A lively discussion has been triggered by Mike Duran’s new blog article, “On ‘Christian Horror’ and Atheist horror“. I know little of contemporary religious tensions in American fandoms, but the article seem to me to be an ideological attempt to build a sharp fence around something called “Christian horror”, a form that appears to have been incipient for about 18 months now, and to isolate it from ‘infection’. Matt Cardin chips in his article length commentary on his The Teeming Brain…

[…] what Lovecraft and the other writers working in the vein of fantastic or weird horror have done is not necessarily […] to dispense with religion or supernaturalism altogether in favor of “atheist dread,” but to find and convey something resembling, fundamentally, a true sense of Otto-esque numinosity in the very fact of their stories’ worldview-upending and -exploding conceptions […].

Lovecraft’s view seems very clear to me — worshipping believers are power-seeking degenerates or weak-minded primitives. But the springboard that takes him beyond religion or supernaturalism is that these cultists are not simply deluded zombies, such as might in other hands serve as a convenient plot device to allow a glamorous female to be rescued by a jut-jawed hero. The horror really is there, even though the cultists often worship it only indirectly via the medium of idols and chanted names — rather than truly comprehending ‘the terror of monstrous chaos’ that lies behind it. For a man of science to discover the same horrific truths of cosmic-indifferentist beings — to coldly see past the half-glimpsed cultist deities to the bigger picture, and to realise the insignificance of mankind — that is to invite madness. Lovecraft does have a touch of the human-centric in the fact that (a certain advanced part of) mankind has evolved to such a pitch that they can really ‘know of’ such things against a scientific background.

Lovecraft was in that sense almost making a sort of ‘inoculating vaccine’ for mankind — required if our insatiable scientific curiosity about the elder places of the earth or the reaches of outer space was not to risk springing the trap of civilisational madness. For Lovecraft, growing knowledge of ancient civilisations seems to have implied a twofold risk to ‘belief’. On the one hand if Western civilisation stepped beyond a surface admiration of ancient architectures to a true understanding of the minds and belief-systems of the builders, then it risked unleashing a cultural relativism into the yearning void left by the collapse of Christian belief — which would accelerate the decay of Lovecraft’s beloved rationalist Western civilization. On the other hand there was danger in the knowledge that the most sparkling and worthy ancient civilisations had been swept away by a seemingly inevitable decay and collapse. This risked infecting the fragile Western civilisation of the 1920/30s with self-doubt about its own ultimate fate, a doubt that could develop a dangerous symbiosis with cultural relativism. In all this Lovecraft was part and parcel of the Zeitgeist of the late-1920s/1930s.

I’m still a beginner at Lovecraft, but it seems to me that he cared deeply about ‘belief’, but it was not religious belief. Superstition was just a springboard which enabled him to express his fears for a more ineffable and dangerously-fragile ‘civilisational’ self-belief.