The Great Beast 666

Crowley, Lovecraft, and the Gates of Hell

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
— Revelation 13:18 (KJV)

Let’s jump from the first century AD to the early twentieth century. The desire to reach the gods on the far side of the gates of hell has, if anything, grown over the last 2,000 years.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the giants of twentieth century literature, although he wasn’t recognized as such until after his death. And because he wrote scary stories, he wasn’t the kind of writer who received invites to fancy parties. Lovecraft and his friends, most of whom he knew through volumes of letters they exchanged (by one estimate, 100,000 of them)^[1] some believe were more influential than his published work, wrote to entertain, usually by crafting terrifying tales and conjuring monstrous images of overpowering, inhuman evil.

As a child, Lovecraft was tormented by night terrors. Beginning at age six, young Howard was visited by what he called night-gaunts—faceless humanoids with black, rubbery skin, bat-like wings, and barbed tails, who carried off their victims to Dreamland. The nocturnal visitors were so terrifying that Howard remembered trying desperately to stay awake every night during this period of his life. It’s believed that these dreams, which haunted him for more than a year, had a powerful influence on his fiction.^[2]

Lovecraft’s mother raised Howard with his aunts after his father was committed to a psychiatric hospital when Howard was only three. Sadly, she failed to recognize the phenomenon for what it probably was—demonic oppression of her only child. But by the late nineteenth century, the technologically advanced West didn’t have room in its scientific worldview for such things. In fact, Lovecraft claimed to be a staunch atheist throughout his life.

Ironically, despite his disbelief, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft has been adapted and adopted by occultists around the world. The man who died a pauper not only found an audience over the last eighty-five years, but he also inspired an army of authors who have preserved and expanded the nightmarish universe that sprang from Lovecraft’s tortured dreams.^[3]

This is an excerpt from our 2024 book The Gates of Hell. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish it here at no charge. If you want to own a copy, it’s available in paperback, as a Kindle e-book, and as an audiobook at Amazon and Audible.

Although Lovecraft claimed he didn’t believe in the supernatural, he was more than happy to use the spirit realm as grist for his writing mill. Lovecraft apparently saw potential in the Theosophical doctrines of Madame Helena Blavatsky for stories that would sell. They did, but sadly for Lovecraft, mostly after his death. During his lifetime, Lovecraft was barely known outside the readership of pulp magazines, the type of publication called a “penny dreadful” a couple of generations earlier in England.

Pseudoscientific concepts popularized by Blavatsky, such as the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, served him well as an author. The notion that certain humans had an ability to see beyond the veil to communicate with intelligences vastly greater than our own also made for compelling horror. Lovecraft viewed the universe as a cold, unfeeling place. In his fiction, those intelligences, unlike the kindly ascended masters of Blavatsky’s religion, had no use for humanity—except perhaps, as slaves or sacrifices. The horror of discovering oneself at the mercy of immense, ancient beings incapable of mercy is a common theme in Lovecraft’s tales, and he gave those ideas flesh and bone with carefully crafted prose that infused them with a sense of dread not easily or often distilled onto the printed page.

Lovecraft’s style of gothic horror has had a powerful influence on horror fiction and film. Writers and directors like Stephen King, Roger Corman, John Carpenter and Ridley Scott, among others, drew on Lovecraft’s style, and sometimes adapted his Cthulhu mythos directly. That’s not the type of legacy left by Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the audiences who have seen The Thing, Alien, or any movie based on a Stephen King novel far outnumber those who’ve read Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Even though H. P. Lovecraft was basically unknown during his lifetime, he’s had far greater influence on pop culture than the literary greats who were his contemporaries.

And, as we’ll see, the influence of the staunch atheist Lovecraft has bled over into the metaphysical realm. It is perhaps fitting that the principalities and powers aligned against their Creator would find a self-described atheist to be a most useful tool.

Not coincidentally, as Lovecraft began his career as a writer, across the ocean another man fascinated with arcana and the influence of old gods on our world was hearing voices from beyond.

In a previous chapter, we dealt with ancient doorways and how the keeper of a ritual pit, an ʾôb, would summon spirits and so-called dead ancestors. In the twentieth century, that long tradition was revitalized and glamorized by one of the most infamous occultists of the modern era, if not all time: Aleister Crowley.

