The core part of this system is the Great Old Ones. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoThey are terrifying, ancient beings of great power, who once ruled the earth in ancient times, only to sleep peacefully in a sleep like death. The most famous of these is Cthulhu, which sleeps in the undersea city of R'lyeh in the South Pacific. When the stars are in the right position, Lalaye will float from the bottom of the ocean and Cthulhu will wake up and bring havoc on Earth.

Although Cthulhu is so famous that entire mythological systems are named after it, it is not the most powerful of the Old Dominators, nor is it the center of the story. At the center of this system is Azathoth, the head of the demon gods, while Nyarlathotep has been in more frequent contact with the human world, and is more inclined to deceive and seduce humans than other old rulers.

At the beginning of the universe, only Azathoth existed. From Azathoth came "Darkness", "Nameless Mist", and "Chaos".

The blind and foolish Azatoth originally gave birth to "Darkness", and "Darkness" gave birth to the "Supreme Mother Goddess" Shub-Niggurath, who was very fertile. It is said that she gave birth to almost all of the Old Dominants, including Cthulhu, and all of life. The Nameless Mist gave birth to Yog-Sothoth, the "Key to the Door", who knows everything in time and space, and is the existence of the Silver Door Key. And "Chaos" is Nyarrathotep, often referred to as the "messenger", a symbol of ridicule and contradiction. The often used human form incarnation is a tall, dark-skinned, pleasant-looking man who was once worshipped in Egypt, and legend has it that he taught Einstein about the invention of the atomic bomb, in order to make humanity self-exterminate faster and complete the task of "cleaning up".

In the novels of the Cthulhu Mythos, characters may be too deep or encounter the Old Dominators or other cosmic races through some opportunity, and most of them will end up dying and falling into madness.

Lovecraft himself did not intend to systematically organize the myths he created. In a letter to J. F. Morton dated April 27, 1933, he laid out some of his foundational ideas for the Cthulhu Mythos system. After his death, Auguste William Dresser put his system in stock and came up with the title "The Cthulhu Mythos".

But the Cthulhu Mythos is not a myth in nature, but a legend. Mythology is a type of folk literature. The collective oral creation of the people of ancient times. Includes stories of the gods and heroic legends of apotheosis. Legends are also a type of folk literature. It is a narration of people and events that have been circulated among the people for a long time. Some of the content is based on specific historical figures and events, while others are purely the product of fantasy. From this, it can be seen that although the Cthulhu Mythos is translated as a myth, it should actually belong to the category of legends, and the Cthulhu Mythos should be a system of legends, not a system of mythology.

Some of the themes in this system may be reinterpreted from myths and legends from around the world, such as Itakua the Old Ruler and the legendary North American snow monster Wendigo.

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"I think that the human mind lacks the ability to connect what is known, and that is the most merciful thing in the world. Humans live on an island called Ignorance in the middle of a dark ocean, a vast ocean full of secrets, but we shouldn't sail too far and explore too deeply. ”

- Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The common theme of Lovecraft's novels is that human value is meaningless in the universe, and that all search for the mysterious unknown leads to a catastrophic end. Humanity often relies on the power of other powerful beings in the universe who are of no interest to humanity - if not with malicious intent.

"Why do you publish something like Lovecraft's 'Crazy Mountain' in the name of science fiction? Are you really so difficult that you have to publish such nonsense?...... If stories like these—like two people scaring themselves half to death looking at a stone carving in an ancient ruin, or someone being chased by something that even the author himself can't describe, or someone babbling about indescribable fears such as a windowless five-dimensional vault, Jossoto, and so on—are what the future adventure story "Strange Tales" is all about, then God can only hope for science fiction to help. ”

The above is an excerpt from the July 1936 issue of the Fantasy Story, which refers to one of two H. P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" published in the same year. The response to Lovecraft's story was not all negative, but the praise was drowned out by shouts of anger, bewilderment and despair.

In the thirties of the 20th century, most of the science fiction novels in American magazines were plots and adventure stories concocted by hired literati, who simply changed a lazy ranch to a planet, and then randomly applied the same storyline, replacing the cattle thief with a space robber. In 1936, science fiction enthusiasts were still accustomed to jumping on starships, doing somersaults on drives faster than the speed of light (don't think about Einstein's theories), and blowing Betelgeuse to pieces, unable to comprehend the atmosphere that Lovecraft painstakingly painted, leaving his two intrepid explorers babbling and screaming in frenzy in the face of unparalleled fear in the Antarctic wilderness.

