Talk:Cthulhu Mythos/Archive 1

message: I tracked down a copy of the short story The Nameless City, and filled out the article about the eponymous city, The Nameless City. Does anyone know if there's a canonical name for the creatures that live in that city? In the short story, they're as nameless as their city. I thought maybe they were the Serpent People, but the creatures in that article don't sound like the same creatures. In any case, if the Nameless City creatures do have a recognized name, they should perhaps be added to the list of "Non-human species of the Mythos".
Actually, now that I google for it, I find there's a copy of this story in Wikisource: http://wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nameless_City .--67.188.65.218 19:26, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: * Actual location of Leng is never certain, especially as there is such a place in the Dreamlands too... personally, I think the myths about it are a mix of 3 places (possibly wearing the same name) : Leng of the Dreamlands, Leng of the Asia, and the place found in the antarctic, with the possibility of the ancient chroniclers being mixed up, or of the Elder City having been an influence on the Asian place. --Svartalf 03:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

text: * While Chambers' writings certainly weren't made with the Mythos in mind, it's an indiscutable fact that they have been co opted and elements from them have found their way into later mythos works, so now, it's better for students of the mythos to know where those things come from, first hand. As for Dagon, HPL included a lot of stuff from real life, myth, books... all the better to mix in his own inventions unnoticed, or "explain" old legends and religions as mythos inspired.  --Svartalf 03:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Miscellaneous

message: The first part of this article seems to be mostly a rant against Derleth's interpretation and augmentation of the works of Lovecraft rather than a discussion about Lovecraft's system itself.  The information about how Derleth developed the mythos on his own probably should go in a subcategory on this page, but we need some more paragraphs about the feeling of the Lovecraft stories as a whole. --The demiurge 22:21, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You are correct.  I would have done it myself if not for being buried under homework. Please feel free. --Yath 04:03, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Can anybody add info about significant contributions (IE: not just adding new elements, but redefining the whole system) made by other authors than Lovecraft & Derleth? --Tydaj 18:19, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: Phew! There's still some things lacking (influences by other authors) but I think it's a vast improvement. I have one question, was "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" actually a Lovecraft story, or was it one that was "channeled" by another author? --Tydaj 22:59, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Focus on Lovecraft

message: I think this article doesn't belong in this category. Did Lovecraft have any particular story continuity between any of his mythos books? They all stood on their own, if I recall correctly. Even if some of the other authors, such as Derleth, wrote some mythos books in series (I don't know), this article shouldn't go in the category. --Yath 21:50, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Series of Books category? 

message: Would it be apropriate to add this article to the Fictional religions category? I'm currently just running though articles linked from List of fictional religions and adding the category where missing, but I'm a tad unsure how apropriate the fictional religion label would be for this particular article? Any thoughts? --Sherool 08:34, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[:Category:Fictional religions|Fictional religions]] 

message: To cut down the size of the article, the following entries should be split into separate articles, along with their respective tables (these subjects probably deserve their own articles anyway):
* Elder Gods
* Great Ones
Otherwise, other entries should probably remain (?), since we don't want to trim down the article too much—that is, the article should be as informative as possible, yet within Wiki's recommended size constraints.
Gate2ValusiaOh?..(contribs) 12:49, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Things to do (recommended) 

message: Has anyone ever considered giving information regarding the pronunciation of the names of each of the creatures in the mythos? Does anyone know the correct pronunciations for them all? Does anyone have a copy of Encyclopedia Cthulhiana () they could pull the info out of?
Matthew king 01:51, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As I understand, the proper names of these beings cannot be correctly pronounced. Names like Cthulhu are approximations given the language it's found in. In other cases like Azathoth, it's just names that humans have given them. I'm not sure how Hastur fits into all this. --Tydaj 02:36, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

text: *That's interesting. The info at Amazon which says there is a pronunciation guide in the book is obviously incorrect. I guess the reviewer was mistaken. Thanks for clearing that up. Matthew king 10:47, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation. 

