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The "Cthulhu Mythos" is
largely the invention of, not H. P. Lovecraft, but August Derleth.
Lovecraft, of course, did the
groundwork. He invented most of the gods, demons and servitors --- and, above
all, he provided the spooky, Gothic atmosphere necessary to the genre. Yet it
seems to me that it was Derleth who established the concept of a
"Mythos" to comprehend all the Lovecraftian concepts.
Lovecraft himself seems never to have
entertained such a concept. His outlook on the supernatural and the cosmos seems
to have been basically dynamic --- it was constantly developing throughout his
life. Derleth's attitude on the other hand was largely static; he appreciated
Lovecraft's concepts but cared less for developing them than for systematizing
them. His efforts were interesting but less than successful from an aesthetic
point of view. This is not to say that Derleth's work was unaesthetic but merely
that, in my opinion, his basic outlook was non-Lovecraftian and his attempt to
carry on the Lovecraft tradition left out something vital.
Derleth probably coined the term
"Cthulhu Mythos". If he did not, he certainly developed the attitude
that goes with that term. Consider the basic premises of the "Mythos":
a cosmic cluster of "good guys"(Elder Gods) protecting the human race
from the "bad guys" (Ancient Old Ones) who are striving to do us
(humanity) in! Derleth maintains that this is all a parallel of the
"Christian Mythos", with its bad against good, and with humanity the
focal point of it all. Evil Ancient Ones are striving to take our planet from
us, but angelic Elder Gods always intervene in time to save us.
I grant Derleth the right to his view
of the cosmos, but the sad thing is that he has made all too many believe that
his view is that of Lovecraft also. This is simply not true. Lovecraft's picture
of the universe and Derleth's are completely dissimilar.
Derleth seems determined to link the
Cthulhu pantheon with Christianity and the Medieval tradition by making it a
struggle between "good" and "evil" from an anthropocentric
point of view. Too, the concept of "elemental forces" in the Mythos
seems to be Derleth's own --- borrowed from the ancient theory that all things
known to us are compounded from the four elements: fire, water, earth and air.
Derleth runs into many contradictions here. For instance, he makes Cthulhu and
his minions water beings, whereas "The Call of Cthulhu" has them
coming down from space and building their cities on land; only later are their
cities submerged by geological upheavals, and this is a catastrophe which
immobilizes the Cthulhu spawn. Hastur is portrayed as an "air
elemental", while at the same time Derleth implies that he lives on the
bottom of the Lake of Hali. Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep, probably the two most
purely Cosmic of all Lovecraftian entities, are squeezed into the
"earth" category; while, finally, he invents the fire elemental,
Cthugha, to round out his menagerie of elementals. (Lovecraft invented no beings
that could be construed as "fire elementals"). Cthugha comes from the
star Fomalhaut --- presumably because Lovecraft once mentioned that star in one
of his sonnets.
Elementals aside, the whole basic
concept of Derleth's "good-versus-evil" Mythos seems as non-Lovecraftian as anything conceivable. Lovecraft actually regarded the Cosmos
as basically indifferent to anthropocentric outlooks such as good and evil. The
"shocker" in his best tales is usually the line in which the narrator
is forced to recognize that there are vast and powerful forces and entities
basically indifferent to humanity because of their overwhelming superiority to
Man.
Most writers continuing the
"Cthulhu Mythos" in fiction or documenting it in scholarly articles
are merely perpetuating the misconceptions begun by Derleth. I feel Lovecraft
reached his highest imaginative peak in the two novels, "The Shadow out of
Time" and At the Mountains of Madness. In both these tales,
Lovecraft turned the whole universe into a haunted house, so to speak, linking
the findings of modern science to the flavor of Gothic horror. In so doing, he
created a type of "creepy" story that Twentieth Century man could
continue to believe in even after the traditional trappings of cemeteries,
crumbling castles, haunted mansions, etc., began to acquire the flavor of
cliches. But Lovecraft's followers have never pursued this line of development.
Without exception they all leave Man and his values at the center, in the
Derleth tradition, and most of them even continue to use the non-HPL devices of
"Elder Gods", "elementals", etc., while writing endless
variations on the basic Lovecraftian themes dealing with Dunwich and Innsmouth.
To sum up: The Cthulhu Mythos as it now
stands is at least as much Derleth's invention as it is HPL's. The line of
Lovecraft's development remains open --- no one has really taken up as yet where
he left off --- and it leads toward the cosmic. Yet if one wants to get to the
heart of what Lovecraft felt about the cosmos, one must sidestep Derleth and his
followers.
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