The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon

by Donald Tyson

  He was able to establish contact off of Devil Reef, not far outside Innsmouth harbor, where there was a deep rift in the sea floor. He created a new religion, the Esoteric Order of Dagon. The priests of the new religion were drawn from the ranks of his own crew. Marsh began to offer in sacrifice the young people of Innsmouth to the Deep Ones off Devil Reef. In return, the town began to prosper. Marsh set up a refinery to smelt down the gold articles he bartered with the Deep Ones, since they could not be sold in their original state without arousing unwanted attention in the outer world. His three daughters decked themselves in this strange and sometimes ill-fitting gold jewelry, which had not been designed to be worn on the human body. Overnight, the fishing off Devil Reef became abundant.

  Most of the town remained unaware of this hellish commerce. March and his cult abducted their sacrifices in secret, and kept silent about where they obtained the strange gold pieces they wore. Eventually, suspicions were raised, and in 1846 a group of townsfolk not in Marsh's circle rowed out to Devil Reef while a ritual was in progress, and arrested Marsh and thirty-two others, placing them in the town jail. For a period of two weeks nothing happened. Then one night the Deeps Ones emerged from the sea to liberate their human worshippers. There was a general massacre. The only ones allowed to live were those in the new church and those other townsfolk who swore not to interfere with the sacrifices and rituals. The loss of life due to the massacre was explained away in the outer world as a plague.

  The Deep Ones demanded the freedom to visit with the townspeople and have social and sexual intercourse with them. Marsh did not even try to refuse. Perhaps he recognized that to oppose the amphibians would be futile, or he may have decided it was the best way to bind the townspeople in loyalty to the Deep Ones. Some of the Deep Ones began to stay as guests in certain houses in the town. Everyone was compelled to take the first Oath of Dagon as a display of solidarity. Those who were more closely involved in the affairs of the Deep Ones took a second or even a third oath that bound them to more serious consequences, which Lovecraft did not specify. Zadok Allen asserted that he took the first and second oath from Marsh himself, but would rather have died than to have taken the third oath.

  In 1846, following the massacre, Marsh took a second wife from among the Deep Ones, and she gave birth to three children. Allen stated that two of them vanished in childhood, presumably beneath the waves, but that a daughter was educated in Europe and was married to an unwitting husband from Arkham. In 1927 when the story takes place, the Marsh refinery was being managed by Obed's grandson, Barnabas, who was half human and half Deep One. Barnabas was the son of Obed's eldest son Onesipho- rus, who was wholly human, being from Obed's first marriage, but Barnabas had a Deep One for a mother, and was almost changed enough to retire from the land and take up his life beneath the sea.

  The Old Ones planned a general attack against humanity using as weapons some of the creatures from the deepest depths, among them shoggoths, but this was disrupted, temporarily at least, by a government raid that took place early in 1928. Torpedoes were sent into the rift beyond Devil Reef, where the Deep Ones had their city. This did enough damage to at least delay their plans, but it did not destroy them. Obed Marsh died in 1878, but his legacy and his bloodline live on in Innsmouth. His hybrid children engendered on his second wife may never die, baring accidents. Those with the "Innsmouth look"-signs of the transformation from human to amphibian-turn up in odd places in Lovecraft's fiction, always connected with dark doings and evil magic.

  (The Shadow Over Innsmouth)

  The witch Keziah Mason was convicted of witchcraft in the town of Salem in the year 1692, but before her execution could occur, she drew occult curves and angled lines on the solid stone walls of her jail cell using a sticky red liquid, and vanished into thin air. At her trial she had informed judge John Hathorne of certain lines and curves that could point the way through the walls of space to other spaces beyond. By means of this alien geometry, Keziah was able to travel to distant worlds and through strange dimensions of space. The corner of the room in an old house in Arkham in which she had once lived was constructed in such a manner that the very angles of the walls served as a dimensional gateway.

