Congregations of the Abyss

There are gods in Lovecraft, or at least beings whom human beings are inclined to call gods. There are monsters, alien intelligences, sorcerers, hybrids, witches and things which resist any comfortable taxonomic category. But between humanity and these entities stands another recurrent Lovecraftian institution: the cult.

The cult is one of Lovecraft's most useful narrative devices because it solves a peculiar problem. How can knowledge survive when the things known have disappeared for millions of years? Civilisations collapse, libraries burn, languages die and rational people quite sensibly discard stories about tentacled entities sleeping beneath the Pacific. Yet somebody must remember. Somebody must preserve the name, the rite, the object, the oath or the formula until the stars are right again.

That is the function of the Lovecraftian cult.

Its members are custodians of continuity.

This makes Lovecraft's cults rather more interesting than conventional collections of hooded villains. They are alternative institutions of knowledge. Universities preserve respectable learning; cults preserve what respectable learning has forgotten. Archaeologists classify objects; cultists know what the objects are for. Historians regard ancient rites as extinct; the cult knows where they will be performed next Thursday.

And occasionally, disquietingly, the cult is right.

I. The Cthulhu Cult: the church that waits

The most important cult is the unnamed worldwide religion discovered in The Call of Cthulhu.

Professor George Gammell Angell's papers contain a dossier headed “CTHULHU CULT”. Inspector Legrasse's Louisiana raid reveals one branch, while Professor Webb recalls encountering a strikingly similar tradition in Greenland. The connection is not institutional in any familiar modern sense. There is no visible headquarters distributing newsletters or reminding members that the annual sacrifice is due. Instead there is a common body of tradition.

Its adherents believe that the Great Old Ones came to Earth from the stars before humanity existed. Cthulhu and his kind are now entombed or dormant, but can still influence unusually sensitive human minds through dreams. The earliest human recipients of that influence formed a cult whose task was to preserve the memory of the Old Ones until conditions permitted their return.

This is an extraordinarily long institutional horizon. Christianity waits for a Second Coming measured in millennia. The Cthulhu cult has apparently constructed its eschatology around geological time.

Its purpose is therefore not simply worship. It is maintenance.

The cult keeps names, symbols, idols and ritual formulae alive while ordinary history forgets. It also preserves an apocalyptic expectation: the return of the Old Ones will accompany the collapse of conventional human morality and social restraint. What the cult anticipates is not salvation in a recognisably Christian sense but release from the human order itself.

One detail is particularly useful. Castro distinguishes this cult from the European witch-cult. Lovecraft was not imagining one universal occult organisation behind everything. Different traditions exist, overlap and sometimes appear to preserve separate histories. Later systematisation is therefore apt to make the fictional world tidier than Lovecraft did.

II. The Esoteric Order of Dagon: religion as municipal government

If the Cthulhu cult is global and prehistoric, the Esoteric Order of Dagon is almost parochially modern.

It belongs to Innsmouth.

In The Shadow over Innsmouth, Captain Obed Marsh imports the central bargain after contact with a Pacific island community already dealing with the Deep Ones. The Order eventually overwhelms Innsmouth's conventional churches and occupies the former Masonic Hall. This is Lovecraft's most fully institutionalised cult: it has premises, degrees of commitment, oaths, economic influence and, in practice, civic power.

The bargain is brutally straightforward. The Deep Ones can provide fish and gold. Innsmouth must provide sacrifices, secrecy and eventually reproductive partners. The town is not merely converted. It is gradually incorporated.

The Order therefore differs from the Cthulhu cult. Its religion begins as transaction. People accept the arrangement because it works. Fish return. Gold appears. Prosperity follows. Only later does the bargain become hereditary and increasingly inescapable.

Lovecraft gives us tantalisingly little about the Oaths of Dagon. Zadok Allen says that everyone had to take the first oath, that further oaths marked deeper commitment, and that he himself would not take the third. Lovecraft never tells us what the Third Oath contains. The omission has naturally encouraged later generations to spend a quite unreasonable amount of time on the matter.

The cult's theology is similarly untidy. Dagon and Hydra are invoked, yet the Cthulhu formula also appears. Lovecraft never provides a denominational chart explaining the relationships. This may be a virtue. Real religions accumulate local, imported and inherited layers which later theologians must struggle to reconcile.

