For the Un-Initiated
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American horror/science fiction writer who toiled in obscurity during his life but gained a cult following after his death. The ideas and devices in his stories have been borrowed, adapted and built upon almost to the point of becoming cliche, and modern horror owes him a tremendous creative debt. That's the short biography.
In H. P. Lovecraft's fictitious New England, characters discover information concerning dark truths about the world we live in. Humankind lives in comfortable, blind ignorance of the true horror that existence belies. There are ancient alien monsters (the "great old ones") buried beneath the sea, waiting to be awakened, and hordes of depraved, daemonic cultists who use dark rites and rituals to attempt necromancy and the resurrection of their evil gods. There are ominous mountains, sinister dark woods and brooding abandoned houses always seeming to contain crypts locked away below them, hidden. Often, knowledge of these nightmarish realities alone is enough to drive most of our protagonists insane, and the few who actually encounter some trace of the horrors that exist in this world perish, or turn out much worse for wear.
Lovecraft built his stories around his unique (especially for his time) "cosmic philosophy." As a man of science who saw humankind toiling to scratch out an existence on earth, a tiny planet in a lonesome corner of the galaxy, he imagined the day to day lives of people in general as fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Compared to most other creatures in H. P. Lovecraft's universe, humankind is utterly insignificant. In The Call of Cthulhu, the eponymous monster begins killing humans the instant after he awakes not because he is evil, but because humans are nothing to him (and he's "ravening for delight.") The horror in these stories comes not specifically from the monsters or nightmarish creatures, but from what they represent; our own meaninglessness in the universe, our constant proximity to utter extinction, and our powerlessness to stop it.
Lovecraft is a fascinating and creepy, atmospheric read. I could not recommend him more.
The Mythos
As mentioned above, Lovecraft populated his universe with a number of entities, all with power or technology far outstripping our own. There is a race of technologically superior aliens that existed on earth long before man and may have created life, a race of terrible crustacean-like alien creatures that inhabit the foothills of New England, the dreaded Cthulhu, an other-dimensional being contained of matter formed from outside our own time space continuum, dwelling under the sea. There is Azathoth, the all consuming entity existing outside of space and time and Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos, his messenger. There is Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, there is the dreaded Necronomicon, a book of dark secrets referenced so often and so convincingly by Lovecraft that many people don't realize that he made it up entirely.
Many of these entities and things receive mention in a number of Lovecraft's stories. The significance of these references ranges in degree. Cthulhu's name is mentioned in passing in many stories, without any real focus on or explanation of who or what he is. Other references provide a direct link between stories. The extinct(?) Elder Things of At the Mountains of Madness are said to have waged war with "half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures - creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north" (AtMoM), a direct reference to the still active alien creatures in The Whisperer in Darkness. The protagonist in Mountains even goes so far as to mention "the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's english department," (AtMom) referencing Albert Wilmarth from Whisperer.
Because of these references (particularly the story-linking ones), many people have taken to the idea that Lovecraft created a sort of coherent parallel world for his fiction. On the surface, this seems likely. The fictitious town of Arkham and its Miskatonic University play central roles in much of Lovecraft's most popular work, and there is obviously a pantheon of names that Lovecraft used over and over again. The Necronomicon is a constant player in the stories, and many of Lovecraft's characters seem to have at least passing knowledge of it and other tomes of forbidden lore; the Pnakotic Manuscripts, The Golden Bough (an actual book by James George Frazer), and (my personal favorite) The Unaussprechlichen Kulten (although this was actually borrowed from Lovecraft's friend Robert E. Howard).
There was a reason for all of this cross referencing. Lovecraft wanted to give his readership the impression that his creations were actually real things. By keeping names and fictitious tomes and lore somewhat consistent, Lovecraft hoped to make his stories convincing, and thus creepier. Indeed, when he ghostwrote for others, he would insert his own creations, slightly modified ("Tulu" in the place of "Cthulhu") into these stories, and he encouraged his friends to borrow names and locales from his tales, all so that unsuspecting readers would begin to assume that separate writers were drawing from the same source legends, rather than just one man's imagination.
