Summer School: assignment six

26 Tuesday Jul 2011

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Assignment Six, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Under the Pyramids”.

“Under the Pyramids” was ghost-written by Lovecraft for Harry Houdini, the first of several small (but lucrative) jobs. […] Your assignment today is […] on any aspect of today’s reading

S.T. Joshi does not give an index entry to ‘Egypt’ or ‘Ancient Egypt’ in his monumental two-volume biography of Lovecraft, I Am Providence. Possibly that particular passage into the great pyramid of Lovecraft’s mind is one that is best left sealed. Such an entrance, if opened, might at first look deceptively small — but one could surely be lost down there in the immense dark maze — wandering in the footsteps of the youthful Lovecraft amid the dusty chambers of cat mummies that smile so enigmatically, the spectral visage of the former explorer Theophile Gautier, the dead books of myth and lore, the little chamber of Abdul Alhazred where one must stoop as if a child, the great glitteringly stygian wells of ancient lore, the eerie bas-reliefs of Hotep (who might be Nyarlathotep), and the scarab beetles still inexplicably crawling in the shadowy corners.

Lovecraft’s interest in Ancient Egypt spanned the major period of digging and discovery in the early 20th century. What then are the key discoveries that might have excited Lovecraft’s imagination, in the twenty years from when Lovecraft reached the age of 14 (1904) until his writing of “Under The Pyramids” (Feb 1924)?

In 1904 the first authoritative book on the famous Rosetta Stone was published. The Stone was the key to deciphering the Ancient Egyptian language, unread since the fall of the Rome. It was because of this stone, worked on by scholars since 1822, that the young Lovecraft was able to read the myths and lore of the Ancient Egyptians — in a fine readable translation by Budge of the British Museum. The book placed the academic cap-stone on over 80 years of work, validating in the modern mind the various translations that had been published.

In 1905 the sand was completely cleared away from the Sphinx, and the great monument was seen its entirety for the first time since classical antiquity. Lovecraft refers to the Sphinx several times in his works other than “Under the Pyramids”. In “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) the Sphinx is referred to briefly, although only in passing. In his “The Cats of Ulthar” (June 1920), he has his narrator suggest a link with the cat-worship of the Ancient Egyptians…

The Sphinx is his cousin [i.e.: the cousin of the house cat], and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

This might appear to imply that Lovecraft thinks the Sphinx’s original face (the current one is a later and cruder addition) was perhaps more cat-like. I believe a lion-with-mane (thereby allowing the current head-dress to be cut in the later carving) has been suggested, and that may have been a current theory known to Lovecraft in the 1910s?

In his “Under The Pyramids” Lovecraft transfers Houdini’s choice of location to the Temple of the Sphinx (a real place, the gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid), leading him to speculate again on the nature of the original face of the Sphinx…

Near the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx — mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and memory. […] There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren — but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear.

Sphinx, partly excavated from the sands, circa 1904/1905.

Countless shrines and temples and tombs were discovered in Egypt in the 1900s and 1910s, some perfectly preserved. These built on a great train of previous discoveries in the nineteenth century, which had included the life-sized sculptures of Khephren which are among the finest we have from Ancient Egypt. The articles on the early 20th century finds come thick and fast in The Century, National Geographic, Scientific American, and elsewhere. The famous bust of Nefertiti was found in 1912. Various writers of fiction notably responded to the new discoveries and the public interest they aroused. Algernon Blackwood produced various notable Egypt stories such as “Descent in Egypt” (1914) and “The Wings of Horus” (1914). Sax Rohmer published the novel Brood of The Witch-Queen (1918). Both these writers had visited Egypt. Lovecraft himself refrained from using Egyptian settings, possibly because he could not afford to travel and because he felt he required sight and sound of a place in order to write about it. He only managed to write “Under the Pyramids”, to order, with aid of guide-books and travel accounts. Although in Nyarlathotep (1920) his dreams had certainly drawn near to the place, if only briefly…

“And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. 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. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger.”

