H.P. Lovecraft was American author of fantastic and macabre short novels and stories, and he was one of the 20th century masters of the Gothic tale of terror. His short stories deal with frightening events, and terror and morbid dreams are surprisingly realistic. Sometimes he is compared with another American master of Gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe.

Biography – Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890. His father died in 1898 after being committed to a mental institution. Because of this traumatic event, Lovecraft’s mother also suffered from mental instability up until her death in 1921.

While she was still alive, Lovecraft’s mother was neurotic and overprotective, and so she pampered her only son to excess. He fed on nothing else but sweets and ice-cream, slept till late afternoon, and was actively awake after dark. Actually, his mother stayed by his side even while the little boy slept. Because Susie Phillips Lovecraft had always wanted to have a daughter, she tried to turn her son into the “little girl” that she knew she would never have. This extreme over-protectiveness eventually made a recluse of Lovecraft. Even while growing up he had little contact with other children. However, signs of his growing genius became clear while he was still very young. He learned the alphabet at the age of two, was reading at three, and could write by the time he was four years old.

Lovecraft had many hobbies and interests ever since he was a young child. Most of all he was a very enthusiastic amateur astronomer. As a child, it was Lovecraft’s greatest dream to one day become an astronomer. He also showed an early interest in chemistry and history. While he was young, Lovecraft adopted the eighteenth century as his personal historical ideal, even going so far as to adopt archaic modes of writing (for example “Aftronomy,” or “Inveftigat’d,”).

Lovecraft was intelligent and would have done well in school, but he kept having problems with his nerves. Because of his many various health and mental problems, many biographers have diagnosed him as being somewhat schizoid. He also had a strange disease called pokilothermism, which means that he couldn’t control his body heat and instead had to assume the temperature of his surroundings, like a reptile. For this reason, if the temperature was anywhere above 80 degrees, he was very comfortable, but if it dropped, he felt worse and worse. If the temperature was below freezing, he would collapse in a faint.

Because of Lovecraft’s peculiarities and lonesomeness, ever since early childhood, he was seemingly haunted with frightening nightmares of demons and death. He thought himself caught in a fantasy realm of ghastly creatures, and thus the writer found escape only by weaving his living nightmares into surreal blood-curdling tales of horror and madness. At the age of sixteen the young Lovecraft finally began to let his genius flow onto paper, ultimately becoming the grand-master of Gothic and macabre literature.

He was never famous during his life, even though from 1923 on, many of Lovecraft’s short stories appeared in the popular magazine Weird Tales. His writings appeared mostly in such “pulp” magazines of his time and received little critical attention outside of the horror genre. He was obsessed with dreams, and wrote most of his stories and poems around a central theme of ancient gods who once ruled the earth and are now merely awaiting a return to power.

Lovecraft was a master of poetic language, and even his most horrifying tales have a frightening poetic brilliance to them. Some of his most famous stories are Rats in the Walls, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and At the Mountains of Madness. In these short stories, Lovecraft’s intimate knowledge of New England’s geography and culture is blended with an elaborate original mythology. These truly frightening accounts tell of horrifying spirits, ghoul changelings, of supernatural possession, of foul evil, and of legendary planets in which both time and space are dislocated.

The Cthulhu Mythos – H. P. Lovecraft is best remembered for his creation of the so-called Chtulhu Mythos. This label was actually invented by a later writer, August Derleth. This name sums up the imaginary world based upon the subjects, characters, and story elements found in the works of Lovecraft, his contemporaries, and also later writers who were profoundly influenced by him. When joined, these stories form something of a “mythos.” This is the system of symbols upon which Lovecraft crafted his dream-like tales. However, much of the mythos published after Lovecraft’s death by other writers greatly differs from the original notion of a worthless and all-in-all pointless universe of chaos.

The Chtulhu Mythos is mostly made up of various tales describing common New Englanders’ encounters with horrendous creatures of pre-historic and extraterrestrial origin. According to Lovecraft, several primeval races of giant celestial beings held dominion over Earth many eons ago. They had crossed the dimensional void of time and space to dwell in our world long before even early mankind existed. The two major factions among these alien races were the so-called Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones, who are believed to be ancient sorcerers highly skilled in the black arts.

