Episodes 84-88 - The Shadow Over Innsmouth

[Bob Lovecraft]

I'd like to point out that Zadok Allen never says the Deep Ones are allied with shoggoths, only that they are "going to raise" one. To me, that sounds much more like a summoning than a partnership. And typically, anything summoned is the slave of whatever or whoever summons it. There is a reason magical lore talks about summoning circles as protection or containment. So the relavent passage just tells me that the Deep Ones are getting powerful enough to be a real threat, not that they are consolidating power with other mythos critters.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

Actually, all Zadok ever says on the subject is that them fish devils is bringin' things up out of where they come from into the town. Been doin' it for years, and slackenin' up lately. And when they get ready... y'ever hear tell of a shoggoth?

Doesn't say anything about the relationship between the Deep Ones and the shoggoths. All we know is that they're working together in some way.

[old book]

Good point, Genus. I have this mental picture of one of the Innsmouth cottages given over to shoggoth-raising, probably nappies all over the place, chew-toys, little penguin mobiles... but that's not really spelled out in the story, is it? Just that they're raisin stuff up what we hope the kin put down agin, and random mention of a shoggoth.

[Mike J.]

It's kinda hard to tell, but I think Zadok means by "slackenin' up," that they're speeding-up. That seems to be the more sinister of the possibilities.

I imagine those houses by the harbor are just filled waist-deep with goo that has random eyes floating in it. Occasionally the eyes will blink or look around and the goo will burp.

[Genus Unknown]

It's kinda hard to tell, but I think Zadok means by "slackenin' up," that they're speeding-up. That seems to be the more sinister of the possibilities.

I've never heard "slacking" or "slackening" used to mean "speeding up." It sounds like they're slowing down, which sounds more sinister to me because it means they're almost done with whatever preparations they're making...

[Bulbatron]

I just assumed that the Deep Ones were just using the shoggoths as living tools, be it for warfare or whatever other purpose they have.  I think they probably used them in much the same way the Elder Things did.

Also, I've always considered Cthulhu and Dagon to be separate entities, and also that the Cthulhu spawn and Deep Ones to be separate entities.  I haven't got and particular reference in mind for this, it's just my own perception.

[old book]

"Slackening" usually goes back to "reins" as in horses, doesn't it? Or is it also a nautical thing? I guess it could be both, if you ride walruses.

[fubarinpittsburgh]

This is my reaction to the Robert M Price interview. Hope you enjoy it-

Fubar talks about The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Robert M Price 

http://cthutube.blogspot.com/2011/09/countdown-to-halloween-day-59-fubar.html

[old book]

This is my reaction to the Robert M Price interview. Hope you enjoy it-

Fubar talks about The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Robert M Price 

http://a20.video2.blip.tv/12180009266612/Channelfubar-FUBARTalksAboutTheShadowOverInnsmouthAndRobertMPrice907.m4v?brs=1505&bri=8.4

Gentle Sir:--

I agree with your interpretation and said as much earlier in this thread. I think Robert M. Price, however much I do admire him, got it exactly backwards. One of the merits of the story is that is is susceptible to multiple levels of interpretation, a true exercise in cross-cultural and interspecific communication.

On the Pope's fish hat: it is generally said it harkens back to the Akkadians and their teacher-god from the stars, Ioannes. The Polish Pope before this current Hitlerjugend German one admitted there were Sumerian and Akkadian symbols in the Bible with a pneuma-/numismatic attraction that informs the Christian faith, especially in its Catholic branch.

On natives versus colonialists: it seems rather obvious the Deep Ones are colonizing the land as a sort of New World, and that they are not interested overmuch in assimilating to local mores. Thus Price's anology to the Zadokites' subversion of Hellenism fails. The only Zadokite in Innsmouth is Zadok Allen.

