TSOU -- Azathoth
HARMSDM
"Azathoth"
Sources: _Dagon and Other Macabre Tales_, Arkham; one of the Ballantine
books (I don't recall which one).
Synopsis: This story is only the first few paragraphs of a short story
or novel Lovecraft never completed. In the story, the world becomes
less and less a place of wonder, leaving a man wholly dissatisfied with
his life. One night while star-gazing, his spirit leaves his body and
he ends up on a beautiful shore.
Comment: There's not much to say about this, because it's not all there
and it's difficult to comment on it because of this. The story here
might be thought of at Lovecraft's first attempt at something like
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". In later stories, Lovecraft
mentions three dreamers, including King Kuranes, who journey to the
court of Azathoth; maybe this was to have been their story?
Azathoth himself only appears in the title of this work. Robert
Price has speculated that Lovecraft originally intended Azathoth to be
an anthropomorphic figure ("daemon sultan"), though I'm not sure whether
Lovecraft continued to give him this title after he made him a force of
primal chaos. Azathoth later was mentioned, among other places, in
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", "The Dreams in the Witch-House", and
one poem from the "Fungi from Yuggoth" cycle where he is connected with
Nyarlathotep. Later authors have also taken him up. Ramsey Campbell
(or was it August Derleth?) said that Azathoth was deprived of his mind
in a great cosmic war, and more recently authors have linked him to
chaos mathematics. Here we see the first mention of this concept.
Daniel