HP Lovecraft's Human Design Fear Chart (4/6 Emotional Projector)

“I have seen the dark universe yawning, where the black planets roll without aim, where they roll in their horror, unheeded, without knowledge or luster or name” - Nemesis by HP Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft is one of my favorite horror writers because he’s responsible for cosmic horror (existential fear, human irrelevancy, and madness). His work revolves around hopelessness. He’s also known for writing about his fears, the most documented being what’s beneath the ocean and race—primarily immigrants.

In this post, I explore aspects of his fear chart, which contains Ra’s fear-specific teachings that underlie certain gates. I’m also interested in his open centers. I won’t get into his type and authority, but you can read about them here—projector type and emotional authority.

HP Lovecraft’s life

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born into a comfortable New England family. His maternal bloodline is traced back to colonial times, which may explain his future fear of immigrants. By the time he was five, his father was institutionalized for a mental breakdown. His father passed when he was eight.

Then, he was raised by his mother and grandfather. He was particularly attached to his grandfather because he encouraged Lovecraft’s love for literature. Lovecraft could read by age three and started writing by age six. But Lovecraft was documented to be sick, and it’s suspected that much of it was mental illness.

When Lovecraft turned fourteen, his grandfather passed away, along with the comfortable life his grandfather offered. The downgrade to a lower-class lifestyle traumatized him to the point he contemplated taking his life. He began to have breakdowns and couldn’t graduate high school or attend Brown University.

He was financially dependent on his mother and spent most of his time writing, even creating a publication. Other journals published his work, and he could be seen as a successful writer for someone in his late teens/early twenties, though he wasn’t paid much for it. He later found his calling through amateur journalism.

When he turned twenty-nine, his mother also suffered a breakdown, which led to her being institutionalized. She passed two years later.

I mention all the losses Lovecraft had in his life because it aggravates his fear chart, which we’ll explore shortly.

He continued writing but with a focus on the torments in his life. He became increasingly xenophobic because of the amount of immigrants who went to where he was living, New York City. He wrote Red Hook, which reflects this horror.

Lovecraft was terrified by the intermixing of culture and race, which contributed to his existentialism and suicidal tendencies. This inspired some of his work, such as The Shadow over Innsmouth, in which people interbred with an alien, aquatic species. This reflected his fear of multiculturalism and the unknown behind it.

I was introduced to HP Lovecraft’s work through the Cthulu mythos. If you’re a nerd who plays Dungeons and Dragons or videogames labeled Lovecraftian horror, you’re likely familiar with this part octopus, part dragon humanoid creature. Cthulu is said to entice artists and creatives into madness, drawing them to his underwater cult.

His other works contain an essence of self-pity, indifference, and hopelessness. In spiritual communities, these genres could be considered low vibrational and encourage a victim mentality.

I think it’s moreso how you approach it.

Now, let’s explore Lovecraft’s chart (generated here).

The Splenic Center: Primal Fears

The image below shows Lovecraft’s splenic center.

The splenic center deals with fundamental human fears: staying healthy to stay alive. You need air, water, food, shelter, and community.

👉🏼 Note: in the context of the splenic center, community is the pack you stay with to ensure safety. You might also reproduce with members of that pack but it isn’t about friendship or falling in love.

Gate 48 is the fear of inadequacy. Based on what I shared about Lovecraft, it didn’t seem that he feared inadequacy in publishing his writing. There’s no mention of fear of rejection in his chart.

The context here relates to his existential crisis. Inadequacy challenges a person between belly-up submission and gritting through. There’s no correlation between suicidal tendencies and gate 48 but knowing Lovecraft, it’s possible that his constant desire to leave the world could’ve been pushed by this fear.

Gate 32 is the fear of failure. Again, this has nothing to do with rejection. In the primal world, it speaks of the inability to sustain without basic human needs. In the modern times, it’s the inaccessibility of basic needs without money, though it can be argued that one can always grow their food and build a shelter. In New York City, where Lovecraft lived in his adulthood, neither of those would be feasible.

Lovecraft was known to be financially dependent. He lived in wealth with his grandfather and then his mother supported him through his early adulthood. He married a Russian-Jewish businesswoman (interesting, knowing how he felt about interracial marriage) and couldn’t find work to contribute to their shared home. Then he moved in with his aunts in Providence. He couldn’t afford shelter without dependence on family.

