• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

The Necronomicon

I fail to see how the second sentance contradicts myself & supports you. Contradiction is taking an opposite stance.
I said he never associated the great old ones with element and that others were based on actual god, myths etc while others were based on ideas or created based on a myth, god etc. If the great old ones were based on the Titans he still did not himself associate them with elements in an elemental way.

That does not contradict myself in any way.

PS- I thought Shub-Niggurath was based on Pan.
 
Elementals, My Dear Lovecraft

Many-Angled One - I think I take your point. You mean that, in the stories, HPL didn't use the gods and creatures he created as directlly linked to the four elements. Overtly, in a literal sense, this is true, but if you abstract a bit you'll see he was obviously operating off this very pattern. Innsmouth was watery, the Witch-House and Erich Zann's apartment were of the air, the Dunwich Horror was cthonic and earthly even though it fell from the sky, etc.

I suspect you're right, you didn't contradict yourself. Instead, I misunderstood your references. My fault, and sorry about that, I can but plead incipient stupidity and the start of what may prove to be a head-cold.
 
I suspect that if you abstract anything you can make it into something it never was originally :)

I suspect too much delving into forbidden tomes has unhinged you slightly my friend :)
 
Now Why

Now why isn't this considered flaming?

It's a personal affront and attack intended to ricidule. It's a patronizing and condescending brushing aside of something simply because it revealed things the poster didn't like for some reason.

Ad hominem and uncalled-for.

Oh, and sneering at what I've learned in much reading, and in speaking with people who knew HPL, and so on, does not affect its factuality in the slightest.

However, it obviously doesn't matter, does it?
 
The idea of linking the Mythos with the four elements was Derlath's (sp?), who created fire vampires simply to fill in his theory that this was "what HPL originally intended". The elemental connection is one HPL directly contradicts in his collected letters.

Derlath wound up as de facto executor of HPL's work and published a large number of essays in which he "interpreted" HPL's work and refused to allow any other interpretation.

One of those literary dilemmas - if he hadn't continued to publish HPL's work from the Arkham House publishing stable, the original stories might have died out. If he hadn't policed writing within the Mythos so draconically according to his own interpretations of HPL's work, we might have a much bigger, richer and wider Mythos to have nightmares about :eek:

Guess what I did for my degree...go on, guess...
 
Derleth's Depredations

August Derleth's rewriting wasn't nearly as extensive as we've been led to believe. In most cases the original manuscripts exist, so we can compare and contrast Lovecraft's originals against Derleth's pulpish bowdlerizing. In fact, at least one book doing exactly this has been published.

Derleth had a derivative, conventional imagination, and you're right, had he not published HPL's work via Arkham House, we'd probably have forgotten most of it. However, I'm not at all convinced he rendered HPL's "mythos" simplistic so much as making it comprehensible to the largely teenaged readership of the pulps. Lovecraft was scholarly, precious, and disdainful of audience, whereas Derleth was a pulp whore. The compromise they hit on gave us very good, original commercial fiction, nothing more.

Again, I'd refer anyone interested to L. Sprague de Camp's excellent biography of H. P. Lovecraft. He goes into much of the business dealings, as well as Lovecraft's approach to writing, and his near indifference toward the audience or toward selling his work. It's just that he needed the money - and he even collaborated with women want-to-bes on occasion!

Unlike othes, though, HPL didn't seize advantage from this situation, and in fact he was so indifferent to sexuality that his single stab at marriage ended in boredom and disinterest. lol

In any case, most of the original versions are available, so you can read Lovecraft's own stuff without Derleth's depredations taking away from them if you choose to track it all down.
 
I never was too much of an expert on or fan of "netiquette" but I suspect it isn't considered flaming because of the presence of smilies ... the international symbol for "I just called you a **** but there's nothing you can do about it", or more charitably "I am just joking my friend"

FraterL, I for one would never sneer at your learned reading, your esoteric knowledge is peerless on these boards from what I have seen ...... I suspect that Many_Angled_One is something of a Lovecraft fan judging by the name and that the two of you are perhaps arguing from two fairly different viewpoints thus allowing a little misunderstanding or difference of opinion to occur ...... I hope no ill-feeling will result ..........

