In searching the past for clues to the present, I have been reading a little about Ireland. My family is from western Ireland, historically a poverty-stricken and now a vastly depopulated place. Sad to say, much of that was because of the British. The Penal Laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were among the chief instruments of British oppression. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), an Anglo-Irishman and a man to whom we as Americans owe so much, wrote of the Penal Laws:
[A] machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.
I leafed through a book the other day and my eyes landed on a page, specifically a quote on that page. The book is Ireland for Beginners by Phil Evans and Eileen Pollock (1983). Here's the quote:
Illicit Catholic worship survives [in the early 1700s], using round flat-top rocks as altars hidden in the woods. (p. 26)
When I read those words, I thought immediately of altar stones in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and his associates. They're in or mentioned in "The Dunwich Horror,""The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Colour Out of Space," all by Lovecraft, and "Notebook Found in a Deserted House" by Robert Bloch. In every story, they are associated with forbidden rites, including rites of human sacrifice and of bringing into our world beings from other places. (1) Altar stones or sacrificial tables in Lovecraftian fiction are found on hilltops and in backwoods. If you replace the word Catholic with the word Cthulhu in the second quote above, you have a pretty precise description of them. By the way, the forbidden altar stone has a name: mass rock, or Carraig an Aifrinn in Irish.
That brings up two issues. First, the word Cthulhu in relationship to the word Catholic. If you remove the vowels and the last consonant (if h is a consonant) from both, you get:
Cthl
and
Cthl
Coincidence? Yeah, I think so.
Second, H.P. Lovecraft was a pretty WASPy guy, an old New England Protestant Tory. Did that make him anti-Catholic? I have never read anything anywhere to suggest that he was anti-Catholic, although as a nativist, he might have been disposed against Catholics and people from Catholic countries, for example, Italians, Spaniards, and Latin Americans. Castro, the old man who knows the story of Cthulhu in "The Call of Cthulhu," leaps to mind as one of the type. But was Lovecraft exposed to remnant anti-Catholic language and sentiment from Colonial America? Rhode Island was founded as a colony of religious freedom. Did that include freedom for Catholics? I suppose so. I have read that Rhode Island, at 44% of the total population, is the most Catholic state in America. I am more inclined to look at Lovecraft's admiration for and emulation of the writers and thinkers of the eighteenth century. The period during which they lived just happened to coincide with the enactment and enforcement of the Penal Laws in Ireland, as well as with the casting out of religion in favor of reason in western Europe as a whole. We're still paying the price for that casting out in that materialism, atheism, socialism, etc., with origins in the eighteenth century, are rampant in the world today. That's beside the point. The point is this: Did the image of the flat-top mass rock hidden in the woods, a place where forbidden rites were held, survive into the twentieth century and find its way into weird fiction? If so, was it still moored to anti-Catholicism, or had it been cut free to survive as a kind of atavism?
Note
(1) You could say that, in a way, the Catholic Mass is symbolic of human sacrifice and a bringing into the world of a being from another place. Beyond that, we shouldn't forget that the story of the resurrection of Cthulhu is similar to the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
 |
| H.P. Lovecraft in eighteenth century dress, by Virgil Finlay. |
Copyright 2015 Terence E. Hanley