message: I just noticed that the space eaters aren't included in "Other species". Are they significant enough to put them in? Dali 03:09, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The Space-Eaters

message: I removed the following (unreferenced) information (contributed by 65.189.251.176)  from the article. If you can provide a citation for where this came from, I would like to see it:
Derleth also promoted the concept of elementals; a fan, Francis T. Laney, had written a glossary tying the deities of the mythos to the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water.
This seems to imply that the fan, Francis T. Laney, advocated the elemental theory and that later Derleth picked up on this and endorsed it. However, based on my sources, the elemental theory was in fact originally conceived and developed by August Derleth himself.
First, Francis T. Laney's essay ("The Cthulhu Mythos") was first published in The Acolyte (Winter 1942). Secondly, in the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, Daniel Harms indicates on pg. 101 ("Elemental Theory") that the first mention of elementals appears in Derleth's "The Thing That Walked on the Wind", which was published 9 years before Laney's essay appeared.
With regard to the aforementioned essay, Laney wrote in Ah, Sweet Idiocy (1948) (emphasis added):
During this time, I corresponded extensively with Derleth, and somehow or other got him innoculated with the mythos bug, too, for one day he sent me a bulky envelope with the carbons of new Lovecraftian stories he had just sold to [Weird Tales], mentioning that my compilation had showed that no fire entity had yet appeared so he created Cthuga (sic).
According to David E. Schultz: "In other words, Laney's essay... inspired Derleth to write The Trail of Cthulhu and "The Dweller in Darkness." It is worth noting that the first "chapter" of The Trail of Cthulhu ("The House on Curwen Street") and "The Dweller in Darkness" mention the fire elemental Cthugha.
We may infer from this that Laney recognized Derleth's elemental theory in his stories, and simply pointed out that Derleth had neglected to include a fire elemental. Thus, Laney's contribution was Derleth's fire elemental (Cthugha) but not the theory itself.
In fact, this is reiterated by Robert M. Price in The Ithaqua Cycle. Price says that the elemental theory was crafted to suit the air elemental Ithaqua (first appearing in "The Thing That Walked on the Wind"): "Ithaqua is the mythic-narrative embodiment of the 'elementals' schema. The whole business seems to have existed for the sake of Ithaqua and wouldn't have been invoked apart from him." Later Price states: "...Cthugha the fire-devil was made to order, after the fact, to plug a gap in the Derlethian Table of the Elements once Francis T. Laney had pointed it out to Derleth."
===Notes===
*David E. Schultz, "Notes toward a History of the Cthulhu Mythos, Crypt of Cthulhu #92 (Vol 15 No 2, Eastertide 1996, West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press), Note #41, pp. 27–8.
*Ibid, pp. 28.
*The Ithaqua Cycle, Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1998. .
*Ibid, Price, "Ghost Riders in the Sky", pp. ix.
*Ibid, pp. ix.
;Postscript
:It could be argued that Laney was one of the first to categorize the mythos, but we have to be careful here. A secondary source would have to definitively confirm this before it could appear in the article.
-,-~R'lyehRising~-,- 23:12, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Text removed from "Derleth's elemental theory" 

message: *David E. Schultz, "Notes toward a History of the Cthulhu Mythos, Crypt of Cthulhu #92 (Vol 15 No 2, Eastertide 1996, West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press), Note #41, pp. 27–8.
*Ibid, pp. 28.
*The Ithaqua Cycle, Oakland, CA: Chaosium, 1998. .
*Ibid, Price, "Ghost Riders in the Sky", pp. ix.
*Ibid, pp. ix.
;Postscript
:It could be argued that Laney was one of the first to categorize the mythos, but we have to be careful here. A secondary source would have to definitively confirm this before it could appear in the article.
-,-~R'lyehRising~-,- 23:12, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Notes

message: *I added a footnote about this issue in the article's "Derleth's elemental theory" section (see part about Cthugha).-,-~R'lyehRising~-,- 05:12, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Update

message: *Robert M. Price seems to contradict himself in the "Introduction" to Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (New York, NY: Random House, 2002, ). On page xv, Price writes:Another modification for which Derleth's critics cannot forgive him is his apportioning of the Lovecraftian entities among the hackneyed categories of the four elements, so that Cthulhu becomes a water-elemental... Actually this was not Derleth's idea. He accepted it from Francis T. Laney, a fan whose glossary of the Lovecraft Mythology Derleth read, liked, and reprinted. In fact we owe Derleth's fire-elemental Cthugha to Laney: Derleth created him... to plug the gap left by Lovecraft who had not obliged Laney by creating any fire-elementals . . . or, come to think of it, any air-elementals, either!-,-~R'lyehRising~-,- 02:39, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The plot thickens

