I sort of doubt this quote, since James Ferdinand Morton, one of HPL's closest friends, not only was an early advocate of civil rights, but I've seen reports from several sources that his wife, Pearl K. Merritt (also a friend of Lovecraft's), was of African-American descent. Then again, maybe it occurred before Morton and Merritt got hitched.
Also, HPL's friend and collaborator Winifred Virginia Jackson/Jordan, from whom Sonia claimed she stole HPL, was not only the mistress to William Stanley Braithwaite (look him up), but was married to a black man (not Nyarlathotep). So even for the early 20th Century Grandpa was finding that the color line was getting a bit blurred. He may not have been all that happy about it, but he undoubtedly handled it with the discretion and taste required of a gentleman.
Best,
Scott

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm still working on my "Lovecraft and Werewolves"
> essay; I'm on page 200 now, and it keeps getting
> longer, since I've expanded it to deal with
> Lovecraft's view of paganism. It's now called
> "Repentant Pagan: Lovecraft and Classicism".
>
> I'm having trouble, however, finding an anecdote
> relating to Lovecraft. I've checked through all
> my books and biographies until my eyes are
> running, stayed up until 3AM looking, but still
> haven't been able to find it. I seem to recall a
> story about Lovecraft telling one of his friends,
> who said he found women of color attractive, that
> anyone who "slept with a black woman should have
> the 'n-word' tattooed on his forehead!". If
> anyone can direct me to this quote, I'd be
> grateful. I'm trying to connect it to Lovecraft's
> climax of "The Mound", in which the "white man"
> has his capture by his alien mistress branded into
> his skin.
> GDC

Scott Connors Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I sort of doubt this quote, since James Ferdinand
> Morton, one of HPL's closest friends, not only was
> an early advocate of civil rights, but I've seen
> reports from several sources that his wife, Pearl
> K. Merritt (also a friend of Lovecraft's), was of
> African-American descent. Then again, maybe it
> occurred before Morton and Merritt got hitched.
> Also, HPL's friend and collaborator Winifred
> Virginia Jackson/Jordan, from whom Sonia claimed
> she stole HPL, was not only the mistress to
> William Stanley Braithwaite (look him up), but was
> married to a black man (not Nyarlathotep). So
> even for the early 20th Century Grandpa was
> finding that the color line was getting a bit
> blurred. He may not have been all that happy
> about it, but he undoubtedly handled it with the
> discretion and taste required of a gentleman.
> Best,
> Scott
>

I disagree. The whole quote has a ring of authenticity to it, from its accurate reflection of Lovecraft’s opinions on race, to its accurate capturing of Lovecraft’s tendency, when excited, to use folksy and colloquial expressions. Indeed, the only thing even remotely startling about this quote is that it represents an aspect of Lovecraft’s life which has unexpectedly managed to escape through the filter with which early memoir-writers and later Lovecraftian scholarship have managed to obscure certain aspects of his thought and philosophy. (vide L. Sprague de Camp’s later contention that being shocked by Lovecraft’s racism is being “like a Prohibitionist who writes about Poe but cannot get past the fact that Poe was a drunkard” (deCAMP 469), the difference, of course, being, that Poe was not engaged in a lifelong and intellectually acute polemic on behalf of drinking, but merely suffered from a disease, whereas Lovecraft, on the other hand, was not diseased, but the rational exponent of a particular Imperialist-racist ideology and Spenglerian worldview: a worldview whose multifarious flaws are all open to debate and critical examination. Or witness the more ridiculous and recent assertions of Robert Waugh, who writes in Lovecraft Studies that “Willy-nilly we are forced to align ourselves-- not with his [Lovecraft’s] anti-Semitism-- but with the wound from which his prejudices proceed, and not only align ourselves with it but to probe it and make it hurt again, because it is so integral a part of his fiction” (LS 39:33) --as if to read Dennis Wheatley’s racist rhetoric in one of his Satanic novels one must perforce “align oneself” with the British Imperialism which underlies it.)

Lovecraft did indeed have a gentlemanly code of “discretion and taste”, as you say: and part of this code was the fact that a “gentlemen”, as Lovecraft put it in his story “Medusa’s Coil”, had “no trouble at all to make him let the nigger wenches alone”(thus; HM 170) --and if a gentleman did violate this racist taboo, then, as violators of this gentlemanly code, they deserved, as Lovecraft himself said, to have the word “NEGRO” tattooed on their foreheads.

That the above anecdote is authentic, and, in fact, was well known amongst Lovecraft’s friends, is suggested by E. Hoffman Price’s posthumous Lovecraft memoir, in Book of the Dead, in which Price avers:

“There was never any trace of racism or even racial discussions in our letters, not ever a trace. Knowing that I had fraternized with Syrians, Jews, Chinese, and Algerian Arabs, and inferring that I had not overlooked the aesthetic potentialities of selected Japanese and French ladies, there was never a suggestion of the denunciation of all but white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant persons, which I read, years later, in early volumes of Selected Letters.

