keep calm and read

keep calm, you can read the entire text of dagon at the lovecraft archive.

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the star-winds laden with funghi of yuggoth

''dear a.w.:--what you say of the fascination of autumn is very true--and i have always felt it despite the menace of physical discomfort it brings ... the woods, the fields, the hillside orchards laden with fruit, the fields of sheaved corn, the old stone walls overgrown with flaming vines, ... at this second i am sitting on an old new england stone wall under an ancient elm, with a squirrel chattering nearby and a lovely profusion of poison ivy [to which i am oddly immune despite a cuticular hypersensitiveness in other directions] climbing among the mossy rocks. ... it has been this way for 250 years--and may the gods keep it so [by virtue of ownership by large, conservative institutions] as many more.''

h.p.lovecraft, selected letters--iii. arkham house.

 

 

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travels in dreamland

 

''sometime in the 1960s i was cruising at night off some point of arabia. in the interior not far away was the ruined castle of orbutum. there were stories that somewhere along this coast were the lost mines of king solomon. mysterious lights shone in the sky above the castle, ... i persuaded the captain that we should search in the ruins.''

graham greene, a world of my own.

 

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opening lines to a couplet

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet: "that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.". (full text of nameless city)

 

h.p.lovecraft, the nameless city.

 

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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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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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barbara hambly--apology for lovecraft

''i wish i could write like h.p. lovecraft. lovecraft was a man with a vision of the world: astonishing macabre, intricate as a giger drawing. his sense of cosmoses opening out of cosmoses, of dark abysses concealing in their hearts the entrances to further gulfs, infuses nearly everything he wrote with an atmosphere, not of horror, but of wonder. his worlds have an air of completeness.

''the things that can be said about howard phillips lovecraft don't sum up, or even come close to summing up, what his writing is. on the downside, his writing is racist and sexist and wildly open to parody because it is so original, so idiosyncratic. every year or so I go on a lovecraft binge, devouring story after story the way a glutton sits in a corner devouring cookies. then I associate with those persons of more elevated tastes and feel a little ashamed of myself. but then I meet the eyes of other lovecraft addicts, and we smile.

''reading lovecraft's writing, one has the impression of a man so caught up in his vision that he is struggling to find language with which to share what he sees. bizarre and elaborate words, piled atop one another in baroque cacophony, seem the only outlet he can find to convey the fulgent richness of his dream, to explain what is, at heart, inexplicable or at least incomprehensible: to name the nightmare. to those of a certain temperament, that legion of my fellow addicts, h.p. lovecraft's tales are enormous fun.

''in many of the lesser-known stories we find themes or images that recur in later or better-known works, stories played out from other angles but returning again and again to the same core nightmares. ... the takeover of ones body by some entity of the past ... "bad blood" or evil or alien ancestry, forgotten for a time, that returns to destroy an innocent scion of the family. ... men ( at the moment I cannot think of a single lovecraft story in which a woman was the linchpin of the plot's evil--even asenath Waite was actually a man ) who delved for forbidden knowledge, acquired forbidden knowledge, and surrendered their humanity in the process. ... his thesis that humanity is but a blundering set of Johnny-come-lately peasants stumbling amid the terrible secrets of unknown ancients opens the door to endless narrative possibilities. ...

'' i'm still not sure that any of this explains the fascination of lovecraft, the power that his images and themes exert over so much of the literature of horror and the fantastic, ... maybe it's just that lovecraft takes such obvious pleasure in what he writes. enthusiasm is contagious. he was clearly a man who loved his craft.''

barbara hambly; the man who loved his craft.

fanfare for nyarlathotep

''when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a daemon trumpet. ... presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new sound came. this, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; ... in this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of etheral dream; exotic vistas of imagined loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. ...


"hei! ai-shanta nygh!'' ...



''then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born.''

h.p.lovecraft; dreamquest of unknown kadath.

couplet for azathoth

'' 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 azathoth, 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.

droning song

''trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born.'' h.p.lovecraft, the dreamquest of unknown kadath.

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.

where the blighted shadows fall

''i had, i realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed innsmouth. it was a town of wide extant and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visable life. ... the vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, ... i could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. ... i could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. all the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed ...

''soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur ... i strolled out on the square and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly. one side of the cobblestoned space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings ... eastwards i could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful georgian steeples. thus i began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of innsmouth's narrow shadow-blighted ways. ...

''i struck a region of utter desolation which somehow made me shudder. collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish decapitated steeple of an ancient church ... down unpaved side streets i saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles ... certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather then arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. ... and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigal fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse ...

''mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds ... in all these streets no living thing was visible ... furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and i could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut ... innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable.''

 h.p lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

nameless mesostic

''now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: "ph'nglui mqlw'nafh cthulhu r'lyeh wgah'nagl phtagn."

