The Gospel According to Arkham

The Gospel According to Arkham

Lovecraft's Open Mythos, the Christian Mythos and the Manufacture of Canon

There is a curious difference between reading H. P. Lovecraft and reading about the "Cthulhu Mythos".

Lovecraft's own fiction is untidy.

Names recur without always meaning exactly the same thing. Gods shade into aliens. Dreams become geography. Ancient books contradict one another by implication. Hastur may be a place, person or something else entirely. Azathoth is magnificently important and almost entirely unexplained. Lovecraft borrows Tsathoggua from Clark Ashton Smith, von Junzt from Robert E. Howard, Ludvig Prinn from Robert Bloch, and cheerfully allows his friends to borrow Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu and the Necronomicon in return.

There is no catechism.

There is scarcely even continuity in the modern franchise sense.

What exists instead is what Lovecraft himself called a pooling of resources intended to create a convincing background of "mythology, legendry, & bibliography". He explicitly explained that members of his circle borrowed one another's gods and imaginary books for the pleasure of creating "a convincing cycle of synthetic folklore".

Only later does this become the Cthulhu Mythos.

The definite article matters.

August Derleth, editors, scholars, anthologists, game designers and later writers increasingly treated Lovecraft's suggestive network as though it were a system capable of being diagrammed.

Something surprisingly similar happened to Christianity.

Christianity did not begin with a New Testament.

Jesus left no Christian book.

The earliest surviving Christian documents are Paul's letters, written to particular communities about particular disputes. The canonical Gospels appeared later. Other gospels, letters, revelations and acts followed. Different Christian communities used different selections. Interpretations competed. Harmonisers tried to reconcile divergent accounts. Bishops argued about legitimate and illegitimate texts. Only gradually did a bounded corpus emerge which later Christians could open and call "the New Testament".

The comparison is therefore not between Cthulhu and Christ.

It is between two processes of myth-making.

One was consciously fictional and collaborative.

The other was religious, historical and eventually institutional.

But both demonstrate what happens when a foundational body of stories passes into the hands of a community.

The community does not merely preserve it.

It continues writing.

Then it decides which continuations count.

I. Lovecraft's genuinely open mythos

The expression "open source" is anachronistic, but unusually appropriate.

Lovecraft encouraged reciprocal borrowing.

Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua and Book of Eibon entered Lovecraft's stories.

Robert E. Howard's Friedrich von Junzt entered them.

Robert Bloch's Ludvig Prinn entered them.

Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth and Necronomicon travelled in the opposite direction.

Lovecraft described this explicitly as collaborative construction.

Nobody owned doctrinal continuity.

A borrowed entity could acquire new characteristics in another writer's hands.

The resulting "Mythos" was therefore less a fictional universe than a conversational one.

Each story was partly proposition and partly reply.

II. Christianity begins in much the same textual condition

The earliest Christian movement likewise possessed no completed canonical sourcebook.

Paul's authentic letters are generally placed in the 50s CE and are the earliest surviving Christian writings. The canonical Gospels are later: Mark is conventionally dated around 70, Matthew and Luke somewhat later, and John towards the end of the first century, though precise dates remain approximate.

Early Christianity therefore develops through overlapping media:

oral traditions;

interpretations of Jewish scripture;

sayings attributed to Jesus;

stories about Jesus;

letters;

liturgical formulae;

visions;

missionary preaching;

gospels;

and eventually theological commentary.

There was no leather-bound New Testament sitting beside the empty tomb.

The book comes later.

III. The founder problem: Lovecraft is not Jesus

Any simple equation fails immediately.

Lovecraft is the principal author of Lovecraftian fiction.

Jesus is the principal subject of Christian literature.

There is no Christian equivalent of Lovecraft because Christianity separates the roles which Lovecraft combines.

Lovecraft creates characters, books, cosmology and stories.

Jesus, as historically recoverable, leaves no surviving writings.

Other people narrate him.

Consequently the closest Christian structural equivalent to Lovecraft would have to be an impossible composite:

Jesus as originating focus;

the earliest oral tradition as primitive mythos;

the evangelists as narrators;

and perhaps the apostolic community as collaborative circle.

The analogy becomes useful only after this asymmetry is admitted.

IV. Paul as August Derleth

Here the comparison becomes considerably sharper.

August Derleth did not invent Lovecraft's fictional universe.

Paul did not originate the Jesus movement.

Both entered an existing tradition and became enormously influential interpreters of it.

Both transformed stories and inherited material into systems.

