Cosmic Horror: The Coming of Azathoth
Unveiling the Thoth Archetype in Lovecraftian Lore
This essay unearths the hidden influence of the Egyptian god Thoth on H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror, bridging the chasm between ancient mythology, modern literature, and contemporary philosophy. By examining the archetypal resonance of Thoth in Lovecraft's works, we seek to uncover the deeper connections between forbidden knowledge, cosmic order, and existential dread.
Our analysis extends to Alexander Dugin's philosophical reflections on horror, particularly his engagement with Eugene Thacker's concept of the "World-without-Us." This concept provides a framework for appreciating the true power of Lovecraftian themes: the stark confrontation with an objective reality indifferent to human existence, a reality that demands not submission, but understanding.
Our analysis was inspired by and incorporates key insights from Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin's essay, "Toward a General Theory of Horror." Dugin's piece serves as a contemporary philosophical foray into the nature of horror, one that informs our analysis of cosmic dread that permeates the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.
Dugin, engaging with Eugene Thacker's concept of the "World-without-Us" — a reality beyond human comprehension that actively negates our existence — proposes that true horror stems not from external threats but rather from the internal confrontation with this very abyss. Dugin warns that the pursuit of ultimate knowledge, the drive to penetrate the veil of reality, can lead to an encounter with a void that consumes all meaning and order.
Particularly intriguing is his reflection on the Russian soul, suggesting that, in a Russian person, "the stubborn love for life...shifts horror too deep inside — so deep that we don't notice it ourselves. But others do notice. Horror is what we inspire."
While Dugin explores the philosophical implications of the "World-without-Us," his concept of an incomprehensible void that negates human existence has ancient parallels. If Dugin's abyss is the ultimate chaos, then the Egyptian god Thoth stands as its antithesis. He was, throughout history, a deity of order, knowledge, and writing, representing humanity's quest to understand, categorize, and impose structure upon a chaotic universe.
This terror is not merely literary; it mirrors the fundamental struggle of the individual against a universe that often appears indifferent to human existence. Our collective angst, fueled by a rapidly changing technological landscape that simultaneously promises progress and threatens to render us obsolete, is transformed into the essence of cosmic horror.
The process resembles a Catch-22 — we strive to control our destiny through technology, yet this very technology brings us face-to-face with forces beyond our comprehension, creating a self-reinforcing reality that exacerbates contemporary anxieties. Lovecraft's vision, then, becomes a chilling prophecy of the technological age, where our own creations might ultimately become the instruments of our existential undoing.
A Master of Cosmic Horror
H.P. Lovecraft crafted a literary universe populated by ancient, incomprehensible entities and pervaded by a sense of humanity's insignificance in the face of a vast, indifferent cosmos. While his literary lineage can be traced to the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe and even the fantastical realms of Lord Dunsany, we argue that Thoth, as an archetype who first appeared in Egyptian mythology during the Predynastic Period (6000–3150 BC), was involved.
This essay proposes that Thoth, in his archetypal role as a deity of writing, knowledge, and cosmic order, served as Lovecraft’s unwitting muse. Together they shaped the themes and narrative style that define Lovecraftian horror. This viewpoint, consistent with our Theory of Archetypes, suggests that we correlate Lovecraftian horror with our own time and prepare ourselves accordingly.
Furthermore, we will explore how these themes intersect with the contemporary philosophical reflections on horror, particularly as articulated by Alexander Dugin in "Toward a General Theory of Horror."
Dugin's exploration of horror, particularly his engagement with Eugene Thacker's concept of the "World-without-Us, i.e. a world without humanity, provides a framework for understanding the power and precision of Lovecraft's prophetic vision.
The World-without-Us — According to Thacker, this is what instills horror, as it lies between the world-with-us and the world-in-itself. This intermediate dimension is the experience of contact with something that actively and concretely abolishes our very nature. This is the zone of pure horror, not fear. Contact with the world-without-us is far more acute than personal death. When we perish, our species remains. But the experience of the species' extinction is truly horrifying.
