THE CTHULHU MYTHOS ENCYCLOPEDIA, BEING AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE MYTH-PATTERNS OF THE XOTHIC AND COMMORIOM LEGEND-CYCLES WITH NOTES ON THE ALHAZREDIC DEMONOLOGY, OR, A COMPENDIUM OF LORE RELATING TO THOSE BEINGS WHO ONCE RULED THE UNIVERSE AND THOSE WHO HAVE REVERED AND RENOUNCED THEM, AS EXPRESSED THROUGH THE MYTHOLOGY OF ALL CULTURES AND EXPLAINED IN THE WORKS OF H. P. LOVECRAFT AND OTHERS IN A MANNER THOUGHT TO BE FICTIONAL BY THE UNINITIATED AND RATIONAL
The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia is published by Elder Signs Press, Inc.
This book is © 2008 Daniel Harms.
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Cover by Malcolm McClinton.
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Rhan-Tegoth: Formula from “The Horror in the Museum”, copyright 1989 by Arkham House.
Sixth Sathlatta: From “The Horror at Oakdeene”, copyright 1977 by Brian Lumley.
Tsathoggua: From Selected Letters III, copyright 1971 by Arkham House.
Vach-Viraj: From The Burrowers Beneath, copyright 1974 by Brian Lumley.
Descriptions of specific story elements in this work are for the purposes of reference and commentary. They are not intended in any way as a challenge to the ownership of relevant trademarks, copyrights, or intellectual property.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written persmission of the publisher.
FIRST EDITION
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Published in July 2008
ISBN:
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1-934501-05-0 (Trade Paperback)
Printed in the U.S.A.
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DISCLAIMER
The material within this volume is as accurate as current knowledge in the field of medieval metaphysics permits, but inaccuracies may appear nonetheless. Daniel Harms, Elder Signs Press, and any distributor or retailer of this volume may not be held accountable for any use or misuse of the material within this volume which results in physical, psychological, or financial harm to its owner, any of his/her family or associates, large sections of the population, the earth, or the cosmos itself, including the higher dimensions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Scott David Aniolowski, Shannon Appel, Az0th, Alex Beckers, Guy Bock, Monika Bolino, Nancy A. Collins, Georg Datterl, Paul Dietzel, W. Paul Ganley, Alan Glover, John W. Gonce III, Frank Hummel, Tani Jantsang, Susan Jata (a real miracle-worker), S. T. Joshi, Matthew Leonard, Chick Lewis, Philip Marsh, Dru Myers, David Papayanopulos, Robert M. Price, Philip Rahman (thanks for setting me straight—again), Kevin A. Ross, Paul Rydeen, Christophe Thill, John Tynes, David Watson, Patrick White, everybody on alt.horror.cthulhu, and that nameless librarian at VU who must have wondered what the hell was going on.
Special thanks to my family, E. P. Berglund, Catharine Good, Steven “The Evil” Harris, Chris Jarocha-Ernst, Laura Junker, Steven “The Good” Kaye, Gary Libby, Donovan Loucks, Alan T. Pyotreh, Janice Sellars, Steve Shartran, Lynn Willis, and the inter-library loan departments at Pulaski County Library and the John and Alexandra Heard Library at Vanderbilt.
Third edition: Thanks to Fabien Amlin, Martin Andersson, E. P. Berglund, Hervé Boudoir, James “Jeb” Bowman, Matt Carpenter, Dan Clore, David Conyers, Manolito Gallegos, Patricio Gonzaga, Steven Marc Harris, C. J. “Two-Gun” Henderson, Keith “Doc” Herber, Tani Jantsang, Steven Kaye, Bret Kramer, Donovan Loucks, Thomas McGrenery, Dru “Reverend Doctor” Myers, Terje Nordin, Kevin Ross, Troy Sagrillo, Takeoka Hiraku, and Leigh Ann Vrabel for their comments and suggestions.