Health issues live within the realm of the splenic center. There’s no record of what he was sick with, but the consensus is that it was due to mental health. While mental health could be attributed to the ajna center (the mind), Lovecraft’s deteriorating mental health could’ve contributed to his declining physical health. He passed away at age 46 from intestinal cancer. We know he died in poverty, and without financial resources, it would’ve been difficult for him to receive proper care for his mental and physical health.

There wouldn’t be a choice but to belly up.

Emotional Center: Relationship-Based Fears

The emotional center, also known as the solar plexus, is the most complex of all centers. It deals with emotions and relationships, which are grey areas.

We already know that Lovecraft struggled with relationships. His parents both passed away while they were institutionalized, and his mentor, his grandfather, passed when Lovecraft was a child. His marriage failed. He was terrified of immigrants. He isolated for most of his adult life.

I mentioned that gates have multiple layers. Fear interpretations are one aspect of the emotional center, but they also include another type of gates. HP Lovecraft has gate 30 (nervousness over fate), which is a collective gate.

👉🏼 Collective gates have expectations, but those expectations kill them. These gates live in a fantasy for the experience. People with these gates have intense emotional ups and downs—the “highest of highs and lowest of lows.” It’s the archetype of the tortured artist. They’re often called dramatic because of their wide spectrum.

Gate 30 is nervousness over fates, which is existentialist—everything Lovecraft embodied. It’s the persistent questioning of whether there is anyone or anything to live for or whether everything is in the hands of fate and the gods.

Lovecraft enjoyed fantastical stories of Greek mythology and the Arabian pantheon. He also wrote about otherworldly creatures and their cults. His passion was submitting to fate and gods.

Mixed with his indifference, Lovecraft was immersed in this fear. His expectation was not to expect anything because life is meaningless. You live. You die.

This is a fascinating expression of the fear of fate. Instead of ruining himself by wondering what could happen next and what the destination would be, he decided it didn’t matter.

👉🏼 While the emotional center contains relationship-based fears, this is about his relationship with the gods.

Open Head & Open G Center

If you look at the image, you’ll notice that two centers are completely white with none of the gates circled in. Those are called open centers.

Open centers are unique because you have no inherent experience of what that center feels like. You understand it through other people’s conditioning.

First, what do those centers mean?

• Head Center: inspiration, muses, ideas

• G Center: love, direction, identity

If someone has an open head center, they are open to external inspiration, musings, and ideas.

If someone has an open G center, they are open to how they experience love, receive direction, and have a sense of identity through the external.

Lovecraft’s xenophobia is considered extreme, even for his time. I’m curious about who influenced it. Given the open head center, he must’ve read material or had conversations with others who shared this view. This exposure likely inspired his approach to horror, which is a full projection of his worldview. He is a Projector.

The other side is the horror of I don’t know what to think. I don’t know anything. What is worth understanding? I don’t doubt that Lovecraft was tortured by these thoughts which eventually led him to existentialism.

Instead of talking about how Lovecraft’s open G may have affected him, I’ll note how it impacted the rest of us. People see themselves in the open G center. They identify with something there. Cosmic horror became popular because it hits something in the human condition.

For me, I purchase most video games labeled Lovecraftian horror. Maybe it’s because I’m an 8th house stellium Capricorn (the nonbeliever goat seduced by the occult), but I appreciate a world built upon legitimate fear. I play video games from creators inspired by Lovecraft’s work because it makes you question yourself, your purpose (if there is any), and whether any of this matters. I sell a whole course on life’s purpose, as written through Human Design, yet I enjoy a good reset of plunging into a state of purposelessness.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” - The Call of Cthulu by HP Lovecraft

Learn more about the Gates of Fear by reading your Fear Chart

The Gates of Fear is a course that journeys you through the most personal, intimate, and vulnerable part of humanity: fear.

Each person enters this incarnation with a series of karmic cycles and contracts, some personal, some inherited from the bloodline, and some not meant for us at all. Yet, we bear the burdens through real or imagined obligations.

The Gates of Fear explores that terror through your Human Design chart.