H. P. Lovecraft, or Howard Phillips Lovecraft, was an anxious and insecure kid who dealt with constant illnesses—many of them probably psychological. His dad, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, ended up in a mental hospital after a psychotic episode when Lovecraft was just three years old. He died of syphilis. Lovecraft’s mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, became overprotective and let her son out of her sight.
Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, was a father figure who introduced him to fairy tales, poetry, and classical literature. Ironically, these stories helped Lovecraft overcome his fear of the dark. He became the center of attention as if he were living in his little universe. When Lovecraft was two or three years old, he read poetry. By six or seven, he was writing his stuff, reading nonstop, and spending hours in his private library.
Lovecraft’s work is filled with themes like madness, fear, meaninglessness, and alienation—things he struggled with personally his entire life. After his grandfather’s death, Lovecraft and his mom had to move out of their fancy Victorian home and into a much simpler one.
He later described this as one of the darkest times in his life. He felt so hopeless that he considered suicide but ultimately did not go through with it. His curiosity about the world and thirst for knowledge kept him going. When his grandmother Robie died, it cast a shadow over the family that they never shook off.
His mom and aunts dressed in black to mourn, and Lovecraft started having terrifying nightmares about a creature he called the “nightdress.” In his dreams, these creatures dragged him through endless black skies over dead, crumbling cities until they dropped him into a gray void surrounded by jagged mountains. He would wake up screaming, and this haunting creature later showed up in his stories.
At school, Lovecraft was good at most subjects—except math. He had a nervous breakdown in 1908 while still in high school and never returned, essentially becoming self-taught for the rest of his life. When he was eight, he discovered astronomy, chemistry, and science, which deeply influenced his future writing. These fields made him realize just how small and insignificant humans are in the vast cosmos.
Later, Lovecraft found a sense of belonging when a group of amateur journalists invited him to join them. For the first time, he met people who shared his interests. He started corresponding with tons of people and eventually became one of history’s most prolific letter writers, sending out around 100,000 letters in his lifetime. Many of them are as fascinating as his fiction, offering unique insights into his beliefs and way of life.
Lovecraft had a complicated love-hate relationship with his mother. She often called him horrible and claimed he avoided people because he did not want anyone looking at him. Lovecraft came to believe this about himself. There are even reports of him walking down the street, hiding his face in his raincoat so no one could see him.
His mother eventually had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the same hospital where his father had died 21 years earlier. In 1921, she passed away after complications from gallbladder surgery. Lovecraft was devastated and again thought about suicide. However, he managed to recover and eventually met Sonia Greene, who would become his wife. The two moved to New York, but financial troubles and Sonia’s job, which required frequent travel, caused them to separate.
Living in New York was tough for Lovecraft. He felt completely alienated in a massive city filled with strangers, which deepened his feelings of detachment. This isolation influenced his writing, contributing to the mood of his stories. Xenophobia and racism were common at the time, and while Lovecraft was a product of his era, these attitudes remain one of the most controversial aspects of his legacy.
In 1926, Lovecraft returned to Providence, Rhode Island, where he would live for the rest of his life. Though he continued to struggle financially, many of his most significant works were published in pulp magazines. Unfortunately, most people overlooked these stories during his lifetime.
Lovecraft’s health started to decline. By the 1930s, he was in such severe pain that he could barely hold a pen. In 1937, cancer spread to his intestines, leaving him in constant agony until his death. He likely died believing his work would be forgotten.
Despite his hardships, Lovecraft never let the darkness in his life stop him. In fact, it fueled his creativity. Many of his fans recognized the value of his work and made sure it was preserved, and today, he is considered one of the greatest writers of weird fiction ever. His name has even become an adjective—”Lovecraftian.”
What made Lovecraft unique was how he shifted the source of horror away from traditional monsters like demons, ghosts, and vampires. Instead, his horror came from cosmic entities—vast, unknowable beings that exist outside time and space. This idea stemmed from his early fascination with astronomy, which taught him how small and insignificant humanity is in the grand scheme of the universe.
Lovecraft’s work often explores the idea that human existence is meaningless when compared to the vastness of the cosmos. His stories rarely focus on detailed character development. Instead, they emphasize the strange phenomena surrounding his characters and the raw emotions they feel when facing the unknown. The bleakness of his tales is surprisingly captivating, and few writers have ever captured that same chilling poignancy.
We should leave questions about the meaning of life unanswered. Cosmicism is like an extreme form of existentialism. It challenges humanity’s role in a universe that does not care about us, creating an existential crisis on a massive scale. Lovecraft’s philosophy emphasizes fear of the unknown—specifically, the fear we feel when we encounter phenomena beyond our understanding or control, things far outside the narrow bubble of human experience.
