The Xothic Legend Cycle

THIS one Lin Carter wrote especially for my magazine Crypt of Cthulhu (#7, Lammas 1982). Though “The Red Offering” leads off this collection, it was by no means the first of these tales to be written. The five stories making up the projected novel Тhe Terror out of Time had all already been written and published, but “The Red Offering” is something of a prequel, in which certain motifs occurring in other stories of the Xothic cycle are retroactively anticipated. For instance, the notion of the red offering itself is now seen to begin and to round off the Terror out of Time sequence, occurring as it does in both “The Red Offering” and “The Winfield Heritance.” The notion implicit in "Out of the Ages" that Harold Hadley Copeland was the reincarnation of the Muvian hierophant Zanchu is (implicitly) elaborated in this tale, in which the eerie archaeological delvings of both men proceed along fate-driven parallel lines.

Speaking of parallel lines, it is tempting to trace one here with Carter's Conan tale "The Thing in the Crypt" (in the Lancer/Ace collection Conan). As in Carter’s Simrana tale "The Laughter of Han" (apparently no relation to the "Dark Han" of Mythos obscurity), "The Red Offering” shows us the other side of the ethos of the sword-&-sorcery genre. In his tales of Conan and Thongor, Carter always had the steel-thewed hero triumph over skinny sorcerers and animated mummies, whereas in his horror tales set in analogous milieux, it is the Mythos equivalent of Dalendus Vool or Thuth-Ammon who wins.

The title “The Red Offering” appeared atop a surviving draft of this story, though for the Crypt of Cthulhu appearance he had shortened it to simply "The Offering." I have chosen to go back to Lin’s original, literally more colorful, title. Another difference from the published version is that, in the draft, the lost item sought by Zanthu was not the Black Seal of Iraan, but rather the ancient scripture The Rituals of Yhe. A later reference to the same book has also vanished, this time in favor of another old text, the Ygoth Records. In closing, let me conjure up Lin Carter’s shade, as eager to tell a story now as it was then, when this note was subjoined to the story:

Author’s Note: S.T. Joshi has discovered evidence in Lovecraft’s letters that H.P.L. had a hand in rewriting one of Henry S. Whitehead’s stories, "Bothon." The story is partly laid in Mu, and, comparing the text of that tale with another Muvian yarn, also one of Lovecraft's revision jobs (“Out of the Aeons” {written for Zcalia Bishop}), I feel certain that Joshi is correct. Such Muvian place names as Ghua, Aglad-Dho, Yish and Knan, and the Gyaa-Hua submen certainly sound like the place names in the Heald story (K’naa, Yaddith-Gho, etc.) and like some of the names in another Lovecraft revision job, “The Mound” (Yoth, K’n-yan, Nith)—and there is a striking similarity between the Gyaa-Yothn submen in “The Mound” and the Gyaa-Hua submen in “Bothon.” So I have written this new story, incorporating the names that seem most Lovecraftian in “Bothon,” together with previously-established place names from “Out of the Aeons” and my earlier Muvian story “The Thing in the Pit," which also purports to be a translation from the Zanthu Tablets.

The Seven Lost Signs of Terror and the Words of Fear are taken from yet another revision story, [William] Lumley’s "The Diary of Alonzo Typer," while such phrases as the Bottomless Well of Yuggugon, the dark tarn of Kyagoph, the onyx sea cliffs of Kho, etc., are drawn from Lovecraft’s letters, as is the Black Seal of Iraan itself.