The early 1920s saw one of the greatest triumphs in Egyptology. Howard Carter was then one of the most famous excavators in Egypt, and he probably influenced the choice of Lovecraft’s name of Randolph Carter (who made his first appearance in print in 1919) in amalgam with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter hero (first appeared in print 1912). Three years after the formal end of the First World War, in 1922 Howard Carter excavated the steps leading to the untouched tomb of Tutankhamun. The final tomb (‘the mummy chamber’ or ‘Sepulcher’) was not opened until February 1923 and was reported in full in National Geographic magazine in May 1923. The marvels uncovered sparked a renewed Egyptomania that swept the western world and continued into the 1930s.

Lovecraft’s “Under The Pyramids”, written exactly a year after the opening of the Tutankhamun tomb, rode on the immediate coat-tails of Carter’s famous discovery. “Under The Pyramids” followed various non-fiction books issued in 1923, and also literary re-issues that cashed in on the public interest — such as the Sax Rohmer vampire thriller Brood of The Witch-Queen (1918) which was revised and reissued as It Came Out of Egypt (Munsey’s magazine, serialised Sep, Oct, Nov 1923).

Further reading:

Baikie, James (1924). A Century of Excavation in the Land of the Pharaohs. [Gives a useful overview of the excavations Lovecraft might have known of in 1924.]

Barrell, John (1991). “Death on the Nile: Fantasy and the Literature of Tourism 1840–1860”. Essays in Criticism (1991), XLI (2), pp. 97-127.

Barker, Phillip (1949). “Egyptian Mythology in Fantastic Literature”. Fanscient 3 (3), pp.41-44. Fall 1949. (No.9) [This appears to be the only substantial scholarly writing on the topic that strays beyond the 19th century]

Colby, Sasha (2006). “The Literary Archaeologies of Theophile Gautier”. CLCWeb, Vol. 8 Issue 2 (June 2006).

Dahab, F. Elizabeth (1999) “Theophile Gautier and the Orient” CLCWeb, Vol.1 Issue 4 (December 1999).

Day, Jasmine (2006). The Mummy’s Curse : Mummymania in the English-speaking world. Taylor & Francis.

Frost, Brian (2008). The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. Scarecrow Press.

Lant, Antonia (1997). “The Curse of the Pharaoh : or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania.” IN: Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Rutgers University Press. [See also the Ancient Egypt Film Site for a complete list of films.]

MacDonald, Sally (Ed.)(2003). Consuming Ancient Egypt. UCL Press.

Parramore, Lynn (2008). Reading the Sphinx: ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century literary culture. Palgrave Macmillan.


With thanks for the Creative Commons photo-elements used, to Elizabeth Hollins (pyramid) and Zanthia (tentacle).

The Strange High House in the Mist

25 Monday Jul 2011

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Here are some picture postcards of the inspirations for the story “The Strange High House in the Mist” (9th Nov 1926), inspirations which Lovecraft confirmed in letters. The story itself is set in the massive ‘dream-cliffs’ above Kingsport.

Postcard caption: “Eastern Point Lighthouse at the “Mother Ann” cliffs at Gloucester, Massachusetts [about 100 miles NE of Providence]. Mother Ann is a rocky cliff at the far south end of Eastern Point, near the lighthouse.”

Note the profile-figure of a recumbent woman, made by the outline of the rocks against the sky. Presumably this is “Mother Ann”.

Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call Father Neptune … — The Strange High House in the Mist

Lovecraft also writes in a letter that he had…

obtained a bit of natural grandeur on the cliffs at Magnolia, where the ocean pounds in supreme splendour at the historic rock of Norman’s Woe Rock

Postcard caption: “Rafe’s Chasm [on the cliffs very near Norman’s Woe Rock] is a remarkable fissure cutting into the sheer rock ledge at Magnolia. It is 200 feet long and 60 feet deep and into it the sea continually roars. From here you can obtain a marvelous view of the open ocean, “Kettle Island”, the Salem shore line and a glimpse of Marblehead.”

Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep, so that he had to let himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this was the way the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth and sky! — The Strange High House in the Mist

Here’s an interesting painting of Monhegan Island, Maine, by J. Perry Wilson in the late 1930s, which gets closer to the sort of setting I imagine for the story…

The island as long been a haunt of artists (see the books The Art of Monhegan Island, and Monhegan, the artists’ island), and one wonders if Lovecraft might have seen similar pictures in the 1920s?

