by Donald Tyson
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
In The Colour Out of Space, during the 1880s a meteorite falls to earth near the well of the farmer Nahum Gardner, whose farm occupies a valley west of Arkham, Massachusetts. When scientists from Miskatonic University gather a sample and return it to the university for tests, they discover that it displays under the spectroscope "shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum." The soft material is alien, dissimilar to anything on the Earth. It radiates a constant heat, as though from some inner radioactivity. Over the span of a few days the sample evaporates to nothingness.
When the scientists return to the Gardner farm for more, they learn that the meteorite has shrunk. In the center of its dwindling mass they find a colored globule. The color is indescribable, but resembles the spectral bands of the meteorite fragment tested earlier. When tapped with a hammer, the glassy globule pops into nothingness. The next day, when the scientists come back yet a third time for more samples, they learn that during the night the meteorite attracted multiple lightning strikes, which utterly destroyed it. Nonetheless, the alien color lingers in Gardner's well, and in the mists that hang above it.
In some strange way the well has become poisoned, causing unnatural growth in plants and animals watered by it, tainting them so that they are unfit to eat, and driving insane the human beings who drink from it. Eventually it kills everything on the farm. A circle of death expands from the well over a period of four decades into an area of five acres, which comes to be known locally as the blasted heath. This gray zone grows larger each year as the poison continues to spread from the well beneath the ground. The alien colors themselves seem to be poisonous, or a part of the poison.
Lovecraft derived this concept of colors so alien, they were not a part of the normal visible spectrum, from the story The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce. In Bierce's story, an alien creature is colored with colors that are beyond the usual human range of perception, rendering the creature effectively invisible to human sight. Lovecraft's alien colors in The Colour Out of Space are not invisible, but the mind cannot quite grasp them or assign any familiar qualities to them. Wilbur Whateley's invisible hybrid brother in The Dunwich Horror also owes much to Bierce's story.
(The Colour Out of Space)
Covens are groups of witches. The traditional number of a coven is said to have been thirteen, but the number often varies as members join or leave the group. One witch serves as priestess, the embodiment of the Goddess, and the other twelve form the circle around her. In some modern covens the witches take turns serving as priestess. Sometimes a male member fulfils the role of priest, the embodiment of the God of the witches.
Lovecraft's presentation of witchcraft was wholly negative. There is no such thing as a good witch in the Necronomicon mythos. He based his references to witchcraft upon the writings of Christian demonologists, both Protestant and Catholic. Much of his concept of witches, their sabbat meetings, and their sacrifices comes from the writings of Cotton Mather, and also from his study of the Salem witch persecutions. Lovecraft had read The Witch-cult in Western Europe by Margaret A. Murray and used some of her material in his stories-his references to the Black Man of the sabbat are drawn in part from Murray's book-however, his reading of Murray did not soften his traditional prejudice against witchcraft.
In The Thing on the Doorstep, the coven of witches to which Ephraim Waite belonged met in the pit of the shoggoths in northern Maine, beneath a circle of standing stones near the town of Chesuncook.
(The Thing on the Doorstep)
A race of worm-like beings in distant galaxy scattered crystal cubes across space in order to learn more about other galaxies, which they could not reach with their starships. By chance, one of these cubes fell to Earth in the distant past, during the occupa tion of our planet by the Great Race from Yith, the space and time spanning beings who inhabited with their naked minds alone an ancient earthly species of rugose cones.
No race in the universe is more knowledgeable than the Great Race. They recognized the danger this cube posed to all who looked within its illuminated depths-that their minds would be captured and transported to the distant world of the worm-like race, and their bodies stolen by the disembodied minds of these hostile aliens, sent to Earth through the cube to investigate our world and determine whether all life on it should be destroyed.
The Yithians did not destroy the cube, for they valued knowledge above all else, but they built for it a darkened shrine and hid the cube within it so that none of their race would look upon it. Over time, the chaos of warfare caused the arctic city of the temple to be destroyed, and the cube to be lost. Fifty million years ago the Great Race left to inhabit the distant future of the Earth, leaving the crystal cube behind them.
The ancient cube is picked up from the ground by George Campbell while camping in the Canadian woods. His mind is exchanged through the cube with the mind of one of the worm-like beings on their distant planet Yekub, where his human mind in its alien body acts decisively to seize control of their god, and thus becomes supreme ruler of their world. Meanwhile, the alien mind inhabiting his human body in the Canadian wilderness falls into bestial madness and perishes.
(The Challenge from Beyond)
Mention is made in the Necronomicon of the "Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles." These seem to refer to the two separate periods during which the Old Ones under Yog-Sothoth, and the octopi spawn under Cthulhu, dominated the Earth. Cthulhu and his spawn were subdued by the Elder Things, after much warfare, and were forced to go into suspended animation on the Pacific island of R'lyeh when the stars went wrong in the heavens. Eventually R'lyeh sank beneath the waves. The invisible Old Ones, or at least one branch of them, were driven underground by the advanced technology of the Great Race, who locked them into the earth behind massive trap doors.
