But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to howl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye—magic for magic—let the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulæ whose first had raised the writer of those minuscules—the cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragon’s Tail, sign of the descending node—
“OGTHROD AI’F GEB’L-EE’H YOG-SOTHOTH ’NGAH’NG AI’Y ZHRO!”
At the very first word from Willett’s mouth the previously commenced formula of the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms until they too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation or recapitulation; and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the incantation could be pronounced.
But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets never troubled the world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.
1. Written January–March 1927, the story first appeared (posthumously) in Weird Tales 35, no. 9 (May 1941), 8–40, and 35, no. 10 (July 1941), 84–121.
2. This is actually a description of Borrellus’s view taken from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, book I (see “The Picture in the House,” note 12, above), first identified in print by Barton Levi St. Armand in “The Source for Lovecraft’s Knowledge of Borellus in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” “Borellus” is Pierre Borel (1620–1689), a French physician who was a member of the Academy of Sciences and studied broadly in chemistry, biology, and related fields, probably including alchemy. Mather paraphrases Borel in the context of discussing the problems of biography and how much easier the task of research would be if the dead could be raised!
However, Mather’s characterization of Borrellus’s work may be unfair. A more limited view is found in Antoine Augustine Calmet’s treatise on vampires and revenants, usually titled The Phantom World, first published in 1746 and translated by the Rev. Henry Christmas in 1850:
David Vanderbroch affirms that the blood of animals contains the idea of their species as well as their seed; he relates on this subject the experiment of M. Borelli, who asserts that the human blood, when warm, is still full of its spirits or sulphurs, acid and volatile, and that, being excited in cemeteries and in places where great battles are fought by some heat in the ground, the phantoms or ideas of the persons who are there interred are seen to rise; that we should see them as well by day as by night, were it not for the excess of light which prevents us even from seeing the stars. He adds that by this means we might behold the idea, and represent by a lawful and natural necromancy the figure or phantom of all the great men of antiquity, our friends and our ancestors, provided we possess their ashes.
This is quite different from the conclusions ascribed to Borrellus by Mather. For a detailed discussion of Borrellus’s scientific work and writings, see Roger Bryant’s “The Alchemist and the Scientist,” in which Bryant incorrectly states that the narrator made up the passage from Mather.
3. The hospital is later described as sited on Conanicut Island, thirty-five miles south of Providence. Butler Hospital for the Insane, the first hospital in Rhode Island exclusively for mentally ill patients, was founded in 1847, as a result of a report by American health-care crusader Dorothea Dix. However, Butler Hospital, a few blocks east of College Hill in Providence, never had a facility on Conanicut Island.
4. Ward was born in 1902; this is consistent with Dr. Willett’s later description of “the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928.”
5. College Hill—that is, the epicenter of much described in “The Call of Cthulhu,” above.
6. A Quaker day school in Providence, founded in 1784 and, until 1926, coeducational (it returned to admitting girls in 1976).
7. According to the Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, “It has been handed down by tradition [that,] soon after the settlement of Providence[,] a body of Indians approached the town in a hostile manner. Some of the townsmen by running and stamping on this hill induced them to believe that there was a large number of men stationed there to oppose them, upon which they relinquished their design and retired. From this circumstance the hill was always called Stampers hill or more generally the Stampers. Stampers street passes along the brow of this Hill.”
8. Ancient and medieval manuscripts in Latin and Greek were written in a cursive script or handwriting known as “minuscule,” and the term has come to mean books written in the script.
An example from the Freising Manuscripts, ca. tenth century CE.
9. The school is at 250 Lloyd Avenue, a few blocks east of Prospect Street.
Moses Brown School, in 2013. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2013, reprinted with permission
10. A private membership library, located at 251 Benefit Street, near College Hill, since 1836. Henry L. P. Beckwith Jr. recounts, in Lovecraft’s Providence & Adjacent Parts, that until the late 1980s, the Athenæum maintained a locked “scruple” room, in which were kept books “of questionable redeeming social merits, such as Studs Lonigan and the works of Erskine Caldwell.” Newly acquired works that seemed destined for the “scruple” room were “kept temporarily in a drawer, known to the staff as ‘The Sewer,’ at the circulation desk” (35).
Providence Athenæum, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
11. The Rhode Island Historical Society is currently at 110 Benevolent Street, also near College Hill; it previously occupied 68 Benefit Street, a structure now taken over by Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center.
Rhode Island Historical Society, in a building now belonging to Brown University, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
12. Lovecraft’s own papers and manuscripts now reside at the latter library.
13. Colonel George Leander Shepley established the Shepley Library, said in 1937 to hold over 30,000 historical items, in a one-story stucco and limestone structure at 292 Benefit Street, near the Athenæum, in 1921; it was subsequently maintained by his daughter Mrs. Ernest T. H. Metcalf. It closed in 1938, and its considerable holdings—letters, maps, bound volumes, and so forth—were transferred to the Rhode Island Historical Society.