There is an essential difference between Lovecraft's "mythical" story and the Star Wars story that Dr. Smith and his party reveal, and not just a difference in focus on plot and atmosphere. At that time, many of the leading figures of space exploration, such as E. E. Smith, Knight Schachneh, and Ralph Milne Farley, were born a century ago, when it was still believed that the universe was moving according to Newton's immutable laws. Like our sun, every planet is a star, and when astronomers in the 19th century aimed their beamsplitters into space, they were given reliable information that there were hydrogen, helium, magnesium, sodium, and other elements on those planets exactly as we found them in our own solar system. At the end of the 19th century, when physicists were glad to think that they had fully understood the universe, was the ultimate dream of mankind to conquer the universe really such an impossible task?

In 1905, Albert Einstein inaugurated the 20th century's scientific revolution that would eventually shatter the teachings of classical physics. With the continuous development of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, etc., the universe no longer seems to be so understandable. As Copernicus and Galileo reversed the anthropocentric theory, modern man began to realize that not only was he not the center of the universe, but that he was only a special case of the universe. The universe and its neutron stars, quasars, and black holes are all foreign to us, and we are a stranger in the universe.

Of all the writers who published science fiction in magazines in the thirties of the twentieth century, Lovecraft was the only one who transcended the monotony of his colleagues and conveyed the mystery of the universe, the most sensitive topic of the twentieth century. "All my stories," Lovecraft wrote in a 1927 letter, "are based on the most basic premise, namely, that ordinary human laws, interests, and emotions are invalid and meaningless in the vastness of the universe," a manifesto that in effect encapsulated the revolution in modern science that was taking place at the time, when stunned physicists were astonished to discover a strange new world unconstrained by Newtonian mechanics. Einstein had to contend with non-Euclidean geometry in his exposition of his theory of general relativity, and the subsea city of Cthulhu represented the same non-Euclidean geometry, and the mysterious meteorite radiation depicted in "Colors of Outer Space" replicates the radium experiments done by Antoine Henri Becquerel and Curie in the early 20th century. Even the contemporary development of higher mathematics - the phenomenon of chaos - is foreshadowed by the Cthulhu Mythos, in Lovecraft's fictional pantheon, the supreme god is the idiot blind god Azarso, who is the master of the spiraling black vortex of the ultimate chaotic space. If properly equipped with Mandelbrot's fractal theory and Armand Vallin Feigenbaum's theory of constants, Asassol should feel at home in the sequences and perturbations of contemporary chaos.

It makes no sense to talk more about the consistency between the Cthulhu Mythos and the development of science in the 20th century, because Lovecraft borrows these concepts not from the relevant formal knowledge of higher mathematics, i.e., relativity, but from an accidental, instinctive insight into the "raids of chaos and undiscovered space demons." Historically, Lovecraft has been intimately associated with the social and economic elites left over from the modern twentieth century, a dreamer of nothingness, an outsider in his own time and an outsider in the universe. The Argentine writer Julio Cortazar once pointed out that "all perfectly successful short stories, especially science fiction, are the product of neurosis, nightmares or hallucinations that are neutralized by objectification and transformed into a medium outside the neurological realm." Lovecraft, for his part, saw the universe as a refuge for terrible miracles, a notion that was nothing more than a vivid portrayal of his sick outsider mentality, and just as Lovecraft was an outsider in his hometown of Providence, in the Cthulhu mythos, modern man is also an outsider, disoriented, drifting with the flow, teetering on the edge of a terrible abyss. In 1936, when Lovecraft's "Madman Mountain" was serialized in "The Legend of the World", the contents that alluded to the vastness and mystery of the universe were dismissed as gibberish by readers, but the scientific revolution of the 20th century has confirmed the correctness of those contents. In a recent article, physicist Lewis Thomas said, "The greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century was the discovery of human ignorance." With that in mind, pause for a moment and turn to the first page of the book to read the first paragraph of the opening paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu."

After Lovecraft's death in 1937, bizarre horror stories continued to flourish. Lovecraft was a few years short of John W. Campbell taking over The Legend of the Dead, and his editorial prowess and influence led to a remarkable advance in the field of American science fiction magazines as a whole. Despite his astonishing talents, he maintained a fundamental design ethos, namely a transcendent belief in the sheer potency of technological triumph, human ingenuity and resourcefulness, and by comparison, Lovecraft seemed like a whimsical alien under the sky of science fiction.

The lonely Providence hermit and his mythological legacy are immortalized in the minds of his friends and admirers, who maintain the "Cthulhu Mythos" like the oracles and idols of a secret society guarding them. This includes the controversial parody writing project initiated by Akham Press, which was founded in 1939.