(The Whisperer in Darkness; The Call of Cthulhu; The Shadow Out of Time)
A word chosen by Lovecraft to describe the idol of the god Lathi, ruling deity of the dream city of Thalarion. It is a curious word with multiple meanings, which is certainly why Lovecraft selected it. "Eidolon" is a Greek word meaning "an image, an idol," but also "an apparition," "a ghost," and even "an ideal." In Theosophy it was used for the astral double of a recently dead human being, a kind of simulacrum of the deceased rather than the actual soul or spirit of the deceased. Theosophists believed that the eidolons of the dead are always present around us, but under ordinary circumstances do not see us any more than we are able to see them. However, the strong desire of those at a seance, coupled with the psychic abilities of the presiding medium, can sometimes summon these eidolons to the material level of reality and manifest them to ordinary human vision. Theosophists regarded this as a form of necromancy. Lovecraft was familiar with Theosophical doctrines and may have drawn the word from this source.
(The White Ship)
A secret religion founded in the Massachusetts fishing community of Innsmouth by the South Sea trader Obed Marsh for the worship of the god Dagon, the goddess Hydra, and their children, the amphibious race known as the Deep Ones. No exact year is given for its founding, but it was established around 1838. It used the former old Masonic Hall on New Church Green for its church. The priests of the religion wore upon their heads a strangely shaped golden tiara given to the order by the Deep Ones.
Those admitted to the order were required over time to take three oaths. The first oath of silence bound them not to speak about the order. The second oath of loyalty bound them to support the works of the order, and for this support they were rewarded by the Deep Ones. The third and final oath compelled them to take a Deep One in marriage and to have hybrid children from this union, who would go to live beneath the sea when they matured. At first Marsh and his followers balked at the third oath, but after the Deep Ones demanded it, they were forced to accede.
In February1928, the Federal government raided Innsmouth and destroyed many of its older buildings along the harbor, using the cover s
tory that the raid was to combat smuggling. A submarine sent torpedoes downward into the deep-sea trench off Devil Reef in an effort to destroy the city of the Deep Ones, Y'ha-nthlei. The Esoteric Order of Dagon may have ended at this time-or it may merely have gone into hiding.
(The Shadow Over Innsmouth)
In Lovecraft's Necronomicon mythos, the human body may be reduced by alchemical means to its essential salts-what remains after its more volatile components have been driven off. Once the essential salts are refined from the corpse, it is possible at any later date to reconstitute them into the living creature from whence they came by means of a ritual formula that is found in the Necronomicon. The use of essential salts for calling up the spectre of a dead ancestor is mentioned in 1702 by Cotton Mather in his Magnolia Christi Americana (bk. 2, ch. 12). Mather referred to the alchemist Borellus as his source. According to Mather, Borellus asserted that the process was lawful and did not involve any necromancy. Lovecraft quoted Mather's paraphrase of Borellus at the beginning of his novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead An- cestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.-Borellus
The quotation from Mather's book indicates that the process involved the calling forth of a visual image of the living creature to whom the salts had belonged. It was an act of natural magic, which was not considered unlawful by many authorities, but Lovecraft made it into a necromantic process.
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
In the story fragment The Book, a man finds a worm-riddled manuscript book in an old bookstore and recites a formula from it that opens the first gateway leading beyond the ordinary three-dimensional reality of normal consciousness. As a consequence, he acquires a familiar spirit-"For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone." The recitation of the magic formula evoked the familiar from some other reality and bound it to the man.
Familiars appear elsewhere in Lovecraft's tales. The Salem witch Keziah Mason, in the story The Dreams in the Witch House, had as her familiar the rat-like creature with the human face and hands called Brown Jenkin, which Lovecraft patterned after descriptions of familiars given by Cotton Mather. They were often said to resemble small animals, but with various distortions or deformities, and unnatural in their behavior. The familiar acted both as servant and guardian to its master.
(The Book; The Dreams in the Witch House)
Lovecraft had a minor obsession with the sound of flutes-not the modern transverse flutes played from the side with which we are familiar today, but Eastern wind instruments of the kind that might be heard in Arab or Asian folk music. The sound of flutes occurs numerous times throughout his body of work, sometimes accompanies by drumming, and always it is characterized as horrid or abominable.
In The Dreams in the Witch House, Gilman resists accompanying Keziah Mason to the throne of Azathoth "where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly." Even so, he has memories of his dreams in which he hears echoes of "monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute," suggesting that the decision is not fully his to make.
In the story Nyarlathotep, the narrator hears "the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep." It is obvious that he hears the music at the center of chaos, just as Gilman heard it. There is no indication who may be playing the music, or what its source may be.
