by Donald Tyson
With the visualized image of the gate clear in your mind and projected upon the astral plane in the direction west by south, speak this invocation to Yog-Sothoth, which has the same general form for all the gates:
Guardian of the Gate! Defender of the Door! Watcher of the Way! Who art the stout Lock, the slender Key, and the turning Hinge! Lord of All Transition, without whom there is no coming in or going out, I call thee! Keeper of the Threshold, whose dwelling place is between worlds, I summon thee! Yog-Sothoth, wise and mighty lord of the Old Ones, I invoke thee!
By the authority of the dreaded name, Azathoth, that few dare speak, I charge thee, open to me the gateway of Virgo, the Virgin, that lies between the blazing pillar Spica on the right hand and the blazing pillar Syrma on the left hand. As the solar chariot [or, lunar chariot] crosses between these pillars, I enter the city of the Necronomicon through its Tenth Gate. Selah!
Visualize the key of the Tenth Gate in your right hand some six inches long and made of cast iron. Feel its weight, texture, and shape as you hold it. Extend your right arm and use the key to draw upon the surface of the gate the seal of the key, which should be visualized to burn on the gate in a line of white spiritual fire. Point with the astral key at the center of the gate and speak the words:
In the name of Azathoth, Ruler of Chaos, by the power of Yog-Sothoth, Lord of Portals, the Tenth Gate is opened!
Visualize the gate unlocking and opening inward of its own accord upon a shadowed space. On the astral level, walk through the gateway and stand in the darkness beyond. Hold in your mind the talisman or magical object of the mythos you wish to scry or better understand. Open your mind to receive any impressions that may arise. In a more general sense, this ritual and this gate may be used to gain guidance and information on the making of any talisman, so that its working will be effective.
After fulfilling the purpose for which this gate was opened, conclude the ritual by astrally passing out through the gate and visualizing it to close. Draw the seal of the Tenth Key on the surface of the gate with the astral key you hold in your hand, and mentally cause it to lock itself shut, as it was at the beginning of the ritual. Speak the words of closing:
By the power of Yog-Sothoth, and authority of the supreme name Azathoth, I close and seal the Tenth Gate. This ritual is well and truly ended.
Allow the image of the gate to grow pale in your imagination and fade to nothingness before you turn away from the ritual direction.
The Eleventh Gate
ovecraft was a life-long fancier of the strange. He liked being around not only things old, but things old and dead. Family trees of the long deceased fascinated him. Old houses with horrifying histories attracted him. He had a particularly fondness of graveyards that shows itself in many of his stories. As a young man he made frequent nocturnal visits to the graveyard at the Cathedral of St. John, Episcopal, in Providence. He liked to walk the streets alone at night and breathe in the atmosphere of genteel decay. Almost the entire short story, The Unnamable, is set in the old burying-ground at Arkham, where Lovecraft's alter ego Randolph Carter, and Carter's friend Joel Manton, spend a quiet afternoon seated on a tomb, discussing various local horrors.
The affinity which Lovecraft felt for the grotesque and uncanny may have arisen in part from his feelings of alienation as a boy. His father went insane and had to be locked into a mental institution when Lovecraft was only three years old. He lived as a madman for another five years, finally dying in 1898. By that time Lovecraft's mother had begun to show symptoms of insanity. She became convinced that her son Howard avoided other people and walked the streets alone at night because he was ashamed of his hideously deformed face. While Lovecraft cannot be considered handsome, he is scarcely deformed, yet his mother's constant reiteration of hideous deformity must have made a deep impression on the boy.
Lovecraft was by nature rather odd. He was a precocious genius who learned to read by the age of three, and was translating difficult Latin poetry at age ten. Although his formal schooling was disrupted by periodic nervous breakdowns, which forced his removal from school for extended periods, he acquired an education of sorts by reading the dusty old tomes in the library of his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. He was especially drawn to eighteenth-century works of literary criticism and essays. The writing style, speech mannerisms, and attitude of eighteenth-century England became a kind of mania for him, which he only shook off with difficulty as an adult. He would salt his prose with quaint expressions and archaic spelling, and took to referring to himself as the "Old Man." He thought of himself as an ancient, even while still in his twenties and thirties. It was a harmless affectation, but a curious oddity.
Another quirk of his character was the determination to live his life as an English gentleman, even though he was not English, and did not have the wealth to ignore the necessities of earning a living. Lovecraft steadfastly called himself an amateur writer throughout his life, often corrected or expanded the works of others without compensation, or for such scant payment that he might as well have done it for free, and refused to be businesslike about placing his stories for publication or demanding the fees that were past-due to him from publishers and those who hired him to do ghostwriting assignments. Indeed, his determination not to be financially successful as a professional writer was almost perverse, and bordered on the self-destructive.
It was probably not a case of Lovecraft refusing success, but more a matter of him being constitutionally incapable of acting in the ways necessary for a successful professional writer. Still, at times it seemed that he was willfully thwarting attempts by his friends to help him. A few casual words of discouraging criticism might cause him to put a story into a drawer for years, and not even seek to have it published. He wrote only two novels, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, neither of which was published during his lifetime. There was nothing wrong with either novel. Both were published to acclaim after his death. Yet Lovecraft simply would not, or could not, make the necessary effort to place them with book publishers. The imp of the perverse sat on his shoulder, counseling him to avoid success at all costs.
