Magic, Campbell, Lovecraft, Derleth, and Martin

[falcotron]

This is going to be very long and rambly, but Lucifer means Lightbringer asked for it, so blame him. :)

Also, there will be (unmarked) spoilers to a variety of different stories by Lovecraft and other Lovecraftian authors, although I'll try to keep things vague.

What is Magic?

Let's look at GRRM's approach to magic. From the October 2010 Octocon Q&A, "He doesn't have a magic system specifically. Some authors do but too like D&D for him... Magic has to be magic - something that violates law of nature." He contrasts his approach with John W. Campbell, who "treated magic as science... that approach to magic and the aproach in role playing games is...just science, not magic. Magic has to be more mysterious than that. He wants less Campbell and more Lovecraft. It has to be dark stuff we can't fully comprehend."

GRRM's magic is definitely not sufficiently advanced science. It's also not sufficiently advanced engineering. Engineering means coming up with repeatable practices that produce quantifiably predictable results. But GRRM's magic is unpredictable and uncontrollable. The biggest piece of magic we've seen--the rebirth of dragons--we've been specifically told is a "one-time-only event". In a Vancian setting, if you memorize the Excellent Prismatic Spray spell, then say the right words and make the right gestures to release the spell, you get a prismatic spray. In GRRM's setting, magic is always a dangerous risk; you may perform a great and terrible sacrifice and get nothing in return, or something completely different from what you wanted.

And it's not just that the practitioners don't understand the laws of magic. There are no laws, and magic is intrinsically beyond comprehension. That's what "something that violates law of nature" means.

GRRM's magic is also not divine intervention. He's told us that the gods, if they exist, don't exercise direct power. Further, the whole point of religious magic is that, while it violates the laws of nature, it's predictable: if you perform the designated rituals, you get what you want (e.g., water transmutes into wine), unless maybe you've done something to make your gods angry. Again, that's systematic and comprehensible, and not what GRRM is writing.

Of course he has characters who think they comprehend what's going on. The Maesters treat magic as science; Melisandre treats it as religion. But they are wrong, and this is the kind of tragic mistake that they or others around them will end up paying for.

What Does "More Lovecraft" Actually Mean?

Lovecraft's universe is ruled by gods who are ancient aliens of unfathomable power and destructiveness, completely indifferent to humans, even though they have human worshippers, and so far from anthropomorphic that they cannot be understood at all. In a famous letter attached to his submission of "Call of Cthulhu", he explained this in detail:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

But the most important and consistent theme in Lovecraft's stories was that of "forbidden knowledge". Either magicians or, more often, scientists driven by a quest for knowledge learn more than is good for them. At best, they spend the rest of their lives numbed and full of regret; often they're driven mad, or killed. If anyone could survive this knowledge, it was only primitive peoples who didn't try to understand it. The more learned the protagonist--and, worse, the more he thinks he understands what he's doing--the worse his fate will be.

Together with the idea of forbidden knowledge is the idea of inescapable fate. Often the characters simply fail to think of fleeing, or they try and find themselves paralyzed, or even find themselves compelled to carry on into the dark. But sometimes, they do flee, and it does no good; having taken the first step into darkness, they are doomed, whether by immediate pursuers or by being torn to shreds by undetectable forces when they think they're safe at home. Worse, sometimes this doom is passed down the bloodline to distant descendants.

There are definitely elements of all of this in ASoIaF. For example, once Dany commits to the blood magic sacrifice, she cannot step back from it, and as badly as she is punished, her son of course gets it even worse.

But I think we don't necessarily want to take GRRM too literally here. He's influenced by Lovecraft, but he's not writing a pastiche--it's just more Lovecraft than Campbell. His world is not a world of humanity as the playthings of indifferent, terrible gods, but rather of an indifferent godless universe, which is only terrible if they make it so. Magic is dangerous and unfathomable forbidden knowledge not because of its connection to the gods but because it's inherently dangerous and unfathomable, while science is not dangerous at all. And when people are doomed by fate, it's because they've doomed themselves; they could have stepped back at any point, but never did.

