Old Ones & Outer Gods in H.P. Lovecraft
For first-time readers of Lovecraft's fiction, the jumble of impossible names and dizzying spans of time can baffle even a careful
student. Add to that confusion the abysses of lore you find with a Web search! Lovecraft's original Mythos was expanded upon by other writers even when Lovecraft was still alive. Lovecraft then put some of their eldritch books of magic--or are they Math texts?--and evil gods into his stories as well.
Today there's a veritable "Cthulhu Industry" since copyright expired and the original writings entered the Public Domain. So here is my basic understanding of what you have encountered (thankfully, only in print and not in the flesh!). It's all you need to know for the purposes of this class. Beyond that, you may delve into arcane and forbidden tomes, or at least geeky Web sites and roleplaying games, at the cost of your sanity and social skills.
All quotations and paraphrases come from our edition of Lovecraft's complete works.
The Great Old Ones and Merely "Old Ones"
To make things clearer (well, a bit clearer) I refer to Cthulhu and a few other beings we've not read about as "The Great Old Ones" and that doomed prehuman race in Antartica as "The Old Ones." After all, humans give them both names and that may explain the confusion. I'm sure they'd have their own names for themselves, but Lovecraft never gives them.
In "The Dunwich Horror" (written in 1928, two years after "The Call of Cthulhu") the Great Old Ones would appear to include entities like Yog-Sothoth or Azathoth, who live not on Earth and "[n]ot in the spaces we know, but between them" (Lovecraft "Dunwich" 42). As I'll explain, the author changed his mythos a few years later.
In "Dunwich," Cthulhu, who is at least partly material and waits, dreaming, beneath the Pacific for the stars to be right, is not the same sort of being as Yog-Sothoth and his peers but instead "[t]heir cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly" (Lovecraft "Dunwich 43). Nyarlothotep, my favorite evil creature from Lovecraft's works, shifts form and can appear on Earth at will and without the help of cultists. He is not indifferent to humans at all; instead, he enjoys corrupting us and driving us insane, but Nyarlothotep cannot bring about The End Times by opening the gates of destruction.
Neither can Cthulhu, the being most associated with Lovecraft. Only madmen like Wizard Whateley and his grandson Wilbur can put such a plot into motion. That said, it would not make much sense for Cthulhu, the ancient race living in Antarctica, or The Deep Ones to support the plans of a Wilbur Whateley. They'd be wiped out too or, for Cthulhu, lose his earthly followers who have plans "for a city greater than Innsmouth next time" (Lovecraft, "Innsmouth" 127). My guess, from reading Lovecraft's letters, is that in his correspondence with other writers he came to realize the inconsistencies he'd put into his tales. He's made things complicated by adding monstrous gods and awful books that friends made up, such as Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua, mentioned in At the Mountains of Madness.
That novella (written in 1931, published 1936) has "The Old Ones" being the very-much-Earthly creatures that built the vast city in Antarctica. They fought other races like the Pluto-based Mi-Go, who are not extinct but still coming to Earth for mining and the occasional human brain to study, as shown in the 1931 novella The Whisperer in Darkness. The Old Ones also war with the "star-spawn of Cthulhu" (Lovecraft, Mountains of Madness 179). Are these "star-spawn" the Deep Ones? I don't know. Lovecraft never quite finished his mythos during his lifetime, and he was at work on it almost up to his death.
The process of distinguishing the Earth-colonizing alien species from the original "Great Old Ones" continues in The Shadow Out of Time (published 1935-36). Here Lovecraft further humanizes the monstrous aliens, by making them more sympathetic and scientific in nature as well as more ancient. Gradually, the writer sketched a history a quarter billion years into the past, rather like The Time Machine of Wells run backward into Deep Time. Lovecraft was hinting at this in earlier stories such as "Dagon" and it continued in later ones such as the 1932 "Dreams in the Witch House." Note how in his strange travels with Keziah and The Brown Jenkin, Gilman stops briefly in Antarctica's vast city, but he arrives during that place's tropical heyday (Lovecraft "Dreams" 85). The Mythos was, and I'm not the first to conclude this, becoming less supernatural and more a body of science fiction based upon new theories of math, physics, and cosmology.
The Outer Gods
Here comes my favorite part of The Cthulhu Mythos: mindless things that play flutes in the center of infinity. It may be why I love "The Haunter of the Dark" more than the other tales: you get the cosmic sweep of the invented universe and how inadequate it all is for human brains (even those that the Mi-Go stuff into brain cylinders and haul off to Pluto) to comprehend.