  She is hag-like in appearance, with a bent back, long nose, and shriveled chin, and her voice is an unpleasant croaking. She dresses in shapeless brown clothing. Keziah has the disturbing habit of appearing and disappearing at will. Never far from her is her familiar, a rat-like creature named Brown Jenkin with a bearded human face and paws that are like the tiny hands of a man. Keziah suckles it with her own blood. In return, the unnatural beast carries messages between the old witch and the Black Man of the sabbat, who is one of the guises adopted by Nyarlathotep when he has dealings with humanity. The Black Man gave Keziah a secret name, Nahab, by which she is known at the other-dimensional gatherings of witches. The old crone sacrifices infants in his honor, and to renew her own occult powers.

  (The Dreams in the Witch House)

  Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a religious fanatic and witch-hunter of New England, was mentioned in several of Lovecraft's stories, both for his Magnalia Christi Americana and for his Wonders of the Invisible World, where he examines the practices and nature of witches. The artist Richard Pickman of the story Pickman's Model reviled Mather because Mather witnessed the hanging of his "four-times-great-grandmother" for witchcraft on Gallows Hill at Salem. Pickman expressed the wish that someone had "laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night." Joseph Curwen wrote in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward "you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of , and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported."

  (The Unnamable; Pickman's Model; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  A descendant of the Van Kauran clan of wizards, and native of Mountain Top, New York, he worked a spell from the Book of Ebon to turn the sculptor Arthur Wheeler to stone, because he believed that Wheeler was having an affair with his wife.

  (The Man of Stone)

  Bearded priest of the temple to the earthly gods in the cavern of flame, near the gates to the dreamlands. He presides there with his fellow priest, Kaman-Thah.

  (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

  A pharaoh of ancient Egypt who erected a temple with a windowless crypt in which was placed the Shining Trapezohedron, a great, faceted black jewel with enormous occult power. In some way that is not recorded, but was regarded as an abomination by the priests of Egypt, Nephren-Ka made use of the jewel, and for that transgression, his name was erased from all monuments and scrolls, and the temple of the Trapezohedron pulled down on top of the jewel, which rested beneath the rubble until it was unearthed by Professor Enoch Bowen in 1844.

  Nephren-Ka is mentioned in Lovecraft's story The Outsider-reference is made to the "catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile." They may be the same catacombs which Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon, explored near Memphis, as mentioned by Lovecraft in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith dated November 27, 1927. It may be that the temple of the Trapezohedron was located near the catacombs in the lost valley.

  (The Haunter of the Dark; The Outsider)

  This queen of Egypt, and last pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty, was mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in his History (bk. 2, ch. 100), and also by the Egyptian historian Manetho, whose Egyptian history, written in Greek, survives only in fragments. Herodotus related the story that Nitocris murdered a group of conspirators who had assassinated her brother (unnamed by Herodotus), the pharaoh, to whom she was married by the royal customs of Egypt, by luring the conspirators into a subterranean room for a banquet, and flooding it with water from the Nile. After achieving her revenge, she then killed herself by throwing herself into a chamber filled with ashes (Herodotus, pp. 113-4). Manetho claimed that she had built the third pyramid at Giza, and described her as beautiful. Modern historians question whether she ever existed, and tend to regard the account of Herodotus as a fable.

  In the
story Imprisoned with the Pharaohs she is characterized as the "ghoul-queen" who rules with her husband, the Egyptian pharaoh Khephren, over mummies who are neither animal nor human, deep underground in secret chambers and passages beneath the Sphinx and the Pyramids. The narrator of the story, Houdini, comments about the Pyramids, "Even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly-for was it not in this that they had buried Queen Nitocris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen Nitocris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon." In The Outsider, mention is made of "the unnamed feasts of Nitocris beneath the Great Pyramid." Note the variation in the spelling of the name, which is probably just an error on Lovecraft's part.

  (Imprisoned With the Pharaohs; The Outsider)

  A magician of the "dark conquerors" of 16,000 AD whose mind had been displaced by the time-spanning mind of a Yithian, and trapped in the Yithian's cone-shaped body more than fifty million years in the past.

