by Donald Tyson
(The Ghost-Eater)
A small town to the northwest of Arkham, in the Miskatonic Valley, in northern Massachusetts, that lies just off the Aylesbury pike road beyond Dean's Corners. It is a bleak countryside of dense undergrowth and marshlands. The farming is poor there. The town of Dunwich, which is more properly characterized as a village, is in an advanced state of neglect, with many of its ancient gambrel-roofed houses falling to ruin. The steeple of the old church has collapsed in on itself, and the church has been turned into a general store. Dunwich is nestled in close to the almost vertical side of Round Mountain. The sole access to the town from the main road is had over a moldered covered bridge crossing the upper stream of the Miskatonic River, which runs past the town, hemming it in against the side of the mountain. Residents are furtive and few, and are noted for their unfriendly manner. The place breathes an atmosphere of decay.
(The Dunwich Horror)
The writer Robert Harrison Blake, protagonist of The Haunter of the Dark, discovered in the Church of Starry Wisdom at Providence, Rhode island, seven brooding, blackpainted plaster images that resembled the statues on Easter Island. They surrounded the altar on which rested the Shining Trapezohedron. In Medusa's Coil the unnatural woman that Denis de Russy married in Paris, who called herself the priestess "Tanit- Isis" reincarnated into the body of Marceline Bedard, was revealed to be no true woman at all: "It was the old, hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention-the thing hinted at in the Necronomicon and symbolized in the Easter island colossi."
The statues of Easter island are linked in an unspecific way with the cult of Cthulhu and the Old Ones. In Out of the Aeons, mention is made of the speculation by scholars that the great stone figures on Easter island may be a remnant of an ancient civilization that occupied a Pacific continent that has since sunk beneath the waves, leaving only its highest mountain peaks to form the scattered islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. The continent that sank beneath the Pacific, leaving only scattered islands, may be the same continent of newly formed volcanic upheavals occupied in the distant past by Cthulhu and his spawn after their war against the Elder Things, but prior to the sinking of the city of R'lyeh.
(The Haunter of the Dark; Medusa's Coil; Out of the Aeons)
Egypt figures prominently in several of Lovecraft's stories. At the time he was writing, Egyptology was all the rage. The tomb of King Tutankhamen had been unearthed by the English archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, and all things ancient Egyptian were in the news. Egyptian styles were displayed in films and in women's fashions. Even before the actual discovery of the tomb, there had been considerable anticipation. Carter had been searching for the tomb since 1914. The books of E. A. Wallis Budge had made Egyptian history accessible to the masses.
To take advantage of this Egyptian craze, the escape artist Harry Houdini hired Lovecraft to write a story in which Houdini was the protagonist. Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, written in 1924, managed to embroil Houdini in an adventure beneath the Second Pyramid, and indicated that the great monster after which the original likeness of the Sphinx had been carved was still alive deep underground, nourished on ancient mummies by a cult of the undead that was led by the pharaoh Khephren and his ghoulqueen Nitokris.
Nyarlathotep, written in 1920, was based entirely on a dream in which the Crawling Chaos came out of Egypt to tour America as a stage performer. "He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet." Part of his stage show consisted of displays of alchemical wonders. His face resembled that of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. It transpired in the story that Nyarlathotep's real purpose was the harvesting of human beings, which he led in an entranced state back with him to the vortex of ultimate chaos.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the necromancer Simon Orne wrote to his fellow searcher of occult secrets, Joseph Curwen, "I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75 yeares gone, from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in 1924. As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond." What Orne meant was that he had revived by necromancy a sorcerer of ancient Egypt who was so powerful in magic that he had very nearly escaped Orne's control and killed him. The magicians of ancient Egypt have for thousands of years been considered the most skilled in all the world-as appears in the book of Genesis, where they contested with the God-given power of Moses, and very nearly matched it.
In was in Egypt where the Shining Trapezohedron was found by professor Enoch Bowen, during the excavation of the tomb of the forgotten pharaoh Nephren-Ka, in Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark. Nephren-Ka had committed the indiscretion of building a temple for the black stone and attempting to draw upon its power. For this hubris his name and image was stricken from all records and monuments of Egypt. The black stone sat buried in the wreckage of the temple until 1844, when Bowen found it and carried it back to Providence.
(Imprisoned with the Pharaohs; Nyarlathotep; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Haunter of the Dark)
A cruel empire that will flourish on the Earth around the year 5000 AD.
(Beyond the Wall of Sleep)
An ancient structure built by the Saxons on the crest of a high cliff near Anchester, a village in the hills to the north of Exeter, in southwestern England. Around 1000 AD it was the home for a "strange and powerful monastic order," surrounded by extensive gardens, but unwalled-no walls were needed to keep away the local peasants, who held the place in dread. Before its occupation by the Saxons, a more ancient Roman temple to the goddess Cybele, the Great Mother, had stood on the site, built by the Third Augustan Legion and presided over by a Phrygian priest. Prior to that, a druidic or pre-druidic temple dated to about the same antiquity as Stonehenge had occupied the ground. Each subsequent structure had been erected on the ruins of the preceding one, incorporating the earlier building's foundation stones into its own, so that the priory was a mixture of architectural styles, the pre-druidic blocks at its very base sitting directly on the primal limestone of the cliff, and its Saxon walls surmounted with gothic towers.