Cosmicism, as Lovecraft saw it, is all about the meaninglessness of human existence and our actions in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Unlike anthropocentric philosophies, which place humans at the center of everything, Lovecraft’s view rejects the idea of human importance. For many, this non-anthropocentric perspective is unsettling because it strips away the “intellectual certainty” people often cling to. In Lovecraft’s stories, scientific discoveries are both thrilling and deeply unsettling.
For Lovecraft, science does not offer enlightenment—it is more like a harbinger of doom for humanity. Knowledge, he believed, is a self-destructive disease. While modern science has led to incredible discoveries, it has also forced us to confront how small and fragile we really are in the cold, vast universe. Our limited minds cannot handle these revelations. Lovecraft often described humanity as no more significant than ants in the endless expanse of time and space.
The universe’s incomprehensibility breeds a fear of the cosmic void, a fear that shatters humanity’s self-confidence. Lovecraft suggests that if we, after thousands of years in the dark, suddenly turned on the lights, we would realize we are not alone—and that would be terrifying. Scientific discovery is not something we can overcome; it is a truth that reveals the strangeness of our reality. Lovecraft’s Cosmic captures this feeling by placing us in a strange and disturbingly alien world.
However, cosmicism is not about fearing the unknown. In Lovecraft’s stories, these forces are out in space, lurking in dreams, in the soil, in the deep sea, and even in the Earth itself. Take The Color Out of Space, a meteorite crashing onto a farm, and a “color” from another world. Humans call it “color” only because there is no proper word, but it is completely beyond human comprehension.
This cosmic “color,” which has never been seen before, distorts human perception and defies all scientific explanation. It is a force so alien that it poisons everything around it—plants, animals, and people. As the farm’s inhabitants descend into madness and die one by one, Lovecraft paints a grim picture of how humans react to the incomprehensible.
For Lovecraft, what we perceive as an “alienated self” is really the result of encountering these terrifying truths about the universe. His characters often suffer complete mental breakdowns during these encounters, which illustrates how incompatible humanity is with the truths of cosmicism. Instead of accepting the absurdity and contingency of our values and beliefs, we are crushed by the realization of our insignificance.
Cosmicism is the philosophy of our inability to process our insignificance in the grand scheme of things rooted in objective or eternal truth—and that is what is so troubling.
These feelings only get worse when we realize just how indifferent the universe is toward us. Suddenly, we grasp the extent to which our lives lack any objective purpose or meaning. In the opening line of The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft writes that the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a small, quiet island of ignorance surrounded by the infinite black sea of the cosmos, and we do not even have to venture far to feel its weight. On the horizon is the inevitable realization of our insignificance—a kind of doom that looms large in Lovecraft’s work. As our understanding of the universe has grown, science has revealed many alien forces unrelated to human interests. To appreciate Lovecraft’s use of this “cosmic externality” and how it strengthens his cosmicism, we must consider the biography of his existential views.
Lovecraft’s perspective stemmed from the night terrors he experienced as a child. His fears of emptiness and indifference, combined with his love of 18th-century antiquities and influences, shaped his imagination. In one childhood nightmare, he felt a sense of dread and almost otherworldly dread—a feeling he incorporated into his stories.
In a 1916 letter to an early correspondent, Lovecraft mentioned that starting at age six, he had recurring nightmares filled with unspeakable horrors. In these dreams, he was hurled through space at dizzying speeds, poked and prodded by grotesque creatures wielding loathsome tridents. These vivid, disturbing dreams left a lasting impact, making Lovecraft’s early years a time of genuine terror.
At 18, Lovecraft went through a severe depressive episode. The combination of mental and physical exhaustion forced him to drop out of school for long periods. During this dark time, he frequently contemplated suicide. What kept him going was his curiosity and his fascination with the unknown and the vastness of the cosmos. He once wrote that certain elements—like the marvels of science and the mysteries of the wider world—held him back from ending it all.
Despite his confusion, Lovecraft believed that if he studied and lived long enough, he could find answers through his writing. The Call of Cthulhu was his pinnacle, blending horror, suspense, the occult, and the strange into a strange fiction.
The story does not just evoke fear—it explores occult practices, alien phenomena, and the limits of human understanding. Lovecraft incorporates magic, prophecy, visions, alien races, lucid dreaming, astral travel, and even astral possession into his work. To fully grasp the story’s themes, though, it is worth considering Lovecraft’s atheism.
Raised in a Protestant family, Lovecraft grew up learning the legends and teachings of the Bible. In his essay A Confession of Unfaith, he reveals how he drifted away from religion. Atheism gave him a perspective to explore the supernatural and the cosmic, skepticism, and a fascination with the unknown.
Lovecraft’s skepticism about the existence of God started showing even before he turned five. Around that same time, he found out Santa Claus was not real. That revelation got him thinking—if Santa was made up, what about God? His family sent him to Sunday school at the First Baptist Church, but instead of reinforcing his beliefs, it had the opposite effect. He renounced his remaining Christian faith and declared himself an agnostic. He was not an atheist yet, however.
