Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of
a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and
forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which
poetry and legendDefinition: a story about mythical or supernatural beings or events; brief
description accompanying an illustration
Word Type: other
Number Of
Synsets: 2 alone have caught a flying memory and called them godsDefinition: the
supernatural being conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator
and ruler of the universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions; any
supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of
life or who is the personification of a force; a man of such superior qualities that
he seems like a deity to other people; a material effigy that is worshipped
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 4, monstersDefinition: an imaginary creature
usually having various human and animal parts; someone or something that is
abnormally large and powerful; a person or animal that is markedly unusual or
deformed; a cruel wicked and inhuman person; (medicine) a grossly malformed and
usually nonviable fetus
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 5,
mythicalDefinition:
based on or told of in traditional stories; lacking factual basis or historical
validity
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 1 beings of all
sorts and kinds. . . .” —Algernon Blackwood.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
TheosophistsDefinition: a believer in theosophy
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 1 have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein
our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals
in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not
from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I
think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case
an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will
accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link
in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent
regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden
death seized him.
My Knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death
of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an
authority on ancientDefinition: a very old person; a person who lived in ancient times; belonging to
times long past especially of the historical period before the fall of the Western
Roman Empire; very old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4
inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so
that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was
intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken
whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after
having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark
courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the
deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,
but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by
the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At
the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to
wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,
I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved
his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I
correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was
one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewingDefinition: establish
the validity of something, as by an example, explanation or experiment
Word
Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 1 to other eyes. It had been locked, and
I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the
professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when
I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For
what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings,
ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become
credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric
sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It
seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a
diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpyDefinition: like a pulp or overripe; not having
stiffness
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 1, tentacledDefinition:
having tentacles
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 head
surmounted a grotesqueDefinition: art characterized by an incongruous mixture of parts of humans and
animals interwoven with plants; distorted and unnatural in shape or size; abnormal
and hideous; ludicrously odd
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets:
3 and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the
whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion
of a CyclopeanDefinition: of or relating to or resembling the Cyclops
Word Type:
scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press
cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary
style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The
manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and
Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative
of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S.
Mtg.—Notes on Same, @amp Prof. Webb's Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief
notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them
citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot's Atlantis and
the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden
s, with references to passages in such mythologicalDefinition: based on or told of in traditional
stories; lacking factual basis or historical validity
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 1 and anthropological source-books as
Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings
largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the
spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale.
It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited
aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was
then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my
uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to
him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and
living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious
youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention
through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called
himself “psychicallyDefinition: from a psychic point of view
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 1
hypersensitiveDefinition: having an allergy or peculiar or excessive susceptibility (especially to
a specific factor)
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1”,
but the staid folk of the ancientDefinition: a very old person; a person who lived in ancient times;
belonging to times long past especially of the historical period before the fall of
the Western Roman Empire; very old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
4 commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with
his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a
small group of aesthetesDefinition: one who professes great sensitivity to the beauty of art and
nature
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 from other
towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him
quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the
sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archaeological knowledge in
identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner
which suggested pose and alienatedDefinition: arouse hostility or indifference in where there had formerly
been love, affection, or friendliness; transfer property or ownership; make withdrawn
or isolated or emotionally dissociated; socially disoriented; caused to be
unloved
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 5 sympathy; and
my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet
implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed
my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic
cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found
highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a
dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative
Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon
a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight
earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some
years; and Wilcox's imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
unprecedented dream of great CyclopeanDefinition: of or relating to or resembling the
Cyclops
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 cities of titan
blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent
horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined
point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy
could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost
unpronounceable jumble of letters,“Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and
disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and
studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found
himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen
bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his
slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions
seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the
latter with strange s or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated
promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in
some widespread mysticalDefinition: relating to or characteristic of mysticism; relating to or resembling
mysticism; having an import not apparent to the senses nor obvious to the
intelligence; beyond ordinary understanding
Word Type: gothic
Number Of
Synsets: 3 or paganly
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 0 religious
body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of
any or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports
of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records
daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal
imagery whose burden was always some terrible CyclopeanDefinition: of or relating to or resembling the
Cyclops
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 vista of dark
and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in
enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most
frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R'lyeh”.
On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and
inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of
fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the
night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then
only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the
family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the
Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrileDefinition: of or
relating to or characterized by fever
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 1 mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor
shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what
he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which
walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional
frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be
identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture.
Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man's
subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal;
but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental
disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain
of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the
ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of
the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various
persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange
visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of
inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence,
asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for
some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at
the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled
without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes
formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and
business—New England's traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions
appear here and there, always between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young
Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague
description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is
mentioned a dread of something abnormalDefinition: not normal; not typical or usual or
regular or conforming to a norm; departing from the normal in e.g. intelligence and
development; much greater than the normal
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 3.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and
I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it
was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked
leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he
had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow
cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran
scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to
April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarreDefinition: conspicuously or grossly unconventional
or unusual
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 1 things, the
intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the
sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and
half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers
confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case,
which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known
architect with leanings toward theosophy and ocism, went violently insane on the date of
young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to
be saved from some escaped denizen of hellDefinition: any place of pain and turmoil; ; a cause
of difficulty and suffering; (Christianity) the abode of Satan and the forces of
evil; where sinners suffer eternal punishment; (religion) the world of the dead;
violent and excited activity; noisy and unrestrained mischief
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 6. Had my uncle referred to these cases by
name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and
personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of
these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of
the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no
explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic,
mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a
cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered
throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had
leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor
of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has
seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophistDefinition: a believer in theosophy
Word
Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 colony as donning white robes en
masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak
guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in
Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the
Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are
mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too,
is full of wild rumour and legendry
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 0, and a
fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemousDefinition: grossly irreverent toward what is
held to be sacred; characterized by profanity or cursing
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 2 “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring
salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a
miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and
drawing mystifiedDefinition: be a mystery or bewildering to; make mysterious; totally perplexed and
mixed up
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 3 conclusions. A
weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous
rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had
known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so
significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript.
Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellishDefinition: very unpleasant;
extremely evil or cruel; expressive of cruelty or befitting hell
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 2 outlines of the nameless monstrosity,
puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be
rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it
is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest
for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all
the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local
source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of
Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesqueDefinition: art characterized by an incongruous
mixture of parts of humans and animals interwoven with plants; distorted and
unnatural in shape or size; abnormal and hideous; ludicrously odd
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 3, repulsive, and apparently very ancientDefinition: a very old
person; a person who lived in ancient times; belonging to times long past especially
of the historical period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire; very old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4 stone statuette whose origin he
was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least
interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by
purely professional considerations. The statuette, idolDefinition: a material effigy that is
worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an ideal instance; a
perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets:
3, fetishDefinition: a form of sexual desire in which gratification depends to an abnormal
degree on some object or item of clothing or part of the body; a charm
superstitiously believed to embody magical powers; excessive or irrational devotion
to some activity
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 3, or
whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New
Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the
rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on
a dark totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of
the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales
extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the
anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the
frightful symbol, and through it track down the to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close
and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely
artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoidDefinition: person who resembles a
nonhuman primate; any member of the suborder Anthropoidea including monkeys and apes
and hominids; resembling apes; resembling human beings
Word Type:
scientific
Number Of Synsets: 4 outline, but with an octopus-like head
whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on
hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct
with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and
squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable
characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied
the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped
the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal.
