148 The incantation, a bizarre mixture of Hebrew (from the Kabbala) and medieval Latin, is taken verbatim from The Mysteries of Magic, a compendium of Eliphas Lévi’s writings selected and translated by Arthur Edward Waite (1886; rev. ed. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1897), p. 217. In Lévi the incantation (not translated) is in prose. It occurs in the chapter on “Ceremonial Magic,” in a section on “Conditions of Success in Infernal Evocations.” After noting that a pentacle enclosed in a circle should be drawn, Lévi remarks: “The formulae of evocation found in the magical elements of Peter d’Apono or in the Grimoires, whether printed or in manuscript, may then be recited. Those in the Great Grimoire, reproduced in the common Red Dragon, have been wilfully altered in printing, and should read as follows:—” HPL has followed Lévi’s error of “Metraton” for “Metatron” (see n. 123). In another volume, Transcendental Magic, trans. A. E. Waite (1896; rev. 1923), a translation of the incantation is provided: “By Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton on Agla Mathon, the Pythonic word, the Mystery of the Salamander, the Assembly of Sylphs, the Grotto of Gnomes, the demons of the heaven of Gad, Almousin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evan, Zariatnatmik: Come, come, come!” (p. 391).
149 Directly after the incantation cited above, Lévi in The Mysteries of Magic (p. 217) writes: “The great invocation of Agrippa consists only in these words:—‘DIES MIES JESCHET BOENEDOESEF DOUVEMA ENITE-MAUS. ’ We do not pretend to understand what they mean, they have possibly no meaning, and can certainly have none which is rational, since they are of efficacy in conjuring up the devil, who is supreme senselessness. Doubtless in the same opinion, Mirandola affirms that the most barbarous and absolutely unintelligible words are the best and most powerful in black magic.” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was an Italian humanist and philosopher. Lévi may be referring to Pico’s Disputationes adversus Astrologos (1495), a theological refutation of astrology.
150 This is a phonetic rendition of the “Dragon’s Head” incantation discovered by Willett in the Pawtuxet bungalow (see p. 179).
151 Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet is a fourteen-acre development in Pawtuxet begun in 1872 by Thomas H. Rhodes as a site for clambakes. It later flourished as a popular casino and seaside resort.
152 HPL’s residence from 1904 to 1924.
153 Portuguese, Italians, and Poles are the three major immigrant groups in Providence. HPL conveniently alludes to all three in the names of the robbers in “The Terrible Old Man” (1920)—Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva.
154 Hope Valley is a village in the far southwestern part of Rhode Island, between Wyoming and Hopkinton. It is chiefly known for its mills (the first dating to 1770) and factories.
155 The anecdote is taken in part from Kimball (306-7), who mentions a “Histrionic Academy,” the principal actor in which was David Douglass. However, the troupe of actors arrived in Providence from Newport only in the summer of 1762, settling in a house in Meeting Street. HPL has added the detail about the sheriff’s wig, although the sheriff in fact attended at least one performance (see Kimball 308).
156 Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), The Conscious Lovers (1722), a comedy.
157 Protests against the perceived immorality of the troupe of actors resulted in their departure from Providence on August 24, 1762, about a month and a half after their arrival (Kimball 308).
158 From the tavern of Richard Olney “the stage-coach was advertised to set out every Thursday morning for Boston. This public accommodation was due to the enterprise of Thomas Sabin” (Kimball 325). The Boston stage line was initiated in 1767 (see Greene, Providence Plantations , pp. 57, 128).
159 HPL is in error: the Crown Coffee House was owned by Richard Olney (see Kimball 325).
160 A term formerly used to designate the Portuguese colonists of the Cape Verde Islands off the western coast of Africa; the name derives from Brava, the most southerly of the islands. See “The Call of Cthulhu” (CC 153).
161 A common family name throughout New England. Cf. Darius Peck in “In the Vault” (1925; DH 4).
162 A large island about fifteen miles south of Providence, at the southern end of Narragansett Bay. Its chief city is Jamestown. There is no private hospital there.
163 A reference to Simon Orne’s desire to secure the remains of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) for purposes of resurrection.