So, we can't infer too much from "more Lovecraft" except "the opposite of Campbell"--unsystematic, unpredictable, unnaturalistic magic.

What Do GRRM's Lovecraftian Borrowings Mean?

(Note: Here's where it gets especially long and rambly, because I'm not sure how much background to assume. The big problem is that many people think they know Lovecraft a lot better than they do...)

H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories full of mysterious gods, damned books, and evil cults. He rarely gave us much information about any of them. In fact, that's what made his horror so effective: we almost never find out what the "nameless horror" was that drove the main character insane. As Lovecraft himself put it:

The strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

What little detail Lovecraft gave us was often inconsistent from one story to another. For example, "Call of Cthulhu" describes Cthulhu as a Great Old One,"The Dunwich Horror" says he's a cousin of the Old Ones, and "Mountains of Madness" uses Old Ones as a synonym for the Elder Things who were at war with Cthulhu and his relatives.

On top of that, Lovecraftian borrowing doesn't just mean borrowing from Lovecraft. During his lifetime, Lovecraft corresponded with a group of other writers for the same pulp magazines (mostly Weird Tales), especially Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, and with emerging new writers like Robert Bloch and Fritz Lieber. Many of these writers borrowed elements from Lovecraft, and Lovecraft in return borrowed elements from their stories, and all of them from each other. The borrowings were generally very playful, a nod and a wink to an inside joke. Lovecraft even had characters with names like "Klarkash-Ton", and both Bloch and Lieber had characters named "H. Phillips", etc., just to make sure you got the joke.

Some of these writers were writing stories pretty different from Lovecraft's. Howard, while he wrote some Lovecraft-style horror (including a few direct pastiches of Lovecraft), also wrote the Conan novels. Smith's stories were all weird horror, but in a very different bent, ranging from a sort of twisted parody of Conan's universe to a magical version of a deSadian France to a medieval France as envisioned by neo-Pagans to a far-future dying Earth. Lieber tried to create a more "grounded" swords-and-sorcery world than Conan, where people act as much as possible like real people (except when they're acting like Monty Python/Douglas Adams characters). And so on.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft also had what he called "revision tales", stories he supposedly just edited but usually completely ghost-wrote for other authors. Most of these stories were in a different style from his work, and featured different kinds of horror (often more traditional things, like haunted houses or mummy's curses), and were completely disconnected from his own work. But in the later revisions, he began borrowing elements from his own stories (e.g., Shub-Niggurath and the Pillars of Irem) and from other writers (e.g., the Lost Continent of Mu, an occultist/pseudoscience notion that Smith had used as a framing device in one of his stories).

So, how do you share elements between these very different worlds and still make them fit?

Simple: you don't. Usually, almost every detail is changed from the source story.

Let's take a specific example: the god Tsathoggua.

Smith's Hyperborean setting was a lost jungle continent full of dinosaurs, deep inside the Arctic Circle, long before the European bronze age. Man reached this continent, and took it over from the Voormis, hairy humanoids who had an iron-age civilization. This included borrowing the Voormi religion, which centered around the worship of Tsathoggua, a squat, pot-bellied monster, with the head of a black toad, a sloth-like body, and bat-like fur. The Voormis built grand underground temples of some unknown black stone, with great toad statues, and carvings of uninterpretable symbols. But they also delivered sacrifices directly to the volcano he lived in. "He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice." There's also a basin full of black ichor from which would rise the "formless spawn" of Tsathoggua. He was also part of an Norse Pantheon-like complex family, which was worked out by Pnom, a prophet and geneaologist, and some of the members of this family are Lovecraft's Gods--e.g., Azathoth is his great-grandfather (and great-great-uncle).