At six, Lovecraft discovered the wonders of Greco-Roman mythology, and it changed his outlook on religion. He dove into Greek polytheism and became fascinated by the gods, nature spirits, and fairytale-like stories. By the time Lovecraft was seven or eight, Lovecraft considered himself a heathen. He was so enchanted by the beauty of Greek mythology that he half-believed in nature spirits and ancient deities.
This curiosity drove him to study other mythologies and religions, like Norse myths and Hinduism, in an attempt to figure out which one held the most truth. Eventually, he concluded that the myths of religion were myths. He shifted his focus to science and adopted a materialistic outlook. At this point, he saw himself as a pagan in spirit, but his understanding of man in the universe was not yet developed.
Between 1902 and 1903, Lovecraft started studying astronomy intensely, and it became a cornerstone of his worldview. He credited the Greek discovery of the natural world and the vastness of space as two of the most pivotal moments in his intellectual life. These ideas would later deeply influence his fiction. As he explored astronomy and learned about the solar system, his philosophy—what he eventually called “cosmicism”—started to take shape. It marked a turning point for him, and he stopped seeking answers in religion altogether.
As Lovecraft moved away from paganism, he fully embraced cynicism, cosmicism, and materialism. He became an atheist, but he was not naive enough to think humans were the only intelligent beings in an ever-expanding universe. He began using these ideas to craft his pantheon—the Great Old Ones like Gobogeg, Yuggoth, Yog-Sothoth, and Cthulhu are simply imaginative creations that are a way for him to express his ideas.
Lovecraft drew inspiration for his mythology from writers like Lord Dunsany, whose works Time and the Gods and The Gods of Pegāna left a lasting impression on him. Like Dunsany, Lovecraft constructed a pantheon for philosophy. However, while Dunsany’s gods tended toward mysticism, Lovecraft’s creations were “anti-mythologies.” Creating artificial gods and cults, Lovecraft subverted the traditional, offering scientific or cosmic explanations for phenomena people attributed to the divine.
Lovecraft also flips the script on the relationship between humans and the gods of all things. He concludes that people cannot accept the idea of an atheistic universe. In his stories, cults fail to understand that the “gods” they worship—such as Cthulhu—are extraterrestrial entities who do not care about humans. These beings see humans as nothing more than tools for their purposes. Lovecraft even gave these beings names that emphasized their alien, incomprehensible nature, further solidifying his vision of an indifferent cosmos.
Even now, fans and scholars argue about the “correct” way to pronounce Cthulhu. Lovecraft himself said the name is just a clumsy human attempt to pronounce a truly alien word. After all, these monstrous entities were not named by beings with human vocal cords, so their names have nothing to do with how humans speak.
The inspiration for Cthulhu likely comes from the Greek-Hellenic chthonic gods and The Book of Dzyan. The Chthonic gods were always buried underground, waiting to rise again, and were often seen as sources of evil humanity needed to avoid. Although Lovecraft was a staunch materialist, he was well-versed in Hellenic culture and had some knowledge of Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. While he mostly mocked the latter, he used elements of storytelling and fantasy to craft his universe—one teeming with cosmic, monstrous creatures.
These beings do not just terrify; they drive humans insane or even kill them. When we are faced with the unknown, we tend to make up answers because the silence of not knowing is unbearable. In Lovecraft’s stories, characters often chase forbidden knowledge, only to be destroyed by what they discover. The most infamous example of this is the Necronomicon, the fictional Book of the Dead supposedly written by Abdul Alhazred, the “Mad Arab.”
The pursuit of knowledge in Lovecraft’s world often leads straight to death or madness. Still, characters cannot resist chasing it, even when they know it will not end well. Once you uncover certain truths, there is no going back. Knowing can destroy you—mentally or physically—or both.
Think about it this way: when someone is diagnosed with a terrible disease, the knowledge changes them. Even if they felt fine before, the awareness of the disease becomes part of their identity. They cannot understand it, and their reality shifts permanently. In Lovecraft’s Through the Gates of the Silver Key, the protagonist, Randolph Carter, uses a mysterious silver key to open the Highest Gate.
Through it, he glimpses all of his past and future selves—versions of Carter across time. He realizes that every tiny decision branches into a different version of himself, creating countless Carters across history. This omniscient awareness strips him of individuality. Carter realizes he is not separate from these other versions of himself; instead, they are all him. The boundary between self and others dissolves.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze described this kind of breakdown as a shift from paranoid madness to schizophrenic madness. Paranoia is all about clinging to a single, rigid identity, shutting out anything that does not fit. Schizophrenic madness, on the other hand, is about embracing the unconscious and accepting other identities and beings as part of yourself.
Lovecraft’s grotesque stories force readers to let go of their usual assumptions about identity, reality, and emotion. In his stories, the characters who cling too tightly to their sense of self go mad. Those who fear losing their individuality end up destroyed by the truth they encounter.
References
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