The Derleth Mythos

"The Derleth Mythos" is a half-page essay of criticism and scholarship by Richard L. Tierney. It critiques and analyzes the relative contributions of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth to the body of work that has come to be almost universally accepted as the Cthulhu Mythos.
==Overview ==
Tierney identifies the Derleth approach as essentially attempting to map Mythos entities and concepts to Christian ethics and morality, and the the Paracelsian concept of Elementals. He makes the excellent point that equating Cthulhu with the element of water is to ignore or miss the point that Cthulhu is a space alien who built his city on land and who became immobilized by water when his city sank in an ancient cataclysm. Clearly water is not a sympathetic element for Cthulhu in that case.
Further contradictions are highlighted: Hastur is meant to be an Air Elemental but lives on the bottom of a lake (water), and it is necessary for Derleth to invent out of whole cloth a Fire Elemental (Cthugha) to round out the four elements in the Mythos and provide the needed balance between opposing elements in the Paracelsus model of atomic structure.
In essence, Tierney identifies the difference and semiotics of pastiche as opposed to continuation or exploration of an author's work.
==Publication History==
*HPL (1972)
*Essays Lovecraftian (1976)
*Crypt of Cthulhu #24 (1984)
*Nightscapes (1997)
*Discovering H. P. Lovecraft (2001)
==External Link==
*Nightscapes: "The Derleth Mythos", by Richard L. Tierney
Category:Richard L. Tierney works
Category:Non-Fiction Works