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The Yellow Mythos is a name that has come to refer to the whole fictional universe covered in this wiki.

As clarified elsewhere on this site in Mythos (Definition), there is more than one version of the continuity, depending upon where you set the boundaries of what is included:

  • "The Yellow Mythos" can be deployed as a synonym for the Carcosa Mythos, referencing both the centrality of the King in Yellow and the general predominance of yellow as a trope therein, mainly derived from the writings of Robert W. Chambers.
  • It is also though an alternative name for the Hastur Mythos, wherein the King is viewed as an identity or avatar of the Great Old One Hastur and wrapped into a larger mythology (the Cthulhu Mythos) derived from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft – himself influenced in part by Chambers, from whom he became one of the first to 'borrow' elements to lend depth to his own cosmology.

Why "Yellow"?[]

This is due to the continuity being rooted, most fundamentally, in Chambers' book The King In Yellow and its associated key ideas. These include the mysterious, horrific play also called 'The King In Yellow', the forbidden text of which can send someone insane at a single glance – and the frightening and powerful entity of the same name, which seems to stalk not only the play's pages but somehow the reality the characters in the stories inhabit as well, and whose emblem is the Yellow Sign.

Why "Mythos"?[]

The reason the stories have evolved into a "mythos", a wider, shared fictional landscape crossing over multiple works, media and authors, is perhaps threefold. Firstly – the book was published over 125 years ago. There has been plenty of time since for others, from Lovecraft onwards, to take up the baton and reuse the same or similar characters, settings and/or themes... not to mention the original stories are out of copyright.

Secondly, Robert Chambers didn't just fabricate an unusual, darkly fascinating concept: a stage (so to speak) set for eerie happenings, shadowy figures, half-alien places, strange artifacts and an ancient, fathomless evil. Crucially, too, he appeared to chronicle merely the most sparse, isolated fragments of it. His handful of 'Yellow' tales – 'The Repairer of Reputations', 'The Mask', 'In the Court of the Dragon', 'The Yellow Sign' and 'The Demoiselle D'Ys' – use a writing style that suggests, if only obliquely, a much deeper story behind them. The actual nature and specifics of it however remain almost entirely nebulous and unknowable. Those stories, and equally notably the one-page poem 'Cassilda's Song' that prefaces the book, are scattered with allusions to a host of evocative but largely unexplained names and phenomena. There are passing references to clouded lakes and dark stars, cities of mist and phantoms of truth; implications of terrible gods, death reanimated, and everywhere madness pushing in through the walls of the world. And somewhere at the hidden heart of it all lies the eponymous King in Yellow himself: a figure both omnipresent and distant, implacable and impenetrable. All of these are cast into the text with the lightest of touches, virtually without context or elucidation – and the shadows and lacunae within the narrative where they lurk are all the more terrifying, and beguiling, for it.

Thirdly, and related to the above, is how brief was Chambers' dalliance with this, his most inspired handiwork. The mysteries of Carcosa, the King and his Yellow Sign have faded altogether from view even before the end of this single collection of stories – a puzzlingly grab-bag assortment that veers off into the impressionistic, possibly-related vignettes of 'The Prophets' Paradise', deviates sharply in the direction of the Franco-Prussian War and, eventually, ends up recounting the romantic misdeeds of art students in fin-de-siècle Paris. For whatever reason, its author would not or could not sustain this invention he had begun to map so vividly but with such economy in those early pages. And he would never return to it.

The effect is of something plucked momentarily out of thin air, such is the lack of warning of its arrival and so fully-formed it appears... though quite what form that may be is only ever glimpsed or grasped at, as if through fog, and described in just the barest, most disjointed of detail. Then, with equally mystifying abruptness, the whole thing is simply dropped again without ever being explored or expanded upon. Yet this open-endedness, while frustrating, has proven to be an irresistible lure – one that has piqued the imagination of all manner of later writers. We will never know how a prolific, competent but otherwise unremarkable 19th-century novelist, who mostly churned out romantic and historical fiction, suddenly hit upon such a grippingly, bewitchingly enigmatic creation... nor why, having once done so, he apparently felt no need to pursue or revisit it. But, ultimately, nature abhors a vacuum. By leaving the boundaries of his cosmos so vague, its breadth and depth almost wholly undefined, he inadvertently provided almost limitless scope for numerous others to follow the Yellow brick road – as it were – in his stead and fill in some of the gaps.

This has led into the realms of further stories, poems, games, music, even attempts to reconstruct the dread play itself for the stage, and more. Successive generations have rediscovered, revived and built upon Chambers' cryptic, piecemeal hints – as indeed he himself had built upon a handful of names, like Hastur and Carcosa, lifted from the earlier writings of Ambrose Bierce, which are thus retroactively counted as part of the mythos too. Chief among the assortment of motifs plundered from Chambers' text are the titular play The King In Yellow, the King in his tattered yellow robes, and his direly compelling Yellow Sign. Over the century and a quarter since, the separate efforts of all those inspired by this memorable symbolism have thereby formed a basis for what may be collectively labelled the Yellow Mythos.

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