I said last week that I’d almost finished reworking my portrait of Tsathoggua for the Lovecraft book, and here it is. Tsathoggua first came into the world in a Hyperborea story by Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, before being incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by HP Lovecraft who refers to the god-creature in several of his stories. Where Smith describes a hideous toad-like being, Lovecraft avoids being too closely bound by material specifics, referring to an “amorphous” entity which suggests a range of possibilities for illustration. To be fair to Smith, there is an amorphous and very deadly creature lurking in the temple of Tsathoggua in The Tale of Satampra Zeiros but we never learn whether this is Tsathoggua itself or some other being.
The amorphousness of Lovecraftian entities is a factor which is too often ignored in the world of weird illustration. Cosmic horror thrives on the fluidity of physics and physical matter but many illustrators seem content to copy one another instead of inventing new teratisms, a process that results in the accretion of stereotypes. Cthulhu, as I’m always reminding people, explodes into pieces after being struck by a ship at the end of The Call of Cthulhu, the remnants then recombining when the ship sails away from the scene. Lovecraft never intended his “spawn from the stars” to resemble the accreted stereotype we see today, a kind of Jolly Green Giant with squid mask and bat wings, reaching a brawny and very human arm towards the viewer. The ultimate expression of cosmic amorphousness may be found in the Shoggoths, those alien entities whose default condition is a mass of shapeless, iridescent protoplasm.
It was the amorphous nature of Tsathoggua that I wanted to honour with my original Photoshop creation in 1999. The starting point was a photograph of a cephalopod (I forget now whether it was an octopus or a squid) torn from an old issue of National Geographic. My initial experiments with the picture weren’t intended to develop into Tsathoggua; I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I started but at some point during the production of The Great Old Ones I decided to turn the picture into Smith’s entity with the addition of a toad-like head. Rather than mould the rest of the picture into more recognisable organic shapes it was left in a largely amorphous state. The eye-like shape at the top is a complete mystery to me now, I can’t say why it was there but it felt right so there it stayed. Alan Moore’s text for Tsathoggua identifies the creature with the Kabbalistic sphere of Geburah, “Strength”, a zone imbued with the martial qualities of the planet Mars. This is one of the more arbitrary assignations in The Great Old Ones—there’s nothing especially warlike about the toad-god—but something had to occupy the space, and I’d already finished the picture before Alan started writing his pieces. For the new version I’ve redrawn some areas of the original, but most of the work has been a case of sharpening edges and improving the contrast and modelling. The spiky, crown-like upper half has been emphasised a little in order to complement the martial aspect. And the bulging, convex appearance of the original has been slightly enhanced, giving the impression that the creature’s gravitational mass is of a sufficient density to bend the light around it. None of this should be taken as a negation of Smith’s description of a squatting, pot-bellied toad-god. The icons of the Great Old Ones created by human beings are exactly this: human attempts to represent alien monstrosity. Some acolyte who happens to envision the real Tsathoggua might stammer that “It looked like…a giant toad!” thereby giving a form to the subsequent iconography. But the map is not the territory. Cthulhu doesn’t, and shouldn’t look like the statues either. The Jolly Green Giant needs to ditch the mask and wings and get back to selling canned vegetables.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• H.P.L.
• The Return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
John, I was reading a book by journalist Kelly Weill, Off the Edge, about Flat Earthers and conspiracy culture, and I came across this striking quote about one such believer who had a crisis of faith.
“Gonzales did not immediately abandon Flat Earth, even after he saw proof of the curve through his telephoto lens. ‘I wanted to believe so hard,’ he said. He imagined a future in which Flat Earth was revealed to be reality. He would be vindicated, championed as one of a select few truth tellers who’d been right all along. He was going to be big. Those dreams clashed with the evidence of his own eyes. The dissonance between the two became so extreme that he couldn’t bring himself to look at a sunset, for fear it would remind him of his doubts. ‘I didn’t want to look up at the sky…”
How Lovecraftian! Ontological dislocation. Metaphysical vertigo. And why, I think, that Lovecraft based movies never turn out to be any good. They get bogged down with the CGI monsters and forget the real terror. And given the frequent criticism of HPL’s literary powers, ironic that this terror is foremost a literary effect. You’re exactly right about this “amorphousness”. You begin with a hint of the familiar but then the universe reveals itself strange and oddly transformed.
The thing that would be most frightening in real life, being chased by a maniac with an ice pick, is, in movies, the biggest bore. Most of all, horror should be disturbing.
Beware of St Toad’s cracked chimes!
Yes, cognitive dissonance is a big thing in cosmic horror: you expect one thing and end up with something that you can’t fully comprehend. The ending of The Call of Cthulhu is all about this, when the sailors stumbling across the stones of R’lyeh have trouble making sense of the shifting perspectives and prismatic light. There’s also a recurrent thing in Lovecraft that the horror in the story is only a part of it, there’s more which is only hinted at. The Whateleys may be vanquished at the end of The Dunwich Horror but the Great Old Ones are still out there, waiting for someone else to open the way for them to take possession of the Earth.
It’s true that this works better in words than pictures, with images you’re always having to fix things in a single state. That’s good in one sense, it opens the way for many different interpretations.