(Facts in the Case of Providence is a collaborative blog by Joe Linton, Alexx Kay, and Bobby Derie dedicated to annotating Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence and Neonomicon from Avatar Press. In what follows, Derie gives S&S readers a sense of the works’ layers and linkages to the study of religion.)

The seeker of truth for its own sake is chained to no conventional system, but always shapes his philosophical opinions upon what seems to him the best evidence at hand. Changes, therefore, are constantly possible; and occur whenever new or revalued evidence makes them logical.
– H. P. Lovecraft, “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922) [Lovecraft 2010, 1]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an atheist materialist, who in light of reflection and the discoveries of science dismissed the orthodoxies and mythologies of the world’s religions, saying such beliefs “could not possibly arise from a close and impartial survey of nature and the cosmos today[.]” (Lovecraft 2010, 89) While he may have lacked belief in God or the supernatural, Lovecraft at least appreciated  the importance of the religious feeling, as he expressed in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror  in Literature” (1927):

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.

Lovecraft’s own mythos, inspired by that of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen, was filled with indifferent, alien entities that satisfied both his materialism and his cosmicism; these were not airy spiritual beings, but creatures of matter—yet possessed too of tremendous capabilities and knowledge, and were subjects of worship by strange cults, some of which predated humanity, and their scriptures were terrible tomes like the Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Cultes des Goules, and Livre d’Eibon.

Alan Moore (1953-) is a ceremonial magician who works in a pantheistic cosmology, taking the ancient Roman god Glycon as his primary deity. (Doyle-White 29) Moore’s approach to Lovecraft is flavored by his interest in the occult, and by Moore’s careful study of the critical literature that has developed surrounding Lovecraft’s life and writings. (Derie) In part, this is an outgrowth of Moore’s continual interest in the blurring between fiction and reality, as expressed in works like From Hell by Moore and Eddie Campbell.

Even during his own life, Lovecraft’s creations began to take on a life of their own, as he received inquiries as to whether or not his fictional gods and blasphemous tomes were real. Lovecraft reported that one correspondent, the aged occultist William Lumley, believed he and his fellow pulpsters:

[…] are genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark and profound for human conception or comprehension. We may think we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, an other pleasant Outside gentry. (Lovecraft 1976, 271)

Lumley unknowingly presaged the occultist Kenneth Grant, one of the heirs of Aleister Crowley, who likewise accepted the “magickal truth” of Lovecraft in The Magical Revival (1972), which was followed in ensuing years by a medley of Necronomicons, and other magical writings which accepted as given that Lovecraft’s entities were either real, or that the idea of those fictitious entities were real enough for occult workings, as expressed particularly by Phil Hine in the Pseudonomicon (1996).

Alan Moore’s The Courtyard (2003) by Moore, Antony Johnston, and Jacen Burrows touches only very lightly on the more religious aspects of Lovecraft’s mythology, paying homage to a few names and images, but not much else. If anything it pays more tribute to Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder” (1895), with the eponymous drug acting as a sacrament of initiation for protagonist Aldo Sax into the mysteries of Lovecraft’s mythos.

Burrows and Moore’s Neonomicon (2010), which acts as a sequel to The Courtyard, goes into a little more depth. The trappings of Lovecraft’s stories are still largely kept off the page, but the reader is introduced many of the core concepts—the blurring of line between Lovecraft’s fiction and the reality, an organization built up around the orgiastic rites which Lovecraft would hint at and never describe. As Moore himself put it:

And also, where Lovecraft being sexually squeamish, would only talk of ‘certain nameless rituals.’ Or he’d use some euphemism: ‘blasphemous rites.’ It was pretty obvious, given that a lot of his stories detailed the inhuman offspring of these ‘blasphemous rituals’ that sex was probably involved somewhere along the line. But that never used to feature in Lovecraft’s stories, except as a kind of suggested undercurrent. So I thought, let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in. Let’s come up with some genuinely ‘nameless rituals’ – let’s give them a name. So those were the precepts that it started out from, and I decided to follow wherever the story lead. It is one of the most unpleasant stories I have ever written.
(“Alan Moore: Unearthed and Uncut”)

The “nameless rituals” and “blasphemous rites” of Lovecraft’s fiction in part echo the era he lived in and the colonial fiction that influenced him; many of the various cultists of the Lovecraft mythos are “exotic” or foreign in make-up, and follow the sensationalist and often inaccurate portrayals and understanding of religion such as found in William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), or theosophical texts like The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1925) by William Scott-Elliot, both referenced in Lovecraft’s letters.

Still, Moore doesn’t venture very far into these particular waters, and the main crux of Neonomicon concerns a very realistic and brutal rape by a Lovecraftian monster—an act which might echo the “divine rape,” and which features a parallel or echo of the annunciation of Mary—following a tradition from Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and Lovecraft’s own “The Dunwich Horror,” and is explored somewhat further in The Horror of Rape: Alan Moore, Lovecraft, and Neonomicon.

