One of the old masters of the Dungeons & Dragons experience, and indeed of many role-playing games, is H. P. Lovecraft. Since tomorrow would have been his 136th birthday, it seems fitting to examine his contribution to the Witches of Appendix N.
I could spend an entire series discussing his influence on D&D, AD&D, and Call of Cthulhu. I could spend another series on his influence on modern horror. Others have done that work, and done it well.
Instead, I want to narrow the focus. Not how Lovecraft influenced Gary Gygax when co-writing Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson, nor how he influenced later AD&D design. I want to look specifically at the witches in his fiction. Witches that are recognizable to readers of this blog.
The Big Three
When it comes to witches, there are three stories that stand out more than the others: Dreams of the Witch House, The Dunwich Horror, and The Thing on the Doorstep.
The Dreams in the Witch House features Keziah Mason, the ur-witch of the Mythos.
She is said to have lived in Salem in 1692 and to have been arrested during the witch trials. That alone gives her a witch pedigree that no other Lovecraft character quite matches. Her former home is literally known as “The Witch House.”
But Keziah is not merely a colonial sorceress. She is a mathematician of the forbidden and the occult.
Her witchcraft blends:
- Ritual magic
- Non-Euclidean geometry
- Pacts with beings beyond human comprehension
- Dimensional travel
She has a familiar, the rat-thing Brown Jenkin, which acts as a proper familiar should: as an intermediary, a spy, and a bringer of harm.
The aspect of Keziah that makes her truly Lovecraftian is her intellectual approach to magic. She gets her power not from the earth, the herbs, the spirits, but from her understanding of the world in terms of angles, of solving equations, of navigating hyperspace through mathematics.
You could argue quite readily that the character of Keziah Mason is much closer to the D&D warlock than the witch. She is not the village's wise woman. She is the academic heretic, the one who has turned her back on the academic world. And it is here that the concept of the warlock in D&D starts to come together: the pact-maker, the wielder of forbidden knowledge, the one who trades safety for power.
I have also used her as the source of the equations used to power starships in my BlackStar setting.
Lavinia Whateley and the Whateley Clan
The next one is The Dunwich Horror. Lavinia Whateley and the Whateleys are basically archetypical witch family. The Mayfair family from Anne Rice is basically from the same mold.
Lavinia is described as ugly, albino, and strange-looking. She is isolated in the rural area of Dunwich, Massachusetts, and is raised by her grandfather, Old Whateley, who teaches her arcane formulae from forbidden books.
She is a participant in a ritual summoning and has a child with Yog-Sothoth.
This is hereditary or family witchcraft.
Unlike Keziah, Lavinia does not seem to be driven by a thirst for knowledge, merely part of a family tradition. The Whateleys seem to be part of an occult dynasty, a decadent New England family that still practices pre-Christian and cosmic rituals.
Lavinia is a bit of a mysterious figure; is she a willing participant or a victim? She is only described in external terms, observed, and spoken about.
This is the archetype for the rural cult witch in D&D: the isolated valley, the hidden grimoires, the crossbreeding with the outer forces, and the idea that witchcraft is not a class choice, merely a blood inheritance. It might even be related to the D&D Sorcerer, rather than the standard Draconic bloodline that is standard in the 3rd edition era; it is the root of the Aberation bloodlines in later editions.
She is presented as attractive, though marked by unnerving eyes. She is the daughter of Ephraim Waite, an Innsmouth occultist. Her mother was a Deep One.
Asenath’s witchcraft is intimate. She practices:
- Body-swapping
- Identity erasure
- Psychological domination
Where Keziah works through geometry and Lavinia through lineage, Asenath works through possession.
She is a domestic witch in the most terrifying sense. She marries. She enters a home. She infiltrates identity itself.
And unlike Lavinia, Asenath is not passive. She is willful. She drives the action. She pursues control.
Lovecraft and Witches
We know from his letters that Lovecraft had a dim view of feminism. I am not prepared to say he was misogynistic at all, but rather, he seemed not to think about women very much. The women in his tales were either mothers or had occult ties.
Keziah Mason and Lavinia Whateley are examples of women who engage in forbidden knowledge, defy social norms, and exist outside ordinary domestic life. While this makes them good witch characters, it does not put either into particularly good light. There are no witch protagonists in Lovecraft tales because there are no women protagonists. Some of this is due to the time, and some to Lovecraft's very conservative social outlook. None of this is really in dispute, but it does color how I want to approach his witches.
True, none of the characters above are "misunderstood," but they could be more nuanced. Is Lavinia a victim of her weird-ass family? Is Keziah a victim of her own genius? Is Asenath a...no Asenath is pretty much as she is written.
The Witch as Seeker of Power
There is a recurring pattern here.
Lovecraft’s witches access knowledge denied to them by conventional institutions. They do not sit in classes at Miskatonic University. They might haunt the library, but they are never part of the faculty or student body.
- They make pacts.
- They inherit grimoires.
- They calculate angles that warp reality.
It supports a powerful interpretation: witches are those who seek access to forbidden systems of knowledge when barred from official ones.
And in Lovecraft’s universe, knowledge itself corrupts.
Given how many of his male scholars meet equally terrible ends, perhaps the lesson is not that women should not seek knowledge, but that no one should.
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