Alexander Dugin
This notion of a reality beyond human comprehension, one that actively negates our existence, is central to Lovecraft's work. His ‘Great Old Ones’ and ‘Outer Gods,’ slumbering in the depths of space or in sunken cities beneath the sea, embody the "World-without-Us." These monsters represent forces utterly indifferent to human life and capable of extinguishing it without a second thought.1
The Book of Thoth
The apocryphal Book of Thoth was rumored to contain spells that allowed one to understand the speech of animals, and to perceive the gods themselves. Could such a grimoire have been an inspiration for Lovecraft's Necronomicon?2 We believe that it was.
The very name, ‘Azathoth,’ Lovecraft's ‘Idiot God’ who is at the center of his mythos, hints at a connection to Thoth and, by extension, to the horrifying implications of encountering a reality well beyond human understanding.
The origin of the name 'Azathoth' is debated among scholars. Some suggest biblical influences like 'Anathoth' and 'Azazel'. However, the '-thoth' suffix and Azathoth's role as a primal force at the universe's core may hint at Thoth's influence. Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, represents cosmic order and knowledge, which starkly contrasts with Azathoth's chaotic nature.
It is not unreasonable to posit that the name's phonetic quality, combined with the god's archetypal significance, subconsciously influenced Lovecraft, even if a direct, conscious link is absent. This is how archetypes behave across eons.3
In Lovecraft's own words, from a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, he describes his creative process:
All I say is that I think it is rather good fun to have a consistent and artificial mythology to play with. One's stories then get such an air of verisimilitude and objective reality.
This suggests to me that Lovecraft was more concerned with creating an "air of verisimilitude" than with strict adherence to established mythologies. It also suggests that he intuitively grasped the significance of the Collective Unconscious — the abode of archetypes and ‘playful mythologies’ — with authentic creativity.
Azathoth, then, can be seen as a terrifying inversion of Thoth's ordered wisdom – a blind, chaotic force that underscores the ultimate insignificance of human knowledge and understanding in the face of cosmic reality.
Thoth’s Attributes
Thoth's multifaceted nature as a deity of knowledge, both sacred and forbidden, finds a foreboding resonance in Lovecraft's recurring exploration of the perils of unchecked intellectual curiosity. Lovecraft's protagonists, often scholars and antiquarians, are driven by a thirst for knowledge that leads them to uncover truths best left undisturbed.
Thoth is also known for his own complex relationship with wisdom – he is both a bestower of knowledge and a guardian of secrets too profound for the human mind to bear. Dugin highlights this tension:
Horror arises from within, confronting something undefined and inexpressible. Lovecraft's characters, in their pursuit of forbidden knowledge, often confront this very "undefined and inexpressible" horror, a confrontation that shatters their sanity and leaves them face-to-face with the "World-without-Us.”
Call of Cthulhu
This theme is epitomized in Lovecraft's famous dictum from his pulp fiction novella, Call of Cthulhu: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."4
Call of Cthulhu explores the horrors and mystery of the “Black Abyss," where humanity may be trapped or where something rising may sink. The "Black Abyss" represents everything that Thoth's ordered domain is not. It is the chaos that exists beyond the boundaries of knowledge and understanding — the realm that Thoth's wisdom seeks to keep at bay.
In Dugin’s cosmology, the ‘Black Abyss’ is a manifestation of the "World-without-Us,” the catastrophic event that he implicitly warns us against. This is not arcane, lunchbag philosophy: The ‘Black Abyss’ is an existential threat that stares us modern humans in the face every day.
Both "Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" explore this threat through the consequences of unleashing forbidden knowledge – a theme in modern debates surrounding transhumanism and its potential to irrevocably alter the human condition. In each story, characters delve into secrets that shatter their understanding of reality, bringing them face-to-face with monstrous forces that threaten to engulf and ultimately obliterate the human soul and our world.
