ὁ Χθουλοῦ καλεῖ

Innsmouth as Counter-Platonic Descent

Photo by Polina Grishma on Unsplash

I am presently in the humbling company of a coterie - perhaps a coven? - of some of H.P. Lovecraft’s foremost academic acolytes at a conference on Lovecraft’s Philosophy in Waseda University. Fellow Cthulhu fans may enjoy my paper, presented yesterday, a revised and expanded version of which will be published in a collection of essays under the same name: Lovecraft’s Philosophy: Architect of Weird Providence. Here’s a precis:

Lovecraft’s Shadow over Innsmouth portrays the unwitting apotheosis of its urbane protagonist into one of the ancient and immortal amphibians who serve at the throne of their god imprisoned beneath the waves. His descent offers a materialistic mirror and parody of Neoplatonic ascent to the world of Forms, reflecting Lovecraft’s simultaneous yearning for the Good and Beautiful and recognition that, under his materialist and evolutionary worldview, there are no metaphysical grounds for its objective reality. The faery beauty he glimpses in the waking world gives way to nightmares conjured by ritual artefacts redolent of theurgic συνθήματα. In a reversal of the Neoplatonic πρόοδος–ἐπιστροφή motif, these artefacts enable the denizens of the deep to make their evolutionary procession onto the land above and to lure their offspring back below. What Lovecraft regards as the ultimately useless spiritual quest of humanity is thereby materialised, replacing the unknowable spiritual source of being and order with an equally unknowable material source of chaos. Liberation consists, for the initiated few, in the extinction of personality and absorption into sheer, primal materiality. But first they must answer the One who calls: not τὸ κάλλος, but ὁ Χθουλοῦ.

Everything you see and think you know is but the flickering of shadows on a wall, images of images in smoky silhouette. The truth behind those dim outlines dwells elsewhere in radiance which only the eyes of the elect can bear. For the rest of us, the collective illusion is sustained by means of chains, societal or material, which keep our heads from turning back and seeing the hands which pull the strings. If we glimpse them in our peripheral vision we ignore them, with laughter, or a shudder. And should one somehow break the chains and turn, and crawl up the tunnel past the fire and the marionettes and their silent bearers to the realm of truth and glory, he would be wise to stay there. For were he to return, we would sooner kill him than believe him.

One need never have read Plato to know the story of his cave. The sci-fi aficionado would recognise it straight away. Red pill or blue pill, Neo? And since Neo, the new man, is an anagram of the One, his admirers would also recognise the Neoplatonic motif of hēnōsis, later theōsis, as his assimilation to the Matrix gives him divine power over and within it.

Western science fiction offers many other renditions of that myth of dualistic yearning for escape from lumpen physicality into realms of pure spirit. But bereft of the old Christian-Platonic spiritual worldview, they reformulate the quest in strictly materialist terms. Perhaps this is the calling of science fiction. Since man can no longer escape to heaven, he must be content with other planets, or an unending and unbounded life of mind uploaded to silicon or some superior alien substitute, or biological restructuring into some new transhuman, post-human or cyborg existence. Science fiction is itself the quest to rehabilitate with a soulless cosmos that human faculty which strict materialism discredits and discards, and Artificial Intelligence relativises: the imagination.

The time traveller need not wait as late as 1999 for the weird debut of this motif. Lovecraft was already emerging from the Shadow, precisely that over Innsmouth, back in ’31. The story, as all his stories, is a refraction of his own. A gentleman scholar escapes mundanity, unwitting. The first draw to the remote fishing town of Innsmouth, despite the warnings of the normie denizens around, is its architecture. The buildings have been untouched for centuries, and he wants a taste of their old-world charm. That is, the quest begins as aesthetic, with yearning, that old Platonic drive for the beautiful and good. Τὸ κάλλος καλεῖ, beauty calls. So he defies local opinion – there’s nothing to see there, don’t turn your head – and boards the rusty jalopy, literally through a tunnel, to go and see the faery world of colonnades and spires.

