by Donald Tyson
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
A symbol or glyph that according to the Necronomicon is engraved on stones in the lost city of the Elder Race on the high plateau of Antarctica, and also on stones of the city on the sunken island of R'lyeh were Cthulhu and his spawn lie dreaming. Precisely what this seal looks like is a matter for conjecture. Lovecraft never described it in his stories, but he drew it in 1930 in one of his letters to fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith-in that thumbnail sketch he made it resemble the naked branch of a tree, a central stem with five angled twigs extending from it. August Derleth described the Elder Seal in his story The LurkerAt the Threshold in the form of an eye, but it may be presumed that Lovecraft knew better what it looked like than Derleth. It is not called the Elder Seal in the Necronomicon, but is referred to as "their seal"-the seal of the invisible Old Ones.
(The Dunwich Horror)
A hand gesture made as a cultic sign of recognition, and perhaps to ward off the Old Ones. In the Necronomicon Alhazred makes reference to "the evil that defieth the Elder Sign." There is more than one elder sign, although only one is widely known and used. In The Last Test, the Atlantean priest Surama "made an elder sign that no book of history records." Through the Gates of the Silver Key speaks of "vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae" who know Yog-Sothoth, the keeper of the gates, only as an "untranslatable Sign."
If this sign of Yog-Sothoth is a form of the Elder Sign, then it may be that the power of the Elder Sign lies in its ability to close the gates of Yog-Sothoth. By inversion, the sign would open the gates-in the poem "The Messenger" the Elder Sign is said to be that which "sets the fumbling forms of darkness free." It is possible that these two forms of the Elder Sign are hand gestures that represent the nodes of the Moon, known as the Head of the Dragon and the Tail of the Dragon. The glyphs of the nodes are used in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in conjunction with the name "Yog-Sothoth" to raise up dead men from their essential salts, and to return them to their salts once again.
(The Descendant; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; The Last Test; The Haunter of the Dark; The Book; The Messenger)
A disk of dark and lustrous unknown alloy about two inches in diameter, bearing an image of Yig the serpent god on one side and an image of Cthulhu on the other. It hangs upon a thong of leather through a perforation on its rim, and is magnetically attracted to objects of the same metal that composes it. The charm was the family heirloom of Grey Eagle, a chief of the Wichita Indian tribe who was some one hundred and fifty years old, his life having been strangely prolonged by the power of the charm. The Indian chief never knew that what he thought of as a magic charm was not of this planet, and was the ceremonial metal of the copper-skinned alien race of subterranean K'n-yan.
(The Mound)
An ancient key made of some frosted, greenish, unknown metal described as similar to brass that had corroded and become covered in verdigris. The key is said to be of ponderous bulk, with a coffin-shaped end, and a handle in the shape of a non-human image the exact nature of which cannot be discerned. It was found in 1935 by the occultist Alonzo Typer, hidden in the drawer of a desk in a small locked room of the deserted ancestral home of the van der Heyls, in the New England village of Chorazin. The key was wrapped in a piece of newspaper dated October 31, 1872. Inside the newspaper was a second wrapping of some dried, reptilian skin that bore crabbed Latin writing in the hand of Claes van der Heyl, a wizard who had lived at the end of the sixteenth century.
In the note, the wizard declared that he had traveled to the lost and forbidden city of Yian-Ho in the flesh, something no other human being had ever accomplished, and had acquired there the secrets of the primal ones, which he would never reveal. He declared that the key was to a lock given to him in Yian-Ho, that must be placed on the "vestibule of That Which is to be found." The reference was to a vault beneath the house that guarded an entrance to passages beneath the earth. Upon the door of that vault was a lock in the same unknown greenish metal as the key, covered with strange occult hieroglyphics.
