Lovecraft and atheism

In 1918, Spengler, a German philosopher, published the first volume of his magnum opus, The Decline of the West. Spengler’s basic thesis was of a cyclical civilizational history. “High cultures” pass through stages like organisms: birth, development, a maturity of cultural flowering, then the slow decline through urban civilization to senescence, decadence, and death.

Like weird fiction itself, Spengler’s portentous vision was a scar caused by the wound of early twentieth-century cataclysms. His worldview was enormously influential. Hitler was an admirer, as were the right-wing theorist Julius Evola and the wack-job high priest of American “intellectual” fascism, Francis Parker Yockey. But Spengler’s model had a wider cultural impact. Relatively mainstream figures such as the historian Arnold Toynbee and the writers Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller drew upon his ideas.

So, crucially, did H. P. Lovecraft, who read the first volume in translation in 1927. When discussing At the Mountains of Madness, the importance of Spengler’s The Decline of the West cannot be stressed too highly. (Indeed, S. T. Joshi places Spengler at the center of his discussion of Lovecraft’s political and philosophical ideas—his book on the topic is entitled H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West.) The very setting, that enormous, impossible city, is utterly Spenglerian, recalling the “civilization” phase in his cycle, when culture passes beyond its high point and its upheavals occur in burgeoning megalopolises.

“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature,” Spengler says. “It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself. . . .” In turn, Lovecraft describes the unbelievable sprawl and scale of the Old Ones’ city, “stretched nearly to the vision’s limit,” a “Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks . . . which cut off all comfortable refuge,” the “unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts,” as embodying “some fiendish violation of known natural law.”

For Spengler, the city-as-world exists in a vampiric relationship with the country around it. Where once the city was thrown up by the country, “now the giant city sucks the country dry,” relentlessly seducing the population until the city is full and the country is devoid of human life. In Lovecraft’s story, the dynamic of the city’s parasitic rise and fall is rendered aesthetically, with a vivid image of a dark city surrounded by country that has been sucked so dry it is bone-white, bled of all color.

As the narrator navigates the vast stone corridors, he literally walks through the architecturalization of Spengler’s cyclical history. In the bas-reliefs that he and Danforth are able (however improbably) to decipher, we read a fantasticated representation of The Decline of the West.​

For Western readers, Chinese sci-fi is enticing because it takes what we think know about modern China – the strange combination of ancient history and racing electronic change, the cities that spring up in months, the sheer scale of the country and its vast population – and makes it even bigger. In the opening scenes of Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth, engines the size of mountains stop the Earth from spinning, and the planet escapes the solar system while the sun explodes. Western sci-fi begins to look almost parochial next to such massive ideas.
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