Due Nov 4
Properties of Light
Blackbody radiation and line spectra; the composition of stars. Colonialism and turn-of-the-century science fiction.
Astronomy Reading
Openstax Astronomy (pdf | online), Chapter 5.
Fieldwork
Galileo’s Moons final: details in the assignment posted at right.
Artwork: brief description
Via email: please send Prof Henebry a brief (2-sentence) description of the artwork you’re preparing for the end of the semester. This isn’t a contract—you can change your mind. We just want to jog your memory and get your creative juices flowing.
Arts Assignment
HP Lovecraft, “The Color Out of Space” and the opening passage from “The Call of Cthulhu” (download link). How does Lovecraft compare, in his conception of the cosmos, with Virgil or Galileo earlier in the term? Write a 1-3¶ response on this or another aspect of the reading of interest to you. At some point in your response, be sure to focus attention on a key passage from the reading.
I think it is interesting to compare Virgil’s writing with Lovecraft’s. Both of them, in very different ways, seem to have similar conceptions of both geocentrism, good v. evil, and extraterrestrial power over humans. In Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space” the alien that arrives in the story is “against Nature.” It kills the Gardner’s crops before killing the whole family. The family is described as “good” (church going and social) before the alien brings evil to them. It seems to suck the life out of them. This “goodness” depicted of the family juxtaposed to the “evil” of extraterrestrial life is interesting promotes a geocentric view, wherein only Earth’s inhabitants are capable of being good. I think Vigil’s writing is similar. The Gods are working to protect the helpless humans. Though they have the control, their focus is still in humans. Their is a sense that both of these authors see humans at the center of the cosmos.
Both authors also share similar conceptions of humans’ powerlessness to outside forces. The humans in both stories seem to be at will to the extraterrestrial powers. The Gods dictate humans’ lives, and the alien is able to destroy the family.
Lovecraft’s view of the universe is definitely different from what we saw from Virgil and Galileo. The universe in Aenid feels controlled by the gods toward human goals while Galileo’s universe has structure and order. Almost everything in their respective universes can be understood by other people through reason and/or science.
However, in The Call of Cthulhu, the opening passage reads “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Lovecraft leans into the idea that ignorance is bliss, since true knowledge could drive humans crazy. In The Color Out of Space, Lovecraft writes “It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it,” creating a universe that is strange and chaotic instead of one full of divine purpose and rooted in reason. Where Virgil and Galileo believed that the cosmos had meaning, Lovecraft saw space as something completely alien, mysterious, and something humans know horrifyingly little of
I liked the way Lovecraft is very blunt with his opinions and writing surrounding how humans actually don’t know much and are ignorant. I really thought that the introduction to “The Call of Cthulhu” was very interesting and the most interesting part of the passage. Reading about how he wrote so bluntly about humans and our knowledge of the world around us. This is a stark contrast compared to Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil takes a stance that the Gods are directly influential in human lives, giving them knowledge. Virgil almost makes it seem like we are divine due to our proximity to the gods, whereas Lovecraft shows how ordinary humans and our knowledge actually are.
Lovecraft’s view of the cosmos, from my perspective, is somehow an exploration of the undescribed portion of Galileo’s. Galileo believed that humans can understand the universe by studying it through experiment, mathematics, and reason, but not how complex and desperate the process can be. In a specific paragraph in Lovecraft’s writing, he describes how, when the scientists examine the meteorite that fell on the farm, their tools are useless and their theories are completely off, and the more they study, the less they understand, until they begin to doubt their own senses. The narrator describes how the professors “verified the fact of the utter vanishment” after the meteorite disappeared, and how “nothing of value had been learned of it.”
The scientists in the story investigate the meteorite exactly as Galileo would, through testing and observation, but nothing makes sense. Their experiments end in confusion, leaving them unsure of what they even saw. This part of Lovecraft’s writing explores the dark side of Galileo’s optimism: instead of knowledge leading to clarity, it more often leads to doubt first. The universe must still follow some laws, but they might be beyond human grasp. It is true that humans can eventually learn something, but the process of learning and understanding the Universe can be challenging and discouraging.