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FOREWORD
THIS BOOK IS NOT a historical work. Instead, it represents one person’s perspectives on the present state of the phenomenon known as the “Cthulhu Mythos”—a collection of fictional monsters, books, places, people, and other elements which weave together the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors through a stream of common references—in all of its glorious confusion. It is a phenomenon with roots dating back over a century, shaped via carefully crafted narratives, philosophy, mythology, systematization, oversystematization, deconstruction, mistakes, hunches, and outright errors. Nonetheless, an examination of its development may help to clarify its origins and future.
But why embark on such a project at all? Isn’t all of this just fiction? But what do we mean by that? Nothing is “just” fiction, as jokes are never “just” jokes and entertainment is never “just” entertainment. That’s not to downplay the relevance of such material as entertaining or ridiculous, as they certainly are. Nonetheless, all of them also address more serious topics in ways that might not be possible through “serious” communication, providing outlets for perspectives and opinions that might not be acceptable elsewhere. Such “non-serious” material can nonetheless affect us on an intellectual and emotional level, and therein lies the source of its power.
When we get past the slime and the tentacles, Lovecraft used the Mythos to talk about issues that he did not have an avenue to address otherwise. We begin with the following passage from his letters—one familiar to many readers, though it has seen little critical attention:
When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half-sincere belief in the old gods and nature-spirits. I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo, Diana and Athena, and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk. Once I firmly thought I beheld some of the sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks …
What we have here is not a childhood game, but an experience similar to those that many people across the world have had over the centuries. We might debate whether these experiences originate in the external world or simply in the mind, or some combination of the two. Nonetheless, they do occur and have a profound effect on the lives of people around them. Those who have studied modern Neopaganism might point to similar (if usually less dramatic) childhood narratives of encounters with beings from another level of reality.
Also of crucial import for understanding Lovecraft and his Mythos are his dreams. Lovecraft’s accounts of them are nothing short of breathtaking:
Space, strange cities, weird landscapes, unknown monsters, hideous ceremonies, Oriental and Egyptian gorgeousness, and indefinable mysteries of life, death, and torment, were daily—or rather nightly commonplaces to me before I was six years old.
In another time or culture, Lovecraft’s childhood experiences and intensive dreaming would have led him to great acclaim—or death—as such individuals were often seen as people of great power in cultures around the world. As it happened, he was born into Victorian New England, in which the dominant paradigms were either materialistic science or mainline Protestantism. Both of these encouraged the dismissal of Lovecraft’s experiences as childish, ridiculous, or signs of mental disorder. One of the few acceptable outlets for these sentiments was aesthetic expression, and this is what Lovecraft chose.
Was Lovecraft an occultist, a modern-day shaman? No credible evidence indicates that Lovecraft had more than a superficial grasp of occult topics and terminology. Critics are correct to point out the vast material in his letters and essays detailing his mechanistic materialism. Still, Lovecraft was a man, not a philosophy, and we cannot assume that his thoughts can completely explain him or his output. What makes Lovecraft’s writing so compelling is that it brings together the rationality of Western civilization with i
mpulses and experiences that this civilization downplays but that nonetheless cannot be denied.
Lovecraft took quite some time to find a mixture that he found aesthetically pleasing. His works before “The Call of Cthulhu” draw on a wide variety of source material, through the use of which he tried to reconcile these divergent demands. In some cases, he made reference to religion and folklore. “Dagon” and “Hypnos” draw upon his love of mythology, while folk beliefs inspired “The Temple” and “The Rats in the Walls.” “The Horror at Red Hook” combines long-circulated rumors surrounding Oriental religion with the trappings of ceremonial magic. A supposedly scientific rationale drives such stories as “Herbert West—Reanimator”, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, and “From Beyond.” Lovecraft’s cobbled-together cosmologies for these tales are mirrored by such otherworldly works as “Polaris” and “The Other Gods”, which seek to remove us entirely from the modern rational world to another where other laws reign. Finally, we have stories including creations of Lovecraft’s own invention, such as Alhazred (“The Nameless City”) and the Necronomicon (“The Hound”), though these still take on the logic of a dream—or perhaps that of a story by his idol, Edgar Allan Poe.
