Nyarlathotep

Also Known As: the Crawling Chaos; the God of a Thousand Forms; the Haunter of the Dark; the Black Man; the Black Pharaoh
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He wears any shape he likes, walks openly among people in human company, and drives crowds to madness for his own amusement.
Role in Mythos: He is the messenger and active agent of the Other Gods in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, the one cosmic power who bothers to deal with humanity face to face.
Relation to Humans: He seeks people out rather than ignoring them, gathering audiences, followers and cults wherever he goes. What he offers is knowledge, and what it costs is sanity, and he appears to enjoy the exchange.

The autumn heat would not break that year, and nobody was sleeping. Screams in the small hours had become a civic problem, the kind of thing wise men discussed and could not solve. Then a man came out of Egypt. He was slender and dark and looked like a pharaoh, and the fellahin knelt when they saw him without being able to say why. He moved north into the cities buying strange instruments of glass and metal, combining them into instruments stranger still, and giving public lectures on electricity and psychology that emptied halls of their composure. People advised one another to go and see him. Then they shuddered. Then they went.

What happened in the choking upstairs room was this. Something was thrown on a screen, hooded shapes among ruins, the world struggling against waves of destruction rolling in from outer space around a cooling sun. Sparks played around the heads of the audience, hair lifted, and shadows that were not anyone’s shadows came out and squatted on people’s skulls. One spectator, colder and more scientific than the rest, muttered something about imposture and static electricity, and Nyarlathotep drove the whole crowd out into the deserted midnight streets, where the tram rails had already gone to grass and one of the towers was missing from the skyline.

That scene is a hundred and six years old and was written in a fever. In late 1920 a young amateur journalist in Providence, Rhode Island, woke from what he called the most realistic and horrible nightmare he had experienced since he was ten, and wrote the first body paragraph of a prose poem while still half asleep. In the dream, a letter had arrived from his friend Samuel Loveman warning him not to miss Nyarlathotep if the man came to Providence: horrible beyond anything imaginable, and also wonderful. H. P. Lovecraft had never heard the name before in his life and seemed, inside the dream, to understand the allusion perfectly. The result ran in the November 1920 issue of The United Amateur, a magazine he edited himself. S. T. Joshi, who has spent a career reconstructing the sequence of Lovecraft’s composition, suspects it was written in December and used to fill an overdue issue. So the god of a thousand forms began as filler.

Where the name came from is guesswork, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Robert M. Price has suggested that Lord Dunsany supplied it below the level of conscious thought, since Dunsany’s work contains a false prophet called Alhireth-Hotep and an angry god called Mynarthitep. Will Murray has proposed that the dream figure, the itinerant showman with his exhibitions of electrical apparatus and his sinister celebrity, was Nikola Tesla. Both are readings, not evidence. The name sounds Egyptian and is not.

Describing him is a problem, because he does not hold still. In the prose poem he is the swarthy lecturer. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath he is a tall, slim figure with the young face of an antique pharaoh, dressed in prismatic robes, crowned with a golden pshent that glows by its own light, carrying himself like a dark god or a fallen archangel, with a lazy glitter of amusement around the eyes. In The Haunter of the Dark he is a tentacled, bat winged thing crouched in the steeple of an abandoned church in Providence, and it cannot endure light. In The Dreams in the Witch House he is the Black Man of the old witch trials, standing at the elbow of a Salem witch who signed with him centuries earlier. In The Whisperer in Darkness the horror is quieter: a chant promises that he will put on the semblance of man, the waxen mask and the robes that hide, and at the end of the story a man’s face and hands are found lying on a couch, empty.

The Kadath encounter is the centre of the whole thing. Randolph Carter, hauled captive to the onyx castle on the mountain of the gods, is met with trumpets and incense and a young pharaoh who greets him by name and speaks to him with extraordinary generosity. The sunset city he has been searching the dreamlands for, the voice explains, is Boston. It is the light on the western windows, the dome on the hill, the Charles going drowsily under its bridges, Salem and Marblehead and Providence on its seven hills. All he must do is fly there on a waiting shantak and steer for Vega. Every word of it is a lie. The route leads outward instead, toward the blind idiot sultan Azathoth at the centre of chaos, and the parting line is a taunt: pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Carter escapes only by throwing himself off the bird and falling through a universe, while the old god Nodens howls him clear.

