The Legacy of H. P. Lovecraft from an Identitarian Perspective: Part Three
by Andrej Sekulović
Andrej Sekulović expounds on H. P. Lovecraft’s cyclical perspective of civilizations and races in the context of the themes expressed in his fiction.
In the second part of this essay, dedicated to the Identitarian and racial aspects of the works and thoughts of the great master of horror and science fiction, H. P. Lovecraft, we had a quick look at which things should be considered priorities in evolved societies judging from the attitudes expressed both in his literary works and his letters. In the third and last part, we will touch again upon a subject that was at the center of the first part of the essay and which remains most problematic and unwelcome to many of his contemporary admirers and readers. We will once again examine his racial views, but this time we will focus on how they are reflected in his fiction. There are many examples throughout his opus that give us, at times, only hints and, at times, quite straightforward illustrations of his feelings and thoughts concerning race and ethnocultural identity. But the two tales that express most deeply his revulsion and even dread towards racial miscegenation and the creation of a multiracial society are probably the famous The Shadow over Innsmouth and the short story “The Horror at Red Hook.”
Hellish Landscape of Multicultural Slums
The latter was written in August 1925 and was inspired by his stay in New York, where he lived from 1924 until 1926, when he returned to his hometown Providence in his beloved New England. Lovecraft saw New York as a multiracial hellhole dominated by a large Jewish population. He recalled his time in the “Big Apple” on numerous occasions in his letters. Still, the following sentence from a letter, written on November 19, 1931, probably encapsulates his feelings toward the great cosmopolitan metropolis most vividly: “The population is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every god damn bastard in sight.” One could argue that such sentiments of complete revulsion concerning the ethnically mixed population of New York are almost screaming out of the pages of “The Horror at Red Hook.”
The tale revolves around a strange ancient cult that was rooted in the “dark religions” which existed in the forgotten depths of history before the rise of the “Aryan world,” which apparently represents the light of higher culture and civilization. This strange cult involves some sort of worshiping of demons, as well as human sacrifices. The cult gains the attention of the police when it starts to spread with the arrivals of mostly Kurdish illegal migrants, who are described as “squat figures” with “characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing.” They are welcomed by the mish-mash population of Red Hook. The destiny of the neighborhood itself follows a pattern often seen in many Western European and American cities. Red Hook once presented a “brighter picture,” one that is becoming only a fading memory in the age of the “progressive” march of multiculturalism across the West. It was a district where “clear-eyed mariners” lived on the lower streets, while the larger houses were “homes of taste and substance.”
Today, one may be reminded that one is still in Europe or North America only by the architecture and old monuments that stand as witnesses to the past among the dark crowds of strangers in many urban areas of the Western world. A similar situation is described in Red Hook, where the signs of a once homogeneous and safe community, or as Lovecraft puts it, “traces of former happiness,” remained only in the “shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there.” There are almost no more “bright-eyed” inhabitants left in the neighborhood. The population is “a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant.” Furthermore, Lovecraft expresses his repulsion toward the human melting pot in the following words: “It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.” Later, he goes on to say that “from this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky.” It is a grim and poetic description that would today be suitable for numerous big cities across Europe and the USA.
Demonic Reflections of Racial Chaos
But the most striking description of the ruinous ideological multiculturalism and “diversity” that the overlords of Brussels and Washington are pushing upon white nations today is found towards the end of the story, when the main character, officer Malone, who was assigned to the task of stopping the people smugglers and illegal migration operations in the district, descends into the underground of Red Hook. There, the culmination of the story reaches its highest point:
Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man’s fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which had come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and brimming coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.
It is precisely the racial miscegenation that “swallow{s] cities and engulf[s] nations,” an act that goes against nature itself, and against which even nature can become helpless, once the “sin” of “blood-mixing” has been committed. Some readers and critics of Lovecraft may be baffled by the mythological confusion and clutter of beings and scenes alluding to such different mythologies as Ancient Greek, Middle Eastern, and Northern European. Some may think that Lovecraft was too hasty and got carried away with his demonic descriptions or that this mythological jumble shows that he was not too familiar with different mythologies. But this confusion makes perfect sense in the context of the whole story as the underground reflects the life above the surface, the multiracial chaotic mish-mash of the inhabitants of the Red Hook.
Blood versus Gold
If “The Horror at Red Hook” is a direct attack on the multiracial population of New York, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, written at the end of 1931, may be a bit more subtle. Nevertheless, the miscegenation and “the corruption of blood” are likewise integral parts of this tale. The story revolves around the decaying town of Innsmouth and its dwindling population, which looks somehow unnatural to the folks from surrounding cities. This hostility is shown at the beginning of the novella when the worker at the bus station in a town nearby expresses his doubts about the strange inhabitants of Innsmouth:
But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice — and I don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn’t care to go to their town. I s’pose you know — though I can see you’re a Westerner by your talk — what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ‘em. You’ve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.