After Lovecraft's death, this idea took off. August Derleth, a close friend and supporter of Lovecraft, began writing his own stories set in Lovecraft's fictitious world. Derleth himself coined the phrase the Cthulhu mythos, and he flushed out the pantheon of "Gods" by writing stories about many of the entities Lovecraft had never done more than merely mention (Shub-Niggurath, for example.) In fact, Derleth went as far as to modify the ideas of Lovecraft, setting up a cosmos in his own stories where the evil "Old Ones" (including Cthulhu) were at war against the good "Elder Gods" for control of humanity. Derleth, a Roman Catholic, inserted his own ideas (read: Roman Catholicism) into the "Mythos," betraying, I think, what Lovecraft was going for. Because Derleth did a lot for popularizing Lovecraft, and because he expanded greatly upon the world started by him, this good-vs-evil idea has permeated the Lovecraft sphere, and colored many people's opinions of his work.
Cthulhu's Not Such a Bad Guy, When You Think About It
It's rather fun to discover all the little cross references that Lovecraft made in his own work. And it wouldn't be a Lovecraft story without him name dropping a host of his fictitious books, locations and creatures. But I don't get the impression that Lovecraft was aiming to create a consistent mythology as so many people (thanks to Derleth) assume he was. Again, I'll grant that he definitely wanted to imbue his stories with a feel of authenticity, and that's precisely why we get so many repeating names and references. But it's honestly really frustrating to me when people place so much importance on this whole pseudo-world inspired by Lovecraft (especially when much of it is drawn from Derleth's Christian, good vs evil modification to the Lovecraft universe.)
First off, Derleth's take on the universe is, frankly, offensive to me. Lovecraft, as I previously mentioned, placed humanity as an insignificant, helpless speck in the grand scheme of things. The idea that some entities would want to destroy us while others would seek to protect us is utterly contrary to the themes he established. Cthulhu is evil only in our perspective. He is horrible and terrible, and apparently favors destruction. But is he really bad? No one thinks twice about mowing the lawn, so to speak, and, as powerful, advanced and complex an entity as Cthulhu is, should we be any more important to him than grass is to us? What I'm trying to say is that Lovecraft's universe is an amoral one; that is to say, there is no such a concept of morality outside the morals humanity puts in place for itself. Why ought Cthulhu subscribe or even give any consideration of our own morality? It is meaningless to him. Again, this is where Lovecraft's true horror derives from; humankind is unknowingly teetering on utter annihilation from forces well beyond our reckoning, and there is no sympathetic or benevolent force to help us face the darkness.
That Derleth injected the universe with his Roman Catholic themes is also offensive considering Lovecraft's personal view on religion, which we can easily divine (pun intended) from the following quote:
I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine... pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. (Selected Letters, S.T. Joshi)Raise your hand if you think Lovecraft would have thought favorably about benevolent Elder Gods fighting Cthulhu to save mankind... didn't think so...
Do Balrogs Have Wings?
J.R.R. Tolkien fans are notorious for quibbling over miniscule topics, combing the literature and nitpicking over obscure lines of text written concerning Middle Earth. The notorious "do Balrogs have wings" debate centers on a controversy concerning the intended depiction of the Balrog species in Lord of the Rings. In the Peter Jackson film adaptation (and in most art inspired by LotR) the Balrog that Gandalf confronts in Moria is depicted with wings. However, there is some debate as to whether Tolkien himself intended them to possess actual wings (without getting into the debate in depth, Tolkien used the term "wings" and "flying" in Fellowship and The Silmarillion respectively, but it is unclear weather he was speaking literally or figuratively.)
This is a nerdy debate to be sure, but it isn't unjustified. Tolkien spent his entire life meticulously crafting a mythology for his stories. The man created entire languages, histories and legends, and strove to keep his stories rich, deep, and consistent. He even went as far as to have the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter of The Hobbit modified years after its initial publication because he realized it would contradict something that he had written into the (then) upcoming publication of Lord of the Rings. So if Middle Earth is your thing, maybe it is worth debating how the man who so finely crafted that world intended something to be.
