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Among the crimes with which Dirk W.
Mosig has charged August Derleth, two stand out as of key importance. First,
Derleth remolded Lovecraft's Mythos along the lines of the Judaeo-Christian
story of Lucifer's rebellion against God. Only in Derleth's version, it has
become Cthulhu and the Ancient Ones versus Nodens and the Elder Gods. The latter
are even pictured, like God in Exodus, as pillars of fire. All this is not mere
surmise on Mosig's part. Derleth himself spells it out, "The Great Old Ones
. . . rebelled against the Elder Gods, and were thrust --- like Satan --- into
outer darkness. . . . Its similarity to the Christian mythos . . . will be
immediately apparent to the literate reader" ("A Note on the Cthulhu
Mythos"). "I was indeed familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, with its
remarkable lore in essence so similar to the Christian Mythos of the expulsion
of Sathanus and his followers and their ever-ceaseless attempts to reconquer
heaven" ("The Black Island"). "This lore . . . was in fact,
a distortion of ancient Christian legend" ("The House in the
Valley").
The second offense with which Derleth
is charged is that of domesticating HPL's transcendent Old Ones as mere
"elemental forces". And, no question about it, Derleth is guilty of
this one, too. He speaks of "Great Old Ones akin to the elemental
forces" ("The Watcher from the Sky"), of "certain elemental
Ancient Ones" ("The House in the Valley"), and
"representations of elemental forces" ("The Seal of
R'lyeh"). Derleth generally parceled the Old Ones out among the traditional
categories of earth, air, fire, and water. Earth spirits included Yog-Sothoth,
Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Tsathoggua. The water elemental was, of
course, tentacled Cthulhu. The fire-spirit was Cthugha, Derleth's own invention.
The "Lords of the Air" were Lloigor, Zhar, Hastur, and Ithaqua (this
last sometimes identified with the legendary Wendigo, as in "The Thing That
Walked on the Wind", but sometimes not, as in "The Seal of
R'lyeh" and "Witches' Hollow"). Yet sometimes Derleth made
Ithaqua alone the air-elemental, designating Hastur the scion of
"interplanetary spaces", Shub-Niggurath of fertility, and Yog-Sothoth
of "the time-space continuum". Derleth's own difficulties, let alone
those pointed out by hostile critics, demonstrate the complete arbitrariness of
the system thus imposed on Lovecraft's entities.
Most of Derleth's detractors, having
reached this point, are content to dismiss both of Derleth's developments as sad
corruptions, and then move on. And insofar as Lovecraft's Mythos is one's
concern, this is entirely proper. But we are also curious about the meaning of Derleth's
Mythos as he saw it. If we had to strip away Derleth's accretions to appreciate
Lovecraft as a "myth-maker" (Dirk W. Mosig), perhaps we can now take a
second look at the "Derleth Mythos" (Richard L. Tierney).
Cthulhu and Baal
The key to Derleth's system is that the
two aspects noted above (the biblicizing and the transformation into
"elementals") are really one. The accurate understanding of the
Derleth Mythos has been waylaid by Derleth's own partly misleading statement
that the principal biblical parallel is to Satan's revolt. For Satan has little
to do with elemental spirits. Another Old Testament demon, Baal, however, does.
The mythic struggle reflected in Derleth's saga is not only that of Satan's
storming heaven, but also the contest between Baal (or the Baals) and Yahweh
(God). This was a battle fought through the agency of very real combatants over
generations, as the Yahwists Jehu, Elijah, and Elisha contended with the
prophets and patrons of Baal, e.g., Queen Jezebel. As described by G. Ernest
Wright and other biblical scholars, the nature of the conflict was this:
Canaanite polytheism centered about the worship of the seasonal fertility
deities Baal, Astarte, etc., who embodied the forces of nature and agriculture.
One must supplicate them with orgies and human sacrifices in hopes of having
good crops this year. The view of life and history thus promoted was cyclical
and static. On the one hand. Baal-worship produced immorality, and on the other
an oppressive social status quo. The prophets of Yahweh, by contrast, preached a
deity not of static nature, but of dynamic history, who demanded righteousness
and promised liberation from oppression (e.g., in Egypt). The triumph of
Yahweh-worship meant a new understanding whereby human beings must not worship
nature, but rather, as God's servants, are responsible for "tending the
garden". Under Yahweh-worship, humanity is served by nature, whereas under
Baal-worship, it is the other way around. (See Wright, The Old Testament
Against Its Environment; William Foxwell Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of
Canaan. )
Derleth's identification of the Old
Ones with the elements of nature implies that they are like Baal and Astarte,
and that the struggle of humanity against them is like that of Elijah against
the prophets of Baal. Humanity's task is to "fill the earth and subdue
it" (Genesis 1:28) rather than worship it in fearful bondage. Even so,
protagonists like Dr. Laban Shrewsbury must fight to check Ithaqua and Cthulhu,
to keep them in their place.
When he outlined the parallel he saw
between the Cthulhu Mythos and the biblical one, Derleth usually discussed
Satan's fall from heaven, but he does mention "Beelzebub" in the same
breath with Cthulhu and company in "The Horror from the Middle Span".
"Beelzebub" (= "Lord of the Flies") is a corruption of
"Beelzebul" (= "Lord of the House"), but either would be a
member of the Canaanite pantheon of "Baals" (= "Lords").
Seen in these terms, Derleth's alteration of Lovecraft's Mythos has its own
unique logic. Whereas Lovecraft's picture was of the crushing threat of cosmic
Powers indifferent to humanity, Derleth is depicting an intra-worldly struggle
of humanity against the forces of nature. Derleth's is an ecological battle that
humanity stands a chance of winning. The goal, of course, is not to vanquish
nature with pollution, but rather to survive nature's onslaughts. As a
naturalist himself, Derleth would have felt this struggle keenly, and he has
mythologized it in his additions to the Cthulhu Mythos.
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