Eternal Servitude Day

It does not appear that anyone has noted the significance of the date on which The Truth of Ethan Haas blogspot was created.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Independence Day in the US of A???

It could of course be coincidental that a blog in some terrifying foreign (or alien???) script denouncing such a fine upstanding American citizen as Ethan Haas, whose name is so very similar to that equally fine and upstanding American actor, Ethan Hawke, and who shares the Christian name with that just as fine and upstanding American Revolutionary leader, Ethan Allen.

Or it could be that Haas is warning mankind about the imminent enslavement of the American peoples and their global empire commonly known as Earth. Lovecraft warned us about the servants of Tulzscha (the Green Flame – not to be confused with the Green Lantern – who is an Outer God and courtier to Azathoth). For all we know these next five months will be our last – after that the Goa’uld, the Greys of Zeta Reticuli, the reptoids of the Bellatrix system or any of the other alien species we are aware of (not to mention those who have yet to reveal themselves to us).

Websites such as UFOs and Aliens on Earth and Disclosure and the End of History mention alien slavery ships and suggest that the truth is being hidden from us.

Is this the Truth that Ethan Haas will reveal?

Will we listen?

Or will next year’s Fourth of July be Eternal Servitude Day?

Everything You Wanted To Know About Ethan Haas But Were Afraid…

The website Ethan Haas Was Wrong stated on,


“Wednesday, July 4, 2007


Ethan Haas was wrong


It has come to our attention that the blasphemy of Van Mantra is spreading across the globe.
His prophet Ethan Haas was nothing more than a raving lunatic long forgotten by history.
Mantra’s website EthanHaasWasRight is a foolish attempt to capture the short attention of today’s youth in an attempt to breath [sic] new life into the visions of a long dead fool.
We will do our best to counter this filth and steer humanity back to it’s [sic] proper course.”
Apart from spelling and punctuation inaccuracies suggesting that the writer is a foreigner or other alien, the website declares that Ethan Haas is the prophet of Van Mantra. Van Mantra would appear to be a ‘factional’ character, a hybridised half-fictive, half-factual entity who is involved in some way in an invasion. Although the year is two years out, this ‘ficlet’ gives the same ‘warning date’ (1st August) as the grainy video clip that is transmitted after the first puzzle of the sphere is solved. Is this a coincidence or deliberately misleading?



There are those – heathen believers and other satanically versed votaries amongst others – who would persuade us that Van Mantra is involved in an Alpha-Omega RPG or ARG.
The whole Van Mantra message is back up on YouTube - Ethan Hass Message - cloverfieldclues.com Van Mantra’s full message about Ethan Haas from ethanhaaswasright.com. Find out more info at cloverfieldclues.com – lots of screenshots of the movie plus all sorts of other great links and blogsites.

There’s nothing much there yet but don’t forget to visit CKROX.COM. It appears to be connected to the sphere and the ARG and maybe, just maybe the movie.





Was Abdul Alhazred as mad as Ethan Haas is?



Time will tell – or I will…

Will Ethan Haas Be Abducted?

“We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.... Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.”

Ben Rich, former Head of the Lockheed Skunk Works, in a lecture shortly before he died.

The oddball alternate reality game on the Ethan Haas Was Right website features a mystifying alien sphere. The curious extra-terrestrial symbols on it and in the stars are part of a puzzle that seems to be linked to movie trailers, other websites, the blogosphere, the Lovecraft Cosmos and hush-hush projects.

Project Serpo was the codename of a secret exchange program between the greys of the planet Serpo in the Zeta Reticuli system. The Serpian greys are better known to us as the Roswell aliens. Documented cases of alien abductions and UFOs frequently involve greys and the Roswell crash information is of especial fascination.