Perhaps the most diabolical of the so-called Elder Gods was the mad god Azathoth, who was too horrible to even describe aloud in the human language. Azathoth rules supreme over time and space while sitting on a throne at the very center of ultimate chaos. He was originally the god of primeval darkness, even though there is some debate over whether Azathoth was merely an Elder God, or their one true master. His name is probably a combination of two different parts, aza and Thoth. The name Thoth comes from the Greek pronunciation of the name of an ancient Egyptian deity Tahuti. On the other hand, Aza is a mispronunciation of the Arabic word izzu, meaning “power, might or strength.” The name written in Arabic would thus be Izzu Tahuti, or “Power of Thoth,” and in Greek it would become Azathoth.

One of the most often mentioned Old Ones in Lovecraft’s stories is an entity called Yog-Sothoth, “The Lurker at the Threshhold.” He exists in a distant dimension and stands guard at the gateway between worlds. He is sometimes described as being the “key and guardian of the gate.” Yog-Sothoth knows when the stars will be right and it is he who will open the gateway to allow the Great Old Ones to enter into our dimension. To summon Yog-Sothoth, a follower must construct a great stone pillar surrounded by a circle of standing stones. (This circle of standing stones should look somewhat like Stonehenge.)

Another of the Great Old Ones whom Lovecraft mentions in his tales is Nyarlahotep, “The Crawling Chaos,” the messenger of the Great Old Ones. The name Nyarlahotep is made up of two separate words – hotep in ancient Egyptian means “satisfied,” and nyarlat is probably derived from some African place name, such as Nyasaland. Another version of the meaning comes from an ancient Egyptian phrase Ny Har Lut Hotep, which translates into “there is no peace through the gate,” or “there is no sanity at the place of judgement.” One description of this demon says that he is a tall featureless man with a three-lobed eye that shuns the light. In The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath Nyarlahotep is described as a “tall, slim figure with the face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent.” Nyarlahotep is believed to now be banished to a dark dimension or he is imprisoned beneath the great pyramid of Egypt.

Yet another of the Great Old Ones was Shub-Niggurath, a sort of female fertility deity. Although Shub-Niggurath can manifest in a number of forms, the shape described by Lovecraft is that of a large cloudy mass, which boils and changes, protruding limbs and other things at will. Small creatures are spat forth, which are either re-consumed into the miasmatic form or escape to some monstrous life elsewhere. Her milk is reputed to have mystical properties. The name Shub-Niggurath probably combines the Arabic word shabb (“young”) and the Latin word nigritiae (“blackness”). Although the literal meaning of the name is “A Young One of Blackness,” Shub-Niggurath is most often referred to as “The Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young.”

However, the chief creature of the Tales was Cthulhu. He is the high priest of the Great Old Ones, and he awaits their return, a time that will cause worldwide insanity and mindless violence before finally displacing humanity forever. Chtulhu is a monstrous entity who lies “dead but dreaming” in the city of R’lyeh, a place of non-Euclidean architecture presently sunken below the depths of the Pacific Ocean. One powerful invocation mentioned in some stories was ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, which translates into “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

Cthulhu appears in various monstrous and demonic forms in most early myths of the human race. He is humanity’s most basic nightmare. Lovecraft described Chtulhu in this manner:

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopuslike head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence... (“The Call of Cthulhu”)

One problem that confronts many readers of the “Chtulhu Mythos” stories is the correct pronunciation of “Chtulhu.” The most popular pronunciation is that used by most Lovecraftian scholars. This form is based on Lovecraft’s revision tales where Cthulhu is often referred to as Clooloo or Clulu. However, this form does not have a sound representing the “th” combination. According to Lovecraft himself: “The actual sound – as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it – may be taken as something like Khlul’-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly.”

Several other Great Old Ones were mentioned in Lovecraft’s tales. One of them is the rival and half-brother of Cthulhu. This is Hastur, “Lord of the Interstellar Spaces,” believed to now reside in the Hyades. Various stories mention that Hastur’s cult often offers assistance to anyone trying to prevent Cthulhu’s awakening.

