The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon

by Donald Tyson

  This private showing of Pickman's work is enough for Thurber, who resolves never to have anything more to do with the artist. While in the studio, Thurber happens to place in his pocket one of the photographs from which Pickman worked, and later sees that his semi-human subjects were not imaginary, as Thurber had assumed, but were painted from life. This is how Pickman has been able to achieve such realism in his paintings-they are indeed portraits. Pickman disappears shortly thereafter.

  It in an interesting choice made by Lovecraft as a writer, that he never used the term "ghoul" in this story, and never stated clearly what it is that the awful subjects of Pickman's art may be eating. We are left to form our conclusions from a series of allusions and intimations. Yet there is only one conclusion to draw-either Pickman is himself a ghoul, or he is a human being who has so greatly degenerated by constant close association with ghouls that he can scarcely be distinguished from them.

  We have no way of knowing what became of him in 1926, following the end of the story Pickman's Model, but he reappears in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where he plays a small but important role in Randolph Carter's quest. Carter encounters a group of ghouls, and is informed that his old friend Richard Pickman is not far away. The ghouls escort Carter to a dreamworld cemetery. Seated on a tombstone from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston that bears the year 1768 is Pickman, who has wholly assumed the appearance of a ghoul. Lovecraft wrote: "It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure."

  Pickman agrees to help Carter forward his quest, and advises Carter to remove his clothing and disguise himself as a ghoul to escape notice. He gives Carter a password in the gibbering ghoul language that allows Carter safe passage among the night-gaunts, which have treaties with the ghouls of the dreamlands. Pickman remains Carter's friend and comrade in later adventures of the dream quest, leading with Carter a combined military force of ghouls and night-gaunts against the moon-beasts. It is mentioned that Pickman has had a civilizing influence on the ghouls, "for Pickman always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded." This shows that Pickman's Boston education had not completely gone to waste.

  In gratitude for his aid in their battle against the moon-beasts, the ghouls become Carter's companions in his quest for Kadath, along with their allies the night-gaunts, going so far as to accompany Carter into the great throne room of the gods of Earth as his personal escort. It is only the friendship of the ghoul who had once been known as Richard Pickman that allows Carter to find his way to Kadath and fulfill his dreamquest.

  Lovecraft wrote in his brief publishing history of the Necronomicon that the Salem family of Pickman was rumored to own a sixteenth-century Greek translation of the text, but that if this rumor was true, the book disappeared when the artist Richard Pickman vanished in 1928. The presumption must be that Pickman took the Necronomicon with him when he left the habitations of men and went to live in the subterranean world of the ghouls in the tunnels beneath Boston.

  (Pickman's Model; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; History of the Necronomicon)

  An artist in wax of the city of London who had been dismissed from the employ of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum for mental instability, Rogers is a tall, lean man with dark eyes that stare wildly from a pallid and customarily unshaven face. He is a student of occult lore, and has a fascination that amounts to an obsession for the grotesque, which he creates in wax in his own private wax museum.

  Some of the creatures on display in Rogers' Museum are not made of wax, but were gathered from the far corners of the world. In northern Alaska he acquired the mummified body of the god Rhan-Tegoth, an amphibious creature from the warm seas of the planetoid Yuggoth (which we call Pluto). Declaring himself Rhan-Tegoth's priest, Rogers sets about reviving the god with blood sacrifices and the long ritual from the eighth Pnakotic fragment. He makes the assertion that were Rhan-Tegoth to perish, it would be impossible for the Old Ones to return. He is killed by Rhan-Tegoth, who is in turn killed-or at least rendered dormant-by Rogers' strangely knowing servant, Orabona.

  (The Horror in the Museum)

  The only man before Barzai the Wise ever to climb to the summit of the mountain Hatheg-Kla. It is written in the Pnakotic Manuscripts that he found nothing but "wordless ice and rock."

  (The Other Gods)

  An Arab scholar quoted by Alhazred in the Necronomicon. In the short story The Festival, Alhazred is said to have written of him, "Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes." In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the necromancer Joseph Curwen writes to a fellow wizard, "I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye ." The unnamed work represented by the line is probably the Necronomicon.

  (The Festival; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  The builder of thousand-pillared Irem, called Ubar by the Arabs, a city lost in the desert of the southern part of the Arabian peninsula that was once known as the Empty Space. According to the Koran, King Shaddad ignored a prophet, and for this transgression Irem was crushed beneath the sands by Allah.

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

  One of the crinoid Elder Things dwelling in Antarctica who in the distant past was psychically abducted by a mind of the time-spanning Great Race of Yith, and held captive in an alien body in a tower of the Yithian city the ruins of which lie beneath the wastes of western Australia. S'gg'ha occupied his captivity by chiseling pictures on the walls of his prison.

  (The Shadow Out of Time)

  A being composed of violet gas who dwells in a distant region of space that is without form. He once warned the priest of Celephais, Kuranes, never to approach the central void that contains Azathoth, and Kuranes in his turn passed this warning on to Randolph Carter.

