Cosmicism

Cosmicism is a literary philosophy associated with H. P. Lovecraft that portrays humanity as insignificant in an immense, indifferent universe, where human values and knowledge cannot command cosmic meaning.

H. P. Lovecraft: An American writer whose fiction shaped modern horror and articulated cosmicism. His stories and essays give cosmicism its best-known literary expression.
The Call of Cthulhu: A 1928 short story by H. P. Lovecraft about a cult and an ancient entity beneath the Pacific. Its discovery of Cthulhu renders humanity’s place in history startlingly brief.
Edgar Allan Poe: An American writer known for poetry and tales of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre. Poe’s atmosphere and psychological horror helped shape Lovecraft’s literary inheritance.
Cthulhu Mythos: A shared fictional universe of deities, locations, and lore originating in Lovecraft’s stories and expanded by other writers. The mythos gave later authors a framework for extending cosmicist fiction.
Cosmic horror: A mode of horror in which encounters with vast, incomprehensible forces expose human vulnerability. It turns cosmicism’s indifference and human smallness into narrative dread.
At the Mountains of Madness: A 1936 novella by H. P. Lovecraft about an Antarctic expedition uncovering an ancient nonhuman civilization. Its explorers find evidence that humans are latecomers to an older world.
Lord Dunsany: An Irish writer whose mythic fantasy and invented pantheons influenced twentieth-century fantasy literature. Lovecraft drew on Dunsany’s dreamlike mythmaking before developing his own cosmic idiom.
Weird fiction: A literary mode that blends horror, fantasy, and the uncanny to unsettle familiar explanations of reality. Cosmicism is one influential philosophical current within this broader literary mode.
Anthropocentrism: The view that human beings occupy a central or privileged place in the world. Cosmicism rejects the human-centered assumptions this outlook makes.
The Colour Out of Space: A 1927 story by H. P. Lovecraft about an extraterrestrial force that devastates a farm and its surroundings. The alien force resists familiar explanation and leaves human life powerless.

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