Edward Henry Potthast’s “Hilltop (Monhegan Island)”, circa. 1925, is also evocative of the story…

All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky … — The Strange High House in the Mist

Summer School: assignment five

25 Monday Jul 2011

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Assignment Five, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Howard Himself”.

Your assignment today is pure speculation. What aspect of modern culture do you think would have influenced Lovecraft if he were writing today? What contemporary scientific or cultural developments do you think would have enthralled him?

An Alternate Ending : a fiction

Howard Phillips Lovecraft made it, somehow, to 1939. And 1939 made him. Having enlisted but failed to serve in the First World War, in 1939 Lovecraft was determined to serve his country in the coming Second World War. After much wrangling, since he was then nearly 50, he became a member of the local Coast Guard Reserve force in 1939. In this capacity he then, somehow, came to the attention of the Boston Navy Yard. There he was able to secure a part-time assistant’s job with the library of the Naval Archives at Boston — probably so as to release a serviceman for intelligence duties. Within a year he had completely mastered the history of the navy in New England, and later made many useful contributions to its scholarly study. One of the first papers he wrote was a thorough historical survey of smuggling, usefully suggesting a number of little-known places on the New England coastline at which German submarines might try to clandestinely land people or materials. This bought his abilities to the notice of his superiors. His old and latent talent for comic writing also came into service, and he published comic stories and sketches in the armed forces magazines. Most notable of these are a string of fascinating comedy propaganda squits against the Axis powers, hilariously depicting them in his most outrageously pulp manner as inept and stupid many-tentacled monsters. It is also believed that he was sometimes confidentially consulted, by his predecessor at the Navy archive, on thorny problems in military intelligence work. Lovecraft himself notes that he was regularly assigned to help monitor the popular story magazines, for their possible clandestine use in passing ‘secret messages’ to German and later Japanese spies. The regular Navy pay, a warm office and the food of the officers’ canteen (for which, as the stand-in archivist and ad-hoc intelligence consultant, he was given a special pass) rapidly beefed up his physical and mental condition. As did a change of situation from Providence to Boston, since he was required to move there for the duration of the war. He felt this move to be his patriotic duty, but was no doubt pleased to find that it brought him into regular contact with those younger than himself.

From 1942, when America formally entered the war and men were consequently in short supply on the Home Front, he was placed in command of a special intelligence group of the U.S. Coast Guard Beach Patrol. This consisted of young lads who were not of sufficient mental fitness to serve in the forces, but whose youthful appearance, zeal, and writerly and artistic powers of observation led the Navy to form them into a clandestine ‘plain clothes’ unit — with special responsibility for detecting any communication between persons on the New England shoreline and the enemy at sea. Toward the end of the war Lovecraft once again began to write steadily, and in 1943-44 he wrote his great trilogy of weird werewolf novels now generally known under the title “The Wreck of Dreams”. These were set on the mist-haunted New England coastline of the 18th century, and were well reviewed for their powerful anti-Nazi subtext, the exploration of the roots of human cruelty, and the depiction of the struggle of man to overcome his own bestial instincts in the face of overwhelming terror. The strong sales of these popular but intelligent wartime chillers led to the publication of a long-awaited book collection of the best of his earlier stories in 1948.

After the end of the war he drifted back to Providence and found that he was able to eke out a living on book royalties, rights-options sold for some radio monologues, and the ghost-writing of plots and regional dialect for radio playwrights. The early 1950s saw the decline of radio in the face of television, for which he felt he was not suited to write. But around that time he began to be regularly approached by Hollywood agents to option some of his early works and werewolf novels for movies, and this — with the help of his shrewd new agent August Derleth — meant he was able to live in some modest comfort for the rest of his life. After receiving one especially lucrative movie options cheque in 1958, Lovecraft even made attempts to purchase back his boyhood home — but he found that the owners were unwilling to sell.