Paul's letters are not biographies of Jesus. They are theological interpretations of what Jesus' death and resurrection mean.

Paul develops interconnected ideas concerning Christ, sin, death, resurrection, justification, salvation, the Church, Gentile inclusion and the approaching fulfilment of history.

His influence on later Christianity is difficult to exaggerate. Cambridge's Companion to Biblical Interpretation describes Paul as perhaps Christianity's most important thinker and his letters as formative for later Christian confessions.

Derleth performs a roughly analogous operation upon Lovecraft.

Lovecraft supplies encounters, names, ancient texts and cosmic horrors.

Derleth increasingly turns these into a cosmology.

V. The crucial Derleth move

The irony becomes delicious because Derleth's own systematisation was explicitly Christianising.

Lovecraft's universe is fundamentally indifferent.

Cthulhu is not Satan.

Yog-Sothoth is not morally evil.

Human survival carries no obvious cosmic ethical significance.

Derleth increasingly imposed a struggle between benevolent Elder Gods and malignant Great Old Ones, introduced elemental classifications and interpreted the Mythos through something much closer to a conventional battle between good and evil.

The H. P. Lovecraft Archive identifies exactly this as the central controversy surrounding Derleth's Mythos: he transformed Lovecraft's alien entities into a more comprehensible moral and elemental system.

Derleth therefore does to Lovecraft something analogous to what theological interpreters commonly do to inherited religious narrative:

he discovers a system.

Whether the system was originally there is another question.

VI. Where Paul resembles Derleth

The comparison should not be caricatured as "Paul corrupted Jesus".

That is much too crude.

Paul inherited traditions rather than inventing Christianity from nothing. His own letters refer to traditions he had received, including material concerning Jesus' death, resurrection and appearances.

But he gives those traditions a conceptual architecture.

That is the Derleth-like role.

The originating material says:

something happened.

The interpreter asks:

what does the whole thing mean?

And soon the meaning becomes as important as the event.

Derleth asks what relationship Cthulhu has to the other entities.

Paul asks what relationship Christ has to Adam, Torah, sin, Gentiles, resurrection and the history of Israel.

Systematisation begins when isolated narrative elements become nodes in a theology.

VII. Where Paul does not resemble Derleth

There are important differences.

Paul writes before the canonical Gospels, not centuries afterwards. His letters belong to Christianity's first generation. He knew Peter and James and was engaged in disputes with other early leaders.

Derleth knew Lovecraft personally but performed much of his definitive systematisation after Lovecraft's death.

More importantly, Paul's writings themselves became canonical.

Derleth's stories never became works by Lovecraft, however influential they became upon popular conceptions of the Mythos.

The Christian tradition therefore gave its Derleth analogue an authority that Lovecraft scholarship generally refuses to give Derleth.

Paul is not merely commentary on Christianity.

Paul becomes scripture.

VIII. Paul may actually be more powerful than Derleth

This produces a striking counterfactual.

Imagine that Derleth's Mythos stories had been bound together with Lovecraft's and declared equally authoritative.

Imagine further that later readers were required to reconcile Lovecraft's cosmic indifference with Derleth's good Elder Gods because both belonged to the same canon.

That gets us closer to Christianity.

Paul's interpretation of Jesus does not sit outside the New Testament as theological commentary.

It sits inside.

The interpretative layer has become part of the source material.

Later Christian theology must therefore interpret Jesus partly through Paul because Paul has already been canonised as one of the principal authoritative witnesses to what Jesus means.

The commentary has entered the text.

IX. Mark and the first great narrative consolidation

Mark performs another function familiar from collaborative mythmaking.

It is generally regarded as the earliest surviving canonical narrative Gospel. Matthew and Luke subsequently make extensive use of Mark while revising, expanding and rearranging its material.

This resembles what happens when one contribution to an open fictional universe becomes foundational.

Later writers do not merely cite it.

They rewrite through it.

Mark supplies a narrative spine.

Matthew adds extensive teaching, scriptural fulfilment and a strongly Jewish interpretative architecture.

Luke produces a different theological and literary expansion and then continues the story into the early Church through Acts.

One might call them authorised forks.

Except, at the time they were written, nobody had yet created the repository into which the authorised versions would eventually be committed.

X. Matthew and Luke as Mythos redactors

This resembles Lovecraftian collaboration more closely than simple sequel writing.

A Mythos writer may take:

a god;

a forbidden book;

a geographical location;

a cult;

or a suggestive name

and embed it within a new narrative which subtly alters its meaning.

Matthew and Luke do something structurally comparable with inherited Jesus traditions.

They preserve Mark.

They modify Mark.

They add material.

They rearrange scenes.

They alter emphases.

The shared material creates continuity.

The differences create theology.

This is exactly how shared universes develop.

XI. John as the Clark Ashton Smith of Christianity

If we insist upon an authorial parallel, John and Clark Ashton Smith make a surprisingly enjoyable pair.

Not because their theology resembles one another.

It does not.

But because each inhabits a recognisably shared imaginative world while sounding unmistakably unlike his neighbours.

John's Gospel is not simply another Synoptic Gospel.

Its chronology, vocabulary, speeches and theological presentation are conspicuously distinctive. Its Jesus is introduced through the cosmic language of the pre-existent Logos and speaks in a register unlike the Synoptic Jesus. Modern scholarship readily acknowledges the diversity represented by the four canonical portraits.

Clark Ashton Smith likewise participates in the Lovecraft circle without writing like Lovecraft.

His Hyperborea, Tsathoggua and Book of Eibon cross the border into Lovecraft's world, but they retain a Smithian decadence and imaginative texture.

John therefore resembles Smith not as theologian but as the distinctive collaborator whose material is too valuable to exclude merely because it refuses stylistic conformity.

XII. Four Gospels: contradiction preserved as canon

One of Christianity's most interesting editorial decisions was not to harmonise the four canonical Gospels into a single official biography.

Their differences were preserved.

Irenaeus, writing around 180 CE, famously defended precisely four Gospels, neither more nor fewer.

That is extraordinary from the perspective of franchise management.

A modern continuity editor might be expected to produce:

Jesus: The Definitive Edition.

Christianity instead preserved four partially overlapping narratives.

The contradictions and tensions became features of the canonical object.

XIII. Tatian: the continuity editor

Someone did try the obvious solution.

Tatian's Diatessaron combined the four Gospels into a single continuous account.

He rearranged material and reconciled narrative differences in order to create one story.

Tatian is therefore the Christian equivalent of the Mythos continuity editor.

His instinct is immediately recognisable:

there cannot have been two incompatible chronologies;

therefore arrange the events so that they fit.

The resulting harmony is cleaner.

It is also one step further from each source.

Later mainstream Christianity preferred to keep the untidy originals.

XIV. Eusebius invents cross-referencing instead

Eusebius found a more elegant solution.

Rather than destroy the individuality of the Gospels, his canon tables allowed parallel passages to be cross-referenced.

One could therefore read four narratives as a single canonical complex while retaining each individual text.

In software terms, Tatian attempted a merge.

Eusebius built the documentation.

Christianity chose the latter.

XV. The apocrypha: Mythos contributions that lost the vote

Early Christianity generated considerably more literature than the twenty-seven books eventually contained in the New Testament.

There were additional:

gospels;

acts;

letters;

apocalypses;

infancy narratives;

sayings collections;

and apostolic revelations.

Canon formation gradually selected some texts from a much larger Christian literary environment.

The analogy with the Cthulhu Mythos is obvious.

A shared fictional universe produces more stories than any one reader accepts as authoritative.

Some become central.

Others become peripheral.

Some are beloved despite dubious continuity.

Some are quietly ignored.

The difference is that Christianity eventually attached ecclesiastical authority to the distinction.

"Non-canonical" ceased to mean merely "another Christian book".

It increasingly meant a book which could not establish doctrine.

XVI. Marcion: the radical anthology editor

Marcion offers the opposite solution.

Rather than expand the library, he drastically reduced it.

His Christian collection centred upon a version of Luke and Pauline letters, while rejecting the Jewish scriptures which other Christians retained. His activity became an important episode in the history of Christian canon formation.

Marcion therefore resembles the fan who announces:

"I have worked out which material is actually consistent."

Everything else is continuity error.

His opponents responded, in effect:

"You do not get to decide the canon alone."

The argument was not merely over individual propositions.

It was over which source files were authoritative in the first place.

XVII. Irenaeus: keeper of continuity

Irenaeus plays a role closer to that of an institutional Mythos custodian.

He argues against competing Christian systems by defining the legitimate relationship between scripture, apostolic tradition and interpretation.

His insistence upon the fourfold Gospel represents "plurality within limits": several accounts remain valid, but not indefinitely many.

This is where the open repository begins closing.

Write about Jesus if you wish.

But not every Jesus will count.