14. Although the address is not given, most scholars identify the Halsey House, at 140 Prospect Street, built in 1801, as the residence of the Ward family.
The Halsey House at 140 Prospect Street, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
15. Thomas Durfee (1826–1901) was a prominent Rhode Island jurist, serving as chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court from 1875 to 1891. He and his wife lived at 49 Benefit Street.
49 Benefit Street, home of Thomas Durfee, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
16. In the early eighteenth century, when the street was new, “pre-Revolutionary” wigs were obligatory items of fashion for men. (Women rarely wore wigs but supplemented their natural hair with artificial strands, twists, and rolls, and used cork, horsehair padding, and pomade to build towering styles.) The fashion for men’s wigs began in seventeenth-century France but, with the colonization of America, spread to England and across the Atlantic. It was satirized by William Hogarth in 1761, who depicted “five orders” of wigs worn to the coronation of King George III.
> The Five Orders of Perriwigs as They Were Worn at the Late Coronation Measured Architectonically by William Hogarth (1761).
17. The church itself, properly the Cathedral of St. John’s Episcopal, is at 271 North Main Street. There is also a St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in Providence, but it was at 352 Atwells Avenue, not in this neighborhood.
St. John’s Church, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
18. The so-called Old Colony House, on Washington Square, essentially unaltered since its construction in 1760–62, and originally home to the colonial legislature and later the Rhode Island State Legislature. A contemporary picture of the structure is at here, above.
The Old Colony House, also known as the Old State House, shown here in 1891, is at 150 Benefit Street in Providence.
19. At 159 Benefit Street, since demolished.
20. Bookseller John Carter, who printed the Gazette and later was its publisher, owned a home and shop at 21 Meeting Street, built in 1772. He placed a sign depicting a bust of Shakespeare outside his shop, and the building retained the name.
Sign of Shakespeare’s Head, 21 Meeting St., Providence, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
21. Housing the oldest Baptist congregation in America (organized by Roger Williams in 1638), the church was built in 1775.
22. James Gibbs (1682–1754), a prominent English architect, did not design the church; the narrator here refers to Gibbs’s innovation of placing the steeple in the middle of the structure, rather than adjacent, as was the style of Christopher Wren’s contemporary churches.
23. In Market Square, on South Main Street.
Market House, in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
24. First Church of Christ, Scientist, on the corner of Prospect and Meeting streets.
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, at 71 Prospect Street, in 1990. Photograph courtesy of Will Hart
25. According to Welcome Arnold Greene’s The Providence Plantations for Two Hundred and Fifty Years: An Historical Review of the Foundation, Rise, and Progress of the City of Providence (128), the Boston stage line was initiated in 1767. Lovecraft had a copy of Greene’s book in his library.
26. A tavern and museum at 54 Pearl Street in New York City, seriously compromised by several nineteenth-century fires and then irrevocably damaged, in 1975, by a bombing that killed four and injured more than fifty people, now housed in a reconstructed building based on conjecture as to its original appearance. The original was host to pre-Revolution meetings of the Sons of Liberty.
27. According to Gertrude S. Kimball’s Providence in Colonial Times (hereinafter “Kimball”), Dexter, formerly a London stationer and printer, had been given a lot on Towne Street (Kimball’s spelling), at the extreme north end, in 1640. He became town clerk and a leader of the Fenner-Dexter faction (78).
28. The street doesn’t exist, and Kenneth Faig Jr., in his 2013 monograph The Site of Joseph Curwen’s Home in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, proposes that the house was actually at 6 Olney Street, razed in the 1930s. Curiously, the house later was the address of Mrs. Delilah Townsend, a housekeeper for Lovecraft.
29. A small rural village in Bristol County, Massachusetts, only eleven miles east of Providence.
30. A Native American tribe from the area, part of the Algonquin Nation.
31. According to Kimball, Arthur Fenner and two brothers came to Providence in 1647. Arthur built a “farm in the woods,” probably in 1655, on the west side of the Great Salt River, in the present suburb of Cranston (80).
32. A village—actually, a section of the townships of Warwick and Cranston, Rhode Island, at the intersection of the Pawtuxet and Providence rivers. In the late nineteenth century, the Rhodes family, local merchants, developed a casino and dance hall there (known as Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet) that became a popular tourist attraction—one could also rent canoes—which drew large numbers of visitors by trolley from Providence.
