The Other Gods

Dream Cycle

by H.P. Lovecraft

A high priest and prophet greatly learned in the lore of the gods of earth attempts to scale the mountain of Hatheg-Kla in order to look upon their faces, accompanied by his young disciple. But the gods of the earth are not there alone.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Lovecraftian, Fantasy, Fiction, Classics, Audiobook

26 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1933

About the author

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

— Wikipedia

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although one of the most characteristic and suggestive of all the early Lovecraft tales, “The Other Gods” was also a story for which H.P. found it difficult to find a publisher : written in 1921, it achieved its first publication eleven years later, and then only in an amateur journal (The Fantasy Fan, 1933). It is one of his best Dunsanian imitations, and enriches the mythic speculations of the earlier Irish writer with his own sinister and cosmic quality.

Barzai the High Priest and Atal his disciple climb Mt. Hatheg-Ka to look upon the faces of the gods of the earth. Although they see the earth gods up close and exult pridefully in their achievement, they soon discover that “other gods” are there also. And these gods are much more powerful than the earth gods, and not so easily pleased.

These “other gods” are not yet the Chthulu-connected entities Lovecraft would soon imagine. But they are cosmic, alien, and unforgiving, and suggest the Old Ones and Elder Gods to come.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The other Gods moved away from their original place. Now Barzai and Atal try to climb a mysterious mountain to find any traces. Do they find them? What does a search team come across? Not the best of his stories but readable and entertaining. You come across a reference of Ulthar.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

An old man and his frightened sidekick scale a mountain to see the faces of the gods, and no person has seen them and lived. A short, ten minute read. I continue to feel drawn to Lovecraft. I believe he writes well. He makes strong use of the active voice and paints wonderful pictures in my mind. In this I saw gods dancing in the clouds. Beautiful, and Terrible.

[ᴥ Irena ᴥ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barzai the Wise decides to go to the highest peaks of the mountain of Hatheg-Kla to find the earth gods.

'He believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up to the summit of high and rocky Hatheg-Kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there.'

With his disciple Atal, who was just a boy in The Cats of Ulthar and a 300-year-old priest of the Elder Gods in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath when Randal Carter tried to find the hidden place where gods live, Barzai finally reaches the place he can hear and see the earth gods.
What Barzai doesn't expect is that the earth gods are not alone.

[Mizuki · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a very short story about cosmic horror, very likely inspired by the dreams Lovecraft had had. It reads like a dark fairy tale, the plot is simple, not outstanding but it is still very effective.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very short. About a magician who wanted to defy gods

[Mika · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is literally a fear of mine after seeing how Ophanim looked like. So when Barzai screamed I was scared. I will never be curious of finding out how Gods look like ever again.

[Angel Torres · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well this was outright bad... everyone knows I'm not a big H. P. Lovecraft fan but I'm always fair and give his writings a shot. And even with all of that, this was boring, poorly written and forgettable. Skip it.

[Eddie B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of a follow-up to "The Cats of Ulthar".

[John Yelverton · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mad priest goes in search of the gods and gets exactly what is coming to him. It's so predictable that it was absolutely boring.

[Amelia Bujar · Rating 1 out of 5]

FULL REVIEW ON MY WEBSITE
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...

Let me be honest with you and say that the plot was boring. I had high expectations for it but it didn’t live up to them.

This one also felt to me like a follow-up story to “The Cats of Ulthar”, which I wasn’t a big fan of either.

The writing style isn’t bad, but it could have been better. The HP Lovecraft was missing from the writing style. Which really killed the story to me. The writing style is also difficult to read in this one.

The characters here are very flat. And that’s the thing which annoys me the most. As long as a story have good characters or character ill very probably give the story a good rating.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

What's worse than punishment by the REGULAR gods for hubris?

I've never come across this Lovecraft story before and I was pleasantly surprised. There's the beginnings of some of his more interesting ideas here about cosmic entities, although their infancy gets in the way of their potency. Its got an almost fable-esque or biblical quality to the prose, but is otherwise just as purple as he always is. There are at least several quite terrifying passages, and the fate of Barzai the Wise is haunting. I think a lot of its imagery will linger with me. Cool to get mention of the Pnakotic Manuscripts again.

2.5 Really Bad Mountains out of 5

🏔️🏔️1/2⬛⬛⬛

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Other Gods" is a very cool micro-story from Lovecraft. Plot: Earth's Gods live in the mountains. They've had to move higher and higher up as mankind has encroached upon their territory. Two guys trek up the mountain to find them. There is a ledge that only one is able to climb. He finds the Gods but also "the Other Gods." Basically evil alien Gods who are even more powerful. Then he gets sucked up into the sky! I would love to see this idea fleshed out with a longer story or a movie. It would be epic!

[{Alexandra} · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10 I’ve recently begun with the dream cycle of Lovecraft, skipping all of the major works in favor of focusing on the short stories, which means that this story doesn’t provoke any special feelings or thoughts. This is lore-building at its finest. If you’re into the dream cycle and want to know more this is a great short story. If not, maybe skip this one.

