An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

In 1932 the composer Harold S.Farnese engaged HPL in an epistolary discussion of HPL’s theory and practice of weird fiction. Farnese seems to have misunderstood much of what HPL said to him, and after HPL’s final move to 66 College Street, the two lost touch with each other. Then, after HPL’s death, when August Derleth asked Farnese to lend him HPL’s correspondence for use in SL,Farnese replied (April 11, 1937; ms., SHSW) that he could not at the moment find all his letters from HPL, but he supplied what he had, as well as what he claimed was a direct quotation from one missing letter: “Upon congratulating HPL upon his work, he answered, ‘You will, of course, realize that all my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on one fundamental lore or legend: that this world was inhabited at one time by another race, who in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet love on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.’‘The Elders,’ as he called them” (emphasis by Farnese). This quotation does not appear in any surviving letter by HPL to Farnese or anyone else. Derleth, however, found the quotation useful in his own interpretation of the Mythos, which differed radically from what HPL himself conceived. (Derleth was unable to recall where he had obtained the quotation and, very late in life, became angry when Richard L.Tierney asked him to verify its source.) This interpretation featured several key notions:

1. The Old Ones(a term HPL used in several stories to denote several different entities, most

notably the barrel-shaped extraterrestrials in At the Mountains of Madness) are “evil” or “malignant” and are opposed by the “Elder Gods” as forces of good. But HPL never mentions any such entities as “Elder Gods”; “Elder Ones” are cited in “The Strange High House in the Mist” and some other tales, but their exact denotation is unclear. HPL did not regard his Old Ones as evil or malignant, although in some cases they presented a physical danger to humanity.

2. The major gods of HPL’s mythology were “elementals”: Cthulhu a water elemental, Nyarlathotep an earth elemental, and Hastur an air elemental.Since HPL purportedly failed to provide a fire elemental, Derleth obligingly supplied Cthugha. HPL, however, did not conceive of his “gods” as elementals; the fact that Cthulhu is an extraterrestrial imprisoned(not enthroned) in the underwater city of R’lyeh makes it highly illogical that it should be considered a water elemental. The glancing citation of Hastur in “The Whisperer in Darkness” does not make it clear that it is even an entity (in Bierce, Hastur is the god of shepherds; in Chambers, a star or constellation).

3. HPL’s mythology parallels the “expulsion of Satan from Eden and Satan’s lasting power of evil” in Christian mythology(Derleth, “Introduction” to HPL’s The Dunwich Horror and Others[Arkham House, 1963], p. xiii). This interpretation appealed to the Roman Catholic Derleth but is absurd when attributed to the atheist HPL.

4. There is a rigid distinction to be made between those of HPL’s tales that “belonged” to the “Cthulhu Mythos” and those that did not.Much subsequent criticism (by Francis T.Laney, Lin Carter, and others) was involved in debating which stories did or did not “belong” to the Mythos, but most critics failed to note that HPL scat

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tered references to his pseudomythology, his imaginary topography, and his mythical books across many stories, making the exercise of segregating them into mutually exclusive categories a futile endeavor.