According to Project Serpo’s Posting 7, “…Lush green fields were found containing a form of grass, but contained bulbs. The Team coined these fields, “Clover Fields,” even though the bulbs were not clover.” ‘Cloverfield’ is the codename of the unnamed JJ Abrams movie due to be released on 18th January 2008. Despite his protestations to the contrary, all manner of links may be unearthed if one digs deep enough (would we be interested had he confirmed the two are connected?). The Cloverfield News website suggests that the monster of the movie is Cthulhu and it is quite conceivable that the Serpian greys worship this dead but dreaming god. It is also believable that these greys will return in the near future – that is, if they ever left. Slusho.jp – ‘You can’t drink just six’ – has been confirmed as a Cloverfield viral website. (Slusho is featured on Alias and might be the drink used on the 1-18-08.com site). In the History section of Slusho it mentions a deep-sea ingredient that causes abnormal growth. Cthulhu’s home of R’lyeh is a city deep beneath the sea where such an ingredient might well be discovered. (***Check out my Lovecraft Stories Interactive Multimedia CD-ROM – see below – for much more stuff on Cthulhu).

There would also appear to be a connection between Cloverfield and the Masons and the links between this blogpost and the Illuminati, Annunaki and Masons may be explored in more detail by those foolish enough to delve into the depths.

In ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, H.P. Lovecraft commented, ‘…There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them . . . were still be found as Cyclopeanadj.3 stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.”

If They are returning, then, as Ethan Haas says, ‘Look to the stars for help.’
See you in the Red Interactive Agency’s eccentric chatroom where the ethan-haas-puzzlers and the transformer-freaks hang out.

(Thanks to MaK for the Cloverfield News website info.)

Ethan Haas Is Missing, Presumed ???

According to this blog,

“The writings of a mad man
How could the world be so enamored with a lunatic like Ethan Haas ?

It is almost not worth mentioning his writings but if only to discourage mankind from putting its faith in such “visions”. Read for yourself what this “great man” wrote:

The great war of the gods will come upon the earth; the fires and terror of their rule will return for a time, but the children of the gods may be thus prepared, themselves aware and powerful…they may stand along side the gods not as equals, but as allies, feared and ready.”

After Ethan Haas has been abducted (by grays for experimentation or United States government officials by extraordinary rendition or Cthulhu’s spawn for nameless rites) – if, of course, this is what transpires – then such debunking will have succeeded. Like Abdul Alhazred, who was also denigrated and diminished by the epithet ‘mad’, poor Ethan Haas will be called ‘fool’ and ‘lunatic’ rather than ‘sage’ and ‘visionary’. It is a sad indictment of our times that any honest-to-God and shame-the-Devil genuine prophet appearing hereabouts and just about now would be committed post haste to one of those ‘care homes’ of which H.P. Lovecraft was so terrified, his father and mother having both died in the same insane asylum and he himself subject to precarious mental health and ‘nervous collapses’.

But the truth may be even more sinister. The Ethan Haas Was Right website may or may not be a viral marketing site for the Cloverfield project.

But what if it uses subliminal marketing techniques – the brain washing methods of the grays, the CIA and Cthulhu cultists – what then?

Ethan Haas Is Coming…

…to a movie theatre near you? Or not, since JJ Abrams denies there is a link.

"The great cycle, the beginning and the end, turns just as the plans of the gods turn once again to the world of men.

And they will come upon the earth only after the skies rain down fire and the very earth itself is made to shake and the great cities of men fall into ruins. Their plans are set and their purpose is clear; they come for war."

Posted by Mezin Source

When the dwelling-place of the ‘mad’ Arab, Abdul Alhazred was excavated in 1923 by Professor Bernard Houston and his team from Miskatonic University, it is known that they discovered the human skin leaved original of the ‘Kitab Al-Azif’ (literally, ‘The Book of the Howling of the Djinn’, that we know as the Necronomicon) Whether, by some eccentric and eclectic means, this dig disturbed the ‘dead but dreaming gods’ – Cthulhu and his ill-omened ilk – has not been revealed, except by those who have consequently been incarcerated in maximum security insane asylums before their untimely and bizarre deaths and, naturally, the angekoks of the Inuit (Esquimaux). Perhaps the Necronomicon was chanted aloud…

Just as the Tomb of Tutankhamun (also excavated in 1923) was cursed, so was the Abode of Alhazred, particularly so since both met violent ends – Tutankhamun’s skull displays damage and Alhazred was eaten alive by an invisible devil-beast.

The following quotation is from the Necronomicon and is similar in tone to the that from the Ethan Haas Was Wrong website:

‘…Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They rule again.’ Mentally translated by Dr. Henry Armitage, looking over the shoulder of Wilbur Whateley in the Library of Miskatonic University, from the Latin version of Olaus Wormius, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century.