In the '30s, Lovecraft himself wrote faux "myth" stories for different versions of his clients, and he specifically mentioned that "[I] would never have associated my name with them under any circumstances." In the years following Lovecraft's death, a ****** was inaugurated starting with Francis T. Laney's 1942 glossary of "mythical" terms, during which Cthulhu and his cosmic accomplices were scrutinized, analyzed, classified, classified, and abridged to the point of fragmentation. Thus, in the 70s of the 20th century, in a very shallow book on "mythology", an American science fiction writer suggested that Lovecraft had "gaps" in his conception and that it was incumbent upon him and others to "fill" these gaps with new stories. Before Lovecraft, there was only a fairly limited market for frog cannibal stories, and in the decades following his death, the creation of imitation Cthulhu works grew into an industry with a large market share.

The sheer number of such spin-offs was, in the words of the late E. Hoffman Preese, "abominable garbage," but they did not affect the "myths" as much as the actual infringements. Lovecraft's hypothetical theory of the evolution of the universe is by no means a static system, but an idea of artistic value, which is always adapted to the development of the personality and the changes in the interests of its creator. Thus, as Gothic sensuality gave way to the cosmic complex in the last decade of Lovecraft's life, early "myths" such as "Dunvech's Panic" (1928) remained firmly anchored in the closed regions of declining New England, and only six years later, in "The Shadow of Dissonance," Lovecraft began to dizzigently narrate the universe. Similarly, when Lovecraft finally began to lose interest in horror fiction in the thirties of the twentieth century, one can once again see from the comparison that in "Dunvech's Panic", the "mythical" gods are still charms, dwelling in the bay, demonic entities, and in "The Shadow of Dissonance", alien beings have become open, authentic socialists, which directly reflects Lovecraft's sudden interest in social and social reform. If he had lived until the forties of the twentieth century, myth would have continued to evolve with the changes of its creators, and there was no rigid system that could be applied to the imitators behind the author.

Moreover, the essence of "myth" lies neither in the multitude of imaginary gods nor in the long-forgotten forbidden books, but in a convincing cosmic attitude. The universe is a term that Lovecraft repeated countless times in describing his important aesthetic: "I choose horror novels because they are most in line with my inclination—that I want to fulfill at once one of my strongest and most enduring desires, fantasizing about the annoying limitations of time, space, and natural laws that magically imprison us forever and thwart our curiosity about the infinite cosmic space......"

In a sense, Lovecraft's entire mature work consisted of stories of cosmic wonders, but in the last decade of his life, when he began to abandon Dunsani-esque exoticism and New England black sorcery in favor of the mysterious theme of chaos in outer space, he wrote a large number of works that came to be known as the "Cthulhu Mythos." In other words, "myths" represent Lovecraft's stories of cosmic miracles in which the author has begun to turn his attention to the cosmic world of modern science, and in turn, the gods of "myths" concretize such a purposeless, indifferent, and unfamiliar universe that cannot be expressed in words. Therefore, those who imitate Lovecraft's style who have been creating clumsy imitation of "myth" works over the years should understand that "myth" is not a series of effortless formulaic expressions and glossary glossaries, but a cosmic state of mind.

The stories in this episode that have the Cthulhu Mythos are among the few successful stories of this kind. The earliest of these may seem like shoddy works of popular culture now, but the rest are brilliant, such as those by Robert Bullock ("Notebook in an Abandoned House"), Fritz Leible, Ramsay Campbell, Colin Wilson, Joanna Russ, and Stephen King, which exemplified H. P. Lovecraft's style and contributed their own way to the spread of "myth."

The author of the last novel in the book, Richard A. Lopov, has something more to offer: not only did he write the brilliant "mythical" story of "The Discovery of the Gurico Belt", but he was also the only author I have met other than Lovecraft who conveyed the meaning of breaking with tradition and innovation. In this remarkable work, Ripov not only uses the indispensable term "mythology", but also creates the atmosphere of the most basic cosmic wonders, and also recreates the exhilarating excitement of those "mythical" archetypes. If you're wondering why there was such a thrill in 1936, turn to the book's "Discovering the Gurrico Zone" and take a look at its opening.

It can be seen that Lovecraft's life was like a curse, and sickness, pain, and poverty always surrounded him - this undoubtedly shaped the black side of his personality, and also led to his works always full of madness, horror and evil. This interweaving of blows and pain finally flowed through the Cthulhu Mythos system at the tip of his pen.

The most famous is Cthulhu, which sleeps in the underwater city of R'lyeh in the South Pacific. When the stars are in the right place, Lalaye will float from the bottom of the ocean and Cthulhu will wake up and wreak havoc on Earth. They are the root of all evil, magic, and mysteries, and they are unsearchable. They came from other planets and brought life to the earth - but they were by no means good, they made life only to enslave - and they were as powerful as gods, so they became the origin of all myths on earth. Humanity has no power to fight against it, and once they wake up, humanity will perish!—even in the novel, all those who try to probe their secrets, or who come into contact with them, will be consumed by boundless fear after one glance, and then completely insane or die.