Later, it is shown that this “race prejudice” is well grounded. This reminds us of the quote cited in the first part of this essay, when Lovecraft says that for him racial prejudice, despite its awkwardness, has many more benefits than disadvantages. The Shadow that lays over Innsmouth is, in fact, the curse of miscegenation, not with other races, as the bus station worker presumes, but with strange fish-like beings known as the Deep Ones that dwell under the sea. It is the result of the greed of the wealthy local sea captain Obed Marsh, who convinced the townspeople that it would be in the interest of the whole community to cooperate with the strange beings after the area suffered an economic crisis. Another important theme from the Identitarian perspective that appears in this regard is the question of “blood versus gold.” The captain invites strange and appalling creatures to the town, where the citizens are gradually expected to “entertain” them. Some of the locals rebel, but they are mostly killed by the sea creatures and their collaborators, and, after a generation or two, most of the inhabitants left are of mixed heritage. Their blood is infected because the greed for gold prevailed. Due to the mingling of their blood, they do not die but turn into the Deep Ones as they get older and move under the sea. But such longevity is characterized by the unnatural process of losing one’s humanity and, most of all, racial integrity. If a certain population is prepared to sacrifice this integrity, it ceases to be itself, its descendants turning into something else, while their ethnocultural legacy slowly disappears into nothingness. For Lovecraft, such a process was completely unnatural, hideous, and frightening. Before we move to the last subject of Lovecraft’s works that may be of particular interest to the Identitarian reader, we should mention that, incidentally, the amulets that were used for protection against the Deep Ones were little stones with swastikas carved on them. This brings us to our last topic, the cyclical view of history and human civilizations.
The Cyclical Approach toward Civilizations
We should briefly examine the following important aspect of Lovecraft’s outlook, which he apparently shared with other conservative and rightist authors and thinkers: the cyclical nature of civilizations. The gradual decline of the earthly civilization of the Elder Beings from his novella At The Mountains of Madness is marked by the increasing decadence in art. The artistic pieces and carvings on the walls, from which Professor Dyer learns the story of the Elder Beings and their life on Earth, become more decadent as time passes and the old craftsmanship is forgotten. Later pieces from the time when the Elder Beings started to retreat back into the sea are completely decadent in comparison to older art, which is still cherished by them. In this regard, Lovecraft compares their civilization to that of the late Roman Empire:
Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendors than its own people could create.
To a certain degree, this cyclical view of history and civilizations is also present in The Shadow Out of Time. Even the highly evolved beings, known as the Great Race of Yith, cannot escape the physical destruction that awaits all life forms and civilizations. They can survive only by mass migrating through time, which they can accomplish by sending their minds to occupy the brains of other intelligent life forms in the distant future. Furthermore, through the main character and narrator of this tale, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who gains access to the vast historical records of the Great Race of Yith and comes into contact with other humans and beings from the distant past and future, we learn that the long history of our planet is, in fact, a history of successive downfalls and births of different life forms and civilizations.
When we discuss the cyclical nature of races and civilizations in Lovecraft’s works, one of his most famous short stories, “The Call of Cthulhu,” should also be mentioned. As one of the main characters, police officer John Legrasse, finds out from a member of the cult that worships the great Cthulhu, who “sleeps” in his tomb beneath the Pacific Ocean, a time will come when he will awake and rule the Earth once more. Additionally, the cult member says that such “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.” While this prophecy may make us wonder why Cthulhu hasn’t already reemerged from the depths of the sea to rule over the hedonistic liberal masses of the modern Western urban jungles, it may also remind us of the gloomy descriptions of the various ages of violence, lies and strife that we find in Indo-European pagan religions. Kali Yuga, the age of darkness, when all morals are forgotten and men are ruled by vice, greed and sin, comes to mind. As well as the Wolf Age in Norse mythology, when morality collapses, family members turn against each other, and violence and war rule supreme until a three-year-long period of ice and snow, known as Fimbulvetr, comes, followed by Ragnarök, the end of the world. While Lovecraft’s terrific and horrific stories are enjoyed by countless fans of the horror and science-fiction genres, his opinions and views, which are reflected within them, prove as interesting and well-suited to Identitarian circles as they are shocking to the liberal establishment.
I want to clarify something here that cuts pretty close to home for me.
The "racial dregs" of Red Hook that Lovecraft wrote about were largely Irish immigrants, although there were apparently also Italian, German and Swedish in the mix at Red Hook.
I'm Irish Catholic heritage. My parents came of age, and married, in New York City in the 1930's during the great depression, and my father had to deal with businesses posting signs saying "Help Wanted - No Irish Need Apply". I can tell you a slew of crude jokes about the dirty and shiftless Irish and Italians - and those groups were further guilty of the unforgivable sin of being Roman Catholic.
In other words, I am part of the "racial dregs" Lovecraft was so horrified and disgusted by.
Does this mean that I should be shunned since associating with me would pollute the racial purity of your Aryan society?