The Occult Influences on Lovecraft Country (And Their Racist Legacy)
Warning! This post contains spoilers for episode two of Lovecraft Country.
The second episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country packed as much plot and emotion into a single hour than many series do in an entire season. The series, based on the novel by Matt Ruff, is a sort of anthology that will explore different horror tropes and genres. Last week was a “cabin in the woods” story and next will be a haunted house. This week’s entry was a take on the “creepy cult opening a door to another dimension.”
This is a great concept for sure and the way the series is recentering these tropes and common narratives on Black Americans is very interesting and needed at this time. My only quibble as a viewer is that I got some tonal whiplash going from episode one to two, considering how very different their pacing was; going from a slow build of tension in episode one to a non-stop rollercoaster of horrors and emotion in episode two.
But the real monster of Lovecraft Country is racism, and the series examines how institutions and culture perpetuate and support racist ideas. The cult plot was pretty much perfect for this, given how it tied into both real history and the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The way that the existence of the secret society here called the “Order of the Ancient Dawn,” was treated as unsurprising really worked, given how the lead characters are used to small groups of white men thinking they should run the world (America), and explicitly racist white men dressing up in robes and calling themselves Wizards (the KKK).
But where did the actual secret, occult societies referenced and alluded to here figure into history, racism, and how did they influence the real Lovecraft and thus the horror genre? One influence is clear just from the name “Order of the Ancient Dawn” and that is the very real Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawn was an organization devoted to ceremonial magic, founded in 1887. The practices of the group were derived from all over, with influences from Hermetic Qabalah, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and the Roman novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius. The group was concerned with seeking deeper spiritual truths and ancient wisdom and their members, practices, and traditions have influenced everything from the Tarot to modern Wicca to the works of Aleister Crowley.
H.P. Lovecraft was not a member of the Golden Dawn—he lived on the wrong continent and worked after the order had faded. But he was possibly influenced by the work of other alleged members (or dabblers) like Bram Stoker and possibly Robert Louis Stevenson. In actuality, the Golden Dawn was not, as Lovecraft’s cults were, an order intent on bringing back old gods or unlocking ancient evils. It was more a bunch of Victorians experimenting with magick and mysticism in a very repressed time. The idea of a secret cult channeling ancient knowledge to connect to “old gods” is a very Lovecraftian trope, and it’s clear he was in some way inspired by the Golden Dawn and their practices.
The Golden Dawn wasn’t as old as the “order of the Ancient Dawn” mentioned in Lovecraft Country, which was founded in the 1830s. Nor was it, as far as I can tell, explicitly racist. The group was, for their time, actually progressive, because they admitted women and treated them as equals, unlike the Freemasons and other secret groups. The group in Lovecraft Country, was of course, sexist as well as racist, and shutting out the character of Christina Braithwaite was one of the factors that led to their doom in the episode.
The Golden Dawn, like the Masons or other fraternal organizations, relied upon ceremony and a supposed connection to ancient ways. This sort of semi-esoteric ceremony is present in all sorts of organizations, from Greek fraternities to modern racist groups. And that brings us to the other influence on the cult at the center of this episode: the “wizards” as Tic (Johnathan Majors) pointedly calls them to reference something far more sinister than the old Golden Dawn: The Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan, founded after the Civil War and then re-founded in the 20th century after the success of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is a group dedicated to white supremacy and racism, but as part of that, they adopt the ceremonial and esoteric trappings of other fraternal organizations. Like the characters in Lovecraft Country, they use made-up ceremony and titles to harken back to a supposedly “greater” and whiter past.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn itself (founded after the KKK) was no more racist than any organization founded in 1887 in England might have been. It was in some ways progressive for its era, and the ideals of harkening back to a pre-Christian and mystical era were for some members, like W.B. Yeats, a powerful inspiration in terms of a struggle for national freedom for his homeland of Ireland. But even that was a form of privilege, which is one of the big points the episode makes. And the ideas of a Golden Dawn have become a rallying cry for some racists, such as a far-right party in Greece that has taken on the name.
One of the many climaxes of the episode saw Tic used for his body and blood during a cult ritual to open a door to the garden of Eden. The scene was scored by Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which highlights the privilege of white people to go to the moon while Black Americans still suffer. Thus it set the very idea of being in a cult, of seeking to open Eden, as a kind of white privilege. Just being in a creepy cult looking for a higher “cause” that whites have the luxury of pursuing while Black people struggle to survive.
But any “secret” and “mystical” group is going to inspire fear, and the confluence in Lovecraft Country of the racism and privilege of some secret societies and the racism of H.P. Lovecraft show us the more insidious implications of these orders. Not that they’re summoning monsters from another world, but how they represent a society that protects the monsters that are already there.
(image: HBO)
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