by Donald Tyson
A gate allows passage both in and out. The seals of the gates may be used as locks upon their portals to prevent the escape of the city's inhabitants. Even those gates that concern zones of the city related to places or things have numerous spiritual beings dwelling within who may seek to explore our world, just as we seek to explore the world of the mythos. It is better to seal the gates after leaving the city of the book. This may easily be done by looking at the image of the gate, imagining it to close, and then tracing in the mind the seal of the key on the surface of its gate. A key by its nature both unlocks and locks, so the same seal serves for both functions.
Such precautious are not necessary when merely reading this text with the conscious awareness, since at such times the passage through the gates is purely intellectual, consisting of ideas without tangible astral substance. Should the reader find that his or her mind drifts, and that an abstracted, daydreaming condition occurs repeatedly while reading this book, it would be a useful precaution to deliberately seal the gate after exiting the city, by deliberately closing the gate in the imagination and tracing the sigil of its key on its outer surface. A word to the wise is sufficient in these matters. The Necronomicon and the mythos it represents are not without their potency in the receptive mind. Any traveler passing through a strange city in a foreign land must remain watchful of its byways and turnings.
Those impatient to open a gate, and unwilling to wait for the Sun to enter it, may use the entry of the Moon for the same purpose. The Moon makes one complete circuit of the heavens against the backdrop of the stars (sidereal lunation) in approximately twenty-seven days, crossing all thirteen astral gates. The ritual of opening a gate may be worked while the Moon occupies that gate, or less effectively when the Moon occupies the constellation of that gate, but bear in mind that the Moon and the Sun are quite different in their natures. The Moon rules dreams, visions, and illusions. Working a ritual of opening while the Moon passes within a gate is especially effective when seeking a prophetic dream or a dream vision associated with the nature of the key used to open that gate.
The phase the Moon while passing through a gate, whether it be waxing, waning, or full, has a bearing on the general quality of the results that are likely to be obtained. The best result is obtained when the gate is occupied by the full Moon, or the waxing Moon. The waning Moon is less trustworthy. When the Moon is new, it is in conjunction with the Sun, and at these times the Sun should be used to open the gate, not the Moon.
The calculation for the location of the Moon in the actual zodiacal constellations (as opposed to the astrological signs of the zodiac) at any given hour is obscure to most of us. Fortunately, the Internet has sites that show the location of the Moon in the constellations in real time. For example, the website "http:/ /heavens-above.com/" gives a sky-map of the constellation that contains the Moon for any given moment. By periodically refreshing this map, the motion of the Moon may be tracked across the constellation. The stars that form the gate of the constellation are labeled with their Greek letters, making it a relatively simple matter to determine when the Moon enters the gate. Probably the easiest way to learn these crossing days and hours for the Moon is by use of an astronomy program such as Stellarium, which can be easily installed on any computer.
Knowledgeable practitioners will divine another function of the gates and their keys-the manipulation of the matter of the Necronomicon mythos for the purposes of active practical magic. Such a use of this book is possible for a skilled occultist. Indeed, the system of the thirteen star gates of the actual zodiacal constellations need not be limited to Lovecraft's work, but is versatile enough to be used for general meditations, scryings, divinations, invocations, the making and empowering of charms and amulets, and even for the evocation of gods and spirits, particularly those who make their abodes beyond the planetary spheres amid the stars. Simply by using the power glyphs to creating different keys for specific ritual purposes, the gates may be employed in any form of magic, such as the magic of witchcraft, the Golden Dawn, Thelema, and even Enochian magic.
