The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon

by Donald Tyson

  In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Carter is mentioned only in passing as a friend to Doctor Marinus Bicknell Willett, who had once spoken to Willett about the power of the sign of Koth, a symbol which dreamers sometimes see fixed above the archway to a certain black tower in the dreamlands. Willett was made uncomfortable recalling the things Carter had told him, but what those secrets may have been, Lovecraft did not reveal.

  (The Statement of Randolph Carter; The Unnamable; The Silver Key; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

  The mind of Randolph Carter, inhabiting the alien body of the wizard Zkauba, traveled to present-day earth from the distant past of the planet Yaddith through a timespace portal, as described in Through the Gates of the Silver Key. He called himself Swami Chandraputra, "an adept from Benares"-a guise adopted by Carter to conceal his alien form while he acquired the occult knowledge necessary to regain his human body. He appeared in Arkham in 1930, and from 1930 to 1932 lived in a flat in Chambers Street in the West End of Boston, where he pursued his researches. His speech had a hollow, metallic quality on the ear. His dark face was partially hidden behind a bushy black beard, and he wore the turban of a high-caste Brahman on his head, and mittens over his hands. His oddest feature was his deep-set eyes, which are described as "night-black, burning, almost irisless." In reality, his face was only a mask to hide Zakauba's alien features, just as the mittens served to cover his alien claws. When Zkauba regained control of his own body, he leapt through a time-space portal in the form of a tall, coffin-shaped clock with four hands, dragging the unwilling mind of Carter back with him to Yaddith.

  Chandraputra was given a brief reference in the story Out of the Aeons, where he is described as a very strange character with a labored, unnatural voice and an expressionless face, who always wore mittens over his hands. He appeared in Boston at the Cabot Museum of Archaeology in November of 1932, where he quickly demonstrated that he was "unbelievably erudite in occult lore" and had some knowledge of the mysterious hieroglyphic scroll in the iridescent cylinder that was one of the prize exhibits of the museum.

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key; Out of the Aeons)

  Colonel James Churchward (1851-1936), the author of the 1926 work The Lost Continent of Mu, Motherland of Man, and two other books on Mu, was drawn into the Necronomicon mythos when Lovecraft made him into a minor off-stage character of his story Through the Gates of the Silver Key. In the story, Churchward has been consulted about certain strange hieroglyphics on the parchment that was left to Randolph Carter along with an ornate silver key. Churchward offers his opinion that the hieroglyphics are not Naacal, the writing of lost Mu, nor do they resemble the symbols found on an Easter Island war club. Churchward is mentioned in passing in Out of the Aeons, along with Lewis Spence, as an authority on "lost continents and primal forgotten civilizations."

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key; Out of the Aeons)

  A witch of Salem, Massachusetts. His daughter married Dirck van der Heyl, and the couple lived in Albany until 1746, when accusations of witchcraft drove them out.

  (The Diary of Alonzo Typer)

  A Florentine monk of the twelfth century whose mind was imprisoned in the distant past in a cone-shaped body by the time-spanning Great Race of Yith. He conversed with Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a former resident of Arkham and professor at Miskatonic University whose mind was similarly trapped.

  (The Shadow Out of Time)

  A Cimmerian chieftain who lived circa 15,000 BC. Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee conversed with him while Peaslee's mind was held prisoner by the Yithians. This character is a minor tribute to Robert E. Howard, with whom Lovecraft carried on a friendly letter correspondence. Howard's greatest creation, Conan the Barbarian, was a Cimmerian, and the god of the Cimmerians was named Crom.

