An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Writing to Clark Ashton Smith ([November 11, 1930]; ms. in private hands), HPL mentioned YogSothoth as one of several “ingredients of the Miskatonic Valley myth-cycle.” In early 1931, HPL wrote to Frank Belknap Long: “I really agree that ‘Yog-Sothoth’ is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature…. But I consider the use of actual folk-myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in employing the former one is forced to retain many blatant puerilities and contradictions of experience which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation…. But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitation regarding the sense of outsideness” ( SL3.293–94). HPL’s comment shows that his “pseudomythology” is not so much a “false” or made-up mythology, but an anti-mythology—the only kind of mythology that could be possible in this day and age. It is not a mythology of the kind invented or believed in by previous cultures—lore or legend intended to explain or account for the history of humankind, the history of the universe, the exploits of heroes, and so on. In fact, the careful reader of his stories will realize that it is no mythology at all, but a cycle of events intended to be perceived by only the more primitive or impressionable characters as realin the context of the fiction. Again, HPL’s use of the term “Yog-Sothothery” is unclear, but it appears to denote his more “cosmic” narratives (the letter was written during his writing of At the Mountains of Madness). The context in which HPL used “Yog-Sothothery” (which resembles such terms as tomfooleryand chicanery) suggests that HPL took his pseudomythology none too seriously.

HPL emphasized that allhis tales—whether they used his pseudomythology or his invented topography or not—were linked philosophically. His canonical utterance on the subject occurs in a letter to Farnsworth Wright (July 5, 1927), accompanying the resubmittal of “The Call of Cthulhu” to WTand at a time by which he had written the majority of his tales, but only a few of what most proponents refer to as his “mythos” fiction: “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large…. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all” ( SL2.150). As early as the fall of 1927, when Frank Belknap Long wrote “The Space-Eaters,” HPL’s associates were “adding” components to various elements of his tales—in this case, his ever-growing library of mythical volumes of occult lore (Long invented John Dee’s translation of the Necronomicon,citing it as an epigraph to his tale, although the epigraph was omitted in its first appearance in WT,July 1928). HPL cited Long’s invention in “History of the Necronomicon” (1927). In late 1929 Clark Ashton Smith wrote “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,”

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which invented the toad-god Tsathoggua. Whether Smith was inspired by HPL’s example is debatable; in fact, it was HPL who borrowed from Smith, citing Tsathoggua in his revision of Zealia Bishop’s “The Mound” (1929–30), on which he was then working, and also in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930). Smith himself later wrote, in reference to several citations by other authors of elements he had invented: “It would seem that I am starting a mythology” (Smith to August Derleth, January 4, 1933; ms., SHSW).