This article originally appeared
in the Arkham Advertiser, Volume 1, Issue 1.
The Mythos of Howard Phillips
Lovecraft is a huge subject and worthy of a series of articles. This is
the first in that series.
During his career, H.P. Lovecraft seems to
have written fiction in three distinct styles. These might be classed as:
fantasy, Gothic horror, and science horror. Some critics and scholars
consider H.P.L.s fantasist stories such as
"The White Ship," "The Silver Key," and "The Doom That Came To Sarnath"
as relatively innocuous and derivative of Lord Dunsany. His
Gothic horror stories, such as "The Picture
in the House," "The Music of Erich Zann," and "The Strange High House in
the Mist," while archetypal and atmospheric, are often considered
derivative of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce
and the eighteenth century. This is not to say that the fantasy and Gothic
horror tales aren't fascinating and deserving of praise, but it is
Lovecraft's tales of science horror which,
says August Derleth, "manage to remain individually Lovecraftian to such
an extent that it has influenced many other writers of the genre."
Of the science horror stories, the ones centering
on the "Cthulhu Mythos," a term critics invented after Lovecraft's death,
are often considered his best and most original. In these tales
Lovecraft made up a distinctive universe made
up of four distinct elements: atmospheric landscape, legends, modern science,
and a mythology of Lovecraft's own invention. Of these
elements, it is the addition of the scientific
aspect that became the unique quality that set Lovecraft's work apart from
those who came before him. And it is these stories which have
placed Lovecraft securely in the great American
horror tradition of his mentors: Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. Perhaps
the opening paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu" best
serves as an introduction to the tales of
the "Cthulhu Mythos":
The most merciful thing in the world, I think,
is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live
on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant what we should voyage
far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, has hitherto harmed
us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated
knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace
and
safety of a new dark age.
In many ways, Lovecraft almost saw mankind
as ignorant peasants cowering in awe and wonder as the accepted and comfortable
laws
of Nature are reshaped by horrible and godlike
celestial forces. This seemed to him a greater
fear than that of witches and cemeteries. As early as 1922 he wrote: "My
own view toward aesthetic things has always been one of awe at
the mystery of the cosmos. The dominant sensation
has been a kind of ecstatic wonder at the unfathomed reaches of nighted
space... The only poignant sensation in life is that of
wonder, fascination, and terror at the unknown."
It is this fearful vision suggested by the
explosion of scientific thought in the early years of the Twentieth Century
that allowed Lovecraft to take the Gothic horror story into a new
direction not available to Bierce, Poe, and
Blackwood.
August Derleth has pointed out that the Mythos
was not a planned development on Lovecraft's part, he never even gave it
a name. Lovecraft was finding that the traditional Gothic
horror tale was losing its punch in the Twentieth
Century. His audience was becoming better educated and more aware that
science, and not occult superstition, ruled our universe.
Remember that Einstein presented his theory
of relativity in 1908. Witches, ghosts, and ogres were becoming old hat
to his audience who had begun to discover the new and expanding
world of science fiction. In his search for
a means to make his horror both plausible and suggestive, Lovecraft began
to blend the occult, which he now thought banal, with science and
the supernatural.
James Turner wrote, "Lovecraft typically would
take an element from the old Gothic tradition - perhaps an authentic New
England setting or some aspect of New England lore or legendry
- and reinterpret this element in terms of
the scientific theories (Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, et al.) of his day.
Through a fanciful extension of contemporary scientific thinking Lovecraft
ultimately would resolve his narrative upon
a supernatural - or, more accurately, supramundane-level [far above the
mundane - Ed.] of reality, thus revivifying the trappings and
appurtenances of old-time Gothicism through
an expressly scientific approach." In a 1930 letter, Lovecraft explained
this technique: "My big kick comes from taking reality just as it is -
accepting all the limitations of the most
orthodox science - and then permitting my symbolizing faculty to build
outward from the existing facts; rearing a structure of infinite promise
and
possibility whose topless towers are in no
cosmos or dimension penetrable by the contradicting-power of the tyrannous
and inexorable intellect."
An excellent example of this technique is "Dreams
in the Witch House" (written in 1933). Lovecraft created from New England
legends the old Salem witch Keziah Mason, her evil ratlike
familiar, and the infamous Black Man of the
witch cult. Rather than accepting the occult image of these characters,
as they had been viewed in the past, Lovecraft brought these
legendary elements into the twentieth century.
They are not just the simple creatures of an old superstition but characters
capable of traversing the fourth-dimension, unheard of in the
days of the Salem witch trials and thus revealing
our culture's lack of scientific knowledge in the Colonial period. This
contrast of our superstitions with possible scientific explanations
creates an eerie synthesis of New England
black magic and Einsteinian physics. This may seem premeditated but it
was probably a natural and unplanned move on Lovecraft's part. And
it did not happen overnight. In "The Shunned
House" (written in 1924) it is the weakest element in a powerful story:
the explanation of the haunting, with its "certain kinetic patterns"
continuing to function in "some multiple-dimensional
space along the original lines of force," seems a muddle. Yet only three
years later in "The Colour Out of Space" he quite
convincingly blends a tale of terror with
science fiction. This latter story never mentions any of the Mythos names
and has therefore been left of the "Mythos" listing by most scholars.