164 HPL refers to a fantasy realm called “the vaults of Zin” on several occasions in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27; see MM 339-42). He may have believed Zin to be his own invention, but there is a land called Zin cited frequently in the Old Testament (e.g., Numbers 13:21; Joshua 15:1-3) as a wilderness at the southern end of the Promised Land.
165 An allusion to HPL’s own tale, “The Outsider” (1921): “Now I . . . play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile” (CC 49).
166 In his aesthetic conservatism, HPL had reacted with hostility to the appearance of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (first published in America in the Dial, November 1922). In an editorial, “Rudis Indigestaque Moles” (Conservative, March 1923), HPL remarked that the poem was “a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation” (MW 233). HPL also wrote a parody called “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance” (1923?; AT 252-55).
167 An allusion to the novel HPL had written just prior to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—the fantasy The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath , in which Randolph Carter searches through dreamland for the “sunset city” of his dreams. At one point Carter and some allies “came to a somewhat open space before a tower even vaster than the rest, above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol in bas relief which made one shudder without knowing its meaning. This was the central tower with the sign of Koth” (MM 342).
168 Caerleon-on-Usk, in southeast Wales, was originally the Roman city of Isca Silurum, base of the Second Augustan Legion. It was well known to Arthur Machen, who cited it in many of his tales. Hexham in Northumberland was not itself the site of a Roman settlement, but Roman materials were brought there in Saxon times from the neighboring settlement at Corstopitum (Corbridge), four miles to the east. HPL’s paternal grandmother Helen Allgood was “of the line of Nunwick, near Hexham” (SL 2.179). Cf. Exham Priory in “The Rats in the Walls.”
169 Archaic term for nitric acid (HNO3), a compound of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. It is cited under its modern name in “The Colour Out of Space” (CC 175).
170 The two parts of the sentence reflect the two titles HPL had initially devised for the novel: “I shall call [it] either ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ or ‘The Madness out of Time’ ” (SL 2.100).
THE DUNWICH HORROR
“The Dunwich Horror” was written in August 1928 and first published in Weird Tales (April 1929); HPL received $240 for it, at that time the largest sum he had ever received for a story. There are several significant literary influences on the tale. The central premise—the sexual union of a “god” or monster with a human woman—is taken directly from Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan”; HPL actually alludes to the story at one point in his narrative. The use of bizarre footsteps to indicate the presence of an otherwise undetectable entity is borrowed from Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo.” There are several other celebrated weird tales featuring invisible monsters—Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?”; Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (certain features of which had already been adapted for “The Call of Cthulhu”); Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing”—but they do not appear to have influenced the tale appreciably. A less well-known story, Anthony M. Rud’s “Ooze” (Weird Tales, March 1923), also deals with an invisible monster that eventually bursts forth from the house in which it is trapped. HPL expressed great enthusiasm for the stor
y when he read it in the spring of 1923. A still more obscure work, Harper Williams’s The Thing in the Woods (1924)—read by HPL in the fall of 1924—involves a pair of twins, one of whom (a werewolf) is locked in a shed.
HPL later admitted (see SL 3.432-33) that Dunwich was located in south-central Massachusetts, around the town of Wilbraham; it is clear that both the topography and some of the folklore (whippoorwills as psychopomps of the dead) are in large part derived from eight days (June 29-July 7, 1928) spent with his amateur associate Edith Miniter in Wilbraham. But some parts of the locale are taken from north-central Massachusetts, specifically the Bear’s Den, an actual site near Athol to which HPL was taken by his friend H. Warner Munn on June 28. The name Sentinel Hill is taken from a Sentinel Elm Farm in Athol.
Although very popular with readers, the story has been criticized for being an obvious good-versus-evil scenario with Henry Armitage representing the forces of good and the Whateley family representing the forces of evil. Donald R. Burleson has suggested that the tale should be read as a kind of satire or parody, pointing out that it is the Whateley twins (regarded as a single entity) who, in mythic terms, fulfill the traditional role of the “hero” much more than Armitage does (e.g., the mythic hero’s descent to the underworld is paralleled by the twin’s descent into the Bear’s Den), and pointing out also that the passage from the Necronomicon cited in the tale—“Man rules now where They [the Old Ones] ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now”—makes Armitage’s “defeat” of the Whateleys a mere temporary staving off of the inevitable. These points are well taken, but there is no evidence in HPL’s letters that the tale was meant parodically (i.e., as a satire on immature readers of the pulp magazines) or that the figure of Armitage is meant as anything but seriously. Indeed, HPL clearly suggests the reverse when he says in a letter that “[I] found myself psychologically identifying with one of the characters (an aged scholar who finally combats the menace) toward the end” (HPL to August Derleth, [September 1928]; ms., JHL). Armitage is clearly modeled upon Marinus Bicknell Willett of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: he defeats the “villains” by incantations, and he is susceptible to the same flaws—pomposity, arrogance, self-importance—that can be seen in Willett.