Innsmouth has merely added gills to the process.

III. The Starry Wisdom sect: revelation by optical instrument

The Church of Starry Wisdom in The Haunter of the Dark represents another species of cult. It is organised around knowledge.

Professor Enoch Bowen returns from archaeological work in Egypt and establishes the sect in an abandoned Providence church. Rumours of disappearances, sacrifices and nocturnal rites gather around it until the congregation is driven out. What remains is its library and its central instrument: the Shining Trapezohedron.

The Trapezohedron allows those who gaze into it to perceive distant worlds and contact the entity later known to Robert Blake as the Haunter of the Dark. The cult's worship is therefore entangled with observation. Its sacred object is also an apparatus.

This is quintessential Lovecraft. The boundary between occult ritual and scientific investigation repeatedly collapses. The cultist and the scientist may perform structurally similar acts: both seek knowledge by specialised procedures inaccessible to ordinary people.

Robert Blake's fatal error is essentially experimental repetition. He finds the instrument, examines it and reconstructs the conditions under which earlier investigators contacted something beyond ordinary perception.

He behaves like a scholar.

The universe responds like a Lovecraft story.

IV. The people of “The Festival”: religion by inheritance

“The Festival” presents one of Lovecraft's earliest and strangest secret religious communities. The narrator returns to Kingsport because his ancestors have instructed their descendants to observe a centennial rite. There is no clearly named organisation. There is lineage.

Religion survives because families remember that something must be done even after much of the original explanation has disappeared. The procession into the subterranean chambers beneath the church therefore feels older than doctrine. The participants enact something received rather than comprehended.

Lovecraft's correspondence makes clear how strongly contemporary theories of a surviving European witch-cult stimulated his imagination. Margaret Murray's historical thesis has not survived modern scholarship, but as fiction it supplied Lovecraft with an extraordinarily productive mechanism: extinct religions might not be extinct at all. They might persist in isolated communities, distorted folklore, family obligation and rites whose practitioners themselves only partly understand.

The principle is already present: civilisation forgets; the cult remembers.

V. The witch-cult and Nyarlathotep

The Murray-derived witch-cult becomes considerably more cosmic in The Dreams in the Witch House.

Walter Gilman begins with mathematics rather than occultism. His work on non-Euclidean geometry leads him to suspect that witchcraft legends may encode imperfect descriptions of dimensional travel. Keziah Mason's supposed witchcraft becomes a form of trans-dimensional technique.

The traditional Black Man of witchcraft is identified with Nyarlathotep. The Sabbath becomes part of a genuinely cosmic network of initiation and communication. Folklore is not simply “true” in the naïve sense. It is an inadequate cultural description of a phenomenon with a reality far stranger than the believers' own theology.

The witch-cult is therefore a corrupted scientific archive. Its initiates know routes through dimensions modern mathematics has only begun to describe.

One may imagine the subsequent Miskatonic faculty memorandum: the student was correct about the topology; his safeguarding procedures were unsatisfactory.

VI. Red Hook: the problematic congregation

The Horror at Red Hook offers another secret occult community, but one requiring more caution.

Robert Suydam becomes associated with a network of subterranean rites, disappearances and ceremonial activity which Detective Malone interprets through the occult anthropology available to him. Several ideas later used more successfully by Lovecraft are already present: hidden survivals beneath a modern city, forbidden knowledge transmitted through marginal communities, and apparently unrelated traditions converging upon genuinely supernatural realities.

But “Red Hook” is also inseparable from Lovecraft's intense xenophobia during his New York period. Immigrant populations are repeatedly made part of the horror rather than merely the setting. That prejudice belongs to Lovecraft, not to any defensible anthropology.

The contrast with his stronger later fiction is instructive. Cosmic horror works better when the threat is genuinely cosmic. Cthulhu is more frightening than Brooklyn and considerably less unfair to Brooklyn.

VII. The Yuggothian network in “The Whisperer in Darkness”

The Whisperer in Darkness presents something difficult to classify.

The Mi-Go maintain human collaborators. Akeley discovers evidence of ceremonies in the Vermont hills involving human voices and the characteristic buzzing speech of the aliens. The recorded rite invokes several names from Lovecraft's developing pseudo-mythology. Human beings are plainly cooperating with non-human intelligences.

