“Nyarlathotep”

Lovecraft's biggest collection of interrelated works - and the one that made him a household name long after his death - is the Cthulhu Mythos. However, while the titular entity is one of that body's most memorable and frightening elements, he's far from the only one. In Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories, the universe is an endless battleground between self-interested, uncaring entities who create and destroy for reasons no human could comprehend...until they die. Cthulhu and other beings like him might be much higher in the food chain than humanity, but ultimately their situation - and their eventual fate - are no better than ours. There is but one name that means the same thing to every order of beings in this setting. One law that governs an otherwise lawless cosmos. One entity who, in my opinion, SHOULD have been the namesake of the mythos.

Nyarlathotep.

This story, like so many other of Lovecraft's horror stories, was inspired by a nightmare. According to his notes, however, this was possibly the most vivid out of any of them, and the one that he was able to adapt the most closely into prose. Nyarlathotep's portrayal will change throughout Lovecraft's career, as he appears in more stories than any one other character or creature and Lovecraft frequently reinvented or retconned mythos elements. His first appearance, though, was in the short story that shares his name, printed in Lovecraft's old favorite the United Amateur in the winter of 1920. This is the point at which we enter, beyond any shadow of a doubt, into the Cthulhu Mythos era.

This is another story I read not long ago, and as with "Ulthar," I will try to imagine what my first impressions would have been like as I read. Following Nyarlathotep's evolution into the rightful figurehead of the mythos that I remember him as, from this story onward, should be interesting.

“Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . ”

This is easily Lovecraft's best opening sentence so far. "I will tell the audient void" communicates so much of the nihilism that the cosmic horror genre is based on. The character knows that there's no point in action, but he chooses to do it anyway because there's nothing else for him. He tells his story to a void, even though he knows there's no one to listen.

“I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.”

This hits harder for a modern reader than it probably did at the time of publication. Seasons of political and social upheaval are plentiful throughout history, but the aberrant seasons and feeling of barely-acknowledged collective guilt are strongly relatable to climate change, and environmental degradation in general. The last line states that the world has moved into the grasp of forces beyond our control, but everything up until then suggests that we, humanity, are responsible for moving it into their clutches. Again, that sounds really uncomfortably familiar. Not just in regards to climate change and extinction vortexes, but even things like technology and finances getting out of control, weapons finding their way into the hands of terror groups, unaccountable corporations having free reign under the noses of dying governments, etc.

As a story written at the beginning of the nineteen twenties, "Nyarlathotep" would have reflected some similar contemporary events, with the rise of a new form of investment capitalism, mistrust of science and government in the wake of the war, and the comparatively sensual and consumerist pop culture that was starting to take hold in America after the stodgier early twentieth century. I suspect Lovecraft was one of those who shook his head and chuckled bitterly when people called world war one "the war to end all wars;" he felt that a new apocalypse was inevitable, and had he lived a decade longer I think world war two wouldn't have surprised him in the slightest.

One paragraph in, and this story is already making me uncomfortable about the world I live in.

“And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet.”

I'm not sure if "of the old native blood" makes sense. I've only been to Egypt very briefly myself, but I've met quite a few Egyptians, and the impression I've gotten from them is that between the Macedonian, Roman, and (especially) Islamic conquests, its all become pretty evenly mixed. If I'm wrong in my impressions, then any Egyptians on this forum can feel free to correct me.

"Fellahin" were peasant farmers in pre-national Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Nyarlathotep seems to have made quite an impression on them, but then Lovecraft's rurals are all superstitious morons so that might not mean much. :/

