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One of my favorite Cthulhu Mythos stories is "The
Mound", a short novel conceived by Zealia Bishop and published with her
name appearing as that of the sole author. Yet we all know that this tale is
primarily the work of H. P. Lovecraft. It certainly reads like one of his
stories and he obviously took a very great interest in it --- so great an
interest, in fact, that it now stands not only as an incorporation into the
Mythos, but as a major extension of it. According to Derleth's introduction to The Horror in the Museum,
Frank Belknap Long also had a hand in it. The interesting thing about this story
is that it really does tie in very well with the religions of the ancient
Indians who inhabited Mexico and Central America --- the Aztecs, Toltecs,
Teotihuacanos, Zapotecs and Mayans --- just as Bishop and Lovecraft imply.
Perhaps one or both of these authors had a very detailed knowledge of
Mesoamerican religions, or perhaps the correlation is due mostly to chance; I do
not know. Still, it is interesting to observe some of the correlations.
Francis T. Laney, in his long-out-of-print article, "The
Cthulhu Mythos: A Glossary", equates Cthulhu with the Aztec god
Huitzilopochtli. I have never been able to discover where he might have read
anything that would lead him to make this correlation. Huitzilopochtli was the
patron god of the Aztecs who led them to the "promised land", the
island in the center of Lake Tenochtitlan where they founded a capital, much as
Yahweh led the Hebrews to Canaan. He has nothing to do with water or "Deep
Ones" --- he seems primarily a war god --- again like Yahweh --- and he was
born of a virgin-mother goddess. Perhaps the final letters of his name, "chtli",
have something to do with Laney's correlation. At any rate, he would seem to be
more likely one of the spawn of Yog-Sothoth, who is known to beget his progeny
on mankind. . . .
But in "The Mound" we read that the humans who occupy
blue-litten K'n-yan, which land lies somewhere far within the earth beneath the
southwestern United States, carried on trade or contact of some sort with the
surface Indians centuries ago. The people of K'n-yan worshipped Yig and Cthulhu,
and their images often occupied the same temple. Furthermore, it is definitely
stated that Yig is the prototype of the great Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, the
"feathered serpent".
Now, the interesting thing is that there is a very important
archaeological site in central Mexico where Quetzalcoatl was evidently
worshipped alongside another god who bears some striking resemblances to Great
CthuIhu. This site is Teotihuacan, a huge ancient city which was abandoned long
before the Aztecs or even the Toltecs came to dominate central Mexico, and the
god is the one that the Aztecs later came to call Tlaloc, the Rain God.
Teotihuacan, in the Aztec language, means "place of the
gods". The pyramids there are so huge that the Aztecs evidently thought
they had been reared by the gods in ancient times. The largest one is as big
around at the base as the great pyramid of Khufu in Egypt. But the most
interesting thing pertaining to this study is that one of the lesser pyramids, a
famous one often called the "Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl", contains
carvings along its sides of two deities, one of which is obviously a serpent and
the other some strange being with perfectly round eyes and suggestions of
tentacles around his mouth. These deities are supposed to represent the
prototypes of the later Aztec divinities, Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc. But one of
the most amazing things about this pyramid-temple is that along its base,
beneath the carvings of the two gods, are bas-reliefs depicting marine
motifs --- and this despite the fact that Teotihuacan is several hundred miles
from the sea. The designs are primarily of snails, scallops, and other mollusks.
After the Teotihuacanos (whose city seems to have been
mysteriously abandoned along with a great many others around 800 A.D.) the
Toltecs dominated the central Mexican plateau. Their principal god was
Quetzalcoatl, but they, too, worshipped Tlaloc. They depict him on their vases
and urns as a more humanlike being than did the Teotihuacanos, but his eyes are
still huge, round and expressionless, and there are suggestions of tentacle-like
appendages around his mouth. The Toltecs' capital city, strangely enough, is
called "Tula"!