But are they worshippers?

Possibly. They perform rites, maintain secrecy and serve beings from beyond Earth. Yet the Mi-Go are material extraterrestrials possessing advanced technology. Their human assistants may therefore resemble collaborators, agents or initiates more than worshippers of supernatural gods.

Lovecraft deliberately blurs the distinction.

An additional complication appears when the supposedly converted Akeley claims that a hostile human cult associated with Hastur and the Yellow Sign persecutes the Outer Ones. By this stage the speaker is almost certainly not Akeley. The assertion is therefore evidence of what the impostor wants Wilmarth to believe, not a guaranteed map of Mythos denominations.

This is a useful warning: Lovecraft's characters are not encyclopaedia entries. They speculate, lie, misunderstand and repeat folklore.

VIII. “The Thing on the Doorstep”: the occult international

The Thing on the Doorstep gives tantalising glimpses of a wider occult network. Edward Derby and Asenath Waite are associated with circles extending beyond Arkham. Derby later fears “certain groups of searchers - certain cults”, while Asenath is said to have connections with horrible groups of devotees outside New England.

Lovecraft does not give these groups a name, headquarters or common creed. But he does drop one remarkably specific clue. In mid-September Derby is rumoured to have met “a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York”.

That detail deserves to be read beside Lovecraft's letters, because it raises the distinct possibility that a real occult celebrity briefly casts a shadow across fictional Arkham.

VIIIa. Aleister Crowley: the cult leader who may have crossed the threshold

Lovecraft never names Aleister Crowley in his fiction. In his correspondence, however, Crowley appears repeatedly and unmistakably. By June 1929 Lovecraft knew his reputation well enough to refer jokingly to the “poor devil-worshipper” after seeing The Diary of a Drug-Fiend in a bookshop. A month later he told Wilfred B. Talman that his own interest in Crowley was less intense than Frank Belknap Long's.

More importantly, on 22 July 1933 Lovecraft wrote to Robert Bloch praising H. R. Wakefield's “He Cometh & He Passeth By”, explaining that its villain Oscar Clinton was “a sort of caricature” of the living mystic and alleged Satanist Aleister Crowley. Lovecraft then wrote The Thing on the Doorstep on 21-24 August 1933 - barely a month later.

The chronology makes the story's unnamed “notorious cult-leader” unusually suggestive. Crowley was already fixed in Lovecraft's mind as the contemporary model of the learned, scandalous occult chief; the fictional figure is a notorious cult leader associated with expulsion and New York. This is not proof, and Lovecraft nowhere supplies the missing name. But as an allusion it is considerably more plausible than a resemblance discovered only in hindsight.

Later letters strengthen the inference by showing the somewhat garbled picture of Crowley that Lovecraft carried in his head. Writing to Clark Ashton Smith on 11 February 1934, Lovecraft said he had heard that Crowley was then in New York and added that “London won't stand him any longer”. The biographical details were wrong - Crowley had not been expelled from England - but the mistake is revealing. Lovecraft imagined Crowley as precisely the sort of itinerant, expelled occultist who could plausibly be transplanted into Derby's whispered New York connection.

Crowley continued to serve as Lovecraft's stock example of the modern occultist. To Emil Petaja in March and April 1935 he called him over-advertised, learned and deeply disreputable, repeated stories about secret groups and expulsions, and again connected him with Wakefield's fictional magician. Lovecraft's details were frequently second-hand and sometimes plainly inaccurate: he placed Crowley's student days at Oxford rather than Cambridge and credited him with compiling The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, in which Crowley was merely represented. What the letters establish is familiarity with the legend, not expertise in Thelema.

That distinction is essential. There is no evidence that Lovecraft met Crowley, corresponded with him, seriously studied his magical writings or derived the Necronomicon from Thelema. Crowley entered Lovecraft's mental furniture chiefly as a newspaper-age emblem of the scandalous occult adept.

The safest conclusion is therefore deliberately modest: the unnamed cult leader in The Thing on the Doorstep is very plausibly a fictionalised Crowley allusion, but Lovecraft never confirms the identification.