“In the spring of 1976, Harry Brobst told me that Lovecraft was amazingly adaptable as well as benevolent, so that he would never knowingly offend either friend of associate. Apparently he reserved his condemnation of drink and un-chaste women to those who shared his puritanical views.” (BOTD 59-60)

Elsewhere, in the context of a review of L. Sprague deCamp’s biography of H. P. Lovecraft, in which Lovecraft’s above-quoted comments to Morton are preserved, Price reiterates: “Ever considerate and gracious, he [Lovecraft] never addressed a word of racism to me [in letters] --he knew that I had fraternized with Malays, Japanese, Chinese, and Syrians, as well as various non-Nordic French folks.” [clarifications mine] (BOTD 339) I would suggest that these various passages suggest that Price was perhaps independently aware of such outbursts as are quoted by deCamp, above, and that he was citing Lovecraft’s lack of criticism of his own various involvements with foreign women as a counter to such anecdotes.

If you delve a bit more, you’ll find that Lovecraft (like certain present-day critics) was very dismissive of Morton’s civil rights advocacy, Lovecraft’s comments about Morton’s civil rights work having the same tone of amused condescension one finds in his earlier Conservative essays on the “might of the Teuton”. Indeed, Lovecraft first came into contact with Morton via a bitter epistolary argument in 1915, in which Lovecraft, expounding views just a little bit to the right of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, criticized the pro-black views of a Jewish amateur journalist named Charles D. Isaacson, Lovecraft describing the Ku Klux Klan as “that noble but much-maligned band of Southerners” (MISC 424) as he did so. (Elsewhere, echoing Coulter’s modern equation of liberalism with “treason”, Lovecraft suggests that those, like Isaacson, advocating pacifism, are guilty of “‘a crime’” “‘deserving of severe legal punishment’”. [JOSHI 136]) Lovecraft’s friend Reinhardt Kleiner, in retrospectively discussing this racial dispute of Lovecraft’s, observed that “Lovecraft pulled an amount of heavy artillery into action against” Isaacson’s “drollery” (CANNON 158), as if such things as a concern for equal rights and the barbarism of war are “drolleries”. No doubt for some they are.

Morton, a Harvard graduate (Lovecraft never even graduated from high school) and the author of such works as The Curse of Race Prejudice (1906 [JOSHI 136]), for his part, entered this debate on Isaacson’s side, writing an essay entitled “‘Conservatism’ Gone Mad”, which read in part, “‘Mr. Lovecraft holds that a mere accident of birth should determine for all time the social status of an individual; that the color of the skin should count for more than the quality of the brain or the character’” (JOSHI 136) --words which prefigure those later spoken aloud by Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Washington mall, and which have since become enshrined as the finest expression of America’s vision. Lovecraft, however, for whom the individual rights and freedom of Blacks meant nothing, himself later wrote rather condescendingly of his friend Morton, “He has thought too much---overreached sane human limitations….. He is to be tolerated gently, and his declining years must not be vexed with any more criticism than is demanded by the self-defense of his victims.“ (SL I 17) Of these so-called “declining years” of Morton’s, however, several years after Lovecraft himself was dead, Morton’s friend E. Hoffmann Price once wrote, “Mortonius makes it very clear why Cato, at age eighty, began to study Greek” --Cato, of course, being the arch Roman statesman and xenophobe, something of whose apparent gradual thawing during his later years some have erroneously attempted to graft onto Lovecraft himself. For Price, this relation of Morton with Cato had nothing to do with “thawing” after a lifetime of bitter conservatism, however, but rather was related rather to the endless fecundity and possibilities of Morton’s mind, even at the end of his life.

Peter Cannon, for his part, in his Lovecraftian memoir anthology Lovecraft Remembered, supplies a strangely ambivalent portrait of Morton in his introduction to Morton’s memoir, writing:

“A Harvard graduate, a Yankee of old New England stock, the grandson of the man who composed the words to ’America’, an authority on genealogy and mineralogy, he stood out as perhaps the most eccentric of the Kalems. As revealed in a letter to Maurice W. Moe shortly after his initial New York visit, Lovecraft was sensitive to the man’s shortcomings: ‘Morton is, in a sense, a pathetic figure. Always animated by a futile and quixotic idealism and determination to be true to his own convictions, he has wasted a magnificent brain on radical nonsense, squandered a vigorous life in espousal of unsound causes, and alienated most of those whose respect he really deserves through his conscientious advocacy of repellant ideas.’ One of those causes was Negro rights. To be fair, Lovecraft was not wholly lacking in sympathy…..” [emphases mine] (CANNON 176)

Whether it is Kleiner, referring to Isaacson’s ideas as “drollery”, or Cannon, referring to Morton’s by now firmly-established ideas regarding “Negro rights” as “eccentric” “shortcomings” requiring “sympathy” from the pro-KKK Lovecraft, there seems to be a strange amount of equivocation in modern representation of Lovecraft’s ideas, which perhaps explains why Lovecraft’s obviously polemical intent has been so difficult for modern Lovecraftian criticism to uncover.