[Maria Jose · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐⭐💫

[Julio Diaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

Muy corto, entretenido aunque me hubiera gustado un final de mayor dimensión.

[Anabella (anabellasbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me ha gustado pero se me ha hecho indiferente, aunque tiene una conexión muy grande con los Gatos de Ulthar, así que recomiendo que lo lean después de este relato.

[Marcos Navarro Diago · Rating 3 out of 5]

Descripción perfecta de una subidita al Moncayo en otoño.

[Derek McPhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Gods, on its own, is not necessarily worth of a four-star review. This piece of work is much more like a cautionary tale, or a myth, within the mythos of Cthulhu. On its own it lacks something that keeps it grounded. Were one to read it, without any prior knowledge of the existing mythos, it would be easy to discard as a "short story, mostly about nonsense". Still, when it is grounded with the rest of the "timeline" the story adds elements to the relationship between the Star Gods, and the Gods of the World.

This connection becomes quite important to understand elements of how the Star Gods are related to other gods in the pantheon that H.P. Lovecraft put together throughout the books. This one stands quite separate in that it doesn't really feature (at least not directly) any of the *common* Deep Ones that he uses - certainly not Cthulhu. Still, with that in mind, the relationship to the rest of storyline is an important one and it does add elements to the overall mythos. Quite a good read if you're a Lovecraft fan, though it's definitely not a good place to start your venture into Lovecraft's body of work.

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 4 out of 5]

This feels like a foreshadowing of what would later come to be known as the elder gods. A man scales a mountain in which he would be able to see the gods of Earth from our own familiar religions and folklore. He sees them dancing in the moonlight on the peak of the mountain, but he also finds them dancing with something else. Something cosmic, alien and terrifying to behold. Here they are referred to as the other gods, which we can assume is a hint for the future concept of elder gods that lurk in the distant black sea of the cosmos.

[Per · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46534
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tal...

https://www.tor.com/2015/01/20/danger...

[Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

El conocimiento es poder, si, pero también un poco de arrogancia, misma que puede verse en quién lo posee, como en quien lo otorga, los dioses serán todo lo poderosos y divinos que quiera, son egoístas y mezquinos, algo cómo lo que sucedió con la torre de Babel.

[Guacii García · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una analogía hacia la avaricia del ser humano muy sencilla y directa. Es lo primero que leo de Lovecraft y me ha gustado su estilo narrativo aunque me ha faltado un poco más, quizás, del relato.

[Tony Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Gods sits early in Lovecraft’s body of work, a time when he was still shaping the ideas that would later become the backbone of his cosmic vision. You can feel him testing themes, experimenting with myth, and playing with a voice that would grow darker and grander in later years. This story stands at the border between his Dunsanian dream pieces and the colder, more cosmic tales he eventually became known for.

The tale follows Barzai the Wise, a mystic and scholar who has spent his life studying the gods worshiped by the mountain people. These are not the great cosmic forces that dominate Lovecraft’s later mythos. These are the smaller tribal gods of dream and legend, gentle and approachable in theory. Barzai believes that with enough knowledge and enough daring he can climb to the summit of Mount Hatheg Kla and look upon them directly. His friend Atal warns him. Old tales warn him. Even the land itself seems to hold its breath. But Barzai climbs anyway, convinced that wisdom grants immunity.

Lovecraft tells the story with a calm, almost ancient cadence. It feels like something passed down through generations, a story meant to teach humility. The journey up the mountain has a quiet beauty to it. The night sky glows. The wind moves like a living thing. Barzai feels triumphant, ready to witness what no mortal has seen. And then he learns the truth, that the little gods he seeks are not alone, and that higher powers watch from beyond the stars. These are the Other Gods, beings far older, far colder, and utterly uninterested in human ambition.

What gives the story weight is its simplicity. There are no long explanations, no monstrous battles, no frantic terror. Lovecraft lets the silence speak. When Barzai realizes what he has provoked, the story shifts in an instant from wonder to doom. The mountain becomes a place of judgment. The sky becomes a gate. And Barzai vanishes into the night, taken by forces no prayer can reach.

It is also a good example of Lovecraft’s habit of blending personal belief with myth.

He saw himself as a seeker of strange knowledge and often wrote protagonists who reached too far. His stories carry that warning: knowledge has limits and violating them carries a cost. This one feels almost autobiographical in its tension between curiosity and dread.

The Other Gods remains a small but effective tale. It works as a parable about pride and as an early hint of the larger cosmic order Lovecraft would later build. It leaves a lingering chill, not because of what it shows, but because of what it refuses to explain. It reminds us that in Lovecraft’s world, the universe is vast, indifferent, and always watching from just beyond the edge of sight.

[David Sarkies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Searching May Bring Greater Terrors
23 October 2022

This seems to follow the theme of a lot of Lovecraft’s stories, namely that a human goes in search of something only to discover that either it is much nastier than he expected it to be, or that there is something sitting behind it that is much nastier. Okay, I would have initially suggested he/she, but the thing with Lovecraft’s works is that all of the protagonists seem to be male. Sure, there are women in his works, but most of the time it's the men that stand at the front, and are also the ones that get torn to shreds by the nasties.

