WI Lovecraft lives and pulls a Ron Hubbard

Kidblast said:
I read that HP Lovecraft didn't even believe in the supernatural, and was a rational man, and quite confounded when people actually believed his writings.

I did my 12th grade senior thesis on him back in the day, and supposedly he was nuttier then a fruit cake, with many borderline OCDs. Wich is believable since insanity ran in his family on both sides.
 

Hendryk

Banned
pisces74 said:
supposedly he was nuttier then a fruit cake, with many borderline OCDs.
AFAIK, apart from his almost neurotic racism (which he managed to more or less get a grip on in his later years), he suffered from a bad case of thalassophobia. It's not a coincidence that the Deep Ones look like humanoid fish, that Cthulhu has the head of an octopus and that the Mi-Go have crustacean features.

Robert M. Price, a Biblical scholar and former Baptist pastor, has contributed short stories of his own to the Cthulhu Mythos and written insightful analyses of its religious aspects. I personally wonder about the exploitation of Azathoth as the basis of a neo-Gnostic cult; in the Mythos it's suggested that Azathoth created the universe, but a flawed creator he certainly is, being completely mindless.
 

Hendryk

Banned
This is borderline ASB, Lovecraft was an atheist and he would never have created a religon based on his writings.
Had he lived longer, who's to say he wouldn't have decided to give his personal worldview a spiritual dimension? Or, alternatively, he could have let his cynical misanthropy get the better of him, and deliberately create a religion he didn't believe in himself. It's no coincidence I called it "pulling a Ron Hubbard". The existence of Scientology as a religion in OTL is evidence enough that when a SF writer starts either taking himself too seriously, or applying P.T. Barnum's motto that there's a sucker born every minute, he may well end up a latter-day prophet.
 
The odds are against him, how many writers had America during that era. And how many did a Hubbard? That said, wouldn't it be cool beeing annoyed by a Hubbardist at the airport. Or having one knocking on your door.
 
This would give us emos in the 1960s.
'Whats the point in doing anything? We're all insignificant nothings anyway...'
:p
 

Nietzsche

Banned
Had he lived longer, who's to say he wouldn't have decided to give his personal worldview a spiritual dimension? Or, alternatively, he could have let his cynical misanthropy get the better of him, and deliberately create a religion he didn't believe in himself. It's no coincidence I called it "pulling a Ron Hubbard". The existence of Scientology as a religion in OTL is evidence enough that when a SF writer starts either taking himself too seriously, or applying P.T. Barnum's motto that there's a sucker born every minute, he may well end up a latter-day prophet.

The problem is that HPL was the epitome of the "Scientific Materialist". If he couldn't taste, touch, hear, or see something, it isn't there. Anything beyond that is purely speculation. You'd need to rework his entire character. Lovecraft allowed people to believe in his fiction because it might help him sell more copies, but he had a 'policy' that, if anyone contacted him about it, he would set them straight.

However, that's not to say Lovecraft couldn't start a Cosmicist "faith". It wouldn't recognize Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth or Nyarlathotep as hyper-dimensional alien entities, but it would recognize humanity's "grain of sand in the sahara" status in the universe.


...now, as far as people believing in his monstrosities, I sorta-count amongst their ranks. Do I think a Yog-Sothoth like beast exists? More than likely. But I don't think it cares..at all, about us. Lovecraft "preached" cosmic indifference. If anything, he was the world's most staunch nihilist.
 
Such a thing could only become widespread if one of the following happened.

1. A scientific project, promised to unveil the secrets of the universe, goes horribly awry. Humans survive, but are disenchanted with science.

2. A pandemic reduces humanity to isolated outposts without potential for expansion. That would make human insignificant indeed.
 

Vault-Scope

Banned
He would not have created a religion but he might have been tempted to co-found an order(most probably secret) to be in the look-out for xeno influences and against trends of that time he considered corrupting.
He most probably wouldn´t be a leader, more of a spiritual father and ideologue.


April 1943: "....governement officially aknowledge that president Roosevelt is among the victimes of yesterday´s attacks on the White House. There have been revendications for the attacks, denying any connections to nazi Germany and denouncing Roosevelt as a degenerate seeking the destruction of western civilisation, those claims hovewer have been dismissed and governement officially suspects a German commando landed by submarine.

June 1943: (Newspaper headline) Fires levels Red-Hook.
"... there have been so far no evidences that those fires are of criminal origine... (extensive disturbance)...lice hovewer, strongly suspect the involvement of the mafia or the Klu Klux Klan, since a squad of Klansmen are known to have triggered riots shortly before the fires occured, which prevented firemen from intervening."

January 1944: (Newspaper headline) The Horror in Portsmouth: Unknow vigilant group uncovers foreign cannibal cult in Portsmouth!

(Newspaper headline) Mysterious assassin continue rampage against the mob.
 
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