  (The Shadow Out of Time)

  This very old woman of Kingsport lives in Ship Street. Along with the Terrible One Man, who dwells in Water Street, she is the unofficial historian of Kingsport.

  (The Strange High House in the Mist)

  A native of Crane Street, in the town of Arkham, he was born and raised in the town of Haverhill. In 1895 he became a teacher of political economics at Miskatonic University. Three years later he rose to the rank of associate professor, and in 1902 attained the title of full professor at this prestigious institution of higher learning. Peaslee's mind was forcibly displaced from 1908 to 1913 by the projected mind of a member of the Great Race of Yith, and he abruptly found himself within the ten-foot tall, cone-shaped body of the Yithian, a prisoner of an alien species in a distant time. During the duration of this captivity, the Yithian in his human body embarked on an intensive study of occult subjects, and participated in secret cultic activities. The alien mind sought out and read such forbidden works as Cultes des Goules by the Comte d'Erlette, De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the enigmatic Book of Eibon, and the most infamous book of them all, the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, a Latin copy of which is kept in the Miskatonic University Library.

  After the mind of the Yithian learned all it considered useful, it constructed a machine of mirrors and lenses and used it to return to its own body. The mind of Peaslee was thrust back into his human shell, and he awoke with no memory of the time that had passed. He discovered that his wife had divorced him in horror at his changed manner. He regained custody of his second son, Wingate, who later became a professor of psychology at Miskatonic University. The Yithians had inserted a mental barrier that prevented him from remembering what had transpired while he inhabited the body of the alien. Gradually, Peaslee regained his memories, and recalled being in a great library with other alien prisoners whose minds had been displaced from their original bodies by the time-traveling minds of the Yithians. The Yithians took good care of their captive minds, and allowed them to study and converse amongst themselves.

  Peaslee discovered that a secret cult existed among humanity that worshipped the Yithians and aided the time travelers from Yith when they made their presence known to its members. It was with this cult that the Yithian in Peaslee's body had trafficked, and it was a member of this cult that removed from Peaslee's room the machine by which the Yithian had effected a return to its own flesh. The existence of this cult is hinted at in the Necronomicon.

  (The Shadow Out of Time)

  A scholar and occultist at Constantinople who translated the Necronomicon from its original Arabic into Greek in the year 950. It was Philetas who gave the book its Greek name-prior to his translation it had been known as Al Azif, which is said to signify the "howling of demons."

  (History of the Necronomicon)

  Lovecraft inserted himself into his own stories a number of times, the most obvious example being the character of Randolph Carter, the dream adventurer. However, his identity was never more thinly veiled than in the person of Ward Phillips, who appears in Through the Gates of the Silver Key. "Ward" is the latter half of Lovecraft's first name, and "Phillips" is Lovecraft's middle name. He is a friend of Carter's, and the only one who is convinced that Carter is not dead, but has merely vanished into the dreamlands. He is described as an "elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island"; Providence was Lovecraft's home town. Although Lovecraft was not an old man, he had the curious affectation that he believed himself much older than his years, on some mental or spiritual level, and would often refer to himself as an old man when speaking of himself to his friends.

  The character Ward Phillips was a writer of fiction who had written about Carter's disappearance, even as Lovecraft had done. Phillips was convinced that Carter now "reigned as king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad," a city of the dreamlands. Phillips described himself as a dreamer, meaning a dream traveler, and it seems beyond question that Lovecraft thought of himself in these terms. Phillips is said to be "lean, gray, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered," a description that very well suited Lovecraft himself.

