This past weekend I attended (as a humble paying member) NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, Rhode Island. If you know anything about horror fiction or games you can probably guess that NecronomiCon is a convention focused on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror. I had a great time and plan to go back for the next iteration in 2021.
In connection with the con I decided to re-read Lovecraft's famous essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." It's a good comprehensive survey of horror fiction up to HPL's time, with a fascinating introduction laying out his theory of what horror (or as he calls it, "weird fiction") should be.
As I was reading it, something struck me. Lovecraft knew a hell of a lot about horror fiction, and his analysis of it was quite thorough and profound. But when he touched on other subjects, I started to realize that he wasn't as erudite as his scholarly fictional characters — and probably not as erudite as he thought he was.
H.P. Lovecraft was mostly self-educated. He read widely and exhaustively. He really did know a lot.
BUT . . .
He had the problem common to many autodidacts: without any formal teaching, it's very hard to tell serious scholarship from bogus. So Howard evidently read, and uncritically swallowed, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race. If you're hoping it's a "Shadow Out of Time" novelization, I'm sorry to disappoint you: it was a work of racist pseudoscience popular in the 1920s. It even gets a shout-out in The Great Gatsby, of all places. (F. Scott Fitzgerald is using it ironically, though: his vapid, decadent character Tom Buchanan is worried about the decline of the Nordic peoples.)
In "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Lovecraft refers to the grimoire "The Key of Solomon" as some immemorially ancient text, but by the 1920s serious medievalists knew it was no older than the 14th Century. He also makes reference to Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult theory as fact, though it was always controversial. He believed Charles Fort's accounts of paranormal events, even though (somewhat sadly) Fort's credibility suffers as soon as you start looking at the sources he cites. His views of the Middle Ages are the standard erroneous 19th-Century mix of Enlightenment anti-Catholicism and Victorian self-congratulation. And anyone who took high-school geometry can recognize that one of his favorite shuddersome adjectives, "Non-Euclidean," isn't quite as sanity-blastingly unnatural as he seems to think.
This is all quite ironic because of course HPL considered himself a great skeptic and materialist, and planned (unsuccessfully, alas) to write a series of "debunking" works with none other than Houdini himself!
Now, I'm not just making fun of a dead man's mistakes. As I mentioned, I think Lovecraft's self-education suffered from a lack of guidance. The only reason I can spot his errors is that I did have the benefit of many very good teachers, both in high school and in college. Without that advantage, he wound up siezing on authoritative-sounding works which were nevertheless wrong.
This is not a problem confined to people named Lovecraft in the early 20th Century. It is a HUGE problem today. We all probably know at least one person who has just read the One Book That Explains Everything. In past decades that book was usually either something by Noam Chomsky or something by Ayn Rand. More recent examples are left as an exercise for the reader.
There is a difference between ordinary "punditry" and the One Book That Explains Everything. It's hard to pin down precisely, but I think a key feature is that pundits — be they Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow — make no secret that they are expressing their own opinions. They are making a case, attempting to persuade. Whereas the authors of the OBTEE genre simply assertthings as true, in a very authoritative way, with just enough evidence that only a real expert can spot the flaws.
This is where it gets good. I propose that not only did Lovecraft absorb some intellectual claptrap from writers like Grant and Murray, I think he also (perhaps unconsciously) learned from them how to convincingly put across his own made-up lore in the same way.
He's got all the tropes of bogus nonfiction in his fiction: the casual allusions to things as true (like the existence of "pre-human civilizations" or lost continents), the appeal to bogus authority (e.g. the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred himself), selective use of quotations (Lovecraft mixes real occult bits with made-up lore of his own and makes extensive use of fictional newspaper clippings), and specific-sounding but vague details (we get directions to both Dunwich and Innsmouth, but you can't quite find them).
These are hugely effective ways to sell the reader on your story's background details in fiction (or in games). One reason we're still reading Lovecraft in a new century is the extremely convincing way he plants his fantastic horrors in a base of reality. Do likewise, and people may be organizing conventions in your honor in 2119.
You, I believe, are incorrect about the Key of Solomon. The Hygromanteia, the Greek ‘original’ source of the Key, is thought to be as old as the sixth century and is believed by many to be older still that is just the age of the oldest known copies. That is a recollection I would have to look it back up to be 100% sure though that is as I recall.
Posted by: Robert B. | 08/31/2019 at 02:28 AM
I can believe it's sixth century -- or at least that the medieval versions included plagiarisms from some sixth-century text. But it's obviously and unambiguously written in a Christian context. One only need compare it with the Corpus Hermetica to see the difference.
Doesn't really change my point: HPL obviously considers it much older. Here's the relevant quote:
"[Cosmic terror] was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of daemons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind . . . "
To me this reads as though he thinks those books are quite ancient, certainly pre-Christian. The Book of Enoch barely qualifies, as it's dated to the first or second century BC.
The "tell" for the Key of Solomon is that it's attributed to Solomon. That follows exactly the same pattern of Medieval and Renaissance works claiming authorship by Moses, Mary, etc., and echoes the folk belief that Solomon was a great magician. A medieval writer making up a book of magic bullshit would use that name; I don't know if a Jewish writer before the destruction of the Temple and the end of the priesthood would have done so.
Posted by: Cambias | 08/31/2019 at 07:43 AM
Due to Jewish persecutions, a number of texts were misattributed to protect the identity of the writer while allowing the dissemination of the text. The Book of Abramelin is a perfect example — the real name of the Rabbi who wrote it was not included in the texts available to non-Jews and I only learned of his identity fairly recently. The texts for the general reader give the authorship to “Abraham the Jew,” which sounds anti-Semitic to many today. I regret that Rabbi Yaakov Moelin could not use his name for authorship of the book (assuming referenced claim is correct).
Additionally, attribution of authorship in distant times was often given to famous and well loved antecedents, in some cases to spare the writer persecution. No one can accuse Solomon of heresy but even as recently as the mid-19th century persecution and violence against proscribed authors was instigated by the Catholic Church. That was the case for H. L. D. Rivail, pen name Allan Kardec, the systematizer of Spiritism. There may be even more recent examples.
Posted by: Robert Bright | 08/31/2019 at 01:33 PM