On Canaan, Phoenicians and Jews: it is my understanding that the polytheistic Canaanites were called Phillistines/Phoenicians, the ones who adopted monotheism were called Hebrews/Jews, but that the tribe remained Canaanite until the Babylonian captivity. Dagon would have been a more localized Syrian deity who bears mention in the Old Testament in connection with the Phoenician/Phillistine branch of the Canaanites, although there is not a good deal of archaeological evidence he was ever adored much outside his home town set back from the coast in what is now Syria, not Lebanon. His name appears on some of the "god lists" but his identification with a Sumerian counterpart is still clouded in some mystery. "Phillistine" is cognate with "Palestinian" but the origin is also obscure, and some have even posited a Greek origin from "Pallas Athena."

Was there a video component to your posting? I didn't see it, but the audio encoding seemed to have been accomplished at an overly high level of quality, where a lower one would have sufficed for the spoken word. Ai! Cthulhu f'tahgn!

http://www.sendspace.com/file/advuyd

[fubarinpittsburgh]

This is my reaction to the Robert M Price interview. Hope you enjoy it-

Fubar talks about The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Robert M Price 

http://a20.video2.blip.tv/12180009266612/Channelfubar-FUBARTalksAboutTheShadowOverInnsmouthAndRobertMPrice907.m4v?brs=1505&bri=8.4

Gentle Sir:--

I agree with your interpretation and said as much earlier in this thread. I think Robert M. Price, however much I do admire him, got it exactly backwards. One of the merits of the story is that is is susceptible to multiple levels of interpretation, a true exercise in cross-cultural and interspecific communication.

On the Pope's fish hat: it is generally said it harkens back to the Akkadians and their teacher-god from the stars, Ioannes. The Polish Pope before this current Hitlerjugend German one admitted there were Sumerian and Akkadian symbols in the Bible with a pneuma-/numismatic attraction that informs the Christian faith, especially in its Catholic branch.

On natives versus colonialists: it seems rather obvious the Deep Ones are colonizing the land as a sort of New World, and that they are not interested overmuch in assimilating to local mores. Thus Price's anology to the Zadokites' subversion of Hellenism fails. The only Zadokite in Innsmouth is Zadok Allen.

On Canaan, Phoenicians and Jews: it is my understanding that the polytheistic Canaanites were called Phillistines/Phoenicians, the ones who adopted monotheism were called Hebrews/Jews, but that the tribe remained Canaanite until the Babylonian captivity. Dagon would have been a more localized Syrian deity who bears mention in the Old Testament in connection with the Phoenician/Phillistine branch of the Canaanites, although there is not a good deal of archaeological evidence he was ever adored much outside his home town set back from the coast in what is now Syria, not Lebanon. His name appears on some of the "god lists" but his identification with a Sumerian counterpart is still clouded in some mystery. "Phillistine" is cognate with "Palestinian" but the origin is also obscure, and some have even posited a Greek origin from "Pallas Athena."

Was there a video component to your posting? I didn't see it, but the audio encoding seemed to have been accomplished at an overly high level of quality, where a lower one would have sufficed for the spoken word. Ai! Cthulhu f'tahgn!

http://www.sendspace.com/file/advuyd

See, this is why I love this podcast and this forum. I would never have a conversation this deep on Fangoria or Rue Morgue forums.

Here is the link to the video on Youtube if the Blip video is not working for you-


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYR6LxXfEt8


The reason I use video over audio is I am trying to reach more young adults. And I have found younger people will watch a video over listening to a audio file 99.9% of the time.

Thank you for your information.

[ahtzib]

On natives versus colonialists: it seems rather obvious the Deep Ones are colonizing the land as a sort of New World, and that they are not interested overmuch in assimilating to local mores. Thus Price's anology to the Zadokites' subversion of Hellenism fails. The only Zadokite in Innsmouth is Zadok Allen.

Price's point is actually not bad, IMO.

