continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly: the theory that the distribution of the Earth’s land masses was the product of shifting plates was theorized by Frank Taylor (1860–1938) in 1910, as a precursor to the German geologist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), whose Origins of Continents and Oceans was translated in 1924. It was supported by John Joly (1857–1933) in the 1920s, but remained a controversial theory, rejected by many geologists, until the motive force behind the shift of tectonic plates began to be established in the 1960s.
During the Jurassic Age … Snow Men: HPL added that the half-fungous creatures were ‘from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto’ to the manuscript. The dwarf planet Pluto had been discovered in 1930; the legends of the abominable snow men were the subject of ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness’ (see note to p. 126).
Carboniferous: geological period, 399 to 259 million years ago.
Wilkes and Mawson: Charles Wilkes (1798–1877) undertook a South Seas expedition between 1838 and 1840; a large part of eastern Antarctica is called Wilkes Land. Douglas Mawson (1882–1958) was the Australian commander of several key expeditions into Antarctica from 1912. His Home of the Blizzard was one of several famous exploration memoirs written at the time.
Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands: Douglas Mawson claimed and named Queen Mary Land in 1912; Kaiser Wilhelm II Land was claimed by the Germans in 1902.
Budd and Totten Lands: Budd Coast and Totten Glacier are on the eastern side of Antarctica, on the Wilkes Land coast.
greater splendours than its own people could create: this narrative of aesthetic decadence and decline is greatly indebted to the cyclical history of all human cultures outlined by the pessimist Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, a big influence on HPL’s thought.
Borchgrevingk: Carsten Borchgrevink (1864–1934) was an Anglo-Norwegian polar explorer. In 1898–1900 Borchgrevink led the Southern Cross Expedition, funded by the press baron George Newnes, which was the first to winter on the Antarctic mainland and the first to ascend the Great Ice Barrier. His career was overshadowed by that of Robert Scott, but HPL remembered as a child following his adventures.
primal nature: Part II of the serialization ended here.
‘Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!’: at the end of chapter XXII of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator escapes from an island of murderous savages, who line the beach ‘with the strangest expressions of mingled horror, rage, and intense curiosity depicted on their countenances, and shouting at the top of their voices Tekeli-li!’ Poe scholars speculate that buried here is an echo of the apocalypse predicted in Daniel 5: 25, ‘Mene mene tekel upharsin’, tekel translated as ‘thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting’. Other suggestions include the Polynesian tiki, to shake with fear before a god, or the Arabic tekkela, meaning trust. HPL is loading his culminating scenes with literary echoes from Poe to Coleridge’s weird ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
Orpheus … Lot’s wife … backward glance: in the Greek myth, Orpheus’ backward glance means losing his wife to the underworld for ever. In the Book of Genesis, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back on God’s destruction of Sodom.
Kadath: see note to p. 94.
Ulysses’ men off the Sirens’ coast: in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus has the sailors stop their ears with wax to avoid the lure of the fatal songs of the sirens.
‘Yog-Sothoth’: the being invoked in ‘The Dunwich Horror’. See note to p. 87.
THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE
This was written in February 1932, but HPL did not display much confidence in the story. August Derleth, HPL reported dolefully, considered it a ‘poor story’, and he lambasted himself that ‘I have allowed the popular forms to infect my work more than I have realised; so that it is always deficient in the subtlety and fineness of mood-drawing which marks anything even approaching real literature’ (SL iv. 91). However, it was Derleth who showed a manuscript copy to the editor of Weird Tales, who bought it for $140 and it appeared in July 1933. The story is one of HPL’s most direct engagements with the New England witch-trials, although the supernatural is thoroughly science-fictionalized.
Arkham: HPL’s fictional version of Salem, Massachusetts.