For my part: in my essay, which has now reached page 600, and is now entitled “Dark Arcadia: Arcadia vs. Arkham in Lovecraft’s Fiction”, I manage to establish close linguistic parallels between Lovecraft’s statement to Morton, i.e. “Any white man who would do such a thing ought to have the word NEGRO branded on his forehead!’” (deCAMP 235-36), and the ending of “The Mound”, where Lovecraft reveals the mutilation done to the Spanish Zamacona, who Lovecraft describes as “’That white man’”, in reinforcement of the essentially racial nature of Lovecraft’s climax (“Yes ---it had been a very human being once; and what is more, it had been white,” Lovecraft writes). Lovecraft goes on:

“On its white and only slightly hairy chest some letters had been gashed or branded ---I had not stopped to investigate, but had merely noted that they were in an awkward and fumbling Spanish; and awkward Spanish implying a kind of ironic use of the language by an alien inscriber familiar neither with the idiom nor the Roman letters used to record it. The inscription read “Secuestrado a la voluntadad de Xinaian en el cuerpo decapitado de Tlayub’ ---’Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the headless body of T’la-yub’”. (HM 163)

Perhaps the most striking parallel between these two statements is the marked conjunction between the words “white man” and “branded” in both passages; but perhaps more important is the “ironical use” of English by the decadent aliens. Lovecraft’s racist ideology was neither sick nor unconscious: it was deft, and promoted with all of the considerable rhetorical skills at his disposal. The only difference between the quotes is that the former represents Lovecraft's ideas "in the raw", as it were, while the latter represents a more artful and disguised exposition of them.

As for Lovecraft’s relationship with Winifred Jackson (aka Elizabeth Berkeley), who was not only married to Horace Jordan, a black man (JOSHI 199), but was involved in a relationship with William Stanley Braithwaite, a noted black poet and editor (200); --as you say yourself, Lovecraft did not marry her, and Lovecraft’s lifelong attitude that “blacks” and “women” were twin “troubles” which did not come “singly” (MISC 336), was perhaps reinforced, if not first suggested, by such relationships of Jackson’s. Lovecraft would later combine both of these dislikes, of blacks and women, in the form of the shoggoth s, in which he managed to combine the “blackness” of blacks, with the “eyes” of women --along with the “imitativeness” of the Jews. The very name of the "shoggoth" seems to preserve aspects of this "triple threat" from Blacks, women, and Jews, "shoggoth" apparently being a contraction of Lovecraft's racist "Shub-Niggurath", retaining the initial "sh-", the middle "gg", and the Hebraic "-th" suffix, while the feminine element is provided by the fact that "Shub-Niggurath" was the "Goat with a Thousand Young". I go into all of this pretty exhaustively in my essay.
…………………….
Any suggestions, anyone, on where that new quote I need came from? I’m really desperate here. Help, please, someone………



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 28 Apr 07 | 08:25PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
> Lovecraft would later combine both of these
> dislikes, of blacks and women, in the form of the
> shoggoth s, in which he managed to combine the
> “blackness” of blacks, with the “eyes” of
> women --along with the “imitativeness” of the
> Jews.

You need to work on your arguments there.

1) Black is a very common colour in horror fiction. Why does it have to be black people that provided Lovecraft with the colour of the shoggoths?
2) The eyes -- I've checked every occurrence of the word "eye" in At the Mountains of Madness, and there's no connection to women anywhere. Need I point out that there are other things that have eyes as well, including men, potatoes, anteaters, squids, and turtles? I simply don't see the female connection.
3) Shapeshifting or amorphous creatures are also fairly common in horror and science fiction -- do all of them reflect anti-semitism? If yes, how do you explain Bloch's "Terror in Cut-Throat Cove"? If no, then why would Lovecraft's shapeshifting creatures be an expression of anti-semitsim when those of other authors aren't?


> The very name of the "shoggoth" seems to
> preserve aspects of this "triple threat" from
> Blacks, women, and Jews, "shoggoth" apparently
> being a contraction of Lovecraft's racist
> "Shub-Niggurath", retaining the initial "sh-", the
> middle "gg", and the Hebraic "-th" suffix, while
> the feminine element is provided by the fact that
> "Shub-Niggurath" was the "Goat with a Thousand
> Young". I go into all of this pretty exhaustively
> in my essay.

That's your personal interpretation, not a commonly agreed-upon fact. A Swedish scholar interpreted the word "shoggoths" as being inspired by the Goths, who was the downfall of the Roman civilisation in more or less the same way that the shoggoths caused the destruction of the civilisation of the Old Ones. I'd say that's just as valid.

As for the connection between shoggoths and Shub-Niggurath -- I don't buy it. Also note that all the letters necessary to form the word "shoggoth" are present in "Yog-Sothoth" (well, except for one "g", but doubling a letter is easily done).

I can't see either why "Shub-Niggurath" should be necessarily racist. Lovecraft knew Latin -- is it impossible that he was directly inspired by the Latin word for "black"? Or that he was inspired by Dunsany's "Sheol-Nugganoth"? Besides, if Shub-Niggurath is an expression of racism, and if racism was so important to Lovecraft -- then why isn't Shub-Niggurath mentioned more often?

One more thing: I can't see how a guy who was so devoted to his aunts as Lovecraft obviously was could be the misogynist you claim.

