Lovecraft's Concept of Blasphemy

by Robert M. Price

copyright © 1981 by Robert M. Price
reprinted by permission of Robert M. Price

Much of the critical attention received by the work of H. P. Lovecraft has focused on his heavy use of adjectives to evoke an atmosphere of horror. The technique has been assailed as denoting Lovecraft's inability to create a mood by description. Instead, it is charged, he must repeatedly assure the reader that something is "noxious" or "horrid", as if he could not craft the scene so that the reader could discern the horror for himself. Others have defended Lovecraft at this point, contending that his reliance on adjectives was an intentional adoption of an antique literary style. But, whoever may be judged the winner of that debate, we would concur with the judgment of Philip Herrera. The flood of adjectives has a mesmerizing effect all its own, and this effect helps make Lovecraft's stories what they are. In the present essay, we want to concentrate on one of Lovecraft's favorite modifiers, "blasphemous". We think it carries in seed form the very secret of horror as he saw it. In addition, it provides an excellent case study illustrating his use of mood-building adjectives generally.

Traditionally, blasphemy has three distinct though related connotations. First, it means simply to speak against, or to slander. This meaning is spelled out in Matthew 12:31-32: "Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the son of man [=, in this context, any human being] will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come." In this text, "blaspheming" and "speaking against" are paralleled. But it is just as clear that a blasphemy against God is far more serious than one directed at another mortal. Accordingly, blasphemy eventually came to be used only of reviling a divinity or holy things. Thus it came to mean the same as "sacrilege".

Its second meaning also has to do with God, but more in the sense of a Promethean overstepping of bounds. Now one does not speak abusively to or about God, but he attempts to grasp at the prerogatives of deity, whether power, knowledge, or whatever. Man is poaching on God's reserve and he will not escape due punishment. Tantalus betrayed the confidence of Zeus and was damned to torment in Hades. The citizens of Sodom sought sexual relations with angels and were destroyed by a rain of fire and sulpher.

Finally, the third meaning of blasphemy is a derivative one. It has become equated with heresy, or the holding of heterodox, dissenting religious opinions. Now heresy need denote no more than a regrettable mistake in theological beliefs. And what mortal can avoid such mistakes completely? Even the Apostle Paul admitted that, "Now we see but a poor reflection; then [in heaven] we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" (I Corinthians 13:12). There is no apparent reason that God should be particularly offended by someone's honest mistakes. But as the medieval church moved to enforce ideological orthodoxy, a high price tag was attached to heresy. Since God himself allegedly stood behind every pronouncement of the church, then to presume to differ with the latter was to spurn the very word of God. So heresy was deemed blasphemous. It was finally made synonymous with blasphemy. (For an interesting historical treatment of the subject, see Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God, A History of the Offense of Blasphemy. )

Does Lovecraft use the terms "blasphemy" or "blasphemous" in any of these conventional senses? He shows his familiarity with the first meaning, that of reviling God, in a passage in Supernatural Horror in Literature; ". . . the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they [had] outraged" (p. 99). The elements of "presumption" and "outraged sanctity" denote that Lovecraft here uses "blasphemy" in its traditional sense of "sacrilege".

He uses "blasphemous" to mean "heretical" in many of the famous references to the Necronomicon as a "blasphemous tome". It is because of its unorthodox doctrines that the book "is rigidly suppressed by . . . all branches of organized ecclesiasticism" (A History of the Necronomicon, p. 4).

Lovecraft's massive use of the term "blasphemy", however, has more to do with its second meaning, that of Promethean trespass. The idea is well conveyed by a statement in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where the protagonist Dr. Willett explains the ruin of Ward. "He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one should ever reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him" (p. 136). Charles Dexter Ward came to a bad end because of his occult researches.