Providence (2015-) is proving to be a different beast. Set as a prequel to The Courtyard and Neonomicon, the core idea of the series so far has been a re-casting and re-evaluation of Lovecraft’s mythos, with the “real” characters and events behind Lovecraft’s fictions reimagined. While Lovecraft had written his stories sporadically over a lifetime, with little idea of a cohesive mythology, Moore and Burrows deconstruct his characters and re-establish them in the context of history and occult theory.

Issue #2, for example, “The Hook” relates directly to Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927), a tale that deals with a multi-ethnic devil-worshiping cult in the New York City—but Lovecraft’s xenophobic horrors largely never materialize on the page, as the reality of Providence showcases an erudite occultist whose particular interests lie in certain aspects of mythology, such as the demon Lilith, which featured prominently in the climax of Lovecraft’s tale. Moore has made a distinct effort in Providence to ground Lovecraft’s often slipshod occultism in something closer to reality, with references to the Kabbalah and other systems.

Providence is seen through the eyes of a most atypical Lovecraftian protagonist: Robert Black, whose Jewish ancestry and status as a homosexual put him at odds with the world of 1919, and as he tracks down the secrets of Hali’s Booke (the Providence analogue of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon) in issue #3, he finds a strange sympathy with the hybrid folk of Salem (standing in for Innsmouth) and the persecution they suffer for their queer religion, directly in antipathy with Lovecraft’s treatment of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931)—though perhaps if Black had read a little deeper, and understood a little more, perhaps he would be less kind in his appraisal.

Just as Lovecraftian literature has been subject to analysis comparable to a biblical manuscript, one of the tricks of Providence is how it can be read and understood at multiple levels by the reader. Part of this hinges on the swastika—used by Lovecraft in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a talisman against certain entities, probably echoing its long use as a good luck charm, but in the context of eventual arrest and internment of the Innsmouth folk in that tale, it assumes a more sinister shadow of things to come, as expressed in a lengthy and phantasmagorical dream-sequence which equates the persecution of the Deep One hybrids for their race and religion with the Holocaust—and the greatest horror might be that the reader, knowing more of what they believe and practice, might find this a lesser evil.

An examination of Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) forms the crux of issue #4, and introduces—or perhaps emphasizes—the idea of prophecy in Providence, as Hali’s Booke speaks of a messiah (“the Redeemer”) who will apparently be preceded by a John the Baptist-type figure (“the Herald”)—the latter of which many folks appear to believe Black is. The sudden familiar echoes of the Judeo-Christian myth-cycle is not quite as jarring as it first appears: “The Dunwich Horror” after all is based on Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” and both of them deal with the supernatural conception of of an offspring by a god-like figure or force, in a direct relation to the conception and birth of Christ, and which has been commented on by, among others, Donald Burleson in Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (1990).

The introduction of this myth, as a story within a story for readers to tease out over subsequent issues, casts into question many of the assumptions made about Providence and its relation with Neonomicon, and invites the kind of speculation into the “reality” of Providence, even as it forges direct connections between Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothoth and the Kabbalistic Tree-of-Life, which attempts to reconcile Lovecraft’s story with sex magick along the lines of Aleister Crowley’s The Moonchild (1917). This concept of a “deity” or “messiah” being so conceived, and retroactively altering history to arrange for its own conception, would appear again in issue #6, and recalls the idea of the Biblical God as a self-created entity, to which Lovecraft once noted:

As to the origin of a supposed deity—if one always existed and always will exist, how can he be developing creation from one definite state to another? Nothing but a cycle is in any case conceivable—a cycle or an infinite rearrangement, if that be a tenable thought. (Lovecraft 2010, 59)

As Providence is only on issue number 7, it is too soon to tell if this kind of cycle or infinite arrangement is what Moore and Burrows have planned as they continue their exploration and exegesis of Lovecraft’s work. What is clear is the extant to which the sacred texts—Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and Hali’s Booke in Providence—both seem to factor into the mythology, acting as the key transmission of the true message to those who are supposed to receive it. It yet remains to be seen how (or if) Moore will close the circle between Providence and Neonomicon, between Hali’s Booke and the Necronomicon, between the alien gods that Lovecraft didn’t believe in but which Lumley and Grant did.

Works Cited

“Alan Moore: Unearthed and Uncut” (2010). By Bram E. Gieben. Weaponizer. Retrieved from: https://web.archive.org/web/20130626013148/http://www.weaponizer.co.uk/onearticle.php?category=nonfic&articleid=181

Derie, Bobby (2015). “The Road to Providence.” Retrieved from: https://factsprovidence.wordpress.com/moore-lovecraft-comics-annotation-index/the-road-to-providence/

Doyle-White, Ethan (Summer 2009). “Occultic World of Alan Moore” in Pentacle.

Lovecraft, H. P. (2010). Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Sporting Gentlemen.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1976). Selected Letters IV: 1932-1934. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1927). “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Retrieved from: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx

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