His own fiction writing was quiescent throughout most of the 1950s, possibly because he felt that he had said all he had wanted to say, and because the horrors of the recent war overshadowed anything he might be able to conjure in fiction. He did however write thoughtful and prescient prose meditations on the dawn of the atomic age and its likely impacts on the psyches of the young, which gained him some brief prominence as a public intellectual. Like many after the war, he was somewhat embarrassed by his political enthusiasms of the early 1930s. His intellectual infatuation with the authoritarian/fascist variant of socialism had been swept away by the experience of the war. In the early 1950s he read Ayn Rand’s science-fiction work Anthem (1937) while writing his monumental survey essay on the history of early science-fiction, and this led him to Rand’s seminal novel The Fountainhead (1943). He found Rand’s works chimed well with his own very similar atheism, individualism, and rigorous rationalism. Amid the changed and burgeoning economy of 1950s America, and under the influence of Rand’s potent pro-capitalist arguments and the very real communist threat, he sloughed off his earlier distaste for capitalism. He became a minor but very effective early supporter of Rand in the years before she published Atlas Shrugged (1957).

In the late 1960s Lovecraft was much feted by the new generation of science-fiction and fantasy writers, especially British writers, to the extent that he had to hire a part-time correspondence secretary, the brilliant young Harvard graduate S.T. Joshi. But at that time Lovecraft felt himself too old to accept any invitations to travel, and confined himself to dictated correspondence. The hiring of an eager secretary did, however, have the by-product of leading in time to the magnificent six-volume edited collection of letters which effectively form Lovecraft’s autobiography and which may — in future centuries — be judged to be Lovecraft’s most lasting contribution to the world of literature.

In the late 1960s Lovecraft learned of the experiment which the science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock was undertaking, in ‘giving away’ his major character Jerry Cornelius to be used by others writers. Lovecraft was put in mind of his own permissive attitudes to the use of his work in the 1920s and 30s, and made the seemingly spur-of-the-moment decision that has forever enshrined him as a ‘founding father’ of the open source movement. On his 80th birthday he famously demanded to be driven through the August heat, by the visiting Robert Barlow, to New York. At the main copyright offices in the city he alarmed the officials by signing all of his early Dunsanian and ‘Yog-Sothothery’ works into the public domain, a then unheard-of thing for a writer to do. Barlow, then a tenured and highly respected university professor of anthropology, was luckily able to assure the officials that the old man was quite sane and knew what he was doing. Derleth was furious when he found out what had happened, since he had renewed the copyrights just a few years before. But Lovecraft thereby ensured the place of the Cthulhu mythos in the weird literature of the 1960s and 70s, and spawned an empire of spin-offs and pastiches that will forever keep his name in the public eye. To encourage interest in his radical decision, he returned to Providence and wrote a new work for the Mythos, dictating it to Barlow over the following week and collaborating with his protégé on polishing the writing for a contemporary audience. This was Lovecraft’s final dazzling classic, and his first work of ‘Yog-Sothothery’ since the late 1930s. The novella “The Messages of Nyarlathotep” begins conventionally enough in a classically early Lovecraftian vein in a sort of alternate-history ‘proto valve-punk’ 1920s New York that recalls Nyarlathotep’s first appearance in fiction, but then moves forward in time to become an almost psychedelically intense and richly terrifying multi-layered voyage into the information society and its psychic implications — showing that Lovecraft had fully assimilated the new ideas on communications, cybernetics, systems theory and many other ideas of the 1960s. This last great work places him firmly in the vanguard of the prophets of the information revolution, and has also been seen as a progenitor of cyberpunk.

‘Tis the monstrous makeover!

23 Saturday Jul 2011

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I’ve decided to change this blog to a much better WordPress theme, a very lovely one by Ignacio Ricci that has only appeared in the last few weeks. Reading posts should be a little easier, and I now have a more comfortable 520px width for images…

The ‘Lovecraft on the Web’ directory of 330 Web links, that was previously on the sidebar, now has its own page.

The current header image is a crop from my own photomontage.

Arkham Sanitarium completes filming

23 Saturday Jul 2011

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Dejan Ognjanovic interviews the director of Arkham Sanitarium (an anthology film of: The Thing on the Doorstep, The Shunned House, The Haunter of the Dark), at the close of filming…

“we’re also faithfully recreating a number of Lovecraftian locations including The Shunned House, The Church of the Starry Wisdom, The Crowninshield Place, and Arkham Sanitarium itself (based largely on Danvers).”

“Let’s put on a show!”