The key was hidden away on Halloween, 1872. Alonzo Typer, descendant of the van der Heyl bloodline, made use of it in 1935 on April 30-Walpurgis Night. It may be that the sabbat of Halloween is when the lock on the vault was sealed, and the sabbat of Walpurgis is when the lock was opened. These dates are six months apart, on opposite sides of the year. The opposite dates suggest sealing and loosing, but also a going in and a coming out. It was the fatal destiny of Typer to release that which his ancestor had sealed and imprisoned beneath the house, so that it could make its way to the well in the circle of standing stones on the hill, thereby returning to its original place, and lifting the curse from the bloodline of the van der Heyls. Since the body of Typer was never found, it may be speculated that the monster took Typer with it into the well.
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
In the story Dagon, the monolith is a massive white granite stone, artificially shaped, that is covered with unknown hieroglyphic writing made up of symbols representing sea creatures such as "fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales," as well as several other species unknown to the modern world. Also depicted in bas-relief carvings on the stone are amphibious beings similar to men, but possessing webbed hands and feet, wide frog-like mouths, and bulging eyes, who worship large stones. The monolith was brought to the surface when a new island rose from the floor of the sea due to volcanic activity in the South Pacific Ocean. A shipwrecked man landed his lifeboat on the island in time to see a gigantic amphibious being arise from the water and embrace the monolith as though in a kind of adoration or worship, making certain "measured sounds."
There is another very similar, but larger, monolith, in The Call of Cthulhu. This also is a single block of carved stone, which was exposed in the spring of 1925 when the island of R'lyeh temporarily rose from the floor of the Pacific Ocean at the coordinates S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 123° 43'. This monolith, described as rising from the sea like a great pillar, was also covered with hieroglyphics, and was situated on the top of a mountain where dreaming Cthulhu had his fortress house of stone. The influence of the earlier story Dagon on the later tale is obvious. It may be that the monolith on R'lyeh had the function of magnifying Cthulhu's telepathic commands, which he was able to send around the world once his city arose from the depths and the intervening miles of ocean water were no long an obstacle to his projected thoughts.
(Dagon; The Call of Cthulhu)
Lovecraft wrote of this great gemstone that it was "a window on all time and space." In geometry, a trapezohedron is a polyhedron with regularly alternating kite-shaped sides, a form of anti-prism. Different regular trapezohedrons are distinguished by their number of facets. The Shining Trapezohedron referred to in The Haunter of the Dark was described by the protagonist as a "crazily angled stone" that was egg-shaped, or irregularly spherical, and some four inches in size. It was nearly black in color, but with red striations visible in its depths through its polished, irregularly shaped facets. This indicates that it was a distorted trapezohedron, or perhaps a symmetrical form that was modeled upon a higher geometry than is used in this world.
It was fashioned on Yuggoth (another name for the planetoid Pluto), probably by the Mi-Go although this is not explicitly stated, and carried to the Earth by the Old Ones. The crinoid Elder Things of Antarctica valued it highly and placed it into a specially constructed "strangely-adorned metal box." The asymmetrical box with its hinged lid was of a yellowish metal, and covered with bas-relief images of alien beings. The Trapezohedron did not rest in the bottom of this box, but was suspended in space within it by means of a metal band around its equator that was attached to the upper edge of the interior of the box by seven radiating spokes.
Long after the crinoids abandoned their great city, the serpent-men of Valusia found the box amid its ruins. In the land of Lemuria it passed into the keeping of men, but it was lost beneath the waves with the sinking of Atlantis. A
Minoan fisherman chanced to haul it up from the bottom of the sea in his net, and sold it to an Egyptian merchant. The pharaoh Nephren-Ka of Egypt recognized its value and built a temple above the windowless crypt where he kept the jewel. He had the audacity to use the Trapezohedron, and for this transgression his name was stricken from all monuments and scrolls, and the temple pulled down upon the sealed crypt with the box that held the jewel still within it.
