Legal Ramblings
[ Monday, August 2, 2004 (8:10 PM) ] ( link )
Cthulhu!: My posts the last few days have been way too serious for their own good. So I think it's time for some silliness, and what better way to get silly than to talk about the Cthulhu Mythos.
The Cthulhu Mythos came to mind because I recently saw Hellboy, the fun but flawed movie by Guillermo del Toro. (I've previously talked about the film here, a post that also contains a brief summary.) I think that by any objective measure the movie is pretty bad. But I love the Hellboy comics, by Mike Mignola, and I love the Cthulhu Mythos, which is part of the dark background of the Hellboy comics, and so I thought, in an unabashedly fanboyish way, that the movie was fabulous. Now, it may be that people are unfamiliar with the Hellboy comics. Although I think they're broadly accessible, it might be that their commercial distribution (at least prior to the film) wasn't wide enough for people to know enough about them. I can appreciate that. But some people are also unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos, and I find that ignorance unacceptable.
A word about me and Lovecraft. I first encountered Lovecraft in my seventh-grade speed-reading class, which was utterly useless except that it gave me an hour every day to just read whatever the hell I wanted, outside the watchful supervision of my parents, who thought that I should only read books from the insufferably dull "Classics" section of our public library. (This is why, in that same class, I also breezed through Franz Kafka's The Trial in two days, without retaining a damned thing except that the narrator was killed by a knife twisted in his chest--the first time I had ever heard about that particular method of murder.) Unfortunately the books in my speed-reading classroom were terrible, even for somebody like me who really just wanted to read anything that was not Lorna Doone or some other hideously dull novel. The one exception was a slender volume with a luridly gruesome cover, which turned out to be a collection of stories by an author with the strangely macabre name of H.P. Lovecraft. The first two stories in the collection that I read were "The Colour out of Space" and "In the Walls of Eryx," fortunately two of Lovecraft's most accessible and sensational stories. I was immediately hooked, and devoured as many of Lovecraft's stories as I could find. By an extraordinary coincidence, many of his books were so old that they looked like classics, allowing me to fool my parents into thinking that I was educating myself, when in fact I was just scaring myself silly. (Now you can read many of Lovecraft's stories here, or in multiple collections that have sprouted since his posthumous popularity.)
But back to the Mythos. I recently discovered that the owner of my apartment, who otherwise has highbrow stuff like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose on his shelves, also curiously has H.P. Lovecraft's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Volume I, edited by August Derleth. The introduction to that book, written by Mr. Derleth, has the following excellent summary of the Cthulhu Mythos: "All my stories," wrote H.P. Lovecraft, "unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again." . . .
These powers of evil are variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones . . . . Supreme among them is the blind idiot god, Azathoth, an "amorphous blight of netermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity." Yog-Sothoth, the "all-in-one and one-in-all," shares Azathoth's dominion, and is not subject to the laws of time and space, being co-existent with all time and conterminous [sic] with all space. Nyarlathotep, who is presumably the messenger of the Great Old Ones; Great Cthulhu, dweller in hidden R'lyeh deep in the sea; Hastur the Unspeakable, who occupies the air and interstellar spaces, half-brother to Cthulhu; and Shub-Niggurath, "the black goat of the woods with a thousand young," complete the roster of the Great Old Ones as originally conceived.
It's hard to explain to Lovecraft newbies what is so interesting and exciting about his works. It is not the silly names, which are simply too easy to make fun of. (Imagine the Great Old Ones as Pokemon creatures, who communicate by speaking their own names: "Cthu-lhu!" "Yog-yog-soth-oth!" "Aza?") It is partially, I think, Lovecraft's writing, which can sometimes achieve a slimy and decadent beauty. ("I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.") But it is mostly the tremendous atmosphere that Lovecraft evoked, a sense of dark and awesome powers lurking behind the thin fabric of normal life, gibbering madness straining against the illusion of sanity. Or, as Lovecraft put it in the opening of the classic "The Call of Cthulhu" (from which the name of the Mythos is euphonically derived): The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Heavy stuff.
Then there is the lighter side of the Mythos. Neil Gaiman has written a short story, nominated for the Hugo Award this year, on Sherlock Holmes in a Lovecraftian universe. Roger Zelazny wrote the whimsical and charming A Night in the Lonesome October, where a dog matter-of-factly narrates his master's adventures to quell various unspeakable horrors. (His master, by the way, is Jack the Ripper.) Then there is the unmentionably weird Hello Cthulhu (irregular comic strip here, merchandise here), and Cthulhu for President. Alternatively, you can search the web with Cthuugle, which links to the highly amusing Tales of Plush Cthulhu. Or you could run your web page on the Cthulhu server. And finally, there is this site, which frankly just confuses me. ("As Cthulhu, you have a natural interest in the welfare of your fellow man, and a desire to help and serve others in a humanitarian way." They must be kidding.)
In other words, the Cthulhu Mythos has a little something for everybody. So what are you waiting for? Cthulhu fhtagn!
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