  (The Shadow Out of Time)

  An alchemist and necromancer born in 1662 at Salem-Village (now called Danvers), Massachusetts, not far from Salem. The full nature of his involvement in the Salem witch persecution is not known, but in 1692 when the witch trials were in progress, he was forced to flee from Salem to Providence, Rhode island, where he settled and prospered as a merchant and slave trader. His true avocation was not trade, but necromancy. Working with the alchemists Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem by means of written correspondence, Curwen perfected a technique for resurrecting the dead from their essential salts. He procured ancient corpses from the far places of the world, reduced them to their essential salts, and then brought the dead to life to extract by torture their secrets of magic. Through his alchemy he was able to prolong his own life and maintain his youthful appearance in Providence for almost eight decades, but in 1781 the townspeople of Providence mounted a raid on his lands and killed him.

  In 1928 Curwen's descendant, the occult student Charles Dexter Ward, resurrected him from his essential salts. For a time the two studied together and resumed Curwen's necromantic work, but when Ward's horror began to grow at the monstrous evils they were committing, and at his ancestor's dark designs, Curwen murdered him and assumed his identity. This was made possible by a close facial resemblance between Curwen and his descendant that was not accidental, but the result of magic worked by Curwen during his first life to ensure his resurrection.

  Due to his changed manner and the obvious gaps in his memory, Curwen masquerading as Ward was pronounced insane and locked into a mental institution. The Ward family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, investigated the land where Curwen's old farmhouse had stood and discovered a catacomb of horrors in tunnels beneath it. Visiting the asylum, he reversed the necromantic spell that had given Curwen life, and returned him to his essential salts.

  (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  Called the last of the Neoplatonists, Damascius (480-c. 550) is remembered chiefly for commentaries on the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and other Greek philosophers. He is mentioned by Lovecraft in The Nameless City, where the narrator speaks of "paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius" along with other dread works by Abdul Alhazred and Gautier de Metz. There is no evidence that Damascius ever wrote anything that might be described as "apocryphal nightmares."

  (The Nameless City)

  The First Baron Exham, he received the title to Exham Priory, just outside of Anches- ter, a village in Exeter, in the southwest of England, from King Henry III in 1261. In the year 1307 the family became cursed. The de la Poers entered into a black pact with an inhuman race of beings that dwelt in caverns deep beneath the ancient house, a pact that entailed human sacrifice and cannibal feasts.

  (The Rats in the Walls)

  The eleventh Baron Exham, he tried to lift the ancient curse that had hung over his family estate of Exham Priory for centuries by slaughtering his father, five of his siblings, and several family servants. He fled to the colony of Virginia, aided in his escape by the grateful people of the nearby village of Anchester.

  (The Rats in the Walls)

  The friend of Randolph Carter and a native of the old French Quarter of New Orleans. De Marigny met Carter while the two were both serving in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War. Both men shared an intense interest in occult studies. On a joint furlough, de Marigny took Carter to Bayonne, in the south of France, and revealed to Carter "certain terrible secrets" in the network of crypts beneath that ancient city. This act of trust sealed their friendship for life. Carter appointed de Marigny as the executor of his estate, should he die before the Creole. After Carter's disappearance at age 54, de Marigny prepared to handle the division of Carter's estate, and was present when the strange revelations of Swami Chandraputra were made in de Marigny's New Orleans home, as related in Through the Gates of the Silver Key. De Marigny is described in this story as "slim, dark, handsome, mustached, and still young."

  Another reference is made to the "famous New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny" in Through the Aeons, where he is said to h
ave written an article in the Occult Review concerning the hieroglyphics on the scroll inside the iridescent cylinder that is part of the collection of the Cabot Museum of Boston. De Marigny contended that several of the hieroglyphs on the scroll corresponded with certain ideographs copied from monoliths or from secret rituals of obscure cults by Friedrich von Junzt, and recorded in his book Nameless Cults.

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key; Out of the Aeons)

  French poet of the thirteenth century who wrote a poem about creation and the nature of the universe titled "L'Image du monde" ("Portrait of the World"). The narrator of The Nameless City characterized this poem as "delirious." It describes a spherical Earth, and part of the work is astrological.

