flight of the shantak

goya at giornal nuovo.


''then the man motioned carter to mount one of the repugnant shantaks ... it was hard work ascending, for the shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery ... once he was seated the slant-eyed man hopped up behind him ...

'' there now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, ... beyond which leng was said to be ... far above the clouds they flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits of which the folk of inquanok have never seen, ... carter saw them very plainly as they passed below, and saw upon their top most peaks strange caves ... he noticed that both the man and the horse-headed shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, ...

'' the shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain whereon at great distances shone little feeble fires ... around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, ... very slowly and awkwardly did these forms leap; and with an insane twisting and bending not good to behold ... as the shantak flew lower, the repulsivness of the dancers became tinged with a cetain hellish familiarity, ... they leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet and seemed to wear a sort of wig or headpiece with small horns ...

'' but the shantak flew on past the fires ... and soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and snow ... and still the vile bird winged meaningly through the cold and silence ... and finally they came to a wind-swept table-land which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world ... the lothsome bird now settled to the ground,''

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

strange innsmouth

more innsmouth jewelry at  notcouture.

"so i spent part of that evening at the newburyport public library looking up data about innsmouth... the essex county historys on the library shelves had very little to say... the epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsley treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county...most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with innsmouth." 

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

body of mythos

spirit of the thing via lovecraft's legacy for may 11, 2012.

''the bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. its designs however were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; ... it seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.


''if i say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human charicature, i shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing ... a pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu 


''not only can the yogi experiance the vagus nerve in and of itself, but by means of neurological connections to the vision area of the brain at the back of the skull, he or she can even visualize the nerve... is such a visualization a myth? and if so, what myth is it? our answer is that it is not a single myth but refers to an entire genre of myth; slaying the kraken, or, sea monster. ... it is a description of the brain and its twelve cranial nerves. the myth of the kraken, whose many tentacles reach deep into the viscera, is a description of the struggle with the vagus nerve.''

j nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

lovecraft's prose-poesy

aklo musics c-d, beyond madness, including the classic nyarlathotep.

''screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell.

''a sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blilndly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.

''beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness.

''and through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums , and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time; the detestable pounding and piping  whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods--the blind, voicless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is nyarlathotep.''

h.p.lovecraft, nyarlathotep.

chapter on prose-poesy in the wikinomicon.

go not too often among ruins

''Arrived at the city of Hems, on the border of the Orontes, and being in the neighborhood of Palmyra of the desert, I resolved to visit its celebrated ruins. After three days journeying through arid deserts, having traversed the Valley of Caves and Sepulchres, on issuing into the plain, I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins—a countless multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. Among them were magnificent edifices, some entire, others in ruins; the earth every where strewed with fragments of cornices, capitals, shafts, entablatures, pilasters, all of white marble, and of the most exquisite workmanship. After a walk of three-quarters of an hour along these ruins, I entered the enclosure of a vast edifice, formerly a temple dedicated to the Sun; and accepting the hospitality of some poor Arabian peasants, who had built their hovels on the area of the temple, I determined to devote some days to contemplate at leisure the beauty of these stupendous ruins.

''Daily I visited the monuments which covered the plain; and one evening, absorbed in reflection, I had advanced to the Valley of Sepulchres. I ascended the heights which surround it from whence the eye commands the whole group of ruins and the immensity of the desert. The sun had sunk below the horizon: a red border of light still marked his track behind the distant mountains of Syria; the full-orbed moon was rising in the east, on a blue ground, over the plains of the Euphrates; the sky was clear, the air calm and serene; the dying lamp of day still softened the horrors of approaching darkness; the refreshing night breezes attempered the sultry emanations from the heated earth; the herdsmen had given their camels to repose, the eye perceived no motion on the dusky and uniform plain; profound silence rested on the desert; the howlings only of the jackal,* and the solemn notes of the bird of night, were heard at distant intervals. Darkness now increased, and through the dusk could only be discerned the pale phantasms of columns and walls. The solitude of the place, the tranquillity of the hour, the majesty of the scene, impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city deserted, the memory of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my mind to high contemplations. I sat on the shaft of a column, my elbow reposing on my knee, and head reclining on my hand, my eyes fixed, sometimes on the desert, sometimes on the ruins, and fell into a profound reverie.''

constantin francois de volney; the ruins. complete text at project gutenberg.