Still later, in Aztec times, Tlaloc was worshipped atop the
greatest pyramid in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) alongside Huitzilopochtli rather
than Quetzalcoatl, who now had a pyramid of his own. Quetzalcoatl came to be
worshipped on circular, truncated pyramids, rather than those in the shape of a
coiled serpent.
It was supposed by the Aztecs that there was not merely one
"great" Tlaloc, but many subservient ones as well, especially four who
ruled over the four quarters of the earth. They were somehow considered to be
associated with frogs --- a rather striking association considering some
of Derleth's stories in which croaking frogs herald the coming of Cthulhu and
his minions. Students of Aztec mythology suppose that the croaking frogs
announce the advent of rain and that this is how batrachians were first
associated with Tlaloc, the rain god. But HPL-students know better, I'm sure. .
. .
When we consider other Mesoamerican cultures, the resemblances
continue to hold: the Zapotec culture, well inland, depicts its rain-god, Cocijo,
as fundamentally human, yet with a queerly long and tentacle-like proboscis and
with huge ear-rings that resemble the round, staring eyes of Tlaloc; the
Totonacs on the Gulf coast have temples to Quetzalcoatl in the truncated shape,
roughly like a coiled serpent. But the really striking correlations occur when
we study the coastal Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula.
The Mayan rain god, the equivalent of the Aztec Tlaloc, is
called Chac. He is depicted on the limestone-built temples of the region as a
being possessing not only round, staring, expressionless eyes, but with a
coiling, tentacle-like proboscis exhibiting suction discs on both sides! In the
recently-excavated city of Dzibilchaltun there is actually a representation of
Chac showing him with several long tentacles protruding from the side of his
head --- tentacles with suction-discs.
In the long-abandoned city of Chichen-Itza, the Mayans used to
sacrifice young men and maidens to Chac by throwing them into a deep well, or cenote,
which was sacred to the god. Yucatan is entirely a huge, flat plain of
limestone, honeycombed with underground caverns winding off to the sea, and
pockmarked with cenotes
or wells marking the collapsed roofs of water-filled caves. Chac was supposed
to live at the bottom of the particular cenote at Chichen-Itza. If the
thing the Mayans actually worshipped was one of the squidlike minions of Cthulhu,
it could have easily oozed in from the ocean via the underground waterways
draining the limestone peninsula. . . .
Another striking correlation: the Mayan word for the
serpent-being was not Quetzalcoatl but "Ik" or "Ix" --- a
word identical to "Yig", considering that the Mayans had no phonetical
alphabet but rather a complex system of hieroglyphics!
Finally, returning to the Aztecs, there was an earth-god
Tlaltecuthli, who was represented as a huge frog or toad. He is considered to be
one of the older gods in Aztec mythology, antedating Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc
among others. Students of HPL who have read "The Mound" will recall
that the worship of Tsathoggua, the toad-god, preceded the worship of Yig and
Cthulhu in blue-litten K'n-yan.
I could make some more correlations here, like equating Cthugha
with Huehueteotl, the fire-god of the Aztecs, or Nyarlathotep with Tezcatlipoca,
who is the god of Evil and takes many forms including that of a jaguar, or
Hastur with Mictlantechutli, Lord of the Dead, whose association with the dios murcielago
or bat-god seems similar to Hastur's rule over the bat-winged Byakhee. But I
won't detail all these associations; I think the reader can see the technique I
am using. It is probably the technique theologians everywhere have always used:
first establish your conclusions and then correlate them with your data.
This is not to say, though, that there are not some very
striking correlations between the Cthulhu and Mesoamerican myths. I have tried
this same technique on other existing religions such as the Incan, the
Polynesian and the Hebrew-Christian; in all cases, I have found striking
correlations here and there; but to date I have found none more striking than
the relationship between these two.
Did HPL or Zealia Bishop deliberately incorporate elements of
Central American myth into the structure of the lore of Cthulhu? I think it
quite possible. Perhaps someone can document this more fully some day.
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