Durkheim meets Cthulhu: the impure sacred in H. P. Lovecraft

ABSTRACT American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is in vogue more than ever before. His creation – the Cthulhu mythos – is widely referenced across popular culture today. We can rightly speak of this as Lovecraft-mania, which is all the more unexpected considering Lovecraft’s personal details: he never achieved job stability in his life, let alone fame, while he was convinced that humanity had no value when seen in relation with the whole universe. This article examines what lies at the source of Lovecraft-mania as cultural phenomenon. By relying on Durkheim’s theory of religion, the article underlines the elements in Lovecraft’s writings marking a distinction between profane and sacred – not the pure sacred in this case, but the impure (transgressive) sacred. Through his stories, Lovecraft transports his readers from a profane time-space to a sacred time-space. It is this experience of transcendence that accounts for the pleasure (as effervescence) one finds in reading Lovecraft. Following this logic, we can add that the famous monsters imagined by Lovecraft – Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep to name a few – do not stand as symbols of Lovecraft’s own racism, but as celebrated religious totems in a Durkheimian sense.