But why debate why Cthulhu is locked under the sea? Or argue about whether Shub-Niggurath is a feminine or masculine entity because it's alternately referred to as "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young" and "The Black Ram of the Forest with a Thousand Ewes." (This last one is particularly pointless, as Shub-Niggurath really doesn't appear in any of Lovecraft's work at all, and is only a character in the works of Derleth and others.) Don't tell me with an air or pride that Cthulhu came from the planet Vhoorl (something, correct me if I'm wrong, Lovecraft NEVER MENTIONED), and claim to be the ultimate H.P. Lovecraft fan. Lovecraft really didn't care! He cared about making his stories convincing and creepy. Ok; Lovecraft directly references The Whisperer in Darkness in At the Mountains of Madness. But he also put a number of facts into his stories that make no sense to insert if he gave two craps about a consistent "Cthulhu mythos"
1. In The Call of Cthulhu an evil cult is apprehended while they dance around a statuette of Cthulhu. During an interrogation, a member of the cult, Castro, explains the nature of their worship:
They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky... This was that cult... it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring earth again beneath his sway (TCoC)So clearly, here Lovecraft establishes that Cthulhu is in fact one of the "Great Old Ones." Or is he? In The Dunwich Horror we have the following mention of Cthulhu (italics my own):
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be... Great Cthulhu is their cousin, yet he can spy them only dimly... (TDH)Sooooo... is Cthulhu an "Old One" or not? That seems to present a problem for the "Cthulhu Mythos." The solution to this conundrum is quite plain, however. Lovecraft never intended to establish a consistent mythology, so it doesn't really matter what Cthulhu is exactly. The Call of Cthulhu and The Dunwich Horror are two very different stories, that should both be enjoyed as they are, individual, distinct tales. They are both clearly set in Lovecraft's fictionalized New England, and share common elements (Miskatonic University, the mention of Old Ones, the Necronomicon etc.) but it doesn't matter so much that the rules or details of the stories match. The unnatural elements of each story are adapted to work within that particular story, and thats really all that matters.
2. Lovecraft wrote a number of stories that even Derleth and the Mythos proponents don't tend to associate with the Mythos Cycle. They have designated these stories as separate and distinct. There are the early works of Lovecraft that don't really contain any of the specific characteristics of the Mythos stories, and there are the "Dream Cycle" stories, which focus on a sort of parallel dream world that Lovecraft sets events. But is it really fair to separate these stories out into other categories? On the face of it, it seem unfair to take focus away from these stories, as some are very good, and enjoyable in their own right. Why focus only on a small sample of Lovecraft tales? Im willing to bet the average hipster who has shanghaied Cthulhu for his/her informed yet perfectly droll discussions about Lovecraft has never read The Strange High House in the Mist, because it's not part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and that's a real shame, because its a good story.
But more specifically, there are issues raised in these stories that could concern the Mythos that get ignored, presumably because they are inconvenient to address and keep the Mythos idea in tact. For one, there is a tremendous amount of crossover in these stories as well. The evil old man in The Terrible Old Man (one of Lovecraft's earlier works) makes an appearance in the aforementioned Strange High House in the Mist. In High House he is a source of information for the main character, and seems a fairly benevolent force in the Kingsport community. In The Terrible Old Man, he is a feared and probably evil entity (he seems to keep people's souls in jars).
This simple crossover raises a few concerns. If Lovecraft wanted his crossover references in his later work to be established as some sort of Mythos, why wouldn't he want this obvious crossover element to count in his mythology as well? Both stories are, after all, set in Lovecraft's fictional town Kingsport, and both contain elements that could be worked into the Mythology. But they aren't for some reason. And I'll tell you that reason. If the Old Man himself is part of the Cthulhu Mythos, then the stories have to be taken as canon for the Mythos. The Terrible Old Man could fit in fine, because he seems to practice a dark magic. But then, no one wants High House in the Mythos because when the protagonist finally visits the mysterious house (after being advised by the Terrible Old Man):
Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss. (TSHHitM)And we can't have Cthulhu palin' around with Neptune can we? No, because that would be silly. So, goodbye Old Man, sorry you don't fit in so well, eh? The simple way out of this puzzle for Mythos proponents is to chalk up the Old Man's crossover appearance as a simple instance of Lovecraft just using the same town with the same character for an utterly different story simply because he liked the character, and though it would be fun to reuse the idea and add some verisimilitude to the story. But once you admit this, why isn't the same for ALL of Lovecraft's crossover references?
3. The argument could be made (and I don't think it's a particularly convincing one) that High House and Lovecraft's other "Dream Cycle" stories need to be excluded because much of their events take place in a sort of dream world, separate and distinct from the harsh, realistic world of the "Cthulhu Mythos" stories. However, Lovecraft placed a special emphasis on dreams in most of his stories (as he did in real life.) Cthulhu communicates by appearing in the dreams of artists and aesthetes, after all.