In the Lovecraft reading, page six is particularly striking. Capturing moments of unordinary situations, the writer uses the farm and animals to discuss how the cosmos is embedded into Earth’s natural society. For example, Nahum’s prosperous crops ended up being poisoned by a meteorite, showing that forces from outer space can affect the livelihood of humans on Earth. Additionally, the connection to tales based on unusual animal footprints is interesting to see. As many cultures have had stories about the moon for centuries, the mentioning of a rabbit can remind readers of the East Asian legend that the moon’s dark markings look like a rabbit pounding ingredients. Therefore, the passage reflects Earth’s direct relation to the cosmos, as well as observations included in cultural tales.
Compared to Virgil or Galileo, Lovecraft’s conception of the universe seems far colder and more terrifying. Virgil believed that there was still order in the universe, regardless of whether it was divine or strange. Even if he disagreed with tradition, Galileo believed that mathematics and observation could help us comprehend the universe. However, Lovecraft disregards all of that consolation. He claims in “The Call of Cthulhu” that we dwell “on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity” and that when we come to terms with how tiny and helpless we truly are, our own curiosity will eventually drive us insane. His statement, which essentially suggests that science may open doors we’d be better off keeping closed rather than enlightening us, really struck a chord with me.
That same concept is demonstrated in The Color Out of Space by the meteorite and its strange “color,” which obliterates everything it comes into contact with. The scientists examining it are unable to even determine its composition or characterize its color. It is literally incomprehensible to us. Lovecraft’s universe is very different since it doesn’t give a damn about humans. We are unable to decipher any logic or divine order. In a cosmos that is far larger, older, and wilder than we will ever understand, we are but spectators. It’s both fascinating and somewhat melancholy since it challenges the conventional wisdom that knowledge is always beneficial; according to Lovecraft, having too much knowledge is what destroys us.
Based on The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space, Lovecraft’s view of the universe feels completely out of sync from Virgil and Galileos. While Vigril saw that world as guided by the fate and gods and Galileo believed it could be understood through science and reason, Lovecraft suggest that it is far beyond what humans could ever comprehend. In The Call of Cthulhu, he writes that “we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity” which exemplifies his belief that humans are small and insignificant compared to the mysteries beyond earth. In The Colour Out of Space, the strange meteorite that poisons everything around also highlights the idea that cosmos holds things we can’t explain or control. To me, Lovecraft’s world feels cold and indifferent where curiosity and knowledge don’t lead to understand but fear and madness.
I found the story interesting. It seems like Lovecraft writes from a darker and more depressing point of view about the cosmos and exploration. He seems to find a kind of peace in humanity’s ignorance, suggesting that we’re blessed by our inability to immediately understand everything. He even portrays reason as a sort of curse, because ignorance is merciful and blissful.
On the other hand, these ideas completely contrast Galileo’s. Galileo believed in exploring and using science to uncover the truth regardless of what the Church wanted. He was entirely against the idea that ignorance is bliss, believing instead that humanity has a right to know the truth—even if that knowledge might challenge people’s beliefs or cause confusion. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft writes, “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” This completely goes against Galileo’s belief that the universe was meant to be explored and understood. To Galileo, the human ability to use science and reason to learn about the universe was amazing and enlightening. Lovecraft flips this idea, treating knowledge as a curse that could lead to our downfall.
Lovecraft also writes, “The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality…” For Galileo, understanding the universe brought meaning and order to the world. For Lovecraft, science and reason lead only to horror and the collapse of meaning. These are two wildly different perspectives. Personally, I agree more with Galileo’s ideas, but I understand where Lovecraft is coming from—sometimes ignorance really is bliss. We never know what we might discover next; like the deadly force in “The Colour Out of Space” that destroys the Gardner family, exploring space could reveal things we’d be better off not finding. The tricky part is, we don’t know until we know. Exploration could also bring great discoveries and improve human life.