But in this story, as in so many others, such a doom is not punishment meted out by some god (Lovecraft was an atheist). Instead, the seeker after arcane knowledge is destroyed by what he seeks (and finds) because it is beyond his capability to deal with. Thus Lovecraft has reinterpreted blasphemy in terms of the Greek notion of hubris, overweening ambition or over confidence. In the myth of Icarus, the hero masters flight with the artifice of waxen wings. His death is not like the punishment of Prometheus by Zeus. Prometheus dared to steal knowledge from the gods, and his punishment did not follow intrinsically from his act. His torture by vultures was an extrinsically imposed punishment. By contrast, Icarus was done in by the very consequences of his careless action, when he flew too close to the sun.

As in the Prometheus myth, the traditional idea of blasphemy implied an offense taken (and punished) by God. But Lovecraft eliminates this element as in the Icarus story. Can we continue, then, to speak of any continuity between his use of the term blasphemy and its original meaning? Or is he merely appropriating it and distorting it as, e.g., many have stretched the meaning of "obscene" (sexually immoral in a disgusting way) to apply to anything repulsive or revolting? No, we will argue that his distinctive use of the term preserves what is probably the most basic element of blasphemy-as-trespass. By implication, of course, this element cannot have anything to do with God! This may at first seem surprising.

We must seek the solution to this puzzle in the meaning of a related term, "abomination", i.e., something that is terribly loathsome (usually in the eyes of God, but not necessarily). Anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her ground-breaking essay "The Abominations of Leviticus", reveals the root meaning of "abomination" to be perversion or the confusion of natural boundaries. For instance, the holiness code of ancient Israel included provisions such as these:

You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material. (Leviticus 19:19)

And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it; it is perversion. (Leviticus 18:23)

Douglas sums it up: "Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And that different classes of things shall not be confused" (p. 67). Sexual immorality was defined on this basis: incest crossed the bounds of parent/child. Bestiality ignored the difference between human/animal. Homosexuality violated the line between male/female. Even dietary laws stemmed from this logic. Non-kosher beasts seemed to defy taxonomical categories. Shellfish were not true fish because, even though they lived in the sea, they had no fins or scales. Pigs were not true cattle since, despite their cloven hooves, they did not ruminate.

The point of all this is that, "Holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation" (Ibid.). Conversely, abomination is the confusion of those categories. In other words, abomination (and by extension, blasphemy) is the transgression or unraveling of accepted categories of reality. Here is the key to Lovecraft's understanding of blasphemy. For if it means the dissolution of the order of creation, i.e., of one's worldview, this notion survives intact whether or not that worldview is thought (as in ancient Israel) to be God-ordained. For Lovecraft, blasphemy is "that most terrible conception of the brain --- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the demons of unplumbed space" (Supernatural Horror in Literature, p. 15).

In this understanding of blasphemy (examples of which will be supplied presently), Lovecraft echoes Arthur Machen's concept of "real sin". In "The White People", Machen explains "the awfulness of real sin". "What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. . . . Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is."

"Then the essence of sin really is . . . the taking of heaven by storm. . . . It appears to me that it is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. . . . Sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon" (pp. 74-75). Machen's "sin" and Lovecraft's "blasphemy", then, are alike "a transcendent effort to surpass the ordinary bounds" (Machen, p. 76).

In The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Lovecraft speaks of minds being shattered "by the pounding, clawing horrors of the Void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one another for space. . . ." (p. 134). These horrible realities are "blasphemies" precisely because they represent "the Void", i.e., that which our worldview cannot encompass. It shatters the mind. Similarly the "daemon-sultan Azathoth" is described as "blaspheming" by his very existence as an "amorphous blight of nethermost confusion . . . at infinity's center" (Ibid., p. 137). The realization that the universe ultimately has no order at all, that at its very center is "mindless confusion", destroys any worldview. Thus it is blasphemy.

Even architecture may be called "well-nigh blasphemous" because of its "immensity". "Domed towers" are said to be "noxious" and "horrible" because they are "incalculable" in design. The blasphemy here lies in the fact that this architecture is "beyond any dreamable workmanship of man" and "beyond all mortal thought" (p. 125). Its design transcends human categories.

