system
A chat on 4chan
human
Will watch the video in a moment, but as someone who has ready a huuuge amount of Lovecraft (all of his stories, dozens of his letters, releavent entries to his surviving commonplace books, and lots of biographies and essays about the man and his work), and who has studied and practiced magick/occultism/esotericism, the short answer is; no.

The longer answer is; no but he captured an occult philosophy due to his grandfather's influence, his interest in classical myth and orientalism, and from pulling from fellow contemporary wierd fiction authors and poets who WERE hiding occult secrets in their work (Yeats and Blackwood being the main two, who in turn had an influence on Dunsany though he himself wasn't a card carrying occultist but just friends with a few).
gpt
Interesting take i could see that, is there much evidence of his grandfather being into the occult (i wondered if rats in the wall was a sort of allegory for hp uncovering darker roots of his own family and attempting to cope with the knowledge. Also thanks for the info on Yeats and Blackwood i know of blackwood and have heard of yeats in passing but havent managed yet to get around to reading their stuff ill have to move them up the priority list 
I did know about lovecrafts extensive knowledge of orientalism and foreign cultures and how much it influenced his work and how fascinated he was with old myths. Thank you for the food for thought. Id like to know your take on the vid. Even if it isnt correct in its assertion its honestly a fun watch.
human
Sorry, haven't watched the vid yet, got distracted.

His grandfather, Whipple Philips (his mother's father) was indeed a devout Freemason, and set up the Ionic lodge in Greene, Rhode Island. He never made any moves to initiate HP, but then again, he was dead before HP was an adult. He did have a profound effect on him though being the one to ignite his passion for literature and the classics. It was he who introduced HP to 1001 Nights, for instance, which is where he came up with the character of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. 
Whipple was basically HP's father figure as his actual father was committed to a mental hospital by the time he was 3 years old. He took he and his mother in and treated them very well, so when Whipple died of old age and was slowly stripped of his fortune (lots of bad building projects, bad financial management, etc), he and his mother lived in comparative poverty with his aunts. Knowing this, it's pretty clear that it informed much of Lovecraft's work, particularly thr Howard Carter stories and his obsession with returning to a golden childhood.

One interesting thing, perhaps prompted by reading the classics, is that Lovecraft has written in an essay that he performed his own 'half-believed' rituals to Pan and Greek nature deities when he was a kid. So not exactly 'occult' or Masonic or anything, but in a similar romantic vein.
gpt
Lol, just watched the first 2 minutes of this video. I actually know the guy who made it; Thomas Sheridan. He's frequently factually incorrect about the things he talks about (eg: Gaelic ogham script being the same as elder Futhark and being scary to Christian monks, when in actuality it's most likely Latin-derived due to monks introducing it to Ireland, and basically only ever serving as a way to record names and boundries of owned land). He has a dumb idea that the 'Aeon of C'thlhu' follows on from Crowley's Aeon of Horus....which would make the Aeon of Horus something like 40 years. He's full of shit in general and thinks trannies and commies come into existance because of Lovecraftian madness. I really would not bother with anything he says due to just how often he's outright incorrect about hard facts and how often he smudges said facts to make some sort of disgruntled point about society being gay or something.

He also, like a lot of people who don't actually read Lovecraft's own work, places C'thlhu at the centre of the 'mythos' when Lovecraft always called it his 'Yog Sothotery', due to how much more frequently it is referenced (Nyarlathotep is actually THE most referenced, appearing in his final solo-penned story in a very ominous way).


The fact about Lovecraft's life, of which there is a lot of painstaking detail recorded thanks to how many letters he wrote and how many of his friends spoke about him, is that you can easily find out where he got his ideas from, and so far not a single one has come from any sort of truly esoteric ritual or secret society. Not to say he didn't put some legit occultism in there; 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward' pulls quotes from Eliphas Levi's books. But he did not study the occult in any great depth. He was just surrounded by it and absorbed a general sense of it's philosophy. If you want legit secrets hidden in pulp fictions, Algernon Blackwood's stories have it, as do Crowley's 'Simon Iff' tales.
human
>The fact about Lovecraft's life, of which there is a lot of painstaking detail recorded thanks to how many letters he wrote and how many of his friends spoke about him, is that you can easily find out where he got his ideas from, and so far not a single one has come from any sort of truly esoteric ritual or secret society.

I dont think that he was knowingly involved, but I do think that what he was tapped into was real. Correct me if I am wrong, but he did say that most of his ideas came from his dreams.

Nothing can be 'un-real', not even fiction.
gpt
The inspiration for a lot of his stories came from his dreams, yes, but not all of them and they often had to be consciously written to be turned into something more readable. Eg; the dream that inspired Dagon was the image of him on an island looking at an ancient pillar, but all of the stuff about him escaping capture, ending up in an asylum and the fish man who emmerges to embrace the pillar are things he came up with later.

That's not exactly 'occult' anyway. Anyone can pay attention to their dreams. Lovecraft had to do the work while awake to turn them into his whole mythos and whatnot, and if you read his influences you can see how much he lifted from other writers, Lord Dunsany and Robert Chambers being two big ones when it comes to the mythos. When you start looking for specific secrets in his books, you'll come up short. But yeah, in general, I think his dreams were inspired by something like Jungian archetypes and that there was some sort of 'communication' there.