Of course, one person’s god is another’s extra-terrestrial intelligence…

Ethan Haas Was Right Or Wrong (Or Neither)

This wildly weird and wackily wonderful website game was mentioned in Chris Perridas’ Zoetrope Forum as follows:

“…google ‘Ethan Haas’. There are two new viral sites for the new JJ Abrams project, and some of the names thrown around on the sites, including Mezin, Alhazred, and references to a ‘Mad’ prophet lead me (and several bloggers) to believe this project has something to do with Lovecraft’s Old Ones. (JJ Abrams is responsible for, amongst other work, the TV series, ‘Lost’ (this fansite is ironically called Lost-TV).

The trailers put out on YouTube have been removed due to a Paramount Pictures problem. These trailers were originally shown with Paramount’s and DreamWorks’ Transformers: The Movie.

Play the frustrating game on one of the viral sites here:

http://www.ethanhaaswasright.com/The other sites are:

http://ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com/

and http://www.1-18-08.com/ which has two photographs from the future (taken on 18th January 2008, the release date of the movie)

The game may or may not be connected to an as yet unnamed unreleased movie (codenamed Cloverfield). This report suggests that the two are connected and that they and other stuff are part of an ongoing viral marketing campaign. Everything in the known universe about Cloverfield needs to be explored (via warp drive or foldspace). But this blog states that the game and movie are unconnected.

***If you have trouble seeing the symbols, right-click and choose Zoom In.

Check out a review and help, http://ethanhaas.livejournal.com/ mentions petting Cthulhu and asks what happens to us on 1st August, then there’s 54312 on Flickr - Photo Sharing! (but theinsanecultist’s photos are mainly of cats), the MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/ethanhaaswasright, there’s scifighter, http://ethanhaas.org/, the e-mail address, the countdown on parasitemovie.com (a.k.a. cloverfield) plus stuff on blog the internet dot com.

The Mezin referred to may or may not be connected to this site. Project Serpo (and its connections to Roswell) would also appear to be linked to the movie, its codename and maybe the alternate reality game – but certainly to Cthulhu. Check out ‘Who is Ethan Haas, And What Is Cloverfield?’
There is more to come.
The end of something or other is nigh.
Watch this space!


But whatever you do, you MUST visit the Red Interactive Agency for its take on the story, your chance to create an avatar (from many possibilities)and explore the weirdest chatroom in the metaverse).

The Grimmest of Grimoires

Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred...
H.P. Lovecraft
The first mention of the Necronomicon, in “The Hound”

Literally translated as ‘The Book of Dead Names’, the Necronomicon is an imaginary grimoire invented by Lovecraft and described in detail in his ‘History of the Necronomicon’, probably written about 1927 but not published until well after his death. In this history he refers to various copies and translations including an English one – but never published – produced by Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) astrologer, occultist and consultant to Elizabeth I of England. Dee was probably the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s character Prospero in ‘The Tempest’. It has been suggested that the book is real, despite Lovecraft’s protestations to the contrary and although he says that, “…Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also in the library of the University of Buenos Ayres.” The latter library is of peculiar interest since there are a number of contenders and since Buenos Aires was the birthplace of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an extremely influential Argentine writer, who penned one story entitled ‘The Library of Babel’ which, in some ways prefigured the Internet, and who also, as discussed in ‘Return of the Weird’, “…in his maddeningly elliptical way, first denied ever having heard of Lovecraft – then went on to dedicate his story ‘There Are More Things’ to him.”

There is a very basic version of the Necronomicon on the Web as well as another version (both are difficult to read due to their background graphics), a DIY origami version, a book, a very lengthy online version, the Simon Necronomicon, a collection of references to it, the Truth About the Necronomicon and the Necronomicon illustrated by H.R. Giger (the artist who created the creatures in the movie ‘Alien’ and its sequels).

Good background on this bad book may be found in this article, in this one, in here, as well as here, in addition to here and also here.

