H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos

IN A 46-year lifetime H. P. Lovecraft wrote or collaborated on more than 65 stories, penned dozens of articles and essays, and hundreds of poems, and wrote perhaps as many as 100,000 letters. Occasionally referring to his Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles, to the best of anyone's knowledge Lovecraft never used the term Cthulhu Mythos.

Although nearly all his tales can be linked by common references to people, places, and things, for the most part they lack a true central structure or anything resembling a preconceived history and mythology. It was not until late in Lovecraft's career (and then probably only at the urging of some of his younger correspondents) that he began to integrate into his later stories some of the creations found in his earliest tales. In "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931) we find the deep one hybrids worshiping Dagon, a creature not mentioned since the story "Dagon" (1917), his second piece of adult fiction.

Similarly, the fictional city of Arkham and its Miskatonic University, first used as backdrops in "The Picture in the House" (1920) and "Herbert West - Reanimator" (1921-1922), are finally developed in his later stories beginning with "The Dunwich Horror" (1928) and continuing through "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930), "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933). "At the Mountains of Madness" (1931) and "The Shadow Out of Time" (1934-1935) contain detailed histories of prehuman Earth describing the different alien beings that had in the past visited and colonized the planets. Some of these races, such as the fungi from Yuggoth and the Cthulhu spawn, were from earlier stories and were carefully integrated into these late-devised histories.

The dreaded Necronomicon, one of the Lovecraft's most famous creations, undergoes a gradual evolution. First mentioned in "The Hound" (1922), it is here attributed to an Abdul Alhazred, an Arab poet mentioned in an earlier story, "The Nameless City" (1921). Alhazred was, in fact, the boyhood persona of a five-year-old HPL, his youthful imagination inflamed by his grandfather's copy of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

The term Cthulhu Mythos is generally attributed to August Derleth, a young writer and early fan of Lovecraft who later founded Arkham House publishers, dedicated to keeping in print the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft. Fans and scholars have since debated the definition of this term, argued the Cthulhu Mythos content of various of Lovecraft's tales, constructed experimental pantheons of gods and deities, postulated histories, and made vain attempts to explain all the facets of the literary Mythos.

In the meantime dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writers both professional and amateur have continued to write Mythos-inspired stories expanding upon Lovecraft's original concepts while simultaneously developing their own, sometimes inconsistent with HPL and rarely consistent with each other. For the purposes of Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium has incorporated most of Lovecraft's creations, as well as those of other authors, in a loosely cast Mythos that allows Keepers of Call of Cthulhu to add or delete particular creatures and conceptions as they will.