Gavin's essay should be pretty interesting. I once wrote an essay on HPL and Morton years ago for the EOD (don't even have a copy anymore), and I went into detail into the "Minor Key" debate with Isaacson.
Perhaps Sam Loveman was the source? Maybe he made the charge in one of his pieces for Gerry de la Ree?
I actually agree that HPL saw shoggoths as a surrogate for blacks. I've been toying with an essay on "At the Mountains of Madness" as reflecting Southern fears of "servile insurrection." This is not as strange as it might seem.
Best,
Scott

I finally found the quote I was looking for; it was in an old, old issue of Lovecraft Studies, submitted by Peter Cannon.

Martinus Wrote:
----------------------------------
> You need to work on your arguments there.
> 1) Black is a very common colour in horror
> fiction. Why does it have to be black people that
> provided Lovecraft with the colour of the
> shoggoths?

1) True, but then one has to consider how this “blackness” of the Shoggoths is presented in Lovecraft’s fiction, that is, in conjunction with the language of slavery, trouble, and subjugation, as when Lovecraft speaks of the “occasionally stubborn volition” of the shoggoths, of how “They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine old Ones”, Shoggoths forming, Lovecraft writes, “ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community” --an idea which has tended to be glossed over by such critics as Fritz Leiber, who describe the Shoggoths, rather naively, as “machines”. (Leiber writes: “They [the Old Ones] also created hypnotically controlled protoplasmic masses which were their chief machines. These shoggoths eventually evolved mental powers which made them extremely dangerous creatures. (Here we begin to see Lovecraft’s own evolving sympathy for his monsters; by and large he is for the Old Ones and against the shoggoths.)” (LOVECRAFT REMEMBERED 481) Indeed, there is a rather eerie resemblance between Lovecraft’s imaginary Shoggoths, and what Dr. Joel Kovel, in his book White Racism: A Psychohistory, calls the imaginary “black body” created within the symbolic matrix of aversive racism in the American North --what Robert Waugh in Lovecraft Studies 40 calls “the untransformed excremental images” of the Shoggoths at the climax of “At the Mountains of Madness”.

> 2) The eyes -- I've checked every occurrence of
> the word "eye" in At the Mountains of Madness, and
> there's no connection to women anywhere. Need I
> point out that there are other things that have
> eyes as well, including men, potatoes, anteaters,
> squids, and turtles? I simply don't see the female
> connection.

2) When one considers “eyes” as representative of women, one considers not only “At the Mountains of Madness”, but also the rest of Lovecraft’s fiction, in which “Pan”, “Astarte”, “flutes”, “piping”, “eyes”, the “moon”, and other interconnected and associated aspects of pagan and Hellenic myth, are inverted by Lovecraft to form --haphazardly, to be sure-- a symbolic caricature of decadence and decay. The “eye” aspect of this system is particularly complex, applying both to women and to sensuality and decadence in general, and of course it is very hard to do justice to it in one brief sentence.

As early as “Psychopompos”, we find the Dame du Blois causing evil “with glances weird and wild” --a power , or rather corruptive influence, which she passes to her husband (“Whilst ancient Pierre [the aged often err]/Laid all her husband‘s mystery to her.”) In “Arthur Jermyn”, Lovecraft describes Alfred Jermyn’s romance with a circus gorilla, writing of how, “With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars” --an image which is parodied later in Lovecraft’s revision of “Arthur Jermyn”, “Medusa’s Coil”, in which (the “negress”) Marceline de Russy “eyes” the equally strange-eyed decadent artist Edward Marsh --whose decadent eyes allow him to see her “true” form. In “The Horror at Red Hook”, Lovecraft describes a proto-shoggoth in the form of a “cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes”, to which, predictably, Lovecraft then adds the elements of the “sea” and “nymphs” with the appearance of “LILITH”, whom he describes “naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background”. (This pedestal will later reappear…with Cthulhu sitting upon it.) In “The Thing on the Doorstep”, Lovecraft writes, “she [Asenath] would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind”; She [Asenath] eyed him continually with an almost predatory air…”, etc., etc. Occasionally, Lovecraft uses the “eyeing” to refer to men, as when Lovecraft speaks of Herbert West’s gradual Pickman-like degeneration into a “ghoul” who “eyes” “half-covetously… any very healthy living physique” --but he does so, significantly, in the context of the notorious and decadent homosexual figure of Heliogabalus or Elagabalus, suggesting, again, that decadence which Lovecraft associates with such “eyeing”, as seen in his association of the eye with the decadent artist Marsh, mentioned above.

> 3) Shapeshifting or amorphous creatures are also
> fairly common in horror and science fiction -- do
> all of them reflect anti-semitism? If yes, how do
> you explain Bloch's "Terror in Cut-Throat Cove"?
> If no, then why would Lovecraft's shapeshifting
> creatures be an expression of anti-semitsim when
> those of other authors aren't?

3) The anti-Semitic aspects of the shoggoth derive not from their “amorphousness”, (which Lovecraft would seem to have derived instead from Machen’s story “The Great God Pan”, and which would seem to represent certain aspects of feminity --Lovecraft later attributing Pan’s daughter, Helen Vaughn’s, shoggothian change of sex in the Machen story to the male/female Asenath Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep”--) but rather from the “imitativeness” of the shoggoths, the supposed unoriginality and imitativeness of the Jews having a long history in anti-Semitic rhetoric.

