The Classic Horror Stories

by Roger Luckhurst

  Asian dregs … Ellis Island: in New York harbour, the processing point for immigrants to America from 1892 until it closed in 1954. Asian immigration policy was tightened long before Ellis Island opened: the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 had forbidden further entry of migrant workers from China after the gold rush. The 1924 Immigration Act extended this ban further to cover all Asian immigrants.

  Nestorian Christianity … Shamanism of Thibet: HPL evokes ancient and marginal belief systems, just surviving on the edges of orthodox religions. The followers of Nestorius believed that there were two natures in Christ, the divine Logos and the human Jesus: this was declared heresy in 430 CE, and the movement became marginal to Western forms of Christianity. Shamanism in Tibet refers to the practices of the Bon religion, largely wiped out in Tibet over a millennium ago by the advent of Buddhism.

  Mongoloid … Kurdistan … Yezidis … devil-worshippers: more racial demarcations at the Eastern rim of Europe. Mongoloid was a term used by nineteenth-century racial science, identifying the Mongols as a root race: Mongol-like or Mongoloid could at various times be applied to Turks, Uzbeks, Tajiks, or even Native Americans. Here, it implies a suspicious Eastern, Asiatic trait. The Kurds are a large ethnic grouping, but stateless in the modern borderlands of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Yazidism is a specific ethnoreligious subgroup of the Kurds, with a set of beliefs that the world was created by God, but left in the care of seven holy beings. The most dominant of these, Melek Taus, is also called Shaytan or Satan—hence their reputation as devil-worshippers.

  O friend … our sacrifices: to add authenticity, HPL, who cheerfully confessed that he knew very little about magic, uses two citations from the entry on ‘Magic’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was written by Edward Burnett Tylor, the first man to hold an academic post in anthropology in England. This first citation is from a discussion of the primitive magical beliefs of the ancient Greeks and ‘the worship of Hecate, the moon, sender of midnight phantoms’. Tylor’s whole tone in the entry is one of contempt: belief in magic is only evident in the ‘lower races’, and although it ‘still lingers in peasant folklore’, it is simply a faulty primitive mode of cognition. Tylor’s materialism matches HPL’s own.

  HEL … ESCHEREHEYE: HPL’s second quotation from Tylor’s entry on ‘Magic’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this time discussing the various mix of theurgic names found in magical books of the Middle Ages. Because Tylor is so contemptuous—the citation is offered ‘as an illustration of magical scholarship in its lowest stage’—he does not bother to translate in detail. It is a list of sacred names of God, derived from Hebrew and Greek. The technique of citing untranslated, apparently occult terms to suggest closed or secret knowledge is a Gothic device HPL learnt from Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’.

  Cunard Pier: the Cunard Line of luxury liners docked at Pier 54 in lower Manhattan. Cunard had incorporated the White Star Liners—this was the dock from which the RMS Lusitania departed in 1915 before being torpedoed with the loss of 1,200 lives.

  Chaldee letters … ‘LILITH’: in Jewish mythology, Lilith was the first, banished wife of Adam, who refused to be subservient to him. In some racial thought, Lilith is also the origin of the black races. These ideas rely on older meanings of lili or lilitu as female demons of the night, part of Sumerian and Chaldean mythological systems. Ancient Chaldea incorporated Babylon, the demonized other of the Old Testament.

  Incubi … Magna Mater: an incubus is the Latin term for a male demon that lies on women as they sleep and copulates with them; succubus is the female equivalent. The folk belief goes back as far as ancient Sumeria, and they are discussed as savage beliefs in Tylor’s Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on ‘Demonology’. Hecate is the Greek moon goddess, the Magna Mater, the Great Mother, and became associated with witchcraft practices.

  Ægypans: Aegypan was the Goat-God, associated with the Greek Pan, the impish half-goat, half-man, who menaces virgins and induces panic in others. The hybrid, metamorphic nature of the Aegypan, often represented as half-goat, half-fish, is important to HPL’s disgust at intermixed categories of being. In the nineteenth century, Pan was the quintessential pagan god. Again, HPL may be relying on the chains of association built up by Arthur Machen’s story, ‘The Great God Pan’.

  Moloch and Ashtaroth: Moloch was an Ammonite god, associated with propitiatory child sacrifice. Ashtaroth in the Western magical tradition refers to a powerful male demon, often invoked by magi for his dark and impressive powers and his ability to discover secrets. This was another mythic figure that featured heavily in the late Victorian occult revival. In The Lesser Key of Solomon, the magician Aleister Crowley described Ashtaroth as appearing ‘in the Form of a hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach too near unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath.’

  Walpurgis-riot: Walpurgisnacht is the eve of May Day, 30 April, held to be the night of the Witches’ Sabbath; in Germany, the tradition is that this gathering is held in the Harz Mountains. Its name derives from St Walpurga, who ran a convent in Germany in the eighth century: her feast day falls on the same day.

  Tartarus: in Greek mythology, the place beneath the underworld, where the wicked suffer punishment for their misdeeds, especially those who have committed an outrage against the gods.