The most famous revitalization movement study is Wallace's Death and Rebirth of the Seneca about the Handsome Lake Revival amongst the Seneca of the Iroquois, ca. 1799, when they've been brought incredibly low. Wallace studied an number of historical cases, and tries to argue that many religious origins are in revitalization movements. But the Seneca case is his in-depth one. And I think it is quite reminiscent of Innsmouth as Price points out. The Deep Ones are colonists. But the people of Innsmouth aren't Deep Ones - they're Deep One hybrids, in the process of becoming fully Deep Ones. They still live somewhat like New Englanders, they still have churches, and so on. While there are some aspects of this that are purely for the purposes of masquerade, I think it is also a cultural continuation. And certainly in the case of the first generation, the Obed Marsh generation, they were trying to blend the two worlds, and constantly losing ground doing so. Old Man Marsh still wears his finery, his daughters dress to impress on a human scale. They haven't fully acculturated, just as they haven't fully changed and taken to the water. Innsmouth really is a hybrid place, in many ways far more like Newburyport than like Y'ha-nthlei.

Because Innsmouth is always tagged as a racist story, and as being the fear of immigrants, I never really clicked that it reflects and taps into the colonial history of New England, but now I'm thinking very much that Lovecraft may have intended this. He wrote and thought far too much about the Puritans and about European colonization of New England (but not so much about the natives, that were at most an afterthought to him), that I do think this is attempt at working through that. I don't think he had some prototypical idea of revitalization movements, but perhaps through an analogy to the history of New England, he sort of replicated the concept of at least syncretism and acculturation if not revitalization in the Wallace sense, through repetition and reflection.

[old book]

ahtzib,

That is a very well-argued post. I would maintain, however, that the Innsmouthians are "on board" and assimilating to Deep One culture willingly, rather than trying to assimilate it into their New England framework, although one assumes there must be some back and forth, some give and take, some flotsam and some jetsam. If I'm correct then they represent Hellenizing Jews, the sort of fellows who put the zodiac on the floor of their teaching houses and did the nekkid wrestling.

Old Man March sporting his 19th century finery about town is a good point, but I'd guess he's firmly in the Deep One camp by this point and is merely keeping up appearances on land as cultural camoflage.

Are you certain Lovecraft didn't think much about the natives? He gives them sort of a prime place in He, even if only as ghosts (or ghost dancers, following up on the Wallace theme).

There is a chance Lovecraft hit here upon the Deep Structure which Peter Levenda (not Noam Chomsky of Massachussets) hints at as informing American life, but going back to native prehistory, in his weird survey trilogy. I remember reading in Miscellaneous Writings something he wrote about an actual colony of Samoans or Fijians living somewhere on the coast in New England. That might have served as inspiration to delve deeper into the idea of cultural decay and displacement, alienation at a visceral biological level.

Christianity itself is certainly based on a revitalization movement, and it's not completely coincidental that some of the communities pre-dating Christianity but fervently interested in opposing Hellenization sought to employ archaic forms of Aramaic and Hebrew including obsolete grammatical forms.

Innsmouth also hints at the idea of underlying "colonizer guilt," a sort of sense of karma, of, "if we did it to them, someone else can do it to us sometime."

I also still think the themes of leading New England families and Prohibition (and bootleggers and drug dealers) play a big part in the story, and some memory or lore about the Phillips ancestor who fought the good fight for the sould of Andover Prep, and lost. If someone like Levenda, who loves to write about trivial connections and coincidences, tackled Innsmouth from that angle, I have no doubt they'd come up with quite a full net. Unfortunately Levenda isn't a Lovecraft afficianado. Or perhaps it's really better that he isn't.

In any case, it's not the only time Lovecraft touched on the idea of cultural decline and the horrors of syncretism, that stuff runs all through his work, from barbarous medieval Latin to shoggoths imitating extinct Great Old Ones at the South Pole and a bunch of other examples anyone can come up with. He also would have known about the mixed but mainly native Christian base communities/villages in Mass and elsewhere in New England in the 1600s, God-fearing Indians replicating in slightly off forms European cultural norms, up to a point.

