H.P. Lovecraft’s letters

‘I’d like to see that Delphic festival. Greece is the third in order of European nations which I would enjoy visiting—England and Italy being the other two. Greece contains some remarkable survivals of classic myth among the peasantry—I heard a highly illuminating lecture on the subject a year ago by Sir Rennell Rodd, a lifelong student of neo-Hellenic folklore. Much remains to be excavated in Greece—indeed, it is possible that art will receive a new stimulus from what archaeolgy will unearth during the next ten or twenty years’.

‘Emotionally, I endorse religion, and people the fields and streams and groves with the Grecian deities and local spirits of old—for at heart I am a pantheistic pagan of the old tradition which Christianity has never reached’.

Epistle to Woodburn Harris, 1929

‘The cringing Semitic slave-cult of Christianity became thrust upon our virile, ebullient Western stock through a series of grotesque historic accidents’.

Selected Letters, III, p. 45

‘If a Christian tells me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaethusa… My pompous book called Poemata Minora, written when I was eleven, was dedicated “To the Gods, Heroes and Ideals of the Ancients”, and harped in disillusioned, world-weary tones on the sorrow of the pagan robbed of his antique pantheon… I was, and still am, pagan to the core’.

February 1922