H. P. LOVECRAFT &THE BLACK MAGICKAL TRADITION can be PRE-ORDERED now on AMAZON or at BARNES &NOBLE.
AMAZON 
BARNES & NOBLE.

A full description of the book, along with other pertinent information, can be found on my website:
www.johnlsteadman.com.

I have some events coming in the autumn which might be of interest.

The Church of Mabus 
Radio Interview- Friday, 9/4/15 7:00 PM Eastern Time
The Crazy Wisdom Bookstore & Tea Room.
Book Signing Event- Tuesday, 10/6/15, 7:00-8:30 PM

Continuing my exploration of different issues associated with H. P. Lovecraft, many fans of horror and fantasy fiction find it rather odd that Lovecraft was a self-professed materialist and an atheist.  These readers often wonder why Lovecraft felt inclined to create a pantheon of gods and goddesses since a “real” atheist wouldn’t commonly do such a thing.  After all, atheists are not supposed to believe in gods or goddesses.

It is true, of course, that Lovecraft identified himself as a “mechanistic materialist”, by which he meant that he was a believer in the doctrine that nothing exists apart from matter and that all the facts of existence and experience can be explained in reference to the laws of material substances.  Since spiritual beings such as gods or goddesses are immaterial, Lovecraft denied their existence.  In this sense, he was, at least philosophically, an atheist.  But Lovecraft also acknowledged that humans have an incomplete and limited knowledge of reality and thus, he tended to keep an open mind on the issue of spirituality, accepting the premise that there might be alternate levels of being that “supplement” rather than contradict the laws of material substances. Consequently, Lovecraft was closer in his thinking to agnosticism rather than to pure atheism.

There are two other things that should be considered in this context.  First, Lovecraft’s mechanistic, materialist side represented only one aspect of his complex psyche; another, more important aspect to Lovecraft was his deep, abiding respect for dreams and the dreamscape.  Lovecraft was an avid dreamer all of this life and he was both fascinated and frightened by what he encountered in his dreams. Secondly, Lovecraft had always been drawn to weird themes and weird literature since his earliest childhood days and his fascination with the weird ultimately led him to creative composition. And when he created, elements of both the materialistic and the dreaming aspects of Lovecraft’s psyche were invariably represented in his work.

Thus, Lovecraft didn’t deliberately go about constructing gods and goddesses; his pantheon of entities naturally arose as his writing and dream life intensified.  And, interestingly enough, his extra-terrestrial entities reflect his scientific approach to the cosmos.  In many of the stories and poems, the Great Old Ones are depicted as actual extra-terrestrial entities and not really gods or goddesses at all; they are demythologized, as S. T. Joshi refers to it.  In other stories and poems, when the Great Old Ones are presented as Gods and Goddesses, Lovecraft gives us very sophisticated entities, entities that conform, as much as possible, to descriptions of the Quantum Universe. 

JLS