Lovecraft and the Sea Monsters of Jewish Cosmology
Every culture carries its own sense of the world before the world. Even when those stories change, or become theologically unfashionable, something of them remains. The sea, especially, often holds the memory of whatever came first. Its depth suggests an earlier chapter, one that civilisation built over but never entirely replaced. When I read Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, I was struck by how deeply that structure of buried memory resembles the one that runs through Bereshit (Genesis) and later Jewish traditions. The two belong to different imaginative worlds, yet both speak to the intuition that creation rests on older layers lying just beneath the surface.
These parallels do not suggest direct influence. Lovecraft was not engaging with Jewish texts, nor was he drawing on kabbalistic tradition. What emerges instead is a shared human vocabulary for imagining beginnings. The sea becomes the place where cultures preserve their earliest sense of what the world is made from, even when those cultures never touch. The resonance arises not from genealogy, but from the way myth and imagination circle back to the same archetypal spaces. Lovecraft himself was no friend to Jewish life. His letters contain a casual, sometimes fervent antisemitism, including a short-lived admiration for Hitler’s early rise. I acknowledge that, then set it aside here, because the point of this essay is cosmological rather than biographical, and because the sea in his work belongs to an imaginative register older than his prejudices.
Bereshit opens with water. Before light or sky or land, the world appears as tohu va vohu, a swirling emptiness, with tehom, the deep, covering everything. The term tehom is a cognate of Tiamat, the primordial sea figure in Mesopotamian mythology whose vast body was divided in the Enuma Elish to shape the cosmos. The Torah does not retell that myth, nor does it adopt its theology. Yet the resonance is unmistakable. The waters are already present when the story begins. There is no moment in which God creates them. They are simply there, an inherited ancient intuition carried into a new theological setting. This echoes the wider ancient Near Eastern pattern sometimes called the chaoskampf, the struggle between primordial waters and the forces that impose order. The Torah reframes this drama without erasing its shape. The image of a primordial sea creature preceding creation is not unique to the Near East. Variations appear in cultures across the world — Apep in Egypt, Jörmungandr in Norse myth, Cipactli in Mesoamerica, Tangaroa-whiro in Polynesia — each preserving the intuition that something ancient and serpentine waits beneath the ordered world.
Jewish tradition notices this. Unlike later Christian readings that emphasise creation ex nihilo, the Torah itself is more elusive. It describes the ordering of the world, but not the material origin of everything within it. The deep predates creation. Midrash imagines the waters as immense and roaring, resisting divine boundaries until they are held back. Creation unfolds through separation and limitation rather than emergence from nothing. God divides the upper waters from the lower waters and gathers the seas so that dry land can appear. The earth becomes a space carved between ancient waters. It is, in a sense, sandwiched between seas that were always there and perhaps always will be.
The older mythic landscape remains within this structure. The deep is not eliminated. It is placed in order. The creatures of the sea, too, carry this sense of antiquity. Leviathan, described in Psalms as a creature formed by God to play in the waters, belongs to a realm that predates human time. Rahav, sometimes a symbol of the sea and sometimes the name of a mythic creature, appears in poetic texts as a force of great power. The tanninim, the great sea creatures created on the fifth day, echo the ancient Ugaritic sea beings that preceded the world of human order. These figures drift between creature and symbol. They preserve the memory of a world older than the one shaped by divine command.
Jewish monsters are therefore less about fear and more about memory. They are the tradition’s way of keeping the earliest layers of imagination intact. Leviathan, Rahav and the tanninim mark the point where theology brushes against the pre-theological world. They embody the rawness of tehom, not as a threat but as an ancestral presence, a reminder that creation did not annihilate what came before. Jewish cosmology does not forget its monsters. It lets them remain as living traces of the earliest waters.
Midrash often leans into this memory. In Bereshit Rabbah, the waters protest their division until God rebukes them. Their resistance marks a trace of an older agency. Another midrash describes the creation of Leviathan in male and female form, but the female is removed to prevent the species from overwhelming the world. The image is fantastical, yet it speaks to an ancient intuition: the deep holds powers that must be limited, not destroyed. Creation does not erase the pre-cosmic forces. It sets boundaries around them.
The Zohar develops this further, describing the deep as primordial potential. The world as we know it emerges when divine will imposes structure on that potential. Chaos becomes part of creation, not as an enemy but as raw material. The deep remains the oldest element of the world even as order is established above it.
Lovecraft’s tale belongs to a different genre entirely, yet it turns on a similar idea. The Call of Cthulhu is not a story of creation. It is a story of discovery, or rather of recognising that the world conceals an older history beneath its apparent surface. Cthulhu does not appear fully until the end of the narrative, and even then only briefly. The story is told through fragments: the sculptor Wilcox’s unsettling dreams, the bas relief whose contours feel older than any known civilisation, the strange cult encountered by Inspector Legrasse in Louisiana, the logs of sailors describing an impossible city rising from the Pacific, and Thurston’s uneasy reconstruction of these pieces into a coherent, if frightening, whole.