[ahtzib]

Are you certain Lovecraft didn't think much about the natives? He gives them sort of a prime place in He, even if only as ghosts (or ghost dancers, following up on the Wallace theme).

He is one of the rare places he does. For the most part in his stories, they matter little. But more importantly, in his letters, it becomes much more obvious that to HPL, New England's history (and I don't just mean in a written sense) begins with the Puritans. Other than He, he treats North America as terra nullius before European settlement, with the natives quickly brushed aside. Even worse, in cases where he does talk about native American or African civilizations (the US Southwest and Mexico in The Transition of Juan Romero, the Plains in The Mound, Great Zimbabwe), he assigns them to global or pre-human or quasi-human lost civilizations, Lemuria style. In his actual thinking, he doesn't believe this, but he basically doesn't think about such places or times at all, they are of minimal concern to him. And lets not forget he spent his youth writing, and then later destroying, numerous stories of Romans landing in the New World, getting in conflict with locals, but mostly these stories were of the Romans (sort of like what he did with Ireland in The Moon-Bog).

Native Americans are a minimal and shadowy presence to Lovecraft's imagination. He preferred to people his surroundings with transplanted Old World myths, more recent colonial folklore from after the time the Indians have supposedly disappeared, or cosmic fantasies.

[old book]

ahtzib:

Lovecraft presents a tableau of "natives" in Call of Cthulhu, and one gets the sense he is really trying to tie them all together into some sort of Turanian substratum who instinctually understand the lines from the fictitious language. Dream-Quest has a very thin fantasy patina overlaying a quest for the "god race" among fictitious "natives" including a barely disguised Inuit presence. Whether Lovecraft is just using them as background to provide definition to his "real people" or is delving into their mythologies, they're still there. It probably means something he placed de Castro, his Jewish correspondent, among the dark hordes of voodoo practitioners leaping to the beat of the tom-toms in Call, but I'm not sure what. I think he's playing around with some basically theosophical notions of race current at the turn of the century, including Aryans, Turanians, Atlanteans, etc., but foregoing the use of the names Blavatsky assigned, or he's received the same sort of notions from secondary or more removed sources.

There's a book by Henrik Rink translated into English under the title Danish Greenland. Its People and Products from ca. 1877 (the date of publication in English in London). Rink was an important official in the Greenland Trade Department and was later more or less governor of Greenland for the Kingdom of Denmark. He begins his book with a retelling of the history, anecdotes, sagas and rumors regarding the Norse colonization in the late 10th century. His book contains a number of tales or rumors that are no longer repeated much. One of the stories is that some Greenlanders renounced Catholicism as ineffective and "went native" cavorting with the presumably newly arrived Thule Inuit (although Dorset eskimo would've been the first in contact with the Norse Greenlanders, probably), taking up heathen ways and one presumes shamanism (which wasn't so alien to the mainly pagan Icelanders who settled Greenland anyway, there's a saga tale about a female "wyrdsinger" early in the new country's history). There is another about papal correspondence and a Danish-English peace treaty which hints English vessels took Icelanders and Greenlanders hostage in a somewhat secret and pre-Columbus bid for the route to China and North American lands, including an attack where the raiders burned the farmsteads to the ground (although the archaeology has never supported that sort of arson at any of the known sites). Neither of these is at first glance totally applicable to Shadow Over Innsmouth, but the way Rink writes, or at least how he was translated, leads me to believe Shadow took some inspiration from these stories of a decaying civilization turning to Inuit heathenism and attacks by the central authorities (English, Portuguese under papal direction), if that inspiration was not taken directly from Rink's book.

I assume Lovecraft was interested in the lost Norse colonies in Greenland and probably took the name Olaus Wormius down for later use while reading up on the various theories at some library. Wormius was Olaf Wormskiold and I believe I saw him mentioned in footnotes of other books about Greenland as an important Danish/Norwegian writer on the subject.

