by Kenneth Hite
— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Given that “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” combines Orientalism, time-travel, cyclical metaphysics, alien races, and malarkey, it’s as good a place as any to pause and discuss Theosophy and Lovecraft. Without going into mind-numbing detail, Theosophy was an attempt to extrapolate Darwinian science and Hindu mysticism into a single belief system. Its central teachings, as set forth in Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), and as horribly simplified by me, held that over immense periods of time—millions and billions of years—numerous sentient races arose, flourished, advanced, and fell on the Earth in cycles punctuated by continental-scale cataclysms. These races were slowly degenerating from pure spirit into pure matter: our human race, the Fifth, is the lamest of the bunch so far. (Each race has a Root Race; ours is the “Aryan.” Mmm-hmmm.) It achieved a certain vogue around the turn of the 20th century, and its creator Helena P. Blavatsky (often referred to as “HPB” in fine parallel with our own “HPL”) managed to have rather more influence on a certain stratum of intellect than your standard former carnival trick-rider normally does. Even now, post-Blavatskyan Theosophy remains a core component of the New Age and neo-paganism generally, and in Lovecraft’s time, the heyday of such superficially similar cosmic historian-poets as Oswald Spengler and Olaf Stapledon, it absolutely ruled the occult roost.
By 1925/1926—precisely the time he was plotting and writing “The Call of Cthulhu”—Lovecraft discovered Theosophy, through a compilation (Atlantis and Lost Lemuria) by one of its later proselytes, W. Scott-Elliot. In June of 1926, he is writing to Clark Ashton Smith:
Really, some of these hints about the lost ‘City of the Golden Gates’ & the shapeless monsters of ancient Lemuria are ineffably pregnant with fantastic suggestion; & I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff.
His hookup for “the stuff” seems to have been E. Hoffmann Price, his collaborator on “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and (as far as I can tell with admittedly minimal research) not a Theosophist himself. Price was a pulp writer, a friend of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, and a correspondent of Robert E. Howard. Howard arranged for Price and Lovecraft to meet during HPL’s June 1932 visit to New Orleans. The two hit it off, and Price gave Lovecraft either a précis or copious notes on “the Pushkara-Plaksha-Kusha-Shâlmali-Mt. Wern-Senzar-Dzyan-Shamballah myth-cycle” in early 1933, likely to encourage work on this story. Again (in a February 18, 1933 letter), Lovecraft tips off Smith: “I don’t know where E. Hoffmann got hold of this stuff, but it sounds damn good.” By 1936, he is lecturing his other correspondents on the topic, writing on June 19 to Frederic Jay Pabody:
One may add that these European myths [of Atlantis] have nothing to do with the early Hindoo myths on which the theosophists draw. The identification of the lost world Kusha with ‘Atlantis’ was a mere gesture of the 19th century mystagogues.
Lovecraft noticed the commonalities between Theosophy, with its primordial inhuman species following divergent physical laws while remaining subject to the inevitable grindings of evolution and entropy, and the para-paleontology he was developing. As he wrote to Elizabeth Toldridge in March of 1933:
All this sounds amusingly like the synthetic mythology I have concocted for my stories, but Price assures me it is actual folklore & promises to send further particulars.
Price may have been over-egging the pudding a bit calling the sheerly chimerical Theosophy “actual folklore,” or he may have been taken in by one of the many domestic Indian or Tamil mythomanes that took Theosophy as their base, often for political purposes.
Blavatsky’s (fabricated) “Book of Dzyan” made it, via Price, into the pile of moldering Mythos tomes Robert Blake discovers in “The Haunter of the Dark.” It played an even bigger role (along with Shamballah) in Lovecraft’s revision tale “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” and the quasi-Theosophical Mu appears in the revision “Out of the Aeons.” “The Children of the Fire Mist” in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” are likewise Theosophical angel-figures, who (pace Scott-Elliot) descended to Earth from Venus.