The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, displaying the laudable scholarly restraint for which secret societies are universally renowned, dispenses with the ambiguity in its dramatic adaptation and simply has another character ask whether the man in question is Aleister Crowley. This is an HPLHS embellishment, not evidence from Lovecraft - but it is at least evidence that others have found the same inference irresistible.

The wider occult network remains deliberately undefined. Its members may be linked less by worship than by technique, correspondence and the exchange of forbidden research. They resemble a clandestine learned society.

The Royal Society, perhaps, if changing bodies with one's spouse were considered a promising line of research.

IX. The Whateleys: when a cult is only a family

The Dunwich Horror is frequently described in cultic language, but technically the Whateleys are less a cult than a household.

Old Whateley possesses forbidden knowledge. Lavinia participates in his scheme. Wilbur is educated for a specific cosmic purpose. Yog-Sothoth occupies the centre of the family's activities. Yet there is no visible congregation or hierarchy.

This distinction matters because Lovecraft did not need a cult whenever human beings interacted with cosmic entities. Knowledge might survive through a family, an individual sorcerer, a manuscript or an inherited object.

The Whateley household is religion reduced to its minimum viable congregation: three people, one invisible sibling and an alarming quantity of structural damage.

X. Curwen, Orne and Hutchinson: the necromantic correspondence circle

Something similar applies to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Joseph Curwen and his associates Simon Orne and Edward Hutchinson form an international network engaged in necromancy, resurrection and the interrogation of the dead. They exchange letters, formulae and discoveries. Their activity is organised and collaborative, but it is not obviously devotional.

Their attitude to occult power is instrumental.

They are magicians using cosmic forces as technologies.

Again the boundary between irrational cult and rational investigation becomes uncomfortable. Curwen is monstrous, but he is also conducting research. The ethical committee would have several observations. The methodological committee might be distressingly impressed.

XI. What Lovecraft's letters tell us

Lovecraft's correspondence prevents these fictional religions from hardening into a theology he never intended.

He treated his invented pantheon with considerable humour. In a letter to August Derleth of 16 May 1931, he jokingly described his developing material as “Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery” and as a gradually developing mixture of theogony or daimonology. The point is not that he had finally named a coherent religion. Quite the reverse. The letter shows him thinking playfully about a growing assemblage of names and motifs.

More revealingly, in a 22 November 1930 letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft used imaginary religions as a reductio against the claim that inward religious feeling establishes religious truth. A child reared entirely inside a Tsathogguan or Yog-Sothothian religious culture, he suggested, could acquire inward certainties supporting that system just as readily as a child raised within a familiar religion. He then characteristically ruined the solemnity of his own argument by pretending that his emotions might be telling him something about Cthulhu.

In a 3 October 1933 letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft also joked about William Lumley's conviction that the members of the Lovecraft circle might be unwitting transmitters of genuine occult truths. Lovecraft's amusement is important. He was constructing fictional mythology, knew he was constructing it, and found the possibility of someone taking it literally irresistibly funny.

The later history of the Necronomicon suggests that the joke has enjoyed an unusually long afterlife.

XII. Why Lovecraft needs cults

Across these stories, the cult performs several recurrent functions.

First, it preserves information. Human civilisation operates on historical time. Lovecraft's cosmic entities operate on astronomical or geological time. Something must bridge those scales. The cult provides cultural persistence.

Second, the cult creates distributed evidence. A single madman claiming to have dreamed of Cthulhu proves very little. The same symbol appearing in Louisiana, Greenland, archaeological records and unrelated dreams becomes harder to dismiss. Lovecraft repeatedly builds horror through correlation. Apparently independent rumours begin pointing towards the same impossible conclusion.

Third, the cult undermines the reassuring assumption that modernity has replaced superstition. In a conventional Enlightenment narrative, science progressively eliminates primitive religion. Lovecraft offers a nastier possibility: what if some primitive religions vanished not because they were wholly false, but because humanity forgot what distorted phenomena they were trying to describe?

A witch's “demon” may be a trans-dimensional entity. A god may be an extraterrestrial intelligence. A magical crystal may be an instrument.

The superstition is wrong about the explanation but right about the phenomenon.

That is considerably worse.

