Acolytes of Cthulhu

INTRODUCTION

Lovecraft, since his death in 1937, has rapidly been becoming a cult. He already had his circle of disciples who collaborated with him and imitated him.

Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”

November 24, 1945

THE BIG CLUE IS THAT H. P. LOVE CRAFT USED TO SIGN HIMSELF sometimes as “Grandpa Cthulhu” or simply as “Cthulhu.” Thus the acolytes of Cthulhu are the acolytes of Lovecraft himself. The Cthulhu cult is the literary cult of Lovecraft. In this fact I believe we have a large part of the explanation for the power with which Lovecraft’s writings grasp many of his readers and captures their imaginations, never to let go. All fiction, as Michael Riffaterre notes (Fictional Truth) gains depth and resonance, manages in short to “ring true” to its readers only insofar as the author has built in the sounding board of a subtext, some apparently prior reality against which story images and developments will seem to ring solid. A fiction built on sand will sound tinny, hollow, when tapped by the reader. A classic example might be the Old Testament proof texts adduced by the Gospel of Matthew in order to demonstrate that various events in the life of Jesus fulfilled prophecy. The supposed events require some sort of a credibility boost, since they depict a man being conceived by the divine spirit in a virgin’s womb, miraculously healing the sick, etc., not exactly items that easily pass the test of most readers’ criteria of plausibility. But once Matthew narrates them, then provides an apparently matching proof text from ancient scripture, you think the miracles may be true after all. They all of a sudden appear to match ancient prophecy. They appear to be the other shoe falling, matching the one that Isaiah or Jeremiah or Zechariah let drop hundreds of years before.

To take a very different example, the horror in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which the movie version cannot keep from looking cartoonish, strikes deep for the sensitive reader since a great length of the noose rope has been strung upon the gallows of an excruciatingly rendered family tragedy surrounding the gratuitous death of a beloved child. If not for the subtext of too-real tragedy, the text of dripping zombies could never convince.

And I am suggesting that one big reason Lovecraft’s fiction is so hypnotically effective for many of us is that we see ourselves reflected in the mirror it holds before us. When we discover HPL we are likely to be adolescent bookish types, unathletic or at least uninterested in the hormone-driven lemming-existence of our peers. Thus we identify with the scholarly misanthropes populating Lovecraft’s stories. We love books, and by the time we have discovered our favorite recondite authors, most of their works are probably out of print, so we, like the doomed bibliophiles in Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” and Howard’s “The Thing on the Roof,” learn what it is to covet unobtainable volumes and to go to what seem to us (and even more to others who do not share our love of books) to be fantastic, fanatical lengths to possess our treasures. Securing a copy of The Outsider and Others would scarcely be less of an event than stumbling upon a copy of John Dee’s Necronomicon.

Some notice with an element of unease that fandoms tend to take on the overtones of a religious commitment. To those fans, the more mundane issue the challenge to “Get a life!” Ah, but you see, Montressor, we have a life! It’s more a question of where. As Debbie Harry sang in her song “The Real World,” “I’m livin’ in a magazine [Weird Tales, in our case]… I’m not livin’ in the real world… no more, no more, no more.” Or if you prefer REM, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” There is no objective “real world.” All lives are essentially scripted fictions running their course in the context of some fictive narrative universe or other. Everyone is a “creative anachronist,” but we Lovecraftians, like our cousins in other Buddha-fields of fandom, have elected to live a minority, sectarian existence in what sociologists Berger and Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality) call a “finite province of meaning.” We are willing to bear the reproach of the walking dead around us, the same who persecute poor Dilbert. We are proud of HPL for not being able to hold down a worldly job, even if we ourselves are able.

Lovecraft has become our Christ, our God. In a dream an angel appeared to the erudite Saint Jerome to rebuke him for his love of the Classics: “Thou are not a follower of Christ, but of Cicero.” Guilty as charged!

