17. Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, a wide-ranging work on comparative religion and mythology, first appeared in 1890 in two volumes and then from 1906 to 1915 in twelve volumes. Frazer (1845–1941), a Scottish anthropologist, took a dispassionate, rather than a theological, approach, viewing religion as a cultural phenomenon.
18. Margaret Alice Murray’s 1921 book espoused the controversial view that an underground pagan religion flourished until overlaid by Christianity. Her views were also reflected in Encyclopædia Britannica entries (1929–1968) on witchcraft. Modern Wicca claims to embody that historical cult.
19. Headquartered in Providence and founded in March 1877 by the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission, which discovered a $1,675 surplus after mounting the state’s art exhibition at the 1876 World’s Fair, the school offers a broad curriculum of studies in art and design. It is a few blocks from the Fleur de Lys House on Thomas Street and adjacent to Brown University.
20. See note 14, above.
21. A professional association in continuous existence since 1880, it serves to promote the visual arts. It is headquartered two doors away from the Fleur de Lys House on Thomas Street.
22. Now located in modern Lebanon, the city of Tyre was founded in Phoenicia at the start of the third millennium BCE.
23. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, have come to be regarded as more likely legendary than real, although in The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced, Stephanie Dalley, an authority on cuneiform texts, challenges the existing theory. The gardens are traditionally credited to King Nebuchadnessar II (around 600 BCE), but Dalley provides evidence of their having been built by the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (705–681 BCE), perhaps in Nineveh—considered the “New Babylon” after 689 BCE, when Babylon was conquered by Assyria.
24. In fact, a magnitude 7 shock occurred on February 28, 1925, in the region, with an epicenter in the St. Lawrence River region. Intensity V–level effects were felt in Providence, the first of that level since 1883.
25. This is very close to the Fleur de Lys House, where Wilcox resided.
26. Another College Hill neighborhood address.
27. It is tempting to identify this architect as the prominent Dutch Theosophist architect Karel de Bazel, but he died in 1923, not 1925. Many architects were drawn to Theosophy, a popularized esoteric philosophy based on a study of the relations between the world, humanity, and the divine. In 1875, Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and others founded the Theosophical Society, embracing mystical eastern esotericism and purporting to be based on Blavatsky’s studies in Tibet. See “The Haunter of the Dark,” note 14, below, for more on these studies. See also Susan R. Henderson’s “Architecture and Theosophy: An Introduction.” Henderson observes that at the beginning of the century, many architects strove to base their work on esoteric philosophies rather than mere functionalism.
28. Between February 28 and March 23, two other earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.0 or greater occurred, one in China and the other in the Vanuatu Islands (about 1,100 miles north-northeast of Australia). Quakes also rocked central Italy during this interval.
29. Voodoo (properly, Vadou or Vodou) is a religion originating in Haiti fostering worship of gods subservient to Bondye, the unknowable creator. Rituals involve trancelike states in which worshippers are possessed by the loa, or lesser gods (also called orishas); these have often been mistakenly referred to as orgies.
30. There was virtually no time during the United States’ occupation of the Philippines that the natives were not considered to have been bothersome by the officers of the occupying force. The history of the American “pacification” of the population after occupation in 1898 is long and sad. See especially Marcial P. Lichauco and Moorfield Storey, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–1925.
31. March 23 saw “the biggest round-up of crooks and criminals ever ordered in New York City since the days of Police Chief Devery,” according to the New York Times. The effort commenced on the evening of the twenty-third, when all patrolmen and detectives throughout the city received confidential orders to arrest all known thieves and criminals and bring them to the lineup at police headquarters at 9 A.M. on the twenty-fourth. There is no record in the newspaper of discontent among the Semitic population.