Lovecraft's world didn't have the Hyperborean Age, or the Voormis, so his Tsathoggua came from Atlantis, and was later worshipped in various lands around the Atlantic, including Honduras and somewhere that was probably Morocco. He wasn't a toad-bat-sloth, he was an "amorphous, toad-like god-creature". Instead of grand underground temples with great toad statues and mysterious carvings, he had a "squat, plain temple of basalt blocks without a single carving, and containing only a single vacant pedestal... to house a very terrible black toad-idol". And he didn't stay in his volcanic lair waiting for sacrifice, or send out his formless spawn to do his bidding, he took form from his statues, changing "from a toad-like gargoyle to a sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet". He was, obviously, not the great-grandson of Azathoth.

So, if you'd read all of Smith's stories, and then encountered the name Tsothaggua in a Lovecraft story, and tried to guess anything based on that knowledge beyond the basic toadiness, you'd be wrong.

Moreover, despite almost always being radically changed from the source material, there was very often a sense that the borrowings didn't fit into their world.

This is most obvious in Lieber's stories, where the characters even comment in-universe that various things don't belong to this world or don't work the way they're supposed to. (Usually it's the wizard Ningauble, who owns a portal to other universes, so he knows what he's talking about.) Within Lovecraft himself, when the Plateau of Leng, or sometimes the Plateau of Tsang in the Land of Leng, appears, it means a connection to his older, otherwise-unconnected "dream cycle" stories. (And the Necronomicon explicitly tells us that it's a place where different realities meet.)

But let's look at Tsathoggua again. When Lovecraft described him, it was in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, from the First Race, a race related to but distinct from Man, in the pre-Pleistocene era. But everywhere else, there is no such "first race"; different races go back far back into the mists of time, and are completely alien, and the Pnakotic Manuscripts are usually associated with the Great Race of Yith, conical snail things from billions of years ago who travel through time mentally. The presence of Tsathoggua has brought with him an intrusion from a different universe, Smith's Hyperborean one in thin disguise. Howard, meanwhile, had Conan come upon a black stone temple in a jungle in the middle of an island, filled with great toad idols. Within the bounds of this temple, magic didn't work, which allowed him to defeat the evil sorceror he was fighting that week. The entire scene was in a completely different style from most of the Conan stories, and much closer to one of his Lovecraft pastiches. (The more famous appearance of Tsathoggua in Conan is from a post-Howard story by Lin Carter, where he came upon a very similar temple, and the idol was specifically stated to be of an ancient god named Thathoggua, which came to life and attacked him--but this was all much more normal for the Conan universe.)

So, if you've read all of Lovecraft's stories (or just googled for references), and encountered an island with a temple with a giant toad statue in TWoIaF, not only would you be wrong if you tried to guess anything beyond Tsathoggua's basic toadiness from the Lovecraft stories, you'd also run a major risk of being wrong if you tried to analyze it based on the normal rules of GRRM's universe. The only thing to do is treat it as a mystery that will never be solved. And, of course, as an inside joke, a nod and a wink to the Lovecraft Circle.

What Could the Black Stones Mean?

Many GRRM fans have particularly noticed the often-oily, usually-great, always-ancient black stones that appear all over the place, especially in TWoIaF. Surely at least they must mean something, right?

Well, what do black stones mean in Lovecraftian fiction?

Something completely different every time.

Most obviously, there's Howard's "The Black Stone", a Lovecraft pastiche that also introduced the book Nameless Cults, which Lovecraft later borrowed and changed into the more famous Unaussprechlichen Kulten. A medieval cult used to hold ceremonies atop their castle to draw out a giant toad monster and offer it a sacrifice. When Suleiman invaded, his troops slew all the worshippers, and were able to track the monster to a cave and slay him with an ancient sword from the time of Muhammad, after which the castle sank into the mountains, all except the spire at the top: an octagonal monolith made of strange black stone. Since that time, a village has grown up in the region. Every midsummer at midnight, the villagers, in a trance, chant and dance around the stone, then slaughter a baby, which summons the dead god, who takes one of their children as a sacrifice.