This is what separates Nyarlathotep from everything else in that cosmos. Fritz Leiber put it plainly: he is evilly intelligent, where his master Azathoth is simply mindless. The other powers sleep under the sea or are exiled among stars or thrash about with no more malice than weather. Nyarlathotep speaks human languages, passes for a man, keeps up with the news, cultivates followers, and prefers madness to death because madness is more interesting to watch. He is the only one of them who finds us worth the effort.

He also carries Lovecraft’s ugliest freight, and it is not possible to describe him accurately without saying so. The 1920 figure is menacing precisely because he is foreign and dark. The Witch House avatar is called the Black Man. The later Black Pharaoh title, largely built up by Robert Bloch and other writers rather than by Lovecraft himself, keeps the same association running. Joshi, who is Lovecraft’s most committed defender, has written that there is no denying the reality of the racism and no sense in pretending it stays out of the fiction. Michel Houellebecq went further and argued that racial hatred supplied much of the raw force of the work. The best of the character and the worst of his author are made of the same material.

A good deal of what people now recite about him arrived after his death. Lovecraft wrote of the Other Gods; the tidy category of Outer Gods, with Nyarlathotep filed under it, is Chaosium’s classification from the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. The claim that Azathoth is his father comes from a letter of the 1930s rather than from any story. What Lovecraft did give him is stranger and more useful: he called him the crawling chaos, and the dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods, and left the rest open.

His powers follow from being a messenger who enjoys the work. He takes any shape, appears anywhere, knows things about the future that break the people he tells, gathers crowds and unmakes them, and can carry a soul all the way to the throne at the centre of ultimate chaos. His limits are oddly domestic. The Haunter avatar is trapped in its steeple by a lit lamp and by the streetlights of a modern city, and a power failure is all it takes to let it out. Nodens drove him off with a glare of light. Above all he needs an audience, because his method is persuasion rather than force. He has to be advertised, discussed, believed in, and then gone to see. Every version of the story turns on the same small human act: somebody climbing a flight of stairs, in the dark, having been warned.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nyarlathotep?

Nyarlathotep is a fictional god created by H. P. Lovecraft, first appearing in his 1920 prose poem of the same name and known as the Crawling Chaos. He serves as the messenger and active agent of the Other Gods, and unlike the other cosmic powers of Lovecraft’s fiction he walks openly among humans, usually in the guise of a tall, dark, pharaoh-like man.

What does Nyarlathotep look like?

Nyarlathotep has no single fixed appearance and is said to possess a thousand forms. His most common shape is a tall, slim man with the young face of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, wearing prismatic robes and a glowing golden crown, but he also appears as a tentacled, bat-winged creature in The Haunter of the Dark and as the Black Man of the witch cult in The Dreams in the Witch House.

Is Nyarlathotep more powerful than Cthulhu?

In Lovecraft’s own writing the two are not ranked against each other, though Nyarlathotep is far more active: Cthulhu lies dreaming beneath the Pacific while Nyarlathotep moves freely through the world and serves the Other Gods directly. The formal hierarchy that places Nyarlathotep above Cthulhu comes from the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game rather than from Lovecraft.

Where did the name Nyarlathotep come from?

Lovecraft took the name from a nightmare in late 1920 and said he had never encountered it before waking. Robert M. Price has suggested it was suggested to him subconsciously by two names in the fiction of Lord Dunsany, Alhireth-Hotep and Mynarthitep, though this remains an informed guess rather than an established fact.

What is Nyarlathotep’s weakness?

Nyarlathotep depends on being sought out, since he works by persuasion, spectacle and deception rather than by force. His individual forms also have limits: the Haunter of the Dark avatar cannot tolerate light and is confined to a church steeple by it, and in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath the god Nodens drives him off with a burst of light.