The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the
backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the
whole was abnormallyDefinition: in an abnormal manner
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
1 life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally
unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did
it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation's youth—or indeed to any
other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mysteryDefinition: something that baffles
understanding and cannot be explained; a story about a crime (usually murder)
presented as a novel or play or movie
Word Type: gothic
Number Of
Synsets: 2; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent
flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The
characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a
representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least
notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material,
belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something
frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowedDefinition: remove the consecration from a
person or an object; not hallowed or consecrated
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 2 cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions
have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed
defeat at the Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a
touch of bizarreDefinition:
conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 1 familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who
presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late
William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an
explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before,
in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed
to unearthDefinition: bring
to light; recover through digging
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
2; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular
tribe or of degenerateDefinition: a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in
sexual behavior; grow worse; unrestrained by convention or morality
Word Type:
other
Number Of Synsets: 3
Esquimaux
Word Type:
other
Number Of Synsets: 0 whose religion, a curious form of
devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It
was a faith of which other Esquimaux
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 0 knew little,
and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly
ancientDefinition: a
very old person; a person who lived in ancient times; belonging to times long past
especially of the historical period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire; very
old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4 aeons before ever the
world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrificesDefinition: the act of losing or surrendering
something as a penalty for a mistake or fault or failure to perform etc.; personnel
that are sacrificed (e.g., surrendered or lost in order to gain an objective); a loss
entailed by giving up or selling something at less than its value; the act of killing
(an animal or person) in order to propitiate a deity; (baseball) an out that advances
the base runners; endure the loss of; kill or destroy; sell at a loss; make a
sacrifice of; in religious rituals
Word Type: religious
Number Of
Synsets: 9 there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme
elder devil or tornasuk
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 0; and of this Professor
Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 0 or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters
as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetishDefinition: a form of sexual desire in
which gratification depends to an abnormal degree on some object or item of clothing
or part of the body; a charm superstitiously believed to embody magical powers;
excessive or irrational devotion to some activity
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 3 which this had cherished, and around which they danced
when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very
crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so
far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestialDefinition: resembling
a beast; showing lack of human sensibility
Word Type: other
Number Of
Synsets: 1 thing now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his
informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp
-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he
might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
0. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of
really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of
the phrase common to two hellishDefinition: very unpleasant; extremely evil or cruel; expressive of
cruelty or befitting hell
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets:
2 rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the EsquimauDefinition: a member
of a people inhabiting the Arctic (northern Canada or Greenland or Alaska or eastern
Siberia); the Algonquians called them Eskimo (`eaters of raw flesh') but they call
themselves the Inuit (`the people'); the language spoken by the Eskimo
Word
Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2 wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests
had chanted to their kindred idolsDefinition: a material effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored
blindly and excessively; an ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 3 was something very like
this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as
chanted aloud:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:“
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse
related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story
to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest
dreams of myth-maker
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 0 and theosophistDefinition: a
believer in theosophy
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1,
and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and
pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile,
had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of
the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the
terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignantDefinition: dangerous to health;
characterized by progressive and uncontrolled growth (especially of a tumor)
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 hanging nooses of Spanish
moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall
intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and
every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable
huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the
group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far
ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A
reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues
of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters
refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so
Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of
horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil
repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legendsDefinition: a story
about mythical or supernatural beings or events; brief description accompanying an
illustration
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2 of a hidden
lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing
with luminous eyes; and squatters whisperedDefinition: speak softly; in a low voice; spoken
in soft hushed tones without vibrations of the vocal cords
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2 that bat-winged devils flew up out of
caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before
D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beastsDefinition: a living
organism characterized by voluntary movement; a cruelly rapacious person
Word
Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2 and birds of the woods. It was
nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew
enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this
abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the
worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by
Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the
muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities
peculiar to beastsDefinition: a living organism characterized by voluntary movement; a cruelly
rapacious person
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2; and it is
terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac
Word Type: religious
Number Of
Synsets: 0 heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated
through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hellDefinition: any place
of pain and turmoil; ; a cause of difficulty and suffering; (Christianity) the abode
of Satan and the forces of evil; where sinners suffer eternal punishment; (religion)
the world of the dead; violent and excited activity; noisy and unrestrained
mischief
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 6. Now and then
the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of
hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: “
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came
suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two
were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened.
Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and
nearly hypnotisedDefinition: induce hypnosis in; having your attention fixated as though by a
spell
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 2 with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an
acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more
indescribable horde of human abnormalityDefinition: an abnormal physical condition
resulting from defective genes or developmental deficiencies; retardation sufficient
to fall outside the normal range of intelligence; marked strangeness as a consequence
of being abnormal; behavior that breaches the rule or etiquette or custom or
morality
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 4 than any but a
Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying,
bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which,
revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith
some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested
the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred
bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the
ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being
from left to right in endless BacchanalDefinition: someone who engages in drinking
bouts; a drunken reveller; a devotee of Bacchus; a wild gathering involving excessive
drinking and promiscuity; used of riotously drunken merrymaking
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 4 between the ring of bodies and the ring
of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonalDefinition:
bound collection of antiphons; containing or using responses; alternating; relating
to or resembling an antiphon or antiphony
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 3 responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper
within the wood of ancientDefinition: a very old person; a person who lived in ancient times; belonging to
times long past especially of the historical period before the fall of the Western
Roman Empire; very old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4
legendry
Word Type:
other
Number Of Synsets: 0 and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I
later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far
as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a
mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too
much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness,
the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant
type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians
or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the
heterogeneous . But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something
far deeper and older than negro fetichismDefinition: a belief in the magical power of
fetishes (or the worship of a fetish); sexual arousal or gratification resulting from
handling a fetish (or a specific part of the body other than the sexual organs)
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 2 was involved. Degraded and
ignorant as they were, the creaturesDefinition: a living organism characterized by voluntary movement; a
human being; `wight' is an archaic term; a person who is controlled by others and is
used to perform unpleasant or dishonest tasks for someone else
Word Type:
other
Number Of Synsets: 3 held with surprising consistency to the
central idea of their loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a which had never died. This was that , and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret would always be waiting to liberate him. s
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture
could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth,
for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great
Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idolDefinition: a material effigy that is
worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an ideal instance; a
perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets:
3 was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were
precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word
of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whisperedDefinition: speak
softly; in a low voice; spoken in soft hushed tones without vibrations of the vocal
cords
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2. The chant meant only
this: “In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the
rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders,
and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them
from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysteriousDefinition: of an
obscure nature; having an import not apparent to the senses nor obvious to the
intelligence; beyond ordinary understanding
Word Type: gothic
Number Of
Synsets: 2 allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police
did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizoDefinition: a person of mixed racial ancestry
(especially mixed European and Native American ancestry)
Word Type:
scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 named Castro, who claimed to have sailed
to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legendDefinition: a story about mythical or
supernatural beings or events; brief description accompanying an illustration
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2 that paled the speculations of
theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been
aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of
Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as CyclopeanDefinition: of
or relating to or resembling the Cyclops
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 1 stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time
before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come
round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come
themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whisperedDefinition: speak softly; in a low voice; spoken in soft hushed tones
without vibrations of the vocal cords
Word Type: gothic
Number Of
Synsets: 2 Castro, those first men formed the around small idolsDefinition: a
material effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an
ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 3 which the Great Ones shewed them; idolsDefinition: a material effigy that is
worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an ideal instance; a
perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets:
3 brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That would never die till the stars
came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to
revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for
then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and
evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling
in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and
revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy
and freedom. Meanwhile the , by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those
ancientDefinition: a
very old person; a person who lived in ancient times; belonging to times long past
especially of the historical period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire; very
old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4 ways and shadow forth
the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths
and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal
mysteryDefinition:
something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained; a story about a crime
(usually murder) presented as a novel or play or movie
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2 through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the
spectralDefinition: of
or relating to a spectrum; resembling or characteristic of a phantom
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2 intercourse. But memory never died, and
high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came
out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours
picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not
speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could
elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to
mention. Of the , he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of
Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied
to the European witch-, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever
really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings
in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as
they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the . Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder,
for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had
learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and
exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had
come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike
by EsquimauDefinition: a
member of a people inhabiting the Arctic (northern Canada or Greenland or Alaska or
eastern Siberia); the Algonquians called them Eskimo (`eaters of raw flesh') but they
call themselves the Inuit (`the people'); the language spoken by the Eskimo
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2 diabolists and mongrel
Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an investigation of the utmost
thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having
heard of the in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten
and continue the mysteryDefinition: something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained; a story
about a crime (usually murder) presented as a novel or play or movie
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2 at my uncle's expense. The dream-narratives
and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the
rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I
thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript
again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative
of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I
thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas
Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which
flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancientDefinition: a very old person; a
person who lived in ancient times; belonging to times long past especially of the
historical period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire; very old
Word
Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4 hill, and under the very shadow of the
finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once
conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and
authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents;
for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and
phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in
verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden , save from what my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see
with terrible vividness the damp CyclopeanDefinition: of or relating to or resembling the
Cyclops
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1 city of slimy
green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened
expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “
Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead
Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my
rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the in some casual way, and had soon
forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by
virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in
the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my
uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected
and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to
admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all
the success his talent promises.
The matter of the still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had
visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New
Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the
frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived.
Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically
at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my
uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very
real, very secret, and very ancientDefinition: a very old person; a person who lived in ancient times;
belonging to times long past especially of the historical period before the fall of
the Western Roman Empire; very old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
4 religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My
attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I
discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and
odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my
uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an
ancientDefinition: a
very old person; a person who lived in ancient times; belonging to times long past
especially of the historical period before the fall of the Western Roman Empire; very
old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4 waterfront swarming with
foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed
blood and marine pursuits of the -members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to
learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as ancientlyDefinition: in ancient times; long
ago
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 1 known as the cryptic
rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway
a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle
after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor
Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much.
Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd IdolDefinition: a material effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored
blindly and excessively; an ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 3 Found in His Possession.
Inquiry
to Follow.
The Morrison Co.'s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in W. Longitude 152 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven
considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On
April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon
boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had
evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone
idolDefinition: a
material effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an
ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 3 of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding
whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in
College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in
the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange
story of piracy and slaughter. He isGustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence,
and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for
Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and
thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in
W. Longitude 128 34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of
Kanakas
Word
Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 0 and half-castes. Being ordered
peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to
fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of
brass cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment. The Emma's men shewed fight, says
the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline
they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage
crew on the yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly
superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy
mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellishDefinition: very unpleasant;
extremely evil or cruel; expressive of cruelty or befitting hell
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 2 image; but what a train of ideas it
started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence
that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid
crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idolDefinition: a material
effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an ideal
instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number
Of Synsets: 3? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had
died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty's
investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious in Dunedin? And most
marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave
a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully
noted by my uncle?
March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date
Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had
darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth
poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank CyclopeanDefinition: of or relating to or
resembling the Cyclops
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1
city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu.
March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on
that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with
dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a
sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date
on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the
sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful and their mastery of
dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If
so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put
a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind's soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange -members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and
members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at
Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The
crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed
pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well,
finding it a thing of balefullyDefinition: in a baleful manner
Word Type: gothic
Number Of
Synsets: 1 exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mysteryDefinition: something that baffles
understanding and cannot be explained; a story about a crime (usually murder)
presented as a novel or play or movie
Word Type: gothic
Number Of
Synsets: 2, terrible antiquity, and unearthlyDefinition: concerned with or affecting the
spirit or soul; suggesting the operation of supernatural influences
Word Type:
other
Number Of Synsets: 2 strangeness of material which I had noted in
Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous
puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a
shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come
from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now
resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for
the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of
the Egeberg. Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater
city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with
palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancientDefinition: a very old person; a person who lived
in ancient times; belonging to times long past especially of the historical period
before the fall of the Western Roman Empire; very old
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 4 building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting
English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers fallingG from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband's “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor's effort at a post-facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank GodDefinition: the supernatural being conceived as the perfect and
omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the object of worship
in monotheistic religions; any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part
of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force; a man
of such superior qualities that he seems like a deity to other people; a material
effigy that is worshipped
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets:
4, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I
shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind
life in time and in space, and of those unhallowedDefinition: remove the consecration from a
person or an object; not hallowed or consecrated
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 2
blasphemiesDefinition:
blasphemous language (expressing disrespect for God or for something sacred);
blasphemous behavior; the act of depriving something of its sacred character
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 2 from elder stars which dream
beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare ready and eager to loose them on the
world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the
sun and air.
Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty.
The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force
of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the
horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good
progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as
he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy -fiends on the Alert he speaks
with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which
made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the
charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of
inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's
command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in W. Longitude
126 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy CyclopeanDefinition: of or relating to or
resembling the Cyclops
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 1
masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme
terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind
history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay
great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,
after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive
and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and
restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but GodDefinition: the supernatural being
conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the
universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions; any supernatural being
worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the
personification of a force; a man of such superior qualities that he seems like a
deity to other people; a material effigy that is worshipped
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 4 knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned
citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think
of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself
forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon
of elder daemonsDefinition: an evil supernatural being; a person who is part mortal and part
god
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 2, and must have
guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great
carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs
with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every
line of the mate's frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very
close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure
or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone
surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and
impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it
suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry
of the dream-place he saw was abnormalDefinition: not normal; not typical or usual or
regular or conforming to a norm; departing from the normal in e.g. intelligence and
development; much greater than the normal
Word Type: scientific
Number Of
Synsets: 3, non-Euclidean
Word Type: scientific
Number Of Synsets: 0, and
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman
felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith
and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the
immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen
said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate
lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat
like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said,
the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the
ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally
Word Type:
other
Number Of Synsets: 0 variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then
Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he
went. He climbed interminably along the grotesqueDefinition: art characterized by an incongruous
mixture of parts of humans and animals interwoven with plants; distorted and
unnatural in shape or size; abnormal and hideous; ludicrously odd
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 3 stone moulding—that is, one would call it
climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in
the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began
to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow
propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched
the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasyDefinition: something many people
believe that is false; fiction with a large amount of imagination in it; imagination
unrestricted by reality
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 3 of
prigmatic
Word
Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 0 distortion it moved anomalously in a
diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness
Word
Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 0 was indeed a positive quality; for it
obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually
burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it
slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odourDefinition: the sensation
that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular
chemicals in gaseous form; any property detected by the olfactory system
Word
Type: other
Number Of Synsets: 2 arising from the newly opened depths
was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty,
slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It
lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity
through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of
the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that
accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysmsDefinition: a
bottomless gulf or pit; any unfathomable (or apparently unfathomable) cavity or chasm
or void extending below (often used figuratively)
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 1 of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritchDefinition:
suggesting the operation of supernatural influences
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 1 contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A
mountain walked or stumbled. GodDefinition: the supernatural being conceived as the perfect and
omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the object of worship
in monotheistic religions; any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part
of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a force; a man
of such superior qualities that he seems like a deity to other people; a material
effigy that is worshipped
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets:
4! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor
Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idolsDefinition: a
material effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an
ideal instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 3, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to
claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old had failed to do by
design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions
Word Type:
scientific
Number Of Synsets: 0 of years great Cthulhu was loose again,
and ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned.