Lovecraft once wrote this about the Great Old Ones in general:

The Great Old Ones were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape... but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. (“The Call of Cthulhu”)

The Elder Gods, for their own purposes, created a race of primitive creatures called Shoggoths, who were said to be protoplasmic entities of alterable size. The gods hypnotically controlled these slaves, compelling them to do their evil bidding and to build great underwater cities beneath Antarctica. According to the Cthulhu Mythos, the Shoggoths were accidentally created by Ubbo-Sathla, a god-like Shoggoth entity responsible for the creation of all life on Earth. The Shoggoths were said to look like gigantic amoebas made of tar, with glowing eyes floating on the surface. They were amorphous, so they could take on any shape they desired, making them very versatile. However, the mindless Shoggoths eventually gained intelligence, and rebelled against their creators. Considered among the most frightful entities of the Cthulhu Mythos, Shoggoths were known to mindlessly repeat their masters’ cries: “Tekeli-li.”

Another race were the Deep Ones, who live in the blackest depths of our oceans and are a monstrous hybrid of humans and sea-creatures. However, in spite of being mainly marine creatures, they will sometimes come up to the surface to make deals with humans and can survive for some time on land. In exchange for human sacrifices and various gifts, the humans get gold jewelry and lots of fish in their waters, herded nearby by the Deep Ones. In his tale The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Lovecraft described them like this:

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

They worshipped a leviathan monster called Dagon. Originally he was an ancient Semitic fertility god, who was often represented as looking like a merman – half fish, half human. Lovecraft, however, described him in a different manner:

Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds... (“Dagon”)

Lovecraft also mentions a human cult that worships this god. This cult was called The Esoteric Order of Dagon and was mainly located in the town of Innsmouth, which Lovecraft himself had invented.

H. P. Lovecraft’s stories are often enlivened by references to many books of Occult lore. Some of these books actually exist, but others were simply made up by Lovecraft himself. Some of the nonexistent books that he mentions are the so-called Pnakotic manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Earth (also called The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan). The books that he mentions that are real were Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1896), and Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681). One of the books sometimes cited is the Book of Dzyan, which was initially invented by Helena P. Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, in her book The Secret Doctrine. According to her, this legendary book was originally written in Atlantis in the lost Senzar language. However, it is believed that she actually paraphrased this book from a translation of the Sanskrit Rig Veda.

The Necronomicon – However, the most major element in many of Lovecraft’s stories about the Great Old Ones is the fictional book Necronomicon. This book supposedly contained the secret lore and dark secrets of the Old Ones. It had many spells that were able to raise the dead and steal souls. It also had occult rituals that could awaken the Great Old Ones and allow them back into our world, or to banish them. One quote from this book is “Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now.” This clearly points to the belief that someone (in one story, The Dunwich Horror, it was the Whateley twins) will eventually restore the sway of the Old Ones.

Lovecraft refers to the Necronomicon in no less than 18 of his stories. The original Arabic title of this manuscript was Kitab Al Azif, being a reference to the nocturnal sound of insects, which was believed to be the howling of demons. Necronomicon is usually translated as “Book of Dead Names,” but this is inaccurate, because necro- and the ending -icon are both Greek words, as is nom. Thus, nom- comes from the Greek nomos (“law”), and not from the Latin nomen (“name”). So, a more correct translation of Necronomicon would be “Book of the Laws of the Dead” or “Book of Dead Laws.”

The purported author was an Arab, Abdul Alhazred, who lived in Damascus, Syria. In 738 C.E. he was devoured by an invisible monster as punishment for discovering the Nameless City of the Great Old Ones and attempting a ritual of summoning. The Kitab Al Azif was translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople, who gave it the name Necronomicon. Olaus Wormius then made a Latin translation in 1228.

In 1232, shortly after Wormius’ translation, Pope Gregory IX banned both the Greek and Latin versions of the volume. Wormius indicates that the original Arabic text was lost by this time. Dr. John Dee made a translation into English, but only fragments of that version remain. At present, a 15th century Latin translation is said to exist in the British Museum, and 17th century editions exist at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Widener Library at Harvard, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Miskatonic University at Arkham, which is a city that Lovecraft himself invented. Presumably, all these copies remain under lock and key.

The first appearance of the Necronomicon was in Lovecraft’s story The Hound (1922), although Abdul Alhazred, the book’s author, was mentioned earlier in The Nameless City (1921). It was in this latter tale that the best-known quote from the Necronomicon first appeared: