Playing Games with the Great Old Ones: Ritual, Play, and Joking within the Cthulhu Mythos Fandom (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cthulhu Mythos: History of H.P. Lovecraft’s Monstrous Presence in Popular Culture
Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis. Literatura i Kultura Popularna, 2024
The aim of this paper is to analyse various forms of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos and describe specifi c shifts in reception and refl exion of H.P. Lovecraft's legacy in contemporary culture. The opening part of the paper introduces H.P. Lovecraft as the author of weird fi ction, cosmic horror and the philosophy of cosmicism, and corrects common misconceptions regarding the Cthulhu Mythos. Then, the semiotic versioning of three versions of the Cthulhu Mythos is explained and all three versions are further analysed. Version 1.0 of the Mythos includes Lovecraft's legacy, works of the authors from the Lovecraft Circle, but also August Derleth's interpretations of cosmic horror and works of the next generation of authors that emerged after Lovecraft's death or were discovered and guided by Derleth. It's a complex set of terminology, ideas, philosophies, plot devices and narratological specifi cations that is, as is further explained, wrongly interpreted as a fi ctional mythology. Version 2.0 includes all the works created under the label of 'Lovecraftian' or 'cosmic' horror, all transmedia adaptations, infl uences, and pop cultural additions where the infl uence of the original Mythos can be traced and is either explicitly admitted or just implied. Finally, Cthulhu Mythos 3.0 is a version of the Mythos that acknowledges the existence of the previous versions, yet approaches them through a specifi c self-refl ective, self-critical lens and is more focused on intertextual play and metacommentaries on these previous versions than on expanding them.
Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ), Sydney, 29 June – 1 July, 2016, pp. 79-87. ISBN: 978-0-473-38284-1. © 2016 This paper surveys select aspects of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, a model developed in his now-iconic work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and compares it with the weird fiction of author H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. Throughout, it is argued that Lovecraft’s writing shares superficial similarities with the monomyth, ostensibly or actually mirroring certain stages, yet Lovecraft’s work is ultimately subversive of this model. The only triumph in Lovecraft’s work is the continuance of the loathsome entities encountered within his stories. It is argued that Lovecraft’s portrayal of the monstrous can be viewed as an outworking of what Campbell terms ‘horrendous Divine Comedy’. Accounting for this type of storytelling, Lovecraft’s recurrent portrayals of annihilation, the monstrous and cosmic horror could be illustrative of the metanarratives of his own life. In this sense they reflect his experiences and evolving beliefs in early-twentieth century North America. Despite the personalized anxieties of these works, they have endured, continuing to appeal to present-day audiences.
Cults of Lovecraft: The Impact of H.P. Lovecraft's Fiction on Contemporary Occult Practices
Mythlore, 2014
Examines a particularly troubling use of fiction: the adoption of an author's work, against his own intentions, as a quasi-religious text for cultic practices. Lovecraft's mythos is thus observed in the process of deliberately being made into a worship tradition by occult and Satanic practitioners, in spite of the author's personal scientific rationalism.
Fiction in the Desert of the Real: Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (2007)
Aries, 2007
En partant d'une note de Mircea Eliade (1976), cet article qui porte principalement sur l'oeuvre de fiction de H.P. Lovecraft entend marquer que l'existentialisme nihiliste a connu, sous certains de ses aspects, un prolongement au sein du milieu "holiste" et occulte depuis les années 1960. Dans un essai long et pénétrant paru en 1991, l'écrivain français Michel Houellebecq a mis l'accent sur le nihilisme radical qui sous-tend les écrits de Lovecraft . Or, le présent article veut montrer que la perspective radicalement "désenchantée" qui sous-tend l'oeuvre lovecraft ienne n'est nullement incompatible avec le fait qu'il utilise certains thèmes tirés de l'histoire de l'ésotérisme occidental, non plus qu'avec le fait que, depuis les années 1960, des occultistes ont embrassé avec un grand enthousiasme son univers de fiction. Selon la perspective de l'auteur, la suite d'histoires racontant la "quête de rêve" (dream-quest) du protagoniste Howard Carter, d'une part, et les histoires d'horreur fondées sur la "mythologie Cthulhu", d'autre part, sont les deux aspects d'une même médaille, en ce sens que cette suite représenterait le désir de Lovecraft de "fuir la réalité" pour un monde de rêves, tandis que ces histoires d'horreur suggèreraient que derrière l'écran vide et prosaïque de la réalité désenchantée se cache une réalité plus profonde encore, faite d'horreur pure. Dans sa partie finale, l'article traite de ce phénomène surprenant qu'est le "chaos magick" lovecraft ien, avec ses rituels d'invocations de divinités ou de démons lovecraft iens. Ces invocations ne sont pas l'expression de quelque croyance naïve selon laquelle les entités de Lovecraft existeraient réellement au lieu d'appartenir à la fiction; elles sont plutôt l'expression d'un refus bien plus radical, "postmoderne", de la distinction même entre fiction et réalité. Et pourtant, les magiciens du chaos ne peuvent pas toujours s'arranger pour maintenir cette position de façon constante; sous leur déconstructionisme radical on peut voir poindre ici et là, en eff et, une aspiration romantique, celle d'un ré-enchantement du monde.
Lovecraft's fiction in 21st century's popular culture
The paper focuses on such phenomenons as media convergence, incorporation, convention, invention etc. and shows how they work in case of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction in 21 st century. It shows how popular culture today may influence Cthulhu Mythos and why popular culture's participators are interested in creating new content connected with it. The paper looks into different branches such as: music, clothing, games, movies, graphics etc. to show that motives created by Lovecraft may be found everywhere. The motives are used by both: professionals and amateurs which shows how universal the motives are. The paper shows that Cthulhu Mythos have been so popular thanks to universality and huge innovations possibilities which allows them to be shown in so many different contexts.
The Portrayal of Occultism in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) by H.P. Lovecraft
k@ta, 2021
H.P. Lovecraft crafted an intricate mythos which initially did not find success until after his death, and his works, most notably “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), were regarded to be a landmark towards the relevancy of occultism both in the field of literature and religious belief. The short story was regarded to be the staple of “cosmic horror” which Lovecraft applied to almost all of his stories. The paper analyze how “The Call of Cthulhu” influenced the belief of modern occultism, which can be inferred from the literary elements in the story. Further analysis will also identify how Lovecraft portrayed the subgenre “cosmic horror” to enhance the elements of occultism within the short story. In relation to the previous elements, the paper examine how a particular cult, Typhonian Order, was influenced by the elements of occultism used in the story.
Religions
What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific Rim and Hellboy, monsters that would have been obscured to protect Lovecraft’s readers are now fully revealed for Hollywood audiences. Using the period-appropriate theories of Rudolf Otto on the numinous and Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, that share Lovecraft’s troubled history with racist othering, I show how modern adaptations of Lovecraft’s work invert central features of the mythos in order to turn tragedies into triumphs. The genres of Science Fiction and Horror have deep commitments to the theme of otherness, but in Lovecraft’s works otherness is insurmountable. Today, Hollywood borrows the tropes of Lovecraftian horror but relies on bridging the gap between humanity and its monstrous others to reveal a higher humanity forged through difference and ...