The Lovecraft Compendium

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.

“Cthulhu” is so pervasive an image in pop culture that my essential ignorance of it – from mythos to meme – was nearly unimaginable; like knowing nothing about Elvis or Hello Kitty. I've held the weighty collected works of H. P. Lovecraft in my hands many times, but at over 1300 pages, I simply couldn't make the commitment. Yet, when I saw The Lovecraft Compendium, slim and focussed with just five short stories – all related somehow to the mighty Cthulhu itself (himself?) – I knew it was time to take the plunge. Now that it's done, I only wish I had the rest of Lovecraft's work at hand to sample the other subjects of his worldsbuilding; this collection was a joy to read. To share what I've learned, here's Cthulhu (in word and image) from Lovecraft's own hand:

The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

So basically, Cthulhu (despite competing theories about how to say it, Lovecraft himself insists the word is unpronounceable to the human tongue) is an extraterrestrial being that was sent to Earth by Other Ones, long before the Age of Man. The monster is in suspended animation on an island at the bottom of the ocean, and when celestial conditions are right, human collaborators (occultists with their primitive rites and incantations, based everywhere from Iceland to Haiti; from Vermont to the lost Atlantis) will raise the island and unleash Cthulhu upon humanity; clearing the globe for those beings from beyond space and time that would wish to make use of it. 

In each of the five stories in this collection, there are those who have glimpsed the truth of our perilous place in the universe (whether from hapless misadventure or amateur investigation), and when experts are brought in (those Archaeologists and Anthropologists who have thus far dismissed the beliefs of the ancients as mere folklore), the deciphering of runes and hieroglyphs confirms the worst and threatens the sanity of they who would understand the implications. There are numerous references to places and objects with weird geometry, impossible creatures that trail fetor and ichor (two of my favourite words), compelling objects that give insight into all the knowledge of the universe, and quotes lifted from the Necromonicon of that mad Arab Abdul Alhazred (and I hadn't realised that the Necromonicon was also a Lovecraft invention).

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Lovecraft apparently suffered from sleep paralysis – was regularly visited by Night Gaunts while so incapacitated – and his frequent nightmares were the inspiration for much of his writing (it's perhaps also not merely incidental that both of his parents died in an insane asylum). This dream-source might explain why his writing feels universal, and despite the slightly formal writing style, does not feel dated: Cthulhu is a powerfully insidious archetype – all scales and claws and squirmy tentacles – and multiple characters' fear of scientists unwittingly unleashing the destruction of mankind must have been a common fear in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the first of the world wars; a fear no less urgent in our own times (those brains in jars put me in mind of nothing so much as the dreaded Singularity). The saddest thing I learned was that Lovecraft – the founder of a mythos, a genre, an industry – died penniless and little appreciated: the least I can do is keep reading him; this was a perfect entry point.

There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

I understand, 100%, how flakey it is that I like to watch Ancient Aliens. The episode this week (on alien beliefs/sightings in China) was dull and grasped at relevance: exactly what one would expect after a show like this has been on for too many years and all the best stories were used up early. But last week (I watched it on July 11th) was exactly why I like the show: it was a great story. I don't want to fact check (and risk ruining my suspension of disbelief that allows me to enjoy this show), so I'm just going to tell it as I remember it (which is probably half wrong anyway).

The basic premise was very interesting: in antiquity, many unrelated cultures worshipped a council of nine gods who were said to reside in the sky, but who had visited the earth and humanity at some even greater distance in the past. This was true of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Mayans, etc. This council was always watching us, and in olden days, the rulers of these ancient societies were able to enter trances and communicate with the council and intercede on the behalf of humanity. I always like this part of the show -- with pictures and videos of stelae and friezes that I haven't seen before -- and every good Ancient Aliens episode has some kind of Archaeological basis that could have come right out of Lovecraft. But wait; there's more.

In the 1950s, the American Armed Forces started experimenting with psychic phenomena (think The Men Who Stare at Goats), and in order to test telepathy, they built a copper Faraday cage and locked up various scientists to see what they could discover. One such scientist -- a man with a PhD from India: I don't want to Google him and discover he's been thoroughly debunked, so I don't have his name -- went into a deep trance and, apparently, made contact with a mysterious council of nine extraterrestrials who said that they were watching us, and they weren't happy. The people conducting this experiment couldn't prove a hoax, but not getting the results that they wanted (presumably the militarisation of psychic phenomena), the program was shut down and the Indian PhD dismissed.

Around this same time, a man named Valiant Thor appeared in a cornfield in Virginia, saying he was an emissary from space who needed to meet with the president. (The person telling this part was President Eisenhower's great-granddaughter and I found it jarring that she kept referring to her famous family member as simply "Eisenhower". I also liked the veneer of plausibility she lent to this part, as though she had the inside scoop.) Valiant Thor was brought to the Pentagon, where his story was believable enough to send him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who then, indeed, cleared him for a meeting with the president. Whatever was said in this meeting was urgent enough for Valiant Thor to be given VIP status for the next three years. He apparently spent this time telling the American government that he was a representative of an extraterrestrial council of nine who were not happy with humanity, and his ultimate mission was to broker a meeting between the USA and the USSR in order to end the Cold War. Eisenhower absolutely refused this meeting, and at the end of three years, Valiant Thor walked off into the same cornfield and disappeared.

Meanwhile, our Indian PhD believed that he had actually made contact with aliens, and decided that if the US government wouldn't sponsor more research, he would take it on himself. He assembled nine psychics, who were each able to make contact with one of the council of nine, and over many sessions, the PhD and his secretary recorded much astonishing and incredible information about space travel and the supraplanetary agency that regulates it. And the PhD's secretary's name? Gene Roddenberry.

Apparently, this is where Roddenberry first learned about transporters and warp drive, the Federation of Planets and the Prime Directive (which would, I suppose, explain why Valiant Thor attempted to do everything on the down-low). Isn't that a great story? Lovecraft himself could have written it. Here are a couple more ideas that have appeared in Ancient Aliens that could have been lifted straight from Lovecraft – That aliens come to earth to mine elements that are rare on other planets:

The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque, taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely maintained outposts and flew back with vast cargos of stone to their own stars in the north.

And that they have left behind crystals (think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) that can be used to communicate with the great reservoir of universal knowledge –

Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’s spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.

In one Ancient Aliens (actually, the sister show that I can't recall the name of, but again, I won't risk Google spoiling the story for me by looking for it) Giorgio Tsoukalos combined all of these ideas and "proves" that the Loch Ness Monster and other such crypto-creatures are guarding the underwater entrances to dilithium crystal mines (where have I heard of that before?); a mineral so rare and powerful that aliens must make the long interstellar voyage to earth in order to acquire it.

Yes, yes, it's flakey to watch these shows, but sometimes they have great stories. I no more regret watching Ancient Aliens (when it's good) than I do having now read Lovecraft: the story is all; put something subliminally engaging under a veneer of science and you've got me every time. I'll also add that I totally see that the scripts of some episodes could have been lifted straight from the tales of Cthulhu -- in no way am I saying that me recognising themes from Ancient Aliens in the old writings of Lovecraft adds up to proof of anything -- and I leave satisfied that at least I'm now in on Cthulhu as a pop culture reference.