A photo of HP Lovecraft with his friend Arthur Goodenough.
Mythology was my life-blood then, and I really almost believed in the Greek and Roman deities - fancying I could glimpse fauns and satyrs and dryads at twilight in those oaken groves where I am sitting now. When I was about 7 years old, my mythological fancy made me wish to be - not merely to see - a faun or a satyr. I used to try to imagine that the tops of my ears were beginning to get pointed, and that a trace of incipient horns was beginning to appear on my forehead - and bitterly lamented the fact that my feet were rather slow in turning into hooves! Of all young heathen, I was the most unregenerate. Sunday school - to which I was sent when five - made no impression on me; (though I loved the old Georgian grace of my mother’s hereditary church, the stately First Baptist, built in 1775) and I shocked everybody with my pagan utterances - at first calling myself a Mohammedan and then a Roman pagan. I actually built woodland alters to Pan, Jove, Minerva, and Apollo, and sacrificed small objects amidst the odour of incense. When, a little later, I was forced by scientific reasoning to discard my childish paganism, I was to become an absolute atheist and materialist. I have since given much attention to philosophy, and find no valid reason for any belief in any form of the so-called spiritual or supernatural.-Howard Philips Lovecraft