In 1843, the American archaeologist Enoch Bowen dug it from its resting place, and the following year brought it to Providence, Rhode Island. He founded the occult order known as the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence. It was devoted to worship of the Trapezohedron, and the thing it summoned, with ritual blood sacrifice. He placed the box in the shuttered steeple of a soot-blackened, gothic revival stone church on Federal Hill, the meeting place for his cult, which he purchased in July of 1844. In the center of the floor of the tower room stood a strangely angled stone pillar some four feet tall and two feet across. This supported the metal box that held the great jewel. It was surrounded by seven chairs, behind each of which stood a monolithic image sculpted in black-painted plaster.
The Trapezohedron was used to call into our world a being known as the Haunter of the Dark, thought to be an avatar of Nyarlathotep, but the action of the stone was inhibited by light. For this reason, while the cult was active, the tower room in the church was kept tightly shuttered with opaque screens. At its height in 1863, the cult boasted over two hundred members. Toward the end of 1877 hostility toward the cult had grown so intense over the mysterious disappearance of children that 181 cult members fled Providence for their lives in the face of an enraged Irish mob. Thereafter the church remained abandoned.
After the Trapezohedron resulted in the death of the overly inquisitive writer and painter Robert Blake in 1935, it was taken from the church steeple by Doctor Ambrose Dexter and cast into the deepest part of Narragansett Bay.
(The Haunter of the Dark)
A symbol inscribed by the high priest of the city of Sarnath, Taran-Ish, upon the altar of chrysolite just before his death from extreme fear, on the night that the statue of the water-lizard god Bokrug, god of the amphibious people of Ib, was stolen from the temple at Sarnath, where it had been placed as a spoil of war after the destruction of Ib by the men of Sarnath.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
An occult symbol that dream travelers sometimes see affixed above the great open door of a black tower at twilight, in the city of the gugs. It was discovered by the friend of Randolph Carter, Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, carved by Joseph Curwen above a door in the crypts where he conducted his abhorrent experiments in necromancy. Randolph Carter had at some previous time spoken ominously to Willett about the meaning the symbol possessed in the dreamlands, and had drawn it on paper for the doctor, but Willett did not reveal what things Carter had told him.
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
A mysterious object in the shape of an antique key of tarnished silver, almost five inches in length, covered with arabesques that have occult significance. It was passed down as a legacy through the family of Randolph Carter, along with a parchment written in an unknown language, both contained in a box of carved oak blackened with age that was bound with rusty iron. Randolph Carter asserted to his friends that it would open the successive doors of the "mighty corridors of space and time." He believed it connected in some way with the lost city of Irem, and with a hand chiseled into the keystone of a great arch in that city. He was able to determine that the writing on the parchment was a translation of R'lyehian, the native language of the spawn of Cthulhu. To open dimensional gates with the key, it is rotated nine times while chanting certain words.
(The Silver Key; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
A circle of great standing stones, with a single menhir in the center, occupied the grassy, moss-covered crown of a hill behind the abandoned house of the van der Heyl family, in the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York. The occultist Alonzo Typer described the stones as "neither brown nor gray, but rather of a dirty yellow merging into an evil green." The texture of the stones he describes as like that of a scaled serpent, "cold and clammy." Near the menhir was a stone-rimmed opening that resembled a well. The native Iroquois Indians loathed and shunned the stones.
Edward Pickman Derby speaks in The Thing on the Doorstep of a circle of standing stones in the deep woods of northern Maine, near the town of Chesuncook, which he describes as "Indian relics." They mark the entrance to the pit of the shoggoths, which is reached by descending six thousand steps. The coven of Ephraim Waite held their sabbat gatherings in this pit beneath the stone circle.
Near the town of Arkham, rows of moss-covered standing stones are to be found on the unnamed island in the midst of the Miskatonic River, the origins of which are said in The Dreams in the Witch House to be "obscure and immemorial." It is presumed by most of the folk of Arkham that they were set up by the Indians. The stones are clearly visible from the Garrison Street bridge, if one looks northward up the river at the island.
The strangely regular domed hills around Dunwich are crowned by circles of standing stones. The people of the town remember the time old Wizard Whateley shrieked the name "Yog-Sothoth" in one such ring of stones, with "a great book open in his arms."
