Cthulhu of the Caribbean?

Has anyone else noticed that Cthulhu and Davy Jones (as played by Bill Nighy in Walt Disney’s production Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) is a dead ringer for Cthulhu or one of his spawn? Even Davy’s hat looks like Cthulhu’s wings.
Davy Jones lives at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’ Locker and is a nickname of the devil of the seas (Devil Jonah) since he kidnaps sailors and drowns them as they join him in his watery abode. Tobias Smollet‘s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) comments, “This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep....”. As an ardent Anglophile and avid reader (at his death he had over 1500 books in his library), it is quite possible that Lovecraft was familiar with Smollett’s works.

Cthulhu lives – “dead but dreaming” – in R’lyeh, a sunken city deep under the Pacific Ocean in the middle of one of the biggest empty regions of water on the planet. Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as having an “awful squid-head with writhing feelers” (a very apt description of Davy Jones in the movie).

According to Wikipedia, “…Lovecraft said that R’lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R’lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth’s coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the “Ponape Scripture“, a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W“. The sound was given the name “Bloop“.

When in Rome, don’t do as the Romans did…

But the important thing to consider is the prodigiousadj.1/2 vitality of the Roman idea. Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heroes of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosisn.1 among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!

H.P. Lovecraft
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929

Although “…Lovecraft later believed that Hellenism and astronomy were the two central influences of his early years”, he was clearly awed by the Romans as well. The Roman Empire as a whole survived as an autocracy for five hundred years, however, the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire lasted almost another thousand years until Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.

Despite Edward Gibbon and his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire it has been argued that the Empire did not fall at all but underwent a very complex transformation. In some ways, as Lovecraft comments, it vanished, but in others, it remained.

For those who maintain that it fell and who attempt to draw parallels between its decline and collapse with other empires, for example, the British and even the USA (although it is not clear what is actually meant by an ‘American Empire’), a variety of reasons are postulated including, Christianity, the decline in morals and values, public health problems, political corruption, inflation, unemployment, urban decay, inferior technology and military spending. To this have been added the use of lead, the dole and barbarians, and, the sheer size of the empire at its height. It has even been suggested that Rome never fell as it still exists and it has been very well argued that our common view of Roman history is far from the case.

If there is one hero of antiquity who personifies the Roman Empire and who received his apotheosis amongst the stars it is Hercules (Greek Herakles) and the constellation named after him. Indeed, as Wikipedia notes, Hercules was the hero “…whom the later Roman Emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximinus, often identified themselves.”

Lovecraft Stories Interactive Multimedia CD-ROM

Hyperlinked Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction Anthology

I have just published the following which I hope will be of interest:

The Lovecraft Cosmos Collection™ I

Welcome to the worlds of Howard Phillips Lovecraft!

The dreams and the drugs; the witchcraft and the wormholes; the aliens and their alarming deities; the mundane world where the anomalistic occurs quite normally – this, and much more, oozed from the pen of one of the most influential fantasy, horror and science fiction writers of the 20th century. Stephen King has said of him, “He struck with the most force, and I still think, for all his shortcomings, he is the best writer of horror fiction that America has yet produced.”

Creator of Arkham and Cthulhu, Lovecraft was the quintessential outsider who believed that, “…common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” and that, “The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

The digital equivalent of The Daily Prophet, and even more so of The Quibbler, in the Harry Potter books and films, each story is an experience that helps to tell itself though links. The format of this experience is neotext – a totally new multimedia/ hypermedia interactive version of each story – fully illustrated, and with hyperlinks to websites featuring word definitions, background material, sound effects and music, and, videos. Every link has been chosen to enrich the reading of the story and each story has additional ‘Links and Resources’ pages where the themes of the story and further background can be explored via the net. It has also been extensively annotated with footnotes and endnotes providing additional information and links.

This collection comprises five Lovecraft stories – Azathoth, Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Other Gods and The Thing on the Doorstep – as well as two ‘Editor’s Extras’ – Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth and Lovecraftian Labyrinthine Linkages (a list of additional links to all things Lovecraftian.

Each Lovecraft Cosmos Collection™ is normally supplied via CD in the form of PDFs (open with free Adobe Acrobat Reader) with payment processing via PayPal.

You do not have to have an account with PayPal.

The payment of £4.99 ($9.99) plus postage and packing will be processed through PayPal who will invoice you. When you have made the payment, you will be sent a CD of Adobe Acrobat PDF files of the collection you ordered. If you do not have the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader you can download the free version at
http://www.download.com/Adobe-Reader/3000-2378_4-10000062.html
Order your copy at:
rogermartintudor@btinternet.com
Or you can request a digital version and thereby save the postage costs.

Or have a look at eBay (UK and USA) - search for 'Lovecraft CD'.

By all means have a look at my MySpace as well:

myspace.com/lovecrafter

Have you an avatar?

An avatar is:

The physical embodiment of an idea or concept; a personification;
(Computing) A digital representation of a person or being;
(Hinduism) The earthly incarnation of a deity, particularly Vishnu.

Many of the Lovecraft Cosmos gods are embodiments of concepts, particularly Azathoth who is the personification of the nucleus of the cosmos “at the centre of all infinity” yet “beyond time and space”.

Lovecraft was extremely interested in dreams and the nature of reality and many of his stories explore these subjects so, if one considers the role of avatars in role-playing games – many of which feature the Cthulhu Mythos – then there is a fascinating link between his creations and digital representations.

In ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ Lovecraft said,

“…Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”


In the Lovecraft Cosmos, Nyarlathotep is the avatar and soul of the Outer Gods, serving as an intermediary between the pantheonn.2’s deities and their cults. As such he is very similar to the Greek god Hermes who was messenger for the other gods of the Greek pantheon; the god of crossroads, boundaries and travellers; a psychopomp who led or guided souls to the afterlife; a god of luck, and, of scheming and trickery.

The virtual reality world of the ‘role-playing games’ Second Life (and Second Teen Life for those under eighteen) and World of Warcraft feature avatars in different metaverse environments not unlike, in principle, the virtual reality of the Matrix Trilogy that features a fictional universe where the man-machine interface is integrated. The virtual reality world in the Canadian director David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ may be compared and contrasted with the theories of the Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan who wrote a number of analytical and predictive books, particularly Understanding Media.

In our interaction with fiction, movies, television and, especially, cyberspace we all exist as avatars, not as ourselves but as digital representations of ourselves – as do the creations of our minds. Lovecraft would have loved it!

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...Like most fantaisistes [sic], Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in a strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to the forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain or Radcliffian or Ludovician romance [referring to M.G. Lewis]. Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy, ambitious and anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosius. More particular qualities appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate.

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short-story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence—an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, a Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in every sense of the word save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher—especially the latter—that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history—a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.

These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskilled hands, become under Poe’s spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness—the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents an allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous denouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalizing the desired illusion—principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be—we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire’s urbane and Gallically modulated translation—but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist’s creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few other can ever hope to be.

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...Poe’s tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be included at all in weird literature; whilst certain others, probably influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess and extravagance which relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and fountain-head of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship poised on the billow-chasm’s edge in MS. Found in a Bottle—the dark intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing graybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil-current toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which must end in destruction?

Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence.” In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcane of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints of a monstrous metempsychosis—the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was shown the giant horse of the victim’s ancestor in the Crusades; the madman’s wild and constant riding on the great horse, and his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring houses; and finally, the burning of the madman’s palace and the death therein of the owner, borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the beast he has ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins takes the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe’s mind was never far from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.