  (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

  A master dreamer in the class of Randolph Carter. He is fabled to have been the only completely human individual to have visited the far side of the Moon prior to Carter.

  (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

  King of Israel, who built the first Temple at Jerusalem using the labor of demons, which he controlled through his magic. He is mentioned by the occultist Alonzo Typer in connection with the Dread Ones, "giant black beings whose number is legion and whose tread doth shake the earth."

  (The Diary of Alonzo Typer)

  An ancient wizard who accompanies the biologist Alfred Clarendon from North Africa to California, inciting him to kill animals and human beings by infecting them with the black fever, a plague that Surama has brought to the Earth from the spaces beyond the stars. He is associated with Nyarlathotep, but the nature of this association is not explicitly stated. In appearance, Surama is tall, lean, and bald. He is Caucasian, but of no recognizable existing race. There is the suggestion that he was a native of lost Atlantis, resurrected from the dead by Clarendon through the use of a ritual of necromancy with the aid of the Tuareg priests in Africa. Clarendon states that only fire can kill Surama, or a wooden stake driven through his heart while he sleeps.

  (The Last Test)

  A recluse of Flatbush, New York, some sixty years of age, with unkempt white hair and a stubbly beard, he is a world-renowned expert on medieval superstitions, the author of a pamphlet on the Kabbalah and the legend of Faust. The descendent of an ancient Dutch family, he lives without family or servants in a dilapidated mansion on Martense Street behind a front yard densely wooded with ancient trees. He is considered to be a harmless eccentric by his neighbors, who glimpse his black-clad, corpulent figure striding down the streets at rare intervals. For a period of eight years in his middle life, he had lived in Europe. All of his meager funds are expended on the acquisition of rare occult books from London and Paris.

  His relatives grow concerned when rumors begin to spread than he spends most of his nig
hts in the disreputable Red Hook district, consorting with unsavory immigrants, and conducted strange rituals behind closed doors in a basement flat he maintains there. He has been overheard bragging that he is on the brink of obtaining limitless power, and uttering strange occult names. He was able to deflect attempts to have him declared mentally incompetent in court by claiming that he was merely conducting folklore research among the immigrant groups living in Red Hook.

  A change occurs in his appearance. He seems to grow younger and thinner. By the use of some alchemical secret he becomes wealthy. He turns his back on Red Hook and its dark rituals, and opens his newly renovated house to society, eventually marrying a young woman of good social standing. While departing from New York aboard an ocean liner for his honeymoon, he and his bride are both killed by some phosphorescent, tittering thing that comes in through the open porthole of their stateroom, as Lilith is not a goddess to be spurned by her lovers. She expects fidelity from those she gifts with her alchemical secrets. Yazidi cultists carry the body of Suydam to an underground cavern beneath his mansion, where Lilith reanimates his corpse, seeking consummation, but by a trick the corpse of Suydam is able to cheat her of her payment.

  (The Horror at Red Hook)

  The high-priest of the doomed city of Sarnath, who is found one morning lying dead in his temple with an expression of terror frozen on his face. The day prior to his discovery, the looted statue of the lizard-god Bokrug, carried from the city of Ib across the lake from Sarnath, had been set up in the temple at Sarnath to commemorate the complete destruction of Ib and the massacre of all its population. Just before his death Taran-Ish managed to scratch on the chrysolite altar of his temple a single word: "Doom."

  (The Doom That Came to Sarnath)

  This title is given to an elderly sea-faring man with a long white beard and strange yellow eyes who dwells in an ancient and dilapidated cottage on Water Street in Kingsport. Lovecraft has little to reveal about his early history, but he is an object of dread to the townsfolk, who regard him as a wizard. He is not fond of strangers, and it is only with difficulty that he can be induced to converse. He walks with the aid of a knotted cane, is tall and lean, and sometimes smiles horribly. He is renowned for paying his bills with ancient Spanish gold and silver coins two centuries out of date.

  The Old Man figures prominently in two of Lovecraft's stories, The Terrible Old Man and The Strange High House in the Mist. The townsfolk believe that in his youth he was the captain of East India clipper ships, but there is some indirect suggestion that he may have come by his gold through piracy. Like Obed Marsh, he picked up various strange customs in distant lands. Amid the gnarled trees that grow in his front yard he keeps a curious collection of painted stones, perhaps gathered on his sea voyages, which are arranged to give the suggestion of a pagan temple.

  The most curious practice of the Terrible Old Man is a kind of spirit divination, conducted with the aid of a number of empty bottles in which dangle small pieces of lead from strings. He keeps these vessels in a vacant downstairs room of his cottage, and can sometimes be overheard talking to them, and addressing each by a different name-such names as "Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis." Lovecraft is never explicit about these bottles, but it is evident that each contains the soul of a man. Perhaps they are the souls of the old man's friends, or perhaps the souls of his enemies, but he holds power over them, and they fulfill his commands and also protect him from harm.