23 Saturday Jul 2011

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So what would liven up Lovecraft? Show tunes! …

“a musical performance of horror writer H.P.Lovecraft’s 1920s short story “The Outsider” […] through live music, dance, and singing, calling upon Stu Watson to narrate, gymnast Jasmine Daly, choreographer Michelle Moya, Venezuelan folk punk musician Yva Las Vegass, Mason’s band Little Band of Sailors, and more to weave the story together. Performers wearing cat masks played guitar and even performed a yoga dance …”

They had me running away screaming at “Venezuelan folk punk”.

Summer School: assignment four

23 Saturday Jul 2011

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Assignment Four, Vacation Necronomicon School: “Secrecy in horror”.

“Today’s assignment […] It’s difficult to have any amount of horror without secrets […] Without furtive whispers and things unseen, we would have very little to discuss here, so your assignment today is to discuss some aspect of secrecy in horror, using “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a starting point.”

On Secrecy and Secretions

Lovecraft was among the first generation of human beings who were able to write and publish in a fully open manner on religion and ideas. He may have realised this, for he had spent much of his youth clinging to an attic life-raft made of books from the 18th century — a century during which secrecy and dissembling were basic health-and-safety requirements for those imaginative free-thinkers who created the Enlightenment. Codes, cryptic allusions, substitutions, hints, subtly indicative inversions and elisions, private-edition books passed covertly from hand to hand — all the subterfuges variously and routinely forced on writers by intolerant authorities who could forcibly “make windows into men’s souls”, if given a sniff of written evidence. From these 18th century writers Lovecraft must have learned more than style. He must also have learned some techniques for speaking the unspeakable.

When an old technology dies, it often becomes aestheticised by the young and made part of some new and curious bricolage. Literary and religious secrecy was a technology, of a kind. Lovecraft had seen established religion, and its tediously obstreperous counter-sects, start to fade in the light of science and the bedding down of the American experience of intellectual freedom. As a consequence, the counter-measures devised by the intelligent against religion were also increasingly obsolete. The way was open, and Lovecraft deftly aestheticised the old secrecy into new syncretic horrors.

Of course, the censor’s pen continued to strike out from little islands of moral panic until the mid 1960s — but even these would be washed away in time, revealing an abundant coral reef of beautiful queer fish and strange limpet-like creatures dwelling fixedly amid their abundant secretions. Lovecraft never lived to see that carnival of repressed secrets, and he was appalled enough by the fumblings of the literary avant-garde of his own time. So he was only able to deal with personal and psycho-sexual secrets in a hidden manner. Most of his implicitly semi-autobiographical fiction was thus a wash of simultaneous revealings and concealings — rather like a receding tide that reveals a hidden reef on which the reader can sometimes glimpse Lovecraft’s own lived experience flopping and writhing about, far off and forlorn. Lovecraft never expected that we would glimpse it, let alone that one day there would be a whole fleet devoted to trawling in his personal depths, using curiously-shaped contraptions to surface eye-bulging secrets never meant to be seen.

I increasingly think that Lovecraft may have kept another category of secrets. I think he had his own dark reef of influences and sources, a reef unspoken of and still hidden somewhere off the deep water of his imagination. In the 18th century a writer would have had trouble concealing his sources, since there were so relatively few of them. Those living and writing in the 18th century had a serious literature one could read through completely in about fifteen years, if one was keen, including the key works from classical antiquity. The outlets for publishing and intellectual discourse were few and populated by those who were inclined to be capaciously knowing, and this would also make it difficult to conceal sources. By contrast Lovecraft was living in a different world, for all that he pretended otherwise. He was immersed in the fecund abundance of early 20th century popular culture, much of it ephemeral. He was also familiar with the grave-robbers’ paradise of the New York used book dealers and libraries — in which the curious browser could pull down a dusty book and open a window into a dark vista unseen since the 19th century. This must have been a very tempting combination of environments for Lovecraft. Now, of course it would be ridiculous (although rather delicious) to suggest that Lovecraft kept a second, secret Commonplace Book filled with jottings about the tentacles of H.G. Wells (surely topping the Wandrei reading-list in Spring/Summer 1927) and obscure popular arcarna destined for insertion into his stories. Claiming a secret history for which there is no public evidence is exactly what Lovecraft’s work so delightfully pokes fun at. I have little or no evidence to back up my suspicion, and the evidence may never be found, even if there was any reason for it to exist. But I can’t help think that the secrets of writers, like secretions, sometimes leak out onto the printed page and leave stains.