32. By 1926, the “Paris spring salon” was no longer a single venue. From about the mid-eighteenth century, the Salon (always thus designated), sponsored by the national Académie des Beaux-Arts, was the official exhibition of French art, held biannually. (Predating this was the late-seventeenth-century Salon, held in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre.) In 1880, the French government turned over administration of the Salon to a private group, the Société des Artistes Français. However, discontent grew with both the selection process and the manner of exhibition of selected works, and in 1890, after contention regarding the status of medals that had been awarded at the 1889 World’s Fair, a group led by prominent Salon artist Ernest Meissonier split off. The Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts was formed and began to conduct its own spring salon, with a new approach to the exhibitions. In 1903, led by art patron Frantz Jourdain and painters Georges Rouault, André Derain, and Henri Matisse, still another group of artists arranged their own salon, which they named the Salon d’Automne, to distinguish it from the two spring salons. The first exhibition featured works of Bonnard and Matisse, plus a retrospective of the work of Gauguin (who died in 1903). Later the Salone d’Automne featured the works of the Fauvists and eventually the Cubists. See Michelle C. Montgomery’s “The Modernization of the Salon of the Société Nationale” and Norbert Wolf’s The Art of the Salon: The Triumph of 19th-Century Painting for a brief history of the earlier Salons and a stunning collection of representative works.
33. In fact, the Archaeological Institute of America held its tenth general meeting in late December 1908 in Toronto. Although the Boston society was well represented, no Brown University representatives are recorded in the Proceedings.
34. In New Orleans, the inspector of police was the head of the force, selected by the mayor. E. S. Whitaker served as inspector of police until January 2, 1908. It is possible that after leaving office he traveled to Toronto for the conference. The subsequent holder of the title, William J. O’Connor, served from the day Whitaker surrendered the office until his death on November 29, 1910, and so could not have been interviewed by the narrator in 1925. It is more probable that the narrator confused the officer’s title—that the latter was likely a mere junior official of the NOPD given the task of the strange raid described following.
35. Louisiana or New Orleans voodoo, a religious-cultural movement that emphasizes intervention with divine will through charms, potions, and saint and ancestor worship. It derived from West African origins and came to New Orleans and then spread through Louisiana as a product of the African slave trade.
36. Professors Allan Marquand and Andrew Fleming West, both of Princeton University, attended the 10th General Meeting. Marquand specialized in Hellenistic archaeology, while West was deeply involved in Roman archaeology. West retained the Giger Professorship of Latin until 1929. Allan Marquand, however, died in 1924, but in 1860, “forty-eight years before,” Marquand would have been only seven years old and hence not engaged in this capacity in a tour of Greenland and Iceland. Charles R. Morey, an art historian, also attended, but he lacks all of the identifying characteristics of “Professor Webb.”
37. Alphabets dating from 150 CE used for the Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet.
38. The Eskimos (an obsolete term) of western Greenland are the Kalaallit, a part of the Inuit people; Lalaallit Nunaat, the Greenlandic name for the island, simply means “land of the Greenlanders.” More than 80 percent of Greenland’s population are Kalaallit. They are regarded as descended from the Dorset people, a culture that dates from 500 BCE. Both archaeological record
s (see Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World) and Inuit mythology suggest displacement, by the Dorset—who thrived until 1500 CE in the region—of the Tuniit or Sivullirmiut, or First Inhabitants; the latter also peopled Arctic Canada. The First Inhabitants probably arrived in Greenland around 3000 BCE. The Inuit invaded the Arctic around 1100 or 1200 CE, pushing out the Tuniit—who were not vanquished, however, until 1902 CE, when illness wiped out their last settlement.
39. In Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, with a Sketch of Their Habits, Religion, Language, and other Peculiarities, by Henry Rink (1875), the Tornasuk is translated as “‘the supreme helper,’ who only revealed himself to the angakoks, or wise men, that is to the priests.”
40. Jean Lafitte (ca. 1776–ca. 1823) was a French buccaneer who, in exchange for a pardon, helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in 1815.