In The Whisperer in Darkness, Henry Wentworth Akeley takes a photograph of a circle of standing stones atop a hill in Vermont, which Albert Wilmarth, a professor at Miskatonic University, examines. The circle is described by Wilmarth as "druid-like" and the grass around the stones is much beaten down and worn away, as though by the tread of many feet, although no footprint is visible in the photograph. The hill is in a remote location, as evidenced by the completely uninhabited vista of low, forested mountains behind it.
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer; The Thing on the Doorstep; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Dunwich Horror; The Whisperer in Darkness)
The swastika was not invented by the Nazis, but is an ancient Hindu symbol of good fortune. The Vikings used it to represent the fiery meteor of Thor's hammer. It is more generally considered to stand for the blazing disk of the Sun. Examples of it have been found in rock carvings dated to the Neolithic period. There are two forms that rotate in opposite directions, but opinions vary as to which is lucky and which unlucky, with some cultures making no distinction between the two. The shape of the arms also varies considerable from place to place.
This sign of the lost Old Ones painted on small beach stones was found by Captain Obed Marsh of Innsmouth scattered all over the ground when he visited for the last time the South Sea island "east of Othaheite" where the Kanaky natives had close dealings with the Deep Ones. Natives on neighboring islands had driven the inhabitants away due to their unnatural practices. The sign of the Old Ones had been used by the Kanakys to control the Deep Ones and ensure that the Deep Ones did not turn against them.
(The Shadow Over Innsmouth)
The Salem witch Keziah Mason testified at her trial for witchcraft before Judge Hathorne about a white stone in a dark valley beyond Meadow Hill, near Arkham, where witches gathered at midnight and drew "lines and curves" to open portals between worlds. In modern times, the white stone is still to be found in the shadowed ravine, the ground surrounding it strangely barren of plant life. The common people of Arkham believe that witch sabbats are held at the stone on Walpurgis Night, at which children are sacrificed.
(The Dreams in the Witch House)
The Key to the Tenth Gate
Sun passes through Virgo: September 16-October 31
Constellation is represented by a winged virgin who carries stalks of ripe wheat in her hands.
Right Pillar: Spica (Latin: spicum-The Spike), meaning a spike, or stalk, of ripe wheat. Astronomical designation: Alpha Virginis. Astrological nature: Venus-Mars. Influence: promotes success in the arts, sciences, religion and law, but may signify isolation or loneliness. Magnitude: 1. Color: brilliant w
hite-binary star. Sun crosses: October 16. Location: the left hand of the Virgin. Comments: This is the only bright star in Virgo, for which reason it was called by the Coptic Egyptians Khoritos (Solitary).
Left Pillar: Syrma (Greek: Train of the Dress). Astronomical designation: Iota Virginis. Astrological nature: Mercury-Mars. Influence: the occult, secret wisdom, concealed truths. Magnitude: 4.1. Color: white. Sun crosses: October 29. Location: the hem of the Virgin's dress. Comments: The dress of the Virgin conceals the Mysteries.
The astral gate of Virgo lies between the star of its right pillar, located on the left hand of the virgin, and the star of its left pillar, which is on the hem of her dress. The Sun enters the gate by crossing the longitude of Spica, the star of the right pillar, around October 16. The solar transition of this gate takes thirteen days. The Sun exits the gate around October 29, when it crosses the longitude of the star of the left pillar, Syrma.
The key to the Tenth Gate opens the constellation Virgo, allowing entry into that part of the walled city of the Necronomicon that concerns the talismans and magical objects dreamed by Lovecraft. Use it for divining information about these talismans.
Seal of the Tenth Key on the Tenth Gate
Face the direction of the compass ruled by the Tenth Gate, which is west by souththat is, slightly to the left of due west. Visualize before you the closed gate in the western wall of the city of the book so that it is more than large enough for you to walk through without awkwardness. You should see it as a real city gate in a city wall.