XIII. Worship after cosmicism

There is a deeper irony. Lovecraft's universe is fundamentally materialistic and indifferent. His cosmic beings need not be divine in any metaphysical sense. They may simply be enormously powerful forms of life or intelligence operating under natural laws humanity does not yet understand.

From the human perspective, however, the distinction becomes practically irrelevant.

If Cthulhu can influence dreams across oceans and ages, whether he satisfies a philosopher's definition of “God” is unlikely to be the cultist's principal concern. If the Deep Ones can grant wealth, altered longevity and access to another civilisation, theological classification becomes secondary to negotiation.

Lovecraftian religion is therefore often empirical religion.

The cultist does not necessarily believe without evidence.

Quite the reverse.

He may have seen far too much evidence.

The horror is not that foolish people worship imaginary monsters. It is that the monsters answer.

XIV. The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society: the cult that escaped into reality

And finally we arrive at the most successful Lovecraftian organisation of all.

The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

It does not, strictly speaking, appear in Lovecraft's fiction or correspondence, having been founded in 1984, an omission usually attributed to chronology rather than a particularly successful campaign of documentary suppression.

The HPLHS says it began among college friends developing Lovecraftian live-action role-playing games. It now produces films, audio dramas, music, publications, prop replicas and other Lovecraftian artefacts. Its motto is Ludo Fore Putavimus: “We Thought It Would Be Fun”.

This distinguishes it sharply from Lovecraft's fictional cults.

The Cthulhu cult awaits the collapse of civilisation.

The Esoteric Order of Dagon provides fish.

Starry Wisdom offers forbidden cosmic knowledge.

The HPLHS produces extremely convincing paperwork.

Of the four business models, the last has so far demonstrated the greatest long-term viability.

There are nevertheless suspicious similarities. The Society preserves obscure knowledge. It reproduces ancient-looking documents. Its members gather periodically. They possess strange insignia. They speak casually of entities whose names disturb ordinary orthography. Large sums of money may disappear following prolonged exposure to its catalogue.

No evidence presently establishes the sacrifice of missing persons.

One assumes this is covered by a higher membership tier.

It would of course be unfair to describe the HPLHS as a cult in any serious sense. It is an organisation of enthusiasts, scholars, performers, craftspeople and incorrigible Lovecraftians whose elaborate playfulness depends precisely upon knowing the difference between fiction and reality.

But there is something wonderfully appropriate about its existence. Lovecraft invented fictional secret societies preserving stories about imaginary entities. Readers became fascinated by those secret societies. They formed actual societies to preserve Lovecraft's stories. They manufactured the documents that the imaginary societies might have manufactured had those societies existed.

Thus, by a route Lovecraft could scarcely have anticipated, the fictional cult acquired something resembling institutional reality.

Cthulhu remains unavailable for comment.

XV. Conclusion: those who remember

Lovecraft's cults are not incidental decorations. They express one of the central anxieties of his fiction: human knowledge is temporary while reality is not.

Civilisations classify the universe according to what they happen to know during their brief existence. They construct religions, sciences and philosophies from a tiny sample of space and time and naturally mistake the resulting picture for reality itself.

The cult preserves the excluded data.

Its rites are frequently barbarous, its conclusions dreadful and its members seldom recommended as dinner companions. But the Lovecraftian investigator repeatedly discovers that the embarrassing old tradition contains information respectable civilisation has lost.

The great terror is therefore not simply that secret cults exist.

It is that they may possess the better archive.

The Cthulhu cult remembers something humanity knew before recorded history. The Esoteric Order of Dagon knows what lives beneath the Atlantic. The Starry Wisdom sect has seen worlds beyond Earth. The witches know routes through dimensions modern mathematics has only begun to describe. Strange families preserve ceremonies older than their explanations. Collaborators in Vermont know that interstellar travel is already occurring.

The cult is consequently Lovecraft's dark counterpart to the university.

Both preserve knowledge.

Both initiate newcomers.

Both maintain specialised vocabularies.

Both possess restricted collections.

But only one knows why certain books are chained.

And somewhere between Miskatonic University, the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society lies the characteristic joke of Lovecraft's afterlife.

The first studies the forbidden knowledge.

The second practises it.

The third produces an exquisitely convincing facsimile, together with appropriate stationery.

For the moment, that is probably the safest arrangement.