Edward Alexander “Aleister” Crowley, born into a wealthy family in October of 1875, disavowed his parents’ Christian Plymouth Brethren faith and pursued the modern idea called Western Esotericism.

In case you’re scratching your head just now, wondering what Western Esotericism was, allow us to explain, in brief. So-called Western Esotericism was the natural offspring of an eighteenth-century pursuit known as the Enlightenment. For those unfamiliar with this idea, Enlightenment was a philosophical set of beliefs that demeaned faith in God as foolish. Instead, Enlightened individuals replaced our very real and loving Creator with the cold god of Self, whom they pursued through four basic paths.

· Firstly, Rationalism, where acolytes derived conclusions about the world and humanity’s place in it, based solely on logic.

· Empiricism formed the counterpoint. Here, the pursuit of knowledge was done through sensory experience. Cold facts were replaced by “feels” and sensory assessment.

· Progressivism appealed to those who sought political change. This philosophy taught that that only Science and Technology could drive social reform.

· Cosmopolitanism claimed society required equality and equity to find balance. In other words, you might call this a combination of all the above.

Having read the above, you might well conclude that our present society is based entirely on the Enlightenment, but you’d only be partly right. Indeed, the cauldron in which our present age bubbles is made from all the above mixed with magic. Yes, magic, or rather “magick,” as Crowley spelled it. But why? Why did paganism emerge from an era that prided itself on reason and social reform? The answer is simple: the Enlightenment mindset relegated our Omnipotent Creator to their preferred and quite impotent position of Observer. This is not unlike the image of the sky-god of ancient Mesopotamia, Anu, who was depicted in the religions of Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon as remote, inaccessible, and, in the religions of the Hurrians, Hittites, Greeks (as Ouranos), and Romans (as Caelus), literally castrated.

Today, we see this idea in a growing corollary to evolutionary theory called Intelligent Design, where a Divine Watchmaker—probably an extraterrestrial, according to the gospel of Ancient Aliens—set the world in motion, who then, after growing quite bored, decided to retire.

Eighteenth-century “enlightenment” did little to bring light to the human condition, but instead delivered us into a deep, dark spiritual Void, by booting God out the door; and yes, we use the word door intentionally. In a very real way, these puffed-up philosophers and political theorists opened the doors and windows of Humanity’s House and swept it clean of all references to Yahweh. In doing so, they made our House ready for other inhabitants. These foolish humans thought their newly cleaned House would be furnished with their philosophical wisdom, that it would better Man’s future. Instead, this dangerous Void attracted evil: neo-paganism, witchcraft, spiritualism, and a return to the “old ways.” Though the context concerns a person freed of one demon infestation, we can see a foreshadowing of what happens to Mankind’s House, in Christ’s parable of the wandering spirit:

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”
— Matthew 14:43-45, emphasis added

The aforementioned Aleister Crowley participated in multiple magickal workings (again, spelled as Crowley insisted). As a child, Edward Alexander Crowley resisted his family’s Christian faith. His father, Edward Crowley, had inherited enough of a fortune from a family business to allow him to retire and preach the gospel. The senior Crowley converted from Quakerism to a subset of the Plymouth Brethren. As such, the younger Crowley’s youth was formed in a Christian mold. The willful child struggled with these constraints so much that his mother referred to the boy as “the Beast” (yes, that Beast). After his father’s death in 1887, young Edward Crowley inherited a tidy sum of money, allowing him to seek a looser lifestyle as a schoolboy. Such mischief forced his widowed mother to remove her son from one school after another, finally placing him with a Plymouth Brethren tutor. The child who would later call himself Aleister refused to believe in the Bible’s authenticity, proclaiming it filled with errors and inconsistencies.

That set Aleister Crowley’s life on a path that has influenced millions to follow, drawing them away from the Light for the last hundred years.

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^[1] Sian Cain, “Ten Things You Should Know About HP Lovecraft.” The Guardian, August 20, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/20/ten-things-you-should-know-about-hp-lovecraft, retrieved 2/9/24.

^[2] Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce, The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft’s Legend (Boston, MA: Weiser Books, 2003), p. 5.

^[3] One of the most well-known pop culture references to Lovecraft is the Arkham Asylum, which has been featured since the mid-1970s in the Batman comics, cartoons, movies, and video games. Arkham was named for a fictional town in Massachusetts featured in many of Lovecraft’s stories.