What is the Mythos? The American Heritage Dictionary
says: "mythos n, pl. mythoi. 1. Myth. 2. Mythology. 3. The pattern of basic
values and historical experiences of a people,
characteristically transmitted through the
arts. 4. A deliberately fostered cult: "Sukarno... established a mythos
in which towns were named for him, and his picture displayed
everywhere." (New York Times). [Greek muthos,
MYTH]" It is the third and fourth definitions which might best apply to
Lovecraft's stories. For the fourth dictionary definition, to current
science and existing legends Lovecraft added,
invented, and fostered the cult of Cthulhu, a fictional being which was
said to have come from beyond time and space to live on this planet
long before man was formed. This creature
vanished into a sunken city in the South Pacific, perhaps by man's arrival,
and waits in a strange hibernation for the day it will again take
control of the world we live in. Around the
figure of Cthulhu (pronounced Koo-too-luh), Lovecraft organized a full
mythology of beings who ventured from time and space to reside at
some point in time on our planet. The effect
Lovecraft's alien creatures (gods) had on early cultures or their effect
on current people's lives fits the second dictionary definition. Thus the
Mythos is a fictional cosmology which explained
the dynamics of the origin and structure of our Universe, or rather Lovecraft's
universe.
Besides his own feast of mythological inventions,
Lovecraft incorporated many elements invented by other writers, some contemporary
and some who had influenced Lovecraft in his
youth. In the evolution of the Mythos as a
whole, "The Whisperer in Darkness" is enormously important - it is the
Lovecraft Mythos story which contains the first references to the
Abominable Mi-Go (the Yeti or Tibetan Abominable
Snowman); Yuggoth, the dark planet in the rim of the solar system (the
planet Pluto only discovered in the 1930's); Tsathoggua, the
loathsome demon god of primal Hyperborea (a
creation of writer Clark Ashton Smith); to say nothing of Hasthur, the
Lake of Hali (Ambrose Bierce), the Yellow Sign (Robert W.
Chambers), Bran (Robert E. Howard), Yig the
Father of Serpents (Zelia Bishop Reed), the Hounds of Tindalos (Frank Belknap
Long), and other Mythos elements of considerable
importance.
The Mythos was never coherent, nor did it need
to be. Its subtle presence in the Mythos stories functions not to explain
itself but to suggest something larger and more terrible than was
ever stated. Often in Lovecraft's work, it
is what is hinted at and not stated that creates the most terrifying visions
of a world out of the control of mankind. And often this grand
cosmology hovers offstage of a story which
concerns simple experiences, not directly affecting the characters but
subtly controlling the world they move in.
And while science was bombarding society with
revelations that might be taken as horrifying, since they constantly changed
the shape of the universe we had come to feel comfortable
with, it was the stark and legendary New England
countryside that Lovecraft used to emphasize this uncertainly man felt
about the universe he lives in. Lovecraft wrote:
...it is certainly a substantial artistic feat
to bring the unreal into the midst of the every day; and only an illiberal
critic, whatever his personal predilections, could judge any
atmospherically effective performance of this
feat tame or commonplace. The raison d'etre . . . in many cases attempts
at crystallizing certain natural sentiments connected with distant or
rarely observed scenes or phenomena . . .
to dramatize, substantialize, or symbolize certain definitely existing
perspectives which naturally evoke vague emotions of a mystical sort. The
important factor is the remoteness and the
uncommonness rather than the weird emotion . . . To use a personal example,
- my object in writing "The Whisperer in Darkness" was not just
to be weird, but primarily to crystallize
a powerful imaginative impression given me by a certain landscape.
Lovecraft was captivated by what he considered
the ideal beauty of New England's traditional landscape and architecture,
but, simultaneously, found in these landscapes a darker
dimension as the modern world cut us off from
long-standing traditions and turned parts of New England old and dark.
The "Cthulhu Mythos" works are inspired by New England
locales, but their settings are extensively
recast to form Arkham, Innsmouth, and Dunwich, fictional examples of a
New England overseen by Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and other alien gods.
Of these Lovecraft wrote: "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
practicing black magic, lost their foothold
and were expelled, yet live on the outside ever ready to take possession
of this earth again."
The Mythos grew gradually across a number of
years and stories. It is generally felt that, of all his stories, only
twelve are truly Mythos stories. The earliest of Lovecraft's stories which
genuinely belongs to the Mythos is "The Nameless
City," which he wrote in 1921. The last of these is "Haunter of the Dark"
written in 1935. Other of the "Cthulhu Mythos" tales include
" The Call of Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in
Darkness," and "At the Mountains of Madness." There are a couple of borderline
cases: some Lovecraftian scholars consider the novel "The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (written in 1927-1928)
and the short story "The Colour Out of Space" (written in 1927) to be Mythos
stories. Through these stories Lovecraft developed a
complete mythology and geography - "a wild,
weird, yet curiously impressive flight of the imagination".
- compiled by Jean-Paul Ouellette
