Cthulhu's Reign

WHEN ALL THE STARS ARE RIGHT ON THE EARTH’S LAST NIGHT An introduction by Darrell Schweitzer

“All my tales,” H. P. Lovecraft famously wrote, “are based on the fundamental premise that human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form — and the local human passions and conditions and standards — are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.”[1]

That, we must admit, is a pretty stringent “ideal,” which even Lovecraft could not stick to all the time, it being inherent in the nature of fiction that a certain amount of human interest is necessary to keep human readers interested. Nevertheless he clearly stated the underlying philosophy behind his literary corpus, and had done so at a significant moment, because that letter accompanied the submission of the classic “The Call of Cthulhu” to Weird Tales in 1927.

It is probably unnecessary in this age of Google and Wikipedia to go into great detail about who H. P. Lovecraft was. Suffice it to say that Lovecraft (1890–1937) was the greatest writer of weird and horrific fiction in English in the 20^th century. He published most of his work in pulp magazines, particularly in Weird Tales, and saw only one very limited, shabby book publication (of the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth) in his lifetime. Were he not a strict mechanistic materialist who did not believe in such things as “spirit” or an afterlife, he might be looking down in utter astonishment to see his work not only published all over the world but reprinted under such prestigious imprints as Penguin Classics or Library of America, this latter explicitly placing him on the same level as his own literary idols, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

One can only guess what he would have made of those plush Cthulhu dolls you can get from The Toy Vault, which are actually manufactured in China, and if anyone had told him, back in the ’30s, that he would become a world-wide cultural phenomenon adapted into everything from films to comic books (just being invented in his time) and manga (unknown) to role-playing games (likewise), he would have thought his informant stark, raving mad.

A good deal of the reason for Lovecraft’s enduring fame is his invention of the body of lore we call the Cthulhu Mythos — although he did not use that term. The core of it is to be found in three key stories, “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” all written in the space of five years, between 1926 and 1931. Certainly other Lovecraft tales contain elements and allusions — for example, Abdul Alhazred is mentioned for the first time in “The Nameless City” (1921) and the dread Necronomicon is introduced in “The Hound” (1922) — but if you read just these three stories you will get the basics.

Not only is humanity negligible in the cosmos at large, says Lovecraft, but humans are only one of the many masters of the Earth, neither the first nor the last. In “The Shadow out of Time” (1935), a contemporary man’s brain is exchanged through time with that of a member of the Great Race, cone-shaped beings from a civilization (ultimately of extraterrestrial origin) that flourished in Australia about 150 million years ago. From other kidnapped minds, the hero gains a hint of the earth’s post- human future, when, thousands of years hence, there will arise a civilization of intelligent beetles.

“The Call of Cthulhu” deals with the still lingering “god,” Cthulhu, who sleeps in the sunken island of R’lyeh below the South Pacific, and who once possessed the Earth and may one day awaken to reclaim it. But even Cthulhu may only dimly spy even vaster powers, the Old Ones of “The Dunwich Horror,” about whom we learn something in what is perhaps the most famous of all Necronomicon quotes:

“Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. Man rules where They ruled once; They shall rule soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”[2]

In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the sunken island of R’lyeh actually is heaved to the surface of the Pacific by an earthquake and the awful, squid-headed god walks (or shambles) beneath the clear sky for the first time in “vigintillions of years,” but conditions are not quite right and the island sinks again, and mankind has had a narrow escape more through sheer luck than anything anyone actually did about the matter. In “The Dunwich Horror,” a degenerate back-country sorcerer manages to impregnate his daughter with the seed of Yog-Sothoth, resulting in twins, one of which, Wilbur Whateley, superficially resembles a human being, whereas his brother (the “horror” of the title) decidedly does not. In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the tourist narrator discovers an entire town taken over by cultists of the Old Ones and especially of the sea-god Dagon. The Innsmouthites have a peculiar “look” which becomes more pronounced as they age, because they have been interbreeding with the Deep Ones, minions of Dagon, and eventually transform into an aquatic, post- human form in the course of their very long (possibly immortal) lives.

What we are intended to take away from these stories is the notion that humanity’s existence is a transient and precarious affair, and that most of us are better off with the delusion (encouraged by most of the world’s conventional religions) that we are the center of the universe, watched over by benevolent angels and deities. The truth, says Lovecraft, is likely to drive you mad. While Lovecraft did not personally believe in any supernatural beings or forces and had invented the Necronomicon as a tongue-in-cheek hoax, he did, through the Cthulhu Mythos, express in an indirect yet dramatic way his most firmly held beliefs about the nature of our existence: that the virtually limitless universe revealed by science is a vast, impersonal, mindless chaos, in which we exist purely by biological-chemical accident and only on a very small scale. His utterly inhuman monsters are symbols of forces in that cosmos-at-large that he described to Farnsworth Wright, for which human endeavors have no significance or validity.

