ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 20
Happy Birthday, H. P. Lovecraft!
(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
On
August 20th, 1890, a boy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, who would spend
his entire adult life insisting, in essay after essay and letter after letter,
that none of it was real: no gods, no spirits, no cosmic forces, no life after
death, nothing beyond the cold indifferent mechanics of matter in motion. H. P.
Lovecraft called himself, in his own words, “an absolute materialist so far as
actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of
supernaturalism.” And yet the fictional universe that same committed skeptic
built, almost entirely as a private literary experiment, would go on to be
treated as genuine occult revelation by real practicing magicians within
decades of his death, its central invented text eventually manifesting as an actual,
physically purchasable grimoire that people still use today.
Understanding
how a lifelong atheist's deliberately fake holy book became a working piece of
modern ceremonial magic is one of the strangest, most instructive stories in
twentieth-century occultism…
Piercing the Veil
Lovecraft's
skepticism wasn't a passing pose; it ran through his entire correspondence with
real conviction and philosophical rigor. He described himself as, at most, a
theoretical agnostic who was, “practically and provisionally,” an atheist,
finding the odds of any theistic reality “so microscopically small” that
calling himself anything else would be dishonest. He was an admirer of Bertrand Russell and Thomas Henry Huxley,
and even a brief mid-1920s wobble over what relativity and quantum theory
seemed to imply about mechanistic physics resolved back into the same
fundamental conviction: the universe runs on physical law, full stop, and human
beings are a cosmic afterthought within it.
That
conviction is the actual philosophical engine behind his fiction, not a
contradiction of it. Lovecraft's cosmic horror isn't about demons or devils in
any traditional theological sense; it's about the terror of genuine
insignificance, the idea that reality is vast, mechanical, and utterly
indifferent to human meaning, populated by entities so far beyond us that human
concepts like good and evil simply don't apply to them. His famous “Great Old Ones”
aren't supernatural in the classical sense at all; they're framed as
extradimensional, physically real beings operating by rules we're simply too
limited to perceive, science fiction dressed as gothic horror. Lovecraft wasn't
smuggling real occult belief into his stories. He was building an elaborate
fictional apparatus specifically designed to dramatize the absence of cosmic
meaning he was already convinced was true.
The book at the center of today's occult afterlife, the Necronomicon, was Lovecraft's own invention from the very beginning, first mentioned in his 1922 story “The Hound” and expanded across dozens of subsequent tales as a suitably ancient, suitably forbidden literary prop. Lovecraft actively encouraged fellow pulp writers like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth to reference the book in their own fiction, effectively crowdsourcing the myth across an entire circle of collaborating authors. Even in his own lifetime, he received earnest letters from readers asking, and sometimes insisting, that the book was real, and he spent considerable correspondence patiently explaining, repeatedly, that he had made it up entirely.
That
explicit denial didn't stop the idea from taking on a life of its own,
particularly once it reached Kenneth Grant, a
former personal secretary to Aleister Crowley and founder of the Typhonian Ordo
Templi Orientis. Grant proposed something genuinely audacious: that Lovecraft,
despite his conscious atheism, had unknowingly tapped into real occult currents
through his fiction, and that Crowley's own Thelemic cosmology and Lovecraft's
invented mythology were, on some level, describing compatible realities. Grant
wrote extensively about an “astral Necronomicon,” a genuine magical current he
believed the fictional book pointed toward even in its nonexistence.
In
1977, that theoretical astral text became a physical one. A book calling itself
simply the Necronomicon appeared from a small publisher, credited only to a mysterious figure named “Simon,”
widely believed by researchers and former associates to be the writer Peter
Levenda, working alongside collaborators connected to New York's
occult bookshop scene. The book presents itself as an ancient Sumerian and
Babylonian grimoire, blending genuine (if selectively interpreted) Mesopotamian
mythological material with names and concepts lifted directly from Lovecraft's
fiction and Grant's Crowley-adjacent theorizing, framed through an invented
narrator called the “Mad Arab.” It is not ancient, nor a real Sumerian text in
any scholarly sense. It is, by the most credible accounts, a genuine
late-twentieth-century synthesis, built by real occultists specifically to make
Grant's theoretical framework tangible, and it has been treated as a working
grimoire by practicing magicians ever since, exactly the kind of unauthorized
afterlife its author would never have anticipated and Lovecraft himself would
almost certainly have found bitterly ironic.
None of this makes Lovecraft himself an occultist by any honest measure; every scrap of evidence we have points the opposite direction, a man who built an entire fictional cosmology explicitly to illustrate why none of it could be real. What his legacy demonstrates instead is something genuinely worth sitting with: that a sufficiently well-built fiction, populated with sufficiently convincing texture, can outgrow its creator's own intentions entirely, taken up by later readers hungry for exactly the kind of mystery its author may have accidentally unleashed from behind the veil...
OCCULT
READS PRESENTS: “DAILY OCCULT REVIEW”
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the mythos that
outgrew its creator's own skepticism, we're recommending a book that treats
that afterlife not as historical curiosity, but as a live working system.
By
Phil Hine | The Original Falcon Press
First
published in a limited 1994 edition and long difficult to find before this
revised and expanded reissue from the Original Falcon Press, Phil Hine's Pseudonomicon takes a genuinely
different approach than the Simon Necronomicon's claim to ancient authenticity.
Hine, former editor of the influential Chaos International magazine, doesn't
pretend Lovecraft's mythology is secretly true or secretly ancient; he treats
it explicitly as a modern pathworking, a deliberately constructed symbolic
territory chaos magicians can enter and work with on its own terms, fiction as
functional magical technology rather than disguised fact.
Hine's
own framing is refreshingly candid about the risks involved, warning openly
that engaging seriously with the "Cthulhu Mythos" as a working system carries
real psychological hazards, obsession, personality disintegration, the kind of
destabilization that comes from taking deliberately alien, non-human cosmic
horror seriously as a meditative and ritual framework. This new edition adds a
substantially expanded section on banishing, a practical acknowledgment that
any book teaching readers to invite Lovecraftian entities into their practice
owes them an equally serious method for closing that door again.
This
is advanced, deliberately unsettling material, not a beginner's introduction to
chaos magic, and readers new to the tradition should build a foundation
elsewhere first. But for readers of this magazine who finished today's post
fascinated by how thoroughly a committed atheist's fiction escaped into real
magical practice, Hine's book is the most honest, clear-eyed account of what
actually happens when practitioners pick up that invitation.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
Modern Occultist
2026. Modern Occultist Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.