XVIII. Derleth splits into Paul and Irenaeus

Our original analogy therefore needs refinement.

Paul resembles Derleth the theologian.

Irenaeus resembles Derleth the custodian.

And Derleth and Donald Wandrei's Arkham House resembles, in another respect, the institutional preservation of a canon.

Derleth helped keep Lovecraft's actual work in print and played a major role in preventing it disappearing into pulp-magazine obscurity.

This creates the Derleth paradox.

The man accused of misreading Lovecraft was also one of the principal reasons later generations could read Lovecraft at all.

Canon-builders are often like that.

Preservation and interpretation arrive in the same parcel.

XIX. Athanasius: the man with the contents page

By the fourth century the boundaries become recognisably modern.

Athanasius's thirty-ninth Festal Letter of 367 is the earliest surviving Christian document to list precisely the twenty-seven books of what became the standard New Testament canon.

He explicitly distinguishes canonised texts from other Christian books which might still be useful for instruction.

This is an enormously important transition.

There is now:

the corpus

and

everything else.

The open mythos has acquired a permissions structure.

XX. Canon does not end creativity

Closing the canon does not stop Christian mythmaking.

It redirects it.

Later Christianity produces:

theologies;

creeds;

saints' lives;

visions;

angelologies;

demonologies;

legends;

Marian traditions;

liturgical dramas;

medieval cosmologies;

Dante;

Milton;

mysticism;

apparitions;

and several incompatible accounts of precisely what Hell is like.

None is simply "the New Testament".

Yet all can influence what ordinary Christians imagine when they think of Christianity.

The same happens with Lovecraft.

Most people who know the Cthulhu Mythos do not know it solely from Lovecraft.

They know Derleth.

Chaosium.

Role-playing games.

Illustrations.

Later fiction.

Films.

Internet culture.

Perhaps plush Cthulhus.

Reception history becomes indistinguishable from the thing received.

XXI. The Pauline school and posthumous collaboration

There is another uncomfortable parallel.

Modern scholarship widely distinguishes between letters generally accepted as authentically Pauline and several whose Pauline authorship is disputed or rejected by many scholars.

A common scholarly core consists of seven undisputed letters, while Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians and the Pastoral Epistles receive varying degrees of doubt.

These later writings participate in Pauline tradition by speaking with Pauline authority.

The comparison with posthumous Mythos collaboration is hard to resist.

Derleth published stories advertised as posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft, sometimes working from Lovecraftian notes or fragments but supplying substantial original material.

The analogy must not be pressed too far: ancient pseudepigraphy belongs to a very different literary environment.

But structurally the move is familiar.

The revered founder or apostle continues producing texts after his death because later members of the tradition write within his authorial identity.

XXII. Apostolic attribution and Lovecraftian attribution

Authority attracts authorship.

A text attributed to an apostle begins with an advantage.

A story associated with Lovecraft acquires another kind of market and imaginative authority.

This does not mean ancient Christians were simply perpetrating modern literary fraud.

Ancient conventions of attribution and pseudepigraphy require more care than that.

But the underlying social mechanism is recognisable:

the closer a new work can be placed to the originating authority, the more easily it can claim continuity.

Christian writers invoke apostles.

Mythos writers invoke Lovecraft.

Both traditions develop genealogies of legitimacy.

XXIII. Heresy as continuity violation

Once canon and orthodoxy develop, theological disagreement becomes partly a dispute about continuity.

The heretic is not merely someone with an unusual idea.

He is someone accused of misunderstanding the authorised material.

This resembles arguments among modern franchise communities more closely than theologians might enjoy.

"That isn't what Lovecraft meant."

"That isn't what Paul meant."

"Cthulhu isn't a water elemental."

"That isn't Nicene Christology."

The stakes differ enormously.

The argumentative form does not.

Communities protect identity by policing interpretation.

XXIV. Derleth and Paul as retroactive lenses

The deepest parallel between Paul and Derleth may therefore be one of readerly invisibility.

Once an interpreter becomes sufficiently influential, later readers stop noticing the interpretation.

It begins to look like the original.

Millions of people encounter a morally structured "Cthulhu Mythos" and assume Lovecraft constructed it that way.

Likewise, Christians commonly encounter Jesus through categories shaped enormously by Pauline theology and no longer notice how much interpretative work has occurred between the historical ministry of Jesus and the later theological system.

The successful interpreter disappears into the tradition.

His conclusions become the furniture.

XXV. But Paul is inside the canon

Here again Christianity goes one step further.

