L — authorial invention

Nyarlathotep

Literary invention
Scritto inizio dicembre 1920 · «The United Amateur», numero datato novembre 1920

Nyarlathotep — unlike the other entities, Nyarlathotep walks among men in human form and speaks.

On the steps of a public building, at night and among skyscrapers, a tall man in a long coat addresses a small crowd and shows a glowing screen with a burning city; the people look up, motionless.

First appearance: Prose poem Nyarlathotep. Also called «the Crawling Chaos».
What is told: Unlike the other entities, Nyarlathotep walks among men in human form and speaks. It is the only figure in the corpus with anything resembling a will directed at humanity, and for that reason the one later fiction has used most.
In the corpus: It was born of a nightmare, which Lovecraft recounted in a letter before transcribing it. It is the clearest case of his method of dream composition.
Publication data: «The United Amateur», vol. 20 no. 2, issue dated November 1920, pp. 19-21.
Caution: The date of the magazine issue precedes the date of composition given by the chronology: amateur magazines appeared late with respect to their cover date. It is a good example of why citing a single date is always risky.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

Nyarlathotep is the only entity in the corpus whose origin in a specific dream is documented: Lovecraft described to Reinhardt Kleiner the nightmare — the worst, he wrote, since the age of ten — in which he received a note warning him not to fail to see Nyarlathotep should he come to Providence, horrible but wonderful. The prose poem arose in 1920 directly out of that dream. In the vision the figure is an itinerant lecturer who gives demonstrations in public halls with electrical apparatus and projections: Will Murray has proposed Nikola Tesla as a model, whose lectures with electrical experiments drew great crowds and whose figure some found disquieting.

H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (December 1921) and «Nyarlathotep», 1920; W. Murray, Tesla hypothesis

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.

Entries that share the motif, the phenomenon behind it or the history of their collection — not the geography.

Nyarlathotep

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