For what it is worth, I have never considered the possible elemental attribution of the Lovecraftian bestiary, prefering to keep my magick and my fantasy/horror quite seperate (whilst thoroughly enjoying both) and perhaps Lovecraft didn't consider it either, as Many_Angled_One suggests, though as FraterL mentions, when using entities from established pantheons such correspondances and other baggage come already built in .....

............. thus everyone is in the right ..... as is so often the case .....
 
None At All

Lizard 23 - No hard feelings have resulted at all. It was an academic question, as I've been "cautioned" for far less, you see. Thus I remain convinced that "flaming" is what the moderator means when he or she uses the term, and nothing more. In short, it's arbitrary.

You're right, Many-Angled One and I largely agree, but come at it from different angles. Opposite sides, in fact, of the fiction equation. It's of no consequence as I doubt HPL is paying much attention these days.
 
... shall we do a Charles Dexter Ward job on him and ask? Now where did I put ye saltes of HPL .....
 
Ooops

Oh no, is that what that was? I sprinkled it on my hard-boiled egg this morning. Odd taste, and it did induce non-Euclidean perspectives which got me quite pleasantly dizzy as I phased through a scale spectrum.

Ah, well...so much for Egyptian alchemy, eh? lol

Of course, Hallowe'en is coming up, so we could have Houdini bring him to the seances he appears at, eh?
 
Lol.

I myself am trying to give up eating ancient and unnamable eldritch horrors that no man may look upon lest he lose his reason for breakfast ... they take just too long to prepare heh heh
 
There's That

...and finding a pot big enough to hold a Dodo egg is a pain, too, not to mention peeling the darned thing. Had to scrounge for my Howard Carter honest-we-never-peeked-or-pilfered mallet & chisel.
 
Re: Frater

ghost dog said:
Hey, do you reckon they have cthulhu smilies?
Click to expand...

Er...yes they do!! >:E
:D

The earlier talk about Hastur reminded me of one of the gamer's famous last words... "What a useless piece of paper! All it says is 'Hastur Hastur Hastur' over and over again!"

Incidentally, wasn't the name of the book that Ash found in the movie "The Evil Dead" also the Necronomicon? (Lemme guess... Ash and his ill-fated friends were all cthulhoid investigators, right?) :rolleyes:
 
there's always alot..

of toy's -games-books etc..dolls (of that octopus thing monster from story) in catalog's I get in my comic store..lots:goof:
 
Re: there's always alot..

ruffready said:
of toy's -games-books etc..dolls (of that octopus thing monster from story) in catalog's I get in my comic store..lots:goof:
Click to expand...

That "octopus thing monster" you're talking abt is the great and terrible Cthlhu himself!

Cthulhu Fhtagn! (hmm...I wonder if I've found myself a new sig...)
 
Yes I know (just hard to spell)

they have some cool looking "glow in the dark "cthlhu's" in the "prieviews" catalog..check with your local comic store..I can get all that stuff I just might get me one of those for my desk here! I think after reading all these post I will be reading some HPL very soon!! it looks fun!! :)
 
Re: Re: Frater

Fayyaad said:
Incidentally, wasn't the name of the book that Ash found in the movie "The Evil Dead" also the Necronomicon? (Lemme guess... Ash and his ill-fated friends were all cthulhoid investigators, right?) :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

yes, it was...


so, all cthulu is is a great octopus?!? i feel cheated... :)
 
Re: Re: Re: Frater

Phill James said:
so, all cthulu is is a great octopus?!? i feel cheated... :)
Click to expand...

Well he was a big octpus with an attitude...
 
from whence did he come?


excuse me, i'm fairly new to lovecraft et al
 
FraterLibre - I am sorry if I offended you in any way as indeed no offense was in any way intended, especially to you as another Lovecraft/Mythos fan.

The way you look at and enjoy the mythos is how you interpret it, who am I to tell you what you should think about the mythos. Yes I disagree on certain points but thats my view. Of course I will still argue points though. Let me explain my comments a little more to show it is not intended to ridecule, perhaps I should have put it a little better.

>if you abstract a bit you'll see he was obviously operating off >this very pattern. Innsmouth was watery, the Witch-House and >Erich Zann's apartment were of the air, the Dunwich Horror was >cthonic and earthly even though it fell from the sky, etc

>>I suspect that if you abstract anything you can make it into >>something it never was originally :)

That does not deny that if you look at it that way it is somewhat true that they can be roughly classified in an elemental pattern only that it's true if you abstract things you can come to conclusions that the author never originally intended them to be. I wrote a poem once and other people critiqued and analysed it and came to the conclusion that I mean this, that and I was abviously intending to say...blah..blah. I was like "eh?" no I meant...
All I meant was that yes you are right and no you are wrong depending on how you look at it.