The most interesting part of this passage is that Nyarlathotep claims to have been absent or hibernating for "twenty-seven centuries." 2,700 years before this story was written would be the early eighth century BC. The dates are disputed, but this time correlates approximately to the end of Egypt's decline in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. For those of you who don't know, the Collapse was probably one of the most catastrophic events of known history. From 3,000 BC onward, the lands surrounding the Mediterranean - especially around the eastern basin, in places like Egypt, the Levant, Asia Minor, Mycenia, and the various island chains between them - hosted some of the most advanced societies of the ancient world, with elaborate interconnected politics, trade routes, and cultures. Then, during the period of approximately 1200-900 BC, most of these civilizations were destroyed, and even the survivors were reduced to a fraction of their former glory. The area we now know as Greece was hit the hardest; every single city of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations was abandoned and fell to ruin, and the people were reduced to illiterate village-based tribal farmers, their past so forgotten that they even had superstitions that the ruined cities near their villages must have been built by magical giants, rather than their own ancestors just a few generations ago. What we think of as "ancient Greece" with its city states of Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and the others only came about later, built over the ashes of the pre-Collapse civilizations. Eerily, the cause of this Mediterranean apocalypse is still a mystery.

Egypt was one of the societies that decayed the least during the collapse (it at least managed to stay mostly in one piece and keep its sense of historical continuity), and took longer to hit rock bottom. However, by the eighth century BC, Egypt had still indisputably fallen to a shadow of its former self, with weak Pharoahs barely able to control the land, the trade and exploration of the preceding New Kingdom era largely abandoned, and no new pyramids having been built since the second millennium (and some of the existing pyramids being stripped of their beautiful marble coatings and golden caps and left with only the barren, coarse stones that we can still see today).

Looking at the passage from this perspective, Nyarlathotep was active until the very end of the Collapse, when the last of the great Bronze Age societies was brought to its lowest point. Then he disappeared, his work finished...for now.

He missed a spot in Phoenicia, though.

“Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky..”

Ignoring the bit of casual racism with Egypt not being one of the "lands of civilization," we get some more interesting details about Nyarlathotep. He looks and acts human, makes his scientific inventions and demonstrations with materials he buys from local shops, and holds public performances or lectures as he travels around the world; perhaps he even charges admission. A surprisingly mundane package around an unearthly presence, as demonstrated by the nightmares and weather events that follow in his wake.

I'm also interested by the detail of people telling each other to go see Nyarlathotep, even if they're afraid to do so themselves.

“I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.”

Seeing and hearing Nyarlathotep's performances and lectures takes something away from you, even as it opens your mind to knowledge about psychology, physics, and the future. Just knowing these things is bad for you, and makes you less than you were before.

Typically, darkness is associated with ignorance, and knowledge with light, but Nyarlathotep - who in this story and others is strongly connected with darkness, shadows, and nighttime - is a purveyor of knowledge. This seems like a refutation of the traditional concept of knowledge being positive and helpful. There is some information that will bring darkness to your world instead of light.

“It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about “imposture” and “static electricity”, Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.”

The "hot autumn night" is another reminder that the climate and seasons are in disarray.

In the narrator's city, Nyarlathotep's performance involves a video or picture show. It shows scenes of inevitable ruin, first of cities destroyed by war or disaster (I'm just going to decide right now that the "evil yellow faces" are plague victims, not Chinese), then of the planet freezing to death once the sun burns out, and finally of reality itself breaking down into entropy. As the video show ends, the audience are plagued by sparks and clinging shadows, which the narrator desperately tries to explain away as mere static electricity.

I'm not sure the narrator is wrong, but what difference does that make? Electromagnetism is one of the forces that bind matter together...and that tear matter apart. Magnetic radiation is the vector by which the sun loses energy, leading eventually to the slow death by cold and darkness shown in Nyarlathotep's presentation. Nyarlathotep was earlier established to perform scientific miracles using mundane equipment and materials that nonetheless horrified people. What makes him terrifying isn't his supernatural identity, but his natural one. The forces that govern the universe themselves are the enemy.

The people laugh and deny Nyarlathotep's power, even as they obey his every command and march out into the dark, nighttime street. Unwilling to realize what they're doing to themselves, insistent on not taking their own actions seriously as they dance to the tune of something beyond human control.

“I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness.”

Around the narrator and his companions, the city falls to ruins, the Earth cools, and reality as he know it is displaced by chaos. Of particular note is that features of the city are singled out as turning into death traps: the alleyway that devours those who enter it, the subway tunnel that drives people to cackling insanity, etc. More explicitly than before, our own creations are shown to play a part in our destruction, and might even finish wiping us out or reducing us to subhuman madmen long before the sun runs out of hydrogen.

