dagon worship

"this day a solemn feast the people hold to dagon, their sea-idol, and forbid laborious works."

john milton, samson agonistes.

" her own attitude toward shadowed innsmouth---which she had never seen---was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.

" it was called, she said, "the esoteric order of dagon" , and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the east a century before, at a time when the innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

 

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opening statement with unexplained sound

"Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them." ( full text at the lovecraft archive )

h.p.lovecraft, dreams in the witch house.

 

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preface to stellification

 

"the climax? what plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? i have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. ...lest you think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. i will quote the following account of the star nova persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, professor garrett p. serviss: ..."

h.p.lovecraft, beyond the wall of sleep.

 

''the lectures gave me an opportunity to explore a feature of renaissance literature which has probably struck every serious student as puzzling at one time or another: namely, the extraordinary prominence of astronomical imagery. that the stars were important astrologically is at best a partial explanation, i am more concerned here with the impact of astronomical discoveries--particularly their implications for stellification, or translation to the stars.

''renaissance astronomical imagery is often seen as no more than a literary repercussion of copernicus, just as stellification is dismissed as hyperbolic flattery. but for some time i have felt sure that other factors were involved. in the renaissance, purely objective science hardly existed. ... seventeenth century culture was both religious and materialistic. far from science replacing religion, the literature of the period seems to show a great variety of negotiated reconciliations of the two. ... meanwhile, an urge to survive materially after death is squared with new scientific information, there are extreme swings of opinion, strange temporary solutions.''

alastair fowler, times purpled masquers.

 

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opening statement purring

"it is said that in ulthar, which lies beyond the river skai, no man may kill a cat; and this i can verily believe as i gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. for the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. he is the soul of antique aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in meroë and ophir. he is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister africa. the sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten."
h.p.lovecraft, the cats of ulther.

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opening statement written on brick cylinders

 

other sarnath near benares-varanasi

"there is in the land of mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream flows. ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of sarnath, but sarnath stands there no more. it is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of sarnath came to the land of mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stone city of ib, which was old as the lake itself, ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the doom that came to sarnath.

 

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potent pelf

 

 

hound from the pit

"st. john and i had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui ... it was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. ...

 

"by what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible holland churchyard ? i think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.

 

"i remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, ... much--amazingly much--was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. the skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and it's long, firm teeth and it's eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own.

 

"in the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. it was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, or a sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in an antique oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.

 

"the expression of it's features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a makers seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

 

"immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. ... we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden necronomicon of the mad arab abdul alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible leng, in central asia. ... we read much in alhazred's necronomicon about it's properties, and about the relation of the ghost's soul to the object's it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read. ... then terror came."

 

h.p.lovecraft, the hound.

 

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lullaby for cthulhu

sandiego filk-cultist

"they worshipped so they said, the great old ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.

 

"this was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of r'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. some day he would call, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."

 

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

 

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opening quest

 

"when age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when those things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away for ever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world's dreams had fled."

h.p.lovecraft, azathoth.

 

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ghoul sighting

a troop of ghouls pay visit to a house in the vale of arbroath.

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zenig the serious aphoratean

mr. zenig at mister.
''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

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

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more batrachian than ichthyic

strange craftsmanship of purmundus via notcothulhu.

'' most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry associated with innsmouth. ... the fragmentary descriptions were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. something about them seemed so odd and provocative that i could not put them out of my mind, ... i resolved to see the local sample said to be a large queerly proportioned thing ... evidently meant for a tiara ...

'' even now i can hardly describe what i saw though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, ... as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzling untraditional designs-- ... chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftmanship of incredible skill and grace ...

'' there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. at first i decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy ... however i soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source ... among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion ... every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil. ''

''but the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the orne jewellery in a downtown safe-deposit vault. some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. ... as my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hidiousness of the designs. artists and archeologists who had seen them pronounced the workmanship superlativley and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. there were two armlets, a tiara , and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of an almost unbearable extravagance.

''he seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but i doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. i did not expect it, either, for i thought i was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be.

h.p.lovecraft;the shadow over innsmouth.

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landscape piece

illumined trees via notcothulhu.

''the scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain.
''beyond the scarred trunks in the background illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight.
''and nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, i could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.''
h.p.lovecraft, the lurking fear.

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opening statement

 

"i repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but i can say no more than i have said already.

"everything that i can remember, i have told you with perfect candor. nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind--that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me."

h.p.lovecraft, the statement of randolph carter.

 

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lovecraft's ?racism?

i always had read , and even to this day read what people write about reading h. p. lovecraft's weird tales and not having been aware of the racism in lovecraft's weird tales with a grain of disbelief , especially if they be a person of race . it remained a print phenomena for me until one day when i was talking to an acquaintance and she brought up out of the outopia of the moment the subject of h. p. lovecraft's writing . she told me how her brother had read all of lovecraft's writing when he was a teenager and had gifted her with some of lovecraft's weird tales . familiar with lovecraft's writings from reading his fiction and nonfiction and because the person i was talking to is canadian by birth though of asian heritage , the first thing that came to mind was the racism of lovecraft's writing . both what i had noticed in his writing and what i read of mentioned in criticisms and biographical works .

when i voiced the question "can i ask you something? , with you being of japanese background what do you think of the racism in his writing?" , i got an uncomfortable look from her ("what does he mean racism in lovecraft's writing?, is he talking about the same author as me?") , and then the response "no" she hadn't noticed it and she couldnt think of any sample at the moment . no , i thought that interesting and said it wasn't only my opinion, there are critics of his oeuvre who have written of his literary racisms and mentioned realistic examples and figurative ways lovecraft introduced races in to his tales and then showed those races in a negative way compared to characters of euroese races in his stories , specifically characters of british euroese decent . she said she would have to reread some of the stories and maybe ask her brother if he noticed it and would let me know . i can not recall if she ever got back to me about it .

 

 

zenig of aphorat

• 

squamous zenig of fsmnyc.

''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

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

 

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