Another story to think about in connection with what Robert Price said is the Festival. I hope I'm not misremembering the title, I'm thinking of the one where the narrator returns home during yuletide to a strange New England village and ends up doing the wave together with all the other villagers down in the cavern amphitheatre where they're performing ancient rites to Dagon or some marine deity of that general sort.

Rink's book is on archive.org under Henry Rink and the title, or search for the file name, cu31924032358388.pdf (or .djvu). If anyone is interested, the stuff that looks and feels like Innsmouth are passages in the first 38 pages.

PS I think Robert M. Price is great and I'm just about to listen to an interview with him from June I somehow overlooked by TenebrousT of The Stench of Truth on blogalkradio. I think the direct download link for the mp3 is:

http://aa3.blogtalkradio.com/a/0/http:~~edge-dl.andomedia.com~800185~download.andomedia.com~Creative~800~800493_1_64.mp3/4/show/1/939/show_1939931.mp3

[osyrisdiamond]

I'd like to point out that Zadok Allen never says the Deep Ones are allied with shoggoths, only that they are "going to raise" one. To me, that sounds much more like a summoning than a partnership. And typically, anything summoned is the slave of whatever or whoever summons it. There is a reason magical lore talks about summoning circles as protection or containment. So the relavent passage just tells me that the Deep Ones are getting powerful enough to be a real threat, not that they are consolidating power with other mythos critters.

Bob

If I may quote from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you." If what we learned about the Shoggoths in The Mountains of Madness is any indication, either the Deep Ones are more subtle with their dealing with them or they have no clue what they're messing with. This said, considering the humans cleared Innsmouth rather effectively, what happened to them? Did the Deep Ones get wise and pull out their penultimate weapon? (Assuming that they are their own ultimate weapon in many ways.)

If so, then their outpost of Innsmouth should have been awaiting them. So, were these Shoggoths, though apparently amiable to land environments, less self-motived than their Antarctic counterparts? Maybe this would explain why the Deep Ones would even want to muck with these things. I doubt, again drawing parallels to their southern counterparts, that Shoggoths would have much dealings with anyone, and certainly not in a subservient capacity. The fact that they are apparently being stored and brought up at least implied less than equality in the relationship. Then again, this could be a skewed perspective by the speaker. Still, what happened to the Innsmouth Shoggoths? (assuming there were indeed Shoggoths) is a damn good question. Damn you, Lovecraft, and your plot holes! (Or Lovecraft was merely writing a previous plot elements into a new mold for the purpose of story...)

Actually, all Zadok ever says on the subject is that them fish devils is bringin' things up out of where they come from into the town. Been doin' it for years, and slackenin' up lately. And when they get ready... y'ever hear tell of a shoggoth?

Doesn't say anything about the relationship between the Deep Ones and the shoggoths. All we know is that they're working together in some way.

slack·en (slkn)
tr. & intr.v. slack·ened, slack·en·ing, slack·ens
1. To make or become slower; slow down: The runners slackened their pace. Air speed slackened.
2. To make or become less tense, taut, or firm; loosen: I slackened the line to let the fish swim. The tension in the board room finally slackened.
3. To make or become less vigorous, intense, or severe; ease: slacken discipline; afraid that morale might slacken.

So yes, it does mean to slow down; and I agree such would very much suggest that a sufficient capacity was being achieved, or at least an end to their supply was drawing near. Though vague, it does seems like the Deep Ones are trying to pull one out of the Elder Thing's playbook... I refer you to my statements above. I have to laugh, as it seems many of the aspects of Lovecraft's writing we love most more seem to be derived from plot holes or otherwise what one might call inconsistency; traits we might otherwise scold other writer for as sloppy work. Again, since in some aspects, that how Lovecraft operated (adjusting previous plot elements to fit the context).