Magic in Lovecraft's Works: Part 1, Early Stories

This is the first post of two or three where I will discuss how Lovecraft treated magic in his fiction. In this post, I will deal with stories from 1925 and earlier.

In "The Alchemist", one of Lovecraft's very early stories (1908), the narrator's line is haunted by an ancient curse which kills each member of the family at a certain age. It turns out, though, that this is actually the actions of an ancient wizard who has used the alchemical Elixir of Life to prolong his own life, so that he can slay each member of the family in various means (arrows, poison, etc.). The Elixir of Life is not further explained.

The Terrible Old Man in the story of the same title (1920) seems to be a wizard of some sort as well, since he has bottles which seem to contain trapped souls: "in each a small piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer", and he unleashes some form of wrath on the robbers who attack him (implicitly these same pirate ghosts, since the corpses are "slashed as with many cutlasses").

"The Other Gods" (1921) refers to "spells and barriers" wielded by the gods of Earth, and "unknown magic" used by the titular Other Gods.

"The Festival" (1923) includes a passage from the Necronomicon which states "happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws". It seems that some users of magic can survive death in a horrible form, just as the ancient ancestor in the story does.

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1925) includes a series of rites which reanimate a very dead corpse to complete the ritual; it's implied that some dark entity is being summoned.

"He" (1925) includes an explanation of the workings of magic: ""To - my ancestor," he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one's self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature herself." The story also includes a horde of ghosts of ancient magic-users, and an (apparently summoned) slime monster.



So, to summarize:
-magic can be used to trap souls and summon ghosts and other dark entities
-some users of magic can survive bodily death, either as worm-creatures or ghosts
-the gods, especially the Other Gods, can wield powerful reality-altering magic
-ritual is apparently important in at least some types of magic
-the working principle behind magic seems to be the imposition of will to alter reality