Nyarlathotep: Telling the Audient Void (H.P. Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep)

“Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos ... I am the last ... I will tell the audient void.” 

With those words, Lovecraft introduces us to one of his greatest, most evocative, and most mysterious beings. Nyarlathotep is neither man nor god, so much as he is a presence; he is the sign of the Mythos’ illimitable dominion over everything beneath it, and a sign that even the highest of authorities in the cosmos must answer to higher powers. 

Nyarlathotep is many things in the original stories of H.P. Lovecraft. As the “thousand-faced god”, he appears variably as a powerful pharaoh, an obsidian-skinned leader of an extradimensional cult, a faceless, subterranean god, a tri-lobed horror living beneath a dark chapel, the secret god of the Mi-Go, and the bearer of a secret too hideous to tell. Nyarlathotep exudes power, his dominion over all lesser deities, implying his service to a higher power -- and his service to that power implying that even the “gods” of the Mythos are not above reproach. 

Nyarlathotep’s methods are markedly different from the other gods of the Mythos. While for the most part run-ins with the gods were remarkably incidental, like a colossus striding over an anthill, encounters with Nyarlathotep were intensely personal. In the premier story Nyarlathotep, the man himself addresses the masses that come to see him with a personalized view of just how meaningless they were. In The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath, he goes so far as to help our hero, Randolph Carter, in an attempt to do him greater harm in the future, and swears enmity when he is ultimately thwarted. He is even one of the few Lovecraft deities to directly address his human worshipers, as the thing under the steeple in The Haunter of the Dark. The only comparable deity in terms of communication with humans is Yog-Sothoth in The Dunwich Horror, and even he limited his contact to a trio of evil people. Indeed, it’s arguable just how, ahem, involved Yog-Sothoth was in fathering Wilbur and creating the Dunwich Horror itself. 

Nyarlathotep has, in any event, always appealed to me immensely as a character. He is slyly malevolent, more of a secretive whisperer in darkness than a devourer of all men. He seeks to spread madness, pain, and death in very intentional ways, communicating directly to the lesser things his cosmic bosses wouldn’t even bother with on the best of days. I have always wondered just why he makes this exception, what he seeks to gain. Does he know he’s doing evil, or does he think he’s a force for good? Or do either of those phrases even mean anything? 

I have many personal interpretations of the mythos, one of those being Nyarlathotep as a force of pure knowledge. He wants to educate us so we’ll be prepared for the forces of the Old Ones, when that time of revelry and madness and wild abandon become not just a cosmic inevitability, but cold hard face. 

So consider me your interpreter. I’d like to introduce my contribution to the ongoing series of Lovecraft articles on this very website: H.P. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep. My intention for these articles is, of course, to provide game content with each post, but also to enlighten you on a possible motive for Nyarlathotep, or an alternative way to use him in your games. It’s all fun and games to have a dark-skinned manipulator who screws over the players for fun, but there’s so much more to him than that. 

With this H.P. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep series, I intend to provide excellent resources for your games, but also to broaden your horizons on Nyarlathotep. To do this, I’m going to break it into several parts. I intend to do one article a piece based on each mention of Nyarlathotep in Lovecraft’s originals. Then I intend to enter Chaosium’s excellent 2006 publication “The Nyarlathotep Cycle” and give game material based on the contents therein, from the essay by S.T. Joshi to the stories that influenced Lovecraft, to the ones that came after. If I do my job well enough, you’ll be entertained, you’ll be informed, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll come to appreciate Nyarlathotep the way I do.

Thank you for your patience, and buckle in, cuz this chaos doesn’t just crawl. It’s gonna go full sprint.

--Tristan “TK Nyarlathotep” Jusola-Sanders

Recommended Listening: "Nyarlathotep", by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets (YouTube link)