These Shoggoths, recall, are wholly “imitative” in structure --capable of “self-modeling powers” “in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion” ---a description which Lovecraft makes in the context of discussing the latter-day “accidental intelligence” and independent will of the Shoggoths, which directly leads to the decay of the Old Ones who are governing them. This decay of the Old Ones’ society, detectable through their art, involves what critic Robert Waugh astutely recognizes as an anti-Semitic argument, Lovecraft associating the latter-day Old Ones’ statues --with their noticeable imitative quality and “degradation of skill”-- with “such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Oman manner”, these works being no more than “degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superceded.” Palmyra, significantly, was a wealthy mercantile city in Syria associated with the silk trade, inhabited by a small population, mainly Jews. This supposedly “imitative“ quality of Jewish achievements is apparently a staple of anti-Semitic rhetoric, featured even in the writings of Adolph Hitler himself, who writes in Mein Kampf,

“…the most essential characteristic we must always bear in mind is that there has never been a Jewish art and accordingly there is none today either; …what they do accomplish in the field of art is either patchwork or intellectual theft… To what extent the Jew takes over foreign culture, imitating or rather ruining it, can be seen from the fact that he is mostly found in the art which seems to require least original invention, the art of acting. But even here, in reality, he is only a ‘juggler’, or rather an ape;…”

Notice here Hitler’s association of Jews with acting, just as Lovecraft elsewhere principally associates the Shoggoths with mimicry, Hitler, significantly, further compounding this “acting” with an analogy with apes ---an analogy, too, which likewise has numerous parallels with the bestial degeneration so common throughout Lovecraft’s writings, as well as when Lovecraft speaks of the “degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superceded” in “At the Mountains of Madness”. (The city of Palmyra, interestingly, was likewise ruled by a beautiful black queen named Zenobia, a self-prolaimed "Queen of the East" who, it is thought, killed her husband by assassination, and subsequently attempted to assert her independence from Rome [a high crime in the eyes of Lovecraft], thus leading to her removal and the triumphant Roman intervention in the city --this, along with the fact that Palmyra’s chief deity was the “moon” --likewise a symbol of degeneration in the works of Lovecraft-- showing that Palmyra easily served as a multifaceted cypher for Lovecraft’s endless and interconnected polemical antagonisms.)

>
> That's your personal interpretation, not a
> commonly agreed-upon fact.

Any attempt at a derivation of the word “shoggoth” must, of course, remain tentative, which is why I used the word “seems” in my earlier response. But I think “Shub-Niggurath” forms the best candidate for a source for the later “Shoggoth” contraction, because “Shub-Niggurath” already contains within it the multiple matrix of “horror” --or, if one prefers, irrational hatred-- which Lovecraft was later to compact within the black-hole of the shoggoth --i.e. the black, the Hebraic, and the feminine. One simply does not find such things associated with “Yog-Sothoth”, who as I understand it, is apparently intended to be some sort of formless, chaotic deity, or in such similar words as “Yuggoth”, etc., although of course one must realize that all of Lovecraft’s supposedly “cosmic” entities function to some extent as caricatures of a pagan and Hellenic pantheon whose Bacchanalian excesses and mysticism Lovecraft associated with decadence and decay.

>A Swedish scholar
> interpreted the word "shoggoths" as being inspired
> by the Goths, who was the downfall of the Roman
> civilisation in more or less the same way that the
> shoggoths caused the destruction of the
> civilisation of the Old Ones. I'd say that's just
> as valid.

An interpretation of the word “shoggoth” which finds a derivation from the Goths who destroyed the Roman empire-- and I thank you very much Martinus for bringing this to my attention-- would still tend to confirm my view of the symbolic function of the shoggoth, since as I should have noted, and as Robert Waugh notes elsewhere, the shoggoths represent a multi-faceted symbol in which Lovecraft created what was, for him, the culmination, the very apotheosis, of horror and decay. And for Lovecraft the central component of this “horror” was the undermining of what he saw as the traditional social order --whether by “rebellious”, “uncontrollable”, or “intractable” slaves, or by barbarians such as the Goths.

> I can't see either why "Shub-Niggurath" should be
> necessarily racist. Lovecraft knew Latin -- is it
> impossible that he was directly inspired by the
> Latin word for "black"?

Of course, even if “Shub-Niggurath” does reflect a Latin origin for Lovecraft’s word, Lovecraft is still using Latin to represent the word “black”, which then leads us back again to the question: why it is that Lovecraft should specifically associate a goat with blackness? --this then leading us naturally to consider the (feminine) witch cult and Lovecraft’s depiction of it, and the women associated with it, as transmitters of decadence, bestiality, and hybrid degradation, as well as Lovecraft‘s association of women with blacks throughout his fiction.

>Or that he was inspired by
> Dunsany's "Sheol-Nugganoth"?

Even if Lovecraft’s “Shub-Niggurath” can be regarding as being derived from Dunsany’s “Sheol-Nugganoth” --and, again, I thank you very much for this suggestion-- and certainly the close resemblance makes it seem likely-- even so, one is still left with the question of why Lovecraft has so altered the word to conform to his larger racial and ideological symbology of “blackness”.