Power Glyphs Chart
The First Gate
he Necronomicon mythos is predicated on the assumption that the universe teams with alien forms of life, many of them intelligent yet some of them evolutionarily so far removed from the biological life that inhabits the surface of the Earth and its seas that we are scarcely able to recognize them as living beings. Aeons before the creation of humanity by the crinoid beings known as the Elder Race, our planet was populated by other alien species that had descended to its surface through space from distant star systems, or through dimensional gateways opened in the very fabric of space-time itself. These alien species built their cities and fought their wars with each other long before humans discovered the use of fire. n .1 C 1 11 .1 1• 1 1 1
Over the vast expanse of geological history these species diminished in potency and prominence. The Elder Race was beaten back by warfare to its first colony in Antarctica, and suffered to see its mighty city sealed beneath the ice of an advancing glacier before retreating to a deep sea-filled cavern. The invisible Old Ones retreated from a malign alignment of the stars in the heavens into the spaces that lie between dimensions, while the related spawn of Cthulhu sought protection by sealing themselves in stone crypts under the surface of the ground, and were subsequently covered by the waters of the Pacific Ocean when their great island of R'lyeh sank beneath the waves.
In spite of these retreats, which left the world in the condition we presently know, the once-dominant alien races continue to maintain a presence on our planet, some beneath the seas, others under the ground, in distant aeons, or from the spaces between the stars. They watch and wait for conditions to change, when the stars will come right, and the Earth will once again be favorable to their natures, so that they can emerge from their places of waiting and resume their roles as masters. They once ruled where we now rule, and as Abdul Alhazred observed in the Necronomicon, they will rule again.
Throughout our history, these alien species have been classed as spirits, ghosts, monsters, angels, demons, and gods as humanity struggled to recast them into terms it could understand. Their sciences, so far in advance of anything we have achieved even in our modern age, were regarded as magic. They were by turns worshipped and shunned. The remnants of their cities became places of holy pilgrimage for the cults that adore them, or forbidden zones that none dared enter. Objects left scattered by the passage of their civilizations were cherished as icons of obscure religions, and fragments of their language were remembered in the form of magic chants and ritual observances.
Confusion can arise over Lovecraft's use of the terms "old ones," "elder race," "elder things," and similar terms, even for those well familiar with his writings, because Lovecraft sometimes used the same terms for different species. The Old ones is a general term employed by characters in Lovecraft's fiction to refer to several alien races that occupy hidden corners of the Earth, or have occupied it in the distant past. It may be useful here to briefly distinguish between them.
Yog-Sothoth, who in The Dunwich Horror came through a dimensional gate above Sentinel Hill to breed with the mortal woman Lavinia Whateley for the purpose of producing hybrid offspring that could be multiplied to destroy all life on Earth, was one of an alien race of invisible Old Ones. It is to this race that the term is most commonly applied.
The crinoid race described in the story At the Mountains of Madness, which dwelt in a cyclopean lost city on a plateau of Antarctica, were called the Great Old Ones, but were also referred to as Elder Things. In order to distinguish them from the Old Ones of the Dunwich Horror, the general convention is to refer to this latter group of Old Ones as Elder Things or the Elder Race, since they were on the Earth prior to the coming of the invisible Old Ones, and hence from the human point of view are older than the Old Ones.
A third race to which the name Old ones is applied occurs in the story The Mound, co-written by Lovecraft with Zealia Bishop.
There is no question that the mythological aspects are Lovecraft's contribution. These Old Ones are much like human beings and live under the surface of the ground. They are deathless and do not breed. It is fabled that they came to this planet from the distant stars long ago and were the ancestors of all men.
In the Whisperer in Darkness, the name old Ones is applied to the Mi-Go, an alien race from Yuggoth, the planet we know as Pluto. These elusive creatures are somewhat similar in appearance to crustaceans with pinkish bodies around five feet long, several sets of limbs, and membranous wings. They are composed of the same type of alien substance, so completely unlike ordinary living tissue, that makes up the Old Ones, and also Cthulhu and his spawn.
Lovecraft makes clear that the present conditions upon our world, in which the human race dominates-or appears to dominate-all other forms of life, are anomalous. They cannot and will not long endure. Humanity is living in a kind of bubble of conceit, the illusion of which may burst at any moment, precipitating a reign of horror unknown to us, but of common occurrence on the ancient Earth.
