A new question from one of my Patreon patrons…

HPL’s “The Call of Cthulhu” makes several references to voodoo. What other connections can we draw between HPL and voodoo (hoodoo, voudo etc)?”

There is not a great deal to say about Lovecraft and voodoo. Firstly he could have picked up much from encyclopaedia entries such as the entry on “West Indian Islands” in his copy of Lewis Spence’s An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920), a long and vivid entry almost entirely devoted to voodoo.  A few years later Lovecraft first mentioned voodoo, in passing, in his story “The Rats in the Walls”. He then has Inspector Legrasse assume voodoo in “The Call of Cthulhu”, cleverly playing on his likely audience’s knowledge of voodoo as a real belief system… before he reveals the true horror and cosmic dimensions of the Cthulhu Cult. His good friend and correspondent Henry Whitehead also had a strong interest in the topic and spun it into his stories. Lovecraft likely learned much in conversations and correspondence with Whitehead, and perhaps with his other missionary friend Sechrist. By circa 1930 Lovecraft appears to have been much better informed on the topic, having read a new ethnographic book on ‘zombie’ beliefs in Haiti.

The earliest mention of voodoo I can find is in 1923, where it adds slightly to the atmosphere of Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1923). The reader is told in passing that cousin Randolph Delapore… “became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.” This poetically implies, perhaps, that voodoo practices were to be found in the jungles of Mexico circa 1850, far from the centres of voodoo in New Orleans and Haiti. It also implies that Lovecraft was at this point aware that voodoo had ‘priests’ of a sort, and generally plays into the multiple Atlantic criss-crossings of the Delapore ancestors.

Then his close friend Frank Belknap Long had the tale “Death-Waters” in Weird Tales in December 1924, in which a Central American black sorcerer has the power to summon forth a mass of vengeful snakes. Not quite voodoo, but close. In the same issue Arthur J. Burks also had the tale “Voodoo”, further evidence that editor Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was interested in voodoo stories. Burks followed this in August 1925 with his “Black Medicine” set in Haiti, and the story had the front cover illustration. Since Lovecraft was at this time reading Weird Tales cover-to-cover we can be sure he read these stories. “Voodoo” has a military man infiltrate a voodoo human sacrifice ritual in Haiti, and Lovecraft would have picked up much detail about such things. If he believed them to be ethnographically accurate or not is another matter.  But, unlike Long, Burks was himself a military man and one who had actually been in the places described and could depict them authentically. Lovecraft was at least impressed… “God! What Burks could have done if he’d stuck to the mood & manner of his early Haitian stuff” — from a mid 1930s letter to Catherine L. Moore.

Perhaps inspired by Farnsworth Wright’s apparent interest in voodoo, an aspect of “The Call of Cthulhu” began to take a vague shape in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book. He recorded story-idea No. 109 — a voodoo wizard in a cabin, amid an as-yet un-located swamp. Soon this vague notion was followed by story-idea No. 111 which added the geographical location and possible elaborating element of an “ancient ruin in Alabama swamp – voodoo”. One at first imagines that that a story based on voodoo might have been considered somewhat ‘hokey old stuff’ at that time, since dime novel heroes can be found fighting voodoo cultists in the early 1900s. Although it appears to have become rarer after that and it may well have seemed somewhat fresh again by the mid 1920s. We have to remember that cultural memories were much shorter in those days, when popular culture was a very ephemeral thing indeed and there were almost no avid curators or collectors. A few seasoned editors such as Farnsworth Wright, with good memories and sets of back-issues lining their office walls, may have been able to reach back several decades. Most readers and writers could not.

In formulating this aspect of “Cthulhu” Lovecraft was working in advance of what would become the early 1930s ‘boom’ in voodoo based material (screen, fiction, ‘true-life’ ethnographic accounts, etc). But ‘the swamp’ was certainly a key element of both the news (drug-running, prohibition, baby-farming) and the screen entertainment in 1926. For instance the Mary Pickford movie Sparrows had a very wide release in May 1926, and has vivid New Orleans swamp scenes…

“Art director Harry Oliver transformed 3 acres (12,000 m2) of the [studio] back lot between Willoughby Avenue and Alta Vista Street into a stylized Gothic swamp. The ground was scraped bare in places, 600 trees were carted in, and pits dug and filled with a mixture of burned cork, sawdust and muddy water.”

