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.