>Besides, if
> Shub-Niggurath is an expression of racism, and if
> racism was so important to Lovecraft -- then why
> isn't Shub-Niggurath mentioned more often?

“Shub-Niggurath” may not have been used often in Lovecraft’s canon, but one can certainly analyze it where it was used, at which point we find that it was but one small element within a larger grammar which Lovecraft used to convey his conservative ideological polemic against (what he perceived to be) racial and societal decay.

> One more thing: I can't see how a guy who was so
> devoted to his aunts as Lovecraft obviously was
> could be the misogynist you claim.

As for Lovecraft’s “aunts”: a man, of course, can never choose his relatives , but he can certainly choose his views. And if we study the women who, in Lovecraft’s fiction, are depicted as agents and transmitters of decay, one finds that these women are, usually, nothing like his aunts, but rather naked nymphs like those he satirized in his poems to Alfred Galpin, and who, as in “The Horror at Red Hook”, participate in the orgiastic, bestial Bacchanalias which Lovecraft so deplored; either that, or as aged witches whom Lovecraft invariable associates with influences of decay. (In “The Man of Stone”, for example, Lovecraft attributes the transmission of witch-cult lore through Mad Dan’s family, including rites of “Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young and “sacrificing the Black Goat at Hallow Eve….” [HM 207], specifically to his “mother’s side” of the family, “handed down” through the Van Kauran family since 1587”, Lovecraft reiterating later how Mad Dan “practiced all sorts of hellish ceremonies handed down by his mother’s people”. [HM 213] Elsewhere, in Lovecraft’s “The Diary of Alonzo Typer”, too, this transmissible of the decadent witch tradition will be associated specifically with women, in this case “Dirck van de Heyl’s wife” from Salem, “a daughter of the unmentionable Abaddon Corey.” [HM 306]) Other women in Lovecraft’s fiction correspond to the Medusa/Gorgon/Semiramis/Zenobia mode of woman (i.e., the Near Eastern femme fatale): the Dame du Blois, Marceline deRussy, Queen Nitocris --all stand-ins, basically, for Astarte, and for that “Mother Goddess” whom Lovecraft, in “Out of the Aeons”, specifically identifies with Shub-Niggurath. (HM 273) This figure of the goddess reaches its ultimate inversion and caricature in Lovecraft’s “Arthur Jermyn”, where the “goddess” of a tribe in Africa --and the wife of Lord Jermyn-- is revealed to be nothing other than a half-human white “ape”. In no case is there any discernable relation to Lovecraft’s aunts, except perhaps through contrast; the closest example to Lovecraft‘s aunts, Mrs. Gardner, from “The Colour Out of Space”, ends up devolving herself, until she is “walking on all fours” (imagery associated by Lovecraft with decadence throughout his fiction) and making leering “faces” like those he associates with Lilith, Dame du Blois, and Asenath Waite.

Scott Connors wrote:
---------------------------------------
>> I've been toying with an essay on "At the Mountains of Madness" as
>>reflecting Southern fears of "servile insurrection." This
>>is not as strange as it might seem.

I would agree with Scott Connors wholeheartedly with regard to “At the Mountains of Madness” directly “reflecting Southern fears of ‘servile insurrection’”, except that I would expand the scope of Lovecraft’s subtext even further, to reflect a lifelong polemic against what Lovecraft termed, in his racist poem “De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature Over Northern Ignorance” (1905), the “saturnalian feast” of “the savage black, the ape-resembling beast”. This “Saturnalian” triumph of the “servants” at the expense of their “masters”-- the Roman Saturnalia being associated, as it is during Boxing Day in England even today, with a switching of places between masters and servants-- is a constant theme (and a constant worry) throughout Lovecraft’s fiction, and often represented by the symbol of “beheading” in his works, i.e. a “dismemberment” of the natural order. And whether it be the struggle between African-American slaves and their masters, or between the Irish vs. the English, or the Indians vs. the English, etc., etc., etc. --in the struggle of masters vs. servants, Lovecraft invariably sides with the masters, as representatives of order against chaos. In this sense, the popular interpretation, starting with Fritz Leiber and others, and continuing on down to this day, of Lovecraft’s famous line “…and poor Old Ones!…Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn--whatever they had been, they were men!”, as reflecting some modification of Lovecraft’s attitudes toward his “monsters”, and perhaps even a softening of his conservative and ideological views, reflects a serious misreading of the text --Lovecraft reserving his encomium only for those creatures which, in his parable of Spenglerian decay, represent the humans and the masters of his tale --certainly not for the “bestial” Shoggoths who, through their stubbornness and intractableness (common American epithets for blacks and black slaves), bring about their decadence, hybdrism/degredation, democratic weakness and disunity, and eventual and inevitable downfall.