The Great Race of Yith in “Shadow Out of Time,” for example, has no physical form, existing only as mentation; the close parallel to the purely psychic Polarians, the “First Root Race” of Theosophy, is remarkable, and intentional. Lovecraft gives us the nod in that tale: “A few of the myths had significant connections with other cloudy legends of the prehuman world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.”
Other specific influences are a little iffier. In his essay “HPL and HPB” (from which I have gladly lifted much of this information), Robert M. Price postulates that Lovecraft’s “Cyclopean” architecture derives from Theosophical giant-lore (the Lemurians and Atlanteans, Root Races Three and Four, were both gigantic). He also speculates that “the undying leaders” of the Cthulhu cult “in the mountains of China” (mentioned in “The Call of Cthulhu”) are a reference to the Ascended Masters of Theosophy, who dwell in Tibet, which is surely close enough. I don’t buy the first—Lovecraft’s use of “Cyclopean” goes back to “Dagon”—but the second seems more than plausible, given the number of shout-outs to Theosophy in “Call of Cthulhu,” and the fact that Lovecraft seems to have discovered Theosophy practically in the midst of plotting the tale.
The Thing on the Doorstep
[August 21-24, 1933]
When Lin Carter doesn’t like a Lovecraft story, I think the critical battle for acceptance is officially over. “The Thing on the Doorstep” is universally acknowledged to be a disappointment, or even an outright failure. (Even by HPL, who eventually allowed Julius Schwartz to badger him into submitting it three years after it was written.) I know that it’s one of the few HPL stories I’ve never bothered to re-read (until now), and although I occasionally enjoying putting my thumb in the critical eye, I have to agree that it’s definitely lesser Lovecraft.
That said, the character of the unfortunate Edward Pickman Derby is actually fairly acutely drawn and interesting, and (like his vague model Charles Dexter Ward) his personality actually moves the plot rather than being convenient to it, unlike so many Lovecraft protagonists. For that alone, I think the story repays some study, although obviously there are hordes of other writers to turn to for competent character-driven fiction. Only Lovecraft can deliver us our cosmic smack, and here he steps on it way too much.
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With that said, in the Lovecraftian universe, there would logically be such minor domestic tragedies as this. Yet more lives deformed and shoved askew by the passage of cosmic forces—forces, in this case, completely unaware of how human sorcerers are tugging at their shoelaces and pretending to control them. The sense of human sorcery as Cargo Cult, picking up barely-understood bits and techniques of an unthinkably advanced species’ physics, could come through quite well in a story like this, and glimmers yet beneath this one if you let it.
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I do disagree with Cannon and Joshi, when they accuse the Arkham background of “Doorstep” of being sketched in. As opposed to most of the Lovecraft canon, Arkham begins to come alive as a place where people do things besides read crumbling tomes in the library. It’s still fairly thin mead—we know far, far more about Innsmouth or Dunwich, which we only visit in one tale apiece, than we ever learn about the supposed center of Lovecraft’s fictional “Miskatonic Country.” But I like the hints of Arkham society and stratification Lovecraft adds, mostly in desperate attempts to conceal how truly unfitted he is to write anything like this story.
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One does wonder what Sonia Greene’s reaction to reading this story in Weird Tales might have been. She doesn’t mention it in her memoir of HPL, and of course it wasn’t published until a decade after the failure of their marriage, but still. One doesn’t have to be Sigmund Freud, or even S.T. Joshi, to read some of Lovecraft’s reaction to married life into the psychic imprisonm
ent of Derby by Asenath.
