parentalia

'' charles darwin shocked victorian society by suggesting that man is descended from the ape. this is a shorthand way of expressing the idea that the common ancestor which we share with the hairy apes, the chimpanzee and the gorilla, was more 'ape-like' than 'man-like'. but at the end of the twentieth century, we have discovered that darwin was wrong. apes are descended from man--which is a shorthand way of saying that the common ancestor from which both ourselves and the hairy apes are descended had some distinctly human characteristics, notably upright walking, which the chimp and the gorilla have lost. ...

'' the case we have made seems so secure that we hesitate to press it further, for fear that it may seem that we protest too much and yet many people find the conclusions disturbing, ... that man, chimp and gorilla are not only very closely related, but are all almost equally close to one another. ... even more disturbing, the traditional picture of human evolution is not based on the same sort of analysis as would be applied to any other group... ''

john gribbin and jeremy cherfas, the first chimpanzee.

body of mythos

'' there is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon, and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of tartarus. ''

hp.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

lovecraft's folly

'' he could not go back to those things in the waking world because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract of such countryside in the region east of the city where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the feet of the tanarian hills. there he dwelt in a grey gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea ... and on the coast nearby he had built a little cornish fishing village ... and in a valley not far off he had reared a great norman abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

i: a dream-village in wales.

landscape piece

'' the sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dingle. a blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of the birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember. ''

h.p.lovecraft, dreamquest of unknown kadath.

parentalia

'' i had not been a day in anchester before i knew i came of an accursed house ... the bare statistics of my ancestry i had always known, ... of details, however, i had been kept wholly ignorant. ... nor was any kind of tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope ... the envelope that had bound us all to the past. ... neither my father nor i ever knew what our hereditary envelope had contained ... i lost all interest in the mysteries which evidently lurked far back in my family tree, ... had i suspected their nature, how gladly i would have left exham priory to its moss, bats and cobwebs! ...

'' apparently the delapores had a colorful and perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son's ... dwelt near the family seat at anchester and related some peasant superstitions which few novelists could equal for wildness and incredebility. ... the anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place. ... they viewed exham priory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves. ... they represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons ... and hinted whisperingly at their responibility for the occasional disapearances of villagers through several generations. ''

h.p.lovecraft, rats in the walls.

body of mythos

'' trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visable, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrouse, mindless other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos nyarlathotep. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

zoog-land

'' in the tunnels of that twisted wood, ... dwell the furtive and secretive zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking world, ... most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees, and although they live mostly on funghi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. ...

'' one particular village of the creatures was in the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stone in what was once a clearing tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, ... for at that spot a mightly slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it bears an iron ring three feet wide . ... the zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring; and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly and deliberately. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

body of mythos

'' outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nether most confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity--the boundless daemon sultan azatoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; ...

'' that last amorphous blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud ... those inconcievable, unlighted chambers beyond time wherein azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes. ''

h.p.lovecraft, dream quest of unknown kadath.

burglar-alarm and whippoorwills

'' the thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, ... it was not quite dead but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved ...

'' it would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, ... it was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the whateleys upon it. but the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, ... above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic, ... below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. the skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur ... the limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians; ...

'' of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it. ... a change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in ... one need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred ... it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, ... whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least in any true or stable sense. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dunwich horror.

i: teratological research at "the teratology society".
ii: teratology at "wikipedia".

demeaculumn

'' all around were crumbling wall and broken columns, ... ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street; ... far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds a pair of monstrous things.

'' huge winged lions of diarite they were, with blackness and shadow between them. full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them ... they were the changeless guardians of the great abyss, and these dark ruins were in truth primordal sarkomand. ... fabled sarkomand with its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds ...

'' ten feet apart crouched the mocking-faced beasts of diarite, brooding on cyclopean pedestals whose sides were chiseled in fearsome bas-reliefs. betwixt them was a tiled court with a central space ... in this space a black well opened, ... whose crusted and mouldy stone steps lead down to the crypts of nightmare. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

i: changeless guardian of diorite.