Near the beginning of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, reference is made to that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity," otherwise known as Azathoth, and to the "muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes." The blind, voiceless, and mindless Other Gods, whose soul and messenger is Nyarlathotep, dance to this music. Further on in the same work, in the windowless stone monastery on the plateau of Leng, Randolph Carter is treated to the music of such a flute played by the High-Priest Not To Be Described, a lumpish figure on a golden throne robed in yellow silk, with a yellow mask concealing his face. The musical instrument he plays is characterized as a "disgustingly carven flute of ivory."
The horror occasioned by the sound of flutes would be inexplicable if it did not evoke the primal sound at the black throne of Azathoth. Chaos is formless, but holds in potential all forms. It is wet clay awaiting its shape, and the music is the shaping instrument. Hence, in The Festival when the narrator attends a ritual of black magic, and hears the droning of a flute, the changing of the key of the music precipitates "a horror unthinkable and unexpected," which causes him to faint, and drives him insane.
In The Haunter of the Dark, the Lord of All Things whose name must not be spoken aloud, Azathoth, is said to be lulled by the "thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in nameless paws." The identity of the flute player is not explicitly stated, but it is usually assumed to be Azathoth himself. Certainly it is Azathoth who is the source of this music, either directly or by proxy.
Lilith is worshipped to the sound of flutes in The Horror at Red Hook. In the story The Moon-Bog, bog-wraiths lead human beings to their doom to the detestable piping of unseen flutes, accompanied by the beating of drums, in the same way snake charmers of India are supposed to mesmerize cobras with flute music (they do not-snakes are deaf).
In The Rats in the Walls, an indication is given as to who is playing the flutes. The half-mad narrator alludes to "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." These are perhaps the same flute players who entertain Azathoth on his black throne, if indeed this god does not play the flute with his own hands. The caverns of the Earth's center may be assumed to be a metaphor for the center of ultimate chaos, which has no geographical location in our universe. Since the narrator of Lovecraft's tale is temporarily insane when he has this vision, his description is not to be trusted.
(The Dreams in the Witch House; Nyarlathotep; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Festival; The Haunter of the Dark; The Horror at Red Hook; The Rats in the Walls)
The footprints of Wilbur Whateley's invisible brother, who is said to resemble in shape the Old one who was his father, are described in the Dunwich Horror as round and as large as a barrelhead, with lines radiating from a single point, like the lines of a palmleaf fan.
The prints of the blind and invisible race from beyond our universe that was cast from the surface of our world into deep caverns by the coming of the Great Race from Yith were made in the form of five circular marks, each three inches across, arranged in the shape of a pentagram. This pattern occupied approximately a square foot of area, and was formed in groups of three. This invisible race, referred to in The Shadow Out of Time, appears to have been the same Old Ones with whom old Wizard Whateley and his hybrid grandson Wilbur had dealings at Dunwich. It may be argued that these prints are not the same as those made by Wilbur's brother, but Wilbur's brother was a hybrid who was half human and half Old One. His footprints may have differed from those of the Old Ones.
In At the Mountains of Madness, the prints of the Elder Things discovered in the Antarctic by the Miskatonic Expedition of 1930-193 1, impressed into pre-Cambrian slate when it was no more than fresh mud, were about a foot across, triangular in shape, and striated.
The footprint of the secretive Mi-Go from Yuggoth, who mine for metals in the hills of Vermont, is described in The Whisperer in Darkness as "hideous
ly crab-like" and around the size of a normal human print. From a central pad project on each side sawtoothed nippers.
In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, the dream explorer Randolph Carter once asked a group of lava-gatherers on the slope of Mount Ngranek if the night-gaunts leave webbed footprints. They denied this to be so.
Footprints in the form of split hooves, like those of a goat, appear in a number of stories. In The Unnamable, one such footprint is impressed into the chest of Randolph Carter during a graveyard encounter with an inhuman creature.
When in The Hound, two English decadents rob a five-hundred year old grave in Holland and carry back to their home in England a jade amulet in the shape of a crouching hound, they discover in the soft earth under their library window a series of footprints "utterly impossible to describe."
In The Dreams in the Witch House, Brown Jenkin, the familiar creature of the Salem witch Keziah Mason, leaves bloody tracks across the floor that have the shape of four tiny human hands, after it finishes killing Walter Gillman by gnawing his still-beating heart out of his chest.
In The Festival, a man led through the snowy streets of Kingsport by a throng of silent, robed figures to the old church on Central Hill sees no footprints in the snow, not even those of his own feet; but later when he is found floating half-dead in Kingsport Harbor, he is told that his footprints in the snow show that he must have become lost in the dark on the road outside of town, and wandered off the cliffs at Ornage Point, before ever reaching Kingsport.