Further reading:

Stahl, John Daniel (1996). “The Imaginative Uses of Secrecy in Children’s Literature”. IN: Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press.

Roberts, M. and Ormsby-Lennon, H. (Eds.) (1995). Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies. AMS Press.

Calinescu, M. (1994). “Secrecy in fiction: textual and intertextual secrets in Hawthorne and Updike”. Poetics Today, Vol.15, No.3, Autumn 1994.

Liste-Noya, Josand (2011). American Secrets: The Politics and Poetics of Secrecy in the Literature and Culture of the United States. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Alliker Rabb, Melinda (2008). Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750. Palgrave Macmillan.

Pionke, Albert D. (2010). Victorian Secrecy. Ashgate.

Meyer Spacks, Patricia (2003). Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. University of Chicago Press.

Gunn, Joshua (2005). Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century. University of Alabama Press.

Summer School: Assignment Three

22 Friday Jul 2011

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Assignment Three, Vacation Necronomicon School: “The Elder Sign”.

“Today’s assignment […] The Elder Sign is one of the only things known to man that can provide any measure of protection against the Deep Ones. I felt it would be prudent to make one …”

On The Elder Sign:

The Elder Sign is mentioned five times in Lovecraft’s work.

1). In “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” (written 1926) it is a genuflection, presumably made with the hands, of simple folk in the Dreamlands when these people are asked by Randolph Carter about the Earth’s gods and the rememberance of their dancing on Lerion (the mountain source of the River Skai)…

“Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.”

The earlier story “The Other Gods”(1921) implies that the Other Gods have long since displaced or captured Earth’s gods to unknown Kadath (“The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!”), so that the simple folk in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” are indeed making a warding sign against the Other Gods, rather than against Earth’s gods. The Other Gods are identified with the monsters of the Cthulhu mythos, since Lovecraft refers in his fiction to “Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods”.

2). In the Lovecraft story fragment “The Descendant” (1927) the elder sign is also a genuflection made with the hands, seen used by Atlanteans living near the sea in the British Isles during the Roman occupation…

“Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the West that had sunk…”

The story refers to Stonehenge and other circles being built by these people. Here again the sign seems to be a ‘warding’ against evil. It also associates the sign with stones. There have been various cranky ideas that the actually-existing stones at Stonehenge contain “hidden” symbols revealed only in certain angles and types of lights, but these theories are only now being seriously tested by archeologists in summer 2011…

“Despite the vast amount of archaeological activity and academic study into Stonehenge and its landscape over the centuries, relatively little is known about the lichen-covered surfaces of the sarsens and bluestones that make up the stone circle. The availability of high resolution laser scanners that can produce highly accurate surface models means that it is now possible to record details and irregularities on the stone surfaces down to a resolution of 0.5mm. It is also hoped that secrets hidden underneath the thick cover of lichens may be revealed in the analysis using sophisticated software.” (English Heritage)

3). The elder sign is also depicted as a ‘warding’ genuflection in Lovecraft’s ghost-written work “The Last Test” (1927)…

“with face convulsed, he called down imprecations from the stars and the gulfs beyond the stars; so that even Surama shuddered, made an elder sign that no book of history records, and forgot to chuckle.”

4). August Derleth, in The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), suddenly leaps in with the notion that R’lyeh is sealed with an Elder Sign. But S.T. Joshi has shown that very little of Derleth’s novel is sourced from Lovecraft. Presumably Derleth knew the short Lovecraft poem “The Messenger“, in which the Elder Sign is linked to the opening of a sealed boundary containing evil…

“The thing, he said, would come that night at three
[…]
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.”

But this small poem is dedicated to “Bertrand K. Hart, Esq.”. The biographical details involved, as excavated by S.T. Joshi, clearly point to this being a humourous poetic squit against Hart, written with much skill but little thought, and meant to be read with a knowing smile by Lovecraft’s circle. It implies that the Elder Sign is a key rather than a ‘warding’ or a ‘seal’ for evil things, and as such it goes against all Lovecraft’s other uses of the term.