The only instance I have ever found of Lovecraft actually siding with an aboriginal or native people against an colonial force or oppressor, is in his early praise for the aboriginal Pelasgians of Greece, whose later absorption into the larger populations of the Greeks and the Romans he credits with the resultant and eventual greatness of Greece and Rome. (LETTERS TO GALPIN 89)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 14 May 07 | 06:24PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
>
> 1) True, but then one has to consider how this
> “blackness” of the Shoggoths is presented in
> Lovecraft’s fiction, that is, in conjunction
> with the language of slavery, trouble, and
> subjugation, as when Lovecraft speaks of the
> “occasionally stubborn volition” of the
> shoggoths, of how “They seem to have become
> peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the
> Permian age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million
> years ago, when a veritable war of resubjugation
> was waged upon them by the marine old Ones”,
> Shoggoths forming, Lovecraft writes, “ideal
> slaves to perform the heavy work of the
> community” --an idea which has tended to be
> glossed over by such critics as Fritz Leiber, who
> describe the Shoggoths, rather naively, as
> “machines”. (Leiber writes: “They also
> created hypnotically controlled protoplasmic
> masses which were their chief machines. These
> shoggoths eventually evolved mental powers which
> made them extremely dangerous creatures. (Here we
> begin to see Lovecraft’s own evolving sympathy
> for his monsters; by and large he is for the Old
> Ones and against the shoggoths.)”

Here you could also use Dyer's reaction upon finding the decapitated Old Ones: ("They were men!") from AtMoM.

> (LOVECRAFT
> REMEMBERED 481) Indeed, there is a rather eerie
> resemblance between Lovecraft’s imaginary
> Shoggoths, and what Dr. Joel Kovel, in his book
> White Racism: A Psychohistory, calls the imaginary
> “black body” created within the symbolic
> matrix of aversive racism in the American North
> --what Robert Waugh in Lovecraft Studies 40 calls
> “the untransformed excremental images” of the
> Shoggoths at the climax of “At the Mountains of
> Madness”.
>
> 2) When one considers “eyes” as representative
> of women, one considers not only “At the
> Mountains of Madness”, but also the rest of
> Lovecraft’s fiction, in which “Pan”,
> “Astarte”, “flutes”, “piping”,
> “eyes”, the “moon”, and other
> interconnected and associated aspects of pagan and
> Hellenic myth, are inverted by Lovecraft to form
> --haphazardly, to be sure-- a symbolic caricature
> of decadence and decay. The “eye” aspect of
> this system is particularly complex, applying both
> to women and to sensuality and decadence in
> general, and of course it is very hard to do
> justice to it in one brief sentence.
>
> As early as “Psychopompos”, we find the Dame
> du Blois causing evil “with glances weird and
> wild” --a power , or rather corruptive
> influence, which she passes to her husband
> (“Whilst ancient Pierre /Laid all her
> husband‘s mystery to her.”) In “Arthur
> Jermyn”, Lovecraft describes Alfred Jermyn’s
> romance with a circus gorilla, writing of how,
> “With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly
> fascinated, and on many occasions the two would
> eye each other for long periods through the
> intervening bars” --an image which is parodied
> later in Lovecraft’s revision of “Arthur
> Jermyn”, “Medusa’s Coil”, in which (the
> “negress”) Marceline de Russy “eyes” the
> equally strange-eyed decadent artist Edward Marsh
> --whose decadent eyes allow him to see her
> “true” form. In “The Horror at Red
> Hook”, Lovecraft describes a proto-shoggoth in
> the form of a “cloudy, semi-visible bulk of
> shapeless elemental things with eyes”, to which,
> predictably, Lovecraft then adds the elements of
> the “sea” and “nymphs” with the
> appearance of “LILITH”, whom he describes
> “naked phosphorescent thing which swam into
> sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat
> leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the
> background”. (This pedestal will later
> reappear…with Cthulhu sitting upon it.) In
> “The Thing on the Doorstep”, Lovecraft writes,
> “she would frighten her schoolmates with leers
> and winks of an inexplicable kind”; She eyed
> him continually with an almost predatory
> air…”, etc., etc. Occasionally, Lovecraft
> uses the “eyeing” to refer to men, as when
> Lovecraft speaks of Herbert West’s gradual
> Pickman-like degeneration into a “ghoul” who
> “eyes” “half-covetously… any very healthy
> living physique” --but he does so,
> significantly, in the context of the notorious
> and decadent homosexual figure of Heliogabalus or
> Elagabalus, suggesting, again, that decadence
> which Lovecraft associates with such “eyeing”,
> as seen in his association of the eye with the
> decadent artist Marsh, mentioned above.

Sorry, I still find the whole "eye" thing pretty far-fetched.