The popularity of the tale can be seen both in its wide reprinting in anthologies (most notably in Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural [New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1944]) as well as in a rather crude film adaptation of 1970, starring Dean Stockwell, Sandra Dee, and Ed Begley.
Further Reading
Donald R. Burleson, “Humour Beneath Horror: Some Sources for ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness,’ ” Lovecraft Studies No. 2 (Spring 1980): 5-15.
Donald R. Burleson, “The Mythic Hero Archetype in ‘The Dunwich Horror, ’ ” Lovecraft Studies No. 4 (Spring 1981): 3-9.
Will Murray, “The Dunwich Chimera and Others,” Lovecraft Studies No. 8 (Spring 1984): 10-24.
Peter H. Cannon, “Call Me Wizard Whateley: Echoes of Moby Dick in ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ ” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 49 (Lammas 1987): 21-23.
Donald R. Burleson, “A Note on Metaphor vs. Metonymy in ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ ” Lovecraft Studies No. 38 (Spring 1998): 16-17.
1 “Witches, and Other Night-Fears” appears in Elia (1823; later titled The Essays of Elia) by Charles Lamb (1775-1834). HPL had an 1874 edition of Lamb’s Complete Works in Prose and Verse in his library. The italics were introduced by HPL.
2 It is not entirely clear what real site, if any, the fictitious name Aylesbury is based on. There is an Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England, but none in New England. There is an Amesbury in the extreme northeast corner of Massachusetts, near Newburyport. HPL visited the town in 1923. Aside from this story, Aylesbury is mentioned only in two sonnets in the Fungi from Yuggoth sequence (1929-30); in one of these, “The Familiars” (XXVI), it is mentioned in conjunction with a John Whateley.
3 Fictitious. There are a number of towns in western Massachusetts with “Corners” in their names (e.g., Worthington Corners, Moores Corner). Cf. Clark’s Corners in “The Colour out of Space” (CC 178).
4 This is the first of many references in this story to these megalithic sites, which can be found throughout New England; the most celebrated of them is Mystery Hill in North Salem, New Hampshire. In spite of several articles (e.g., Andrew E. Rothovius, “Lovecraft and the New England Megaliths,” in HPL’s The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces [1966]) asserting that HPL was intimately familiar with such sites, there is little evidence that he visited very many of them prior to writing the story; and there is no evidence at all that he visited Mystery Hill before 1928, although H. Warner Munn believes he took HPL there at some time or other.
5 While in Wilbraham in the summer of 1928, HPL saw an “absolutely marvellous firefly display . . . All agree that it was unprecedented, even for Wilbraham. Level fields & woodland aisles were alive with dancing lights, till all the night seemed one restless constellation of nervous witch-fire. They leaped in the meadows, & under the spectral old oaks at the bend of the road. They danced tumultuously in the swampy hollow, & held witches’ sabbaths beneath the gnarled, ancient trees of the orchard” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, July 1, 1928; ms., JHL).
6 The name was first invented by HPL in “The Picture in the House” (1920); it became the name of the river that proceeds eastward from central Massachusetts through Arkham on the coast, and also the name of Arkham’s university. The term is probably an adaptation of Housa tonic (a river in western Massachusetts and Connecticut) and other Indian names.
7 Mythical.
8 There has been much speculation as to the origin of this name. It is thought that HPL was aware of the now-vanished English town of Dunwich in East Anglia (now Suffolk) on the shore of the North Sea; it is the subject of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem “By the North Sea,” which is included in the edition of his Poems (New York: Modern Library, 1919) owned by HPL, although the name Dunwich never appears in the poem. This Dunwich is also mentioned in Arthur Machen’s short novel, The Terror (1917), which HPL is known to have read. (For the history of this town see Rowland Parker’s Men of Dunwich [1979].) But the English Dunwich—a coastal city that slowly sank into the sea because of the erosion of the shoreline—seems more reminiscent of HPL’s decaying seaport Innsmouth (featured in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” [1931]). If the English Dunwich is not the source of the name, then there are any number of New England towns with the -wich ending, notably East and West Greenwich, Rhode Island.