In the year 1261 King Henry III gave the priory and the surrounding land to Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, who transformed it into his family estate. It remained in the de la Poer family until 1610, when Walter de la Poer, Eleventh Baron Exham, slaughtered his father, his five siblings, and a number of servants, after learning some terrible family secret, then fled for his life to Virginia. Within a century his descendants had changed their family name to Delapore. Exham Priory reverted to the crown, and was eventually transferred into the hands of the Norrys family of Anchester, who chose not to occupy it due to the odium in which it was held. The Delapores prospered in the New World but never forgot their English roots. A distant descendant of Walter de la Poer, a wealthy retired manufacturer of New England whose first name does not appear in the story, bought the Priory from the Norrys family in 1918, had it renovated, and on July 16, 1923, came to England to live in it.
Troubled by the persistent sound of scurrying rats in the walls, the new American owner investigated with the help of Edward Norrys and five other men, and discovered under an ancient altar in a crypt beneath the building a passage leading downward via a flight of worn stone steps. From the marks of the chisels on the stone, it was evident that the tunnel had been cut from below, upwards. In the mammoth cavern beneath the priory they found countless human bones, and pens of ancient construction designed to keep degenerate, inbred human beings captive, who were fed on vegetables grown in the extensive priory gardens. It was evident that the pens had been maintained right up to the time of the departure of Walter de la Poer for the American colonies. The new owner of the priory realized the horrible truth-that his revered family had engaged in pagan worship and cannibalism. It was to end this plague that Walter de la Poer had killed his father, siblings, and their servants.
It was the common practice in Europe to build Christian churche
s and monasteries on top of the foundations of pagan temples. A priory is a sort of lesser monastery, a prior being somewhat lower in rank than an abbot. Much is left unsaid in Lovecraft's story The Rats in the Walls, or is left only implied, but it may be gathered that some race of inhuman or semi-human ghouls dwelling in the earth tunneled their way up to the pre-druidic temple on its top and confirmed an unholy pact with the priests who inhabited it. Their rites must have involved human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. Over the centuries the pact was maintained by subsequent owners of the holy structures on the cliff, until the priory fell into private hands, and then the pact devolved on to the notunwilling de la Poer family. Perhaps the promise of forbidden secrets and occult power was too tempting to resist.
It cannot have been Gilbert de la Poer who bound his bloodline to such an unholy purpose, for the family curse is said to have begun in the year 1307. It was probably his son, who is not named in Lovecraft's story, who discovered the tunnel beneath the ancient pagan altar, and who descended to have dealings with whatever maintained the pens and their horrifying cattle in the great cavern. After Walter de la Poer slaughtered his family and servants in 1610, the food supply for the pens was cut off, the subhuman things inside them starved, rats ate their flesh and bred unchecked, and then three months after the date of the murders, burst forth from the cavern and ravaged the village of Anchester.
It is probable that the rats also destroyed whatever deep dwellers in the caverns had consorted with the de la Poer family in their cannibal rituals. In his madness, brought on by the horrible discovery and his realization of what it meant concerning his ancestry, the modern owner of the Priory raved about "those grinning caverns of earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players."
(The Rats in the Walls)
A low hill in Salem, Massachusetts, where witches were hanged. In Pickman's Model, one of the canvases painted by Richard Upton Pickman shows a ring of ghouls baying like animals around a hanged witch, whose face resembles their own.
(Pickman's Model)
Gardens in Sarnath from which roses were plucked to crown the heads of dancers and lutanists who mocked and derided the elder gods of the city of Ib, destroyed by the men of Sarnath in an unprovoked sneak attack. This took place yearly at the feast of the destruction of Ib, the most important annual celebration in Sarnath.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
A tribe or cult of "degenerate Esquimaux" living on the northern coast of West Greenland was found in 1860 by the anthropologist William Charming Webb, of Princeton University, to be composed of worshippers of Cthulhu. The other native tribes of Greenland wanted nothing to do with them, saying that the religious practices of the devil-worshippers had come down from ancient aeons before the world was made. Those practices included human sacrifice. Webb was able to verify that the cultic stone image of their god depicted Cthulhu. Their ritual chants included the phrase Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, which may be translated, "in his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
(The Call of Cthulhu)
A sealed and unknown valley beside the Nile in Egypt that holds the catacombs of Nephren-Ka, a pharaoh accursed by his own people for the abominations he worked with the Shining Trapezohedron. His catacombs were probably hidden, and all records of them erased, by the outraged priests of Memphis after his death.
