The Santa Claus Mythos

The popular legend of Saint Nicholas is of course founded on the life of that sainted fourth century presbyter of what is modern-day Turkey, but his journey to twentieth century America had many winds and turnabouts along the way. The modern concept Santa Claus owes as much to English folklore and slick Madison Avenue advertising as it does to any hagiographical accounts of the original St. Nick. Yet perhaps one of the most unusual twists in the tale of Kris Kringle was provided by early twentieth century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, who added new dimensions and perhaps extended the life of our most popular holiday icon.



Lovecraft grew up in 1890s Providence, Rhode Island at the time when Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” had just captured the popular imagination. Children all over New England, and indeed all over America, thrilled at the newly minted notion of a Christmas Eve visit from a jocund elf distributing holiday gifts of toys and sweets. Yet it is clear from an 1897 short story by the young Lovecraft that the tale had made quite a different impression on him. Only the title, “The Sorcerer of Winter’s Darkness,” survives, though it gives some indication of Lovecraft’s attitude toward Saint Nicholas, whose name he would eventually reconstruct as Hsintauur-Khlaous, and which would be irretrievably bowdlerized by publishers of as Santa Claus. Late in life Lovecraft would complain that the name didn’t do justice to a creature he regarded more terrible than any of the “night gaunts” of his youth.

In his late teens Lovecraft expanded on his earlier concept of Hsintauur-Khlaous (hereafter referred to as Santa Claus). The origin of Santa Claus is set down in blasphemous texts such as the Necronomicon, in which the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred tells of a servant of the Elder Race who betrayed them and was punished in turn with the dissolution of his body, for he could not be destroyed by any power known in this world or beyond. Over the aeons his body slowly reconstituted, eventually completing that horrendous process in the Korvatunturi Mountains in what is modern day Finland. This was still before the dawn of man but after the war between Cthulhu and the Elder Race, when they were at their weakest and had forgotten the being that would be known in the tongues of man variously as Kringle, Noel and Santa, to mention but a few of his names which can be safely uttered.

Though the Elder Race was broken and largely vanished, Santa was also weak and bided his time, allowing his strength and menace to grow. As it did the mountain range he dwelt in became known as a loathsome and dreaded place by the tribes of the new race of men who dared venture so far north. In his chilling grip the mountains of Korvatunturi came to be regarded as the remotest, most alien point of the frozen north lands where men had begun to settle. Those who did venture near the foothills of those mountains brought back tales of a distant, hollow laugh unlike that of any human, forced and mirthless. They passed on cautionary stories of the reindeer of that region, who watched the traveler cautiously and intelligently during the day. Any man brave or foolhardy enough to sleep in the shadow of those cursed mountains at night heard the pawing of hard-shod creatures in the branches of the forest canopy, and in the morning cloven prints could be seen in places impossible for any normal reindeer to reach by leaping.

Dread of Santa grew into awe and fascination, and a Santa cult developed among the more secluded, fallen tribes of the men who dwelt in the north in those days. The cult was already ancient at the arrival of the Norse gods, and Santa mingled with the pagan religions in various guises. Later Christian scholars mistakenly discounted as erroneous depictions of Loki as a crimson, adipose figure resembling a man, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, who smoked a pipe and carried a sack with mysterious contents. In part they were disquieted by accounts of this figure’s fixation on the dreams of children and his attempts to engender avarice and covetousness in households dug in for the long northern winters, perhaps in an attempt to drive them to panic and violence, whence they might lose hold of all reason and venture out into the blinding snow, where reindeer or small unspeakable beings in league with Santa might await them.

Lovecraft’s Santa Mythos spread across sixteen short stories, mostly set in modern New England. In these stories rustics and academics struggle with, and usually succumb to, attacks both psychic and material that occur in the midst of the Christmas holiday season. The insidious essence of Santa’s power insinuates itself by way of the restlessness, tension, and ennui Lovecraft associated with a New England Christmas. His characters can be seen arming themselves against the Christmas spirit, though never in an explicitly irreligious sense. Lovecraft was never closer to impiety than he was with his Christmas-themed tales, and he seemed aware of this in choices of language and narrative focus as his characters did battle with the forces of Christmas.