HP Lovecraft’s view of the cosmos contrasts sharply with the ordered and harmonious universe envisioned by Virgil and Galileo. Virgil depicted a cosmos governed by divine will, where human actions are intertwined with the god’s power, suggesting a universe that is comprehensible and meaningful. Similarly, Galileo’s scientific observations reflected a belief in a rational order to the universe, where natural laws can be understood and explained through reason and observations.
In contrast, HP Lovecraft’s cosmos is chaotic and incomprehensible to human understanding. To him, the pursuit of knowledge and further exploration into the cosmos leads to madness, as seen in the scientist’s attempt to understand the alien meteorite in “The Colour Out of Space.”
Lovecraft’s view of the universe is purely pessimistic, whereas Galileo’s is based on curiosity. Galileo faces the cosmos as readable and with an order, just awaiting to be understood and deciphered. However, Lovecraft’s view states that the more we see and the more we learn, the less we matter. In his view, the world has no planning. Since he considers the universe indifferent about humans, our creation is just a casual occurrence that as it begun, it will end. He believes the cosmos is not moral and does not have a guiding creator to give it a meaning. In my opinion, Lovecraft’s ideas are based on his atheist views; without the belief of a God, creator or designer, knowledge about our creation becomes useless since we are just here by chance and will disappear.
In the opening passage of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, when he states “The most merciful thing… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”, he states that understanding will reveal “terrifying views of reality.” Framing knowledge as dangerous and science pushing us closer to realizing our pointless position. Furthermore, on ‘The Colour Out of Space’ he shows this belief, when a meteor brings a “colour” beyond our spectrum, lab tests fail, water and life rot, and the meteor leaves without caring if it was understood or learned. Ultimately showing that the universe does not care if we comprehend it, and the more we do, the more we will realize our insignificant and pointless existence.
After reading the opening passage from “The Call of Cthulhu,” I realized Lovecraft’s cosmic philosophy emphasizes human’s small role compared to the whole universe and that the latter is too alien and incomprehensible for us. Therefore, trying to fully understand it can have devastating outcomes. I like how memorable Lovevraft’s opening is, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” I think this sentence perfectly captures his ideology that humans are lucky not to know the full truth because our inferior minds cannot be a match against the terrifying and chaotic cosmos.
This idea is also reflected in “The Color Out of Space,” which tells how a strange meteorite destroys the land, animals, and people living around the area. In the end, the land is dead and the “alien” presence disappears, but the people can’t comprehend the nature of it or recover from the effects. It’s very interesting to read from the narrator’s anxious and traumatizing tone as he keeps repeating how “alien” the meteorite is and that it’s a “frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.” After all, Lovecraft tries to send a message of cosmic horror where universe is something that’s beyond our comprehension and possession of this knowledge can be dangerous. In these situations, we are powerless and can only watch and suffer from the impact.
In contrast, when we look back at Galileo’s story, the more he learns about the universe, the more motivated he is in expanding human knowledge. For Galileo, curiosity leads to enlightenment and each small discovery brings humans closer to understanding the cosmos. He wasn’t terrified or felt as if he was inferior compared to the universe (he already was!); instead, he simply viewed universe as an interesting subject to study and make sense of our existence. His findings reflects optimism about human intellectual, that through observations and experiments, we can peel layers of the truth slowly and bring light to the ignorance. Lovecraft of course doesn’t believe this as he thinks knowledge does not bring clarity or progress but destruction.
H. P. Lovecraft’s view of the universe in “The Color Out of Space” and “The Call of Cthulhu” is very different from that of Virgil or Galileo. For Virgil, the world follows divine order and purpose, and for Galileo, science and reason help people understand how the universe works. Lovecraft’s universe, however, is cold and uncaring. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator says “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” meaning that not knowing everything protects us from horror. For him, learning too much only shows how small and powerless humans really are.
In “The Color Out of Space,” this idea appears through a strange, colorless light that destroys everything around it. The narrator describes “a faint illumination, so diffused that it seemed to spring from all directions,” turning light—normally a sign of truth—into something dangerous. Lovecraft shows that science and discovery don’t always bring comfort or control; they can reveal things beyond our understanding. While Virgil and Galileo saw meaning and order in the cosmos, Lovecraft saw only mystery and chaos, a universe that continues without caring whether humans understand it or not.