The word ‘grimoire’ is from the Old French ‘grammaire’ meaning ‘grammar’. Latin ‘grammars’- or books about Latin syntax and diction – were regarded during the mediaeval period as books of basic instruction. As books of magical knowledge, grimoires contain spells, incantations, symbols, astrological correspondences and ritual instructions. The most well known include ‘Le Dragon Rouge’ (The red dragon), ‘La Poule Noire’ (The black chicken), ‘The Greater Etteila’ and ‘Le Grand Albert’ et ‘Le Petit Albert’ (the greater and the lesser Albert).
During the late nineteenth century, a number of the earliest-known grimoires (including the Abramelin text and the Keys of Solomon) were reclaimed by neo-Masonic magical organisations such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis.
In addition to the Necronomicon, other volumes, less well known, but just as ill-omened in content, are ‘De Vermis Mysteriis’ (Mysteries of the Worm), by Ludvig Prinn and ‘Unaussprechlichen Kulten’ (Nameless Cults) by Friedrich von Junzt. The authors of the two volumes both met terrible fates, as did Al-Hazred.

Does the magic in these grimoires work? In the hinterlands of reality, anything is possible.

Cthulhu of the Caribbean?

Has anyone else noticed that Cthulhu and Davy Jones (as played by Bill Nighy in Walt Disney’s production Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) is a dead ringer for Cthulhu or one of his spawn? Even Davy’s hat looks like Cthulhu’s wings.
Davy Jones lives at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’ Locker and is a nickname of the devil of the seas (Devil Jonah) since he kidnaps sailors and drowns them as they join him in his watery abode. Tobias Smollet‘s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) comments, “This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep....”. As an ardent Anglophile and avid reader (at his death he had over 1500 books in his library), it is quite possible that Lovecraft was familiar with Smollett’s works.

Cthulhu lives – “dead but dreaming” – in R’lyeh, a sunken city deep under the Pacific Ocean in the middle of one of the biggest empty regions of water on the planet. Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as having an “awful squid-head with writhing feelers” (a very apt description of Davy Jones in the movie).

According to Wikipedia, “…Lovecraft said that R’lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R’lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth’s coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the “Ponape Scripture“, a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W“. The sound was given the name “Bloop“.

When in Rome, don’t do as the Romans did…

But the important thing to consider is the prodigiousadj.1/2 vitality of the Roman idea. Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heroes of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosisn.1 among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!

H.P. Lovecraft
In a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1 1929

Although “…Lovecraft later believed that Hellenism and astronomy were the two central influences of his early years”, he was clearly awed by the Romans as well. The Roman Empire as a whole survived as an autocracy for five hundred years, however, the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire lasted almost another thousand years until Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.

Despite Edward Gibbon and his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire it has been argued that the Empire did not fall at all but underwent a very complex transformation. In some ways, as Lovecraft comments, it vanished, but in others, it remained.

For those who maintain that it fell and who attempt to draw parallels between its decline and collapse with other empires, for example, the British and even the USA (although it is not clear what is actually meant by an ‘American Empire’), a variety of reasons are postulated including, Christianity, the decline in morals and values, public health problems, political corruption, inflation, unemployment, urban decay, inferior technology and military spending. To this have been added the use of lead, the dole and barbarians, and, the sheer size of the empire at its height. It has even been suggested that Rome never fell as it still exists and it has been very well argued that our common view of Roman history is far from the case.

If there is one hero of antiquity who personifies the Roman Empire and who received his apotheosis amongst the stars it is Hercules (Greek Herakles) and the constellation named after him. Indeed, as Wikipedia notes, Hercules was the hero “…whom the later Roman Emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximinus, often identified themselves.”

Lovecraft Stories Interactive Multimedia CD-ROM

Hyperlinked Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction Anthology

I have just published the following which I hope will be of interest:

The Lovecraft Cosmos Collection™ I

Welcome to the worlds of Howard Phillips Lovecraft!

The dreams and the drugs; the witchcraft and the wormholes; the aliens and their alarming deities; the mundane world where the anomalistic occurs quite normally – this, and much more, oozed from the pen of one of the most influential fantasy, horror and science fiction writers of the 20th century. Stephen King has said of him, “He struck with the most force, and I still think, for all his shortcomings, he is the best writer of horror fiction that America has yet produced.”