The Pawtuxet River, in 2009. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, in 2001. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
33. The Rev. John Checkley (1680–1754) was a well-known New England cleric, remembered in John Checkley; or, The Evolution of Religious Tolerance in Massachusetts Bay by the Rev. Edmund F. Slafter. Slafter’s book reprints Checkley’s A Modest Proof of Church Government . . . , a defence of episcopacy, which was the focus of Checkley’s libel trial in 1724. Checkley is also described at some length in Kimball. She mentions his “racy humour and inexhaustible fund of anecdote,” though she omits the incident of the meeting with Curwen (170).
34. The description of John Merritt is confirmed in Kimball. (178) Again, Kimball does not mention Curwen.
35. The Pawtuxet Neck is a cape in Providence County, just east of Pawtuxet.
36. As will be seen, the works include some by crackpots and some by respected scientists, but of course in the early days of modern science, it was difficult to tell one from the other. Note that all but one of the cited works is German or Dutch.
37. Philip von Hohenheim (1493–1541) was a German-Swiss alchemist and philosopher who took the name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim and later the title Paracelsus (“greater than Celsus,” a Roman physician and medical historian).
38. Georgius Agricola (the Latin version of his name), or Georg Bauer (1494–1555), was a German scholar and scientist known as the father of mineralogy. He was perhaps the first scholar to found a natural science upon observation, as opposed to speculation.
39. Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644), a Flemish chemist, physiologist, and physician, was a successor to Paracelsus.
40. Franciscus Sylvius (1614–1672), born Franz de le Boë, another Dutch physician and scientist. Sylvius was an early champion of the work of Descartes, van Helmont, and William Harvey, and in particular Harvey’s theories on anatomy and the circulation of blood, and he described an important deep sulcus—a crease—on the brain’s lateral surface, called the Sylvian fissure.
41. Johann Rudolf Glauber (ca. 1604–1670), a German-Dutch alchemist and chemist and colleague of Sylvius’s who studied chemical engineering.
42. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), a Fellow of the Royal Society, was an English natural philosopher, physicist, and inventor, the first modern chemist and the discoverer of Boyle’s law, relating to the relationship between pressure and volume of a gas. His 1661 masterwork, The Sceptical Cymist: or, Cymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes, was noted for the breadth and detail of its experiments, its classification of the science, its suggestion that there were more elements than previously believed, and, perhaps surprisingly for a book considered to be the first text in this newly codified discipline, its self-deprecating humor. Boyle’s fears that “so maim’d and imperfect” a treatise would result not only in “somewhat numerous Errata” in future editions but the discovery of “grosser mistakes” were not realized, and the book remains a seminal work in the history of science.
43. Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), a Dutch botanist, humanist, and physician, is often credited as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital. Referred to as the “Teacher of All Europe,” his lectures at the University of Leiden were always full to capacity.
44. Johann Joachim Becher (1635–ca. 1682), a German chemist and physician whose theories of combustion influenced Georg Stahl’s phlogiston theory, which was superseded by the theory of oxidation.
45. Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), a German chemist and physician, postulated the existence of a flammable element that he called “phlogiston,” contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion. Once the phlogiston was released or consumed, the substance would no longer burn.
46. Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice-great”) is an unknown person w
hose body of Hermetic writing was studied in the Renaissance and after. Renaissance scholars thought that the author was a contemporary of Moses; later scholars, however, place the body of writing in the second or third century CE. The reference here should probably be to Louis Ménard, Étude sur l’origine des livres hermetiques et translations d’Hermès Trismegistus (Paris, 1866). Louis-Nicolas Ménard (1822–1901) was an artist, chemist, historian, and man of letters who wrote poetry, essays, Du polythéisme hellénique (1863), and two academic theses, De sacra poesi graecorum and De la morale avant les philosophes (1860).
47. The Turba Philosophorum (Assembly of the Alchemical Philosophers) is one of the earliest Latin alchemical texts, probably dating from the twelfth century. It introduced many of the key themes of the alchemical tradition and was often quoted in later writings.
48. Properly, Liber Investigationis Magisterii Ejusdem, published in Strasbourg in 1598. Geber probably flourished in the eighth century. He has been identified variously as an Arab and a Westerner. His alchemical theories regarding metals and elements were followed by chemists until the sixteenth century.
49. Clavis Majoris Sapientiæ (The Key to Higher Wisdom), by Artephius (who flourished around 1150 and was probably an Arab), was first published in Latin in 1609; a German translation was published in 1717.
50. A book, not a person; first published in the thirteenth century, it consisted of mystical commentary on the Bible. Its historical origins and authorship have been controversial from the first. The most likely author appears to be its “discoverer,” a Spanish Jew named Moses de Léon (ca. 1250–1305).
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 48