message: I think there's too much material on Lovecraft in this article, and way too little about other writers who contributed to the Mythos.  First of all, the most significant thing about the Cthulhu Mythos from a literary point of view is that it's perhaps the prime example of a shared world. If it was only about Lovecraft, there wouldn't be any such thing as a Cthulhu Muthos story--there would only be H.P. Lovecraft stories.
Secondly, H.P. Lovecraft has his own article.  At least some discussion of his theories and the content of his fiction should take place there. And other important writers of the Mythos have pages as well.  Here's the only place where we can really talk about how they worked together to build this group project.
Obviously, Lovecraft is the most important Cthulhu Mythos writer; he's going to be a major part of this article. But I think this overdoes it.  The only other writer who really gets talked about is Derleth, and he gets slagged in a pretty POV way.  It's really not the case that Derleth is objectively a failure because his ideas were not exactly the same as Lovecraft's.  Most people, really, would see it as a good thing for a writer not to slavishly adopt another writer's thinking. We certainly shouldn't suggest it's a bad thing.
The argument that Derleth was wrong because Cthulhu doesn't act the way a Great Old One who was really a water elemental would is pretty hilariously geeky, when you stop to think about it. Nareek 06:33, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too much focus on Lovecraft 

message: It's good that we're adding more of the literary history--fictional universe articles on WP often seem to come unmoored from the actual writers and publications that produced said universes.  I think, though, that it could be done in a less POV way.  The way that we break up the Mythos, and the implicit critique of Derleth's work, is not the only way to view the history. 
In fact, it's not the way Price himself viewed the history a few years after he wrote that essay--his introduction to Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos includes an extended defense of Derleth, arguing that his use of the concept of evil, his theme of battles between different races of space aliens, even his elemental theory were not far removed from Lovecraft's own motifs.  "Derleth was closer to Lovecraft, and Lovecraft veered closer to what they deem Derleth's abuses, than Mosigian critics can admit." He adds: "(F)or the Lovecraft Mythos to continue to evolve and developby the addition not only of new gods and new grimoires, but also by the stretching and adapting of Lovecraft's original concepts is by no means alien to Lovecraft's intentions."
There are clearly a number of different ways to view the Mythos and its development; I think we ought to cite several. But I think first we ought to be a little more descriptive--we ought to say when and in which stories Lovecraft started inventing his elements and combining them, and when other writers began participating in the game and how Lovecraft in turn used their work.  The fact that other writers took the Mythos in different directions--Smith setting his sardonic stories largely in the past, Bloch exploring Ancient Egypt, Derleth focusing on a supposed cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, whatever--can be noted nonjudgmentally (though the fact that these writers have their own articles should be kept in mind).
Whether or not a story is in the Mythos or not can be pretty subjective; my inclination is to say that if a story is considered part of the Mythos by a some significant critics, then it's within our scope.  We sort of suggest that "Ubbo-Sathla" is not really a Mythos story, which is a little odd because it's the second non-Lovecraft story in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which would seem to be the most canonical collection of Mythos fiction aside from Lovecraft's own books.
I continue to think that this article would benefit from having substantial parts migrated to associateed articles--some of the discussion of Lovecraft's entities moved to Outer God, perhaps, or some of the material on Lovecraft's philosophy moved to H. P. Lovecraft, and so on.
Sorry for the long-winded analysis--obviously it's been on my mind! Nareek 07:24, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Development of the Mythos 

message: Warning - Wiki Newbie alert...don't quite know how all this works yet, so bear with me...
The reference in the article to Lovecraft regarding Kant's ethics as a 'joke' is apparently incorrect; according to L. Sprague de Camp's 'Lovecraft: A Biography' (Page 136, New English Library, USA, 1975), this is actually refering to Nietzsche:
"Lovecraft read Schopenhauer (whose pessimism matched his own), Nietzsche, and Freud. He admired Nietzsche's reduction of human morals to an anthropological, materialistic basis but did not take the great German windbag very seriously: '...let me state clearly that I do not swallow him whole. His ethical system is a joke...'[21]"
The Footnote that de Champ provides indicates that this was sourced from a letter, 'HPL to A. T. Renshaw, 1 Jun. 1921'.
I'm uncertain if this is in any of the Select Letters Volumes, as I don't have access to those.
--Terminus Est 18:53, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Correction Re: Kant

message: I nearly nominated this article for GA today. I'm still tempted to do so, but... it needs some images. Anyone out there able to add some and tag them appropriately so I can nominate this? Kyaa the Catlord 20:01, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Good/Featured Article

message: "For example, although Smith might mention "Kthulhut" (Cthulhu) in one of his Hyperborean tales, this does not mean that Cthulhu is part of the Hyperborean cycle."
:I though it was Robert E. Howard who wrote about the Hyperborean Age.
:Howard wrote about the Hyborian Age; the Hyperborean cycle are stories Smith set in a pre-Ice Age Greenland. Nareek 11:25, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Hyperborean Age