In Lovecraft's first use of Unaussprechlichen Kulten, he mentions that the book is maddeningly obscure because it frequently refers to the word "keys" with no explanation, including, among other things, the infamous Black Stone. In another Lovecraft story, there's a curiously engraved black stone that leads a professor to the discovery of the Mi-Go, while another has a small, unidentifiable, greenish-black stone statutette that lures Wilcox to discover the Cult of Cthulhu. Rl'yeh is made of slimy black stone that repels water. In the hills around Dunwich, there are great stone columns, which are black and greasy in one story. Robert Bloch has an ancient temple to the star gods made of greasy black stone deep in the Arabian Desert. As mentioned earlier, Tsothaggua's very different temples, in Lovecraft and Clark, both involved black stone. Lieber has an oily black stone slab appear on the other side of a magical gate, and Ningauble shudders and tells Fafhrd that even he isn't brave enough to want to know what it means.

The one thing mysterious black stones consistently mean is that they're mysterious. Which you already knew from them being mysterious black stones.

That's not to say that GRRM can't do something with the black stones in his world. But it does make it less likely. And it definitely means you can't try to predict what it will be by analyzing the Lovecraft stories he borrowed from.

Derleth and the Cthulhu Mythos

Most people who are familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos know that Shub-Niggurath is the main Earth god among the evil Great Old Ones, just as Hastur is the main Air god, Cthulhu the main Water god, and Cthugha the main Fire god, all opposed by good Elder Gods of the same elements.

How is this possible if Lovecraft's stories were always inconsistent, and the stories of his correspondents even more so, and if his gods were completely incomprehensible, and not evil but indifferent?

Because none of this comes from Lovecraft, or the Lovecraft Circle.

Or, rather, it comes from one member of the Lovecraft Circle: August Derleth, who, after Lovecraft's death, took over the stories and tried to build them into a systematic mythology. This included creating or importing gods to fill in the gaps (Hastur and Cthugha). More importantly, he replaced Lovecraft's horrifying tales of cosmic indifference with a great power struggle between good and evil, converting Lovecraft's message of fatalism into a message of hope. He banished Lovecraft's shadowy mysteries, replacing them with a set of known facts. He retconned away the inconsistencies between different descriptions of the same god, book, site, or artifact.

For the next few decades, those who participated in the shared universe of the Cthulhu Mythos largely did so according to Derleth's rules (including a few of the earlier circle, like Bloch).

Ironically, it was Chaosium's role-playing game Call of Cthulhu that began to turn things back. An RPG virtually requires the kind of consistent setting Derleth had created, and obviously you can't have unknowable mysteries when the gamemaster has to know what's going on to run the game. But the writers (primarily Sandy Petersen) tried very hard to establish the mood of Lovecraft's own stories. He encouraged the GM to lay out the adventure as an "onion skin", where things start out naturalistic, but each clue the characters discover leads them one step closer to the nameless horror that awaits them. And he encouraged a sense of building fatalism, where the players would eventually come to realize that their first step had already led them to an inescapable doom. The game also included the (in)famous sanity mechanism: the more knowledge and power the characters gained, the more damaged their sanity became. (But of course without that knowledge and power, they couldn't hope to prevail.) Then Chaosium hired Robert Price to write scholarly works and edit fictional stories within the Cthulhu Mythos, and his notion of the two phases of Lovecraft vs. Derleth became much more widely known.

Since then, many writers, like Charles Stross and Neil Gaiman, have specifically, consciously borrowed in the style of the Lovecraft Circle, rather than writing stories within the Derlethian Cthulhu Mythos.

And I believe this is exactly that GRRM is doing in his novels.

Conclusions, Such As They Are

This means that attempting to, e.g., connect the god of the Isle of Toads to the Black Goat of Qohor because they're both Great Old Ones of the Earth is almost certainly missing the point. The former is a always a toad-like god, and otherwise different in every appearance; the latter is always referenced by the expression "Iä! Shub-Niggurath!", and sometimes called "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!", and otherwise different in every appearance. There is nothing to connect them if you're not reading a Derlethian story.

