The Book of Iod

^Introduction The Khut-N’hah Mythos

A few years ago, if one were writing an introduction like this, one would have had to say that we are focusing on the early, neglected period of a writer who is far better known for his mature work in the fields of fantasy and science fiction. Now we cannot say precisely this, as Henry Kuttner’s star shines neither so brightly no so high up in the firmament as it once did. Even Ray Bradbury’s memoir of his friend and mentor in The Best of Henry Kuttner is called “A Neglected Master”, and that was some twenty years ago. Today it is sad but safe to say that just about all of Kuttner’s exceedingly clever fiction is the property of literary nostalgia-lovers and antiquarians. All of it has passed into the category of literary curiosities. And yet the distinction between apprentice and journeyman work is worth preserving. The Cthulhu Mythos specialist is most interested in the Lovecraftian juvenilia of Henry Kuttner.

Henry Kuttner (1914-1958) was a friend of the young Robert Bloch and, like him, a writer just starting out. Both shared the same markets, including Weird Tales and Strange Stories. They even collaborated on a few stories. Another thing both shared was a literary friendship with the Great Old One, er, Grand Old Man, H. P. Lovecraft. Probably Bloch assured Kuttner that the Providence recluse was actually quite approachable and suggested he write him. Kuttner soon became one of the Lovecraft Circle, submitting plot ideas and draft manuscripts to Lovecraft for evaluation, albeit over the brief space of a single year (February 1936 to February 1937) before Lovecraft’s death.

Critic Edmund Wilson once dismissed the juvenile “Lovecraft cult” in much the same spirit as Athens dismissed Socrates as a corrupter of the city’s youth. Lovecraft encouraged a whole stable of young disciples including Bloch, Kuttner, August Derleth, Duane Rimel, Richard F. Searight, Willis Conover, and (posthumously) Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Gary Myers, and others. Many of these young men started out thinking that what they wanted to do was to write like Lovecraft, but what they eventually decided they wanted was to become writers, period. What Bradbury says of Kuttner, “He did not really want to become a minor-league Lovecraft”, was equally true of these others. Most made it and finally found their own voices, major league or minor. Kuttner certainly became, in his era, a major voice. This was after he had put away the childish things of Lovecraftian pastiche. But these are the things, perhaps perversely, that interest you and me. We want to take a closer look at Kuttner’s early Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Indeed, it is good not to pass it by too quickly, for, not only are several of the tales quite enjoyable in their own right, they contain a number of fascinating details that repay study.

The element of Lovecraft that seems to grab many pasticheurs is not so much the Old Gent’s style as it is his intriguing pseudo-mythology. It seems that every one who treads this path gladly yields to the temptation to complicate the Mythos a little bit more, expand the pantheon, add a few more tomes to the sagging shelf of imaginary grimoires. Our Kuttner was by no means immune. Let us occupy ourselves for a moment first with the sources and then with the shape of the Kuttner or (as HPL dubbed his disciple) Khut-N’hah Mythos.

Obviously the chief influence on Kuttner’s pseudo-Lovecraftiana is Lovecraft’s own work. After an initial experiment with Gothic horror (“The Secret of Kralitz”) Kuttner penned a pair of pastiches ofLovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. These are “The Jest of Droom Avista” and “The Eater of Souls.” Though he would reuse a couple of the names and concepts he coined for these stories, he soon abandoned this form and went on to do more “straight” horror stories set in the modern era. In these he makes passing references once or twice to the Lovecraftian names Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu, Yuggoth and Yig. But these were strictly marginal and might have been as easily pruned as were the Mythos references in the first draft of Fritz Leiber’s “Adept’s Gambit.”

Equally important was the influence of Kuttner’s friend Robert Bloch. Several of Kuttner’s stories for Weird Tales and Strange Stories read much like Bloch’s work of the same period, mixing snappy, crisp narration (reminiscent of 1940’s movie scripts) with the horrors of medieval diabolism—and a wry sense of the incongruity involved. Even in terms of Mythos props, it is significant to note that Kuttner usually eschews Lovecraft’s already hackneyed Necronomicon, preferring instead Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm/De Vermis Mysteriis. And the name given to Kuttner’s Keziah Mason clone in “The Salem Horror”, Abigail Prinn, is obviously a salute to Bloch’s Flemish wizard Ludvig Prinn.