Throughout the greater universe, there are only more scenes of decay, destruction, and obliteration. The ruins of alien civilizations, black holes where there once were suns, and the stellar winds that slowly diffuse the remaining energy of the Big Bang into a sterile equilibrium.

“And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.”

In the closing sentence of the story, we are told explicitly what Nyarlathotep is. The tenebrous, ultimate gods - a pantheon named by Sirs Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin - are slowly killing the universe, not out of malice, but simply because of their nature and its own, and the personification of these uncaring forces, the avatar of material reality in all its cruelty and self-destruction, is Nyarlathotep. He is the End, the herald of social, biological, and thermodynamic decay. A lone horseman of the apocalypse. And it is in our own nature to serve him.


This story can be seen as a dark refrain of "Poetry and the Gods." Eldritch forces from ancient history are returning to the world amidst a cultural shift, but instead of representing appreciation for art and beauty like the Olympians of that story, Nyarlathotep personifies the cynicism, shortsightedness, and apathy that leads to our own destruction. Nyarlathotep is the god of global warming, stock market crashes, nuclear bombs, and dust bowls. Things that we created, we caused, and we refuse to take seriously, even as they nag at our consciences. On a cosmic scale, above the level of human ability or responsibility, he is also the god of black holes, colliding galaxies, and the eventual heat death of the universe. And he is the ONE TRUE GOD who nothing can defy in the end. Its also a much better use of the themes of "Dagon," with a modern protagonist being presented with a sign of the coming armageddon...in this version, we actually get some indication that there will BE an armageddon, unlike in "Dagon."

From a zeitgeist perspective, one can see Nyarlathotep as the nightmare of a religious society coming to grips with the bleaker aspects of modern science. If this universe is really the creation of an intelligent being, what must that being be like? Darwin's belief in a benevolent creator was damaged by his discovery of the ichneumonidae, a family of wasps that lay their eggs in the bodies of living caterpillars and - fittingly - the inspiration behind the titular creature of "Alien." By Lovecraft's time, further investigation of the material universe had given us machine guns, mustard gas, and firebombs, and the massive troop movements enabled by railroads and steamships lead to a deadly influenza pandemic that even our best medical technology couldn't stop. What kind of god would set these sorts of traps in the world he created? If humanity is created in god's image, and it insist on destroying itself and its environment, what does that say about god? To a mind trained to look for divine purpose in the universe, a dystheistic horror like Nyarlathotep poses a constant, anxiety-inducing alternative to a more benevolent God.

On a more personal note, Lovecraft's life had been taking dark turns for some time now, and he was still grieving the institutionalization of his mother. Given that his two other parental figures - his father and grandfather - had died relatively young by this time, Lovecraft's vision of an arbitrarily destructive and uncaring world makes a great deal of sense. If the Dreamland stories like Sarnath and Ulthar were a kind of escape for Lovecraft, this one might have been a confrontation of the darkness. Those are both "ifs" and "mights," of course, I never talked to the guy myself.

In future stories, Nyarlathotep will play a more complicated role in things, and even gets some character traits that personify him as more than just a faceless incarnation of death. This story is more of a poetic explanation of what he represents, and perhaps a statement of thematic intent behind the other tales in which he and the other mythos entities will continue to appear. Since the events of "Nyarlathotep" are apocalyptic and implied to leave the world in a state at least as bad as the post-Collapse Mediterranean, I'll interpret it as not being in the same continuity as the other Cthulhu stories; at the very least, the characters in "At the Mountains of Madness" or "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" would mention it if Nyarlathotep was travelling around the world driving people insane as the seasons stopped making sense and society fell into warfare, ruin, and collapse. If I had to reconcile this with the other stories, I'd say that "Nyarlathotep" is the last of the mythos tales in chronological order, with the seemingly normal 1920's-30's world inhabited by Lovecraft's other protagonists coming to an end heralded by Nyarlathotep some time later.

Lovecraft published two more stories in the final month of 1920. The next one is "Polaris."