The Dunwich Horror
Dunwich is a “sinister little town haunted by a fearsome family of sorcerers, the Whateleys, constantly busy trying to contact dangerous cosmic entities from the Cthuloid mythology invented by Lovecraft.”5
In the story, the protagonist, Dr. Armitage, must use his knowledge of the Necronomicon, a forbidden tome echoing the apocryphal Book of Thoth, to combat a monstrous entity spawned from a union between a human and an Outer God, a category of cosmic entities that are located beyond Earth and our Solar System, somewhat akin to Jung’s archetypes.
The story again highlights the dangers of delving into forbidden knowledge and the terrifying consequences of encountering forces beyond human comprehension.
Moreover, Thoth's role as a mediator between realms, a psychopomp guiding souls through the underworld, resonates with Lovecraft's frequent use of liminal spaces and cosmic messengers.
Lovecraft's stories often unfold at the liminal space between reality and nightmare, where the familiar laws of nature dissolve, and humans encounter entities that defy comprehension. These entities, often acting as harbingers of cosmic truths, mirror Thoth's function as an intermediary between the known and the unknowable.
Dugin notes in his essay that, "Fear makes us flee, while horror makes us freeze in place." Lovecraft's protagonists, when confronted with these cosmic messengers, are often paralyzed by a horror that transcends mere fear and brings them into "face-to-face combat" with the unimaginable.
The Fungoid Mi-Go
In the short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," a Vermont folklorist engages in correspondence with a man who claims to have encountered an extraterrestrial race. The story unfolds through letters, recalling Thoth's role as a god of writing, and gradually reveals the horrifying truth about the Mi-Go, a colonizing fungoid species from another planet.
The tale exemplifies Lovecraft's use of liminal spaces – the remote Vermont hills and the cosmic messengers – and the Mi-Go6 themselves – to convey a sense of dread and vastness of the unknown.
The influence of Thoth can also be discerned in Lovecraft's distinctive narrative style. The author's penchant for vague, adjectival descriptions when depicting moments of cosmic horror can be interpreted as a reflection of Thoth's guardianship over hidden knowledge.
Lovecraft himself hints at the indescribable, employing a "scientific precision vs. cosmic vagueness" approach, that mirrors the transition from the known, recordable knowledge associated with Thoth's role as a scribe, to the unknowable and ineffable nature of cosmic truth and prophecy.
A Scrivener of Cosmic Horror
While Lovecraft drew inspiration from a multitude of sources, the archetypal resonance of Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, knowledge, and cosmic order, provides a structure for understanding the thematic and stylistic underpinnings of his cosmic horror.
From the phonetic echoes in the name ‘Azathoth’ to the thematic exploration of forbidden knowledge and the stylistic use of vagueness and intertextuality, Thoth's influence, whether conscious or unconscious, can be spotted throughout Lovecraft's work. Thoth is the quintessential hidden muse, the scrivener of cosmic horror, his archetypal imprint influencing the very fabric of Lovecraft's literary universe, and others as well. For example:
Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious — The archetype of the Shadow, representing the repressed, darker aspects of the personality, can be seen as a muse in works that explore themes of duality, good vs. evil, and the hidden darkness within human nature. Think of works like Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Or even the hit TV show Dexter, a personal favorite.
The Divine Feminine — The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was heavily influenced by the archetype of the Divine Feminine, often depicting idealized, ethereal female figures inspired by medieval romances and mythology.
The Lady of Shalott
The Lady of Shalott's tragic fate resonates with contemporary existential dread. Her confinement in the tower, permitted only to view reality through a mirror's mediation, can be interpreted as a metaphor for modern humanity's increasing detachment from direct experience — our world increasingly filtered through screens, algorithms, and digital interfaces.
When she finally turns to view reality directly, the resulting curse and her death mirror Dugin's conception of encountering the 'World-without-Us' — a devastating confrontation with unfiltered reality that our constructed systems of meaning cannot withstand.
