Not a long post, but I definitely wanted to get something up on time for once this week. I also wanted to get a post in this month about Clark Ashton Smith since I missed the anniversary of his death a couple of weeks ago. And, finally, I wanted to actually celebrate this date, a celebration which had been planned since at least 2019.

What is ‘Klarkash-Ton Day’? I’d read online about something called that at least as far back as 2018. It was, apparently, the date on which Lovecraft first bequeathed a ‘Mythos name’ to Clark Ashton Smith. That sounded perfectly cool to me. HPL giving Smith that moniker marked one of the very first times he ever did so for one of his correspondents; a sort of pre-dawn glimmering of both the famed ‘Lovecraft Circle’ and also of the Cthulhu Mythos (as opposed to the Lovecraft Mythos).

As it turned out, there was no hard evidence provided for the actual date of Klarkash-Ton Day—which was sometime in March or maybe September, as I recall. So, cool idea, but no good data. Back to the drawing board.

In late 2019, I purchased the two-volume set of Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill. Those volumes collected all of the surviving correspondence betwixt CAS and HPL, which you can read more about here. I presumed that the required true date could be found within those pages—specifically Volume One, which spans 1922 to 1931. I was not mistaken.

Tillinghast23’s rendition of Klarkash-Ton, High-Priest of Atlantis.

There it was, on page 162, from a Lovecraft missive dated August 31, 1928:

“To Klarkash-Ton, High-Priest of Atlantis, All Hail!”

I can find no earlier instance of “Klarkash-Ton”. It is not used again for several more letters. As noted above, while I’m not sure that this is the absolute first time HPL bestowed a ‘Mythos name’ upon a friend/correspondent, it has to be one of the very first. By a ‘Mythos name’, I mean a nickname that also was spelled in Lovecraft’s eldritch fashion. “Ar-E’ch-Bei” for R.H. Barlow is another example. Meanwhile, many of HPL’s correspondents had more mundane plays on their names given as nicknames.

In this case, Lovecraft not only created a name for CAS, he also created a bit of a persona/backstory for it. Smith had yet to write any tales of Poseidonis, the last remnant of Atlantis. Perhaps that sobriquet planted a seed that grew into the likes of Malygris?

Regardless, “Klarkash-Ton” stuck and has been used as a nickname for the Bard of Auburn by CAS fans and scholars ever since.

Happy Klarkash-Ton Day!