The thing that made Lovecraft’s esoteric lore effective was the impression he gave that it might reflect a genuine ancient tradition. To this end he took care to cast his names like “Yuggoth”, “shoggoths”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “Azathoth”, etc., in the linguistic accents of Hebrew and Arabic, the languages of much medieval and ancient magical literature. “Nug and Yeb” were meant to have a Tartar or Tibetan ring. This kind of piggy-backing on genuine ancient lore was a trick not lost on Kuttner. He proceeded to camouflage his own mythologoumena with references borrowed from ancient religion. His favorite source (perhaps because Lovecraft had not used it) was Persian Zoroastrianism. This is plain in his story, not included here, “Towers of Death” (Weird Tales, November 1939), where we do not meet with any of the familiar Mythos spooks, but we do have a character making a deal with the Zoroastrian anti-god Ahriman. Some of the overt Mythos tales (all of which are included here) make sidelong or disguised references to Zoroastrianism, as we will see in the introductions to particular stories.

Lovecraft was much taken with the lore of Theosophy once his pal Edgar Hoffmann Price introduced him to it. Madame Blavatsky’s erudite yet crackpot volumes Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine were a gold mine of esoterica for fantasy writers of the pulp era. In his fascinating article “John Carter: Sword of Theosophy” (available in the Mirage Press collection of Amra reprints The Conan Swordbook), Fritz Leiber shows in convincing detail how several major building blocks of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books were lifted directly from the pages of Madame Blavatsky. In his introduction to Poseidonis, one of his Clark Ashton Smith collections, Lin Carter suggests a similar dependence of Smith on Blavatsky, and it is Carter who rightly notes that “Madame Blavatsky is really quite an important person in the history of fantasy. In the course of [her] two interminable and all but unreadable tomes of spurious occult lore… she codified fugitive and unattached morsels of legend, theory, and nonsense into a systematic prehistory of the world… This system, percolating down through sensational popularizations and Sunday supplement articles, was adopted lock, stock, and barrel by writers for the fantasy pulp magazines, who are thus greatly in her debt.”

Perhaps it seemed natural for pulp writers to incorporate the lore of Blavatskianism, since she herself might be viewed as having done just what they were doing: using genuine mystical and mythic lore as an anchor to provide false gravity for her own innovations with which she mixed them.

Lovecraft compares the Cthulhu cult, implicitly or explicitly, to the Theosophical Society in “The Call of Cthulhu” and other stories. His stray references to the “Children of the Fire Mist” come directly from Blavatsky, as do his occasional citations of The Book of Dzyan, the supposedly ancient palm-parchment codex in the pre-Sanskrit Senzar language. (In fact, the whole of The Secret Doctrine is ostensibly a massive commentary on this imaginary text.) Probably the most significant case of Theosophical influence on Lovecraft was “The Shadow out of Time” (on this point see my article “Lovecraft’s Use of Theosophy” in my collection H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, 2nd edition, Borgo Press).

Some of Henry Kuttner’s most puzzling occult name-drops turn out to have been cribbed directly from The Secret Doctrine. His most often reprinted Lovecraftian tale “The Salem Horror” features most of them. Have you ever found yourself wondering about the derivation of “the Vach-Viraj incantation” or “the Tikkoun Elixir”? What about the blasphemous Book of Iod itself? Stay with me, now.

The terms “Vach” and “Viraj” come from a footnote on page 9 of Volume 1 of The Secret Doctrine: “See Manu’s account of Brahma separating his body into male and female, the latter the female Vach, in whom he creates Viraj”, this last a variant spelling of the vajra, or irresistible thunderbolt of Indra, often used as a penis symbol in Tantric mysticism.

Whence the Tikkoun Elixir? Well, tikkoun or tikkun refers to ritual acts of piety and purification in Kabbalistic Judaism (see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, page 233: “Extinction of the stain, restoration of harmony—that is the meaning of the Hebrew word Tikkun, which is the term employed by the Kabbalists after the period of the Zohar, for man’s task in this world.”), but I’m guessing Kuttner derived it second-hand from The Secret Doctrine, Volume 2, page 25:

“The ‘Heavenly Man’ (Tetragrammaton) who is the Protogonos [i.e., the firstborn of creation as in Colossians 1:15], Tikkoun, the firstborn from the passive deity and the first manifestation of that deity’s shadow, is the universal form and idea, which engenders the manifested Logos, Adam Kadmon, or the four-lettered symbol, in the Kabala, of the Universe itself, also called the second Logos.”

Or perhaps from a footnote on page 706: “The form of Tikkun or the Protogonos, the firstborn, i.e., the universal form and idea, had not yet been mirrored in Chaos.”

In all this, it must not be imagined that Blavatsky is simply laying it on thick. Her genius was in her creative synthesis of many strikingly analogous mythemes drawn from Gnosticism, the Hindu scriptures, the Kabbalah, and who knows what all. MacGregor Mathers performed the same syncretistic feat for the varied Western traditions of ceremonial magic. And of course Lovecraft and Kuttner were doing much the same thing, only for fictional purposes. It is equally obvious, however, that in all these borrowings, Kuttner completely disregarded the original meaning of his terms, merely liking the sound of them.