41. There are dozens of small lakes south of New Orleans, and it is impossible to identify this lake from the scanty directions (at the end of a passable road, reached after a traverse of “miles” through the swamps).
42. Clearly this is not Cthulhu, for Cthulhu is described as a “green immensity.” Is it one of the Great Old Ones?
43. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (1661–1702 or 1706) was a Canadian trader, soldier, and colonial administrator credited with founding the New French colony of Louisiana.
44. Robert de La Salle (1643–1687) was a French explorer who claimed the Mississippi delta for France in 1682, naming it La Louisiane for the king, Louis XIV.
45. Sidney Sime (1864 or 1867–1941) was an English painter, born into poverty, who began working in the late Victorian period and whose patrons eventually included William Randolph Hearst. The newspaper magnate is said to have referred to Sime as “the Greatest Living Imaginative Artist.” Sime’s work often included weird, fantastic images, and he illustrated many stories for Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft mentioned his work again in “Pickman’s Model.”
“Romance Comes Down Out of Hilly Woodlands,” 1910 illustration for Lord Dunsany’s A Dreamer’s Tale.
Self-portrait of Sidney Sime, ca. 1900.
46. Anthony Angarola (1893–1929), an American artist whose pictures often celebrated immigrants, is also mentioned by Lovecraft in “Pickman’s Model.” Angarola illustrated his fellow Chicagoan Ben Hecht’s fantasy novel The Kingdom of Evil in 1924.
The Kingdom of Evil (1924).
47. The most southerly of the Cape Verde Islands, Brava is a volcano, or stratovolcano, like Mount Fuji.
48. That is, a person of mixed European and native descent.
49. This likely refers to visits to the monasteries of Tibet, the Himalayan region that become formally independent of China only in 1913. The Theosophists (see note 5, above) maintained that their teachings were based on those of Tibetan mahatmas.
50. According to Castro, the rise and fall of R’lyeh were predicted by the stars, and Richard L. Tierney, in “When the Stars Are Right,” has worked out the precise star charts for the rise and fall of the cult-city.
51. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), an essay of intense interest to Lovecraft.
52. See “The Nameless City,” note 24, above.
53. This likely refers to the First Baptist Church in America, 75 North Main Street, finished in 1775 and actually the third house of worship erected there—the burgeoning congregation out-grew the two previous buildings. Lovecraft appreciated its architecture.
First Baptist Church, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
54. A Welshman, Machen (1863–1947) was a prolific author of supernatural and horror fiction. He was regarded by Lovecraft as one of the four “modern masters” of supernatural literature (the others being Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Lord Dunsany), and Machen’s writing was important in Lovecraft’s development of the Cthulhu Mythos. Stephen King said of Machen’s novella The Great God Pan “[It is] as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale. . . . sooner or later every writer who takes the form seriously must try to tackle its theme: that reality is thin, and the true reality behind is a limitless abyss filled with monsters” (Just After Sunset, 364).
55. Smith (1893–1961) wrote over a hundred stories of dark fantasy and was as popular as Lovecraft in magazines like Weird Tales. Though they never met, Smith and Lovecraft conducted an extensive correspondence over a period of fifteen years, and each freely used the cosmogony of the other in his own work. Smith, Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard (who created the character Conan the Barbarian, among others) were the “Big Three” authors among Weird Tales readers.
56. See part III, below.
57. The Bulletin thrived as a Sydney weekly from 1880 to 2008. Originally a journal of political and business commentary, its literary influence grew, and it quickly became the launching place for many prominent Australian writers. However, the date given is wrong; April 18 was a Saturday in 1925, and the Bulletin appeared on Wednesdays.
58. Over 1,800 miles east-northeast of Wellington, New Zealand, and over 1,000 miles from the nearest inhabited islands.
59. The University of Sydney, the oldest in Australia, was founded in 1850.
60. The Royal Society describes itself as “the oldest learned society in the Southern Hemisphere, tracing its origin to the Philosophical Society of Australasia, founded in Sydney in 1821.” In 1866, it lengthened its name to the Royal Society of New South Wales, and in 1881 it was incorporated by an act of the NSW Parliament.
