by Kenneth Hite
CONTENTS
Introduction
On the Dark Frontier
A Lonely and Curious Country
Innsmouth and After
The Coldest War
The Global War on Horror
Sources
Further Reading, Watching, and Gaming
INTRODUCTION
The greatest challenge to the historian, I think, is the difficulty of correlating all the contents relevant to a given event. We can assemble a reasoned picture of a given battle or biography in the midst of the black seas of obscurity, but in many cases it is not allowed that we should voyage too far. In the case of the American military campaigns against the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos,” a shadow of secrecy remains over all but a few operations. These operations, each superficially unconnected to the larger war, have been exposed or publicized under very different lights – including propaganda and outright fiction. However, I am confident that in the future some scholar will piece this dissociated knowledge together and open up the true vista of the conflict, and of the United States’ central position therein. On that day, the historical establishment shall either shoulder its true responsibility to humanity, or flee from the deadly light of research and evidence into the peace and safety of “skepticism” and “debunking” of “dangerous blends of fact and fiction.”
The unpalatable truth of the matter is that there is not, as yet, sufficient historically valid material to write, or even outline, a definitive chronicle of the United States’ quarter-millennium of war against the Cthulhu Mythos – or, to use the current preferred jargon, “coordinated national effort to investigate and contain phenomena involving Necronomicon-Related Entities (NREs).” It remains something of an embarrassment to the military historian that the primary source of information on the nature of the enemy is a series of pulp fiction stories written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), an eccentric New England fantasist. True, in many cases Lovecraft based his tales on solid research and documentary evidence. His numerous trips to the area around Arkham, Massachusetts have been conclusively mapped by his biographers, and his “Borrowing Privileges” card from Miskatonic University’s Orne Library can be viewed among his personal papers in the John Hay Library at Brown even after three separate “national security redactions” of the material. Lovecraft had an immense circle of personal correspondence, including not just fellow authors but also scientists, anthropologists, and government officials: however, many of these letters have vanished into the archives of the Multi-Agency Joint Intelligence Command (MAJIC), which has directed the Cthulhu Wars since 1947. Even from the little that remains, it is clear that many of Lovecraft’s correspondents considered him not only a clearing-house for comparing notes, but also an authority on the enigmas they encountered in their careers and a safe channel for judicious leaks.
That said, Lovecraft undeniably drew many of the proper names and entire scenes in his tales not from academic papers or suppressed after-action reports but from his own nightmares. His dreams had been remarkably detailed and specific since childhood, and his habit of recording them shortly after waking has been shown in psychological studies to be an excellent method of strengthening and intensifying dream recall. In his fictions, of course, Cthulhu and other NREs manifest and communicate in dreams – in the ongoing war, Lovecraft’s dreams may actually be the equivalent of a scouting mission or code-breaking effort, voluntary or not. Certainly one of Lovecraft’s primary fictional alter egos, Randolph Carter, deliberately explores occult mysteries both in and out of deliberately induced dream states. But as that example indicates, treating Lovecraft’s fictions as front-line war reporting or tactical intelligence is likely as dangerous as ignoring them entirely: unlike Randolph Carter, the US military, for example, is unlikely ever to have assembled an army of talking cats for dream-wars on the Moon. Lovecraft deliberately changed, conflated, or contracted many names, locations, and events to improve the tales as fiction.
The best we can do, then, is use the fiction as a background: one into which may be inserted the few provable details of the war, and against which we may infer certain larger movements and shapes. Military secrecy and national security measures forbid us further information, and prevent us from knowing for certain whether (or how much of) our inference is valid. If Lovecraft’s fictions are to be taken as gospel, this shroud of ignorance may itself be a legitimate war–fighting measure revealing the truth of the Mythos supposedly drives men and nations mad. But sooner or later, a democracy must learn the truth about its own defenses or fail internally and externally.
Who knows the end? What has been published may be classified, but what was closed may be opened. The US military fights and perhaps dreams in the deep, and knowledge spreads through whispers and Internet alike. Some have advised me not to complete this manuscript, worrying that it, and I, will vanish into some nameless prison. Perhaps that time will come – but I cannot believe it! But let me pray that, if I do not survive this book, my publishers may put truth before caution and see that it meets as many eyes as possible.
–Kenneth Hite, 2014
I have done what I could to assemble a clear and sensible text from the scattered notes and outlines recovered from Kenneth Hite’s home, adding detail where possible from the partially redacted and declassified government documents he received as the result of his apparently quite numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Every reasonable effort has been made to preserve Mr Hite’s conclusions, at least insofar as they were clearly stated: his last writings were, quite frankly, barely comprehensible. It is an incredible shame that the fire took him and his magnificent library so suddenly, but it seems, in examining his papers, that he was not well when he passed. Still, no one (outside the Pentagon, at least) knew more about this subject than Kenneth Hite. I hope my meager attempt to bring his last and greatest work to light is a fitting tribute to a man I considered a friend.