Creator of Arkham and Cthulhu, Lovecraft was the quintessential outsider who believed that, “…common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” and that, “The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

The digital equivalent of The Daily Prophet, and even more so of The Quibbler, in the Harry Potter books and films, each story is an experience that helps to tell itself though links. The format of this experience is neotext – a totally new multimedia/ hypermedia interactive version of each story – fully illustrated, and with hyperlinks to websites featuring word definitions, background material, sound effects and music, and, videos. Every link has been chosen to enrich the reading of the story and each story has additional ‘Links and Resources’ pages where the themes of the story and further background can be explored via the net. It has also been extensively annotated with footnotes and endnotes providing additional information and links.

This collection comprises five Lovecraft stories – Azathoth, Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Other Gods and The Thing on the Doorstep – as well as two ‘Editor’s Extras’ – Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth and Lovecraftian Labyrinthine Linkages (a list of additional links to all things Lovecraftian.

Each Lovecraft Cosmos Collection™ is normally supplied via CD in the form of PDFs (open with free Adobe Acrobat Reader) with payment processing via PayPal.

You do not have to have an account with PayPal.

The payment of £4.99 ($9.99) plus postage and packing will be processed through PayPal who will invoice you. When you have made the payment, you will be sent a CD of Adobe Acrobat PDF files of the collection you ordered. If you do not have the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader you can download the free version at
http://www.download.com/Adobe-Reader/3000-2378_4-10000062.html
Order your copy at:
rogermartintudor@btinternet.com
Or you can request a digital version and thereby save the postage costs.

Or have a look at eBay (UK and USA) - search for 'Lovecraft CD'.

By all means have a look at my MySpace as well:

myspace.com/lovecrafter

Have you an avatar?

An avatar is:

The physical embodiment of an idea or concept; a personification;
(Computing) A digital representation of a person or being;
(Hinduism) The earthly incarnation of a deity, particularly Vishnu.

Many of the Lovecraft Cosmos gods are embodiments of concepts, particularly Azathoth who is the personification of the nucleus of the cosmos “at the centre of all infinity” yet “beyond time and space”.

Lovecraft was extremely interested in dreams and the nature of reality and many of his stories explore these subjects so, if one considers the role of avatars in role-playing games – many of which feature the Cthulhu Mythos – then there is a fascinating link between his creations and digital representations.

In ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ Lovecraft said,

“…Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”


In the Lovecraft Cosmos, Nyarlathotep is the avatar and soul of the Outer Gods, serving as an intermediary between the pantheonn.2’s deities and their cults. As such he is very similar to the Greek god Hermes who was messenger for the other gods of the Greek pantheon; the god of crossroads, boundaries and travellers; a psychopomp who led or guided souls to the afterlife; a god of luck, and, of scheming and trickery.

The virtual reality world of the ‘role-playing games’ Second Life (and Second Teen Life for those under eighteen) and World of Warcraft feature avatars in different metaverse environments not unlike, in principle, the virtual reality of the Matrix Trilogy that features a fictional universe where the man-machine interface is integrated. The virtual reality world in the Canadian director David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ may be compared and contrasted with the theories of the Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan who wrote a number of analytical and predictive books, particularly Understanding Media.

In our interaction with fiction, movies, television and, especially, cyberspace we all exist as avatars, not as ourselves but as digital representations of ourselves – as do the creations of our minds. Lovecraft would have loved it!

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...Like most fantaisistes [sic], Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in a strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to the forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain or Radcliffian or Ludovician romance [referring to M.G. Lewis]. Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy, ambitious and anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosius. More particular qualities appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate.

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short-story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence—an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, a Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in every sense of the word save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher—especially the latter—that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history—a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.

These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskilled hands, become under Poe’s spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness—the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents an allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous denouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalizing the desired illusion—principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be—we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire’s urbane and Gallically modulated translation—but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist’s creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few other can ever hope to be.

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...Poe’s tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be included at all in weird literature; whilst certain others, probably influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess and extravagance which relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and fountain-head of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship poised on the billow-chasm’s edge in MS. Found in a Bottle—the dark intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing graybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil-current toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which must end in destruction?

Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence.” In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcane of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints of a monstrous metempsychosis—the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was shown the giant horse of the victim’s ancestor in the Crusades; the madman’s wild and constant riding on the great horse, and his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring houses; and finally, the burning of the madman’s palace and the death therein of the owner, borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the beast he has ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins takes the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe’s mind was never far from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.