But here, the journey takes an opposite turn to that of Plato’s fugitive. The traveller is not making an ascent, but a descent. The truth he seeks will be found not above, but below. And he will find that all he held as good and true and beautiful is not the dim reflection of a greater glory, sustained in harmony and order by analogical relation to what is above, but a Rousseauvian collage of beneficial fictions arranged solely to prevent the unillumined from falling into utter madness.

The smell of corruption begins as soon as he sets foot on the path. The ferryman across his Styx is the bus driver, a degenerate with neck-slits suspiciously redolent of gills. His few fellow travellers stink like fishheads left to rot in the dockside sun. There is a stale beauty to the place, for sure, but the houses are boarded up and things shuffle inside. Our avatar of Lovecraft, the atheist of Puritan leanings, glimpses in the portal of a once respectable Protestant church a minister clad in suspiciously foreign vestments and alien ritual bijouteries, a Philip Pullman’s nightmare concoction of antique Jewish hierarch and Catholic priest. The pilgrim finds his Vergil in old Zadok, a mad drunk who has seen the light and will die for revealing it. Still, he only half believes. Full faith will come only when he sees the light. But this is a light which comes only in the dark. The bus has broken down, there is no return from his descent now. He takes refuge in a hotel, but fears for his life as keys try the doors. Escaping through a window, he emerges not into the glory of the Platonic sun, but into the leering light of a yellow moon: and in that light he will behold the true forms which animate the cosmos. Shuffling, hopping, shambling forms; part frog, part fish, once human; amphibious Deep Ones, evolutionary missing links which bind the submarine origins of life to their earth-dwelling progeny. This is the order of the cosmos, blind and malicious, driven by the worshippers of a submarine, cephalopod god. Transcendence is impossible, the transcendental good which holds together everything the pilgrim holds dear is false and ruined; but immortality, real immortality in this body, a kind of materialist resurrection, is still possible. We cannot be assimilated to the One who is pure spirit, for He is not; so we must be assimilated to the things below. They are our true source, origin and, for those whom not τὸ κάλλος but Cthulhu calls, our destination.

Like the Platonic spelunker, the Lovecraft avatar returns to the world of the chained uninitiates. He tries for a while to forget and rejoin them. But Lethe offers him no kind waters. On seeing in his own uncle’s hands one of the accursed ritual crowns of the Deep Ones, he falls into a stupor. Thereafter, he will travel in his dreams to the realms beneath. But horror turns to resignation and thence to yearning for the deeps. He longs to swim with the Deep Ones, and this longing comes with corresponding changes to the body. The lines in his neck open to lungs, his eyes refuse to close. His uncle thinks to chain him, like he did his cousin, to trap him in an asylum, keep his unclosing eyes fixed on the shadows on the wall. But where the Platonic adventurer was killed, the Lovecraft protagonist determines to escape again and dwell forever in the depths of nothing less than glory:

‘I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.’

If the overall arc of the Innsmouth katabasis parodies the Platonic ascent, there are also devils, or shoggoths, in the details. Michel Houellebecq, defending Lovecraft’s prose, notes his Victorian and Romantic propensity for faery language.⁴ The pulse of his loins would drive him to the forests of George MacDonald and to glimpse in some glen the Pan of Arthur Machen, but a scissor movement of Nietzsche and Darwin has gelded him. The faery tale promises growth and fertility, the marriage of the princess, in the face of cannibalism, monstrosity and bestiality. All such drives in Lovecraft have been severed. But what remains is that key to the faery tale: the magic item.⁵ What spares the princess from the dwarves and goblins and dragons and witches is the ring, the ribbon, the blessed sword; what puts her in danger is the apple, the poisoned cup, the lock of hair. And while the atheist may mock the Christian religion as fairytale, there are theologians such as John Milbank who would own that appellation: for the Christian narrative, too, depends upon tree, staff, rod and Cross, and the powerful fruit they yield. Innsmouth is a faery village of corrupted faery beauty, the inscribed tiara the magic item which drives the tale.