1692 … Cotton Mather: 1692 was the year when paranoia about covens of witches in New England reached its most intense phase, with over 150 legal trials of witches, of which twenty were executed. Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was a prominent Puritan leader and historian of New England. He was not directly involved in the Salem trials, and was uneasy about them, yet affirmed the existence of devilry in his Wonders of the Invisible World (1692). ‘The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories, and it may be easily supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people there.’
Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred … Book of Eibon … Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt: all imaginary black books: the Necronomicon was HPL’s own magical grimoire. The Books of Eibon was created by Clark Ashton Smith in a 1932 story, and Robert E. Howard’s imagined book by Friedrich von Junzt was coined in collaboration with HPL in 1931. The German is supposed to mean Nameless or Unspeakable Cults.
Court of Oyer and Terminer: the special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to determine) sat in Salem from June 1692, presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop of Salem who was found guilty and was hanged on 10 June. Thirteen women and five men followed her to the gallows before the court was disbanded by Governor William Phipps in October 1692. The Superior Court of Judicature, formed to replace the Court of Oyer and Terminer, did not allow spectral evidence.
Judge Hathorne: John Hathorne (1641–1717) was one of the hanging judges during the Salem trials, and the only one never to repent of his actions. He was the great-great-grandfather of the Gothic writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name: conventional beliefs about witches, which HPL takes mainly from Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). Testimonies often referred to people being visited by a man in black, or a black-skinned man, who was either the Devil himself or an emissary of the Devil usually marked by a concealed cloven foot or other sign. The novice must consent of her own free will, and formally sign over her body and soul, in an oath often written in blood. The novice is given a secret name by the coven and often a secret brand or mark on the body. The witch’s familiar will enter the scene shortly.
May-Eve, and Hallowmass: the two most important nights for Sabbaths, or assemblies of witches. HPL often used these portentous dates in his fiction: see ‘The Dunwich Horror’, for instance.
Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter: HPL already suggests he will bring together ancient superstitions about the supernatural forces with ultra-modern quantum physics in these opening paragraphs. Max Planck (1858–1947) first outlined quantum theory of subatomic particles in 1900, and was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) also worked in quantum mechanics, but was most famous for his Uncertainty Principle, proposed in 1927, popularly grasped as an element of intrinsic indeterminacy at the core of subatomic interactions. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was by the 1930s the American poster boy for this revolution in theoretical physics, famous for his general and specific theories of relativity, which revolutionized conceptions of space and time. Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) was a mathematician who worked with Einstein on notions of ‘dark matter’ to fill out conceptions of an Einsteinian cosmology. All of this work appeared to throw into question classical physics: for HPL, it reconfirmed his stance of ‘cosmic indifferentism’—that the forces of the universe were explicable by science and entirely disinterested in human metaphysical anguish.
brink of audibility: HPL echoes one of his favourite weird fictions here, M. P. Shiel’s The House of Sounds (1896). Shiel often used terrifying sound
to menace his protagonists (as in, for instance, ‘Vaila’). There are Shielian echoes throughout this tale.
shape of a rat: the familiars of witches came in many guises, but rats were common. In Murray’s Witch-Cult, she transcribes the testimony of Elizabeth Weed from 1646, who testified that the Devil appeared in the shape of a rat and declared: ‘You must forsake God and Christ, and goe with me, and take these spirits for your Gods, and you shall have all happinessse, whereunto she consented … and thereupon they sucked her upon and about her hippes.’
Riemannian equations, and … his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems: a reference to the mathematics of German Bernhard Riemann (1826–66), which was one of the first challenges to classical, Euclidean geometry. Riemann introduced the notion of ‘higher space’. This led to late nineteenth-century conceptions of a fourth spatial dimension. It entered popular scientific romances early, but also acquired persistently occult resonances. In the 1870s, the German mathematician Johann Zöllner proposed that the phenomena of spiritualism could be explained by reference to a fourth spatial dimension, to which mediums had learnt access. The British chemist William Crookes also wrote extensively on the fourth dimension and invisible radiant matter, and on his investigations of the spirit world in seances. HPL’s story relies on notions of ‘n-dimensional geometry’, the prospect of multiplying dimensions far beyond the classical constraint of three dimensions. This vanishing point, where new scientific theories met ancient superstitions was exactly where HPL pitched the ‘weird’.
