The bas-relief seems to be of a mysterious, otherworldly, and unheard-of nature. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. In the first chapter of the story, “The Horror in Clay,” the protagonist is reviewing his uncle’s papers, when he discovers a curious box containing a bas-relief of an otherworldly looking creature described in the following manner: We follow Thurston as he recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his great-uncle, Professor George Gammell Angell, and his own investigations regarding those notes through various journals, jottings, newspaper cuttings and manuscripts. The story is presented as a manuscript “found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston”. However, these days it cannot be argued that the name Cthulhu immediately brings H.P. Lovecraft, a usual merciless and harsh critic of his own writings, calls the story “rather middling-not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches”. When “The Call of Cthulhu” was originally published in the February 1928 issue of the Weird Tales pulp magazine, its reception and criticism were diverse. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far”. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. In Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, FOTU is written to develop into an Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) something that is aptly captured in the opening sentence to Lovecraft’s masterpiece “The Call of Cthulhu”. And that the smallest peek into this very truth and forbidden secrets of the universe can drive one over to misery, madness, and death.Ĭosmic horror invokes within its readers an exaggerated sense of what psychologists refer to as Fear of the Unknown (FOTU), understood as an individual’s propensity to experience fear caused by a perceived absence of information at any level of consciousness or point of processing. Lovecraft’s “Cosmicism” in horror is the idea and philosophy that mankind is absolutely insignificant and irrelevant in the vast intergalactic cosmos arrangement that life is genuinely inconceivable to the human mind, and the universe is fundamentally indifferent or hostile towards us. He does not ever seem to have been tempted to embrace any kind of religious or spiritual belief.” However, an examination of his biography-detailed further by his own writings-shows a deep resonance of religious thought, a persistent presence of a sense of awe that eventually transformed itself into dread. Scholar of esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff concurred that “Contrary to many of his admirers, Lovecraft was a radical materialist who saw all religions (including esotericism or occultism of any variety) as self-evident delusions. One explanation of this is Lovecraft’s own position as an avowed atheist and his clear espousal of materialist philosophy, a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. Despite this, scholars of religious studies have paid relatively little attention to his oeuvre with few exceptions when it comes to unpacking his connections to Western Esotericism. It is actually quite easy to see that these stories are suffused with elements of and contemplations on mankind’s relationship with religion. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror features supernatural entities referred to as the Old Ones, Elder Gods, Outer Ones, or simply gods, complete with their own vague motivations, religious groups, and apocalyptic expectations. Giger and Jean Giraud, cosmic horror is a concept which was developed and applied by one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century, H.P. Having widely influenced and inspired a remarkable number of writers and artists such as contemporary horror writer Stephen King, author and artist Clive Barker, comic artist Alan Moore, film directors Dan O’Bannon, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, and Guillermo Del Toro, also surrealist artists H.
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