  When three thieves named Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva enter his cottage, intending to torture the old man into revealing the hiding place of his gold coins, their corpses are discovered the following day, washed in on the tide, disfigured by the marks of boot heels and the slashes of cutlasses. The spirits that dwell in the bottles evidently have the power to take on tangible form and commit violence on those who threaten their master. It is the piratical nature of some of their names, coupled with their use of cutlasses to exact their vengeance on the thieves, that leads me to assume that the Terrible Old Man may once have been a pirate, or at least have had commerce with pirates.

  Lovecraft's specific and repeated use of the full names of the thieves is not accidental. He described them as "new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions." He wished to convey that these were not natives of his world, but immigrants from non-English nations who, in Lovecraft's view, did not belong in Kingsport. The terrible punishment meted out to the three thieves by the bottle spirits of the Terrible Old Man was for Lovecraft a fitting rebuke for their insolence.

  Lovecraft's hostility toward foreigners, as he regarded all immigrants not of English blood, has a bearing on his mythos. The foreign immigrants who dwell in the more rundown sections of such places as Boston, Kingsport, and New York were for Lovecraft a kind of alien plague, no less destructive than the inhuman and unearthly things that in his mythos burrow in tunnels deep beneath the ground. They were regarded by Lovecraft as harmful to the continuing harmony and prosperity of polite New England society. This xenophobia, which rears its ugly head in some of Lovecraft's tales, is no more virulent than is usual in the popular fiction of his period, but it helped shape his belief in the dangers of intermingling the familiar and mundane with the alien and strange.

  Lovecraft did not merely detest immigrants and their customs, he loathed them with an instinctive revulsion that made him physically ill. The brief period he lived in New York City almost killed him, so strong was his nausea at being compelled to interact with recent immigrants to the United States. That was the phase in his life during which he acquired a vial of poison, and carried it around with him everywhere he went, in case he suddenly came to the decision to end his own suffering. He alludes to this unhappy time in The Silver Key, where it is his alter ego Randolph Carter who carries the poison, not Lovecraft.

  The mechanics of the bottle divination described by Lovecraft are not complex. A lead weight is suspended on a thread or fine string in a bottle with vertical sides, in such a way that the lead weight is very near the side of the bottle. The slightest movement or vibration sets the weight swinging on its string like a little pendulum, and it taps against the side of the glass vessel, raising a tinkling noise. This form of divination is based on a practice used by spiritualists in Lovecraft's period. A medium would suspend a small weight on the end of a piece of string inside an empty glass, her elbow resting on the table, holding the weight near the side of the glass, and then would ask questions of spirits, who would respond in a yes or no way by making the weight tink against the glass or not tink. It works in much the same way the Ouija board works, by involuntary movements of the muscles.

  The Terrible Old Man of Kingsport used the bottles as host bodies for the spirits or souls of dead pirates. This practice is also common in magic, although the spirit may be contained in many objects, not only bottles. The responses of the pendulum of a particular bottle to his spoken communications would be from only the spirit contained within that bottle. It may be assumed that the old man used magic to bind the spirits to the bottles, but he also had the power to loose them from their prisons when necessary, and control their actions while they were outside.

  The practice of trapping souls in bottles also makes an appearance in the story Two Black Bottles, co-authored with Wilfred Blanch Talman. In this story the souls are not made into familiar serving spirits or guardians, and do not communicate with their captor, but are kept in the bottles while their bodies continue to live. Without their souls, they naturally incline to evil thoughts and actions. Lovecraft did not indicate what replaced the souls in the bodies. In the story it appears that the soul represents the good nature of a man, and once removed, the evil nature has free rein to do as it pleases without restraint. Evidently removal of the soul extends the life of the body, since the soul of Abel Foster, sexton of the church at Daalbergen, had been removed and placed in a bottle two hundred years prior to the events of the story. Once
Foster's soul is released from the bottle, his body falls to dust.

  (The Terrible Old Man; The Strange High House in the Mist)

  High priest of the cult of Shub-Niggurath in the kingdom of K'naa, on the continent of Mu. He presided over the rites of the Mother Goddess in a copper temple. In the year 173,148 BC he attempted to destroy the demon-god Ghatanothoa, an ancient entity worshipped on Earth by the Mi-Go. He was betrayed by the high priest of the cult of Ghatanothoa, and when he looked upon Ghatanothoa he was outwardly turned to stone and leather, but remained inwardly conscious and aware.

  (Out of the Aeons)

  The Most Ancient One, who instructs Randolph Carter in how to use his silver key to open the ultimate gate. In the Necronomicon, Alhazred referred to this mysterious being as one who is sometimes accepted as a guide by those who seek to glimpse beyond the veil, but cautioned that they would be well advised not to have dealings with the one he described as, "HE WHO guardeth the Gateway: HE WHO will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable devourers." Alhazred made two references to the Most Ancient One from an older authority, the Book of Thoth. The scribe of this book translated the name `°Umr at-Tawil" as "the Prolonged of Life," and wrote that there is a terrible price to be paid for even one glimpse beyond the veil.