''no one could read the old writing now. but things were told by word of mouth. the chanted ritual was not the secret--that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. the chant meant only this: " in his house at r'lyeh dead cthulhu waits dreaming." ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu.
mesostic at wikinomicon.


     shaPes                  theM        resurreCt         wateRs                 Would              oF
         tHe                      aGain               The            fuLl                 aGain                tHe            
          Not                  cycLe               cHosen       mYstery           stArs               iniTiate
          Great                   When            bUt               Even             rigHt                 reAd
         oLd                  pluNge                rLyeh         tHought      am liNks        strollinG
came,bUt                     stArs             witH                                     mArch               iN
       whIch                    oF                   sUnk                            throuGh
                                     H                                                        deathLess

 the dreaded mesostomaticon of euph0r1a.

apotropaic music

'' 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; and deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. 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.

body of mythos

''atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer no man to tell that he hath looked upon them. lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever men form the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remain. sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes.

''in ulthar, which lies beyond the river skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the gods of earth; ... his name was barzai the wise, and the villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the night of the strange eclipse. barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself.

''he believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up the summit of high and rocky hatheg-kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there. ... the villagers of hateg-kla say it is ill to climb the hateg-kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night when pale vapours hide the summit and the moon;

''but barzai heeded them not when he came from neighboring ulthar with the young priest atal, who was his disciple. ... many days they travelled and from afar saw lofty hateg-kla with his aureole of mournful mist. ... the way was rocky and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones, ... for three days they climbed higher and higher toward the roof of the world; then they camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.

''for four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin mournful mist around the silent pinnacle. then on the fifth night which was the night of the full moon, barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with atal to watch them draw near.

''barzai was wise in the lore of earth's gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and feared much. and when barzai began to climb higher and beckon eagerly, it was long before atal would follow.

''then through the high mists he heard thte voice of barzai shouting wildly in delight: "i have heard the gods. i have heard earth's gods singing in revelry on hateg-kla! ... the wisdom of barzai hath made him greater than earth's gods and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught; barzai will behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn the sight of man!"

''then he heard barzai's voice grow shrill and louder: "the other gods! the other gods! the gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth! ... look away ... go back ... do not see! do not see! the vengeance of the infnite abysses ... that cursed, that damnable pit ... merciful gods of earth, i am falling into the sky!"

''barzai the wise they never found, nor could the holy priest atal ever be persuaded to pray for his souls rerpose. ... and above the mists on hateg-kla earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown kadath in ships of cloud and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.''

h.p.lovecraft, the other gods.


''one finds, for example very ancient ''magic'' practices that the yogis employed in order to influence and even to terrorize the gods. the phenomenology of this magic asceticism is archaic: silence, excessive torture, the ''desiccation of the body'' were among the means utilized not only by the yogis but also by the kings [mahabharata,115,24;119,7 and 34]. in order to make indra give ground, pandu remained standing on one foot for a whole day and thus he finally won samadhi [I,123,26].

''but this trance betrays no yogic content; it was rather a case of a hypnosis produced by physical means, and the relations between man and god remained on the level of magic. ... another passage extols the difficulties of these practices and draws attention to the danger that threatens him who fails. ''hard is the great road and few are those who travel it to the very end, but great is called the guilt of him who, once engaged on the path of yoga, abandons its continuation and retraces his steps.''

this is the well-known danger of all magic actions, which unleash forces capable of killing the magician if he is not strong enough to subjugate them by his will and channel them according to his desire.''

mircea eliade, patanjali and yoga; english by charles lam markmann

the woods with a thousand young

''the substance of the record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice ... the recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and had of course been at great disadvantage because of the remote and muffled nature of the over heard ritual; so that the actual speech secured was very fragmentary, ... i will present it here in full as i remember it--and i am fairly confident that i know it correctly by heart, not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. it is not a thing which one might readily forget

''[indistinguishable sounds] [a cultivated male human voice] ... is the lord of the woods, even to ... and the gifts of the men of leng ... so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night. ever the praises of great cthulhu, of tsathoggua, and of him who is not to be named. ever their praises, and abundance to the black goat of the woods. ia! shub-niggurath! the goat with a thousand young! [a buzzing imitation of human speech] ia! shub-niggurath! the black goat of the woods with a thousand young

''such were the words for which i was to listen when i started the phonograph. it was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that i pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire point, and i was glad that the first faint fragmentary words were in a human voice ... and then i heard the other voice. to this hour i shudder retrospectively when i think of how it struck me, ... it swiftly followed the human voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. it is more than two years now since i last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other moments, i can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.

''ia! shub-niggurath! the black goat of the woods with a thousand young!''

h.p.lovecraft, the whisperer in darkness.

keypad of the spheres

''trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. ''

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

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.



''there is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. he wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. in the dark the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic.

''even clothes give insufficient security. it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth defenceless flesh of the victim. all the distances men create around themselves are dictated by this fear. they shut themselves in houses which no-one may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. the fear of burglers is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness. ...

''the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch--proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he can all too easily be disturbed by touch.

elias canetti, crowds and power; english by carol stewart.