Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

by Daniel Harms

  YITH

  YITH-SHESH

  YITHIANS

  YLIDHEEM (“Cold Ones”)

  Y’M-BHI

  YMAR

  ‘YMNAR

  YOG-SOTHOTH (also IOG-SOTOT)

  YOMAGN’THO (or THAT WHICH RELENTLESSLY WAITS OUTSIDE or THE FEASTER FROM THE STARS)

  YOTH

  YOTHIC MANUSCRIPTS

  Y’QAA

  YR-NHHNGR

  YSTE, SONG OF

  YTHOGTHA

  YUGGOTH (also IUKKOTH)

  YUGGOTH, FUNGI FROM

  YUGGS

  YUGGYA

  YUGGYA CHANTS

  Z

  ZAMACONA Y NUÑEZ, PÁNFILIO DE (c. 1512 – ?)

  ZAMAN

  ZANN, ERICH (c. 1865? – c. 1925)

  ZANTHU

  ZANTHU TABLETS

  ZAOTH

  ZARNAK, (DOCTOR) ANTON

  ZARR

  ZATHOG

  ZEGREMBI MANUSCRIPT (also ZEGEMBRI FRAGMENTS or ZEMBREGI MANUSCRIPT)

  ZEGREMBI SEALS

  ZEMBREGI MANUSCRIPT

  ZHAR

  ZHOTHAQQUA

  ZHOU TEXTS

  ZIN, VAULTS OF

  ZIULQUAZ-MANZAH

  ZKAUBA

  ZO-KALAR

  ZOBNA

  ZON MEZZAMALECH

  ZONE OF THE THIRTEEN FAVEOLATE COLOSSI

  ZOOGS

  ZOTH (possibly XOTH?)

  ZOTH-OMMOG

  ZOTHIQUE

  ZSTYLZHEMGHI

  ZUCHEQUON (also ZULCHEQUON or ZUSHAKON)

  ZVILPOGGUA

  ZYLAC

  APPENDICES:

  THE NECRONOMICON

  APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGY OF THE NECRONOMICON

  NOTES ON THE CHRONOLOGY

  APPENDIX B: LOCATIONS OF THE NECRONOMICON

  APPENDIX C: CONTENTS OF THE NECRONOMICON

  Bibliography

  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 that weave together the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors through a stream of common references — in all of its confusion and glory. It is a phenomenon with its roots dating back over a century, with a development based on 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? I think that nothing is “just” fiction, as jokes are never “just” jokes and entertainment is never “just” entertainment. That’s not to say they can’t be entertaining or ridiculous, but all of them also address more serious topics in ways that might not be possible through “serious” communication. The marginal status of this material is the source of its power, and it can provide outlets that might not always be available for people to express themselves.

  My starting proposition, therefore, is that 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 that many people across the world have had over the centuries. We might debate whether this originates in the external world or simply in the mind, or some combination of the two. Nonetheless, experiences such as this 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. 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.

  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 his output. What makes Lovecraft’s writing so compelling is that it brings together the rationality of Western civilization with impulses and experiences that it 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.” 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 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.

&nb
sp; 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. HPL might use Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua in one of his stories, and 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 some to believe 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 authors who went before. 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 hideous 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-pollination. 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 creations 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 time and money. Over the decades, when the pulp authors no longer appeared in magazines, Arkham reprinted their works. 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.

  Derleth became a controversial figure among Mythos fans because of his interpretations of the Mythos. He has been criticized for his interpretation of 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 the story “Lair of the Star-Spawn” in a single day. This tale adds a panoply of beings to the pantheon — the Great Old Ones and Elder Gods (the titles are reversed from their later appearances!), 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.

  Despite these precedents, Derleth could have been more conscientious about his depiction of Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s fiction and letters, with which he was intimately familiar, included few signs of a cosmic war and many passages indicating that cosmic indifferentism was his chosen framework for the tales. Even if he had missed these, Clark Ashton Smith pointed them out to him in a letter written shortly after Lovecraft’s death. It appears that Derleth received some misleading information in his career on these topics and chose never to re-evaluate his conclusions.

  Derleth’s other innovation, the elemental theory, associated some of the Great
Old Ones with the four traditional elements — fire, air, earth, and water. Some have attributed the “elemental theory” to Francis T. Laney, whose error-ridden “The Cthulhu Mythology: A Glossary” in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943) was the first attempt to create a “guide” to the Mythos. Nonetheless, Derleth was using the elemental theory in such stories as “The Thing That Walked in the Wind” long before Laney published his piece. Within this system, a few beings (such as Cthulhu and Dagon) were defined as water elementals, with the vast bulk being earth elementals. Derleth decided to remedy this “imbalance”, creating or reassigning Great Old Ones to both fire (Cthugha) and air (Ithaqua, Lloigor, Zhar).