The 'curse' that befalls her when she looks directly at Camelot can be understood as analogous to the existential horror Dugin describes — the shattering of constructed reality upon encountering something that transcends and negates it.
Her death represents not merely physical cessation but the complete unraveling of a constructed worldview — a fate that modern humanity increasingly fears as technological advancement forces us to confront questions about the nature of consciousness, reality, and our place in an increasingly incomprehensible universe.
This universal experience of existential dread, however, manifests differently across cultures. Dugin's provocative question, "What could be the phenomenon or concept closest to Russian horror?" and his subsequent reflection on the Russian soul's unique relationship with the world, suggests that an encounter with the "World-without-Us" may manifest differently in various cultural contexts.
If, as Dugin suggests, the Russian soul internalizes horror, the Western psyche, steeped in a tradition of Enlightenment rationalism and a focus on individual autonomy, might experience the "World-without-Us" as an externalized threat, a shattering of its carefully constructed worldview.
The Western emphasis on scientific progress and the pursuit of knowledge, while generally dismissive of Spirit, can paradoxically make it more vulnerable to the existential dread of cosmic horror. Many of Lovecraft's predominantly American and British protagonists, often scholars and scientists, descend into madness, their rational worldviews shattered by forces beyond their comprehension.
This vulnerability reveals a deeper truth about the human condition. The horror he evokes indeed taps into a fundamental human anxiety about our place in the cosmos. The power of these ideas drives us simultaneously to explore the cosmos and ponder the fragility of our existence.
A Reflection
No utterance worthy of heaven will be heard or believed, and so the gods will depart from mankind — a grievous thing — and only evil angels will remain who will mingle with men and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime — into wars and robberies and frauds and all things hostile to the nature of the soul.
Then will the Earth tremble and the sea bear no ships. Heaven will not support the stars in their orbits. All voices of the gods will be forced into silence. The fruits of the earth will rot. The soil will turn barren and the very air will sicken with sullen stagnation.
All things will be disordered and awry.
All good will disappear. *
Hermetic prophecy voiced by Graham Hancock in the 10-min. video below.
(The original tune topped Billboard’s chart for 6-weeks in 1969. I was in Vietnam. It’s featured it as a bridge between the Cosmic Horrors of past and present.)
Great Old Ones — A group of demonic extraterrestrial gods that are the main antagonists in the Cthulhu Mythos. They are more well-known to mortals than the Outer Gods, but are less powerful.
Outer Gods — A category of cosmic entities that are located beyond Earth and the Solar System, somewhat akin to Jung’s archetypes. They exert their influence from deep space or beyond our dimension, but some have taken up residence on Earth.
The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire, or textbook of magic, that appears in the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers.
Archetypal consciousness is not characterized by personal identity or subjective experience in the same way that self-aware consciousness is typically associated with individual human beings. Rather, it can be understood as a potential for consciousness inherent within the archetype’s vibrational pattern itself. This potential is actualized and becomes observable when an archetype is activated and subsequently interacts with an individual’s psyche. In this context, consciousness refers to the organized, dynamic, and responsive nature of archetypes, their ability to shape perception, and their tendency to manifest in consistent and meaningful ways across individuals and cultures. This perspective aligns with Jung's view of the psyche as a ‘self-regulating system’ where archetypes function as organizing principles. Further, it does not contradict a scientific worldview, as modern neuroscience increasingly recognizes the powerful influence of unconscious processes on human behavior and cognition.
The Dunwich Horror (movie review)
The Mi-Go are depicted as an extragalactic species that has colonized numerous worlds. They are described as winged fungal creatures that resemble crustaceans, with large claws and heads covered in antennae. The Mi-Go are a scientifically and technologically advanced race, having a particularly sophisticated grasp of surgical techniques and neuroscience. (Source: Lovecraft Wiki) Note: Mi-Go is an indeclinable noun, similar to how we treat some animal names in English (e.g., "one sheep, two sheep; one deer, two deer").