And besides, there are countless connections between the "Cthulhu Mythos" stories and "Non-Mythos" stories that are impossible to ignore. Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, two entities that originate in the "Dream Cycle" stories, and feature prominently in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath are mentioned in numerous "Mythos" tales, such as in The Dreams of the Witch House:
He had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.So if Azathoth is in the Necronomicon (both of which are considered Mythos) why isn't Dream Quest, a story that features Azathoth more prominently than any other Lovecraft story, considered Mythos? Is it because in Dream Quest Randolph Carter is assisted by a band of cats who regularly fly to the moon? Probably. (The cats, by the way, have their own story, The Cats of Ulthar, and Randolph Carter appears in numerous "Dream Cycle" stories. In fact, the "Dream Cycle" stories seem to have a much more specifically elaborated consistency and "mythos" than any of the "Cthulhu Mythos" stories do.)
Still other connections between the "Dream Cycle" and the "Cthulhu Mythos" seem to be ignored because they are inherent contradictions. Is the suicidal narrator, ready to leap from his window in Dagon the very same "nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry"(The Call of Cthulhu)? Probably not, because it would make little sense, but it's a fun reference that Lovecraft may have inserted into his story for the hell of it. The Plateau of Leng is a sinister and evil place that exists, very explicitly, in the dream world Randolph Carter explores in Dream Quest. Yet in At the Mountains of Madness, upon encountering the ancient city over the dreaded mountains for the first time, the narrator remarks:
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth’s globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the most ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss.So does Leng exist in the dreamworld? Or is it in Antarctica? Is it both? Again, it seems that Lovecraft was reusing specific parts of his own fiction for fun and to bestow the feeling of authenticity on his tales.
Cthulhu was Loose Again, and Ravening for Delight
It's clear that Lovecraft enjoyed writing about what he did. He and his circle of friends wrote some very good and very eerie tales about the world we live in. It is also evident that Lovecraft liked to re-use ideas, names, places and events to give his tales a sense of authenticity to increase their creepiness. But I find the "Cthulhu Mythos" idea just goes too far. It inherently steers people away from some great Lovecraft stories not involved with the mythos, and tries too hard to tie together things and characters that Lovecraft never intended to have tied together. Derleth and others did, unquestioningly, use Lovecraft's work as a jump off point for their own "Cthulhu Mythos." But I don't think it's very proper to consider it Lovecraft canon, or assume that he intended or even would have approved of it.
Lovecraft himself poked fun at his work, calling it "Yog-Sothothery." (possibly a play on "tom-foolery" but considering Lovecraft, a perennial racist, probably a portmanteau of his creature Yog-Sothoth and the now outdated term "Nig-noggery") Clearly, he didn't take it all too seriously, likely because while he put effort and work into each story, the consistency or sensibility of the over arching mythos was unimportant to him. A writer who was concerned with the fidelity of his fiction to the degree of creating and maintaining a consistent mythos would probably not poke fun at it in such a way (can you imagine Tolkien calling his life's work Bal-Roggery?) Lovecraft did entertain himself and his friends by expanding upon his universe, but it was almost always in a tongue-in-cheek way. For example, Lovecraft created a family tree for Cthulhu, listing his line of descendants, much like Tolkien created genealogical charts for many of his characters. The only difference? Lovecraft himself was listed as a descendant of Cthulhu...
My all time favorite Lovecraft story is The Music of Erich Zann. It has nothing to do with the "Cthulhu Mythos" and, as far as I can tell, is not referenced in any other Lovecraft story. It's a short, dark tale that scared the crap out of me for reasons I could never appreciably explain. I implore anyone interested in Lovecraft to read it, it's truly one of his best. If you want to read Lovecraft, read Lovecraft, don't limit yourself to reading "the mythos" stories, just because someone you know says that Cthulhu is "the shit" or because he was on South Park the other night. And if you, like me, truly appreciate all that Lovecraft has to offer, next time some snarky bastard tries to tell you about Cthulhu's parental god, smack him in the face. Lovecraft sought to creep us out, and we, as readers want to be scared because it's fun. So go! Read Lovecraft, have fun!
p.s. I don't really like South Park all that much, but they get a lot of credit in my book for being the only mainstream depiction of Cthulhu I've ever seen that made him kind of fat, which is exactly how Lovecraft describes the statuette of Cthulhu ("This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block..." (TCoC) Most people, even the very talented artists who put their Cthulhu art online, often have him muscular, or lean (this is, what? scarier?). It gives me the impression that people are interested in the idea of Cthulhu (and as such the mythology of evil gods that surround him) but not really the substance of Lovecraft's fiction, which is also the impression I get from the people who seem in love with the idea of the "Cthulhu Mythos." So thank you for fat Cthulhu, South Park.
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