  (The Nameless City)

  The Elizabethan mathematician and cartographer Dr. John Dee is supposed to have made an English translation of the Necronomicon. A copy of the book was in the keeping of Wilbur Whateley, an inheritance from his grandfather, but it had become damaged and a portion of the text was missing. This caused Wilbur to attempt to learn the content of the missing pages by comparing his book with the Latin version of the Necronomicon in the library of Miskatonic University.

  Had the Necronomicon existed in a physical sense during the Elizabethan Age, it is quite probable that John Dee would have possessed a copy. He was a renowned scholar, and his personal library was the largest in England. Men came from all over Europe to consult Dee and his books. Dee's primary interest was the use of magic to forward the geopolitical ambitions of his sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I, and to ensure his own financial prosperity. His library contained many forbidden books on magic, and Dee himself engaged for a period of years in an almost daily communication with a hierarchy of spirits identifying themselves as the angels who had instructed the patriarch Enoch in the occult arts. Dee was very much a practicing magician and an alchemist.

  For the past three centuries, historians and biographers have tended to gloss over Dee's occult practices in an attempt to avoid tainting Dee's reputation as a great scholar with the stain of superstition. Much the same was true for the memory of Sir Isaac Newton, who at one period of his life was an ardent alchemist, and who studied biblical prophecy and astrology. In recent decades, Dee's role as a magician has come forth in biographies that no longer attempt to conceal his communications with spirits or his practice of alchemy.

  Although it is almost certain that Dee would have possessed a copy of the Necronomicon, had it existed on the material plane, it is unlikely that he would have made an English translation. Dee had no need to translate Latin texts into English for his own use. Latin was the universal language of European scholars of the period. Dee would have considered the Necronomicon far too dangerous a book to place into the hands of his untutored countrymen. If a copy of the work in Arabic or Greek had fallen into his hands, he would probably have made a Latin translation, not an English translation. Had he acquired a Latin copy, he would not have translated it at all.

  Nonetheless, Lovecraft himself asserted in his fictional history of the Necronomicon that an English copy of the work, translated by John Dee, exists, and it has become a firm part of the lore of the mythos. No historical figure, with the possible exception of Johannes Trithemius, was better suited to make sense of the Necronomicon than John Dee. In the transcriptions of his communications with the Enochian angels, Dee produced a book that is almost as interesting as the Necronomicon, containing as it does an entire system of angel magic and an angelic language.

  (The Dunwich Horror)

  A descendant of the infamous de la Poer family of England, after his return to Carfax, Virginia, from the Mexican War in 1848, he went among the negroes and became a Voodoo priest. It is unlikely that he possessed any knowledge of the ancient curse that hung over his family.

  (The Rats in the Walls)

  A poetic genius and child prodigy, who at the age of seven was composing poems that astounded his tutors, both for their technical skill and their morbid subject matter. His juvenilia was published when he was eighteen under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. His weak constitution caused his parents to keep him segregated from other children, but constantly watched over by nurses and servants, fostering a love of the fantastic and bizarre as an avenue of refuge. The wealth of his family removed any necessity for him to seek practical employment as an adult. He became a keen student of the occult while attending Miskatonic University, an institution of higher learning noted for its library of arcane and prohibited books on magic.

  His mother died when he was thirty-four. He began to associate with occult groups in Europe and to perform rituals of black magic. When he was thirty-eight he married Asenath Waite, of the Innsmouth Waites, who shared his obsession with the occult. Lovecraft intimated that Asenath was a hybrid of a union between a human father and a mother who was a Deep One. The initial happiness of the union turned to horror for Derby when he became convinced that his wife was attempting to psychically displace his consciousness and occupy his body, to make it her own. Even more horrifying, it was not his wife seeking to accomplish this psychic rape, but the consciousness of her father, the wizard Ephraim Waite, who had previously stolen the youthful body of his daughter to serve as the vessel for his mind.