Derleth can be corrected by returning to Lovecraft.

One can say:

"Lovecraft never wrote that."

That move is much more difficult with Paul because Paul himself belongs to Christian scripture.

One cannot recover a canonical Christianity uncontaminated by Pauline interpretation because Pauline interpretation is part of the canonical evidence.

Christianity has canonised one of its earliest theologians alongside its narratives of the founder.

The commentary and the source have become inseparable.

XXVI. The Gospels themselves already interpret

Nor can the problem be solved simply by abandoning Paul and returning to the Gospels.

The Gospels are not stenographic transcripts.

Mark interprets.

Matthew interprets Mark.

Luke interprets inherited tradition.

John interprets radically.

The historical Jesus stands behind texts already shaped by decades of transmission and theology.

Modern scholarship therefore distinguishes, however provisionally, between "the historical Jesus" and the portraits offered by the Gospels.

There is no pristine source file.

Only earlier versions.

XXVII. Lovecraft's letters give us an advantage Christians do not possess

Here the comparison finally breaks sharply in Lovecraft's favour as a recoverable authorial project.

We possess enormous quantities of Lovecraft's correspondence.

He tells us where ideas came from.

He tells us that Prinn was Bloch's.

He tells us that Tsathoggua was Smith's.

He admits the Necronomicon is fictional.

He describes the collective borrowing scheme.

He occasionally explains what he intended philosophically.

We can therefore distinguish Lovecraft from later Lovecraftianism unusually well.

Early Christianity gives historians nothing comparable from Jesus.

There are no letters from Jesus explaining which later interpretations he approves.

No diary.

No theological memorandum.

No surviving manuscript entitled:

Things Paul Has Slightly Misunderstood.

The tradition must adjudicate the founder through the tradition.

XXVIII. Open Mythos versus closed revelation

This leads to the most important difference.

Lovecraft's mythos works precisely because contradiction is permitted.

A later writer may invent another god.

Change a genealogy.

Translate a forbidden book differently.

Move Leng.

Explain something Lovecraft deliberately left unexplained.

Readers may dislike the result, but no ecumenical council meets to excommunicate Brian Lumley.

Christianity eventually could not tolerate unlimited openness because its narratives carried claims about:

salvation;

God;

worship;

morality;

authority;

and eternal destiny.

Contradictory fan-fiction becomes rather more serious when baptism and damnation depend upon which version is true.

Canon is therefore not an accidental feature of Christianity.

It is what happens when collaborative mythmaking acquires existential consequences.

XXIX. Theology as continuity management

Seen this way, theology performs a surprisingly literary function.

It tells the community how apparently divergent texts belong to one world.

How can Jesus be subordinate to the Father in one passage and identified with divine status in another?

How do Paul and James fit together?

How can four resurrection narratives differ and still describe one resurrection?

How do Hebrew scripture and the New Testament constitute a single divine plan?

These are doctrinal questions.

They are also continuity problems.

Creeds function partly as rules for reading the canon coherently.

By the fourth century, Christian argument increasingly concerns not which scriptures opponents possess but how the agreed texts must be interpreted.

The continuity manual becomes doctrine.

XXX. The Christian Mythos becomes more coherent with age

This produces an illusion common to mature traditions.

Later Christianity looks more systematic than early Christianity because later generations have spent centuries systematising it.

Trinity.

Incarnation.

Two natures.

Original sin.

Sacramental theology.

Atonement theories.

Mariology.

Angelology.

Eschatological schemes.

Entire intellectual architectures are erected by correlating texts written by different people for different purposes.

The resulting cathedral can be magnificent.

But the stones were not quarried according to the final blueprint.

The blueprint is partly retrospective.

XXXI. Exactly the same thing happened to Lovecraft

A modern Mythos encyclopaedia can tell us:

which gods belong to which category;

which beings oppose which;

which grimoires contain which spells;

where each entity originated;

how the cosmic hierarchy works;

and where every tale fits chronologically.

Lovecraft would probably have been astonished by the administrative efficiency of it all.

His fiction rarely behaves like an encyclopaedia.

Later readers make it one.

The transformation from suggestive corpus to structured mythology is the common process.

XXXII. A cautious table of correspondences

The analogies can therefore be summarised, provided none is mistaken for identity.

The table is deliberately asymmetrical.

Historical processes rarely provide one-to-one correspondences.

XXXIII. The greatest difference: Lovecraft never claimed revelation

Lovecraft knew exactly what he was doing.

The forbidden books were invented.

The gods were invented.