>I suspect you're right, you didn't contradict yourself. Instead, I >misunderstood your references. My fault, and sorry about that, I >can but plead incipient stupidity and the start of what may >prove to be a head-cold.

>>I suspect too much delving into forbidden tomes has unhinged >>you slightly my friend :)

That was just supposed to be a little friendly lovecraftian humour, preferrable I thought to letting you claim stupidity, which is certainly not true.



It seems to me however that since the creature (large Star Spawn or Cthulhu? *shrugs*) in call of Cthulhu had absolutely no problems moving about and living in the water and Cthulhu has water-based Dagon, Hydra and the Deep Ones as servants that he should really have no problem with being in the water which is incompatible with being an Earth element. HOWEVER it is also true that since he lived on the land and when it sunk he was imprisoned in the water (imprisoned by water or by the Elder Gods though...)

I still think its a shame that Lovecraft never really got the sense of accomplishment he would have gotten had he stuck around a little longer to see him more widely published :( I should think he would just be happy to be remembered for what he wrote and that people still get enjoyment from it.
 
Well .... in each of us as in all things (microscosm/macrocosm; as above, so below etc.) Lovecraftian horrors obviously included, all the elements are present, in varying ratios which in part make up the nature of the thing ...... and each element has attributes it shares with the others....... Franz Bardon especially tells us to seek this information in as many "things" as possible so as to come to a greater understanding of the principle ........ so having completely disregarded my previous notion of keeping my magick and my fantasy/horror seperate, I have been pondering this all bloody night (thanks guys), and assuming that Cthulu is not a pure elemental/elementary entity, I decided that he (heh heh "it" sorry .... really must try not to be overfriendly with these eldritch nightmares) is clearly strongly both watery and earthy by nature, largely in their (often destructive) negative aspects ..... I will not bore you with my reasoning at this time (as it is rather early in the morning for that kind of thing, and also, as is often the way when meditating on such matters, I have forgotten most of it heh heh)
 
i had a copy of the necronomicon spell book, but an ex-girlfriend yoinked it. it's brief, and just has a list of how the rituals should be performed etc

also have a copy of grimiore of armadel which in my opinion is way more gnarlier, and does things with angels
hehe
 
But, But...

Many-Angled - No offense taken, I was but asking a rhetorical question because I've been warned for much less, and often joke that way, too.

But HPL did intend just that, is my point. I mean, he was indeed sparking his creations off Classical myth and legend, as well as obscure winks and nods to other writers whose work he enjoyed. This is documented. He spent many an evening writing letters in which he expatiated upon these very matters, and many other evenings discussing it.

Ghost-dog - Other writers were invited to add to the Chtulhu Mythos as it was being created, yes, but the core of it, and what we've discussed so far, is all HPL. (Yes, as you pointed out, Hastur was R.W. Chambers, but if you check the Chambers tale in The King in Yellow, you'll see it was but a reference, whereas HPL fleshed it out.) The few who took him up on it and tried to add to it mostly did a rather poor job, other than Clark Ashton Smith, who was something of a fractured genius himself anyway.

Some even include Ambrose Bierce in the extended Cthulhu canon, in that he defines Hastur as a shepherd's god in "Haïta the Shepherd", written in the 1850s prior to Chambers writing his tales. It's about the impossibiitiy of finding happiness, and was written after his son Dan's suicidal duel over a woman, and his separation from his wife. Hastur may well be legitimate and not made up at all. In addition, Bierce wrote "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and of course Lovecraft mentions "...far Carcosa" among many such literary references he uses.

And we haven't even touched upon the puns HPL indulged in, such as for example the icthyous inhabitants of Innsmouth. He was referring to Plymouth, Mass, and making a joke on the fact that they described themselves as fisherfolk. He just took out the "er" and made it literal, with eerie results.

Lovecraft's misanthropy and misogyny are the basis for the alienation and ostracism he conveys in his best fiction. He felt stranded in the wrong time, abandoned among alien beings. It shows, even down to his avoidance of dialogue. Remarkably complex writer and man, and fascinating.
 