At any time, a geological upheaval may raise mighty Cthulhu from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The stars may come right at last in the heavens, opening the dimensional gateways of Yog-Sothoth to pour forth the Old Ones into our reality. The Elder Things may choose to leave the protection of their subterranean world and seek the surface once again; or their one-time servants, the shoggoths, may abandon their places of concealment-and if they did, what power of man could stop them? The Mi-Go may return in greater numbers once more to our planet to conquer it, thereby securing access to the ore they cannot obtain on Yuggoth. It may enter the minds of the Deep Ones to conquer and rule the surface of the world, as they presently rule the oceans.
One or more of these various eventualities is not only possible, but regarded by Lovecraft as inevitable. The human race inhabits a kind of dream world that can be destroyed at any time as swiftly and easily as a man kicks apart an anthill. Those who take Lovecraft's visions seriously should regard the threat posed by the return of his fictional races as a metaphor for the very real threat to our continued existence as a species that is posed by the realities that lie behind those fictions. It is certain that in the vastness of space and time, and in the multiplicities of higher dimensions of reality, there exist many strange races of beings who might, at any moment of their choosing, obliterate not only the human species, but all life on this planet, and indeed, the very planet itself.
The ruling intelligent race of our Earth's final period, just prior to its destruction. The time-travelers of Yith sometimes visited their distantly future world.
(The Shadow Out of Time)
A race or sect of beings which the 'Umr at-Tawil (Most Ancient One) tells Randolph Carter are his "extensions" on Earth.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
The race of highly intelligent beetles that will rule the Earth after the passing away of the human race. The naked minds of the time-spanning Great Race of Yith will seek sanctuary in their forms in our future, after abandoning the rugose cones they inhabited in our distant past.
(The Shadow Out of Time)
A race of beings that flourished on the Earth from one billion years ago until around fifty million years ago. Their iridescent bodies were shaped like a cone, with a globular head having four eyes and arm-like appendages, two of which ended in prehensile claws. They stood approximately ten feet in height, and were ten feet broad at the base. Their native minds were displaced 600 million years ago by the invading alien minds of the time-spanning Great Race of Yith. In The Shadow Out of Time, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee suffered the same fate, temporarily, and found himself in one of the coneshaped bodies of the Great Race. He discovered that it was their habit to send forth minds to distant times and places, in order to learn alien sciences. When they did so, the minds of the beings they inhabited were transported into their conical bodies.
(The Shadow Out of Time; The Challenge From Beyond)
The Elder Race, Elder Things, or Elder Ones, as they are variously designated by Lovecraft, are formed of normal matter of incredible durability and toughness. This alien species was sometimes referred to by Lovecraft as the Old Ones, but it is very different in nature from the gelatinous, blood-sucking thing in the Whateley farmhouse that is described in The Dunwich Horror. Whereas the bodies of the beings who are more usually called the Old Ones are made up of substances not of this world, so that when their hybrid children die they simply evaporate into the air, the flesh of the Elder Race is described in At the Mountains of Madness as "leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible." They cannot reshape or reform themselves as can the Old Ones and their kin. A measure of their durability is that a small number of the race lay in a dormant condition, frozen solid for forty million years, yet suffered no serious ill effects after they were revived.
Lovecraft has provided a detailed description of these beings. They stand upright and are eight feet in total length. The central six feet is made up of a barrel-shaped torso with five vertical ridges. Membranous wings seven feet long when extended are folded up between these ridges. Presumable there are five wings, although Lovecraft is not explicit on this point. From the center of each ridge extends a flexible gray tentacle that branches into five stalks, each of which branches into five more slender stalks, so that each tentacle has twenty-five thin fingers. These tentacles serve the creatures as arms and reach to a maximum of three feet from the barrel torso.
