by Donald Tyson
Lovecraft was bound to Providence, and in a larger scope to New England, not only by a sense of place but by a sense of time-past time, as expressed in the architecture and relics of New England history, which, although it would be considered brief from a European perspective, was long and ancient by American standards. Lovecraft lived in the past by studying the old buildings of New England, and by surrounding himself with objects and books from previous centuries. Like several of his characters, he studied the history and genealogy of New England.
He even adopted as a young man the strange affectation of speaking and writing in the manner of an Englishman of the eighteenth century. After a few years, he broke himself of this studied pose, but even to the day of his death his manner of speaking and writing retained an archaic quality. He liked to use obsolete expressions and words that had fallen out of fashion. He never did embrace the use of the typewriter, but composed his stories and essays in longhand with a fountain pen. Though he loved New England, it was the New England of a bygone day, not the New England of his present, which he observed with sorrow to be changing in unfortunate ways.
As it true of other aspects of the Necronomicon mythos, Lovecraft seamlessly blended real locations with fictional locations. He did this with such skill that it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a place mentioned exists on the map of New England, or was drawn from Lovecraft's own rich geography of the mind. Often Lovecraft will describe a fictional town or location, and set it into a real region, or beside a genuine geographical feature. This mixing of the real with the fictional, coupled with the reuse of fictional locations across numerous stories, helps to give Lovecraft's scenes a startling presence.
Books have been written that place Lovecraft's fictional New England upon the real New England of today. The matches between real and fictional locations are surprisingly apt. Lovecraft usually had a real place in mind when he invented a fictional place for one of his stories. There are even bus tours to Lovecraft's imaginary New England-or at least to the existing towns, hills, and houses that are supposed to correspond with his imagination.
Arkham is the center of Lovecraft's imaginary world. It is a thriving city in the Miskatonic River Valley in Massachusetts, located on the river, with a prestigious institution of higher learning, Miskatonic University. On the coast is the quaint old town of Kingsport, its ancient houses climbing steeply up the hillside from the harbor, overlooked by a high sea cliff not far in the distance. Although both these communities have their strange folklore and histories of unnatural events, neither is as unsettling as the decayed town of Innsmouth, with most of its dockside idle and most of its houses shuttered. Even more forbidding is the little village of Dunwich, whose clustered and sagging colonial cottages conceal dark secrets of the past that its inbred inhabitants for the most part keep to themselves.
Lovecraft's landscape is littered with ancient Indian monoliths, curious hills, caves, haunted farmhouses and deserted cottages, cursed islands and reefs. It extends as far north as the wooded hills of northern Maine, but is mostly gathered around Massachusetts, the state in which the Salem Witch Trials were held. Salem figures prominently in several of Lovecraft's stories, notably The Dreams in the Witch House and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The supernatural influences on this landscape are twofold-the history of witchcraft in Salem and surrounding towns, and the occult practices of the Indian tribes of New England, who have left traces of their practices in the form of stone circles and altars.
So detailed in Lovecraft's imaginary Miskatonic River Valley that it is possible to draw complete maps of Arkham, Innsmouth, and other places, as fans of the mythos have done. Readers of Lovecraft find themselves entering a unique world of steep, cobblestone streets overhung with gambrel-roofed cottages under the brooding shadows of old stone churches. These scenes are drawn from Lovecraft's dreams of Providence, not only as it existed in his time but as he imagined it to have existed in centuries past. It is possible to become lost in these streets and step from this world to another that exists on the astral level, slightly out of phase with our reality, a world where the Necronomicon is real.
A river in the ancient land of Mnar that winds past the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath; The Quest of Iranon)
A decaying yet still vibrant town in New England on the Miskatonic River that is noted for dark sorceries. It and the surrounding region had been settled in 1692 by those fleeing the witch persecutions at Salem. Edmund Carter, the ancestor of Randolph Carter, was one of those who fled to Arkham to avoid execution. "The hills beyond Arkham are full of a strange magic-something, perhaps, which the old wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth," wrote Lovecraft in Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Elsewhere, he referred to it as "witch-accursed Arkham" and "legend-haunted Arkham," and wrote of its "hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs." In The Colour Out of Space is it called "a very old town full of witch legends." It is the home of Miskatonic University, renowned as a center of arcane studies and for both its excellent library and museum. St. Mary's Hospital in Arkham is noted in the region for its high quality of care.
(The Festival; The Dreams in the Witch House; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; The Colour Out of Space)
Edward Pickman Derby was committed to the Arkham Sanitarium after he began to rave that his former wife was trying to steal his body. His friend, Daniel Upton, was made his guardian and visited Derby twice weekly. When Upton became aware that Derby's body had been usurped by the mind, not of his former wife, but of his wife's father, the wizard Ephraim Waite, he shot Derby six times in the head in his cell at the sanitarium.