The horror in the Sparrows movie was baby-farming and child-slavery in the American South, but such scenes also call to mind “The Call of Cthulhu” and “the wooded swamps south of New Orleans” in which the all-male orgy scene is so vividly set. Lovecraft’s depicted rites are actually not voodoo or in some vague way ‘Satanic’ (as some academics have claimed), although it forms a point of comparison for the policemen in the story. The Cthulhu cult is instead positioned in the narrative as something far older and more sinister, part of a living practice that has apparently existed for millennia and which reaches from the outer cosmos to the depths of the sea. The Cthulhu Cult rites are certainly initially positioned for the reader in relation to the assumed ‘dark rites’ of voodoo, since that gave Lovecraft something to build from. He could assume that the typical Weird Tales reader had seen the earlier December 1924 voodoo story involving a child sacrifice in Haiti. Thus he has Inspector Legrasse recall that he had expected to find a voodoo ritual (“a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting”), quite in keeping with the assumptions of a police inspector of his era. That it might be an orgy has also been foreshadowed for the reader, by the fact that Professor Angell had noted press reports that alleged “voodoo orgies now multiply in Hayti”.

But then Lovecraft springs the Cthulhu Cult on the reader, and also has it depart from a key practice of voodoo.  Voodoo secret societies were secret, and 1930s members would rather die than tell their ‘secrets’ to outsiders. Yet Lovecraft has old Castro willingly “spill the beans” about the Cthulhu cult to the investigators. This, in itself, would have been another somewhat scary move for the open-mouthed Weird Tales reader of the time. In that it implies Castro is offering a very subtle skin-saving enticement to join with the powerful eon-enduring cult — its worshipping believers being either power-seeking degenerates or the weak-minded. It also bespeaks a cynical attitude that assumes that such things can be told in private, even to law officers, because they would never be believed if typed up as fact in a report. Thus the reader knows that these cultists are not just being set up as a convenient pulp plot device to allow a pouting female to be rescued by a jut-jawed hero. The cult leaders have power to seduce other power-seekers, and also have incredulity as a powerful cloak around their activities. These cultists are no drunken killers of chickens and cats.

A few years later, in a long February-March 1929 letter to Harris, Lovecraft appears to have dismissed voodoo. He casually lumps voodoo in with superstitious “witch-whispers … Spiritualism, magic, luck-charms” and suchlike, and associates the decline of established religious belief with modern dalliances with such superstitions. Would the cat-loving Lovecraft have lumped voodoo in with mere “luck-charms” if he had heard of the very sadistic cat-killing initiation ritual of voodoo, perhaps via his friend Whitehead, or if he had given credence to Spence’s lurid entry in the 1920 An Encyclopaedia of Occultism? If so then he might have held more severe opinions about voodoo. But perhaps he was just pulling his punches in a letter to a correspondent. As evidence for his real opinions on the matter, the 1929 Harris letter is rather slim but it does suggest Lovecraft had not yet read a key book that was published in January 1929.

Several November 1933 letters to Barlow show that Lovecraft had by then read William B. Seabrook’s book The Magic Island (January 1929). This was a best-selling first-hand account of voodoo practices in Haiti, with a chapter on zombies. The comment arose because an un-named friend of Barlow had apparently infiltrated and witnessed a voodoo ceremony in Florida.  The friend being either very brave, very black, or very imaginative.  Probably the latter. Apparently by the early 1930s there was something of a cottage industry of books and articles on Haitian voodoo, and these must have filtered down to the more impressionable youths of the period.