So, this short story opens with how the gods would live at the top of a mountain, and as the human population grew, they would retreat to ever higher mountains until such a time as they got to the highest mountain in the world. The thing is that they would generally leave no indication of their presence on the mountains that they left, though not always. It sort of reminds me of the greek legends in that the gods would live atop Mount Olympus in Greece, though I suspect nobody attempted to climb it back then. I guess what Lovecraft is suggesting is that this is the reason why there are no gods on Mount Olympus, and that is because they left before the humans could get there.

Mind you, you could look at this in two ways, the first way is that humans are basically annoying, much like ants, and the gods really don’t want them crawling all over them. The other way is because the gods want humans to believe in them by faith, but a part of me finds that this is, well, reading too much into it. One of the accepted theories as to why we can’t see the Christian God is because seeing him would result in us dying because we could not handle viewing such a being.

Come to think of it, that seems to be very Lovecraftian, especially since this is sort of what happens in this story. The protagonist finds the gods, eventually, only to discover that there are more gods above and beyond these gods, and upon discovering these other gods, the horror of that is, well, fatal. Actually, I get the impression that these other gods simply killed him, but still, it seems that the reason these gods did remove themselves from humans is because the humans could not understand the truth of the matter.

Actually, I doubt it is about any love for humankind – Lovecraft’s world simply is not like that. However, what his world is like is that the search for knowledge isn’t only dangerous, but fatal. It seems that in his mind ignorance truly is bliss.

[Austin Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though some readers assume that "The Other Gods" is set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands, critic S. T. Joshi points out the connections to the story "Polaris", which seems to be set in Earth's distant past, in arguing that "the clear implication is that this tale too takes place in a prehistoric civilization."

Hatheg-Kla is a "high and rocky" mountain in the "stony desert" thirteen days' walk from the village of Hatheg, for which it is named. It is one of the places where the "gods of earth" once dwelt and sometimes return to when they are homesick.

"White-capped Thurai" is another of the mountains where the gods of earth used to dwell. It is said that at Thurai men mistake the tears of the gods for rain.

Lerion, whose "plaintive dawn-winds" are the sighs of the gods, is another mountain formerly inhabited by the gods. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Lerion is described as the source of the river Skai.

Ulthar, the hometown of the story's main characters, was introduced in the story "The Cats of Ulthar". It is said to lie "beyond the river Skai" and to be a neighbour of Hatheg.

Lovecraft mentions the mountain of Kadath for the first time in "The Other Gods"; the story is set up as an explanation of why the gods of earth removed themselves to "unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads." Lovecraft's novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath involves Randolph Carter's attempt to reach Kadath in order to consult the gods.

In addition to Dream-Quest, the mysterious mountain is mentioned in several other Lovecraft stories, including "The Strange High House in the Mist", "The Dunwich Horror", and At the Mountains of Madness.

[Adrian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It was he who wisely advised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying of cats, and who first told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight on St. John’s Eve.

It is often said that H.P. Lovecraft's writing style makes his works difficult to read and in this case I have to agree. I love the Lovecraftian multiverse that Lovecraft created and all the works that have been produced since, but this story didn't hit the mark.

It didn't help that the narrator read is in a rather monotonous fashion and, even though it was quite short, I found myself drifting out towards the end. Only 2 stars, which saddens me.

[Lautaro Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gusta. Parece parte de una épica griega. Es decir, no en cuanto a un relato de guerras, mas una leyenda griega. Aunque con la clásica narrativa de Lovecraft. Porque claro, no te da lugar a imaginarte algo concreto. Porque los dioses, nunca son descriptos, ya que son inenarrables, y me gustó esta palabra en español cuando describe un sonido:
" Atal oyó, mientras ascendía presuosamente a través de declives impensables, una risa repulsiva en la oscuridad, confundiéndose con aullidos que ningún hombre oyó jamás, excepto en el Fleguetonte

[Oleksandr Fediienko · Rating 3 out of 5]

В давні часи земні боги жили на вершинах гір. З часом смертні люди почали освоювати землі вище і вище, допоки у богів не залишилося єдиної домівки - незвіданого Кадата, куди людям підійматися заборонено. Проте боги іноді відвідували свої старі домівки, сумуючи за минулим. Барзаї Мудрий дуже добре знався на звичках земних богів, він навіть вважав себе розумнішим за них. І він бажав побачити їх на власні очі. Взявши супутником молодого жерця Атала, він попрямував до гори Гатеґ-Кла, і, коли він упевнився, що боги навідалися на її вершину, він поліз до них. Однак зустрів він там зовсім не тих, кого очікував.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was a little creepy but I couldn't really get into this one... I kept thinking that Barzai the Wise was probably just nuts and they'd all finally get to the top and see him jumping around yelling about gods on his own. How convenient when Atal was nearly at the top Barzai starts yelling that he's seen the Gods but Atal shouldn't look cause now other gods have turned up and they're evil. Sure Barzai, sure.

But in seriousness, it was an okay story, typical Lovecraft themes and tropes, just not standout to me.