Lovecraft on Poe

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft (CONTINUED)

...His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master’s vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, that vision had power to project itself in black magical crystallisations [sic] and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the thirties and forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi s not even the nether slopes of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen [sic] of cosmic panic. The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that toll iron bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the “wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space—out of Time”—all these things and more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for us the very jaws of the pit—inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked tension of the speaker’s hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; daemoniac patterns and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A Witches’ Sabbath of horror flinging off decorous robes is flashed before us—a sight the more monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every particular is marshaled and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life.

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft (continued)

...Poe’s spectres [sic] thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical knowledge of terror’s true sources which doubled the force of his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in merely conventional shudder-coining. This example having been set, later authors were naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at all; so that in this way a definite change began to affect the main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship; and although today some of his own work seems slightly melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace his influence in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently in the climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in its present form. His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal aesthetic movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the Symbolists.

Lovecraft on Poe

“EDGAR ALLEN POE”:
FROM SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
H.P. Lovecraft
In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European aesthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the “advanced intelligentsia” to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.

Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority’s artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove—good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.

Where Once Poe Walked

Where Once Poe Walked
H. P. Lovecraft

Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,

Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;

Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,

Arched high above a hidden world of yore.

Round all the scene a light of memory plays,

And dead leaves whisper of departed days,

Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.

Lonely and sad, a specter glides along

Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;

No common glance discerns him, though his song

Peals down through time with a mysterious spell.

Only the few who sorcery's secret know,

Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe

Atlanteans, Lemurians and aliens

H.P. Lovecraft may or may not have said to Harold S. Farnese (with whom he briefly corresponded),

“You will, of course, realize that all my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on one fundamental lore or legend: that this world was inhabited at one time by another race, who in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.”

but he did write, in “The Other Gods” (1921),

“…In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.”

and, in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926),

“…There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.”

and, from the same source,

“…They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape...but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for them…”

and, in “At The Mountains of Madness”

“…Another race – a land-race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to [the] fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu – soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea. . . . Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R’lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet. . . .”

There are different theories about Mu and Lemuria, as there are about Atlantis.

Lemuria may be the ‘Kumarinâtu of Tamil literature’, metaphorical or physical, a place destroyed by volcanoes and earthquakes that sank beneath the sea, a land where the ancestors of both the Mesoamericans and the Egyptians held sway, a continent destroyed in a catastrophe so long ago that all memories of it have disappeared, whose descendants became space travellers and abducted by Daniel Fry in 1949, whose tunnels – like those of Atlantis – still exist under the earth, a civilization whose remains are to be found somewhere in the deserts of Western Australia, the continent inhabited by (according to theosophists) the Third Root-race and whose empire arose 78,000 years ago and lasted 52,000 years before being destroyed 26,000 years ago by a pole shift caused by the near-miss of the planet Nibiru. If the Elder Gods inhabited another planet in our solar system prior to visiting Earth (given that they existed in this spacetime and were sufficiently corporeal) then Nibiru is a prime candidate for such occupation since it has been claimed by Zecharia Sitchin that, “About 450,000 years ago, Alalu, the deposed ruler of the Anunnaki on Nibiru, escaped the planet on a spaceship and found refuge on Earth.” Nibiru is an Akkadian name and is the name of the planet associated with Marduk.

The anagram of Anunnaki is Ik-anu-nan (Ik – one of Quetzalcoatl’s names; Anu – the first part of Anubis, Egyptian god of the Underworld and Nan(na) – the Sumerian Moon-god whose daughter, Inanna, who has been compared to Persephone (because she went to the Underworld and was then saved).

Marduk was a god of wisdom and white magic and therefore the Sumerian equivalent of Thoth.

The priests and practitioners of white and of black magic who inhabited both Lemuria and Atlantis were clearly the descendants of genetically manipulated primates (i.e. human beings) by the Annunaki since the names of their Elder Gods may be traced to those aliens.

Perhaps Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth are, in some way, connected to Nibiru and its return!