In the same letters to Barlow Lovecraft also displays a fine-grained awareness of the different black cultures in Haiti and other islands, probably had from a blend of book and article reading, from long conversations with missionary friends such as Whitehead and Sechrist, and his reading the tales of Whitehead and others in that line. A.M. McGee’s “Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture” (Studies in Religion, Vol. 41, 2012) has suggested Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu”… “as a prototype for many later presentations of voodoo”, but McGee appears to be unaware of the far stronger influence on the pulp idea of voodoo by writers such as Henry S. Whitehead and others who appeared in Weird Tales (see Whitehead’s collections Jumbee and Other Voodoo Tales, and The Black Beast and Other Voodoo Tales). Elsewhere in his letters Lovecraft also makes distinctions between various areas of the South in America, showing he was aware that ‘the South’ was also not a homogenous block in terms of its black cultures, situations or treatment. He generally seems to have a good grasp of the human geography of the matter by the early 1930s.

In Selected Letters III we see Lovecraft asking Talman if he might mail a copy of Argosy magazine for October 1931. Argosy had opened the issue with the Haiti ‘voodoo and trains’ story “Voodoo Express” by pulp writer Theodore Roscoe. The magazine had also given the tale a colour cover, albeit with a rather lacklustre design. Lovecraft appears to be rather surprised that a pulp writer might land in Argosy as a lead writer and bag the cover too — he remarks “I have no idea that the A.[rgosy] could ever become a market for me”. But by that date voodoo had become a ‘hot thing’ in the print entertainment world, even if it had not yet reached the silver screen as a movie, and the Halloween Argosy issue was evidently a part of that surge. At that time many movie producers felt they needed a ‘hit’ magazine story appearance first, in order to ‘prime’ the public in the small cities and rural areas for the resulting movie — this may well be an example of that. Yet it seems unlikely that Lovecraft could have written the type of ‘voodoo threat’ story of the formula type then required.

I don’t yet have access to the Howard-Lovecraft letters but possibly he also picked up something on voodoo from R.E. Howard, re: the Solomon Kane character and his connection with the voodoo wizard N’Longa. See also “Pigeons from Hell” and the chapter “Swamps of Voodoo Vengeance: Indigenous Horrors in the South” in Fred Blosser’s Western Weirdness and Voodoo Vengeance book on the horror tales of R.E. Howard.

It’s also possible Lovecraft learned a little more of street voodoo while in New Orleans in June 1932, as he was there ‘taken under the wing’ of local resident and fellow Weird Tales writer E. Hoffman Price. New Orleans being the centre of voodoo. Lovecraft may at least have seen various hoodoo paraphernalia on sale in the markets.

Are there other instances to be found in the fiction? Some might think of Lovecraft’s serial-shocker Herbert West (1921-22) and its zombies (originally an aspect of voodoo). But given the dates above this series appears to predate an interest in voodoo and was more of a melding of Frankenstein and 19th century grave-robbing tales, with darkly satirical pokes at 1920s ‘goat glands’ rejuvenation quacks.

His later “The Thing on the Doorstep” (August 1933) might seem to owe something to the voodoo notion of spirit possession and bodily vulnerability, and the August 1933 dating would mean it could have been influenced by his more substantial readings on Haitian voodoo and zombies. But such ideas are common and a near universal ‘given’ in folk belief systems, from Northern fairy lore to Classical myth. One should also consider the likely influence of his viewing at the cinema of the notorious movie Madchen in Uniform shortly before writing the story, the movie being a key part of a then-current wave of sexological theories about how a gay person was “a woman in a man’s body” or visa versa. This seems the more likely source for the gender-swopping mind-transfer idea, in addition to his own early ventures into the mind-transfer theme.

Finally, Rimel’s story “The Disinterment” (September 1935) has a partial connection. The narrator travels to the West Indies and finds there a drug to “simulate death”. This was apparently based on actual voodoo wizard practices in Haiti, the real drug being based on the venom of the Pufferfish, and the story’s additional twist of ‘cutting off of the head’ was also a local practice designed to counter such deception. Lovecraft carefully revised the story for Rimel, but it seems he did not originate the ethnographically-informed details of it.

Additional note: I’ve slightly revised my last month’s ‘request essay’ on Harlem, to take into account Hurston’s 1926 story “Sweat”.  Now reads… “Hurston does appear to have had two short pieces in a small Harlem modernist magazine of the mid 1920s, including the now-notable “Sweat” about an abused washerwoman…”.