message: I think Derleth's changes wouldn't be emphasized so much if he didn't go in the completely opposite direction of Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote what was (and is) one of the few fantasy/horror story collections that doesn't rely on a good vs. evil dichotomy, and that Derleth made it just that is what annoys many Lovecraft fans. The fact that the very theme has been reversed is why this is so important. 
This article clears up many misconceptions. The Cthulhu Mythos was not a unified body of literature with a concurrent universe from the moment that Lovecraft put pen to paper, and never approached that during his lifetime. He did not devise the so-called "elemental system" and had nothing to do with the "Great Old Ones vs. Elder Gods" concept, among other things. This may of course be obvious to some, but one would be surprised how many assume this was all canon he himself set down. Also, when the term "Cthulhu Mythos" is brought up, he is of course the first author brought to mind. To associate with him concepts that he did not devise nor include in his fiction is simply erroneous. Which is not to say that his stories did not have some very concurrent themes, which have been discussed in this and the Lovecrafian horror article. Call me geeky, but it (the CM article)is excellent the way it is.
It's correct that no one can really say how an entity like Cthulhu should or should not act, since the idea was that his actions could not be comprehended by human minds anyway. To say that his intentions are "good" or "evil" would be from a purely human perspective, and that didn't carry much weight in anything Lovecraft wrote. Basically, Lovecraft and Derleth are about as thematically similar as Batman Begins and the Adam West TV show. --Carcosan 02:56, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Theme of Lovecraft's Fiction 

message: I maintain that this article is still too confusing for people who are not devotees of Lovecraft's work.  The introduction is clear, and the sections themselves have a sort of internal clarity, but after reading the article several times I don't think I could explain it in detail to someone else other than to say its a set of stories Lovecraft developed involving mythological figures he made up (which I'm sure is a vast oversimplification.)  "Another problem arises when applying the elemental theory to beings that function on a cosmic scale (such as Yog-Sothoth)—some authors have tried to get around this by creating a separate category of aethyr elementals for Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep, and Yog-Sothoth."  And "he developed Hastur into a Great Old One represented as an avatar by the King in Yellow of Robert W. Chambers from a passing reference linking Hastur and the Yellow Sign in Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness."  It's all just lacking an additional encyclopedic layer that would make all of this clearer to someone who is new to Lovecraft's work.  Someone recently mentioned they wanted to nominate this as a featured article, but I don't think that could ever happen until the article clarified its own significance.
:Part of the problem comes from having too much speculation and assumption that borders on violating Wikipedia's neutral point of view.  The nature of the mythos leaves much up to debate but the page itself is not the place for that.  There's a lot of good information here but someone knowledgeable in the mythos who can stick to the pure, established facts needs to clean this up. --Ryuukuro 02:18, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing 

message: "Moreover, it could be said that Lovecraft's Mythos was a kind of elaborate inside joke, propagating among the writers of his circle and wearing thin upon his death. Derleth seems to have not understood this and believed that Lovecraft wanted other authors to actively write about the myth-cycle rather than to simply allude to it in their stories."
This sounds rather biased to me...
~Bengaley Summercat (I forgot my password. Sigh.)
:I agree.  Much of the article seems to be assuming the POV "there's a right and a wrong and Derleth got it wrong".  However, this is pretty much contrary to NPOV. -- Antaeus Feldspar 09:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV violation? 

message: Removed The Thing on the Doorstep because of the lack of encounters with non-human beings, and because it is more a story about possession. Even if it is included in the mythos, it does not define it in the sense of hidden horror from beyond time and space other than in references. Also removed the minor works because they were either written before the new direction in his writings and its dreamlike descriptions, unlike the wide awake and realistic style which is known from the most famous stories in the mythos. 
Like mentioned in the article, Lovecraft didn't find his own voice before around 1923 when after having discovered Arthur Machen and his decription of unknown terror amongst us, secret societies and inhuman hybrids and such, which Lovecraft combined with his own talent, the inspiration from Dunsany and Poe and created his most famous mythology (even if it was named by Derleth). Its breakthrough came as we know with The Call of Cthulhu, which is also why the mythology is called the Cthulhu mythos. The seven stories mentioned are the backbone of the mythos, the other stories containing references to necronomicon and others, are simply flesh to the bone.
193.217.196.226 01:18, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: So basically, we need to admit that this page is being edited by people who fancy themselves literary critics and historians rather than people who are just trying to assemble a straightforward encyclopedia article.-Apollo58 18:31, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Edited a bit

message: Can anyone tell me what is meant by "non-pseudo-legendary"? I know what the words mean but do not think I am correctly parsing any meaning from this particular arrangement. GLKeeney 18:20, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Non-what-what