This also means that it's unlikely that we will learn the details of the Black Goat of Qohor the way we've learned the details of the God of the Seven, R'hllor, or the Many-Faced God. He's meant to be a nameless, unknowable horror in the Lovecraftian mold.

What about the Drowned God, who is clearly Cthulhu, imprisoned in his underground tomb, dead but dreaming? Or is he clearly Dagon, the fishy god of the merpeople married to the great hydra/kraken? Well, that's the point, he's not either one of them. He's not a Lovecraft borrowing. The oblique references to his Rl'yeh-like underwater home, and to his marriage to the great kraken, those are both Lovecraft borrowings. But, unsurprisingly, they contradict each other. And neither is relevant to the information Damphair and other characters give us, they're just nod-and-a-wink references buried within it.

Again, this doesn't mean that nothing that seems Lovecraftian in GRRM's work can possibly have any plot- or theme-relevant meaning beyond spookiness and mystery. It just means that (a) it's much less likely to have one than an original GRRM invention, and (b) even if it does, you almost certainly won't be able to figure it out by reading the Lovecraft wiki or the CoC sourcebooks.

And, most importantly, getting back to the start of this message (that anyone still reading has long since forgotten): writing "Lovecraftian" rather than "Campbellian" fantasy means that magic is not sufficiently advanced science, does not follow natural laws that can be discovered, is not reproducible or predictable, and is a dark force that portends great danger to those who use it, and even more to those who mistakenly think they understand it.

If you want to reply, I'll try to get back to you, but gibbering in a madhouse and evading the unescapable invisible devouring demons may delay me. But first, if you've learned anything, roll your sanity check.

[Knight and Dayne]

GM said my sanity check came up Targaryan, so I'll light something on fire, then proceed.

Campbell vs. Lovecraft is a really useful dichotomy, thanks for that. I think the notoriously unreliable fire visions are a good illustration of the principle in ASoIaF. They're all the interpretations of their viewers of something they're shown, not necessarily what they see. I'd be willing to bet that the glass candles aren't magical cell phones, otherwise Quaithe would be a lot clearer and Marwyn would know more. The Weirnet seems reliable, but limited, and disorienting.

Then you've got the fire dude in Qarth, Thoros' resurrections, and all the warlocks - they suddenly get better at magic because there's more magic, but they're all going through the same motions as before.

Most important is GRRM's intentional cultivation of the sense of the unknown - all the "here there be dragons" and such. Writing-wise, you've got an intricate political drama driving a story set in a world that's far more magical than we intuitively realize.

Anyways, thanks for the OP, good luck with the demons.

[Mithras]

This post is so "under the sea" (and that is a high compliment!)

*claps*

[Mitbert Strangejoy]

Great post, OP. This should be mandatory reading before people go off the deep end with AWOIAF theories.

[three-eyed monkey]

Very interesting post. I used to play the Call of Cthulu rpg back in the day. Introduced me to Lovecraft really.

I like a number of things about GRRM's use of magic. I always get the sense that even the practitioners don't nearly understand the forces they are playing with, and often opt for simplistic explanations like putting it down to will of a god. It leaves it very mysterious. I also like the way it ebbs and flows and how south of the Wall it is often dismissed as the stuff of myth and fairy tales. And I love the way it costs, dearly.

[Archmaester Drew]

Excellent OP! :cheers:

[Daendrew]

Great post.

If you want to better understand GRRM's magic, you need another J. Campbell. Not John, but Joseph Campbell.

His words are truly spellbounding. A good intro is watching The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. It's a masterclass.

We have all bee taught how to read prose. No one teaches us how to read poetry.

