dunwich lovebirds

ring by wilcox-silvershrimp at materialicious.

'' then too the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. it is vowed that the birds are psyhchopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eery cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. if they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemonic laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence ...

'' old whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of cold spring glen to chirp under his window at night. he seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at osborn's that he thought his time had almost come. "they whistle jest in time with my breathin' naow," he said, "an' i guess they're gitten ready to ketch my soul. they know its a-goiin' aout an' dun't calc'late to miss it. yew'll know boys, arter im gone, whether they git me er not. ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singing' and laffin till break o' day. ef they dun't they'll kinder quiet daown like. i expeck them an' the souls they hunt fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes" ...

'' that hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on sentinal hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted whateley farmhouse. after midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandaemonic cachinnation which filled all the country side, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. then they vanished hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. what this meant no one could be quite certain till later. ...

'' a loud chourus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man. ... outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of panic struck whirring and fluttering. against the moon vast crowds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey ... dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickley yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whipporwills. ''

i: caprimulgiforme songs at naturesongs.

h.p.lovecraft, the dunwich horror.

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souvenir-mori of ibid

st. ibid of zambelli at seletti.

''his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.

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skull of zenig

rusted skull of zenig at japantrend.

''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, dreamquest of unknown kadath.

 

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stars made right

starry wisdom in the anagraphic manuscripts.

'' there had been aeons when other things ruled on the earth, ... they all died vast epochs of time before man came,but there were arts which could revive them when the stars come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity ... 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. ...

'' in the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed old ones in dreams, but had then something had happened. the great stone city r'leyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; ... but memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

 

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skull of zenig

''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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zenig the upcycled

bon barde gives zenig the acajou treatment at skulladay.

''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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onyx of the ptolemies

"yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? radiant with beauty, the cup of the ptolemies was carven of onyx."

h.p.lovecraft, supernatural horror in literature.

 

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of onyx

 

"yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? radiant with beauty, the cup of the ptolemies was carven of onyx."

h.p.lovecraft, supernatural horror in literature.

 

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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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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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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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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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fragment of zenig

zenig of chrishabana via polyvore.

''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.

starry positions

stars over r'leyeh via notcothulhu.


''they worshipped so they said the great old ones who lived ages before there where any man, and who came to the young world out of the sky. those old ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea ... mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. but these were not the great old ones. no man had ever seen the old ones. ...

'' there had been aeons when other things ruled on the earth, ... they all died vast epochs of time before man came,but there were arts which could revive them when the stars come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity ... 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. ...

'' in the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed old ones in dreams, but had then something had happened. the great stone city r'leyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; ... but memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.

remember ibid

momento mori via skull per-diem.

''his remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of italy, were taken to ravenna for interment ... were exhumed and ridiculed by the lombard duke of spoleto, who took his skull to king autharis ... ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the lombard line ... the skull was seized by the tottering desiderius and carried in the train of the frankish conqueror ... charlemagne took ibid's skull to his capital at aix, ... william the conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche ... did reverence to its osseous antiquity; ...

'' it was captured by the private soldier read-'em-and-weep hopkins, who not long after traded it to rest-in-jehovah stubbs ... stubbs, upon sending forth his son zerubbabel to seek his fortune ... gave him st.ibid's ... skull as a talisman. upon landing in salem zerrubbabel ... having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one epenetus dexter, ... it was in the house of dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of north main and olney streets, ... but the austere head of ibid continued on its wanderings ...

'' petrus van schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in lombardic miniscules ... from van schaack, sad to say the relic was stolen in 1683 by a french trader, jean grenier ... fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy relic by a protestant, crushed van schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon however being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur michael savard, who took the skull ... to add to a collection of similar but more recent material ...

'' his half-breed son pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the sacs and foxes, ... charles de langlade, founder of the trading post at green bay, ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; later traded to jacques caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named hans zimmerman; ... where falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery ...

'' so for generations did the skull ... lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town ... at first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a diety sent from the upper world, ... and at last one fateful night a titan thing occured. subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ectasy, ... laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble and behold! ... subterrene arcana hidden for years came at last to light. for there in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly and consular pomp the dome like skull of ibid.''

h.p.lovecraft, ibid.

zenig's skull

zenig at a place called etsy.


 ''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.

zenig of aphorat

a million skull ring at ring-a-day.

''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.

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.