Lovecraft’s reaction to Christmas’ social phenomenon resounded strongly with his readers, who demanded of his publishers a new Santa story every year. The first story in the Santa Mythos appeared in the December 1923 issue of Weird Tales, and one followed every year, even as the publishers rejected Lovecraft submissions such as “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Call of Cthulhu.” Though Lovecraft maintained a regular output of Santa stories he steadfastly refused his publishers’ demands to feature Santa in the works of his Cthulhu oeuvre, which he regarded as vastly superior. To a colleague he wrote:

“To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the local attributes and concerns of mankind are acknowledged cosmically. I have done my best to reform the popular Christmas legend of this revolting conceit, but it cannot be done away with entirely in the character of Hsintauur-Khlaous. His interference in human events, for good or ill, smacks of the sort of convenience I’ve striven my entire life to avoid in my work.”

Numerous anthologies of Lovecraft’s Santa Claus stories have been published over the years, most notably an Oxford World Classics edition edited by S.T. Joshi, who is among the many Lovecraft scholars and admirers who have expressed distaste at the latter-day pastime of pitting Santa Claus against the Old Ones in popular role playing games. There have also been several successful stage adaptations of Lovecraft’s Santa stories, which are regularly performed during the Christmas season by both community and professional theaters, the most popular of which are “The Shadow Over Bedford Falls” and “The Caroler in Darkness.”

Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus is a novel in which Mary Shelley, a newlywed in her early twenties, delved into her feelings of a personal nature but also those on the subject of the Enlightenment and the pending boom of the First Industrial Revolution both in her native Great Britain and abroad.



In her novel Shelley relates in the form of letters and memoirs the events of the life of young Victor Frankenstein, the son of a Genevese doctor and diplomat. Victor aspires to become a doctor himself and seeks his education in Wittenburg, where he meets a mysterious professor of the College of Medicine, Doctor Oleaus Snape. Snape is secretive and only after much pleading does he allow Victor entrance to his secret laboratory, which he tells Victor he must secure for himself if he is to become a serious scientist. Victor promises to run out and purchase a crumbling mill or slaughterhouse that very afternoon.

Victor learns much from Snape, including the teachings of Paracelcus, Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Tesla’s coil. With this new knowledge he is worked up into a furor, toiling in his secret laboratory night and day to come up with a really neat experiment to conduct, something impossibly complex with high voltage that’s impervious to peer review. After a string of sleepless nights he strikes upon the pinnacle of scientific achievement: He will create a Frankenstein.

In his zeal Victor skipped the planning phase and went straight to the naming phase, and he was already quite proud of his invention. There would be loud crashes of blinding sparks, massive gears and swooping platforms as his experiment summoned the might of the gods to complete. Finally he decides he will adapt ancient descriptions of alchemists’ experiments with homunculi for something similar on a larger scale. Securing a more or less agreeable bouquet of corpses he sews and knits and staples and glues and bolts together a form so amazing he is proud to call it the Frankenstein Mark 1.

But what is a Frankenstein? This is a matter of some debate, both within the narrative and among present-day scholars. By all outward appearances a mindless, unfeeling, hideous brute composed of the dead, Frankenstein is also known to attempt speech, and with his creator holds forth most persuasively, by perhaps some innate talent, or perhaps simply flattered by Victor’s own considerable guilt.

Upon his creation Frankenstein fled his master, and is next heard of in the frightened alarums ringing up and down the countryside of a terrible monster, a Frankenstein to be sure, sailing children into wells and frightening kindly old blind men with his Cowardly Lion guffaw and constant references to someone called Lilly. Though eloquent on previous occasions, now the Frankenstein is chiefly heard to repeat one blunt, heartfelt opinion to the detriment of fire. He tries this argument on the villagers with torches and pitchforks, with whom he now seems to run a perpetual marathon.

The novel takes readers by surprise at this point by introducing a new major character in the third act. Word of the terror spread by Frankenstein reaches Castle Dracula in Transylvania, which is a short journey from Lake Geneva. Jealous of what would appear to be a potential rival, Dracula sets out for Geneva at once to face Frankenstein and reassert his place as top spook.

Meanwhile Victor has been searching for Frankenstein himself, up and down the Alps and along the lake, but his creation seems visible only to frightened mobs, all of whom have just come back from the torch and pitchfork shop. Dracula finds Frankenstein first and a battle ensues. After a fierce contest of wills Frankenstein dives off a cliff to save a kitten and evil Dracula is triumphant. Yet he did not suspect that Victor had watched the entire proceedings with old Professor Snape and the two are ready, cross, stake and hammer in hand, to deal with the Dracula. They make quick work of the Dracula and return home in time find Van Helsing in a compromising attitude with the Bride of Frankenstein. Not knowing if she is Victor’s bride or the Frankenstein’s, the novel concludes with Victor roiled in a confused mixture of revulsion and jealousy, suggesting Shelley’s anticipation of the decadence of the oncoming consumer age.