“I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D. . . . with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific . . .”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”
If the Pacific washes away the rational and modern, it does so not least because the Pacific is ancient, its people seen as still the “noble savages” of Enlightenment prehistory, each of its islands an antediluvian Eden. But in keeping with our earlier frontier trope, the Pacific is also the future. (Even now, one can hear that the 21st will be the “Pacific Century,” as history zooms westward around the globe.) So, better yet, the Pacific is not merely ancient, but timeless. Again in
Moby-Dick
, Melville notes that the Pacific waves wash “the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham.”
Lovecraft finds this metaphor of timelessness far more congenial than the “island Eden” trope. The Pacific is simultaneously unthinkably ancient and looming in the future, both long-dead and stirring to be born. Lovecraft's cosmic sensibilities thrill to the duality. His “Dagon” is both an ancient god and a modern threat. The “Kanakys” wiped out the Deep Ones off Othaheite, but their race plans its resurgence—“the reel horror . . . ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do!”—in Pacific-tainted Innsmouth. In “The Shadow Out of Time,” the catalogue of entities met by Nathaniel Peaslee includes representatives of both distant past and future Pacifics: Yhe and Tsan-Chan. Lovecraft's ultimate blending of the timeless, the primordial, the apocalyptic, and the Pacific looms over them all: Great Cthulhu.
“Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Cthulhu is very much of the Pacific, even of a specific spot therein, somewhere between Pitcairn Island (where the
Bounty
mutineers succumbed to the Pacific's seductions) and Easter Island (with its “ancient” statues). Even Cthulhu has perhaps bowed his head to Pan; his Pacific “deep waters” are “full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass.” But Cthulhu also is Pan, “the madness from the sea.” Cthulhu is a prehistoric memory and the inevitable future all in one, both old and new, as Wilcox notes of his bas-relief at the beginning of the story: “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx.” Cthulhu once ruled the Earth, then fell in a cataclysm, but “when the stars come right” he will emerge again in a kind of parodic Last Judgment, “a glorious resurrection . . . a holocaust of ecstasy.”
This rhythm, of ancient greatness, catastrophic destruction, current desuetude, and future ascension at the end of the age, is the rhythm of Theosophy. So Lovecraft slyly acknowledges in the introduction to “The Call of Cthulhu”: “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle . . . [and] have hinted at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.” Lovecraft wrote “Cthulhu” shortly after reading a Theosophical omnibus,
The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria
by William Scott-Elliot, and specifically mentions that tome in the tale as one of Angell's “Cthulhu Cult” file sources. No one will be surprised to see Pacific mega-continents, sunken islands, and prehuman survivals prominently featured in Scott-Elliot's pages, albeit “masked by a bland optimism.” Lovecraft further “demythologizes” Theosophy, recasting it as paleontology in
At the Mountains of Madness
, as the bas-reliefs in Kadath tell the epoch-spanning tale of prehuman races and sunken lands in the Pacific.
“Centuries hence … China may yet form a titanic world force to be reckoned with. It would be curious if the oldest of all civilisations of today were to survive its younger rivals in the end.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Henry George Weiss (Feb. 3, 1937)
Shrinking our scope down a bit from prehuman ecologies to mere lost civilizations, another beat of the Theosophist rhythm is that India, or “Asia,” was great before the West was born, and would rise again to reduce Europe to irrelevance. (Lovecraft's fellow New Englander Emerson said much the same thing.) This fed not only Indian nationalism, but paradoxically fueled Western racism. The generally hopeful message of Theosophy is essentially identical to the generally fearful message of “the Yellow Peril”: the dreaming, even sessile “Asiatics” (for Lovecraft and Americans, on the other side of the Pacific) will awaken from their slumber and destroy the (white) world. Sound familiar?
Lovecraft invokes the Yellow Peril even before he reads Theosophy: in “Polaris,” “He,” and “Nyarlathotep,” the future is yellow, and (white) civilization is overthrown. When he adds Theosophy to the mixture, things get even weirder: in the cosmic time-cycles of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” HPL takes time to note that Pickman Carter “in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia,” and we've already met “the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan” of 5000 A.D. Lovecraft doesn't leave the Yellow Peril in his fiction, either. In a 1919 letter to Alfred Galpin and Maurice Moe, he predicts that the Chinese “are a menace of the still more distant future” who “will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilization.” And in a 1934 letter to Natalie Wooley, only the specifics change: “In the end—as we grow weak & decadent . . . Japan will probably dominate the world,” but HPL hopes “that period will be thousands of years in the future.” It's not just Theosophy, then, that leads Lovecraft to put “deathless Chinamen” in charge of the Cthulhu Cult.
“The West, however, was never favourable to [the Ghatanothoa cult's] growth . . . In the end it became a hunted, doubly furtive underground affair—yet never could its nucleus be quite exterminated. It always survived somehow, chiefly in the Far East and on the Pacific Islands, where its teachings became merged into the esoteric lore of the Polynesian Areoi.”
—H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, “Out of the Aeons”
Is “Call of Cthulhu” just a strange Yellow Peril story, Fu Manchu with tentacles? No, it's far vaster than that; it partakes not just of Theosophy's Pacific apocalypses, but the iconic Pacifics of Jack London and Herman Melville: forgetfulness and timelessness, madness and obsession. But for Lovecraft, at least, the Pacific is inextricable from the shores it washes. He demonstrates this in “Out of the Aeons,” as the survivors of the lost continent of Mu (Lemuria renamed by a different Theosophist crackpot, Colonel Churchward) gather in pilgrimage before the mummy of Tyog. By the time the story is done, the litany of “swarthy Asiatics” and “eccentric foreigners” has included Hawaiians, Ceylonese, Filipinos, Peruvian Indians, East Indians, Burmese, and Fijians—and Lovecraft's own authorial stand-in, Randolph Carter, in his “Swami Chandraputra” garb from “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” The Pacific swallows Lovecraft, too; he has bowed his head before the seductive god Pan. Or Dagon. Or Cthulhu.
Next Stop on the Tour: New York City
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