Some despise fandom-as-[a substitute for]-religion because they assume, as Paul Tillich did, that a religion must center about, and must symbolize, one’s ultimate concerns, and that these concerns must be appropriately ultimate in their scope, dealing with issues of timely relevance and eternal significance. But this is a sad and Puritanical definition of religiosity. It gets the focus wrong and neglects the role of imagination in religion, i.e. in myth. I think religious sensitivity is essentially an aesthetic stimulation of the imagination contributing to an aesthetic apprehension of life and the world through whatever filters we may choose to view it, whether that, e.g., of the great salvation-epic of the Bible, or that of the cosmic history of Lovecraft. It is such living fantasies as these which valorize an otherwise dull and utilitarian life. Moral convictions which, admittedly, everyone needs, are a different matter, and it is a dangerous confusion to make them dependent on, a function of, religious convictions. If you make that confusion, morality will always be subject to dogmatic decree, and holy wars, heresy hunts will sooner or later come to pass. So we Lovecraftians, we acolytes of Cthulhu, do not pretend to derive our varied moral stances from Lovecraft (except insofar as we read his essays and letters where he treats of such matters and happen to find him convincing). And we don’t think others should necessarily derive their moral compasses from their religions either. What a better world it would be if we could come together and derive our moral scruples from a common-sense, this-worldly set of considerations and agree to disagree on what choice will nourish our imaginations, generate the symbolic universes we will breathe the air of day by day.

But the Lovecraft cult, I fear, is on a more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars and the cult of Sherlock Holmes.

Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”

…the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1926

Adolescence is a time when intelligent people have begun to attain enough independence from family-circle influences to place all inherited beliefs under severe scrutiny. If you are going to become a rationalist, a skeptic, an agnostic, adolescence is the prime time to do it. It is a rebellion mechanism. It is a way of standing up on your own, for yourself. That doesn’t mean you are not correct in throwing out childhood catechism. You have also come into possession of critical reasoning skills for the first time. If there is something rotten in Dogma Denmark, you have the keen nose to smell it. And all this, too, primes one for HPL. One catches sight of Lovecraft’s scientific, rationalist, cosmicist worldview, where the myth of human self-importance is overthrown by realization of the yawning eternity of (as William Jennings Bryan summed it up) universal dust.

Thus cut off from the common run of conservative sitcom watching parents and prom-attending contemporaries, the young Lovecraft reader clutches his secret lore gleefully to himself, contemptuous of the surrounding herd, even as Lovecraft himself was, and for the same reasons. Such a reader will see himself reflected just as truly in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s novel The New Adam.

The trouble with Edmund Wilson, which led him to those blasphemous words about our God of fiction that we can never forgive, any more than Vietnam veterans can ever forgive Jane Fonda, is that he was getting frostbite and enjoying it. Unlike the Transactional Analysis theorists who urge us to keep the child inside us alive and well, Wilson belonged to a cigar-chomping, scotch-sipping generation addicted to the stale smoke and the bitter reek of “realism,” of boring adulthood, and who thought literature should reflect that outlook, the pages of “good books” merely wallpaper sheets for the prison cell of adulthood. We come on the scene with a childlike second sight which enables us to see the roaring glories of the Zen initiate. Growing up applies cloudy cataracts to the soul, and we can see the magic no longer, though fans have found a way. We use Lovecraft’s fiction (and other fan-idols) like the jaded Randolph Carter used the Silver Key, to return to that brilliant world of dream, which is meaning. And Lovecraft, like Proust, freely admitted it was a regression to childhood. But why put it so nastily? Why not choose another metaphor, say, turning about and becoming as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, since only their like will gain it.

The time is right for a greater appreciation of this deeper, more serious aspect of Lovecraft’s fiction… The ground is particularly ready in Europe, where his works are held in highest esteem.

Dirk W. Mosig, “The Prophet from Providence,” 1973

Antediluvian-cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island. Centre of earthwide subterranean witch cult.

