At last!
The spheres arise to the din of dark concert, as here beneath the gibbous eye of the watching
moon waits lonely Earth.
Probably.
That certainly seems like the kind of thing that should be going on.
I mean, we've been promising this series for almost two years now!
You'd think the horrors that lurk in the darkness beyond the cosmos would have something to
say about the fact that we're finally making videos about them.
Then again, I suppose hopeless insignificance is half the fun of cosmic horror, isn't it?
So, astral omens or no, I think it's time we faced the void together.
Let's talk about H.P.
Lovecraft.
The man has an interesting legacy.
Although he was born and died in relative obscurity-hardly a penny to his name, the
majority of his creations relegated to the pages of lurid pulp mags-the work of Howard
Phillips Lovecraft has since...
evolved.
Over the last few decades, his fiction has slowly turned into something malignant, invading
pop culture through every available artery from the direct canal of homage to the branching
venules of aesthetic mimicry.
If you look, you can find traces of it in film, television, games of both the video
and paper variety, even heavy metal music.
A lot of well-loved authors like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Stephen King have paid
credit to Lovecraft's role in their work.
In fewer words, he's become one of the great icons of Western horror.
Nevertheless, Lovecraft's fame springs not from the man himself, but from the "mythos"
he built: deities like tentacle-mawed Cthulhu and ineffable Yog-Sothoth, locales like Arkham
and Miskatonic University, fictional sources of profane wisdom like the Necronomicon.
All belong to the same cabinet of familiar, interweaving props that combined his otherwise
disparate works into a single mythological performance on a single cosmic stage.
That's a very literary, verbose way to put things, but it's important.
There's strange arcana to uncover in the classification of Lovecraft's mythos-stranger than any number
of tentacle monsters or non-Euclidean angles.
The key to understanding Lovecraft's mythos is to understand that they're actual myth,
not just the product of clever worldbuilding.
For a single author, that's very unique.
In the context of fiction, "mythos" is usually just an affectation for titles from a set
of tales that share connecting lore.
Think of Tolkien's Silmarillion, or Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Both are full of unrelated stories that contribute to a larger fiction, but that doesn't quite
qualify them as actual myth.
They're novel.
The brain-children of clever authors.
They may contain gods and supernatural feats, but these are only the common elements of
myth.
Ultimately, they're missing one key component-something present in all major world mythologies: Mimetic
Circulation.
Big, scholarly words.
What we're really talking about is the game of telephone that cultures play with their
folk tales.
A story is told and altered and told and altered until its iconography is so tempered by the
exchange that it reflects something about its tellers.
The gods and the heroes and the strange origin stories are only props that they use in the
habitual projection of their ideals, feelings, fears-their cumulative psyche-onto a larger,
less ephemeral platform.
That "cosmic stage" I mentioned earlier.
And somehow, shut away in the dim solitude of his study, Lovecraft managed to do the
same.
A large part of it comes from his specific artifice-or rather, the lack of it.
Unlike the authors of most fictional "mythos", Lovecraft didn't really bother to contrive
what he was creating.
It just... happened.
He had a habit of making passing references to items, figures, and locales of limited
intrigue, only to appropriate them for bigger roles in later stories, incidentally tying
them together.
Arkham was just a place-name when it first appeared in his story Hebert West-Reanimator,
but a year later it featured again in The Festival, earning its role as a hub for the
supernatural in his works.
Dagon is a key deity in one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth,
but it began as a vague, disconnected reference in the story Dagon fourteen years earlier.
The other part of this comes from his peers.
Lovecraft was a decidedly strange individual with an incredibly traumatic early life, and
as a result did most of his socializing through letters.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of his correspondents were other amateur writers who worked in similar
spheres.
It was through his dialogue with them that he was able to broaden the scope of his mythos
beyond the usual self-appropriation.
He encouraged them to borrow freely from him, watching and enjoying the ways in which they
built upon his mythos.
Clark Ashton Smith introduced the "toad-like god-creature" Tsathoggua, who received multiple
cameos in Lovecraft's works, including The Whisperer in Darkness, The Horror in The Museum,
and At The Mountains of Madness.
In the unpublished introduction to his story The Space-Eaters, Frank Belknap Long famously
quoted an apocryphal version of Lovecraft's Necronomicon supposedly translated by the
real-world scholar John Dee.
Lovecraft snatched this up and adapted it for his lore, referring to the John dee translation
in letters about the Necronomicon's history.
In this way, Lovecraft was able to develop a cabinet of props to use in the performance
of his own psyche.
He did with his mythos what cultures do with their mythological iconography-a kind of internal
mimetic circulation, projecting his thoughts and fears and feelings onto that cosmic stage.
Actual myth created by one person.
See his philosophy of cosmic insignificance in the minor role of mankind against a backdrop
of indifferent alien creatures and oblivious deities.
See his racism and fear of "the outside"-anything beyond the scope of his limited world in New
England-manifest as invasive and malevolent entities like the shapeshifting Nyarlothotep
and the cross-breeding Deep Ones of Innsmouth.
If you look, you'll find these projections everywhere in his work, sometimes even at
the expense of consistency.
He didn't spare time for the articulation of a specific canon.
It was what the elements of his mythos represented that drove him to keep using them.
What we officially call the "Cthulhu Mythos", he flippantly referred to in his letters as
"Yog-Sothothery" and "Cthulhuism".
This is what we love most about Lovecraft's mythos.
Just as romantics invoke Apollo and Aphrodite, Artemis and Athena, so too do we invoke Azathoth
and Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlothotep and Cthulhu.
Not just because we like tentacle monsters or people going mad or because we enjoy Lovecraft's
writing so much that we really just want to copy him-because their meaning resonates with
us.
We want to use them as the props in our own psychological performance.
And that's exactly what we plan to do for this month's short story.
It should be an interesting experiment to apply Lovecraft's method to my own psyche.
I'm still not sure what part of me that will reflect, and I'm still not sure whether I
find that troubling.
Especially...
in light of recent circumstances.
If you frequent our discord server, you may already have an inkling as to what I'm talking
about.
I've been rather absent lately.
Part of this is due to my role in the foundry-the extensive research I do for each of these
series.
The other part...
well, this will make more sense if you've listened to "Human, Almost," the biographical
story I created with the help of our writer.
But the short of it is that my taleoids have stopped bringing me book pages from inside
the Foundry's great press.
Instead, I've been receiving...
letters.
I don't know who they're from, but the correspondence has been... fascinating, to say the least,
if very time-consuming.
Between this and those...
things that interrupted our shooting of the Junji Ito episode, it's very clear that something's
going on here.
Now the trick is finding out what that something is...
If you'd like to help us, you can support the Tale Foundry team on Patreon.
With only two trustworthy humans at our disposal, we don't exactly have the means of clearing
the rubble and delving deeper into this... facility, whatever it is.
But the support of each of our patrons brings us that much closer.
You can also support the show for zero dollars by starting a free one-month trial with audible.com.
Sign up using the link in the description and you'll get access to two free audiobooks
of your choice from Audible's catalogue of over 100,000 titles.
Lately, the Tale Foundry team has been listening to the "Complete H.P.
Lovecraft Omnibus, Volume 2", compiled and read by Finn J.D John.
If you haven't yet had a chance to catch up on your Lovecraft, this is a great opportunity
to do it while you drive or work or create whatever art it is that you create.
At any rate, that's all for this video.
Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
We'll see you next time!
Bye!