Technorati Tags: lovecraft, atlantis, mu, lemuria, theosophy, cthulhu, r'lyeh, churchward, zechariah, sitchin, anunnaki, akkad, akkadian, marduk, nibiru, anu, anubis, inanna, yog-sothoth, azathoth

Putting the “fun” back into dysfunctional

Rabidly racist, pathologically phobic about frigidity (the weather, not his own – although that may have been the case as well) and miserably misogynistic, Lovecraft opens a whole new chapter on the meaning of ‘dysfunctional’.

Growing up, as he did, in a most unusual and highly eccentric family – his father died (of dementia caused by syphilis) in Butler’s Hospital, an insane asylum, as did his mother (in the same asylum) – he was raised by two maiden aunts. As a child his mother treated him like a girl and his hair was worn long until the age of six. Due to childhood illness he did not receive much in the way of formal schooling and he claimed to have had a number of nervous breakdowns in his youth including a severe one in 1908 that caused him to leave high school – after a mere two and a half years – without a diploma. He was often on the edge of suicide, particularly after the death of his grandfather (and the family’s subsequent ejection from the mansion in which they lived) and of his mother.

His stories rarely mention women and, although he had a girlfriend – Winifred Virginia Jackson (that is, he had a friend who was a girl) – his cohabitation with his wife Sonia Haft Greene lasted scarcely ten months, after which he moved into a single room in the squalid Red Hook area of Brooklyn, with Sonia merely returning from time to time to New York.

His racism and xenophobia knew no bounds (even though Sonia was Jewish) and his hatred and fear extended to what he clearly regarded as ‘degenerates’ of his own race. As such he would have no doubt had much sympathy with the American eugenics movement of the period – second only to that of Nazi Germany.

Yet, for all these peculiarities, he is now regarded as the father of modern horror and has influenced most of today’s seminal writers in that genre:

As Stephen King wrote in his ‘Danse Macabre’, Lovecraft “...opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them...[T]he reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which underlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.”

To be a servant

He who would valiant be ’gainst all disaster,

Let him in constancy follow the Master.

There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent

His first avowed intent to be a servant.

Becoming a servant of one of the Lovecraft deities inevitably(adv.)1 and inexorably(adv.) results in insanity, death or – if you are very, very blessed (damned?) – in both.

In “The Thing on the Doorstep” Edward Pickman Derby was a “…a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary. Derby was to suffer a death not unlike that of the Wicked Witch of the West.

In “The Call of Cthulhu” during Inspector Legrasse’s attack on the worshippers in the swamp “…Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.” The uncle of the story’s protagonist, George Gamell Angell, died mysteriously and prematurely, as did the protagonist, Francis Wayland Thurston – both of whom had learned little but too much.

And in “The Other Gods” Barzai the Wise dies due to his crime of hubris.

GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING: Servitude kills

Genius loci

“…There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.” – H.P. Lovecraft, “The Street”

The concept of a soul is a religious or philosophical one and, together with mind and body comprise the trinity of existence for an individual.

In common with Jews, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs and Hindus, the ancient Greeks believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls whereby a being reincarnates in another living organism – plant, animal or human being. The eternal movement of a soul from body to body is called samsara by the Eastern religions.

Christians, and particularly Roman Catholics, are divided on the issue with some believing that animals possess souls and others denying it. Some Christians believe that reincarnation is the equivalent of eternal damnation. The overwhelming majority, however, believe that there is a soul and some attempt to provide proof, even though such belief is, of its very essence, neither provable nor falsifiable. Certain mystics believe that every living being is ‘part’ of a Universal Soul, others see a more complex interrelationship between God, man and animals. Atheists tend to disbelieve in the existence of a soul in any living organism – and, by extension, in non-living things or places.

The Romans believed in the genius loci, the protective or guardian spirit of a place. According to the Wikipedia entry for ‘genius loci’, “…In the context of modern architectural theory, genius loci has profound implications for place-making, falling within the philosophical branch of ‘phenomenology’.” This concept has much in common with feng shui which “…is a discipline with guidelines that are compatible with many techniques of architectural planning.” In ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’, China Miéville (who has acknowledged the influence of Lovecraft on his writing) describes the Viæ Feræ, the wild streets that occur and non-occur as they fight battles with each other for survival and dominance.

