Fanzines are of particular importance to the history and development of roleplaying games and have, in recent years, enjoyed a welcome resurgence. RPG fanzines were themselves modeled on the earlier ’zines of science fiction fandom. Beginning in the 1930s, these amateur magazines helped popularize the then-new genres of science fiction and fantasy (the distinction between them being a later and largely arbitrary development). Much like the pulp magazines of the same era, early fanzines offer a treasure trove of insight into the tastes, debates, and creative energies of their communities. They capture ideas in motion, as well as passionate – and often acrimonious – arguments played out in print. I take strange comfort in the fact that the nerds of nearly a century ago were no more temperate in their enthusiasm than are their 21st century descendants.
Another way in which those old fanzines strangely mirror contemporary trends is that, much like the Internet today, they enabled fans to interact directly, albeit more slowly, with writers and artists whose work they admired. For example, The Acolyte, a fanzine edited by Francis Towner Laney from 1942 to 1946, often included contributions from members of the Lovecraft Circle, such as Donald Wandrei (co-founder of Arkham House) and Clark Ashton Smith. Though there are many issues of The Acolyte that are worthy of examination, issue #7 (Summer 1944) includes an interesting contribution from Smith.
Entitled "The Family Tree of the Gods," it's a transcript of part of a letter sent by CAS to Robert H. Barlow a decade earlier. In that letter, Smith lays out the genealogy of some of the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos and how they relate to some of his own creations, most notably Tsathoggua.
From what I have gathered, this family tree is intended as an addition/expansion/correction to one that Lovecraft created in a letter to James F. Morton in April 1933. That one seems to have been a joke, a bit of tongue in cheek genealogy that purported to show HPL's own lineage from Azathoth on down through Nyarlathotep to the present day. Here's a reproduction of that family tree:
As you can see, there are points of disagreement between the two genealogies that cannot easily be reconciled. That’s not really a problem, however, since I doubt that either Lovecraft or Smith intended these schemes to be definitive, let alone reliable. They function more as evocative gestures than as firm statements of "canon." Of course, some of their disciples and fans felt otherwise, seizing upon every stray detail and treating it as holy writ, as overzealous fans have been wont to do for as long as fandom has existed. Being prone to this sort of activity myself, I can hardly censure them too harshly. Even so, I can’t help but feel that attempts at encyclopedic categorization miss the point of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothothery entirely – hardly the first time fans have tried to pin down something that was meant to remain elusive and unsettling.
I present this material mostly as evidence of the ways Lovecraft and especially Smith interacted with fans and correspondents, engaging their enthusiasm while never fully surrendering the essential ambiguity of their creations. These genealogies reveal a kind of playful negotiation between creator and audience, where hints are offered, contradictions are allowed to stand, and the resulting uncertainty becomes a feature rather than a flaw. In that sense, the disagreements themselves are more revealing than any tidy reconciliation could ever be.
I cannot for the life of me find the correspondence between CAS and Lovecraft regarding genealogy but my impression of it was that they viewed the shared mythic viewpoint not as a dogmatic history but more akin to a multiverse, similar to how the ancients would "borrow" or "share" gods from other cultures. After all, Ashima and Ashera are the "same" god in different traditions, even though they have somewhat different local biographies (theographies?). Likewise Neptune and Poseidon, even though a Roman might describe his version in different ways than a Greek.
ReplyDeleteThere was a latent friction they were going for.
And as for Lovecraft's self-deprecating coda to his genealogy, I wouldn't dismiss it entirely as a lampoon. I think a fascinating contrast between the two trees is that CAS is clearly classical, literally nuclear, mostly natural and at least weighted towards sexual in nature. The roots at the top reproduce in a nuclear cataclysm, some branches are androgynous, but nonetheless sexually reproduced, until the line ends, once more by fission.
Lovecraft's is entirely asexual, save for two key branches: the parentage of the jovial ten-foot diameter twins, Nug and Yeb, whose father, notably is Yog-Sothoth, which I believe makes them half-siblings to Wilbur Whateley (assuming Whateley's absent father is, indeed, Yog-Sothoth - and Lavinia his consort).
The absence of Whateley entirely from such a tree is fascinating for many reasons.
Related to that absence is, via the Nyarlahotep line the other listed sexual union between Lovecraft's own ancestor/parents, a "hellish and nameless tragedy."
Wilbur Whateley shares a parental union that should be described in precisely the same way, and he, like his half-brother Nug was a twin (to the Dunwich Horror). Whateley is vaguely autobiographical to Lovecraft himself: missing father, grandfather's wealth and library, insane mother, ugly (at least in self-perception, thanks to his mother's unstable perceptions of her child). I'd even argue that the tree reveals a lot about Lovecraft's feelings toward his parents:
Thus the two separate branches of Lovecraft's tree mirror Lovecraft and his own fiction. It is a personal and confessional genealogy, in contrast to CAS' remote, romantic and poetic structure: Viburnia is an obvious mirror to Lavinia: Ghoth (and therefore Lovecraft) is a direct descendant of Yog-Sothoth. Whateley and Lovecraft are half-brothers. Lovecraft was shocked to learn he had a Welsh ancestor (having for decades believed himself to be of pure Anglo-Saxon stock), but Lovecraft's tree, while indeed humorous, reveals the source of his complex relationship with miscegenation.
Lovecraft was self-deprecating, yes, but also awash in loss of identity and grief of ancestry and alienation in Modernity, and that works itself out in his humor.
Smith's "correction" to the Mythos genealogy is far less personal, a poetic interrelationship of sonic chants and traditional theophony. CAS in this case is clearly the better artist, but Lovecraft is the more intimate.