–Kennon Bauman, 2015
Although H. P. Lovecraft had no direct demonstrable connection to the various covert operations against the Mythos, his life between 1908 and 1913 – from the ages of 18 to 23 – is an almost complete blank. During that time, Inspector Legrasse may have recruited Lovecraft into his ring of unofficial investigators of the Cthulhu cult, perhaps initially as a researcher into New England folklore. This work could have inspired his uncannily accurate “fiction” – and perhaps also triggered post-traumatic stress later in life. (Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy)
THREAT REPORT: NRES
“They worshipped 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 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, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.”
–summary of prisoner interrogations from the St. Bernard Parish Raid, 1907
It can be difficult to wage a war if you cannot identify your enemies. The various cults, grimoires, dreams, and romans-à-clef from which the US tries to sift strategic intelligence in the Cthulhu Wars contradict themselves mightily, sometimes within the same page of fiction or scripture. The term “Old Ones,” for example, can mean the monstrosities attending Cthulhu, the class of titanic entities including Cthulhu, or the crinoid aliens that warred against Cthulhu during the Paleozoic Era. Similarly, the term “Cthulhu Mythos�
� refers to the mythological body of lore around the beings, not the beings themselves.
Rather than parse insane or extraterrestrial theology, the US military now uses the general term Necronomicon-Related Entities (NREs) to refer to “unique, titanic beings of this or any other dimension, referenced either in the Necronomicon or in texts interrelated with it.” (Military and MAJIC personnel also use NRE as an adjective when referring to anomalous phenomena, “servitor” or other species, or anything else associated with these beings, although “Mythos” is also a common descriptor.) The Necronomicon, or al-Azif to use its original Arabic name, is a blasphemous “anti-Scripture” written around 730 by the Yemeni mystic and sorcerer Abd al-Azrad (655?–738), called “Alhazred” in medieval European texts such as De Vermis Mysteriis.
Some of the NREs – Cthulhu, Rhan-Tegoth, and Ghatanothoa, among others – are known to have material existence, and are simply gigantic extraterrestrials rather than spiritually exalted “gods.” Others, more traditional gods perhaps, have only been encountered as names and titles in grimoires and recorded cult rituals: Azathoth, the “Blind Idiot Sultan;” Hastur, “The Unnamable One;” Yog-Sothoth, “The Key and the Gate;” and Shub-Niggurath, the “Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young.” Alhazredic mythology places some NREs between categories: physical beings dwelling in taboo dimensions (“Outside”), sacred realms (“Yoth”), or (symbolically?) on other planets such as Saturn: for example, Gol-Goroth, Yig, and Tsathoggua, respectively. Perhaps none of the NREs is a true deity, although if a single being can cause planetary extinction, parsing its right to godhood seems irrelevant.
Many NREs, such as Dagon, Mormo, Nodens, and Itlaqqa, exceed mere cultism. They were – and in some cases still are – worshiped as deities by entire populations, which often swaddle the true natures of these outlandish beings in comforting or self-aggrandizing myth. Other NREs were likely worshiped under other names, either as esoteric tradition or by simple linguistic drift: Yig as the Kukulkan of the Maya and Quetzalcoatl of the Aztec, or Cthulhu as the Etruscan god Tuchulcha and the Tongan god Tutula. Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s controversial works argue that all human religions are similar misunderstandings of the nature of the NREs and their activities, identifying (for example) Yahweh with Yog-Sothoth. Shortly after he published his Traumatic Origins of the Religious Impulse in 1951, Peaslee lost his MAJIC security clearance, though he (just barely) kept his tenure at Miskatonic University.
ON THE DARK FRONTIER (1585–1815)
“Men, in at least some Corners of the World, and perhaps in such as God may have some special Designs upon, will to their Cost, be more Familiarized with the World of Spirits, than they had been formerly.”
–Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World
By the 17th century, most Native American tribes had developed a vast corpus of oral history identifying those lands safe for settlement, passing this knowledge from generation to generation via shamans and elders to ensure that they would continue to maintain their own villages, hunting grounds, and burial places at a safe distance from NRE influence. Only at great peril did they ignore their instinctive need to band together to avoid excessive exposure to the great natural – and unnatural – dangers that lay in the shadows of the North American landscape. The disastrous results of exposure to the truly profane locales poisoned by their long association with NREs reinforced these taboos still more.