Lovecraft’s deployment of ritualistic magic items is not merely decorative. Rather, it exposes the limits of the Protestant sensibilities he has abandoned. The ministers of respectable WASP Innsmouth have been replaced by what Lovecraft deliberately hesitates before calling priests. They wear vestments and their jewellery has a ritual efficacy to it. The typical anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment of the author’s age, to which he was enthusiastically prone, may make us who observe it feel superior, but offers little to a philosophical reading of the story. Let me suggest something else: that the ritual artefact, wittingly or not on Lovecraft’s part, gives the story a sacramental element. That is, the tiara – made of ‘some wholly unknown metal’ and inscribed with complex, ritual motifs bearing motifs of the Deep Ones that ‘no archaeologist could identify’ – is an effective and visible sign of a typically invisible reality. Of course, in Lovecraft’s deployment, it is a strictly material vehicle of other material effects, rather than of any spiritual grace. But its ritual use effects a real change in the one who uses it.

There is another word, which Christian theologians are typically loath to use, but which does the job just as well, and it is ‘magic.’ The appointment of a special person to carry out certain prescribed rites which, validly performed, effect a change in physical items and persons is hard to describe as anything other than a species of magic. But there are certain caveats, and the Platonic tradition, particularly that of Iamblichus and Proclus, provides them. Via St Dionysius, the Christian tradition itself has benefited from their refinement of magic in general to the specific genre of theurgy. In this line of thought, material things in this world have resonances with the divine mediatory realities which form a hierarchical chain between us and the One or Good. The initiated can therefore use these objects, called συνθήματα, not to manipulate the wills of the divinities – to pagans, gods; to Christians, angels or demons – but to channel their power, which is itself a diminished channelling of the power of the One. The dualism of matter and spirit sometimes taken as typical of ‘Platonism’ is very much challenged by the theurgic offshoot of the school, since it regards all physical things as theophanic revelations of the One at various degrees of hierarchical mediation.

The theurgic συνθήματα, then, furnish us with metaphysical grounds for the magic items of the fairy tale, and thereafter, for the Lovecraftian turn from faery. His is a materialist turn, no doubt. He cannot shake off the magic, nor the desire for it, but magic is now the cipher for ancient and alien arts which we mere simians cannot comprehend. Form and substance are irreducibly and inseparably material. A change in substance demands a change in form. To become godlike, we must entrust ourselves to technological sacraments of alien and super-intelligent provenance, which look to us as magic, just as one of Lovecraft’s despised savages might fear the theft of his soul by the white man’s camera. Superstition comes not from awe but from ignorance. The only honest remedy is to receive the dark sacrament and so break the taboo.

Plotinian Platonism envisages a lone flight from matter by meditation to the realm of soul; Iamblichean Platonism a corporate flight through material means by ritual practice to the same; its Christian, Dionysian application, the incorporation of the material cosmos by hierarchical liturgy into the life of God. Each exemplifies, with important differences, the fundamental Neoplatonic journey of πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή, procession and return (pace the additional stage of ‘remaining’ in the theurgic school). The higher beings process from the One downward through the hierarchy, that the lower may be anagogically lifted up and returned to their source. The higher powers may call the lower through theurgic use of those ritual items which reveal them and so manifest their power. The spelunker realises that he came from the realm of the Forms above and so longs to return to it, propelled by the erotic drive to purity and simplicity.