St Stanislaus: HPL noticeably includes several Polish names here, perhaps to amplify a sense of superstition among immigrant populations. St Stanislaus was one of the earliest Christian martyrs in Poland, venerated for his defiance of the king’s tyranny before his murder in 1079 CE.
Azathoth: see note to p. 135.
Nyarlathotep: see note to p. 135.
Hydra and Argo Navis: Hydra is the constellation seen in the shape of a serpent since Babylonian times. Argo Navis was a Greek constellation, named after the Argonauts, but is now no longer used in astronomy.
Innsmouth: HPL’s invented town, subject of ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’.
kidnapping … two-year-old child: child sacrifice was associated with witches, primitive religions, but was also the central element of the ‘blood libel’ against the Jews, who were often accused of stealing Christian children to kill them in rituals. Since HPL deliberately locates this story amongst Central European immigrants, this may be an intentional resonance.
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young: a common exclamation to the wife of HPL’s nasty being, Yog-Sothoth.
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH
HPL wrote this tale in late 1931, but was still suffering a crisis of confidence after the rejection of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. He recognized this story was probably too long for magazine publication and put it to one side to avoid ‘the psychological effect of repeated rejections’ (SL iv. 17). It was rejected by Wright at Weird Tales when shown the story by August Derleth in 1933, and it eventually appeared in a very limited book form with three handsome prints through William Crawford’s Visionary Press in 1936—the first and only book Lovecraft published in his lifetime.
There are echoes of HPL’s early story ‘Dagon’, but STJ also makes the case that ‘Innsmouth’ borrows some key ideas from Robert W. Chambers’s short tale, ‘The Harbor-Master’ from In Search of the Unknown (1904). In ‘The Harbor-Master’, a young zoologist is sent to a remote coastline, where he encounters ‘the remnants of the last race of amphibious human beings’, complete with gills and terrifying fish-eyes. HPL builds on and intensifies this nasty weird tale.
Innsmouth: late in 1931, HPL revisited Newburyport again, the basis for his fictional Innsmouth. Most of the topographic details of the town and surrounding area in the story are accurate. Newburyport is in Essex County, 35 miles north of Boston, at the mouth of the Merrimack River. It was settled in 1635, and grew to be a major shipping port in the mid-nineteenth century, but was in precipitate decline by the 1920s when HPL first visited. The decay of the historical centre continued until the 1970s, and it was nearly entirely demolished before it was restored and turned into a tourist town, with much of the maritime industrial infrastructure removed. HPL commented that ‘Newburyport is one of the most hauntingly quaint towns in America, [with] its spectral hush and semidesertion … Oliver Wendell Holmes (for it was declining even in his day) once remarked that Newburyport is the one American city which is finished. In Haverhill, 8 miles up the Merrimac, they call N. “The City of the Living Dead”’ (SL iv. 259–60).
war on liquor: America’s Prohibition era, when the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks was outlawed by the government, ran from 1920 until its abandonment in 1933. The ban revived smuggling activities in and out of most ports and a vast illegal trade developed.
concentration camps: the term was first used by the British forces in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when the guerrilla tactics of the Boers were countered by concentrating the civilian population of Dutch settlers into makeshift camps. They were not the death camps used by Nazi Germany, but the conditions often resulted in increased rates of disease and death. The tactic had also been used earlier by American forces to concentrate nomadic Native American tribes into fixed zones.
Manuxet: fictional name for the Merrimack River.
