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Cults of Cthulhu

H.P Lovecraft and the

Occult Tradition

Fra. Tenebrous

Cults of Cthulhu

H.P Lovecraft and the Occult Tradition

by Fra. Tenebrous

First published by Daath Press 1987, as a limited edition of

123 copies. Text revised 1993. This on-line edition November

1998 with kind permission of the author.

H.P LOVECRAFT

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Nameless City’, 1921

In the 1920’s, an American magazine of fantasy and horror

fiction called

Weird Tales

began to publish stories by a then-

unknown author named H. P. Lovecraft. As his contributions

to the magazine grew more regular, the stories began to form

an internally consistent and self-referential mythology, created

from the literary realisation of the author’s dreams and intuitive

impulses. Although he outwardly espoused a wholly rational

and sceptical view of the universe, his dream-world experiences

allowed him glimpses of places and entities beyond the world

of mundane reality, and behind his stilted and often excessive

prose there lies a vision and an understanding of occult forces

which is directly relevant to the Magical Tradition.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in

Providence, Rhode Island, at 454 Angell Street — the house

of his maternal grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips. His parents,

Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan Phillips, were of

English descent, and throughout his life Lovecraft remained a

devoted Anglophile. Winfield Lovecraft, a commercial

traveller, spent much of his time away from the family home,

and as a result had little influence on the young Lovecraft.

Three years after his son’s birth, he was admitted to a