Contemporary records and mortar samples date the “Round Tower” in Newport, Rhode Island to around 1660, although Governor Benedict Arnold (1615–1678) may have used Norse or Templar designs in its construction. Its windows, for example, align with several solar and stellar events, and it overlooks a burial ground. Newport alchemist Christian Lodowick (1660–1728) may have conducted researches there, and it may have served as a model for Joseph Curwen’s laboratory in nearby Pawtuxet. (LOC)
The stone circles and megalithic constructions reported in New England marked some of these taboo sites, either as warnings or as channels or both. The Mystery Hill megalithic complex, more popularly known as “America’s Stonehenge,” in Salem, New Hampshire, is perhaps the best known today. Mystery Hill shares a variety of astronomical alignments and structural similarities with several other megalithic sites scattered across the region, including the Slate Hill complex between Attica and Chorazin, New York, and in Massachusetts the subterranean tunnel system at Pratt Hill near Upton, the megaliths atop Burnt Hill near Heath, and the Sentinel Hill stones near Dunwich. “Round towers” attested in Newport, Rhode Island, and in the Miskatonic River valley portion of the Hockomock Swamp may be pre-Columbian (possibly Norse) structures, but most likely they date from the early colonial period before the perils of these locations had been realized.
Even after the first waves of European colonization, many of these “NRE-positive” areas remained isolated and untouched. European settlement, in many cases, flowed into former Native territories left depopulated following plagues and wars. Isolated whites met the same fates as isolated Natives: death, madness, or worse. Certain districts were shunned: first for good reason, and then through habit or superstition. As Dr Albert K. Wilmarth put it in his 1924 monograph “Settlement Folkways in Vermont”:
“The ways of the Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less what fears and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had been any fears or avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions were considered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in, and that the farther one kept from them the better off one usually was. In time the ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and the haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design.”
Of course, some of the new colonists came looking for just such haunted hills.
Lost Colonies
In August 1585, 107 English colonists set foot for the first time on an island the local Algonquian-speaking tribes called Roanoke. They built a small fort on the northern end of the island, but remained on Roanoke for less than a year before fleeing to England, complaining of hostile natives and unnatural storms. The sailors of Sir Francis Drake, who evacuated the first colony, “cast overboard … all our Cards, Bookes, and writings” to calm the “boisterous” seas and refloat the pinnaces that had somehow grounded themselves in the treacherous waters.
The site of the Roanoke colony had been chosen sight unseen by Thomas Harriot, an Oxford-educated court astronomer, mathematician, linguist, and navigator – and coincidentally, a protégé of the magus John Dee. Harriot and Dee had mapped the new colony’s location in the early 1580s, during the same time that they translated the Necronomicon and at the beginning of Dee’s period of “angelic” ultra-terrestrial contacts. In 1583, the occult-minded Sir Walter Raleigh may have sent his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert to check Harriot’s calculations: Gilbert’s expedition spotted a sea monster, then his ship HMS Squirrel disappeared in “Pyramid wise” seas. Eyewitnesses on another ship saw Gilbert reading a book on the stern and lifting his palm to the skies as the Squirrel went down.
Harriot’s calculations had pinpointed a land of “green meadows” he believed to be a reflection of lost Stethelos, an ancient city or country referenced in the Greek Pnakotika, an early compilation of Mythos lore supposedly dating to pre-human times. Raleigh organized a second scouting expedition in 1584, and upon its success gave command of the 1585 colonizing expedition to the experienced mariner Sir Richard Grenville; Harriot accompanied one or both of these. Whatever he found there, Harriot returned to England to stay.
Theodore de Bry engraved this map of the Roanoke area in 1590, based on an original by John White. “Roanoac” is the pink island in the center. By an odd coincidence, the pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (1680?–1718) made his base on Ocracoke Island, unnamed just north o
f “Croatoan” on this map. Blackbeard returned here in 1718 with a “chest of medicines” seized from Charleston, searching for the sailors’ Dreamland “Fiddler’s Green” (possibly related to Harriot’s “green meadow” Stethelos), but quick action by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard closed the pirate’s Gate. (North Wind Picture Libray / Alamy)
Grenville returned to the colony some ten months later with additional supplies, only to find it evacuated. He left a small detachment of soldiers on the island to secure the abandoned fort, and in June 1587 yet another group of colonists arrived. They found Grenville’s detachment gone, save for a single human skeleton “of seemingly ancient provenance” clad in tattered but recognizable English garb. Despite these ill tidings, the expedition’s commander, a former Portuguese pirate named Simon Fernandez, disembarked 115 new colonists at sword-point before setting sail to return to England.
Whether anyone now knew Raleigh and Harriot’s original occult plans for the colony, the Spanish Armada crisis distracted British naval power until August 1590. When colonial governor John White finally returned he found the colony completely dismantled: buildings, tools, and even rudimentary roads gone, as if the entire establishment had simply disappeared. A brief investigation revealed no signs of struggle or violence; indeed, the only clue White discovered was the word “CROATOAN” carved on a tree near the center of the missing settlement. MAJIC gives little credence to the theory deriving this inscription from the Mnari word kara-itun, cognate with the Sumerian garas-iritush, meaning “catastrophe (or doom) of the city,” preferring to derive it from the local Croatan tribe. The name likely derives from krootan, “speaking town”: a meeting place, or perhaps a holy place to hear the voices of local gods or spirits.