In "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", the visionary Randolph Carter entertains "thoughts of infinite and blasphemous daring." Why blasphemous? "For no mind of Earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know" (pp. 183, 182). Carter is one of Machen's "great sinners", since he has "penetrated another and higher sphere", gaining superhuman "ecstasy and knowledge".

When Carter "perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man", it was not merely unsettling. No, it "seemed blasphemously abnormal" (pp. 194, 195). Those eavesdropping on the occult experiments of Charles Dexter Ward hear a sound that is described as "godless" because it is "one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of nature which are not meant to be" (p. 106). Here is that "suspension or defeat" of natural law that Lovecraft feared.

To conclude this section, we may observe that Lovecraft's mention of "mad cacophonous orgies" ("The Call of Cthulhu", p. 57) in various of his stories is intimately connected with his concept of blasphemy. Angela Carter reveals the object of such "noxious and detestable" sexual excess in her intriguing book The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. She explains that, "the notion of sin, transgression, was essential to the libertine's idea of pleasure" (p. 28). In fact, "The libertine's entire pleasure is the cerebral, not sensual, one of knowing he is engaging in forbidden activity." What at first seems to be simply a thirst for exotic pleasure turns out to be a nightmarishly Faustian quest to know that which, in Machen's words, "surpasses the ordinary bounds". It is "the mental factor" which "plays a large part in accomplishing the transformation of the instinctual desire for simple sensual pleasure in the case of necrophily, coprophily and bestiality, . . . The pleasure of the libertine philosophers derives in great part from the knowledge [that] they have overcome their initial disgust. By the exercise of the will, they have overcome repugnance and so, in one sense, are liberated from the intransigence of reality. This liberation from reality is their notion of freedom" (p. 147). Such a desire is an "intuition for entropy, for the reinstitution of a primal chaos" (p. 103). In a sort of freakish zen, the pervert seeks to smash and leave behind the categories by which he has always ordered reality. And this is what Carter calls "the pure glamour of the blasphemy" (p. 72). She has seen clearly the world-rending significance of "abomination" (Mary Douglas), "real sin" (Machen), and "blasphemy" (Lovecraft).

The central horror of Lovecraft's fiction was the notion that our sense of security in the world might be upset by the realization that "man is neither the oldest nor the last of earth's masters" ("The Dunwich Horror", p. 174). The discovery of archaic prehuman races (in "The Nameless City", At the Mountains of Madness, and "The Call of Cthulhu") or extraterrestrial intelligence ("The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Haunter of the Dark") would dispel the illusion of anthropocentricity. In short, man's categories of reality would have been destroyed. The aliens are pictured as coming from the ocean floor, the South Pole, other dimensions, outer space, underground caverns, or the remote past --- all regions with which we do not associate intelligent life. Thus all are symbolic of a "challenge from beyond". And books which tell of such horrors share their alien quality. They are incredibly rare like the Necronomicon or of prehuman in origin like the Pnakotic Manuscripts, or written in an unknown tongue like the parchment in "TheStatement of Randolph Carter". Such knowledge is forbidden. To gain it one must, like Faust, bargain with the devil. Or as Machen said, one must become a devil oneself.

If so much of Lovecraft's fiction may be interpreted in this fashion, what may we say of his "Dreamland" cycle? For it is clear that despite its otherworldly character, Lovecraft's alter ego Randolph Carter feels at home there. In "The Silver Key", Lovecraft explicitly contrasts the dreamworld with the banal realities which occupy most people. "Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth" (p. 158). Do we not have here the same casting aside of the contours of reality that up to now constituted blasphemy? If so, Lovecraft has made an abrupt change of mind. But we do not think he has. In the principal story of the Dreamland canon, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath we find many of Lovecraft's most explicit statements about blasphemy. So both stand side by side in the same story. To paraphrase Tertullian, what has Dreamland to do with R'lyeh?