(The Thing on the Doorstep)
Called by Randolph Carter "hoary Atlaanat, of which few even dare speak," in this place Carter witnessed a circle of adepts transform a thought into tangible substance.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
This island continent in the Atlantic Ocean was ruled by a city-state empire of traders and warriors who conquered much of the ancient world. According to the scraps of myth related by Plato in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, Atlanteans enjoyed a civilization more sophisticated than any other until the island abruptly sank beneath the waves around the year 3000 BC. The myth of Atlantis is the keystone in the esoteric theorizing that civilizations more advanced even than that of the modern West existed on the Earth prior the beginnings of recorded human history. The Theosophists believed that our present race is in part descended from the people of Atlantis. These ideas were popularized in 1882 by Ignatius Donnelly in his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Donnelly was probably influenced by the views of H. P. Blavatsky, whose Isis Unveiled had come forth from the press five years earlier.
Lovecraft referred to Donnelly's book in his story The Descendant, calling it "Donnelly's chimerical account." In his story The Last Test Lovecraft spoke of "the mysterious Saharan Tuaregs, whose descent from the primal race of lost Atlantis is an old archaeological rumour." The Tuaregs are a nomadic people of the Sahara Desert of North Africa. A character of the story named Surama is a priest of Atlantis who has been resurrected through necromancy. Elsewhere in the story, the character Alfred Clarendon says of Atlantis, "There were cults, you know-bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no one will ever drag up that horror from the deep."
In The Strange High House in the Mist mention is made of how "the kings of Atlantis fought with the slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor." The undersea ruins of a great city into which the German submarine U-29 sinks in the story the Temple are assumed by the commander of the submarine to be the ruins of Atlantis. Among the ruins is an immense temple carved from a solid cliff of rock, from the windows of which lights emanate, suggesting that the sunken city is not entirely uninhabited.
(The Descent; The Last Test; The Strange High
House in the Mist; The Temple)
The nearest city to the village of Dunwich.
(The Dunwich Horror)
A distant, mist-shrouded valley visible east of the city of Olathoe, in the land of Lomar.
(Polaris)
A "white and beautiful city" with copper gates beyond the Hills of Hap, described in the 1908 fantasy story Bethmoora by Lord Dunsany. It has been strangely deserted and left to the desert, and Dunsany's narrator speculates as to why this may be, but does not reach any firm conclusion. Lovecraft merely mentions it in a list of names and places intended to be vaguely evocative.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
A town in Caddo County, Oklahoma, near an earthen mound that marks the entrance to a passage that leads into the bowels of the earth to the land of blue-litten K'n-yan.
(The Mound)
A desert region in Mnar.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
The Catskills, or the Catskill Mountains, figure in several of Lovecraft stories. In The Man of Stone, it was on Sugar-Loaf in the Catskills that the wizard Bareut Picterse Van Kauran, great-grandfather of the wizard "Mad Dan" Morris, was supposed to have participated in the Great Sabbat, and received a spell for turning men to stone. In The Lurking Fear, the deserted but evil-omened Martense mansion, home of the inbred Martense clan, was located atop Tempest Mountain in the Catskills. Joe Slater, who became possessed by an alien intelligence in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, was a native of the Catskills.
(The Man of Stone; The Lurking Fear; Beyond the Wall of Sleep)
A fictional town in northern Maine Lovecraft characterized as close to the "wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt" in the state, that has near it a circle of ancient standing stones, beneath which is a passage leading down six thousand steps to the pit of the shoggoths, where Ephraim Waite and other witches of his coven were wont to hold their sabbats in company with shoggoths. It is in this pit where "the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate." There is an actual lake of this name in Maine, which may have given Lovecraft the idea for the name of his town.
(The Thing on the Doorstep)
The name of a village that sprang up around an old country house near present-day Attica, New York. The house was built about the year 1760, and served as the homestead of the Dirck van der Heyl family, which had fled Albany in 1746 after being accused of practicing witchcraft. His wife was a native of Salem, a daughter of the "unmentionable" Abaddon Corey. The house attracted a small community of Iroquois Indians, which formed the germ of Chorazin, and later this group was supplemented by "renegades" of white European blood who intermarried with the Indians, producing a mixed population in the village. Alonzo Typer described these inhabitants of the village as "no better than idiots," so considerable inbreeding among the villagers must be presumed to have taken place.
Behind the village, but in clear sight from the house, is a hill topped by a circle of ancient standing stones that were regarded with "fear and loathing" by the Iroquois. Typer wrote of the stones in connection with "the N estbat." An estbat, or as it is more common spelled today, an esbat, is a minor rite conducted by witches, hav ing less importance than a sabbat. The initial N may refer to Nyarlathotep. In 1872 the entire van der Heyl family and all their servants suddenly vanished from the house. Thereafter, the house remained deserted. Attempts to inhabit it met with death, disappearance, or insanity.