5) As for the modern inclination to make runic-style stones for the ‘sign’ — which ridiculously draws the Mythos into the territory of flaming pentangles and similar pseudo-occult nonsense — this arises via the later story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931). The actual term “elder sign” is not used in this story, but the sign-stones in the story are obviously meant to have ‘warding’ powers. They are learned of thus: the veteran sea captain “Cap’n Obed”, the one who first summoned the Deep Ones to Innsmouth, encounters a small volcanic island in the South Sea Islands in the early 1800s. The story of this was later spun to the drunk Zadok, seemingly by Obed’s First Mate — and Zadok then ramblingly relates it to the protagonist many decades later…

“old magic signs as the sea-things says was the only things they was afeard of.”

“In some places they was little stones strewed abaout—like charms—with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them was the Old Ones’ signs.”

“We didn’t hev them old charms to cut ’em off [i.e.: stop them from coming ashore] like folks in the Saouth Sea did”

These are then clearly sign-charms on small stones, or things that are so old as to appear to be stones. These sign-objects were made by the “Old Ones” [the Elder Things in At The Mountains of Madness] and they have the power to keep the “Deep Ones” away from land.

There are some similarities here with the marked green soapstones that feature prominently in At The Mountains of Madness…

“groups of dots in patterns […] on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times”

Animals are shown in Mountains to be instinctively fearful of the stones, and similar stones may have had a similar effect on the animalistic amphibian Deep Ones.

Assignment:

So, what would be a scientifically valid ‘warding’ instrument, one that could be held in the hand? What about a cup of coffee – the coffee mug being of stoneware (often patterned), being held up before oneself in the hand (rather like a genuflection), and of course the coffee having a genuine ‘warding off’ effect against sleep and thus nightmares. This latter point would thus link it back to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands.

The symbol is from the alphabet-style Vinca sign system, found in Southern Europe and as old as the pyramids. It has never been translated.

Summer School: Assignment Two

21 Thursday Jul 2011

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Assignment Two, Vacation Necronomicon School: “A Study in Emerald”.

“Today’s assignment […] Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”, [a] story that combines the Cthulhu mythos with the world of Sherlock Holmes […] discuss any aspect of this story you’d like …”

The story is available free online as a PDF (direct PDF link). It is also available for the Kindle ereader on Amazon’s Kindle store, as part of Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things.

For those who prefer audio books, there’s a professionally produced audio book edition on Audible with excellent British accent-work. Until recently this one-hour audio book was free, and it may still be floating around the Web in that form — but it now has a price-tag of $4.30. Also available from various sources are the audio book versions (CD, download, Audible) of Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things, which includes the same reading of the story.

The cheapest way to obtain the story in print form is a used copy of Gaiman’s Fragile Things collection, which can be had used from Amazon for about $4 including shipping. The story is also available in print in the mixed-author Shadows over Baker Street anthology of Lovecraft / Sherlock Holmes mash-ups, and this may be a better purchase for Lovecraft fans.

The Angelus Theatre adapted and performed “A Study in Emerald” in what appears to have been a substantial stage play, 29th May 2010. There appears to have been no graphic novel or animated adaptation, as yet.

Completed assignment: (as a PDF)

The Case of the Purloined Prose

Summer School: Final Project anticipation

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Summer School

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There is still time to sign up for the Lovecraft Summer School 2011 — Wednesday the 20th is the sign-up deadline. Today’s assignment comes in the form of advance notice of the Final Project, which involves participants reading Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story ideas…

“Your final project can be any form of creative output: a story, a painting, a poem, a song, a work of collage, or a very short video — whatever appeals to you. Simply choose a concept from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and find a way to make it your own.”

Here’s my choice, if I were possibly to make some CG/Photoshop illustrations…

21. A very ancient colossus in a very ancient desert. Face gone — no man hath seen it.

61. A terrible pilgrimage to seek the nighted throne of the far daemon-sultan Azathoth.

110. Antediluvian—Cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island.

114. Death lights dancing over a salt marsh.

129. Marble Faun — strange and prehistorick Italian city of stone.

172. Pre-human idol found in desert.

178. A very ancient tomb in the deep woods …

189. Ancient necropolis — bronze door in hillside which opens as the moonlight strikes it — focussed by ancient lens in pylon opposite?

213. Ancient winter woods — moss — great boles — twisted branches —dark—ribbed roots — always dripping….

214. Talking rock of Africa — immemorially ancient oracle in desolate jungle ruins that speaks with a voice out of the aeons.

… although I think I’m inclining toward a story or poetry.