An interesting snippet from some notes by Roland John Chester on “Western Hypnosis Arcana” for the website Magazine for Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy…
“Dr. Franklin Chase Clark believes that this state [of hypnosis] occurs through fear (being ‘rooted to the spot’) and cites the serpent’s apparent power over some animals. The victim fears that he can not move: and thus can not.”
Franklin Chase Clark (1847-1915) was Lovecraft’s learned uncle — a medical doctor, translator and author, member of the Rhode Island Historical Society. I can’t find any trace of the paper or book he presumably wrote on hypnosis, but the date would be interesting. Did he perhaps try to hypnotise the boy Lovecraft, to relieve the lad of some of his “nervous maladies”?
I did however, uncover a Sunday magazine article by Lovecraft’s uncle, “A Curious City” in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, April 1878, pages 385-390. It appears to start off as a speculative utopian description of a mysterious ‘communist’ future or past city, the reader then realises that this is an essay on the sponge/corals and the mysterious cities they build in the deeps…
“[sponge] palaces surpassing in elegance and beauty the works of the most famous artists upon earth. These little architects and builders, working miles below the surface of the great ocean, building up quietly and silently in darkness their fragile houses, must remain for ever the wonder and admiration of man.
What beauties, what wonders, then, are found miles beneath the sea? The great steamship, the Challenger, sent out for a four years’ cruise by the English Government, has now returned. It has brought back with it the story so long concealed in these darksome and almost fathomless depths; the story of that great and strange and hitherto unknown country stretching for 140,000,000 square miles beneath the dark blue waves.”
A possible origin here for the underwater cities that Lovecraft would use prominently in his stories, in addition to Poe? And is this illustration for the article a proto-Shoggoth? …
