#mosig

Just how far did the ideas and concepts of Lovecraft's fiction differ from his personal life and awareness of reality? Over the years of his brief life as a fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft toyed with many ideas that he claimed to have absolutely no belief in personally. In various tales he cited Atlantis, Mu, Lemoria, but did not actually believe that any of them were anything more than myths. In THE MOUND, origionally ghost written for Zealia Bishop, Lovecraft suggests that the great world engulfing flood which is a central historical event in the Old Testament was a story element. Flood myths occurred in many cultures including several of First Nations Natives of this continent. Lovecraft sited a world engulfing flood in THE MOUND and suggested that this titanic phenomenon was one of the things that drove the aliens from space to retreat inside the earth. These alien humanoids who later interbred with the later surface-dwelling 'earth-born' humans, were somehow brought to our planet by Cthulhu at some point in prehistoric times. . . OK? A whole lot of myth, magic, legend, lore, superstition, occult mumbo- jumbo, religious conceptions including reincarnation appear in various Lovecraft tales. Perhaps most interestingly is the idea that some of his top cosmic entities were presented in his fiction as ARCHETYPES. That idea runs counter to the interpretation of Lovecraft's fiction by many of the leading critics of Lovecraft's fiction. My contention that Lovecraft's fictional beliefs run absolutely counter to his personal ones is where your curator, Richard G. Huber has stood out and against the popular opinions of men like Joshi and Mosig. Mosig has gone so far as to state that H. P. Lovecraft could not even conceive of the supernatural! For the individual who wrote the essay, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE, that would have been quite a feat! Granted Lovecraft himself believed in no such thing as cosmic archetypes and that fact was made plain in his letters. Tales of the Kraken, the almost universal myths of dragons, vampires, ghosts, demon possession, supernatural forces threatening to return and conquer the earth, witches, familiars, mythic creatures from cryptozoology, impossible twists of the theory of evolution, and multiple possibilities of space-time continuui are proposed in Lovecraft's fiction. All these things were outside of his personal evaluations of reality. True, each of these things were given an updated "scientific" sounding aura, but even then Lovecraft's psuedo-scientific explanations do not hold water. Lovecraft himself was very familiar with the limitations of 'reality' and natural law. He also recognized that most Science-Fiction is actually fictional science.