The following appeared in the Providence Manufacturers and Farmers Journal for February 28, 1901: “[A] tremendous phenomenon was plainly visible [last night] to the unaided eye, provided one was somewhat informed about what was going on in space. Briefly told, the thing that has aroused a lively interest, and even a sensation among astronomers in all the Northern Hemisphere[,] is a new star, discovered last Thursday by a Scotch student of the heavens, Dr. T. D. Anderson, at Edinburgh. . . . This new star discovered by Dr. Anderson . . . is something quite out of the range of known laws of the science of astronomy, although it would hardly have been so promptly observed without the close watch of the movements of the heavenly bodies which makes possible the accurate knowledge just referred to. Neither Dr. Anderson nor any other man is able to tell why a star that is now one of the most brilliant in the sky at night, should have suddenly burst forth at a point where a short time ago absolutely nothing was visible, even to the most powerful telescope. The scientist can do nothing more than speculate concerning it and tell us that something of awful and stupendous character is the cause.” It is unlikely that the eleven-year-old Lovecraft would have read the article.
Nyarlathotep1
Like “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “Nyarlathotep” is a record of a dream of Lovecraft’s. A vision of the downfall of civilization, its powerful images are impossible to pin down—disturbing in the way that dreams disturb us. The persona of “Nyarlathotep” returns in future versions of the Cthulhu Mythos, yet never in more dramatic fashion than here.
Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos. . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .2
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago.3 The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a dæmoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin4 knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries,5 and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude.6 Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.
I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him,7 and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room8 prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.
It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces9 peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling sun.10 Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about “imposture” and “static electricity,” Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.
I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top.11 Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous12 ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.13
“Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter!” (Peoples of Europe, Protect Your Holiest Possessions!) by Wilhelm II, ca. 1895.
1. Written in December 1920, the tale first appeared in the United Amateur (dated November 1920 but published no earlier than January 1921).
2. Will Murray, in “Behind the Mask of Nyarlathotep,” points
out that not only is this Lovecraft’s first fictitious god, but it is the first to appear in more than one Lovecraft story. Nyarlathotep appears as a character in six of Lovecraft’s works, “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), as a faceless god in the caverns of the center of the Earth; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–27), unpublished during Lovecraft’s lifetime; the twenty-first sonnet of the thirty-six-poem cycle “Fungi from Yuggoth” (1929–30); and the stories “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) and “The Haunter of the Dark” (1936). The name, according to David Haden, in Walking with Cthulhu: H. P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer, New York City, 1924–26, may be roughly translated as “the message (messenger) that is trusted of (by) the gods.” In “Cthulhu’s Scald: Lovecraft and the Nordic Tradition,” Jason C. Eckhardt points out similarities between Nyarlathotep and the Norse mythological figures of Loki (a devious, mysterious shape-shifter) and Surt (Lord of Muspelheim, land of fire, who, it is suggested, will figure prominently in the end of the world).
3. David Haden, in Walking with Cthulhu, argues that the “season” is late 1919. The world was still recovering from the mortal and psychic consequences of the Great War, a worldwide influenza epidemic killed over 25 million worldwide, the scientific world was in upheaval due to the theories of Einstein, and a terrible heat wave in New England and New York took almost 600 lives.
4. The rural people of the Middle East.
5. S. T. Joshi, in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (370, n. 1), interprets this ambiguous phrase to mean that Nyarlathotep was born twenty-seven centuries previous, approximately 820 BCE. This would place his rise in the 22nd Dynasty of Egypt, which lasted from 943 BCE to 730 BCE, the so-called Middle Intermediate Period. However, it is equally possible that Nyarlathotep meant that his birth occurred in Egypt at some unknown date, perhaps even earlier than the founding of the first dynasty in 3100 BCE, after twenty-seven centuries of “blackness.” In other words, the “rising up” need not refer to the present day; it is clear from other references to Nyarlathotep that he appeared at various times other than the present (see note 2, above). Elsewhere, in his biography of Lovecraft (I Am Providence, 370), Joshi states that Nyarlathotep arose at the end of the 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, “either in the reign of Khufu (Cheops) in 2590–68 BCE or in that of Khafre (Chephren) in 2559–35 BCE,” and suggests that Lovecraft was implying a connection between Nyarlathotep and the Sphinx (Khafre was the builder of the Sphinx). In a footnote to this work (554, n. 18), he calls George Wetzel’s analysis, in “The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study,” “wildly erroneous” in tying Nyarlathotep to the Ethiopian invasion of Europe that took place from 760 to 650 BCE. Something is plainly wrong with Joshi’s arithmetic: 1920 CE less 2,700 years is about 780 BCE. There is no basis for the view that the “rising up” of Nyarlathotep occurred at the opening of the Common Era.
6. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), best known as an electrical engineer, inventor, and rival of Thomas Edison, was called by one friend a poet, philosopher, and connoisseur of fine music and art. He presented his discoveries to the public in great showman-like demonstrations, often with his Tesla coil pumping electricity through the room, terrifying the audience. There is no evidence that Lovecraft met Tesla or even read firsthand accounts of his presentations. However, Will Murray, in “Behind the Mask of Nyarlathotep,” argues that Tesla made “a profound impression” on Lovecraft, sufficient to shape the description of Nyarlathotep.
7. In 1920, Lovecraft wrote his friend Reinhardt Kleiner of a dream that he had had, in which his friend Samuel Loveman had written him: “Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.” (The letter is dated December 14, 1920; Selected Letters, I, 161, misdates it to December 14, 1921.)
8. The year 1920 was a fine one for the silent screen (sound films did not appear until 1927). John Barrymore starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and two other versions of the same story appeared. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a classic horror tale, was released. Most significantly for this purpose, however, was the release of the film Algol, starring Emil Jannings. In it, an alien from the planet Algol attempts to conquer Earth. See “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” above.
9. “Yellow peril,” the stereotype of the threatening Asian, gained political currency when the epithet was popularized by Kaiser Wilhelm II during the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95. The kaiser sent Tsar Nicholas II a scurrilously allegorical drawing, “Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter!” (Peoples of Europe, Protect Your Holiest Possessions!), showing persons representing the European powers against a backdrop of storm clouds atop which rode a fiery image of the Buddha. He had mentally “developed” the image himself and then commissioned “a first class draughtsman,” the painter Hermann Knackfuss, to render it, as he explained to the tsar: “and after it was finished [I] had it engraved for public use. It shows the powers of Europe represented by their respective Genii called together by the Arch-Angel Michael,—sent from Heaven,—to unite in resisting the inroad of Buddhism, heathenism and barbarism for the Defence of the Cross” (Kaiser Wilhelm II to Tsar Nicholas II, September 26, 1895, in John C. G. Röhl’s Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900, 909, citing Walter Goetz and Max Theodor Behrmann, Briefe Wilhelms II. an den Zaren [Berlin: Ulstein & Co., 1920], 294–96).
Fomented in part by the Hearst newspapers and the stories of Dr. Fu Manchu by the British-born Irish-Catholic novelist Sax Rohmer (1883–1959), the stereotype of “yellow evil faces” soon seized the public imagination.
In a letter to his friends Alfred Galpin and Maurice W. Moe (part of the “Gallomo”—Galpin, Lovecraft, Moe—cycle) dated September 30, 1919 (Selected Letters, I, 89–90), Lovecraft wrote: “Orientals must be kept in their native East till the fall of the white race. Sooner or later a great Japanese war will take place, during which I think the virtual destruction of Japan will have to be effected in the interests of European safety. The more numerous Chinese are a menace of the still more distant future. They will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilisation, for their numbers are amazing. But all that is too far ahead for consideration today. . . .”
10. No specific film with these images can be identified. The scene described is reminiscent of the end of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1898) and of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), neither of which had yet been filmed. Are the “yellow evil faces” Asian? Or the result of baleful light on the planet’s surface? (There are several yellow beasts described in The Night Land.) A color film would likely have been hand-tinted at this early stage of filmmaking; color stencils were also used occasionally. Technicolor was not introduced until 1922.
11. That is, the audience has now traveled into the future, when the city has passed into ruins.
12. Shadowy or obscure.
13. Commercial radio broadcasts of music (mostly live, including church choirs), election returns, and the like began in the United States in 1920, with the appearance, in August, of a Detroit station, WWJ, operated under an amateur license by teenage radio buff Michael DeLisle Lyons, who was supported in the effort by the Scripps family, owners of the Detroit News, and, in November, of KDKA, which sent its signal from the roof of a Westinghouse Electric Company building in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Both stations used 100-watt transmitters.
Cover of H. P. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep.
Boom! Studios, 2008
(artist: Chuck BB)
The Picture in the House1
Poesque in its evocation of horror, the tale explores how an appreciation of terror can lead one to the edge—to a test of character and of whether, as an “epicure in the terrible,” one is as horrifying and pitiful as the grim spectacle one takes pleasure in observing. It is also important as the first story to be sited in Lovecraft’s fictional geography of the valley of the Miskatonic River and the neighborhood of t
he town of Arkham.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais,2 and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries.3 They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.4 Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.5
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