August Derleth has been criticized for choosing the label the “Cthulhu Mythos” for this developing system, as Cthulhu hardly forms an important part in the overall Mythos pantheon. (Lovecraft himself referred to it jokingly as “Yog-Sothothery.”) Nonetheless, “The Call of Cthulhu” is perhaps the first tale in which Lovecraft successfully weaves together real-world legend and belief, the outlook and tools of scientific inquiry, and his own fantastic creations to create a belief system—albeit a fictional one—combining the power of myth with the conviction of science.
Lovecraft built up the Mythos through two methods. First, he spun his stories together with a weave of shared allusions. Many assume that Lovecraft took this technique from Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana (1905), in which the Irish lord created a set of interlocking prose poems about the gods of a fantastic realm. Nonetheless, we have no indication that Lovecraft set out to create a pantheon; his early creations are mostly places, individuals, and forbidden books. A more immediate source of inspiration was probably Dunsany’s Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), in which we find three stories (“Idle Days on the Yann”, “A Shop in Go-By Street”, and “The Avenger of Perdondaris”) that refer to events, individuals, and places from each other, thereby creating a world that the reader explores with the narrator.
The second component of Lovecraft’s Mythos was its inclusion of others’ creations in his work. We see the first signs of this in “The Hound”, which as Philip Shreffler points out in his H. P. Lovecraft Companion, contains so many in-joke references to the works of Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle that it might be considered parody. In “The Festival”, Lovecraft deliberately introduces the works of another author into his story. When the narrator examines the books on his host’s table, he finds, in addition to the Necronomicon and such anti-witchcraft literature as Saducismus Triumphatus and Daemonolatreia, a book called Marvells of Science by Morryster. This book was the creation of Ambrose Bierce, who refers to it once in his story “The Man and the Snake”. We will never know why Lovecraft chose this book, but it seems to have been his only attempt at making such a reference for many years.
Lovecraft’s protégé Frank Belknap Long took the first step at cross-author referencing, thereby starting the Mythos as we know it. While writing his story “The Space-Eaters”, he included an introductory quote from a previously unknown translation of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon made by the Elizabethan magus John Dee. The quote was not printed with the story, but Lovecraft saw it in Long’s manuscript. As a result, he referred to the John Dee translation in his story “The Dunwich Horror”, a story which Joshi has noted had a major impact on conceptions of the Cthulhu Mythos.
After this, Lovecraft and his circle of friends began a process of borrowing gods, books, and people from each other’s stories. Lovecraft played along, often including long lists of references to the creations of authors past and present in his later stories. For example, HPL might use Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua in one of his stories. The California author would return the favor by including the Necronomicon in one of his. The exact process by which these elements were exchanged is difficult to determine in some cases, because no scholar has yet examined the chronology through which these stories were written and exchanged through correspondence. Thus, in some cases, the first appearance of an element in a story might not be the first published, leading to the appearance that it originated with another author. At this point, the Mythos became more than a device to inspire horror; it also signified the friendships between the writers.
Lovecraft also adopted names from stories by his own favorite writers. One of these was the Welsh author Arthur Machen, best known today for his stories of prehistoric resurgences of magic and primitivism. Lovecraft’s use of a black stone in “The Whisperer in Darkness” echoes the appearance of the Ixaxar in Machen’s “The Black Seal”, and “The Dunwich Horror” not only refers to phrases like “Aklo” and “Voorish” from “The White People”, but also explicitly alludes to “The Great God Pan.” After reading Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow and The Maker of Moons, Lovecraft mentioned Yian, Hastur, the Yellow Sign, and the Lake of Hali. (Some of the names in Chambers, such as Hastur and Carcosa, in fact originated in Ambrose Bierce. Commentators have stated this was the inspiration for the Mythos, but Lovecraft was borrowing names well before he had read Chambers’ works.) Finally, Lovecraft turned to Poe, whose “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” contributed not only the inspiration for “At the Mountains of Madness”, but the source for the mysterious phrase “Tekeli-li!”
