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.
Horror Struck 