Though Kuttner will supply his own content for the name Iod, I would suggest that he picked up the name itself from the footnote on page 90 of Volume 1: “In the Kabala the same numbers are a value of Jehovah, viz., 1065, since the numerical values of the three letters which compose his name—Jod, Vau, and twice He—are respectively 10,6 and 5.” My guess is that Kuttner’s “Iod” is a more phonetic spelling of the Hebrew letter Yodh (“Jod”).

Another piece of Kuttner Mythos esoterica pops up in “Hydra”, namely the Chhaya Ritual (also present in “The Hunt”). We have to page through Madame Blavatsky again for this one. And this time we find what we’re looking for on page 17 of the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, in a dense excerpt from the Book of Dzyan:

“The Seven Hosts, the ‘Will-Born Lords’, propelled by the spirit of life-giving, separated men from themselves, each on his own zone. Seven times seven shadows of future men were born, each of his own colour and kind. Each inferior to his father. The fathers, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny were Bhuta, with neither form or mind. Therefore they are called the Chhaya… a shadow with no sense.”

In both “Hydra” and “The Hunt” Kuttner simply employs the word without any of the Theosophic associations. In a Weird Menace tale called “Terror in the House” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1937), he makes it all explicit. The narrator sees a painting a la Pickman, only the picture is titled “The Hunt” (sound familiar?), and “pictured the Chhaya—the ‘boneless ones’ of the Secret Book of Dzyan.” This last is a combination of the titles of Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan and The Secret Doctrine. “The Secret Book of Dzyan speaks of them—‘The Seven Hosts, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny are called the Chhaya.’” Later on someone uses “the Tikkoun motions” to summon them, as well as the Chhaya chant which goes: “Throg Chhaya thrugga—kad’sh Chhaya… Yin Chhaya”, etc. This is apparently part of the Chhaya Ritual of which we read in “The Hunt” and “Hydra.” Note the vocable “kad’sh”, recalling the chant fragment in “The Salem Horror”: “Ya na kadishtu nilgh’ri….” Here is a reference to the Hebrew word “kadesh”, which means “holy.” Another bit of Kabbalah influence.

Henry Kuttner’s own private corner of the Cthulhu Mythos was, then, apparently derived in about equal measure from Lovecraft, Bloch, Zoroastrianism, and Theosophy. But of course there were some original contributions of his own, and they form the real center of his Mythos. And of this center the Book of Iod forms the nucleus. Lovecraft was intrigued (or perhaps pretended to be) as soon as he heard Kuttner’s title: ‘“The Book of Iod’ surely sounds promising in prospect.” (letter of March 12, 1936).

“Some time I’ll quote darkly from your ‘Book of Iod’—which I presume either antedates the human race like the Eltdown shards and the Pnakotic Manuscripts, or repeats the most hellish secrets learnt by early man in the fashion of the Book of Eibon, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or the dreaded and abhorred Al Azif or Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” (February 16,1936)

“This must be the [unintelligible pseudo-script] mentioned on the seventh Eltdown Shard— & may very possibly be the ‘volume that cannot be’ hinted at in the Necronomicon (ix, 21—p. 598 of the black-letter German copy (in Latin) in the library of Miskatonic University). Some day I must bring pressure to bear & borrow that Negus translation (into Latin, I presume) in the Huntington Library.” (April 16, 1936)

But Kuttner’s Book of Iod actually made its first appearance exactly three years later in “Bells of Horror” (Strange Stories, April 1939), published under the pseudonym Keith Hammond. Until then he had been satisfied sticking to Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm (“The Invaders”) or Lovecraft’s Necronomicon (“The Salem Horror”). The very same month, this time in Weird Tales (“Hydra”), two other occult titles made their debut: the Elder Key, of which we are told nothing else, and the Book of Karnak, which seems to have an Egyptian provenance but may not. We can trace an evolution of this term from the early Dunsanian tales “The Eater of Souls” and “The Jest of Droom Avista”, where we find a place name “Yarnak”, on through “The Salem Horror”, where we hear the word “k’yarnak” as part of a magical incantation, and finally to “Hydra”, where we read of the Book of Karnak. Still, once he had replaced the “Y” with a “K”, it is hard not to believe he didn’t have the occult mysteries of Egypt in mind (though he never once mentions Nyarlathotep).

