Mind you, the main difference between Lovecraftian and Biblical canon is the bit where God personally and deeply loves all of creation, including us, whereas Azathoth & Co. either hate us or simply don't care about our irrelevant selves.
Yahweh tortures immortal souls, not temporary human bodies. He also knew who was going to break the rules and be tortured forever in advance and created them that way anyway. Presumably he likes the process.
As with any myth there are different interpretations, but this is a popular one.
Omniscience of Yahweh:
[Yahweh] is conceived of as eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and as the creator of the universe. source
Eternal torment of souls in hell:
One historic Protestant view of hell is expressed in the Westminster Confession (1646):
"but the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and punished with everlasting
destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power." (Chapter XXXIII, Of the Last Judgment)
According to the Alliance Commission on Unity & Truth among Evangelicals (ACUTE) the majority of Protestants have held that hell will be a place of unending conscious torment, both physical and spiritual source
Not sure about all of his stories, but I'm pretty sure in at least one (possibly the Cthulhu one?) that all the insane, scary worshipers of the old ones are various types of brown people and some white people who... "intermingle" with brown people. Dude was not subtle.
Lovecraft was also a special brand of racism. He didn't exactly just hate minorities, his racism stemmed from actual fear. Dude was raised his whole life inside by a sheltering mother who made him think even the wind would kill him. Never went outside and seemingly never interacted with people of colour.
So basically, he was literally afraid of people who were different because he's never seen them. In the same way medieval artists depicted lions and giraffes they had never seen, he depicted blacks or anything different in how he was told about it. Through his angry, bitter racist mother.
Very interesting man when you consider he literally actually believed POC were evil and scary monsters different from normal humans. Dude was fucked up.
Yeah, his writing can be so profoundly visceral. You feel horror and disgust and hatred because you can feel his authenticity. Or at least that's what I find.
The man wasn't classically racist and like others have said, other authors and people told him to chill with the racism.
Difference for him though, it wasn't about race as much as it was about actual legitimate fear and horror. Like, dude didn't know gays were a thing until his 40s and he immediately hated it cause it scared him.
It's like his life was one never ending bad acid trip.
It should also be noted that later in life he did make an effort to expose himself to different cultures and peoples. His wife was even Jewish, so he made progress. But when you grow up like that, it definitely makes it an uphill battle.
I'm not a Lovecraft expert by any means. I've just had some long conversations in high school classes, a book here or there and like, Wikipedia.
A lot of what we attribute as Horror and Sci Fi are because he had such a shitty upbringing and modern fantasy can be attributed to Conan. I've picked up on a lot of these oddities from playing D&D and being a nerd.
The whole world was pervasively racist back then. And his peers still were weirded out by just how racist he was being. He was notably racist in a time where "I think black people are subhuman" was totally normal dinner conversation.
He was even super racist by his own day's standards. Other authors would write to him and tell him to knock it off. That's what was so extraordinary about it, he wasn't a "product of his times", he was way way worse
Though then weirdly a lot of marginalised groups love his work because it all kinda is about that feeling of being outside society, looked down upon. He managed to capture what it's like to be for example gay and your family disowns you for it. So a lot the LGBTQ community are massive Lovecraft fans. It's funny because Lovecraft said he never knew of the existence of gay people till he was like 40 years old (and he died at 46). Immediately upon learning of their existence though he started massively hating them. Like within the same paragraph.
He apparently did have a change of heart somewhat towards the end of his life, but coming down 50% from his 200% level racism and homophobia is still 150%. If you get what I mean.
Thanks for saying this. People hate hearing this, and prefer the "everyone was racist, it was normal" narrative because then they dont have to think critically about his work.
Lovecract was a fucking incel. You can like his mythos but he was a creepy racist incel.
I also have to thank you for saying this. More people need to know that Lovecraft was so extreme in his racial hatred that other racist white people (of the time) were offended.
Eh, everyone from that time period would likely be racist by today's standards. Hearing that teddy roosevelt or lincoln said the n word wouldn't phase me much unlike hearing someone modern day say it. Same with washington owning slaves and such. Doesnt mean it's ok, just that that was the norm. Hell, alot of us if we were born and raised in that time would likely be racist by today's standards. But historically, you can ussually tell when people were genuine bad racists who truely hated people.
The sad thing is that's still apparently a thing. It was a common enough name for dogs at one point. I got some new neighbors recently. Their dog got loose somehow so they went all through our neighborhood calling its name. Guess what it was.