(The Outsider)
This cottage in the late seventeenth-century style of architecture was built on the very edge of the sheer, mile-high sea cliff that faces east and lies alongside the mouth of the Miskatonic River. The cliff and its cottage are visible from the town of Kingsport. When the sea mists lie around the base of the cliff, the cottage seems to float on the air. It is a single room with windows on all four sides that contain leaded panes of bull's-eye glass, and a door to the east. So near is the cottage to the edge of the cliff that it is impossible for a normal human being to enter through the door. It is inhabited by a blackbearded hermit who has some strange commerce with the gods of Earth, particularly with the god Nodens. According to the Terrible Old Man of Kingsport, the cottage has remained unchanged from the boyhood of his grandfather. No one in Kingsport will visit the cottage. Natives do not even like to look upon it for very long. It is an uncanny place, a gateway between worlds.
A summer visitor to Kingsport, Thomas Olney, becomes interested in the legends told about the house by the Terrible Old Man of Water Street, and Granny Orne of Ship Street. He decides to climb to the top of the cliff to investigate. Starting in the morning, he works his way past Hooper's Pond and the old brick powder-house on the western side, the only side of the jutting cliff that is accessible, but finds no road or path leading eastward through the tangled brush to the cliff edge and the house, even though lights in the windows of the house at twilight show that it is inhabited. A natural rift some ten feet deep cuts across the thrust of the cliff, dividing the land occupied by the house from the rest of the prominence. This suggests that the end of the cliff is gradually separating from the main portion, and that at some future time it will drop into the estuary of the Miskatonic far below, taking the house with it.
Olney discovers that the house itself is gray in color, with worm-eaten wooden shingles on its walls and a brick chimney. The bearded owner helps him climb into the house through the western window, which he unlocks for the purpose. The interior is furnished in the Tudor style, indicating the immense age of the house. During Olney's visit, something comes and knocks on the door for entry, which Olney later describes to the Terrible Old Man as a shape "black and inquisitive," but the tenant of the house refuses to open the door. It can only have been some unwelcome creature from the abyss of gray mist beyond that was known to the bearded owner. When the god Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, comes to call, Olney passes out the door with his host and into the giant seashell of the god, which floats on the mist like a ship on the water.
The next day Olney comes down from the house and returns to Kingsport. He cannot remember what transpired after he passed through the eastern door into the shell of Nodens. He leaves Kingsport soon afterward and settles at Bristol Highlands. Outwardly he seems unchanged, but his interest in strange tales and far wanderings in strange places has vanished. The Terrible Old Man is certain that he has left a portion of his soul behind him in the high house, that part which had been filled with wonder and mystery.
Dimensional gateways figure prominently in Lovecraft's fiction. Either they are opened by magic or alien science, or they are already in existence but hidden from casual access. The eastern doorway of the house in the mist is one such gateway, which leads to the dreamlands, where Nodens rules in the Great Abyss. Like the door, the house itself and its bearded tenant exist between worlds, half real and half imaginary. Lights can be seen in the windows of the house from Kingsport, yet the bearded owner has no way to travel to town to buy food, and seems never to leave his house. His needs are supplied from out of the mist, through the eastern door, by the entities of the dreamlands-which would be impossible were he not half a creature of dreams himself.
(The Strange High House in the Mist)
This ancient land was not invented by Lovecraft, but was a part of ancient Greek mythology and history. It is a land to the far north of the world. The name "Hyperborea" means "beyond the north wind." The Greeks described it as a land of perpetual sunshine, a happy place of music and dancing, where disease and the infirmities of old age were unknown, whose inhabitants never suffered warfare or were forced to endure hard labor.
In Lovecraft's mythos, Hyperborea was the source of the Book of Ebon. The toadgod, Tsathoggua, was worshipped in Hyperborea 200,000 years ago by its "furry, prehuman" inhabitants. These creatures were not natives of this planet, but had descended from "Kythamil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus." From this statement given by Randolph Carter in Through the Gates of the Silver Key, we must assume that
Kythamil no longer exists. Perhaps it was the imminent destruction of Kythamil that drove the furry creatures to the Earth, where they established themselves in the northern land of Hyperborea. The silver key that Carter used to travel through space and time was a product of Hyperborea, and had power "over the personal consciousness-angles of human beings alone."
(Out of the Aeons; The Shadow Out of Time; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
One of the first three cities of men built in the land of Mnar, on the river Ai. The other two are Thraa and Kadatheron. These early cities were established by dark-skinned shepherds. They were astonished by the shining domes on the buildings of Sarnath, a lavish city that was subsequently founded by more aggressive wandering tribes deeper into the land of Mnar. After the destruction of Sarnath, the green stone idol of the water-lizard god Bokrug, which the warriors of Sarnath had looted from the city of Ib, was taken from the ruins of Sarnath and carried back to Ilarnek to be worshipped.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath; The Quest of Iranon)
Of all the somber and ensorcelled towns in Lovecraft's fiction, none is more accursed than Innsmouth. The men of the Massachusetts fishing community of Innsmouth, led by Obed Marsh, formed a pact with a race of sea-dwelling amphibious creatures known as the Deep Ones, whereby they would be insured an abundance of fish in their nets and an equal abundance of gold, in return for the sacrifice of their very humanity. At the time Marsh proposed this bargain to his fellow townsmen, their families were living in poverty and starving. He had an easy time turning them away from the worship of Christ and toward the worship of Dagon, god of the Deep Ones.