Sea | Fiction | Tohu Wa-Bohu

After Olorun had brought forth the many orisha, they lived together in heaven. Below them was only the sea...after some time, Obatala grew weary of looking down over the grey waters; he found them monotonous and depressing.

In this creation myth of South-West Nigeria, Obatala is told by Orunmila to gather together a gold chain, a snail's shell filled with sand, a palm nut, a chicken and a cat. With MacGyver-esque ingenuity, Obatala climbs down from heaven on the gold chain, scattering the sand about from the snail's shell to create land, then releases the chicken to scrape about in the sand and form contours. Finally, he plants the palm nut, turning it into a tree, and lives bneath the tree with the cat (who was apparently only ever included in Orunmila's list as a future companion for Obatala). In another, gloomier version of the tale, Odudwa steals the land-creating materials from a drunken Obatala and does it all himself, dooming the earth to stewardship under a thief and usurper. If Obatala had only stayed sober, the myth specifies, our world would have been formed by him and there would have been no wars or catastrophes.

Release the chicken! ...What, that meme isn't funny again yet?

The people of Dahomey, from near Benin, buck the logical trend of putting the sea at the very beginning of creation, perhaps appropriately for a kingdom of fishermen; Mawu the female creator actually invented the sea to help keep her constant friend, Aido-Hwedo, an enormous serpent, cool as they formed the world.

Mawu and Aido-Hwedo, fantastic as they are, are going to have to be ignored for our purposes today, because they go against the basic (and probably truistic) theory I'd like to explore; the notion of the sea as eternal, primordial, an element of chaos, and in some way maternal* - as if our myths and legends can, on occasion, echo the idea that we may have risen up out of the sea - that the ocean itself, in spite of the horrifying monsters, storms and endless depths, may be our true home.

It's a symbol that finds its purest anthropomorphic expression in the figure of Tiamat, the Babylonian ocean mother-goddess (who, however, gets sold short by the myth, which lets her act as the creative force but gives 'firsts' to Apsu, a male freshwater god - the little-documented Sumerian version of Tiamat, Nammu, is allowed to be both the primordial deity and the creative one). Tiamat, frequently portrayed as a monstrous serpent or dragon, is nevertheless mother of all, the chaos which is not in opposition to order but actively and purposefully creating it. This being a pretty standard creation myth, Tiamat is of course brutally murdered by a masculine god by the name of Anu, then dismembered, the various pieces being used in the classic resurrectional sense to create land and sky.

She actually looks a little like a chicken. Have we underestimated the chicken's place in psycho-mythology?

Typical of Hemingway, then, that he should write of the man heroically (and ineffectually) attempting to tame the feminine sea in The Old Man And The Sea. And typical of Lovecraft, that it should be Father Dagon (originally a fertility god and nothing to do with the sea whatsoever) who dominates affairs and not, far more appropriately, a feminine creature. His The Shadow Over Innsmouth, however, created partly as a reaction against inter-racial relationships, does also include a Mother Hydra who was presumably influenced by Tiamat; it also deals, fascinatingly, with the notion of our watery heritage, its protagonist being at first repelled by the amphibian Deep Ones and later coming to realise that...drum roll...he carries Deep One ancestry himself.

With the racial content of the piece, I think we can probably do a little better than simply see the twist as a plot device that gazes back on man's dark past, in the manner of The Rats In The Walls. There is a serious racial neurosis and confusion running deep through Shadow - whereas other works like At The Mountains Of Madness use two different alien species to attempt to draw a distinction between the 'master race' Old Ones and the 'slave race' Shoggoth, Shadow seems to accept the fact that all of life, including that which Lovecraft finds repulsive, comes from a common aquatic source and so no distinction can be made. "Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon, what we all come from onct." The marriage of these two gods is itself an inter-racial sexual act, as that phrasing makes explicitly clear - Absu the freshwater god and Tiamat the saltwater goddess, who meet in a "mixing of the waters." Lovecraft seems to see this as an unnatural pollution - the Babylonian myth, far more intriguingly, suggests that the mingling of different elements is the catalyst for creation...itself as pure an alchemical concept as, I don't know, order being formed out of primordial chaos.

The protagonist of The Shadow Over Innsmouth comes to the understanding that he and the Deep Ones (and, therefore all creatures) are kin, equal children of the marriage of Dagon and Hydra. Lovecraft presents this as a nightmare, but the fact that he acknowledges it at all is significant. No matter how horrific he finds the concept, he does at least come to see man's collective true, chaotic home as cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei.