Lovecraft’s fictional mythology developed during his lifetime. That it is not entirely self-consistent and changed from story to story is only to be expected from a body of ancient lore which is only imperfectly understood from possibly unreliable texts and fragmentary hints. He encouraged his friends and colleagues, notably Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and August Derleth, to use Mythos elements in their stories, and he incorporated their invented gods and forbidden books into his. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), there is even an in-joke allusion to “the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean priest, Klarkashton,” a reference to Smith’s Hyperborean series.

After Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth, who had founded the publishing firm of Arkham House to preserve Lovecraft’s writings and who edited numerous anthologies of Lovecraftian and Cthulhu-slanted fiction, in addition to continuing Mythos pastiches of his own, attempted to catalogue and systematize Lovecraft’s mythos, as if it were the Greek or Norse or Hindu pantheon, with each “god” assigned a place and role. This was probably a mistake. You can’t categorize chaos, and Lovecraft’s fiction, if it is about anything, is about cosmic chaos. More seriously, Derleth misunderstood Lovecraft’s philosophy (or chose to reject elements in it) and turned Lovecraft’s nihilistic, impersonal universe into a dualistic one, in which there are forces of “good” opposed to the forces of “evil,” and which sometimes come to mankind’s aid. For Lovecraft, there is no such moral order and no such hope.

There have since been thousands of Cthulhu Mythos stories by other writers since Lovecraft’s time. Fortunately most of them have (at least in recent years) discarded the dualistic, Derlethian “heresy” and have gone back to Lovecraft’s own ideas. There have been numerous Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, of which the book you hold in your hands will certainly not be the last.

But this book does attempt to go all previous ones one better. Where previous Mythos collections and stories have uncovered more forbidden lore, explored the crazed cults which might seek to bring the Old Ones back, or otherwise deal with the ever-present threat of Their return, Cthulhu’s Reign asks the Big Question which very few others ever have: what happens when the Old Ones do return? What happens when Cthulhu “wins”?

There are only the vaguest hints of this in the Lovecraftian canon itself. If the puny efforts of mankind can do little to stave off this doom, what is to stop the catastrophe from happening at any time? Cosmic forces have to line up, we are told. The stars have to be “right.” But what can most of us do about it? Answer: nothing.

We turn again to the key story, “The Dunwich Horror,” in which the half- human Wilbur Whately writes in his diary and describes (on p. 184 of the Arkham House edition) how he intends to go to “the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles” when “the earth is cleared off.” He speculates further, “I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Ako Sabaoth said I may be transfigured. ”

This leads us directly to the question of survivors. If everyone just dies hideously and quickly, there aren’t many story possibilities. The writers in this book have to do better than that. The results are, of course, not entirely consistent with one another, any more than Lovecraft’s mythos is entirely consistent. These are speculations, possibilities, forebodings, based on dreadful, ghastly, mind-numbing hints from the beginning of time and the furthest depths of space. The entirety of the Answer is not something the human mind can grasp.

Undoubtedly, an Earth ruled by Cthulhu or his minions (or even his enemies, other beings who may in turn displace Cthulhu, as seems to be happening in Fred Chappell’s “Remnants”) will be transformed beyond recognition. At least during the transitional period, some human beings may continue, overlooked by the Old Ones even as humans overlook cockroaches when they aren’t too obvious. Is there some inferior ecological niche humans may still occupy? Some folks may figure, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” and try to join one of those rumored cults which supposedly sides with the Old Ones against the majority of mankind.

Such cults, we are told, have existed since remotest antiquity, very likely inspired in humans by dreams sent by sleeping Cthulhu himself. Cultic worship figures largely in a great number of Lovecraft’s Mythos stories, not just in the Big Three mentioned above, but in such works as “The Festival” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Then there is the town of Innsmouth, where the entire society has gone over to an alliance with the Deep Ones. I once (jokingly, I’d like you to believe. heh, heh. ) produced a chapbook of The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal, which we imagine laid out on the pews during services at Dagon Hall, where the faithful may sing (or croak) along to familiar tunes and such lyrics as:

But will they? Do vast cosmic intelligences like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth make deals, much less keep their promises, with beings they must perceive as vermin or bacteria, if they are even aware of mankind’s existence at all? Are the Cthulhu cultists as deluded and doomed as anyone else? A couple stories here address that very point.

I suppose I should warn you that this isn’t a very cheerful book, what with all that cosmic nihilism inherent in the Lovecraftian worldview. What these stories do is go bravely where few others have, following the Cthulhu Mythos to its ultimate, logical conclusion.