  Derby found himself unable to resist the power of Ephraim's will. The old Innsmouth wizard forced his consciousness into the body of Derby, and simultaneously forced the consciousness of Derby into the body of Asenath. Then he killed Asenath's body. The soul of Derby, bound to the corpse of Asenath, was able through the use of his acquired necromantic knowledge to animate the putrefying flesh and use it to pass a message to his childhood friend, Daniel Upton, begging Upton to kill Ephraim and thereby stop Ephraim's evil practices. Upton shot Ephraim, in Derby's body, six times in the head. So ended, for the second time, the unfortunate life of Edward Pickman Derby.

  (The Thing on the Doorstep)

  The divine, or semi-divine, monarch of the dreamland city of Cathuria, which is noteworthy for its unusual architecture. The palace of Dorieb has marble turrets and a roof of pure gold supported by ten pillars. The floor is of glass, allowing the fish swimming in the river Narg that flows beneath the palace to be viewed by its inhabitants.

  (The White Ship)

  This twenty-one year old man from a wealthy Bostonian family does not attend university or hold a job, but spends his days wandering through the woods and fields near his home, particularly a wooden hollow that contains the ancestral tomb of the Hydes, to whom he is distantly related on his mother's side. He conceives an obsession for the tomb, and for the dead who lie within, with whom he begins to nightly frolic and mingle. As he puts it, "I tasted to the full joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not describe."

  He gradually takes on the mannerisms and speech affectations of a rake of the late eighteenth century, specifically those of his ancestor Jervas Hyde, whose empty coffin lies within the tomb, but whose bones were burned to ashes and scattered in a house fire. The implication is that he becomes possessed with the spirit of Jervas Hyde, which longs to lie at rest within the family tomb. When his parents grow concerned about his outlandish behavior and have him watched, they discover that he goes each night and stretches out on the ground outside the stone door of the padlocked tomb, staring at the crack in the doorway with half-opened eyes in a kind of trance that resembles sleep. The young man swears he enters the tomb each night and converses and interacts with the shades of the dead. Ultimately, his parents have him committed to a mental institution.

  It is obvious that Jervas Dudley is yet another fictionalized version of Lovecraft, who fancied himself an English gentleman with no need to work for a living, who affected the speech mannerisms of the eighteenth century, who had difficulty fitting into a school routine, who spent his youth wandering by himself, and who always feared the spectre of madness that took both his parents. Lovecraft was obsessed with genealogy, heredity, and the past. He was a dreamer who regarded his dreams as more attractive and in s
ome ways more real than waking life. It is interesting to note that Dudley finds a key in a box in the attic, a family relic that opens the lock on the door of the tomb, but it turns out to exist only in his dreams; another of Lovecraft's alter egos, Randolph Carter, also finds a key in the attic, a family relic that for the dreamer Carter opens the gates beyond time and space.

  There is a strong sexual innuendo in Dudley's pleasures within the tomb. After the first night he "staggers from the vault" and drags himself home in the "grey light of dawn [...] no longer a young man." Those who saw him pass in the street "marveled at the signs of ribald revelry." Lovecraft was not explicit about what the "full joys" of "charnel conviviality" might have been, but we may speculate that they included the loss of sexual innocence, since the virtuous Jervas Dudley becomes the dissipated rake Jervas Hyde-the name having been chosen by Lovecraft as a literary nod to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It may be added that it is perfectly possible to have a full sexual experience with an astral being, so this erotic intimation of Lovecraft's is not without foundation in occult practices.

  Those who might assume that the suggestion of sexual relations with the dead was too risque for Lovecraft's era should examine the story The Loved Dead, co-written with C. M. Eddy, where the narrator takes work in a funeral home in order to have the freedom to, as he puts it, "devise new and unspeakable ways of lavishing my affections upon the dead that I loved." He is discovered in the early morning by the director of the funeral home, lying asleep on a slab with his arms wrapped around the "stark, stiff, naked body of a fetid corpse."

  (The Tomb)

  A "swarthy, simian-faced, Indian-like" resident of the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York. In 1935 he found the diary of Alonzo Typer in the collapsed ruins of the van der Heyl house, that had formerly stood near the center of the village.