L’isola di Crono e l’isola di Cthulhu: un capitolo poco noto della fortuna di Plutarco

The evocative myth of Kronos’ sleep on an island off the coast of Britain, recalled by Plutarch in De defectu oraculorum (18.420A) and De facie in orbe lunae (940F-942C), enjoyed particular fortune especially among the Anglo-Saxon public. References in poets (such as Drayton and Milton), historians, essayists, popularisers, and even a theosophical over-interpretation linking the passage to the myth of Atlantis helped to make the story very popular, particularly between the 19th and 20th centuries. Through these multiple channels, the Plutarchean myth even reached the well-known horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. As hitherto neglected references in his epistolary and a number of precise points of contact show, the core of his most influential tale, The Call of Cthulhu (1926), is indebted to the story of Kronos: in both cases, an ancient, deposed deity sleeps on a remote island in the Western ocean, communicates through dreams, and awaits the arrival of his followers when a certain astronomical cycle is fulfilled. The suggestive power of the Plutarchean myth is also demonstrated by its reception by another author of weird tales (as well as Lovecraft’s friend), the Californian Clark Ashton Smith, who dedicated his poem, The isle of Saturn (1950) to it.