Lovecraft’s conception of the cosmos radically departs from the moral and rational frameworks of Virgil and Galileo. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” he opens with the haunting reflection, “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” This passage captures his central idea: that the universe is vast, indifferent, and fundamentally unknowable, while humanity is an insignificant accident within it. Knowledge, rather than a divine or rational pursuit, is portrayed as a perilous act that can lead to madness, “terrifying vistas of reality” that the human mind is too limited to endure. Lovecraft’s cosmos contains no moral order, no benevolent gods, and no rational harmony. It is instead governed by forces so ancient and alien that their existence shatters human confidence in reason and progress. In The Aeneid, Virgil’s universe is purposeful and moral—shaped by divine will and guided by fate toward the establishment of Rome, a vision in which human suffering contributes to a larger cosmic order. Galileo’s cosmos, though stripped of myth, remains comprehensible through observation and mathematics, offering a rational and even spiritual confidence in humanity’s capacity to grasp truth. Lovecraft overturns both. His universe is not illuminated by divine light or mathematical law but drowned in the “black seas of infinity.” His terror lies in the realization that, unlike Virgil’s heroes or Galileo’s scientists, humanity is not meant to understand the cosmos at all and that the attempt to do so reveals a void where meaning should be.
Lovecraft’s view of the universe in “The Color Out of Space” and “The Call of Cthulhu” is very different from Virgil’s or Galileo’s. In Virgil’s Aeneid, he describes the cosmos as having order and purpose. Throughout the book the gods guide people toward their fate and ultimate meaning in life. Galileo’s view of the universe is something that humans can observe and reason with to ultimately understand it. Lovecraft goes against these ideas. In “The Color Out of Space,” the strange meteorite shows how little humans can really know. The “colour which no man could describe” suggests that parts of the universe are beyond human senses or logic.
In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft writes that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Through this quote, Lovecraft describes how immense the universe is and that humans would never be able to comprehend all that and that’s okay. In summary, the cosmos isn’t understandable, rather it’s the opposite. While Virgil and Galileo see humans as part of a comprehensible world, Lovecraft sees us as powerless in the grand scheme of the universe.
When talking about both “The Call of CATHULU” and “The Color Out of Space” Lovecraft imagines a universe that is indifferent to human life and understanding. The opening line sets this up really clearly, he states “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. The cosmos he creates in his mind, is not moral, or made for us humans to understand. It is chaotic, and filled with unknown forces and reasoning. Gakilieo on the other hand, sees the universe as a system of discoveries. Each truth is there just waiting for them to discover it. Lovecraft sees the hunger for knowledge as a dangerous act. For him, the scientist’s need to “correlate all its contents” leads not to enlightenment but to madness, as “terrifying vistas of reality”.
He goes against Galileo’s optimism for discovery and knowledge. As for Virgil, his cosmos operate according to a purpose. Jupiter and Fate guide human events toward a more important meaning of life. Lovecraft’s cosmos is harsh and cold, the “color out of space” and sleeping gods are not evil so much as indifferent since no matter what we do we as humans have no effect on the cosmos or these “gods”. The title of his excerpt I feel like it shares a lot about him, he talks about the “colors” but there are no colors. Space is black, and empty, void of life and any air. He ignores the colors of the planets, and the different stars as he has no access to them. There is no need to pursue anything of that sort since we can’t even influence them, or if they can influence us there is nothing we as humans can do against it.
A part that I found really interesting was the part where Lovecraft describes the mysterious meteorite that falls by the Gardner farm. The narrator says “It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it.” He turns something common as a color (property of light) into something that is scary and hard or even impossible to understand. The “color” cannot be named or described in human terms, showing how fragile human perception really is when faced with something truly alien.
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the world beyodn earth seemd to be controlled arounf humanity. I believe it was like this because of the fact that many of the myths in Roman religion are based off of stories from the stars and the constellations, and that reflects in Virgil’s work. The gods seem to care about the affairs of humans, constantly bringing people up to them or going down to check on them.