Jon Ware
Fiction Editor


*As elsewhere across the world, symbolic mothers don't often fare too well in African myths. Another story has the creator god raping the earth (tearing away her clitoris in the form of a termite mound). The offspring, a white fox trickster figure, then rapes her as well, bringing spirits and magic into the world. Finally, two watery brothers have sex with her to soothe her pain. Charming.

Snow | Fiction | There's Something Nasty Lurking In The Glacier

People flee into snowy places. There’s no other reason to venture there. That seems to be our main literary thesis. Frankenstein’s monster, Frankenstein himself, and Robert Walton are all running away to the wastes of the North Pole (the Creature himself, of course, finds a smaller, less well-fortified wilderness earlier in the book in the Alps) but the latter two both convince themselves falsely that they’re not fleeing so much as chasing something.

The other obvious association is that snowy places are dwelling-places for the uncanny. Frankenstein is an amusing exception to the rule, because while our first suspicion during Walton’s framing device is that something weird lurks in the fog and the ice, the Creature actually originates from a seat of learning and culture in the midst of European civilised society. For most of our uncanny literature, though, that theme is played straight. Consider the presence of ice and snow in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' as the gateway to the otherworld, the natural torment that leads to unnatural torments. In one sense, this is simply practical; the snowy landscape is, as should be made clear by the number of Stephen King novels set there and the number of B-movies and B-novels in which an alien craft crashes there, a perfectly isolated and frightening setting for horror. But consider the way the uncanny seeps into otherwise realistic thrillers as soon as they venture into the snow-filled wilds – Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, for example, or Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights (and for those of you keeping track of just how ridiculous a piece of literary genre fiction can get while still being acclaimed – SPOILERS -, that’s one count of ‘alien parasite inside a fallen meteorite’ and one count of ‘talking apes at a Soviet research facility.)


All of this intrigues me in part because of the upcoming movie version of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness – for my money, the best story by old H.P., which is going to be made by James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro and has, therefore, both the most suitable and utterly unsuitable team behind it that anyone could hope for. Suitable because both of them know how to make damn good, memorable sets, and you think they’d be able to capture the weirdness of an ice-filled land effectively. Unsuitable because…both of them really, really like monsters, and they like to try and capture those monsters visually, which is the wrong approach for any Lovecraftian tale and especially for Mountains, which barely contains any visual monstrosities at all, especially not living. The horror has to come from the alien purity of the snow itself, the twisted reflections of the ice, the white fog that conceals the world around you, the empty flats and the bottomless crevasses. (All right, and the penguins. The horror partly comes from the penguins.)

The black pit! The carven ring...the proto-Shoggoths, the windowless solids with five dimensions!

No, if an adaptation of Mountains is going to work, it requires the spirit of my favourite cryptid – certainly the one with the best name – Am Fear Liath Mor, the Gaelic term for the sense of unease experienced by lonely climbers in harsh mountains; the belief that one is being followed by an unseen presence, or even the flitting glimpse of a humanoid figure. Fear Liath has been, very obviously, connected with the legend of the yeti, and it’s been attributed to loneliness, exhaustion, the effects of high altitude or low temperatures, or the reflection of sunlight off snow or low-lying mist.


It could, conceivably, be an explanation for the fascinating Dyatlov Pass Incident from the late 50s, when nine skiers in the Ural Mountains were discovered to have torn themselves forcibly out of their tent in the middle of the night, as if in a sudden panic, and ran out into the woods in their underclothes. They scattered into the trees, refusing for some unknown reason to return to the shelter of their tent, until eventually they died from the cold. No footprints were found other than theirs. Chilling details began to emerge later, such as that one of the women had had her tongue removed, and that several of the men were heavily bruised, as if they’d been struck by an unknown force. There were plenty of obvious explanations – small carnivores are plentiful, the men could have tripped and injured themselves – but it remains one of the 20th century’s most genuinely intriguing real-life cases of the uncanny.

The slashed tent.

This, perhaps, is snow’s appropriateness for horror – a landscape designed as if by nature to confuse and unsettle us, playing sensual tricks on us, distorting our perceptions, in much the same way that dilapidated old ‘haunted houses’ sometimes have carbon monoxide leaks. A natural world that appears very much to be unnatural, the sense that we are not alone in the loneliest of places. The horrid state of mind, in fact, that connects the Ancient Mariner with Frankenstein, encapsulated by the lines which purportedly caused Percy Shelley to faint in utter terror;


“Like one, that on a lonesome road


Doth walk in fear and dread,


And having once turned round walks on,


And turns no more his head;


Because he knows, a frightful fiend


Doth close behind him tread.”


A very happy Christmas to you all.


Jon Ware
Fiction Editor