The origin of the name "Chorazin" is not stated by Lovecraft, but it is strikingly similar to the name of the arch-demon of Enochian magic, Coronzon, recorded in the transcripts of the conversations conducted with the Enochian angels by the Elizabethan magician John Dee and his crystal gazer Edward Kelley. Aleister Crowley chose to misspell the name "Choronzon" for numerological reasons. Crowley considered Cho- ronzon to be the ultimate negation of all life, and the death of the soul. Lovecraft had some passing knowledge of Crowley, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he derived the name from Crowley's writings. In the Enochian language recorded by Dee, Coronzon is called teloc vovim (Laycock, p. 267), the Death Dragon, or "Him-thatis-Fallen."
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
A cemetery in Arkham, much frequented by Herbert West in search of raw material for his experiments in reanimation. It is also mentioned in an unsigned letter from Philadelphia received by the necromancer Joseph Curwen, where it appears along with the names of other burial places.
(Herbert West-Reanimator; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
The old stone Catholic church at Red Hook, New York, had fallen into decay and been abandoned. It was used by the ill-visaged immigrant residents as a dance hall. The walls were decorated with painted panels showing religious figures with knowing and sardonic expressions on their faces, and indecorous poses out of keeping with religious art. One wall bore an ominous Greek inscription that translated as:
O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!
The church was used by a cult of Yazidi devil worshippers for rituals honoring Lilith, queen of Hell, to whom children were sacrificed. The Greek quotation given by Lovecraft has nothing directly to do with the Yazidi. It is directed at the Greek goddess of the Moon, Hecate, the goddess of witches. The Greek writer of the third century, Hippolytus, in his Philosphumena, quoted substantially the same words. The incantation was used by worshippers of Hecate at crossroads when they offered sacrifices to her. Lovecraft omitted the name of Hecate, because he wished the incantation to be applied to Lilith. Gorgo and Mormo were names applied to Hecate, but they were also the names of other separate hellish spirits.
(The Horror at Red Hook)
A wooded ravine near Dunwich that was the place of refuge for the invisible monstrous child of Lavinia Whateley after it broke free from its farmhouse prison. The glen has a bad reputation for unhealthiness, and it is said that the whippoorwills and fireflies that live there do not behave in a natural way. Those who stand near the entrance to a cave in the glen that is known as the Bear's Den can hear rushing sounds and a kind of talking in the air.
(The Dunwich Horror)
A fabled city of spires built of marble and granite, at one time the capital of Hyperborea (present-day Greenland). The city was founded by a prehuman race from the south. It is the invention of Lovecraft's friend and fellow writer, Clark Ashton Smith. In Smith's fiction, the people abandoned Commoriom and moved to the city of Uzuldaroum, a day's travel from the capital. Eventually, both cities were covered by the advancing glacier. Lovecraft mentioned Commoriom along with Atlantis, Lemuria, Uzuldaroum, and Olathoc in Lomar. The high priest of Atlantis, Klarkash-Ton, is remember for having preserved the myth-cycle of Commoriom.
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Whisperer in Darkness)
A hospital built at Kingsport on Central Hill in place of the old Congregational Church with its distinctive tall steeple. It is next to the ancient graveyard, and it is rumored that strange caves or burrows hollow the ground beneath its foundations.
(The Strange High House in the Mist; The Silver Key)
Presently the capital city of Syria, Damascus is the most ancient continuously inhabited city on earth. Human traces have been found that are twelve thousand years old. It is the place the mad poet of Yemen, Abdul Alhazred, chose to settle after his many years of wandering the deserts and tombs of the ancient world. In Damascus he wrote his infamous Al Azif, later translated into Greek as the Necronomicon, and in this city he vanished from a public square at the hands of an invisible demon in the year 738. During Alhazred's residence the city was the capital of the Umayyad Empire, and the political center of the Muslim world.
(History of the Necronomicon)
A mountain in Vermont associated with the secretive cave-dwelling race known as the Mi-Go.
(The Whisper in Darkness)
A black reef about a mile off the mouth of the harbor of the New England fishing port of Innsmouth. It is above the surface of the waves only at low tide, and it was rumored to contain the hidden openings to caves in its uneven surface, from which monsters would sometimes emerge and wander over the rocks. At Devil Reef the Yankee trading captain Obed Marsh called the Deep Ones up from the depths of the ocean and offered sacrifices to them on May-Eve and Halloween, in order to seal a bargain with this amphibious race that was to the profit of the folk of Innsmouth. Just beyond the reef the ocean drops to a depth that cannot be sounded. Somewhere at the bottom of this fathomless sea trench lies Y'ha-nthlei, the submerged city of the Deep Ones.
(The Shadow Over Innsmouth)
A hill near Dunwich upon which nothing will grow, not even a blade of grass. It was used in the worship of the Old Ones. To this hill the invisible brother of Wilbur Whateley made its way after its escape from the Whateley farmhouse.
(The Dunwich Horror)
This dark stretch of woods in Maine, between the towns of Mayfair and Glendale, has the reputation for being haunted by the ghost of the Russian immigrant Vasili Oukran- ikov, who was killed for being a werewolf.