61. The Colonial, or Sydney, Museum, as it was first known, was founded in 1827. In 1836, it became the Australian Museum. It has been sited on College Street in Sydney since its inception.
62. A port in Peru.
63. Almost 1,000 miles due south of the wreck and perhaps 500 miles south of the direct course of the Emma to Callao from Auckland.
64. “Kanaka” was originally a term for native Hawaiians, subsequently extended to all Pacific Islanders, who were frequently imported as workers in British and Australian colonies and parts of the United States. Now the term is largely regarded as offensive.
65. Could this be the same island described in “Dagon”? Johansen is not the narrator of “Dagon”; the latter landed in San Francisco, not Sydney.
66. This is wishful thinking, notes Justin Taylor, in “ ‘A Mountain Walked or Stumbled’: Madness, Apocalypse, and H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu.’ ” “Did not Legrasse and his men find murdered bodies at the worship-site in Louisiana? Did not Wilcox’s dreams have him carving sculpture?” Furthermore, Taylor points out, the newspaper article makes it clear that the cultists aboard the Alert were going somewhere, intent on doing something. (36) There is no reason to think that the actions set in motion would cease with the dreams, and Professor Angell’s subsequent death should have by itself dissuaded Thurston from the comforting view that the horrors were “of the mind alone.”
67. A mountain to the east of Oslo.
68. Oslo was the original town founded by King Haardrada. After it was destroyed in a fire, the capital was rebuilt in 1624 under the name of Christiania (Lovecraft left out the final i), after the king of Norway, Christian IV. It took back the name of Oslo in 1925.
69. The “Gothenburg dock” is in Sweden, 180 miles from Oslo (the distance in nautical miles is about 140). What was Johansen doing there? The widow’s account makes it seem that Johansen had retired from the sea. Was he conducting his own investigation into the matter?
70. An archaic Anglo-Persian term, which formerly meant a noncombatant but later came to mean any extra personnel on shipboard and especially “native” (that is, nonwhite) sailors who supplemented the crews of European vessels in Eastern waters. The large steamship companies especially favored them, reportedly on account of their docility, temperance, and obedience to orders.
71. About 1,700 miles southeast of the shipwreck, and 1,500 miles from the nearest inhabited land (the Pi
tcairn Islands).
72. Johansen borrows this phrase from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: “darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth . . .”
73. A really, really big number: in American numeration, 1 followed by 63 zeros—twenty (vingt) sets of 3 zeros plus one more set); in British numeration, an even bigger number: 1 followed by 120 zeros. Current estimates of the age of the cosmos—the time since the Big Bang—is much smaller, a mere 13.75 billion years. Just as a reminder, the Earth is believed to be only about a third that old, and Homo sapiens about 500,000 years (that is, about 1⁄9,000 of the age of the Earth). The only larger number is a centillion, 10600. This is of course an exaggeration, for Cthulhu could not have been confined in an earthly prison for longer than the age of the planet.
74. To cachinnate is to laugh convulsively.
Poster from The Call of Cthulhu. H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, 2005
The Silver Key1
Here is another tale of Randolph Carter, at age fifty-four, in which the narrator suffers a crisis of faith. It expresses a literary philosophy not unlike that laid out, in the form of a Socratic dialogue, in “The Unnamable.” The story—which will undoubtedly remind some readers of an early Twilight Zone episode called “Kick the Can”—likely represents Lovecraft’s personal need to reaffirm his ancestry and the constant inspiration he draws from his New England roots. S. T. Joshi records, in his Lovecraft biography I Am Providence, that the readers of Weird Tales expressed a violent dislike for the story. It also provides a thorough survey of the dreamscape Lovecraft had so far invented.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 30