The cross-references were a game of literary verisimilitude.

He explicitly said so.

Christian authors understood themselves very differently.

Paul believed something had actually happened.

The evangelists presented Jesus as a real person acting in history.

Later Christian communities treated their texts as testimony, proclamation and ultimately scripture.

Consequently similarity of literary development cannot by itself establish similarity of truth value.

A true tradition can accumulate legends.

A false tradition can preserve history.

Textual development demonstrates development.

It does not settle metaphysics.

XXXIV. What the comparison does establish

It does, however, destroy one tempting simplification.

Neither "the Cthulhu Mythos" nor "Christianity" dropped into history fully formed.

Both are retrospective names for developing complexes.

Lovecraft's circle supplied stories and names.

Later interpreters supplied system.

Early Christians supplied memories, preaching, letters and competing narratives.

Later Christians supplied canon and orthodoxy.

In both cases the mature tradition conceals its own archaeology.

The finished library makes us forget how many loose sheets once lay on the floor.

XXXV. Paul as Derleth reconsidered

We can therefore return to the deliberately provocative comparison with greater precision.

Paul is not Derleth because Paul "ruined" Jesus.

Nor because Derleth "invented" Lovecraft.

Paul is Derleth because both demonstrate the power of the second-generation architect.

The founder provides the gravitational centre.

The architect decides what orbits it.

Paul asks what Christ means for the cosmos.

Derleth asks how the Great Old Ones relate to the cosmic order.

Paul connects disparate inherited traditions within salvation history.

Derleth connects Lovecraft's disparate entities within Mythos cosmology.

Later readers frequently inherit the architecture before they encounter the ruins from which it was built.

That is the parallel.

XXXVI. And perhaps Derleth is also Luke

Because no analogy survives contact with actual history for long.

Derleth preserves.

He interprets.

He expands.

He edits.

He publishes.

He attributes.

He systematises.

In one capacity he resembles Paul.

In another Irenaeus.

In another Tatian.

In another perhaps Luke-Acts, extending the foundational narrative into the history of the community.

This is not a weakness in the comparison.

It reveals something important.

Traditions later assign multiple functions to a few disproportionately influential people.

Derleth became writer, theologian, archivist and publisher.

Paul became missionary, apostle, theologian, correspondent and eventually canonical author.

Institutional memory compresses complexity into names.

XXXVII. The final irony

Lovecraft deliberately constructed an artificial mythology by making independent stories appear to cite a deeper common tradition.

Christianity developed in almost the opposite direction.

It began with genuinely independent communities, traditions and writings.

Then later interpreters increasingly treated them as manifestations of a single coherent revelation.

Lovecraft begins with one group pretending there is an ancient canon behind the stories.

Christianity begins with many stories and eventually constructs the canon.

One manufactures antiquity.

The other manufactures unity.

The techniques converge somewhere in the middle.

XXXVIII. Conclusion: from conversation to canon

The Cthulhu Mythos is often praised as an early shared fictional universe.

That description is correct but incomplete.

Its deeper interest lies in watching mythology being manufactured almost in real time.

Lovecraft writes.

Smith replies.

Howard borrows.

Bloch invents.

Lovecraft borrows back.

Derleth systematises.

Arkham House preserves.

Later writers expand.

Scholars dispute.

Fans decide what is "really Lovecraftian".

Christian history presents the same verbs under dramatically different circumstances.

Jesus teaches.

Communities remember.

Paul interprets.

Mark narrates.

Matthew revises.

Luke expands.

John reconceives.

Marcion selects.

Tatian harmonises.

Irenaeus limits.

Athanasius lists.

Theologians reconcile.

Churches divide.

Believers decide what is "really Christian".

The comparison does not prove Christianity false.

It demonstrates something both simpler and more interesting.

Revelations, fictional universes and cultural traditions all have histories once human beings begin transmitting them.

The founding material does not remain untouched.

Someone interprets it.

Someone expands it.

Someone explains the contradiction.

Someone writes the sequel.

Someone excludes the sequel.

Someone eventually publishes the authorised edition.

And several generations later, what began as a conversation looks as though it had always been a system.

Lovecraft openly called his version "synthetic folklore".

Christianity calls its corresponding process tradition.

The historian, rather less romantically, calls both of them redaction, reception and canon formation.

And somewhere in the archives, Paul and August Derleth may perhaps be forgiven a thin smile.

They both understood the same formidable truth:

the person who explains the myth may ultimately shape it almost as profoundly as the person who began it.