Whether or not ‘things’ have souls is more problematical. “…In the horror genre model of the universe, whatever is “out there” really is trying to “get” you—the world is full of inimical things that devour all goodness and still have no goodness inside. What’s after you is pure evil, something which is literally God-forsaken. There is no recourse but to run, hide, or fight. And it really is hopeless.” (Neptune, Klipot, and Fighting Evil).

It is illogical and yet strangely consistent with his contrariness that such a confirmed atheist as Lovecraft was, who stated that, “…I am, indeed, an absolute materialist as far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism – religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality...” should, in one of his short stories, suggest that all entities are in possession of souls.

Yog-Sothiology

Yog-Sothoth – a.k.a. The Lurker at the Threshold, The Key and the Gate, The Beyond One, Opener of the Way, The All-in-One and the One-in-All – like An of the Sumerians, Osiris of the Egyptians, Vishnu of the Indians, Anu of the Babylonians, Zeus of the Greeks and Jupiter of the Romans

Each of these (apart from Yog-Sothoth) are sky- or sun-gods or gods of the heavens, lords of the constellations, and, the kings of all the other gods, spirits and demons. Supreme in their pantheonsn.3, they existed as one of a triadn.1 of gods – An, Enki and Enlil; Osiris, Isis and Horus; Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva; Anu, Bel and Ea; Zeus, Poseidon and Hades; and Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. Some – like Zeus – directly involved themselves in the affairs of mankind, whilst others – like Anu – were remote and unlikely to respond to personal appeals (in common with many of today’s governmental leaders!). Yog-Sothoth, however, cannot be said to be one of a trinity unless one was to link him with the all-mighty Azathoth and the all-wise Yibb-Tstll (or, of course Nyarlathotep). He is also remote, except that, like Zeus, he has had congressn.5 with human females – in the case of Yog-Sothoth, the issue was Wilbur Whateley, and in the case of Zeus, too many to mention. Unlike An, Osiris, Vishnu, Anu, Zeus and Jupiter, Yog-Sothoth is neither human nor animal in form, being “a congeries of iridescent globes” – a blood-curdling bubble-bath. Also unlike them he is “…coterminous with all time and space yet is supposedly locked outside of the universe we inhabit.” (Wikipedia entry). This description, from “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, is prescient in that it sounds counterfactual in terms of the Einsteinian spacetime with which Lovecraft would have been familiar but makes perfect sense as far as the ten dimensions of space (and one of time) of string theory are concerned.

However, BEWARE! To learn too much about this deity is to fiddle around with damnation as Yog-Sothoth requires human sacrifice and/or eternal servitude of all his ‘favourites’.

Let Sleeping Gods Lie

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

In the Lovecraft Cosmos it does not behoove any fool to awaken, annoy or otherwise disturb the gods.

Apart from the undesirable and injudicious arousal of Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu”, Bokrug – the Great Water Lizard god was much displeased when the men of Sarnath slaughtered the inhabitants of Ib who were,

“…in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it....[T]hey had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice.”
– Wikipedia entry “The Doom That Came To Sarnath”

In “The Curse of Yig” Audrey Davis incurs the anger of the snake-god Yig when she kills some of his children – deadly rattlers! Other characters descend into insanity merely through the worship of his terrifying deities.

Unsurprisingly, given Lovecraft’s passion for the classical, his gods’ behaviour (even though they are alien and monstrous in appearance) is very similar to that of Ancient Greece’s Olympians. Prometheus and Ixion were punished by Zeus for their amatory adventures, Athena punished Ajax for the ‘rape’ of Cassandra and the ‘wrath of heaven’ was visited upon other mortals by the gods.

Yog-Sothoth

(If the last post was as pellucidadj.1 as ichorn.1 then have a look here.)

Of all the gods in the Lovecraft Cosmos pantheon, Yog-Sothoth is paramount, “...an Outer God … coterminous with all time and space yet…supposedly locked outside of the universe we inhabit. Its cosmic nature is hinted at in this passage from “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1934) by Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price:

It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self — not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence’s whole unbounded sweep — the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign...” – Wikipedia entry

Such a deity would be utterly beyond human comprehension and any futile and foolhardy attempt to fathom its sheer enormity can only instigate abject and incurable insanity.

Please therefore exercise the utmost caution before undertaking such a venture.

A great image of Yog-Sothoth

Limited Print image