Lovecraft however, made it clear that the outer world should not be known by humanity, Lovecraft writes, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” (Lovecraft). Lovecraft plays into the fact that humans can’t entireley comprehend the outside world. He interprets it as a merciful act done onto humanity to sheild them from the hellish outside world. He shows the outside as different from humanity vs Virgil who trys to make the otherworldly beings care about us, but in the call of Cathulu we are unaware and should be glad.
Lovecraft’s conception of the cosmos differs greatly from Virgil. When revisiting week 3’s reading of the Aeneid, I found direct statements like Aeneas claiming to be “guided by a god” or the god’s promise that he will “never desert your side until I set you safe upon your father’s threshold” show that Virgil believes divine intervention to be a key component in the patterns of the cosmos. Virgil finds heavenly components to be a required and immediate factor in the cosmos’ affairs, and a departure from logic containing both religion and universal understanding would be contrary to his intellect. Yet Lovecraft opens the “Call of Cthulhu” with exactly this mindset. The entire first paragraph in the passage hits exactly on this viewpoint. He calls the universe a “placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity”, which seems to dispel any ideas of creation and order as well as the presence of omnipotent gods watching over the universal stage. The adjective of “ignorace” directly contradicts ideas of divine creation fine-tuning the world, and the black seas of infinity seem to communicate that he believes the cosmos are empty of other factors that Virgil sternly believes in. Paragraph 2 of “call of Cthulhu” is even more enlightening on his perspective.
The opening line of “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents” spells out Lovecraft’s belief that people try to assign meaning and transcendant experiences to the universe’s complex appearances, but the human race’s experiences with the world are just temporary events and occurances. Building upon this, a later line in the same paragraph says, ” That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.” To me, this means that the truths the humans find in their transient experiences are not caused or purposeful, as he directly uses the word “accidental”. Attributing these accidents of revelation to minor things like newspapers or professors shows that Lovecraft does NOT believe in divine relevation in the way Virgil does. Gods have no place of dictation or structuring of the cosmos in Lovecraft’s interpretations. Instead, knowledge comes from the accidents of humans stumbling onto truths from transient experiences, which is deeply different to Virgil’s dedication to divine activity in the creation and guiding of experience and existence. Thus, the opinions of Virgil and Lovecraft on the conception of the cosmos could not be more contrary.
I can’t help but notice the huge contrast in tone between HP Lovecraft’s two works, “The Color Out of Space” (1927) and “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), and one of the works that we read last week, George Griffith’s “A Visit to the Moon” (1900). While Griffith’s work is full of curiosity and interest in exploring possibilities related to space exploration, science, and technology, Lovecraft’s works are noticeably different and highly pessimistic. When Griffith wrote his piece (1900), the world was rapidly industrializing, with seemingly miraculous life-changing inventions like the telephone, automobile, and airplane all happening in a short period of time. This optimism in new possibilities must have colored his story about lunar exploration. In the spirit of Galileo, Griffith’s work represents the optimistic view of knowledge and technology and their benefits to mankind.
What happened between 1900 and 1927/1928? World War I must have greatly affected anyone who lived through it. The dark side of knowledge and technology revealed itself to the world: the horrors of technology, with poison gas, machine guns, and armored tanks killing millions in senseless wars. This experience must have made humans feel small and insignificant in the face of overpowering tools of death. In a world without the protection of the Gods as in Virgil’s cosmos, humans discovered, to our horror, that knowledge can be used for great evil: mankind ourselves opened the door for Milton’s devil to freely walk through, bringing along chaos and destruction. Thus, Lovecraft’s works are full of fear. Technology can destroy humanity, as “The Call of Cthulhu” understands that “our world and human race form transient incidents”. In Lovecraft’s cosmos, knowledge only brings fear, death and confusion.
While the advance of knowledge and technology is so rapid, humans are unable to keep up and understand everything. The more knowledge we gain, the less than we can really truly understand. The last two paragraphs of page 4 of “Color Out of Space” really stood out to me, with Lovecraft skillfully using technical terms and phrases, such as “absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature”, “oxy-hydrogen blowpipe”, “aqua regia”, “carbon disulphide”, and “Widmannstätten figures” to convey the confusion and shallow understanding caused by an explosion of knowledge. Try as we might, even with the most powerful tools available to us, humans can still not comprehend the incomprehensible (from the point of view of our limited minds).