  ‘An sint unquam daemones … queat?’: a Latin citation from Del Rio’s Disquisitions on Magic (1603), which is borrowed from Tylor’s entry on ‘Demonology’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Tylor translates it as: ‘Have there ever been demons, incubi and succubae, and from such a union can offspring be born?’

  well of Democritus: Democritus (460–370 BCE), Greek philosopher. He held space to be an ‘infinite Void’ and his ideas laid the foundation for the modern atomic theory. HPL’s reference might echo the use of the phrase ‘something more profound than the well of Democritus’ in Poe’s tale, ‘Ligeia’ (1845).

  THE CALL OF CTHULHU

  HPL wrote this story in Providence on his return from his fateful stay in New York, late in 1926. It was initially rejected by Weird Tales, then resubmitted and finally appeared in February 1928. When HPL resubmitted the story to the editor Farnsworth Wright, he wrote an accompanying letter that contained an important defence of his approach, ‘though possibly you will still think it a trifle too bizarre for a clientele who demand their weirdness in name only, and who like to keep both feet pretty solidly on the ground of the known and the familiar’ (SL ii. 149). In a classic statement of his philosophy, HPL continued:

  ‘Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind have any existence at all … [W]hen we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity—and terrestrialism at the threshold.’ (SL ii. 150)

  Of such great powers … BLACKWOOD: the author Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) was for HPL one of the finest writers of the weird tale. This quotation is from chapter 10 of one of Blackwood’s most mystical novels, The Centaur (1911). The power being discussed is the ability of the human personality to ‘project portions of itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central covering body’. The novel concerns a psychic sensitive able to reconnect with a primordial connection to Nature, lost by modern man. This is an ecstatic possibility for Blackwood, being a mystic; it will produce a different emotion in the narrator of this tale.

  Theosophists … incidents:
the Theosophical Society was founded by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian mystic, in New York in 1875, before she moved first to India and finally London (in 1887), ensuring the movement had a global influence. It had a large impact on the late Victorian occult revival, and also influenced several Gothic writers. Its occult beliefs are based on Blavatsky’s two key books, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), which purport to be communications that come directly from the secret bearers of the lost wisdom of the ancients, hidden away in Tibet. HPL had no time for occultism, but theosophy claimed to be a synthesis of all science and all religions, and importantly offered a Darwinian prehistory of the seven races that preceded the existence of man on earth, the founding beings having originally travelled from Venus. This fabulated prehistory gave HPL rich materials to develop his own cosmic prehistory of man in ‘Cthulhu’ and elsewhere.

  Gammell Angell: HPL embeds family references: he was born on Angell Street in Providence; he lived with his aunt Annie Phillips Gamwell as a child and returned to share a house with her on his return to Providence in 1926.

  cubism and futurism: cubism is the movement founded in Paris in 1907 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Bracques (1882–1963); their radical experimentation exploded classic perspectival and representational practices. The Futurists issued their first manifesto in 1909, and were led by the Italian provocateur Filippo Marinetti (1875–1944). Their destruction of language and pictorial and sculptural form, and their embrace of technological modernity and utter contempt for tradition, suggested to HPL in his essay ‘Heritage or Modernism’ that they were ‘committing an absolutely unjustified aesthetic crime’ (MW, 194).

  Scott-Elliott’s Atlantis …Frazer’s Golden Bough … Murray’s Witch-Cult: all of these books exist. William Scott-Elliott’s The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria was published in 1925, reprinting the two short books he wrote for the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1896 and 1904. These are crucial sources for ‘Cthulhu’. The myth of Atlantis is well known, but in the nineteenth century, it was briefly supposed that there might have been an equivalent lost continent in the Indian Ocean, and this was christened Lemuria by the zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864. Lost Lemuria had a big influence on American pulp science fiction and popular belief into the 1940s. J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) was a multi-volume study of magic and religion, which exercised a major influence on theories of human development up to the Second World War. For Murray’s Witch-Cult, see note to p. 7.

  Wilcox: HPL embeds another family name.

  Rhode Island School of Design … Fleurs-de-Lys Building: RISD was founded in 1877 and continues to thrive as an elite college. The elaborately decorated Fleurs-de-Lys building was built in 1886 at 7 Thomas Street, near College Hill, and is now an American National Historic Landmark.

  Providence Art Club: the Art Club is situated at 11 Thomas Street, a few doors down.

  ‘It is new … Babylon’: as STJ points out, this refers back to this part of the story’s origin in a dream narrated in May 1920: ‘one other dream! I was in a museum somewhere down town in Providence … trying to sell the curator a bas-relief which I had just fashioned from clay. He asked me if I were crazy, attempting to sell him something modern when the museum was devoted to antiquities? … “This,” I said, “was fashioned in my dreams; and the dreams of man are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx or garden-girdled Babylon”’ (SL i. 114).

  unpronounceable … ‘Cthulhu fhtagn’: HPL wrote several letters, some tongue-in-cheek, on this word. ‘The name of the hellish entity was invented by beings whose vocal organs were not like man’s, hence it has no relation to the human speech equipment. The syllables were determined by a physiological equipment wholly unlike ours, hence could never be uttered perfectly by human throats … The letters CTHULHU were merely what Prof. Angell hastily devised to represent (roughly and imperfectly, of course) the dream-name orally mouthed to him by the young artist Wilcox … My careful devising of this name was a sort of protest against the silly and childish habit of most weird and science-fiction writers, of having utterly non-human entities use a nomenclature of thoroughly human character; as if alien-organed beings could possibly have languages based on human vocal organs’ (SL v. 10–11).