> 3) The anti-Semitic aspects of the shoggoth
> derive not from their “amorphousness”, (which
> Lovecraft would seem to have derived instead from
> Machen’s story “The Great God Pan”, and
> which would seem to represent certain aspects of
> feminity --Lovecraft later attributing Pan’s
> daughter, Helen Vaughn’s, shoggothian change of
> sex in the Machen story to the male/female Asenath
> Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep”--) but
> rather from the “imitativeness” of the
> shoggoths, the supposed unoriginality and
> imitativeness of the Jews having a long history in
> anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But there are imitative shape-shifters in other SF and horror fiction too -- are they anti-Semitic too? Your later argument (which I've snipped for reasons of space) supports your thinking very well, but I think this is a matter that needs addressing.
>
> >
> > That's your personal interpretation, not a
> > commonly agreed-upon fact.
>
> Any attempt at a derivation of the word
> “shoggoth” must, of course, remain tentative,
> which is why I used the word “seems” in my
> earlier response. But I think
> “Shub-Niggurath” forms the best candidate for
> a source for the later “Shoggoth” contraction,
> because “Shub-Niggurath” already contains
> within it the multiple matrix of “horror”
> --or, if one prefers, irrational hatred-- which
> Lovecraft was later to compact within the
> black-hole of the shoggoth --i.e. the black, the
> Hebraic, and the feminine. One simply does not
> find such things associated with
> “Yog-Sothoth”, who as I understand it, is
> apparently intended to be some sort of formless,
> chaotic deity, or in such similar words as
> “Yuggoth”, etc.,

But doesn't he describe "Shub-Niggurath" as a "cloud-like entity", hence formless, in one of his letters?

> An interpretation of the word “shoggoth” which
> finds a derivation from the Goths who destroyed
> the Roman empire-- and I thank you very much
> Martinus for bringing this to my attention--

No problemo. It's in Död men drömmande: H. P. Lovecraft och den magiska modernismen by Mattias Fyhr (ellerströms, 2006 [yes, the publisher's name IS spelled with a lower-case e]), p. 105.

>
> Even if Lovecraft’s “Shub-Niggurath” can be
> regarding as being derived from Dunsany’s
> “Sheol-Nugganoth” --and, again, I thank you
> very much for this suggestion--

IIRC, this was mentioned by Robert M. Price in the introduction to The Shub-Niggurath Cycle, but I'm not sure.

> As for Lovecraft’s “aunts”: a man, of
> course, can never choose his relatives , but he
> can certainly choose his views. And if we study
> the women who, in Lovecraft’s fiction, are
> depicted as agents and transmitters of decay, one
> finds that these women are, usually, nothing like
> his aunts, but rather naked nymphs like those he
> satirized in his poems to Alfred Galpin, and who,
> as in “The Horror at Red Hook”, participate in
> the orgiastic, bestial Bacchanalias which
> Lovecraft so deplored; either that, or as aged
> witches whom Lovecraft invariable associates with
> influences of decay. (In “The Man of Stone”,
> for example, Lovecraft attributes the transmission
> of witch-cult lore through Mad Dan’s family,
> including rites of “Shub-Niggurath! The Goat
> with a Thousand Young and “sacrificing the Black
> Goat at Hallow Eve….” , specifically to his
> “mother’s side” of the family, “handed
> down” through the Van Kauran family since
> 1587”, Lovecraft reiterating later how Mad Dan
> “practiced all sorts of hellish ceremonies
> handed down by his mother’s people”.
> Elsewhere, in Lovecraft’s “The Diary of Alonzo
> Typer”, too, this transmissible of the decadent
> witch tradition will be associated specifically
> with women, in this case “Dirck van de Heyl’s
> wife” from Salem, “a daughter of the
> unmentionable Abaddon Corey.” )

It's "Lovecraft & Lumley's 'The Diary of Alonzo Typer'", you know. Even though Lumley's original was much rewritten by Lovecraft, this original still exists and has been published in one issue or another of Crypt of Cthulhu. I suppose the passage you quote may very well (even most likely) have been written by HPL, but to be on the safe side you should check the original text (I haven't got it and haven't read it myself, I'm sorry to say).

> Other women
> in Lovecraft’s fiction correspond to the
> Medusa/Gorgon/Semiramis/Zenobia mode of woman
> (i.e., the Near Eastern femme fatale): the Dame du
> Blois, Marceline deRussy, Queen Nitocris --all
> stand-ins, basically, for Astarte, and for that
> “Mother Goddess” whom Lovecraft, in “Out of
> the Aeons”, specifically identifies with
> Shub-Niggurath. (HM 273) This figure of the
> goddess reaches its ultimate inversion and
> caricature in Lovecraft’s “Arthur Jermyn”,
> where the “goddess” of a tribe in Africa --and
> the wife of Lord Jermyn--

Minor detail, but when it comes to British titles I'm a devoted hobbyist: "Lord" is a word that replaces Marquess, Earl, Viscount, or Baron in the various British peerages (in front of a given name it also indicates the younger son of a Duke or a Marquess, e. g. "Lord Peter Wimsey"). Wade Jermyn was a baronet, and is thus "Sir Wade" or "Sir Wade Jermyn" (but never "Sir Jermyn").

Anyway, thanks for clearing up these points for me. I may not be completely convinced yet, but you've certainly created reasonable doubt. :-)

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
>
> The only instance I have ever found of Lovecraft
> actually siding with an aboriginal or native
> people against an colonial force or oppressor, is
> in his early praise for the aboriginal Pelasgians
> of Greece, whose later absorption into the larger
> populations of the Greeks and the Romans he
> credits with the resultant and eventual greatness
> of Greece and Rome. (LETTERS TO GALPIN 89)


A progressive viewpoint is likewise discernable in Lovecraft’s “The Doom that came to Sarnath”, “In the Walls of Eryx”, “Dagon”, and even “The Beast in the Cave”.