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

  In the story Pickman's Model, Pickman is an avant-garde painter of Boston who specializes in horrific portraits. Many critics are repelled by his work, particularly his masterpiece titled Ghoul Feeding. No art institution in Boston will exhibit it or accept it, no art patron will buy it, so horrible is its subject. Pickman keeps a studio in the rundown section of Boston known as the North End. The artist informs the narrator of the tale, a man named Eliot Thurber, that half the streets of the North End were laid out by 1650, and that the entire region was once interconnected by an intricate set of tunnels leading from the cellars of the houses to Copp's Hill burying ground and to the sea. Pickman asserts that north of Prince Street there are thirty or forty alleys, the existence of which is not even suspected by more than ten English Bostonians.

  Pickman is not only abhorred by Boston art society for the subjects of his paintings, but because of his increasingly repellent appearance and manner, which the narrator hints may have something to do with his choice of diet. One of Pickman's former friends named Reid declares that Pickman's "features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a way that wasn't human." He believes that Pickman is "a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution," or so Pickman himself phrases it. Thurber mentions that Pickman came from old Salem stock and had an ancestor hanged for witchcraft in 1692.

  One night, Pickman offers to show Thurber his studio in the North End. This studio was based on an actual building Lovecraft had seen while passing through this area of Boston. When Lovecraft returned in 1927 to view the structure, he found that it had been torn down, along with an irregular line of similar old buildings. It is described in the story as a dilapidated house with the windows boarded up, with a strange old brick well in its cellar. It is in the cellar that Pickman prefers to do his painting.

  The location of this studio is not specified, but it is not far beyond Constitution Wharf on the waterfront. The building dates back to the period of the witch trials. On the walls of the studio are arrayed the portraits that Pickman could not exhibit or sell in polite Bostonian society. Indeed, they are so shocking, Pickman could not even allow them to be seen in the art circles he frequented. The subjects are creatures only partly human in appearance, their bodies possessed of an unpleasant rubberiness and forward-slumping posture, with a canine cast to the faces and pointed ears.

  In a painting titled The Lesson, which Thurber finds particularly disgusting, these semi-humanoid creatures teach a young human child how to feed on human flesh in a graveyard. Thurber speculates that the child must represent an infant exchanged for a changeling-a human baby stolen from its crib, in which was left an inhuman infant of the race that
committed the theft. The usual superstitious assumption is that such infant abductions are carried out by fairies, but Lovecraft intimated through his narrator that they have a darker source, and are performed by ghouls, who then raise the human child as their own, teaching it to feed on the flesh of human corpses. Indeed, it is suggested in the story that ghouls are not a completely separate race, but have their origin in a degenerate strain of humanity.

  Pickman has depicted in another painting a young changeling child being raised as a human in a Puritan family. Thurber notes with growing horror that the face of the boy resembles very closely Pickman's own features. The implication is obvious, although unstated. Pickman is a ghoul who in infancy was left in exchange for a human baby, to be raised as a human being by his unwitting foster parents. That is the explanation for his degenerate facial features, noted by Reid. It must be presumed that when very young, ghouls look similar to human infants, but that as they mature they take on the more canine aspect of their own kind.

  This was the reason Pickman aroused increasing revulsion among his acquaintances. As the artist aged, he took on more of the characteristics of his own kind, and found it more difficult to masquerade as a human being. In this tendency to change with maturity, we find an echo of Lovecraft's Deep Ones, who when interbred with human women appear completely human in youth, but gradually become inhuman in appearance as they grow older. The same evolution is described in the case of Wilbur Whateley, a hybrid of a human mother and a father who was one of the Old Ones. Wilbur became increasingly monstrous as he aged.

  The canvases of Pickman depict an entire shadow world of Boston that is inhabited by ghouls who arise out of cracks and wells and wait in dark places to feed on the bodies of the dead, or if occasion arises, to slay the unwary living. In the cellar in which Pickman does his actual painting there is a circular well of brick, its rim raised some six inches above the floor, its mouth closed by a wooden cover. While the artist and Thurber are talking in an adjoining room, the cover clatters off the well, and Pickman rushes out with a revolver. The shots from the pistol frighten off whatever thing arises from the well. Mercifully for his sanity, Thurber does not see it.