In both “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Color Out of Space”, Lovecraft imagines a universe where knowledge is dangerous rather than enlightening. This seems to oppose the views of Virgil, who viewed the cosmos ordered by fate and the divine, as well as Galileo, who believed the universe could be understood through rational thinking. Lovecraft’s cosmos is not only vast, but one that is actively horrifying and placing humans as indifferent beings.
A key moment comes in the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality… that we shall either go mad… or flee… into a new dark age.” Here, the pursuit of knowledge, the very thing Galileo celebrated, becomes catastrophic. Instead of revealing something divine, or science, knowledge leads to the destruction of the mind. Lovecraft’s cosmos therefore anti-human: one not built for us to interpret or understand.
“The Color Out of Space” pushes this even further. The narrator can only describe the entity that appears as “just a colour out of space– a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it.” Even his language collapses, something as basic as color becomes unidentifiable. This leaves Galileo’s confidence in measuring the universe feel quaint and Virgil’s way of thought impossible as well. Again for Virgil and Galileo, the cosmos invites a new realm of understanding, while Lovecraft believes, the closer we get to the truth, the less human we become.
While reading, it just felt that Lovecraft’s passage was quite cynical and dark, his choice of words also seemed very dark. This seems to be pretty different than the view that Virgil and Galileo had about the conception of the cosmos. Lovecraft essentially says that humans only stay sane because we don’t necessarily understand the universe(or that we haven’t explored enough of the universe). In the Call of Cthulhu he says if we did understand it then, “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality”. It just seems to show that he believes that exploration is a negative aspect of life, and disadvantageous to human beings.
The Color Out of Space also seems to be on a similar theme of pessimism, it’s shows how something foreign, the rock, can poison everything around us. Lovecraft gives the idea that the more interactions humans have with unknown/foreign objects or experiences, the worse things get. It makes me feel as if he believes that the universe is a very scary place that isn’t meant for humans at all.
Whereas Virgil and Galileo seem to have a different view. Virgil has a geocentric view of the cosmos, he believes that everything is centered around the Earth, and that the cosmos is ordered, and has divine powers and a meaning. On the other hand, Galileo has more of a heliocentric view, he is a firm believer that the cosmos is for humans, and through observations and exploring more we better understand it for the benefit of us humans. Lovecraft’s idea completely contradicts the prior, essentially saying the more you learn the worse everything gets.
Lovecraft imagines a cosmos that is both radically alien and unfriendly to the human mind. In the opening to “The Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator warns that “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” is merciful, because someday the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge” will reveal “terrifying vistas of reality” that drive us mad. This passage flips the ambition that we have as humans for explanations and desired synthesis upside down. Basically saying, the more coherent the picture, the worse for us. “The Colour Out of Space” dramatizes this claim. The meteor’s “unknown spectrum,” the way it “obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos,” and the blight that unthreads matter, mind, and language all stage a universe where our categories (element, disease, color) fail and knowledge maddens us and corrodes what we thought we knew about our world.
On the other hand, both Virgil and Galileo have contrasting takes. Virgil’s world is thick with meaning. Full of omens, prophecies, and fate. Even though fate can be harsh, everything is ultimately part of a bigger plan that leads to the founding and success of humanity. In other words, the universe may be tough, but it’s still on track toward a meaningful goal. Even terrors and prodigies point somewhere, morally and politically. Galileo, for his part, treats the heavens as intelligible. He believed that careful observation and mathematics can translate celestial phenomena into law like regularities.
Virgil sees the universe as having a purpose. Galileo sees it as something humans can figure out with science. Lovecraft, on the other hand, sees the universe as not caring about us at all and built on rules we can’t even understand, and if we do manage to understand it, that knowledge would basically destroy us. In short: Virgil consoles with purpose; Galileo empowers with method; Lovecraft withholds both, offering instead a universe whose truths, once assembled, unmake the assembler.