H. P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book #110, 1923

The exotic pungency of the secret cult of Cthulhu in Lovecraft’s fiction arises from the curious paradox of it being both widespread, worldwide, on the one hand, and yet secret on the other. It is conterminous with history, the bequest of the sleeping Old Ones to their dupes the human race (not that this is any different from the traditional Near Eastern religions, since in both the Babylonian Enuma Elish and in Genesis, humanity is created to serve as a slave race of grounds keepers). It covers the earth as the waters cover the sea; if one learns too much about it, “nautical-looking Negroes” will appear out of thin air to bump you off, and yet Western scholars seem never to have heard of it. The cultists of Cthulhu ply their rituals in lonely places, far from the ken of civilization.

And so with Lovecraft’s acolytes: we identify with the vague net of Lovecraftians spread abroad somewhere else, and though we would relish fellowship with kindred spirits, we dread it, too, lest we be forced to profane our dearest treasures by bringing them forth into the open air. The friendly interest of another Lovecraft fan well met is at once a relief (we’re not crazy—at least someone else suffers from the same obsession!) and a threat, since for us Lovecraft’s fiction is a Holy of Holies into which only the solitary soul may step. The gathering of the coven should be a sacred convocation, and yet it is somehow a trespass.

And perhaps this fact explains a shocking and horrifying feature of many fan conventions (even in those microcosms of the same known as comic book stores). When those who by themselves are esotericists as they tread the solitary path nonetheless come together periodically, they magically transform into a bunch of obnoxious, profane, mundane Racoon Lodge conventioneers. Their odd costumes, which seemed the mark of solitary devotion to Darker Mysteries, now by virtue of simple public accumulation, have become a new and public mundanity, like geeks in the audience of Let’s Make a Deal. Attending such a function one suddenly feels the force of the old joke that you wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have someone like you as a member. The Mysteries become pathetically profane by mutual revelation. Thus the esotericist requires secrecy even should one some day become the majority (and for the moment, in a convention, one is). As Macrobius said with reference to the ancient Greek Mysteries: “only an elite may know about the real secret… while the rest may be content to venerate the mystery, defended by… figurative expressions from banality.” In my estimate, the wonderful Necronomicons have perfectly walked the tightrope I am describing. No costumes are allowed, no weapons, except acid critical tongues.

Similarly, the lover of what is despised by the run of lesser mortals must think twice before seeking respectability among the mundanes for what one loves. Some Lovecraftians are urgent that Lovecraft gain the same anesthetic acceptability among mousy schoolmarms and blockheaded academics that has sunk Poe into the soporific sea. One wonders if their goal can be to return to mundane existence and yet not have to leave Lovecraft behind. But this is all misguided: if one must leave Shangri-La behind, don’t drag HPL kicking and screaming through the enchanted portal with you, for Yog’s sake!

We may be tempted likewise to defend Lovecraft against those who can never appreciate him (like the unregenerate mundane Wilson) by using the favorite trick of the freshman Anthropology major who embraces the ways of alien cultures only to gain a strategic position from which to take pot-shots at his own. In the case contemplated here, we must think of the intimidated Lovecraft fan who counters the criticism of the soulless mundane that Lovecraft must not be worth much if windbags like Wilson don’t like him. (This is like Lucy telling Schroeder that Beethoven can’t be so great or he’d be featured on bubblegum cards.) What is the response? The Lovecraftian apologist may reply that Lovecraft is more highly esteemed in Latin America and Europe, especially in France. But then, come to think of it, so is Jerry Lewis.

The possibility of imitation proves, as it were, that every idiosyncrasy is subject to generalization. Stylistic singularity is not the numerical identity of an individual but the specific identity of a type-a type that may lack antecedents but that is subject to an infinite number of subsequent applications. To describe a singularity is in a way to abolish it by multiplying it.