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George Wetzel adduces this tale to Lovecraft’s “common soul” (or “psychic possession”) trope, along with “The Tomb,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” Charles Dexter Ward (controversially, but I think the theme is clear even if the crux of the actual story is about physical, not psychic, replacement), “The Challenge From Beyond,” “Wall of Sleep,” and (intriguingly) “The Festival,” “Colour Out of Space,” and “Haunter of the Dark.” I would add, perhaps at one remove, “The Call of Cthulhu,” (which is, after all, about Cthulhu’s dream-soul deforming those it encounters) and perhaps even “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which is certainly about the replacement of a human soul by that of a Deep One, possibly triggered by physical change or trauma, or possibly merely by exposure, as in “Colour.” I also recall the slow melding of perspectives and insights between man and crinoid in At the Mountains of Madness. Learning the alien truth makes us alien… Is there a connection here to Derby’s wild accusations that shoggoths are somehow involved in Waite’s sorcery? What is a shoggoth, after all, but the common soul at its most basic, even quantum form, able to take any form and none, fully plastic and completely undefined?
So all in all, it’s a damn shame that the story’s not that good, isn’t it?
The Shadow Out of Time
[Fall 1934 to February 22, 1935]
In many ways the story is the culmination of Lovecraft’s fictional career, and by no means an unfitting capstone to a twenty-year attempt to capture the sense of wonder and awe felt at the boundless reaches of space and time.
— S.T. Joshi, introduction to The Shadow Out of Time: The Corrected Text
[Lovecraft’s] single greatest achievement in fiction. The form and substance of this extraordinary novella, its amazing scope and sense of cosmic immensitude, the gulfs of time it opens, the titanic sweep of the narrative…one of the most tremendously exciting imaginative experiences I have yet found in fantastic fiction …
— Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos
By the way—I finished ‘Shadow Out of Time’ last week, but doubt whether it is good enough to type. Somehow or other, it does not seem to embody quite what I want to embody—and I may tear it up and start all over again.
— H.P. Lovecraft, letter to E. Hoffmann Price, March 14, 1935
Of the three of them, I tend more toward Lovecraft’s opinion of “Shadow Out of Time,” although it’s far and away good enough to type. It’s merely great, though, not transcendent. I think I lowball it for some ill-defined reason, one that Lovecraft put best—for me, too, it does not seem to embody quite what it could. It’s more than a little over-long, and I find very little suspense to the final denouement. Well, technically, none whatsoever. It’s a surgically neat climax, but that’s the best I can say of it. Maybe if we really got into Peaslee’s head, we could feel his shock more fully, but overtypically, Peaslee is a boring stick who spends more time than Lovecraft can believably convey in agonies of Poe-narrative indecision about his experience. Even Australia (with its huge potential for the outré) isn’t really milked and brought to unlife the way Lovecraft does Antarctica in At the Mountains of Madness. My “adventurous expectancy” is sated early, when Peaslee susses out the core myth of Pnakotic possession, and I never really get it back.
I also wonder how you keep your identical handwriting if your mind is immured in a seven-foot-tall cone-being. This isn’t just nitpicking. I am somewhat surprised that Joshi doesn’t see (and on past form, stridently object to) the hugely obvious negation of “mechanist materialism” in the assumption that mentation and personality (even memory, in Peaslee’s case)—the soul, in other words—is independent of the physical brain, or even of humanoid brain structure. (In Lovecraft’s original version of this tale, the mind-transfers were from ancient—but human—Lomar.)
I do love the cosmicism; the stark vastness of time, the great allusion to Buddai (“the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world”), the increasingly deft retournement of the Necronomicon (this time as ‘dream diary’), and what we see of Peaslee’s attempt to discover his bizarre activities while “amnesiac.” I especially love the horrible, horrible Yithians with their “fascistic socialism,” their callous voyeurism, and their utter amorality bred of utter invulnerability. (“Flying polyps going to escape, eh?” “Not our problem. It’s off to beetle-time we go.” BAMF.) Lovecraft never blended the alien and the villainous as convincingly.
But I just don’t love this story as I probably should.
The Haunter of the Dark
[November 5-9, 1935]
To set us up for Lovecraft’s last story, a quote from Lovecraft’s last letter:
There is no drawing a line betwixt what is to be called extreme fantasy of a traditional type and what is to be called surrealism; and I have no doubt but that the nightmare landscapes of some of the surrealists correspond, as well as any actual creations could, to the iconographic horrors attributed by sundry fictioneers to mad or daemon-haunted artists. If there were a real Richard Upton Pickman…I am sure he would have been represented in the recent exhibition by several blasphemous and abhorrent canvases!