Innsmouth is a materialist and evolutionary inversion of this Platonic schema. The traveller discovers in the moonlight that truth is not objective, but relative, governed solely by the power of agents, scrutable or otherwise. Through the magic tiara, it is not higher, pure, angelic powers which call him to rise to the formless yet formative beauty of the utterly One; on the contrary, impure hybrids of man and beast who dwell literally and physically beneath, in the chaos of the waves, call him down to join them. He, like the Platonist, can become more like what those who call him worship, in this case, Cthulhu. He must become more hybrid, more material, closer to the evolutionary prototypes whose origin, like that of their Master, is indeed unknowable, not because it is One and simple, but because it is sheer, idiot chaos. When anabasisis unmasked as an illusion, only katabasis remains.

Elements of Lovecraft’s biography illuminate the philosophical – or, really, anti-philosophical – foundation to the Innsmouth story. They show us where the horror of it comes from. We know that he feared and loathed hybridity in all forms, that he found racial mixing repulsive, that he found sex and procreation itself at best distasteful, and women feature greatly neither in his writing nor in his life. R’lyeh is effectively an Atlantean multiracial New York-under-Sea. He fears the sweeping away by barbarian hordes of the civilisation he holds dear, but for which he can find no objective metaphysical underpinning. And yet the alter-Lovecraft who goes to Innsmouth finds “glory” exactly by recognition and embrace of the fact that he is the product of an interbreeding experiment between degenerate aliens and upright New England stock. How his work must have sent a shudder down his own ramrod spine.

That it still sends a shudder down enough spines nearly eighty years later to warrant writing this paper suggests that we still harbour similar fears, however loudly we may decry them. Indeed, the very loudness suggests that we protest too much. It is tempting to draw this into the shrill protestations of the culture wars. But I would urge that the architectural peculiarities of race, immigration, civilisational decline and fear of barbarian incursion which are correctly divined in Lovecraft’s opus prove, on deeper excavation, to rest on corroded metaphysical foundations. It is to the repair of those that the philosopher is beholden.

As much as I enjoy his work, there is something of the perpetual adolescent in Lovecraft, who claimed that atheist materialism had fully and irreversibly formed his mind by the age of 17. His epistolary comments on race bear traces of the same puerile petulance which one might discern in his pose as thwarted aesthete guided by dark light towards a meaningless and uncaring world where hybrid alien powers constantly threaten personal dissolution and civilisational collapse. But his mind has become the mind of our age. And it is inconsistent. He longs for faery but thinks it a lie. He wants to continue to live in and enjoy the benefits of a civilisation he regards as nothing more than a fragile collective fiction. He wants to do so in a smoking jacket, enjoying his superiority alone in his chambers. Were he writing now, he might see Artificial Intelligence as offering the way out he seeks, but he would hate it for its mechanical human-silicon hybridity all the same. He would, in all these respects, make an excellent twenty-first century teenage dropout internet addict.

His writing would be no less bewitching, I am sure. But the enchantment it offers is the stupor of the slave to alien intelligences. It rests on a duality not of body and spirit, but of the intelligent individual and the ignorant herd. The difference is that when he wrote, his minority status was enough to persuade him that he fell into the former camp. There are too many Übermensch-wannabes now for that illusion to be maintained. But it is powerful enough to remain a sci-fi staple to this day. Lovecraft’s racialism may be of its time, but the philosophical underpinnings remain very much of ours.

Lovecraft’s protagonists are barely sympathetic. It is hard to care what happens to them, whether they escape the beasts, descend into madness or reach some grim apotheosis. This is because they are, like their author, inconsolably alone. There is never a love interest. Family tends to receive only slighting reference. In Innsmouth, for instance, the protagonist’s family comprises a hostile uncle who has committed his own daughter to an asylum, and the looming memory of a sinister grandmother of admirable intellectual acumen. Love does not get a look-in. Hence we should not be surprised that Howard Phillips has become the patron saint of the solitary bedroom gamer fraternity, nor that this fraternity continues to expand as the old social constructs of family, neighbourhood and nation collapse into equalised but isolated fragments of rubble. The detritus of modern society in which we shuffle, hunched over our cell phones, makes real the Lovecraftian nightmare of an indifferent cosmos. No surprise either that in such a hostile environment our minds should be drawn to stories of the orphan hero with magical powers, or the transhumanist dream of editing our bodies, the only things over which we have guaranteed dominion, into something better, something hybrid, something at once more animal and more machine.

