Lovecraft Mythos | At the Mountains of Madness

Shoggoth in the Deep Image by Craig J Spearing

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Often considered to be the pinnacle of the Lovecraft Mythos by his fans  .If you haven’t read it you can get it here. I found this to be an interesting story by Lovecraft, but it had a different flavor to it. The sci-fi elements were atypical of HPL, who up until this point of his career generally leaned toward the mystical side of things. S.T. Joshi, author of the book the Annotated Lovecraft, and foremost Lovecraft scholar had a similar opinion about it being different from his other work calling it “demythologizing” of C’thulhu mythos. I don’t feel that I quite agree with this whole heartedly so I looked at some other Lovecraft scholars and found one that I think best suited how I felt about the story. John William Gonce III wrote, in his book The Necronomicon Files, that Lovecraft “never divorced magick from his fiction; he simply married it to science.”  In response to this I look at the world that Lovecraft found himself in at the time that he wrote this story. Magic was fading from a world that was rapidly advancing in the sciences; however, one did not have to look far to see some scientific sorcerers  in Tesla, Edison, and Planck. The danger of the occult—the unknown, was still very real.

In regards to the story as a whole, I think that this story might have been a cautionary tale, for us to learn from. Lovecraft spun a mythos where the Earth, for some unknown reason, is not held sway to all the laws that rule in the rest of the of a dark and dangerous universe. Previously the only way to come to the “truth” of this cosmic horror was through magical means, but Lovecraft might have been telling us that science was starting to take us there too.

In the story two characters, Dyer and Danforth, following the trail of something that massacred one of their antarctic research scouting parties, venture deep into an heretofore unknown antarctic mountain range. In these mountains they find the ruins of a unnaturally ancient city. There they learn more and more about the prehistoric arrival of the Elder Things from outer space and the accidental creation of life on this planet as a result of their science experiments. It also seems that the Elder Things choose to let this accidental life continue to exist as a kind of a joke.

As the our heroes get to the bottom of the city they are confronted by the evil and sanity stripping Shoggoth:

the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us

The Shoggoth is a terror to be sure. However, once the heroes have learned that Elder Thing science created the Shoggoth as a slave race, and that the slave’s revolt ultimately led to the destruction of their species on Earth, Dyer starts to relate to the Elder Things. Our hero realizes that they had erroneously painted these creatures the villains and monsters, when in fact they are not so different from mankind. I think that Lovecraft meant Elder Things to be a symbol of mankind’s future. The Shoggoths are a warning, that at the bottom of all our sciences we may ultimately find something ugly, formless, and dangerous.Like the Shoggoth, this may serve us for a time, but in the end will be destructive and strip away all that man holds dear. Leaving us nihilistically horror struck and empty like the colossal city that lies beyond the Mountains of Madness.

Lovecraft Mythos | The Call of Cthulhu

“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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” — The Call of Cthulhu

Lovecraft's own drawing of Cthulhu

February 1928 was when horror went cosmic. Call of Cthulhu was not Lovecraft’s first story, nor did he think it was an example of his best writing, but it is arguably his most famous.

Call of Cthulhu is a short story about a young professor that, by piecing together seemingly random events, comes to a dreadful knowledge about the reality of the universe, and what happens when the “stars are right.” The story culminates in the account of a truely unfortunate sailor who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sees the Great Cthulhu and his nightmarish city of R’lyeh rise from the bottom of the sea.

Cthulhu is no mere sea-monster, he is beyond understanding. Simply viewing him or his city is enough to cause one to go stark-raving mad. He is not of this world, he is from beyond the stars, the onetime ruler of this planet from eons past. But something went amiss and the planet fell out of sync with the stars that kept Cthulhu, and his kind, tied to this plane, He now lies sleeping awaiting the stars to align again.

The Call of Cthulhu really started the Lovecraft Mythos as we know it. Up until this point horror consisted of Victorian Ghost stories, formulaic morality tales meant to scare you, but teach you a lesson at the same time. When Lovecraft wrote The Call everything changed. Horror became cosmic horror, and humanities place in the universe was lost in the vastness of the cosmos.

From this story modern horror as we know it would find a place to grow. In its time the Cthulhu Mythos would find its way into the works of Lovecraft’s friends and proteges. Robert E Howard (of Conan the Barbarian fame), August Dereleth, Robert Bloch (Psycho), and many others. Modern horror authors, such as  Stephen King,  has a heavy Lovecraft Mythos influence (It, anyone?), but it doesn’t stop here. Authors continue to write tales in the mythos, it is still alive and growing to this day. Or should I say, That is not dead which can eternal lie. Read the story if you haven’t already, what you find may frighten you, it may intrigue you, or it might bore you. But if you see the truth of it I guarantee it will leave you horror struck.

Types of Horror | Cosmicism

I read an interesting article today talking about the influence of Mass Effect on the sci-fi universe. I have yet to play any of the Mass Effect games ( I know, I know, I’m missing out. I’ll get to it, I swear), but I was intrigued. The most interesting part about the above article is when it describes the philosophy that the game embraces, that being one of Cosmicism. This philosophy of Cosmicism is what I consider to be an important type of horror.

The article does a great job in explaining what Cosmicism is, and one great line sums it all up, “Something is wrong with the universe, but we cannot place it.”  Cosmicism can arguably be said to originate with the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. Ultimatly Cosmicism argues that human beings, and all that we stand for, is totally meaningless. As a matter of fact, all intelligent life, as we know it anyway, is also as equally insignificant in comparison to the grand scope of the cosmos.

Lovecraft developed Cosmicism in his stories like the Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu is not just a scary sea monster, despite what the meme’s have done to him. He isn’t Godzilla, he actually doesn’t give a rip about humanity. He is not evil, because morality is not a cosmic constant, he is an amoral entity. Our destruction at his hands would not cause him, or the rest of the cosmos, to even blink. This is what makes cosmic horror so incredibly horrifying. It is the sudden realization that there are things in the universe could drive you mad and turn you to ash while your still alive (see The Colour out of Space); not because you deserved it, or because of the its evil nature, just because that is what it does and there is nothing that can be done to stop it, NOTHING.

Mankind has always struggled with the idea that we might be insignificant, and have done a lot to protect our minds from the possibility of that reality. Think about it, before Copernicus we placed ourselves that the center of the universe; we fancy ourselves as the most important things on the planet and squash anything in our way to prove it, even each other. Last but not least we have religion; it tells us that we are important and that the universe does make sense because morality must surely be constant. I certainly hope it is right. Still, it is hard to see this image:

Each point of light is a galaxy, with billions of stars each, and this is but a very small portion of the night sky

and not be struck by the vast cosmic scope of it all, and how insignificant our life can be. It is easy to see how this is enough to leave one horror struck.