Lovecraft the Name Dropper

Lovecraft the Name-Dropper

by Charles Garofalo

One of the most tantalizing things about the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the way he drops little hints (a carelessly mentioned name, a certain fact brought out, a clever reference) that there's a lot more going on in his stories than is made explicit. Take this passage from "The Whisperer in Darkness":

I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed --- from hints which made even my informant pause timidly --- the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds, and the globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth.

Now if that seems like a lot of information, just think of how much that fool narrator was holding back! He has a wealth of very interesting information that any occultist, philosopher, or Lovecraft-fan would kill for, and all he does with it is tell us that he has it!

What does he have to tell us? Well, Yig, Cthulhu, and Azathoth are all familiar to Lovecraft readers from earlier stories. However, we do not know much other than that Cthulhu comes from a distant world, Azathoth lies in the center of the universe and is blind and possibly mindless, and Yig is a snake god who leaves humans alone unless they kill snakes. We know little of their basic origins, or their basic motivations, although the author generously provides enough details that we could recognize these beings if we ran across them in our travels. Frank Belknap Long tells us what we know of the Hounds of Tindalos, but he does not describe them in any great detail. All these entities might be of interest only to Cthulhu-worshippers, but what about the other stuff? Astronomers would love to hear any sort of theory connected with the Magellanic Clouds, farfetched and unpleasant though it might be. Oriental philosophers would be interested in a new angle on the Tao myth. But we get no answer, save that the narrator knows. These tantalizing little names are always popping up in Lovecraft's stories: The Doels (sometimes "Dholes") appear also in Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath but all we find out about them there is that they are big and slimy and rubbery to the touch. Other strange beings are more thoroughly described: ghouls, gugs, ghasts, night-gaunts, zoogs, the satyr-like men of the Plateau of Leng, and the frog-like moon monsters. We learn enough to be satisfied that we're fairly familiar with these races. We even discover something about the Loki-like character of the god Nyarlathotep. Yet we get only the most paltry descriptions of the wamps (they're red-footed) and the ancient god Nodens, apparently a benevolent being in HPL's generally unfriendly pantheon. Hints, mind you, not facts.

In "The Horror in the Museum" and "The Mound" (stories Lovecraft rewrote from two tales by Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop respectively) we hear of other strange monster gods. In the former story there is Gnoph-keh, a monster who apparently lives in Greenland. All we know about him is that he's hairy, has at least one horn, and goes "sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six." Not much to go on. HPL couldn't even plead ignorance as to further details, since an accurate wax statue of Gnoph-keh appears in the tale. We get a better description of Rhan-Tegoth, another minor Mythos deity in that story, who appears in person at the climax.

In "The Mound," we find a vague reference to the deities Nug and Yeb, but other than the mere names, all we are told is that the worship offered these beings is extremely repulsive to anyone born and raised Catholic. Shub-Niggurath, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young, and "the Not-to-be-Named-One" (who may be the prototype for Derleth's "Hastur the Unspeakable") are also mentioned in the story. But they are never described. Instead they remain an anonymous fertility goddess and a god of completely undefined character and abilities.

In his later short novels, At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, Lovecraft describes two pre-human races with the accuracy of an archaeologist describing some antique culture. We see the beings themselves, down to the minutest anatomical detail. We see their cities, arts, sciences and customs. We can almost develop a rapport with these odd creatures, star-headed half vegetables and cone-shaped slitherers that they are. We know something of the enemy races they had to contend with, the "Cthulhu-spawn", the Shoggoths that the Old Ones created, and the eyeless creatures fought by the Great Race of Yith.

But, despite such full information, we're still left unsatisfied and tantalized. We're told that there were many ancient races the Old Ones purposely omitted from their archives. There are several others that the narrator of The Shadow cannot mention for the sake of brevity. Our curiosity is piqued when we hear whispers reveal something of these pre-human races, but there the author leaves us hanging. Either the books are all super-rare like the Necronomicon, or they're deliberately left obscure, like the "old Hindu Texts". There are thousands of old Hindu texts, dammit! Which ones?

Some races we have agonizingly brief glances of --- e. g., the races of intelligent beetles and spiders who are supposed to succeed humanity, and the winged, black-snouted beings who lived in crude stone villages. The latter were extinct long before man, yet they were the dominant species on earth after Australia's Great Race and Antarctica's Old Ones passed into history.

On a more human-interest level, the narrator of The Shadow Out of Time mentions that during his sojourn in the past, he met people from vanished civilizations (including Lomar and Cimmeria), but he does not relate any of the invaluable historical data they might have given him. He just lets us know he knows it. Worse, he waves intriguing bits of the future before the reader's eyes. He mentions Nevil Kingston-Brown, an Australian physicist who will die in the early twenty-sixth century, and two future empires, the Chinese(?) empire of Tsan-Chan in AD 5000 and the "Dark Conquerors" of AD 16000. Shouldn't a patriotic American have revealed more about these possible security threats? He offhandedly mentions that he knows how mankind is going to die off, but refrains from telling us! Admittedly, in his day there was no A-bomb, so the end of the human race seemed unlikely and alien to the average person's thought. But hell, we ought to be told something! Maybe if we knew, we could stop it! (Yes, yes: the beetles who stand to inherit the earth from us wouldn't like that, but I can't worry about everything.)

In conclusion, one must say Lovecraft certainly teased us all with his many little mysteries. They never will be truly revealed, at least the way the master from Providence may have intended, though August Derleth, Ramsey Cambell, Lin Carter and the rest claim to have brought some of his secrets to light. Either Lovecraft planned to reveal many of these mysteries in future tales he never got to write, or these hints of the distant past and future are a subtle and nasty revenge on the reading public that praised his stories and then paid him 1/4 cent a word for them.