Although Lovecraft never frames it explicitly, his narrative depends on the idea that the sea retains a memory that humanity does not. The ocean is the site of an older world, one that predates human existence and human meaning. Civilisation floats above it unaware. Dreams carry shards of a forgotten language. Cultic rituals preserve patterns whose origins lie outside human history. Even the architecture of R’lyeh feels like a memory of geometry itself, belonging to a time when the laws that govern our world did not apply.
And Cthulhu’s monstrousness is not merely a matter of shape or scale. It is metaphysical. Cthulhu is a residue of a prior world, a leftover from a cosmic layer that civilisation has forgotten but that reality has not. Its dreaming beneath the ocean is a form of preservation. It is the deep remembering itself. In this sense Cthulhu mirrors Leviathan far more than popular readings assume. Both are imagined as beings whose existence marks the boundary between worlds, creatures whose presence testifies to a beginning older than the one creation narrates.
In this sense, Lovecraft’s deep is remarkably close to the tehom of Bereshit. Both are primordial. Both are pre-human. Both remain after creation or civilisation has taken form. And both serve as the place where the oldest memories of the world reside.
The imagery of the deep as an older reality is intensified in Lovecraft’s story. When R’lyeh rises from the sea, even for a moment, it feels as though the world itself has remembered something ancient. The sailors who encounter it describe surfaces and angles that confound orientation. What appears to be a vertical wall becomes horizontal when approached. The geometry shifts depending on how one looks at it. R’lyeh is not simply ancient. It belongs to another order of existence. Its appearance is like the resurgence of a geological memory, a reminder that the world carries within it a history far beyond human understanding.
Jewish thought has long grappled with the limits of human categories in a way that mirrors this moment. Maimonides insists that we can only speak of God through negation, because any attempt to describe a reality that precedes creation forces language to collapse. The Talmudic story of the four who enter Pardes makes the same point through narrative rather than philosophy. Three do not survive the encounter. Ben Azzai “looked and died,” undone by a glimpse of something the human frame cannot bear. Ben Zoma “looked and went mad,” losing all sense of the world’s ordinary structure. Elisha ben Avuya, known thereafter as Acher, experiences a rupture so profound that he abandons the basic grammar of Jewish faith. Only Rabbi Akiva enters in peace and leaves in peace, not because he grasps the deeper reality but because he does not mistake his categories for the world itself. The story reads like an ancient recognition that there are forms of truth that the mind cannot hold without fracturing. In its own way Lovecraft reaches toward the same intuition. The sailors who enter R’lyeh experience a milder version of Pardes: geometry that destabilises perception, angles that make the mind recoil, and a sense that reality has slipped out of the conceptual net that usually steadies it. Even modern cosmology echoes this intuition in its own vocabulary. Physicists can describe the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, yet when they try to imagine what came before, the equations themselves fail. All three moments turn on the same recognition that R’lyeh forces on Lovecraft’s sailors. Some realities are older than the frameworks we use to perceive them, and when we encounter them directly, our language and perception buckle at the edge of their depth.
Jewish tradition incorporates the older memories into a moral universe. Leviathan becomes, in some texts, the creature whose flesh will nourish the righteous at the end of days. The deep becomes an image of the world before form, something that God shapes yet does not annihilate. The creatures and forces of the primordial waters become part of a larger narrative, interpreted through liturgy, poetry and midrash. The older worlds are not lost, nor are they feared. They are acknowledged and absorbed.
Lovecraft refuses this kind of integration. The older world remains alien. It cannot be translated into human terms. It cannot be named as symbolic or moral. It simply exists. And when it surfaces, even briefly, it reminds the characters that the world they inhabit is contingent and temporary. The deep is not part of their story. Rather, they are intruders in its story.
Yet despite the difference in tone, both traditions preserve the same fundamental idea: the sea is where the world remembers its earliest self. Creation in Bereshit does not begin with nothing. It begins with tehom, ancient and uncreated. In Lovecraft, civilisation does not begin with a complete break from what came before. It continues above an older, submerged reality whose presence is felt in dreams, rituals and ruins.
Both traditions, in their different ways, recognise that creation is never a complete break with what came before. Something remains underneath, persistent and unassimilated. Whether one calls it chaos, memory, or the deep, it becomes a reminder that our stories about the world cannot entirely contain the world itself. The sea holds a truth that eludes our categories, and both Lovecraft and the Torah use their monsters to gesture toward that truth.
This shared intuition explains why both visions linger. The sea holds what has been forgotten. It is the place of origins, whether those origins are theological or cosmic or something more ambiguous. Jewish tradition turns that memory into meaning. Lovecraft lets it remain unsettling. Yet both preserve their monsters as carriers of the deep, creatures through which the oldest layers of the world continue to speak.
