After a year of running Beyond Thule, our group is wrapping up the campaign for now. Players are already talking about returning in the future, as a player or GM.
Here’s how the final session went.
Category Archives: Lovecraft
Lovecraft and Gurdjieff: Part 2: Gods
Conception of a Supreme Deity: AZATHOTH
Readers familiar with the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft know that his fictional representation of the universe is not a godless one. At first, one might think the author’s fiction is contrary to his personal belief in atheism, as expressed in his letters. But it is not. Rather, he conveys his representation of an impersonal and indifferent universe of mindless and blind forces through his fictional deities.
Lovecraft’s universe contains a whole pantheon of alien gods with strange names and agendas foreign and sometimes malevolent towards the insignificant humans of the planet Earth. And at the center of this pantheon is AZATHOTH, the blind idiot god who mindlessly sloughs off creation. This is Lovecraft’s caricature of an ultimate deity, his own conception of God.
“[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.” – Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath
“… ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in nameless paws.” – The Haunter of the Dark
Lovecraft and Gurdjieff, Part 1: Authors and Influences
I’ve had a fondness for H.P. Lovecraft since I was thirteen, when I first read a handful of his weird tales from a Del Ray paperback I bought off a drug store bookrack back in 1984. But even before I read anything he wrote, I had stumbled across his influence two years before.