Mythos

No, Derleth was sort of a pulp entrepreneur, but Lovecraft himself cobbled up the mythos and invited others in on it. As I said, he would even teasingly convert correspondents' names into eldritch-sounding Great Old Ones names, such as Klar-Kash Ton for Clark Ashton Smith. He did this in letters and some of the names ended up in stories, too.

Derleth did indeed later merchandise the mythos, by cobbling up loose theme anthologies based on it but involving other writers. This was done mostly after HPL died, although some of it was during Lovecraft's lifetime.

August Derleth was both a genuine fan of Lovecraft's work, and an exploiter of it, but he saw no contradiction, having helped his friend to achieve some sort of commercial viability, and preserving the work in those beautiful Arkham House editions.

Derleth's own work was often embarrassingly derivative and pulpy, such as his "Solar Pons" stories. These are Sherlock Holmes pastiche lacking any spark of wit or humor.

Some of Lovecraft's most commercially accessible short stories, such as, say, "Cool Air," which was dramatized on a Rod Serling's NIGHT GALLERY episode, (on which Serling was relegated to host and occasional writer, rather than controlling influence, by the way), were "fixed" by Derleth, meaning given a more conventional shape, tone, and denouement. Could well be. Lovecraft's idea of plotting ran to the more roccoco and ornate, or the utterly simplistic, such as in "The Statement of Randolph Carter".

My favorite of his works, as I said, are his fantasies, found in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. He wrote in the manner of Lord Dunsany and yet with an illumination not found in most of his horror. It's incandescent, especially that titular novella. Marvellous stuff.
 
Actual Term

Ghost- dog - You're quite right, Lovecraft never coined that term Cthulhu Mythos. That was indeed Derleth, in exploiting it later on. Lovecraft, however, is the one who created what is described that way. Derleth merely gave it the umbrella term we now use. It was to Lovecraft the Arkham Cycle, exactly so, as most of the stories mentioned or were set there. I believe he was inventing an imaginary county or region akin to and the parallel of Thomas Hardy's Wessex, in fact, so for him it was a kind of grotesque regionalism.

It was Derleth who focused on the gods and saw it as a "myth cycle" or Mythos.
 
Hardy Individualism

I loved Hardy first time I found his pristine, controlled prose and his vivid people and land. I'm among the few who simply doesn't understand why Jude, the Obscure is considered such a downer. Oh, sure, Jude's misused, abused, and kicked when down throughout, but the book is really about the woman who does this to him, and the type of dolt he is for allowing it. In the end he even becomes something ennobled, almost a saint, by his beatific acceptance of such unrelenting abuse. Which was the point, I think, not to depress an audience of semi-literate egotists. lol

Which is why Hardy switched to poetry and never wrote another novel again, tant pis.

Someone, maybe me, should write a Lovecraftian tale involving Hardy and how he brought doom to himself by meddling in eldritch horrors meant to be kept from our mortal ken... Strangely, it'd fit. lol

Return of the Ichor? Far From the Madding Chaos?
 
I'd be interested to read it FraterLibre
Jude the eldritch
 
Why Not?

I may actually write one, we shall see. lol Why not? Using historical folks in pulpy fictions is all the rage now, in some cobwebbed corners of publishing. It all began when E. L. Doctorow dragged this pulp convention into the light of literary squints wiht Ragtime, I suspect.

Nevermore by Harold Schechter is one of the better ones, still pulpy but great fun, in which Edgar Allan Poe helps solve a murder. Then there is Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which uses both real and fictional characters -- Dickens, Magwich from Dickens's Great Expectations -- to create a spell-binding, note-perfect novel of intrigue and irreality.

Max Allan Collins, who has had a big success by having written the text for the graphic novel Road to Perdition, whch became a very good movie, writes Nate Heller novels, about a detective who interacts with real folks in a series of historical mysteries. Fascinating stuff, pure fun. His latest, Angel in Black, takes on the Black Dahlia murder and offers a solution no one's seen before, one he believes is the truth. He may even be right.

In any case, sure, why not? If the Necronomicon can become "real" then surely Thomas Hardy's life and times can be analyzed to reveal the tenebrous and eldritch machinations of evil that can only be the unspoken, nay, unnameable influence of the Great Old Ones. I think.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top