Gerard Genette, Fiction and Diction, 1993

“I am His Messenger, “the daemon said

As in contempt he struck his Master’s head.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Azathoth,” Fungi from Yuggoth XXII

Perhaps the greatest black mark against Lovecraft’s cults, Cthulhu’s acolytes, is that they try too hard (or is it not hard enough?) to follow the Old Gent in his writing. Their many pastiches smell like the seafood Lovecraft himself could not stand. So great is their enthusiasm, that, granted, many go off half-cocked to the fight. But have a little patience. Consider it a learning exercise. In fact, in the ancient Hellenistic world, it was a school exercise. Students would prove their understanding of Socrates, Diogenes, whoever, by composing anecdotes and sayings summing up what the great man would have said. That’s what pasticheurs are doing, and many of them are cutting their teeth doing it. They may one day go on, like Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch, to discover their own style.

But it’s also entirely possible that the result may be a mature Lovecraft pasticheur, someone who will actually carry on the old legacy. Perhaps like the Theosophists ready to anoint Krishnamurti, we must still wait for the One Who Is to Come, though I think we have found him incarnated in Thomas Ligotti and a few others.

But there remains something to learn from the youthful pastiches which constitute something of a right of passage for Lovecraftians (see S.T. Joshi’s “The Recurring Doom” in this volume). Suppose one reads such derivative tales and finds them wanting—do you blame HPL? As if only a poor magnet attracts such filings? Mustn’t a god who allows his servants to clobber him in this way be an idiot?

I think not. It is important to keep in mind that parody and pastiche are kept separate only by a razor’s edge, like love and hate. The pasticheur seeks to grasp the distinctive marks of his model’s style, so to emulate it. The more deeply he grasps the original, the better the result. But if the would-be pasticheur sees no farther than the most obvious surface features (e.g., the Lovecraftian book titles and monster names, or the italicized story endings) one is going to lean too heavily upon them, ignoring the rest, the more complex texture of style and structure that works its magic subtly enough to bewitch even the adolescent reader yet without him being able to put his finger upon precisely what does the trick. It does the trick, all right, but like the amazed audience of Houdini, the adolescent pasticheur cannot figure out how to reproduce the feat, and if he tries, the result will be embarrassing. But eventually, this way, the kid may learn the tricks himself, if we will be patient with him.

* * *

In what sense may the contributors to this volume be considered “acolytes” either of Lovecraft or of Great Cthulhu? A few were among the elite number to whom Wilson referred, disciples of Lovecraft during his lifetime, apprentices who sought his advice and wrote in his mode. Duane Rimel is one such. His “The Jewels of Charlotte” is an adjunct to his better known tale “The Tree on the Hill,” as well as to his poem sequence “Dreams of Yith,” both of which Lovecraft had a hand in. With the former story this one shares the protagonist Constantine Theunis, and like the latter, it mentions the far-flung planet Yith, his creation, along with Lovecraft. Likewise, Richard J. Searight was another correspondent of Lovecraft and accepted his ideas eagerly. Searight left two unfinished draft fragments of a story he planned to call “Mists of Death,” and his son, Franklyn Searight, a gifted weird fictioneer of the old school, has woven the dangling threads into a complete tapestry his father would have been proud of.

Other writers, without consciously seeking to write in the Lovecraftian vein, nonetheless may be numbered among the acolytes of Cthulhu in that they seem to have been, like the mad sculptor Wilcox, sensitive to the R’lyehian Dreamer’s urgings. They were on the same wavelength as Lovecraft, even if they wrote independently of the Providence recluse. One such was Gustav Meyrink, whose novel The Golem, Lovecraft highly praised. But I am thinking of a different work by Meyrink, “Der Violette Tod.” An English version of the story, “The Violet Death,” appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Anyone familiar with the original German of Meyrink will recognize that the Weird Tales version is only a kind of loose adaptation, not strictly a translation of “Der Violette Tod.” Thus I have commissioned a new, faithful translation by Kathleen Houlihan, called “The Purple Death.” You will find it most revealing to compare the two English versions. Thanks to Professor Daniel Lindblum for locating the original for me.

Earl Peirce was something of a literary grandchild of the Old Gent, being a protege of Lovecraft’s protege Robert Bloch. In “Doom of the House of Duryea,” Peirce takes a leaf from Bloch’s book. Which book, you may ask? A little volume you may have heard of: De Vermis Mysteriis.

