Of all of H.P. Lovecraft's invented deities, Nyarlathotep is perhaps the most teasing and enigmatic. In The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath Nyarlathotep is said to assume a thousand forms, and the variegated use of the character throughout Lovecraft's fiction bears this out. The image of Nyarlathotep appears as if refracted into a number of clashing partial images, something like a Cubist painting. Precisely because one's eye can construe no single image, one somehow feels he is seeing more truly the multifaceted reality of the thing. Despite and yet because of the shattered refraction, one senses an underlying unity throughout the many depictions of the god Nyarlathotep. He is thus something of a microcosm of the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole, which Lovecraft "designed" to appear as if not designed - fragmentary and contradictory, just like the confused remnants of actual ancient myth cycles. When he makes Nyarlathotep an entity one thousandfold in form, he is utilizing a genuine mytheme which occurs, among other places, in early Christian mythology. In the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, Christ appears to his disciples, both before and after his resurrection, in several apparently physical forms simultaneously so that, e.g., when James and John see Jesus summoning them to leave their nets and follow him, John beholds him as a beardless youth, while James sees a balding, bearded elder. No sooner do they compare notes than Christ's image changes yet again. This element of polymorphousness implies that such a deity has no true form at all, that all its forms, and ultimately all forms of all beings, are merely illusions. The true reality, as Buddhism says, is beyond Namarupa, beyond Name-and-Form. So it is with Nyarlathotep, who is both the "soul and messenger" of the "blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless Other Gods" on the one hand and "their Crawling Chaos" on the other. With this bizarre collection of epithets Lovecraft provides us the clues we need to penetrate into the hidden arcana, the Deep Things of Nyarlathotep.

Lovecraft had a way of misleading his readers and correspondents with half-truths when it came to explaining the origins of the various words and names he had coined. As Will Murray has established, HPL may have said plainly that Arkham was based on Salem, Kingsport on Marblehead, Dunwich on the Wilbraham-Monson-Hampden region of Massachusetts, and Innsmouth on Newburyport, but a closer scrutiny both of the stories and of the map reveals that Arkham was in fact based on Oakham and New Salem, Kingsport on Rockport, Dunwich on Greenwich, and Innsmouth on Gloucester.