilise to defend themselves from what they see as an existential threat.

This bastardisation of mythos has negative effects for all concerned. Readers of The Republic are probably aware of the dangers of using mythos to direct science and politics, but may be less familiar with the dangers of relying solely upon logos.

These dangers are evident in Lovecraft’s political leanings. Like many Westerners of his era, Lovecraft clung to Aryanism--the belief that Aryan peoples were the evolutionary vanguard of the human race. This ideology endorsed wars of imperial conquest and the subjugation of what he referred to as “degenerate races”. Lovecraft--a penniless neurotic--took comfort in the notion that he was a member of a master race. By turning to crackpot theories to soothe his feelings of personal inadequacy, Lovecraft used logos to fill the void left by exiled mythos. In the process, mythos infiltrated his logos, turning his hard-nosed realism into a flawed and dangerous evolutionary mythology. One need only look at Nazi Germany to see where this process can lead.

Of course, Aryan supremacists aren’t the only secularists whose logos is undermined by an unrecognized mythos. Marxists who pride themselves on their rejection of mythos, for example, are typically blind to the way that mythos reasserts itself within their belief system. Marxism is thick with mythological metaphors, and some Marxists try to organise their emotional lives through the vehicle of their ideology. For these Marxists, dialectical materialism, class struggle, the proletariat, capitalists, and the classless society play the same psychological roles that dispensational theology, holy war, the community of the faithful, Satanists, and the New Jerusalem play for Christian fundamentalists. Rather than pursuing rational ends by rational means, these Marxists simply disguise a mythological agenda with secular rhetoric, with predictably disappointing results.

Fundamentalists and ardent secularists are, like Lovecraft, often plagued by anxieties--anxieties that are aggravated by their juvenile approach to mythos. Without mythic maturity, the inner world can become disorganised and nightmarish. Human virtues like compassion, love, and our capacity for aesthetic delight require a degree of psychological integration, and have a hard time flourishing in such a disintegrated environment. They gradually give way to fear, disgust, and rage, emotions that are easily sublimated by fundamentalist and secular ideologies.

Lovecraft longed for psychological integration, but failed to achieve this goal, and in time became wary of trying, a wariness he alluded to when he wrote, “ The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” By the end of his life Lovecraft had neither resolved nor understood his personal torments, but his story provides a useful case study for those of us who are struggling to balance logos and mythos in our own lives. In order to avoid Lovecraft’s fate, we need to develop a sophisticated understanding of the role played by mythological metaphor and allegory in our psyches. Those who forego this work risk blurring the boundaries between logos and mythos, and thereby blundering into the same traps that mangled Lovecraft and countless others like him, fundamentalists and secularists alike.

****