THE DEEP ONES: "Nyarlathotep" by H.P. Lovecraft

"Nyarlathotep" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins December 21!

ONLINE VERSIONS
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/n.asp
http://tentaclii.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/the-annotated-nyarlathotep/ (annotated version - see >2 artturnerjr:)

PRINT VERSIONS
The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
The Nyarlathotep Cycle

MISCELLANY
From Art: "Found a VERY nice, very professional reading of "Nyarlathotep" on YouTube; the narrator has a deep, sonorous voice that is perfectly suited to this tale"
http://youtu.be/YYEksNpGucU

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyarlathote
http://tinyurl.com/2dpt6hu

>1 gwendetenebre:

LOL at the io9 article. :)

I know David Haden (author of the annotated version of "Nyarlathotep" you linked to) from the S.T. Joshi Enthusiasts page over at Facebook - he's a knowledgeable weird/speculative fiction scholar & a nice guy to boot. Haven't read his annotations but I've no doubt there are some interesting tidbits to be found there.

***

I'll be reading this one out of the best $12.95 I ever spent, aka H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction.

"Nyarlathotep" by John Coulthart, from his book The Haunter of the Dark

Nyarlathotep

And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.

From Fungi from Yuggoth by H.P. Lovecraft

It's interesting that our two HPL picks this quarter both had Nyarlathotep as the chief Entity concerned. "The Dreams in the Witch House" presents him as the critical psychopomp, in the form of the Black Man of the medieval witch-cult.

Short as it is, "Nyarlathotep" seems almost like two separate pieces to me. The first part is quite Dunsanian, with a narrator who speaks in great, mythic generalities about curious events, with reference to unnamed "cities" and "wise men."

The second part, beginning "I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city," became personal, and surprisingly like one of Machen's "Fragments in Jade," which I just finished reading as a warm-up to "The White People." They share the imagistic prose qualities (I'm not a fan of the term "prose poem," but I guess it fits), that in HPL's case seem to have been a function of dream transcription.

Robert Price, in The Nyarlathotep Cycle, suggests that Nyarlathotep himself in the Lovecraftian opus as a whole is theologically isomorphic with Shiva (i.e. Nath), but it seems to me that in "Nyarlathotep" he is more particularly Kalki, especially in the way that the final avatar of Vishnu would manifest to rationalist Westerners.

Naturally, he is also Antichrist.

> 4
Price matches up this HPL poem to form a poetic triptych of Antichrist prophecy with "The Second Coming" by Yeats and "Silence Falls on Mecca's Walls" by Robert E. Howard.

I couldn't find an image of the cover of the November 1920 issue of The United Amateur in which "Nyarlathotep" first appeared, but here's the January issue from the same year. (Other than color, it seems like the covers were pretty uniform in design in that period.)

> 1

Nick Gisburne does a nice job with the reading, but I must insist, against him and a number of other YouTube readers (this piece is popular for the purpose!) that the pronunciation should be:

NIGH-er-lut-HO-tep

The Egyptian -hotep suffix (meaning "is satisfied," generally with reference to a god or ancestor) should be preserved, and the "Jeremy Taylor" meter is too good to pass up.

> 1, 2

I'm underwhelmed by Hadden's annotations (and put off by his typesetting!), except for note 70, beginning "Commercial radio broadcasting of music and voice had begun in America in 1920." That one note was worth the price of reading the others, and might profitably be developed into a substantial essay.

I love this piece (tale? prose poem? Joshi refers to it as a prose poem, and that seems to be the most fitting description to me) even though it's not generally considered to be one of HPL's major works, and I actually prefer to refrain from overanalyzing it (unusual for me, I know) - I'm afraid that doing so would diminsh its power for me. I love the music of it and the nightmarish imagery; to paraphrase Wikipedia, I value it more for its aesthetic and evocative qualities than its meaning.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

The second part, beginning "I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city," became personal, and surprisingly like one of Machen's "Fragments in Jade," which I just finished reading as a warm-up to "The White People."

Glad to see you're doing a warm-up. We could all probably stand to limber up the ol' noggin for that one. :)

>6 paradoxosalpha:

Naturally, he is also Antichrist.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this occured to me even before I read Robert M. Price's writing on the character. The footnote for Revelation 13:1 in my NIV Study Bible (where the description of the beast coming out of the sea begins) reads, in part:

According to some, the beast symbolizes... the deification of secular authority. According to others, he is the final, personal antichrist.

And who, of course, would better represent the deification of secular authority than a being like Nyarlathotep, a "man" of science (or pseudoscience)?

On a related note, does anyone here know if HPL read the Bible? Obviously, he was quite famously atheistic, but of course one doesn't have to be a believer to read scripture for its literary merit.

> 10

I don't think there's any question that HPL read the Bible. In his day, that was the most likely way for an American to become an atheist. Besides, his biblical allusions are numerous. (Theologian Price is usually the go-to guy to spot them, of course.)

There's a real ... pstench about this piece. I always get a sense of deja vu when I read it. Ancient Egyptian magician presides over the dissolution of human culture and civilization, yeah. I hate it when that happens. (Or do I?)

I enjoy the paranoid intensity of the piece, brief as it is. I mentioned recently in one of the other threads that the first paragraph could well describe the existential angst of the recent film Take Shelter, or indeed the general unease and sense of foreboding that seems to be simmering just underneath the veneer of "civilized" society worldwide these days. Maybe we're seeing Lovecraft-as-prophet, although I don't think he had the Christian "antichrist" concept specifically in mind here, and not merely because of his atheism. Lovecraft claimed that the idea came from a dream he'd had when he was young, and I suspect that this prose poem was also fueled in no small measure by his own xenophobia, along with the popular news media accounts of early 1920's Egyptian archeological finds.

Will Murray has notably suggested that Tesla was an (unconscious?) model for this figure of Nyarlathotep, although Hadden's notes seem to provide better support for Tesla's antagonist Edison.

We non-Christians in the West still have dreams with Christian mythemes in them. We're soaking in it.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

Who'da thunk it that under such austere-looking covers lurked "Nyarlathotep"?!

The opening line is pure HPL as today's layman might recognize him: "Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . ." It still grabs you, though - for 1920, the guy could really set a hook!

I really like being addressed as "the audient void."

Why, yes. I am the audient void. I shall swallow your words in the abyss of my non-existence, and they will be no more.

Few if any of Lovecraft's (or anyone else's) pieces has as evocative imagery as "Nyarlathotep". For me at least; I guess there might be unfortunates who are differently wired. ;)

>17 paradoxosalpha:

That's the spirit!

>11 paradoxosalpha:

In his day, that was the most likely way for an American to become an atheist. Besides, his biblical allusions are numerous.

As opposed to our day, in which the most likely way seems to be to read one of the late Christopher Hitchens' books (sales of which are presumably skyrocketing in the wake of his untimely passing).

>17 paradoxosalpha:

Why, hello, audient void! I am the emperor of dreams. I crown me with the million-colored sun of secret worlds incredible, and take their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, throned on the mounting zenith, and illume the spaceward-flown horizons infinite...

But ENOUGH about me! :D

Was surfing around Wikipedia and was interested to note that the author(s) of the article on Nyarlathotep consider Stephen King bad guy Randall Flagg (for those of you who are not regular King readers, Flagg is sort of to the King Universe what Doctor Doom is to the Marvel Universe) to be an avatar of Nyarlathotep:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyarlathotep#Table-c_.28N.E2.80.93W.29