GodDefinition: the
supernatural being conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator
and ruler of the universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions; any
supernatural being worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of
life or who is the personification of a force; a man of such superior qualities that
he seems like a deity to other people; a material effigy that is worshipped
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 4 rest them, if there be any
rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the
other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the
boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't
have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only
Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the
mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the
edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure
of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish
rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst
the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters;
whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from
the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
0 cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops,
great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising
strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept
on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was
wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely
overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and,
setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel.
There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted
higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing
jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemonDefinition: an evil supernatural
being; a person who is part mortal and part god
Word Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 2
galleonDefinition: a large
square-rigged sailing ship with three or more masts; used by the Spanish for commerce
and war from the 15th to 18th centuries
Word Type: other
Number Of
Synsets: 1. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the
bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting
as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a
thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an
instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was
only a venomous seething astern; where—GodDefinition: the supernatural being conceived as the
perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the
object of worship in monotheistic religions; any supernatural being worshipped as
controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the
personification of a force; a man of such superior qualities that he seems like a
deity to other people; a material effigy that is worshipped
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 4 in heaven!—the scattered plasticityDefinition: the
property of being physically malleable; the property of something that can be worked
or hammered or shaped without breaking
Word Type: other
Number Of
Synsets: 1 of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its
hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained
impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idolDefinition: a material
effigy that is worshipped; someone who is adored blindly and excessively; an ideal
instance; a perfect embodiment of a concept
Word Type: religious
Number
Of Synsets: 3 in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself
and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold
flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of
April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of
spectralDefinition: of
or relating to a spectrum; resembling or characteristic of a phantom
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2 whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity,
of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges
from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnatingDefinition: laugh
loudly and in an unrestrained way
Word Type: other
Number Of Synsets:
1 chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder godsDefinition: the supernatural being
conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the
universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions; any supernatural being
worshipped as controlling some part of the world or some aspect of life or who is the
personification of a force; a man of such superior qualities that he seems like a
deity to other people; a material effigy that is worshipped
Word Type:
religious
Number Of Synsets: 4 and the green, bat-winged mocking impsDefinition: (folklore)
fairies that are somewhat mischievous; one who is playfully mischievous
Word
Type: religious
Number Of Synsets: 2 of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin , and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone
which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more,
for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth
still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped
Word Type: religious
Number Of
Synsets: 0 monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the
sinking whilst within his black abyssDefinition: a bottomless gulf or pit; any unfathomable (or apparently
unfathomable) cavity or chasm or void extending below (often used figuratively); make
amends for
Word Type: gothic
Number Of Synsets: 2, or else the
world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has
risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep,
and decayDefinition: the
process of gradually becoming inferior; a gradual decrease; as of stored charge or
current; the organic phenomenon of rotting; an inferior state resulting from the
process of decaying; the spontaneous disintegration of a radioactive substance along
with the emission of ionizing radiation; lose a stored charge, magnetic flux, or
current; fall into decay or ruin; undergo decay or decomposition
Word Type:
gothic
Number Of Synsets: 8 spreads over the tottering cities of men. A
time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive
this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no
other eye.