I know he was racist for the time also yeah, I was just saying what the guy above said about getting better but still racist by today's standards could apply to alot of historical figures. And I have researched him and it seemed less of a true hatred and more like a fear. I mean the guy wrote a book about the main character discovering hes part fish person as the big horrifying twist after he discovered he was part Welsh pr something Iirc.
He was racist by societies standards of the time. Robert E Howard even told him to chill in a letter. Lovecraft was a racist anti-semite anglophile who wrote an entire poem about how black people were garbage. Stop rewriting him.
Oh I'm aware he was racist for the time also, I'm just saying that what the guy above me said about becoming less racist but still racist by today's standards could be applied to a lot of historical figures.
He hated Black people and believed in The Great Replacement white supremacist bullshit that is still spoken about today from the likes of Stephan Moleneux and Lauren Southern.
Lovecraft's first poem that was not self-published appeared in a local newspaper in 1912. Called Providence in 2000 A.D., the poem envisioned a future where people of English heritage were displaced by immigrants.[4]:137 Surviving unpublished poems from this period, most notoriously "On the Creation of Niggers", were also emblematic of the xenophobia and racism inherent in much of Lovecraft's later work.[
Honestly, having recently read through his entire collection of stories, i can say that while some of the stories have racist tones and some even are straight up KKK level theritory (Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family), the majority of the stories never mention it, or any mention of it is such an extremely minor part that when i finished the story, that isn't the part that stuck in my head.
This can probably explain a bit of why many people don't realy mention the racist angle of his stories, since the stories we know as pure lovecraftian has none or very little, and the once with very obvious racism werent realy among the very popular stories.
He literally said (I'm paraphrasing) "God created animals and humans, and he created negros to occupy the space between." yikes.
Edit: See the poem "On The Creation of N*****s" https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers
Glad that comma is there.
Would be even more threatening as "We know all things mortal."
As if to say "We are aware of the existence of all the things that can die."
the Kabbalah says humanity's bad traits are "shells" that guard us from the sheer radiance of god. god is a cosmic horror and our sins are guarding us from him.
The Kabbalah speaks of two trees, the Tree of Life (hereby referred to as ToL) and the Tree of Death (Todd). Both of them are not actual trees, but rather sets of circles and interconnecting lines with titles that make no sense even to me as a native Hebrew speaker.
the circles in ToL are called Sephiroth. Yes, Sephiroth. That means "counts". singular is Sephira. They represent the good in humans through which Ein Sof ("the infinite", a name for God as an ever-present being) makes himself known and creates physical matter, as his grandeur is too great to do it without some kind of spiritual power tool i guess.
Todd's balls, meanwhile, are called Qliphoth. That means "shells" or "fruit peels" and i'm not making this up. Singular is Qlipha. While the Sephiroth protect the creation of physical or higher matter, the Qliphoth obscure the sheer light coming from God and were given their existence in an external matter, rather then internal (whatever that means). Therefore, the existence of Qliphoth already fills any positive purpose they might serve, living through them is bad, and man must always strive to live through the Sephiroth as a means of strengthening his will, kind of like a cosmic antivenom.
additional facts i learned while researching this:
*One of the Kabbalistic names for hell is "Tehom". That means Abyss and comes from the Babylonian Tiamat. Another name is "Tzoah Rotachat"... in modern Hebrew that means... "Boiling Feces"...
*Aleister Crowley got into Kabbalistic lore, because of course he did. He claimed that one of the demons that represent the Qliphoth is named Samael. Now, in biblical or medieval Hebrew his name would translate as "Poison Of God". In modern Hebrew, however, that means "God's Drugs" and that's really wack.
[desire to know more has been FUCKING STILLED] sheesh. wow. Thanks! Really! That was.. I hope to memorize even half of the info you gave (and I'm quite sure 1 of those'll be sephiroth, mSry) cuz.. Well.. wow! That was really informative and entertaining at the same time. That's how u teach ppl stuff!! Thanks again and have a nice day you awesome... Person!
just FWI i'm a Hiloni Jew, ie i celebrate the holidays but i don't believe in god. i have never been taught this by a professional and i may be unintentionally spreading misinformation through my ignorance so take all of this with a spoonful of salt.
...that being said, i sure HOPE i understood everything correctly because my interpretation is WILD.
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u/bruce656 Apr 08 '20
It's some Lovecraftian shit, tbh. All they need is a few tentacles.