Henry Hasse was another Weird Tales contemporary of Lovecraft who, like Wellman, found the Necronomicon too fascinating a book not to check out of the Miskatonic Special Collections Room. He refers to the dreaded tome in “The Guardian of the Book” (in my anthology Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos) and in the present, admittedly more fannish tale, “Horror at Vecra,” which appeared, appropriately enough, in that premiere Lovecraftian fan magazine The Acolyte for Fall 1943.

In his intriguing essay “Some Notes on Cthulhuian Pseudobiblia” (in S.T. Joshi, ed., H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism), Edward Lauterbach tried to call attention to a neglected Mythos text devised by scientifictionist Charles R. Tanner in his tale “Out of the Jar” (Stirring Science Stories, February 1941), the Leabhar Mor Dubh, or “Great Black Book,” a volume of Gaelic blasphemy. Lauterbach’s voice somehow failed to gain for Tanner the attention he deserved. I hope reprinting the story itself may help remedy that. My thanks to William Fulwiller, who doesn’t miss much, for directing me to the tale.

Another case of novel Mythos tomes which remained obscure despite their inherent juiciness is Steffan B. Aletti’s hellish Mnemabic Fragments, which made a too-brief debut in Aletti’s “The Last Work of Pietro of Apono” (Magazine of Horror #27, May 1969). Aletti’s early work, a quartet of tales all appearing in Doc Lowndes’s magazines, made quite a stir among readers, who readily recognized and acclaimed him as a new standard bearer in the Lovecraft tradition. Until very recently, however, Aletti dropped out of the field, and it is high time his early tales be made available again, lest they become as rare as the Mnemabic Fragments themselves. Three occur here, while the fourth, “The Castle in the Window,” appears in my Chaosium anthology The Necronomicon. I am indebted to Mike Ashley for introducing me to Steffan Aletti’s work.

Another Lovecraftian writer whose reputation is narrower than it ought to be is Arthur Pendragon. This relative anonymity is easily understood, however, for two reasons. First, as far as I know, he wrote only a pair of tales, “The Dunstable Horror” and “The Crib of Hell” (which appeared in Fantastic, April 1964 and May 1965, respectively). Second, he hid behind a transparent pseudonym. As the learned Darrell Schweitzer points out, Pendragon’s secret identity was most likely Arthur Porges, who wrote for the magazine under his own (noticeably similar) name during the same period. Sounds good to me. Let me thank Fred Blosser for putting me onto the two tales of Pendragon/Porges.

In a letter to his friend Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith griped as follows: Edmond “Hamilton, consarn him, has ruined an idea somewhat similar to one that I had in mind, for a tale to be called ‘The Lunar Brain’, based on the notion that there is a vast living brain in the center of the Moon” (March 1932). Does Smith mean that Hamilton, a favorite whipping boy for both CAS and HPL, had ruined the idea by a hackneyed development of it? Or that he had merely ruined the prospect for Smith’s using it, since now it might seem he was copying Hamilton? In any case, Hamilton’s story, included here, has much to commend it, especially from the standpoint of Lovecraftian cosmicism.

Among the acolytes of Cthulhu we must certainly count Professor Dirk W. Mosig and his brilliant disciples S.T. Joshi, Donald R. Burleson, and Peter H. Cannon. All followed Mosig’s lead in their innovative scholarship and critical reinterpretation of Lovecraft’s philosophical outlook, as well as in his experimental attempts to write genuinely Lovecraftian fiction uninfluenced by the Derlethian tradition, some of it tongue-in-cheek, some deadly serious. And then there’s the delightful Derlethian pastiche “The Recurring Doom,” a youthful indiscretion perpetrated by the 17-year-old Joshi in 1975 and reprinted here from Ken Neilly’s premiere fanzine Lovecraftian Ramblings XV (1980).

Robert M. Price

Halloween 1997