9 Cf. “The Ancient Track”: “There was the milestone that I knew—/ ‘Two miles to Dunwich’—now the view / Of distant spire and roofs would dawn / With ten more upward paces gone. . . .” (AT 63).
10 HPL has picked the date by design to indicate that Dunwich was founded by those individuals who fled from the witchcraft trials in Salem. For HPL’s views on the witch trials, see n. 11 to “Pickman’s Model.”
11 Cf. HPL’s comment on the people of Wilbraham: “The population is quite sharply divided—the good families are maintaining their old standards whilst the common folk are going downhill” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, July 1, 1928; ms., JHL).
12 Bishop is (as Burleson, “Humour Beneath Horror” [see Further Reading] has pointed out) a prominent name in the history of Athol, as are Wheeler, Farr, Frye, and Sawyer. Bishops and Fryes also figure in the early history of Salem.
13 Both Hoadly and his sermon are imaginary.
14 Azazel is a demon variously mentioned in the Old Testament (Leviti cus 16:8, 10, 26). In the King James Version the name is mistranslated as “scapegoat.” Buzrael is a name invented here by HPL. Beelzebub is a name used interchangeably with Satan in the New Testament (e.g., Matthew 12:24-27). The term probably means “lord of the flies” in Hebrew. Belial is mentioned only once in the New Testament (2 Corinthi ans 6:15) as a synonym for Satan. Azazel, Beelzebub, and Belial are all cited in the first book of Milton’s Paradise L
ost, although they do not appear together in any single passage.
15 Archaic spelling of “Devil.”
16 The reference is to the “Moodus noises,” named after the town of Moodus, Connecticut, where they have been particularly common, although other localities have reported similar phenomena. HPL derived his information on this matter from a chapter entitled “Moodus Noises” in Charles M. Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896), Vol. 2, pp. 43-46. The book was in HPL’s library. Skinner writes: “As early as 1700, and for thirty years after, there were crackings and rumblings that were variously compared to fusillades, to thunder, to roaring in the air, to the breaking of rocks, to reports of cannon. . . . Houses shook and people feared.”
17 The term Devil’s Hop Yard was derived by HPL from the very next chapter of Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land following that on “Moodus Noises.” In “Haddam Enchantments,” Skinner tells of supposed gatherings of witches in the town of Haddam, Connecticut. “. . . there were dances of old crones at Devils’ Hop Yard, Witch Woods, Witch Meadows, Giant’s Chair, Devil’s Footprint, and Dragon’s Rock. . . . In Devils’ Hop Yard was a massive oak that never bears leaves or acorns, for it has been enchanted since the time that one of the witches, in the form of a crow, perched on the topmost branch, looked to the four points of the compass, and flew away. That night the leaves fell off, the twigs shrivelled, sap ceased to run, and moss began to beard its skeleton limbs” (pp. 47-48). The description is clearly reminiscent of the “blasted heath” in “The Colour out of Space” (CC 171-72).
18 This is an actual legend in the Wilbraham area and was told to HPL either by Edith Miniter or her friend Evanore Beebe. Cf. his essay, “Mrs. Miniter: Estimates and Recollections” (1934): “I saw the ruinous, deserted old Randolph Beebe house where the whippoorwills cluster abnormally, and learned that these birds are feared by the rustics as evil psychopomps. It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves. If the soul eludes them, they disperse in quiet disappointment; but sometimes they set up a chorused clamour which makes the watchers turn pale and mutter—with that air of hushed, awestruck portentousness which only a backwoods Yankee can assume—‘They got ’im!’ ” (MW 477). The word psychopomp is adapted from the Greek psychopompos (“conductor of souls” [i.e., to the underworld]), applied variously to Charon or Hermes in Greek myth. In 1918 HPL wrote a long poem entitled “Psychopompos,” but it is an adaptation of the conventional werewolf legend.
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories Page 56