Robert Blake, in addition to being a manque for Robert Bloch, is a painter, and this may partially explain Lovecraft’s Expressionist, almost surrealistic, approach to this story. (Part of it is also no doubt that he dashed it off in four days as a kind of inside joke.)
For example, the normally exquisitely meticulous Lovecraft shows a shocking lack of concern about the effects of light on the Haunter—a little light (filtered through the steeple windows into the open box) keeps the Haunter at bay, but Blake writes “of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous spire.” To the contrary, Blake apparently summons the thing by closing the box and thus cutting the Trapezohedron (both “Shining” and the source of an ultimate fuligin darkness) off from the light. At the end, lightning banishes the Haunter, but the good “Dr. Dexter” buries the box in constant darkness, in “the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay.” This is consistent with the Trapezohedron’s history—it’s inactive while underwater—but not with Blake’s experience. (Bloch had fun with this inconsistency in his own sequel to the story, “The Shadow From the Steeple.”)
Elsewhere, there’s the tendency of the Trapezohedron to move around the church at random; the ridiculous amount of time and effort Blake takes to walk two miles across town (even while dying of cancer, HPL rambled for miles at a time on a whim); the intrepid and surprisingly chatty (or at least informative) skeleton; the Cook’s Tour of Ancient Times; the beautiful Gothic ending complete with Poe reference, blackout, and lightning-storm (although Lovecraft’s instinctual verisimilitude forced him—or allowed him—to use a real, historical thunderstorm); and the surfeit of magical texts just lying around in the Starry Wisdom church. (“He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed for so long.” No kidding.) Not the language (which is relatively restrained even for late Lovecraft) but the incidents of the story are highly colored, exaggerated for effect. And as Lovecraft reminds us, this is the “artist’s version” of the story. The ‘real’ facts implicate hoaxing and hysteria.
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And since the story is actually a jape—HPL killing off his friend Robert Bloch in “revenge” for Bloch doing the same to HPL in his own story “The Shambler From the Stars”—this ‘hoax’ narrative may be Lovecraft’s meta-commentary on his own Mythos, which after all has managed to hoax a lot of people into believing that thre are actual Necronomicons lying around abandoned in Rhode Island churches.
The unreliable narrator “adrift” from his normal course, the dreamlike landscape, the Monster From the Temple, the allusions to antiquity, even the doom at the window and the panicked written climax strongly echo “Dagon,” Lovecraft’s first Weird Tales story, just as the theme of c
ross-temporal possession and the cleansing lightning bolt echo “The Tomb,” his first adult tale.
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I will briefly interrupt the flow of this thought, such as it is, to express my irritation at being misled by Anton LaVey. LaVey founded the “Order of the Trapezoid,” which he borrowed from Lovecraft’s “Shining Trapezohedron.” Well, turns out that a trapezohedron has nothing to do with trapezoids at all. A trapezohedron is a solid whose faces are kite-shaped quadrilaterals, like a 10-sided die. What I (and apparently LaVey) thought was a trapezohedron—a polyhedron with trapezoids for sides—is actually a frustum. So the Hancock Building, which so delightfully crouches on LaVey’s birthplace, is not, despite what I’ve said in person and print for the better part of 20 years now, the world’s largest trapezohedron. It’s the world’s four largest trapezoids, leaned up to make a frustum. Stupid Satanists, wrecking it for everybody.
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But math-crazy Lovecraft would have known that a trapezohedron is an “antiprism.” Something, in other words, that sucks up all colors and melds them into darkness.
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At any rate, the story also, as I re-read it for this exercise, seemed to hint at another set of echoes, although I can’t quite explain them. This, then, is not even the kind of tossed-off literary criticism I’ve engaged in above; it’s completely unjustified, Suppressed-Transmission-level silliness.