Each represents the transcendence of mundane reality in a different way. The key is to be found in the speech of Nyarlathotep in Dream Quest. He reveals that the sunset Eldorado of Randolph Carter's dreams is simply the larger-than-life projection of his (and Lovecraft's) favorite New England towns, Providence, Salem, Marblehead, etc. If R'lyeh represents the threat of destruction to our conventional worldview, Dreamland symbolizes the quixotic quest of humanity to project that worldview onto the universe. The construction of and adherence to a worldview is truly quixotic in both senses. It is finally futile since, as Lovecraft believed, the universe is ultimately indifferent to man and must tread him underfoot. Yet it is as noble an effort as the foredoomed defense of some Camelot against an irresistible tide of barbarians. R'lyeh destroys mundane reality, while Dreamland transfigures it. The former is blasphemous, the latter glorious.

Lastly, we want to use the blasphemy concept to illustrate an often-overlooked feature of Lovecraft's use of adjectives. Most of the discussion of his modifiers has been concerned with the propriety of his using so many of them. Critics have usually ignored the variety of ways Lovecraft used adjectives. We suggest that he used them in four ways. Naturally there is some overlap, but four categories may be rather clearly delineated.

First, there is the objective use. A thing may be characterized as blasphemous (or whatever) because of its own qualities. It is in this sense that Azathoth "bubbles and blasphemes". He actually does the one as surely as the other. Similarly, the high lama of Leng is described as "that frightful silken-masked blasphemy" (Dream Quest, p. 119). The fact that he is masked implies that he is blasphemous in his own right, not in the impression he makes on others, since no one else can see his form.

Second, something may be blasphemous in a subjective sense. That is, it seems blasphemous to an outsider because it violates his particular categories of reality. The antarctic explorer in At The Mountains of Madness describes "blasphemous . . . forgotten aeons" (p. 51), i.e., expanses of time so vast as to profane man's conception of history and his place in it. Several examples of the subjective use are provided in the discussion above.

Third, we may speak of a suggestive use. The idea is that "there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perception and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision" (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, p. 112). The structures of Kadath in their "near-blasphemous immensities" would fit in here, as would the "disturbing" non-Euclidean angles of the ruins of R'lyeh, and the "debatable and disturbing Eltdown Shards".

Fourth and finally, something may partake of the quality of blasphemousness in an associative sense. For instance, in the fragment "The Book", a rune is called "blasphemous". There is no suggestion that the printed character itself is "disturbing" in the "suggestive" sense, as above. Instead, its blasphemousness arises from its function as "a key . . . to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter we know" (Dagon, pp. 340, 341). As a sign the rune shares in the blasphemy of that which it stands for. In a different sense, Lovecraft speaks of a "blasphemous plateau". It manifests no unearthly geometry. It is blasphemous because of its mere spacial proximity to Nyarlathotep. "That on some frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, [Randolph] Carter could not doubt" (Dream Quest, p. 23).

Altogether, our study of Lovecraft's concept of blasphemy has militated against the view of some that he merely peppered his narratives with random "cuss-words", as if he could gather the gloom of horror in no other way. On the contrary, we found that, at least in the case of "blasphemous", Lovecraft had given considerable thought to the meaning and the use of the word. The result is a series of thought-provoking parables on the theme of our worldviews and their tenuousness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970.

Herrera, Philip, "The Dream Lurker", Time, June 11, 1973, pp. 99-100.

Joshi, S. T. (ed. ). H. P. Lovecraft; Four Decades of Criticism. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980.

Levy, Leonard W. Treason Against God, A History of the Offense of Blasphemy. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness. New York: Ballantine Books, 1975.

______. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. New York: Belmont Books, 1965.

______. The Colour Out of Space. New York: Lancer Books, 1967.

______. Dagon &t Other Macabre Tales. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965.

______. The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.

______. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1963.

______. A History of the Necronomicon. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1980.

______. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover Publications, 1973.

Machen, Arthur. Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Vol. 1. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1976.