Now that we've established that 1) Cthulhu is the only "Great Old One" Lovecraft created and 2) Other writers populated the "mythos" with dozens of other ones with names like Ithaqua and Y’golonac, where do creatures like Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth come in?
Modern fandom helped a bit, by clarifying that those entities not residing on Earth and able to move in the spaces between our dimension and others, like the characters in "Dreams in the Witch House," are "Outer Gods." The big guy is Azathoth, a mindless blob of corruption "in the spiral vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos" (Lovecraft "Haunter" 91). Most of the other Lovecraft-named entities dwell there, too, except Cthulhu; the GPS coordinates of R'lyeh can be found on Google Earth and other sites.
Azathoth's realtor and marketing executive is Yog-Sothoth, the gateway through which the Outer gods will return and wipe the earth clear of "the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life" (Lovecraft "Dunwich 48).
Thus, Lovecraft's universe is not about us at all, not even our veggies. China Mieville, in his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness, acknowledges both the author's racism but also an even deeper anti-humanism. Lovecraft's fictional world is one where humanity is temporary and doomed. Our best hope for survival and sanity gets expressed in the first lines of "The Call of Cthulhu" or in the Miskatonic faculty's temporary victory over evil in "The Dunwich Horror." Humanity itself seems to have been an accidental mutation of some of the leftover DNA that the Old Ones manipulated when creating the Shoggoths and other species. Our early ancestors were at best "food and an amusing buffoon" (Lovecraft Mountains of Madness 179).
Writer August Derleth, a close friend of Lovecraft's and the person most responsible for perpetuating Lovecraft's legacy for a few decades, wrote his own stories but had to invent well-intentioned "Elder Gods" to fight Lovecraft's horrors and give humanity some hope.
The coward.
Lovecraft himself could never have horror and evil deep enough. There is always something worse hinted at but never fully seen.
Remember that in At the Mountains of Madness the eponymous peaks are not the Earth's highest but that honor goes to the never-crossed ones beyond. Only Danforth gets a madness-inducing glimpse of what lies on their other side, something "nameless" that The Old Ones themselves feared: some sort of roiling chaos with things like a moon-ladder and primal white jelly that one would not presumably want spread on toast.
So curses on Derleth and his do-gooder Elder Gods! Bring on "Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws" (Lovecraft, "Haunter" 100). They are much more fun in a setting of cosmic horror and do reveal that Lovecraft--always a high-culture snob--feared the influences of Jazz and Martha Graham's school of Modern Dance.
Finale...my favorite new work set in Lovecraft's universe.
You'll find writers reclaiming Lovecraft's work without the racism or turning it on its head. There's a lot of good work out there and a lot of hackwork, too. These stand out.
Anioloski, Scott, ed. Singers of Strange Songs. This strong anthology includes "The High Rollers," with a Donald Trump wannabe unwisely building his latest casino in Innsmouth.
Carpenter, John, dir. The Thing. This 1982 film sets the bar for Lovecraft-inspired work. Set in Antarctica, it reinvents the Mountains of Madness tale for our era.
Datlow, Ellen, ed. Lovecraft's Monsters. Most every story is worthy. I particularly liked "Bulldozer," set at the end of the Wild West era, and "The Bleeding Shadow," a hard-boiled detective story featuring an African-American private eye.
Diaz, Junot. "Monstro." Free to read from The New Yorker. "Monstro" takes Zombie-horror into HP Lovecraft territory. It's less set in HPL's world than the others, but it captures the mood of the tales well. In "Monstro" a group of bored, wealthy Dominican kids encounter things eldritch in a near-future of runaway climate change. Diaz never published the novel for which this longish story was the seed. Pity!
Gordon, Stuart, dir. From Beyond. The 1986 film is not for the weak of stomach, but it captures the sense of what may be in the "spaces between" better than anything I've read or seen. It features faculty and graduate students suffering because of their research, which is always fun to see for academic viewers. Warning: it has some disturbing sexual content that works with the story but would probably make Lovecraft himself faint. Best line: "it bit of his HEAD OFF...like a gingerbread man!"
King, Stephen. "Crouch End." (published in a few different anthologies).
Shea, Michael. "Fat Face." It's a sort of sequel to At the Mountains of Madness and STILL scary just to think about, perhaps one of the scariest stories I have ever red. The link goes to an individual story purchase at Amazon.
Spencer, William Browning. Résumé With Monsters. What if the Great Old Ones decided to team up with the Outer Gods and run a company? This horror comedy follows the adventures of a man who finds work there, working for Mr. Azathoth.
