Necronomicon Myths

[Insanity]

Sir Arthur Jermyn Mythos

^^ Foot note from the Call of Cthulhu

It is actually an explanatory note for Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family made by scholar S.T. Joshi, and it is in the collection The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.

S.T. Joshi is explaining to readers, what Lovecraft is attempting to convey in the story.

Read the next paragraph of the explanatory note.

Lovecraft makes a suggestive remark on the literary inspiration for this tale, in a letter to Edwin Baird published in Weird Tales for March 1924:

[The] origin [of "Arthur Jermyn"] is rather curious—and far removed from the atmosphere it suggests. Somebody had been harassing me into reading some work of the iconoclastic moderns—these young chaps why pry behind exteriors and unveil nasty hidden motives and secret stigmata—and I had nearly fallen asleep over the tame backstairs gossip of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The sainted Sherwood, as you know, laid bare the dark area which many whited village lives concealed, and it occured to me that I, in my weirder medium, could possibly devise some secret behind a man's ancestry, which would makes the worst of Anderson's disclosures sound like the annual report of a Sabbath school. Hence Arthur Jermyn. (MW 508)

It is one in which the few instances in which a contemporary work of mainstream literature had even an indirect influence on Lovecraft's fiction.

Lovecraft's inspiration for Arthur Jermyn, though somewhat indirectly, was another comtemporary author.

[upsidedownworld]

The polythestic dieties of the ancient world were anthromorphic representations of the natural world and surely that was the complete opposite of Lovecraft's intention where a non human centric perspective of the universe was preferred. On this basis I don't see how any of the pagan dieties can have any counterparts in Lovecraft's mythos.

Edited October 11, 2015 by upsidedownworld

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

I was always lead to beleieve that that whole "opposing pantheon to the Old Ones" stuff was added by later writers.

[upsidedownworld]

I was always lead to beleieve that that whole "opposing pantheon to the Old Ones" stuff was added by later writers.

It was. August Derleth being the foremost contributor to expanding the mythos but the beings Lovecraft envisioned were neither good nor evil as both are human constructs.