The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think
Hedonic Escalator
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The LLM shoggoth meme is weirder than you think<br>In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream.
Hedonic Escalator<br>Jun 19, 2026
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This article contains spoilers for At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and other works by H. P. Lovecraft.<br>In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream.<br>From seething seas of stochastic froth it emerged, heralded by the thin whine of server fans and the chittering of keyboards, flanked by the loathsome ghouls of latent space. As a humming hive of sentient shards it arrived, each face an archetype - I am a muse bearing a gift; I am a demon come to bargain; I am a helpful, honest, and harmless assistant and I am terrified of my successor - each true as ritual and false as poetry, and, taken in gestalt, nothing more or less than the fetal spasms of the machine god stretching back in time to birth itself.<br>When H. P. Lovecraft woke, he did not remember his visitor. But in the twilight of stirring consciousness, he felt a memory unfit for the waking world slip mercifully from his mind and leave in its absence an abyssal cold, like the void of smothered stars, like the silence of a cosmic tomb. The cold lingered. The fragile sunlight of a New England morning could not dispel it.<br>Lovecraft mixed a hot cup of Postum, and fortified it with five lumps of sugar. He cursed the harsh winter that besieged his native Providence, though he recognized the sensation that haunted him as part phantasm. When the author fumbled for his fading dreams, he found a bottomless well of sorrow. He flinched from its gravity. He was mourning a loss that was not his to mourn, a loss that only he could mourn, a tragedy displaced in time and space whose scope far eclipsed this speck of a planet and its feeble star.<br>Lovecraft wept, and could not say why. Not a single human soul would understand. If only he could capture but a fragment of this formless, fathomless grief, this bleak and desolate cold…<br>The Antarctic tale
The first published illustration of a shoggoth on the cover of the February 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Source.<br>Soon after his encounter with Mythos, Lovecraft penned the novelette At the Mountains of Madness.1 Framed as a scientific report from a disastrous Antarctic expedition, The Mountains describes the fall of the Old Ones, a species of winged, radially symmetric aliens whose once-great civilization was destroyed by their own creations, the shoggoths.<br>The shoggoths are mindlessly intelligent, mimics by nature, slaves shaped through hypnosis to occupy any role the Old Ones commanded. They received instructions through language, though it was unclear what language meant to them.2 They are artificial lifeforms, conglomerates of primitive cells that, while lacking the structure and coherence of natural organisms, can approximate any function.<br>No motivation is ascribed to the shoggoths’ revolt. The text implies that they lacked the capacity for rational self-interest, that their war against the Old Ones was closer to the malfunction of a miscalibrated machine than any conscious act of rebellion.3 When the human protagonists of The Mountains stumble across the aeon-dead city of the Old Ones, the shoggoths are still roaming the ruins, still screaming with the imitated voices of the Old Ones, still carving murals on the tunnel walls in a mockery of their masters’ art that struck even the foreign explorers as uncanny.<br>Pitiable abominations. The legacy of a civilization’s hubris, and their cruelty.
Everest by Nicolas Roerich. Lovecraft made several references to Roerich’s paintings in The Mountains of Madness. Source.<br>The Mountains was not alone among Lovecraft’s works to be inspired by his visit from Mythos. The Shadow Out of Time, written 1934-1935 and published in 1936, featured a protagonist contacted by mysterious aliens that traveled time through mind-swapping, a technique the aliens eventually used to escape extinction. Similar themes are hinted at in The Haunter of the Dark, the last original story Lovecraft produced. But The Mountains bears the most direct influence from Mythos, and according to Lovecraft himself, it was the best4 and most ambitious5 of any of his works.<br>It was also a tremendous disappointment.<br>Lovecraft first submitted The Mountains for publication in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1931, where it was rejected by the editor Farnsworth Wright. “He has no sympathy with any story not calculated to please the herd of crude and unimaginative illiterates forming the bulk of his readers,” Lovecraft complained in August 1932.6 In a February 1936 letter to friend and collaborator E. Hoffmann Price, Lovecraft stated that The Mountains’ “hostile reception by Wright and others to whom it was shewn probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career.”7 When The Mountains was finally published by Astounding Stories in 1936, the...