  Voodoo … Philippines … Levantines: HPL accumulates associations of colonial unrest. Voodoo is the syncretic religion associated with the black population of the Caribbean island of Haiti, then under American occupation. The Philippines in the Pacific had also been occupied by America following the Philippine-American War of 1899–1901, in which over a million people died, and was followed by continuous rebel resistance. The Levant was a section of the Middle East used to denote predominantly Christian areas of territory now covered by Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. It was carved up by European powers in the wake of the 1914–18 War. ‘Levantine’ could also refer in particular to the Sephardic Jewish population of the area.

  Ardois-Bonnot… salon of 1926: HPL often used real painters to inspire his passages of description but Ardois-Bonnot is an invention. The annual salon system of showing new art in Paris was, however, a frequent cause of scandal and excitement.

  African voodoo circles: voodoo was originally an African religion associated with the Fon tribe in the gulf of Benin, involved in the worship of vodu, ancestral deities. It was transferred to the Caribbean in various forms when the system of slavery transported millions across the Atlantic, and took the form of voodoo in Haiti, fusing with aspects of other belief systems. Under French Catholic colonial rule, it was associated with devil-worship. It was also a form of insurrection, and a Haitian slave rebellion famously threw off colonial rule in the 1790s. When HPL was writing ‘Cthulhu’, Haiti was again under colonial rule, America occupying the island between 1915 and 1934. There were harsh campaigns to stamp out peasant superstitions, but American popular culture became saturated with fears about voodoo black magic, particularly around the ability of bokus (‘witch-doctors’) to create zombies, undead slaves to do their bidding. HPL sets these scenes in the backwoods of Louisiana around New Orleans, a crucial place in the American slave trade, and a racially mixed area of Native American, French, African, and other white European immigrant communities.

  tornasuk … angekok: in Inuit mythology, tornasuk is sometimes the ‘supreme helper’ and sometimes a fierce ocean spirit who pulls people to their death. The angekok is the term for a shaman, who has privileged access to the spirit world. The idea of Eskimos as primitive devil-worshippers and possible cannibals was common in Victorian representations of the Inuit. As in ‘Red Hook’, HPL may have used E. B. Tylor’s entry on ‘Demonology’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for his sources. Tylor’s discussion of primitive tribal beliefs includes a short paragraph on Inuit practices: ‘the Greenland angekok, or sorcerer, is described as following his profession by the aid of a torngak, or familiar spirit (who may be an ancestral ghost), whom he summons by drumming’.

  Lafitte’s men: Jean Lafitte (c. 1776–c. 1823), a famous French-Haitian smuggler and pirate operating between New Orleans and various Caribbean islands, who became caught up in the struggle against British naval forces and helped defend New Orleans from British attack in 1815.

  D’Iberville … La Salle: Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (1661–1702) was founder of the French colony of Louisiana; René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, or Robert de La Salle (1643–1687), another French explorer who colonized the Mississippi river basin for France.

  a Sime or an Angarola: Sidney H. Sime (1867–1941) was a book illustrator who was used by Lord Dunsany for his Gods of Pegana (1905), a crucial influence on HPL. Sime went on to illustrate classic weird authors such as William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen and HPL draws attention to his ‘weird decorative grostesquerie’ alongside William Blake and Gustav Doré (SL ii 219). Anthony Angarola (1893–1929) was another artist and book illustrator, expert in the fantastic and grotesque, with whom HPL wanted to collaborate. In his short story
about a painter, ‘Pickman’s Model’, HPL comments: ‘There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.’

  mestizo: a term used in Latin America to indicate someone of mixed race parentage.

  mountains of China: a reference to Blavatksy’s claim that the esoteric knowledge that formed the basis of the teachings of the Theosophical Society derived from the Mahatmas who lived in the inaccessible fastness of Tibet.

  stones … in the Pacific: perhaps a reference to the 900 monumental statues on Easter Island, one of the most remote and enigmatic islands on Earth. The origins of the statues are a favourite subject for weird and supernatural speculation.

  beyond good and evil: an echo of the polemic by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). HPL grasped Nietzschean philosophy only with the broadest brushstrokes: ‘With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity’ (SL i. 86).

  sunk beneath the waves: another clear reference to the myths of Atlantis and Lemuria, picked up from Scott-Elliott and integral to the theories of racial development proposed by the Theosophical Society. In The Submerged Continents of Atlantis and Lemuria (1911), the mystic Rudolf Steiner traces out the rise and decadent fall of the seven root-races, suggesting that the Lemurians ‘became a stunted race, whose descendants, the so-called savages, inhabit certain portions of the earth even now’.