When GRRM writes magic it is far too easy to see that as prose. A literal shadowbaby, which if also is. But it is far too easy to get caught up in the prose of the menu but not see past those words to the sizzling steak it refers to.

Symbols point past themselves to something greater.

[Mythrel]

Great post, thanks a lot. Lovecraft is someone I haven't had the chance to get into yet. But you've definitely my interest.

:bowdown:

[Nozlym]

well done

[falcotron]

Most important is GRRM's intentional cultivation of the sense of the unknown - all the "here there be dragons" and such. Writing-wise, you've got an intricate political drama driving a story set in a world that's far more magical than we intuitively realize.

Thanks for pointing that out. And I love the way you put it. GRRM's example was that, in the areas the Maesters know little about, the maps will be full of "here be winged men" (and there is, of course, a land WInged Men in eastern Essos), but "here be dragons" is a lot more fun, because, of course, it's literally true in, say, Meereen right now. :)

[Knight and Dayne]

Thanks for pointing that out. And I love the way you put it. GRRM's example was that, in the areas the Maesters know little about, the maps will be full of "here be winged men" (and there is, of course, a land WInged Men in eastern Essos), but "here be dragons" is a lot more fun, because, of course, it's literally true in, say, Meereen right now. :)

:cheers:

TBH I wasn't trying to be quite so clever, but I'm happy to claim credit!

[EternET]

A very interesting post about ...discouraging us to predict (at least concerning mystery and magic). I so much wanted GRRM to adhere to the "humans are insignificant" base of Lovecraft, but in one interview, he said he didn't completely agree, so eventhough George may use some Lovecraft material, he's also giving it a personal twist because : the human's heart in conflict with itself is the only thing worth writting about.

[falcotron]

If you want to better understand GRRM's magic, you need another J. Campbell. Not John, but Joseph Campbell.

Great point, and one I'd actually been thinking about over the past weekend, after rereading The Potential Last Ever Doctor Who Interview with Lawrence Miles. (If you want to read it, you probably want to skip over a lot of stuff specific to Doctor Who novels you probably haven't read, and cattiness about authors you've never heard of, until the part where he talks about Queer as Folk and Chuck Jones and everything that follows.)

George Lucas famously popularized Campbell's monomyth idea, and Star Wars was a deliberate attempt to strip away local-cultural masks and present something as close as possible to the archetypal story, the only story that matters. But what really makes it work, the reason people will still be watching at least the original trilogy until the days when only retro-hipsters will watch that old 2D audiovisual-only stuff, is when Lawrence Kasdan takes his archetypes and fleshes them out into real, believable humans, with character growth driven by what actually happens to them, without stripping away their mythic underpinnings. There's an inherent tension here: great myths have to be about inspirational stereotypes, but great fiction has to be about actual people.

High fantasy (even under the guise of space opera) seems to inherently make the mythical part easier, and the human part harder; most fantasy writers don't really even try, and most who do try fail badly (as Lucas did in the prequels). Faramir has no character development, and Boromir's arc is entirely determined from the start rather than growing organically out of experience. On the other hand, The Great Gatsby is not at all mythical; there's a reason every generation needs a need "Fitzgerald of his generation". Henry V--or The Empire Strikes Back--somehow manages to do both, and it's not at all clear how they pulled it off. But I think that's exactly what ASoIaF is aspiring to. Part of the trick, at least for GRRM, seems to be creating each character as a mythic archetype, but then putting them in situations they can't cope with and seeing where it drives them. But beyond that, it's hard (at least for me...) to say what he's doing right beyond "being a really good writer".

[falcotron]

A very interesting post about ...discouraging us to predict (at least concerning mystery and magic). I so much wanted GRRM to adhere to the "humans are insignificant" base of Lovecraft, but in one interview, he said he didn't completely agree, so eventhough George may use some Lovecraft material, he's also giving it a personal twist because : the human's heart in conflict with itself is the only thing worth writting about.

Damnit, your two lines just said everything I was in the middle of taking three long paragraphs to say. :)