Much of the richness of the Necronomicon mythos stems from the oddities, otherworldly in their strangeness, that impart an indescribable atmosphere to the stories. Lovecraft's great strength was his originality. He wrote to please himself, and never tried to imitate other horror writers, but he sometimes left homages to their work in his fiction in the form of borrowed terms and references, which he modified for his own purposes. These curious little details are scattered like jewels throughout the mythos. They reveal some of the influences upon Lovecraft's mind that helped shape the mythos, but they are also part of what makes the mythos so unique.
The aether (or ether) is a concept held by astronomers prior to the twentieth century to explain how light could propagate through the airless void between the stars. Since light was presumed to be a wave, and it was believed that waves could only travel through some sort of physical medium, space was hypothesized to be filled with an invisible, tenuous substance similar to a very thin fluid that was termed "the aether." The revelations of Albert Einstein concerning the nature of relativity marked the end of the concept of an interstellar aether in modern science.
Lovecraft mentioned the aether in The Whisperer in Darkness as something the wings of the Mi-Go push against when they fly through space: "The things come from an other planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the aether." The same reasoning would no doubt explain how winged Cthulhu, and how the winged race of the Elder Things, were able to fly through space. The aether is also present in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath when Randolph Carter sails off the edge of the ocean of the dreamlands through the void to the far side of the Moon.
Sometimes Lovecraft employed the term more loosely to represent a glowing fog or mist, and in a few cases it is difficult to separ
ate the two meanings, since both seem to apply. The aether in The Strange High House in the Mist is on a material level simply a sea mist, but yet it is also the medium that conveys the god Nodens on his seashell to the door of the old cottage atop the cliff, and seems almost to have a life of its own.
(The Whisperer in Darkness; The Crawling Chaos; The Diary of Alonzo Typer; Hypnos; Celephais; Fungi from Yuggoth; The Nameless City; The Strange High House in the Mist)
The carven sea gate of the dream city Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, that is ruled by the eidolon (idol) of the god Lathi. Those who pass through the gate into the city, and look upon the graven image of the god, are never heard from again beyond the city walls.
(The White Ship)
A great gray rock that in times past stood up from the misty surface of the green lake of the lost city of Ib, in Mnar. Only marshes now remain on the ground the lake once occupied. The rock was near the shore, not far from the green stone seawall of the city of Sarnath that bordered the lake before the destruction of that city some ten thousand years ago. Akurion was used by the men of Sarnath to gauge the level of water in the lake, which varied greatly, in spite of the lack of streams flowing into or out from the lake.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
The ankh, or crux ansata, more commonly known as the Egyptian cross, is a cross that terminates at the top in an elongated loop. It is a symbol representing life, and it appears frequently in ancient Egyptian art. The ankh is generally regarded as a fortunate symbol, or symbol of blessing, although some narrow-minded Christians associate it only with the pagan religion of Egypt and on this basis regard it as a sign of evil magic.
In The Haunter of the Dark, when the writer Robert Harrison Blake first enters the great stone church in Providence, Rhode island, known as the Church of Starry Wisdom, he finds that the usual Christian cross above the altar has been replaced by the crux ansata. This is hardly surprising since the church had been purchased by Professor Enoch Bowen to serve as the center for his esoteric cult of Starry Wisdom, to house the ancient occult relic known as the Shining Trapezohedron, which the archeologist had carried back from a tomb he had excavated in Egypt.
(The Haunter of the Dark)
An avatar is a lower incarnation or expression of a higher being. The term derives from Hinduism, and signifies in a literal sense a descent. The exalted higher gods sometimes descended to lower planes in order to accomplish specific tasks. In order to make this descent, they took on vessels more in keeping with the nature of the lower planes. The concept of avatars was one of the basic teachings of Theosophy, and it was probably from his readings about Theosophy that Lovecraft picked up the term.
In Lovecraft's stories, the Old Ones such as Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep are almost without form as we know it in their purest expression, but at times they adopt more constrained bodies in order to function on our material world. Nyarlathotep in particular has numerous avatars. Robert Harrison Blake believed that the being known as the Haunter of the Dark, which manifested through the Shining Trapezohedron in the Church of Starry Wisdom at Providence, Rhode island, was an avatar of Nyarlathotep. When it came to Blake at the end of the story, he saw that it had black wings and a three-lobed eye.
Blake wrote that in ancient Khem (Egypt) Nyarlathotep even took the form of a man. This is supported by Lovecraft's story Nyarlathotep, where the god appears in the form of an Egyptian showman. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Nyarlathotep shows himself to Randolph Carter as a youthful Egyptian pharaoh in prismatic robes, a regal figure with a proud carriage and smart features who has the "languid sparkle of capricious humour" in his eyes. He warns Carter to pray that Carter may never meet him again in his "thousand forms."