Whence, then, Lovecraft’s philosophical trappings? He claims Nietzsche, but I think too strongly. Nietzsche was clearer-eyed to the implication of dropping all the bourgeois attachments his philosophy entailed, but to which Lovecraft wished to cling. Therein lies his inconsistency. Nietzsche will forego beauty and glory, make it in his own image; Lovecraft seeks beauty and glory while refusing to acknowledge their existence. In this, he is like the typical modern, a reluctant Nietzschean, and hence in the Nietzschean analysis of will, no Nietzschean at all.

For like it or not, Lovecraft dips his head constantly into a well which he insists does not exist, namely the well of the imagination. The memory can be accounted for in materialist terms as readily as a hard-drive, the will can be discounted as illusion, but the imagination is harder to explain away, because one must use it in order to deny it. As long as one draws up from that well words or images of any kind, one must acquiesce to its inherent correspondence to the ordering of the cosmos which one, by exercise of the same faculty, incoherently denies. That the well is empty or the slate blank is itself an image of its making, proving it not hollow but replete with generative waters. It is because of those waters that we are capable of the basic pretence of the fiction writer to be someone else, capable of thinking as others might think and seeing as they see, and hence it is the faculty without which we can have no compassion. Compassion is contingent on imagination.

It would take a braver man than I to accuse Lovecraft of any want in imagination, and, I would aver, more foolish. And yet it is an imagination in isolation, and hence turned in on itself, incurvatus in se. The only erotic yearning it generates is self-love, a kind of pseudo-procreative masturbation, of which the fruits are worse than those of hybridity alone, but are the very apex of incest: the shuffling, stunted forms that Lovecraft’s imagination brings forth are his fearsome children, crawling from the well to devour their doting father. Just so, the failings of modernity are the fruits of such isolated self-lust, the deformed spawn of an incestuous and cannibalistic collective imagination. We at once lionise and condemn those driven by bestial lusts to the abuse of others’ youth and beauty while seeking to preserve one’s own, forever if you can, by whatever magic necessary. We put Epsteins on red carpets and their fingers on red buttons while their loins are stained with blood.

The true philosopher, as lover of Wisdom, knows from Diotima that Eros is born of Want and Plenty, and that both those parents are real. The salve to Lovecraft’s thwarted yearning, and our own, consists in looking into the wells of the imagination and recognising the reality reflected there. Beneath the waters, Cthulhu lies calling, beckoning us to join him and worship him in his subaquatic cell. But the fact that the well exists at all is sign of a call from above, a call not from dearth, but from plenitude which satisfies all yearning. The waters in the well grow muddy and noisome if we do not stir them and refill them with fresh waters from other wells. That is, we cannot be midwives of our own ideas. We need lovers with whom to bring them to birth and to nurture them. These are the social foundations necessary for human flourishing, but not fictional, unless the imagination is itself a fiction.

If the latter were true, not even Cthulhu would have been born. The world would be a poorer place without him. But I cannot help pitying his father. Like the adolescent misanthrope in his gaming chamber, the transhumanist squandering his savings on a cryogenic cell, or the celebrity Scientologist making panicked checks on air quality and waiting for the spaceship to come, Lovecraft was answering a call. But it was the wrong one. He heard the voices of both τὸ κάλλος and ὁ Χθουλοῦ, but the circumstances of his age and, I suspect, upbringing made him discount the former. His solution was to exchange one set of chains for another. His writings might serve as a warning against the same, and a spur to heed the higher call. But I fear that for many, they will remain a συνθήμα which lures the unguarded into yet more abysmal depths.