I have already called attention to the fact that Kuttner made little use of Lovecraft’s own monster deities. Two exceptions are Azathoth, who figures largely in “Hydra”, and Dagon with his deep ones, who are recognizable in “Spawn of Dagon.” In “The Secret of Kralitz” there is a single reference to “leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth.” Kuttner drops this hint, never to pick it up again, but we must wonder if here we do not perhaps discover the origin of August Derleth’s later categorization of Yog-Sothoth as an earth elemental. Certainly nothing in Lovecraft suggests it.

Naturally, Kuttner paid the most attention to his own inventions. Of these the first was Vorvadoss, a being whose cult is restricted to the king (Sindara) of Bel Yarnak. He appears as a dust-devil in the sand in “The Eater of Souls”, where he gives the king advice on how to vanquish the Eater, a local troll who dwells in the Grey Gulf ofYarnak. In “The Invaders” he is hailed by mortals as “Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak! The Troubler of the Sands! Thou Who waiteth in the Outer Dark, Kindler of the Flame.” He even seems to have borrowed an appellation from the Eater of Souls, as he is now called “Vorvadoss of the Grey Gulf of Yamak.” Where did Kuttner get the name “Vorvadoss”? Who knows? But I wonder if he just twisted “Barbados” a bit.

Nyogtha (the Thing that should not be, the Black God of Madness), from “The Salem Horror”, is the best known of the Kuttnerian Old Ones. He is made “brother of the old ones” in Kuttner’s Necronomicon passage, just as Cthulhu himself is made merely “their cousin” in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon text in “The Dunwich Horror.” Nyogtha is said to burrow up from the depths of the earth in answer to an occult summons. Kuttner’s Nyogtha may have served as the inspiration for Brian Lumley’s Shudde-M’elle, the Burrower Beneath. But it is no less likely that Nyogtha was itself an assemblage of themes borrowed from Nyarlathotep in “The Haunter of the Dark.” Both are inky clouds of blasphemy which the protagonist, a visiting writer, accidentally summons in an old building full of occult associations.

Iod appears personified as a deity in two stories, “The Invaders” and “The Hunt”, and he is dubbed “The Shining Pursuer”, “the Hunter of Souls.” It is a true Lovecraftian deity: “It was a blazing, cosmic horror spawned by an outlaw universe, an abysmal, prehuman entity drawn out of fathomless antiquity by elder magic. A great faceted eye” protrudes from “membranous”, “squamous, semitransparent flesh” from which extended “hideous, plant-like appendages” which “writhed blindly in the air, making hungry little sucking noises.”

Finally, in “Bells of Horror”, Kuttner introduces his demon of darkness, Zuchequon, the Dark Silent One. He is the herald and harbinger of eternal darkness and is scheduled to appear at the end of the age, though foolish mortals may awaken him early if they can conjure up exactly the deep tones that can rouse him. Again we seem to have a twin of Nyarlathotep as the avatar of darkness in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” Interestingly, whereas Kuttner explicitly associates Iod and Vorvadoss with Cthulhu and Yig as gods worshiped on primal Mu, here he just as explicitly excludes Zuchequon from the ranks of the Old Ones. He is not a star-spawned creature, but rather more of a cosmic principle. In this Zuchequon reminds us of Clark Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla, also disassociated from the Old Ones as having been here, native to the steaming earth, before the arrival of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth from the stars. Of course, neither statement stood in the way of Lin Carter numbering Zuchequon and Ubbo-Sathla among the Old Ones. In fact, he made the former the son of the latter! (See his story, “Dead of Night”, in this collection, as well as his “Zoth-Ommog” in Edward Paul Berglund, ed., Disciples of Cthulhu, 1976. The latter will be reprinted under the earlier title “The Horror in the Gallery” in my upcoming Chaosium Carter collection The Xothic Legend Cycle.)

Lin Carter’s great joy was to do for the Mythos exactly what he himself described Helena Petrovna Blavatsky doing: codifying fugitive and unattached morsels of legend, theory, and nonsense into a grand system. (For a complete treatment of Carter’s Mythos architectonics, see the chapter “The Statement of Lin Carter” in my book Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds, Borgo Press). What is surprising is that he seems never to have noticed the existence of several of the Kuttner Mythos items mentioned here, taking note in his various Mythos glossaries and theogonies of only Nyogtha, “Zulchequon”, and the Book of Iod.

The present volume is in a sense part of Lin Carter’s championing of the Kuttner Mythos legacy. The Book of lod (it was Lin’s idea to call a Kuttner collection that) would have been the second in his series of Lin Carter Fantasy Selections from Zebra Books, the first being the original edition of Robert Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm (also resurrected, as the second volume in the present Chaosium fiction series). Indeed, Lin wanted to assemble collections of the Mythos work of each major Lovecraft Circle member. Not a bad idea.