B. and M.: Boston and Maine Railroad.
Croesus: a king of Lydia who became for the ancient Greeks an emblem of vast wealth.
epidemic of 1846: New York and New England areas periodically suffered outbreaks of cholera. The disease first appeared in North America in 1832, with periodic serious outbreaks over the next twenty years.
jewellery: Newburyport was the home of the silversmith industry in New England, and HPL’s home town of Providence was also known for its costume jewellery industry.
Poles and Portuguese: there were significant immigrant populations of both nationalities in New England. In HPL’s racial theories, these were Mediterranean or Alpine strains of European people, which contained Asiatic and other taints, and thus threatened the racial purity of the pure northern European ‘Nordic’ race (see the last section of the Introduction).
modernistic defiances of every recognised stream: HPL routinely insults Modernism in passing in his stories, but here it has a racial connotation, since HPL associated particular ‘culture streams’ with national or racial identities.
ichthic … batrachian: half-fish-like, half-amphibian-like.
Esoteric Order of Dagon: the fish-god of HPL’s early Gothic tale, ‘Dagon’ (1917). HPL had names of actual magical religious movements in mind. The notorious Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for instance, had one offshoot called the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn.
Freemasonry: many late Victorian magical orders emerged from the Freemasons, a semi-secret, originally Protestant fraternity that was brought over to America by early settlers. Some versions of Freemasonry have more overtly occult or mystical leanings, claiming to be the bearers of ancient Hermetic wisdom.
Levantine: see note to p. 30.
‘widow’s walks’: a railed rooftop platform typical of nineteenth-century New England buildings, so-called on the coast because of legends that wives watched for the return of sailors from these rooftop structures.
M.E. Church: the Methodist Episcopal Church, an American denomination of the dissenting Methodist low church, set up in the late eighteenth century.
April 30th and October 31st: or May Eve and Hallowe’en, dates that HPL often uses because they were the most important dates for the Witches’ Sabbath.
Zadok Allen: Zadok is an Old Testament priest (in Hebrew, the name means ‘righteous’), and the ‘sons of Zadok’ formed an early Christian priesthood that was an implacable enemy of pagan gods. STJ suggests the character might be based on another elderly and bibulous character in Herman Gorman’s weird tale, The Place Called Dagon (1928), read by HPL.
dandy … deformities: the dandy, the nineteenth-century man-about-town, became associated with aesthetic, sexual, and moral dissidence by the 1890s. There is possibly a shadow of syphilis in this portrait, an echo of the disease of the sexual transgressor—and the illness that killed HPL’s father.
Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets: although standard street names, there is presumably a certain irony in listing the names of the heroes of the American revolution—George Washington, General Lafayette, and John Adams—in the corrupted heart of this decadent town.
imp of the perverse: the phrase made famous as the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story.
snow: a two-masted merchant sailing ship.
Othaheite: the island of Tahiti, in the French Polynesian islands in the Pacific.
Kanakys: Kanaka was the generic racial term for islanders in British colonies in the Pacific, becoming a pejorative racial term, particularly in Australia.
swastika: svastika means auspicious or lucky object in Sanskrit, and has been used in many Indian religions and in Buddhism. A mirror image of the conventional Eastern swastika was adopted by the German National Socialist Party by Adolf Hitler in 1920, where he borrowed it—some think—from vaguely occult sources as an emblem of the Aryan race.
Ashtoreth—Belial an’ Beelzebub—Golden Caff … Mene, mene tekel, upharsin: Ashtoreth, the Hebrew version of Astarte, was a fertility god found in Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, and many other pre-Christian religions. For Belial and Beelzebub, see note to p. 82. The Golden Calf was the idol repeatedly condemned in the Old Testament Bible as a symbol of prior pagan worship. The phrase ‘Mene, mene tekel, upharsin’ is the dreaded ‘writing on the wall’ found in Belshazzar’s palace, only interpretable by the Christian Daniel, who explained it to mean that God had ‘numbered’ the kingdom of Belshazzar and brought it to an end; that the king had been weighed and found wanting (Daniel 5: 25).
The Classic Horror Stories Page 65