If Lovecraft worried that these references would discourage readers, a letter from N. J. O’Neail to Weird Tales, printed in the March 1930 issue, added a new dimension to this cross-pollenization. O’Neail asked whether Robert E. Howard’s “Kathulos” and Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu” were inspired by the same source (they were not). He also noted the appearance of Yog-Sothoth in both “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Last Test”. Here was proof that readers found the in-jokes to be conducive to their enjoyment of the stories. While they did not see the behind-the-scenes connections between the writers, the fans enjoyed puzzling out and bringing together the pieces of what seemed to be an ancient and esoteric lore. The frequent letters to Lovecraft and other writers suggests that many had no idea that these background elements were fictional.
The Mythos also signified another sort of relationship between Lovecraft and his revision clients. A good portion of Lovecraft’s income came through revising the manuscripts of other authors. Lovecraft took such work because payment was guaranteed, whereas original stories might not be accepted due to Farnsworth Wright’s inconsistent editorial policies. However, Lovecraft often took on too much work for his money, writing or rewriting entire stories for which his clients received all the published credit. His letters show that he found this situation frustrating. Lovecraft may have dealt with these feelings by inserting his creations into these stories—in effect, placing his stamp of ownership on them. He also created a new set of elements for them—the gods Nug and Yeb, Yig, the underground land of K’n-yan, and Rhan-Tegoth, the horror from the Arctic.
When Lovecraft died in 1937, fans responded with an outpouring of grief, but this did not spur a corresponding renaissance in Lovecraftian fiction. Some of his friends left off the cross-references, and his close friend Clark Ashton Smith stopped most of his fiction writing. Still, the numerous reprints of Lovecraft’s fiction in Weird Tales and elsewhere kept his work in the public eye. At this time, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House and published a huge omnibus of Lovecraft’s fiction entitled The Outsider and Others (1939).
Derleth’s legacy is a multi-faceted one, and it is appropriate to evaluate its impact on the Mythos. Arkham House was a business into which Derleth sank a great
deal of his time and money that could have been spent on his own writing. Over the decades, when the pulp authors no longer appeared in magazines, Arkham reprinted their works and brought them to a broader audience. Derleth and Wandrei also brought new authors, including Ray Bradbury, A. E. Van Vogt, J. Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley, to the public’s attention.
Nonetheless, Derleth became a controversial figure among Lovecraft fans because of his interpretations of the Mythos. He has been criticized for depicting the Mythos as a battle between the white-hat Elder Gods and the black-hat Great Old Ones. This reading, however, does have some precedent—the minor supporting role of Nodens in “Dream-Quest”, or Keziah Mason shunning Gilmore’s crucifix in “Dreams in the Witch-House”. Likewise, Lovecraft often encouraged other Mythos writers to create such material; Long’s original Dee Necronomicon quote, which started the exchange of concepts between stories, dealt with the cross warding off the forces of evil.
At one time, it appeared that even Lovecraft advocated this view. Harold Farnese, a correspondent of Lovecraft’s, claimed that Lovecraft had sent him the following quote:
All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.
In addition, Lovecraft had a chance to stop the Elder Gods before they appeared. Derleth and his friend Mark Schorer turned out a number of collaborations one summer, most notably the story “Lair of the Star-Spawn.” This tale adds a panoply of beings to the pantheon—the Great Old Ones and Elder Gods (the titles of the two groups are reversed from Derleth’s later usages!), the Star-Warriors, Zhar, Lloigor, and others. Lovecraft, as usual, complimented his fellow author, and stated that he’d use the tale’s most minor creation—the Tcho-Tcho people—in his stories. If Lovecraft meant this to be a mild critique of Derleth’s reinterpretation of his cosmology, it was a failure.
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