On the top of a blunt neck lighter gray in color than the body is a flat head shaped like a starfish. The neck is surrounded by gills. The entire head is covered with wiry cilia three inches in length that are every color of the rainbow. The head is two feet across, with a slit in the top for breathing when out of the water-for these beings are as much at home on land as in the sea. At the end of each of the five points is a short yellow stalk that terminates in a red eye. Between the points of the head extend longer reddish tubes that terminate in mouths that have small white teeth. Its vocal organs are adapted to a language that consists of shrill pipings similar to the notes of a flute.
The anatomy at the base of the barrel torso is similar to that of the head, but serves a different function, that of locomotion. A thick neck light gray in color extends downward from the torso, and terminates in a greenish starfish-like shape, from the points of which extend five flexible legs around four feet in length that end in flat, paddle-like feet. Each foot is green and shaped like a triangle eight inches long and six inches wide at its tip. From the inner angles of this lower starfish-like structure extend reddish tubes two feet in length with orifices at their tips that serve an excretory function.
The Elder Race propagates by means of spores. In place of blood, they have a thick fluid dark green in color. Their bodies emit an unpleasant odor described as pungent and acrid that causes dogs to react with intense hostility. Their brain is large and five-lobed, their nervous system advanced and complex. They have senses beyond the five with which we are familiar. These creatures cannot be classed as either animal or vegetable, but are a curious blending of the two categories. Lovecraft's narrator in At the Mountains of Madness connects them with the Elder Things referred to by Alhazred in the Necronomicon.
They are known as the Elder Race because they came to this planet before the coming of the Old Ones. When the Old Ones crossed space to reach our world, they found the Elder Race already well established, with mighty cities all over the face of the globe. The Elder Race colonized this world before it contained any life, when it was only naked lava flows and sterile seas. In the Necronomicon it is suggested that the Elder Things created all life on this planet, or at least all the beginnings of the life that later evolved. Alhazred was not clear as to why they did so. He thought that it had been done either as a great cosmic joke, or that perhaps it was merely a mistake. It may be presumed that Alhazred was recording lore already ancient in his time. Lovecraft's narrator characterizes the Elder Race as th
e "makers and enslavers" of earthly life.
The notion that life on Earth was a mistake, that it was not intended to exist in the greater scheme of things, is in harmony with the Necronomicon teaching, as related in The Dunwich Horror, that the Old Ones will one day wipe our planet clean of all biological surface life, before returning it to its former place in a higher dimension, from which it fell. If the Earth had been originally sterile, they would naturally view biological organisms as a kind of contamination or infection, to be washed away before this globe could be set back in its proper place. It might also explain in part the intense enmity between the Old Ones and the organic Elder Things-for these two alien races made wars against each other, contesting for control of this world long before humanity evolved.
The Elder Race came to our planet by flying across space on their membranous wings, which were able to push against the aether of space itself. They established their cities under the oceans of our barren sphere, and created various life forms familiar to them from their former worlds of origin to serve as their food sources and slave laborers. Chief among the workers were the shoggoths, enormous protoplasmic organisms similar to giant amoebas some fifteen feet in diameter that used their great strength to lift the enormous stone blocks of the submarine cities the Elder Race inhabited. Eventually they extended their habitations to the dry land, once it had been rendered less harsh by the growth of plant life.
Their original place of settlement was the Antarctic Ocean, and their first land cities were on the landmass of Antarctica, which was warm at this period in the history of the Earth. For a time they were driven back into the oceans by a war that they fought with alien invaders described in Lovecraft's story as "a land race of beings shaped like octopi" that Lovecraft identified as the spawn of Cthulhu. The two alien races made peace for a time, and the Elder Race returned to the older landmasses and kept the seas, while the spawn of Cthulhu occupied the newer volcanic landmasses rising up from the ocean floors. The Elder Race made its greatest city on a high plateau of the Antarctic, and regarded the land it occupied as sacred, since it had been the first place of settlement.