Lovecraft’s view of the universe is different from Virgil’s or Galileo’s. Virgil saw the cosmos as part of a divine plan while Galileo saw it as something humans could study with reason. Lovecraft saw only chaos and indifference. In The Call of Cthulhu, he writes that humanity lives on a small island of ignorance surrounded by infinite darkness, and that too much knowledge would destroy the mind. For him, curiosity is not progress but danger.
In The Colour Out of Space, that idea becomes reality. A strange color from beyond the stars falls to Earth and poisons everything. It cannot be explained or contained; the scientists who study it fail, showing how limited human understanding is. Lovecraft takes the same tools as Galileo, observation and analysis, showing how they fail when looking at something foreign.
His universe has no room for order or meaning. Where Virgil and Galileo have harmony and purpose in the stars, Lovecraft finds nothing. The cosmos are vast, empty, and humanity’s greatest mistake is believing they can make sense of it.
Lovecraft’s view of the universe in The Color Out of Space and The Call of Cthulhu is the opposite of Virgil’s or Galileo’s. Where Virgil saw divine order and Galileo sought rational law, Lovecraft saw chaos. In “Cthulhu,” he writes, “The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” That line captures how he believes that true knowledge would destroy us, that the cosmos are really really vast, uncaring, and beyond reason.
In “The Color Out of Space,” this same terror becomes very physical, the mysterious “color” that science can’t explain shows how small and powerless humans really are. Lovecraft’s cosmos isn’t built for us to understand; it exists entirely without us. That is what is extremely scary about the cosmos as it relates to human life.
Both Virgil and Lovecraft imagine humans as powerless before higher forces, but they differ in how they understand those forces and humanity’s place in the cosmos. In The Aeneid, Virgil’s gods govern human affairs with purpose, keeping Earth and its people at the center of a moral order. In contrast, Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space” presents an alien force that is “against Nature,” destroying the good, churchgoing Gardner family without reason or recognition of human morality. This opposition between earthly “goodness” and extraterrestrial “evil” reflects a distorted geocentrism, where only Earth’s inhabitants possess meaning or virtue. Yet Lovecraft also exposes the fragility of that human-centered view: when scientists study the meteorite, their instruments fail, and they “verified the fact of the utter vanishment” without learning anything. Their experiments, modeled on Galileo’s belief in observation and reason, only reveal how little humans can grasp. In this way, Lovecraft transforms the classical and scientific cosmos, once guided by divine order or rational law, into an incomprehensible void, where knowledge no longer enlightens but terrifies.
Lovecraft sees the universe as cold, strange, and impossible for humans to truly understand, unlike Virgil or Galileo who imagine an ordered and meaningful cosmos. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the narrator says we live on “a placid island of ignorance,” meaning we are safer not knowing too much. In “The Color Out of Space,” the alien “colour” has no purpose; it simply appears and harms everything around it. For Lovecraft, the real horror is that the universe has no clear meaning and humans are small and fragile within it.
Lovecrafts vision of the universe is completely against both Virgil and Galileo’s views. It rejects order and meaning found in their worldviews that is hostile for a human to try to understand. While Virgil’s was structured around divine will and fate and Galileo’s, math and observation; Lovecraft resists this type of categorization. He related seeking knowledge as seeking doom.
The opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” makes this clear: “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” This is almost a deliberate flip of Enlightenment values. In the end, Lovecraft’s cosmos offer no comfort or order, Just a silent hum of something vast and unexplored that runs on its own logic.
I think that Lovecraft and Galileo’s views represent the exact opposite attitudes about space exploration. Where Galileo and other scientists view the unknown as a call for exploration, Lovecraft sees it as a natural limit of humanity. One of the first lines in a Call for Cthulu says: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
As the creator of the Eldritch Horror genre, HP Lovecraft was one of the first writers to build an aesthetic around questioning human advancement. Lovecraft positions humanity in a humble way, as if we are large ants too egotistical to understand that we don’t live on the highest plane of existence. On the contrary, Galileo most likely wouldn’t believe there exists concepts that will forever be foreign to humans.