Another avatar of Nyarlathotep is the fabled Black Man who presided over witches' sabbats. The Black Goat of the sabbat is an avatar of Shub-Niggurath, and the two often are spoken of together in this context.
(The Haunter of the Dark; Nyarlathotep; The Dreams in the Witch House; The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath)
When Walter Gilman is cast from sleep across space by the magic of the witch Keziah Mason, he finds himself lying on a terrace in an alien city beneath a sky resplendent with the mingled colors of three suns. The strangely shaped buildings of the city two thousand feel below stretch away to the limits of his vision, and other terraces are ranked above the one he occupies. Around the edge of the terrace is a metal balustrade as high as his chest, ornamented with metal figurines some four and a half inches tall in the shape of the crinoid Elder Things-a ribbed barrel torso with radiating arms. So thin is the attachment of these ornaments than when Gilman grips one of them, it breaks off in his hand. He notices gaps in the row of figurines along the top of the balustrade, where others have been broken off in the past.
He hears a noise behind him and turns to see the witch and her familiar, accompanied by three Elder Things, entering the room to which the terrace is attached. The sight of the living Elder Things, identical in every detail to the small metal image in his hand, is too much for Gilman, who falls unconscious. He awakens in his own room, and later discovers on his table the uncanny metal icon he had broken from the balustrade in his dream. Is it merely a decoration, or does it have some larger significance? Was it chance that it came loose in Gilman's hand, or was he intended to break it off?
The description of Gilman on the terrace is strangely evocative. We are to assume that Gilman was transported by Keziah to one of the planets of a distant star system ruled by the Elder Things, either in the present or in the past. The gaps in the ornaments along the balustrade have an ominous significance, for they indicate that others before Gilman have been carried through dimensional portals to the same terrace, and that they, too, have broken off its delicate decorations as they clutched at them in horror, fighting vertigo while gazing across the vast city below.
(The Dreams in the Witch House)
In the collaborative story The Night Ocean, an artist vacationing on Ellston Beach finds in the sand a large metal bead of unusual design. Its minute carving shows a "fishy thing" against a backdrop of seaweed. The bead was probably dropped by one of the amphibious race that comes out of the ocean and onto the beach under moonlight. These beings seem to resemble the sea-dwelling race in Lovecraft's story, The Temple, although they are not well described in either tale.
(The Night Ocean)
Beyond the twin Basalt Pillars of the West, in the dreamlands, the waters of the western ocean fall off the edge of the world, forming a "monstrous cataract" that bears most ships to their doom. The exceptions are the black galleys of the moon-beasts, which are able to continue into the void on their voyages to the far side of the Moon. Lovecraft drew on actual folklore of the ancient world, which told of ships that dared to sail from the Mediterranean between the Pillars of Hercules into the unexplored western sea, only to fall of the edge of the world in a great waterfall. In the dreamlands, the fantasies and fears of waking life become reality.
(The White Ship; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
Lovecraft had a peculiar reverence for cats, which finds expression in some of his stories. In Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, cats are mentioned among the sacred animals mummified by the Egyptians so that they "might return some day to greater glory." He created a special city in the dreamlands, Ulthar, where the crime of killing a cat is punished by death. At the beginning of The Cats of Ulthar he wrote, "For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten."
In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, cats are said to be able to leap from the tops of houses to "cryptic realms" on the dark side of the Moon, where they frolic together and "converse with ancient shadows." The
only foes they fear are the very large cats of Saturn, who covet the Moon's dark side for their own, and sometimes contest for it with Earth's cats. The cats of Saturn are in league with the evil toad-beasts of the moon, and hate the cats of Earth. Because Randolph Carter was kind to a kitten, the cats carried Carter off the Moon and back to Earth's dreamlands, saving him from the wrath of Nyarlathotep.
(Imprisoned With the Pharaohs; The Cats of Ulthar; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
A tall, coffin-shaped clock with four hands and strange hieroglyphics on its dial and the front of its case that no one can decipher occupies a niche in a room in the house of Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It is the size of a large grandfather clock, but the case is wider. The hands of the clock do not keep any earthly time, nor is the ticking of the clock any earthly rhythm, but is described as a "cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings." De Marigny was the friend of Randolph Carter, and after Carter was declared dead, served as his executor. Carter was not dead, but came to inhabit and control the alien body of a wizard of the planet Yaddith, which he brought back to Earth via a dimensional portal and disguised as the eastern swami Chandraputra.
Carter indicates in Through the Gates of the Silver Key that the clock had been sent to de Marigny by the yogi that Harley Warren used to talk about, the yogi who declared himself alone of all men to have visited Yian-Ho on the plateau of Leng, and to have returned with items from that forbidden city. The implication is that the clock comes from Yian-Ho. The clock, Carter asserts, had been made by those who know much about the First Gateway. The First Gate is the gate of dreams unlocked by the silver key, which leads from Earth space and normal time to "that extension of Earth which is outside time." When the wizard, named Zkauba, regains control of his body, he flees into the case of the clock and vanishes, presumably back to Yaddith. The clock can be used as a gateway through space and time by those who know how to read it.