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Originally Posted by darrick3909
for instance, try and count how many references to demons, demoniacal, satanic, hell, satan, infernal, etc. there are in his works.
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Actually, the only explicit reference to Satan (apart from swearing and quotations from religious documents) that I can think of can be found in "The Horror at Red Hook: "Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved." And the critics seem to agree that the passage is somewhat uncharacteristic in HPL's fiction.
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i'd agree that Lovecraft might have been trying to put unknowable, alien forces into a perspective that humans could understand: evil personified by the creatures of darkness that oppose god and christianity.
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The vast majority of the entities in the Mythos are perceived as foulness by the human senses because they are essentially incomprehensible to our species, not because they are malicious in themselves. If they personify anything, it's the ultimately alien nature of the universe and its fundamental laws rather than any form of objectively existing "evil". Besides, the closest thing to God in the stories is Azathoth: there's no need for Cthulhu and company to oppose Christianity, since all religions as we know them are basically meaningless.
(An afterthought: you have presumably noticed that Lovecraft favoured the word "daemon" over "demon". In the Classical era, the term was of course neutral and didn't necessarily refer to evil, and as someone who loved Greek and Roman mythology HPL was very much aware of this.)