The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon

by Donald Tyson

  (Beyond the Gates of the Silver Key)

  Wizard who wrote two occult diaries between the years 1560 and 1580 that concern the Nameless One. The occult investigator Alonzo Typer found both diaries in the old van der Heyl house in the New England village of Chorazin in the year 1935.

  (The Diary of Alonzo Typer)

  In 1746 he fled Albany with his Salem-born wife, a daughter of the notorious sorcerer Abaddon Corey, after they were accused of witchcraft. He built a farmhouse in the wilderness near what is now Attica, New York, over the hidden gateway to other worlds that is guarded by the creature known as the Nameless One.

  (The Diary of Alonzo Typer)

  Member of the van der Heyl family who came to New-Netherland from Europe in 1638 in search of occult information concerning the Nameless One, who is the Guardian of the Gate.

  (Diary of Alonzo Typer)

  Great-grandfather of Daniel Morris and one of the Van Kauran family of wizards. He disappeared from New Paltz in 1839.

  (The Man of Stone)

  Uncle of Daniel Morris, and descendant of the wizard Nicholas van Kauran, he kept his family's copy of the infamous grimoire known as the Book of Ebon safe throughout his life, even when he was run out of town for practicing black magic.

  (The Man of Stone)

  A wizard hanged in Wijtgaart in 1587 for black magic, who was widely known along the bank of the Hudson River in New York to have made "the bargain with the Black Man." The Black Man was the lord of the witches' sabbat, usually assumed by Christians to be the Devil or his proxy, but revealed by Lovecraft to have been Nyarlathotep. The bargain referred to was the infamous black pact.

  (The Man of Stone)

  Grandson of the wizard Nicholas van Kauran, he carried the copy of the Book of Ebon owned by his grandfather from Europe to New England.

  (The Man of Stone)

  The daughter of the wizard Ephraim Waite, one of the Innsmouth Waites. Her mother was an unknown woman who always went veiled in public. Lovecraft hints that she was one of the Deep Ones, an amphibious race that had contracted a hellish bargain with the folk of Innsmouth, and had intermarried with them to produce hybrid children. Asenath was such a hybrid, as her unnaturally protuberant eyes showed. She had what is known as the "Innsmouth look," a disfigurement that is characteristic of the hybrids. Early in life it is almost unnoticeable, but later in life the deformities of both face and body become so pronounced that the hybrids must conceal themselves from view.

  (The Thing on the Doorstep)

  A resident of Washington Street, Innsmouth, he was known to be a practitioner of black magic. Late in his life he married a mysterious young woman who always went veiled, and had by her a daughter, Asenath. It is intimated by Lovecraft that his wife was a Deep One, one of the amphibious race that dwell in cities deep beneath the oceans of the world and worship Dagon. Ephraim developed a technique for exchanging minds with another person based upon a ritual he discovered in the Necronomicon, and used it to remove his mind from his aging body and insert it into the youthful body of his daughter. He may have chosen her because, as a child of a Deep One, she was virtually immortal. Her consciousness was displaced into his old body, and she promptly was declared insane and locked away in a padded attic room. When the decrepit body died, there were rumors of poison found in its stomach, but nothing came of it.

  To Ephraim's great dismay, he discovers that her brain is not equipped to handle some of the mental work of magic he attempts. It was inherently unsuited to the task both by virtue of its gender and its inhuman side. As a consequence, Ephraim is forced to find another male, fully human brain equal to the occult work he desires to accomplish. He finds his vessel in Edward Pickman Derby, a child prodigy of "fine-wrought brain and weak will," who is easily manipulated. Before Ephraim can force his mind permanently into Derby's body, Derby murders his wife and buried her corpse in the cellar.

  Ephraim's will is too strong to be defeated by death-he completes the transfer, entering Derby's body at last, and relegates the mind of poor Derby to the decaying shell in the cellar. Derby has studied the same spell in the Necronomicon by which Ephraim worked his mind transfers, and manages to animate the corpse through magic long enough to convey a message to his childhood friend, Daniel Upton, revealing the mind transfer and its horrible implications. Upton shoots Ephraim, in Derby's body, six times through the head.

  The ability of a magician to project his mind into the body of another human being, displacing the mind of that person and claiming the body for his own, was believed to be real among the shamanic Bon priests of Tibet. It is a natural elaboration of the concept of reincarnation, in which personalities are asserted to enter new bodies after the death of the old bodies. If consciousness can enter a new body after death, then why should it not be possible for it to shift from one body to another before death occurs? Students were said to sometimes offer their bodies as vessels for the consciousness of their dying masters.

  (The Thing on the Doorstep)

  Old chief of the Kanaky islanders of the South Pacific who had dealings with the Deep Ones. He taught the Yankee clipper captain Obed Marsh how to contact them and trade with them. The group of Kanaky islands is known as New Caledonia today. The word "Kanaky" is from the Hawaiian word kanaka, meaning "people." Polynesians used it to refer to themselves, and it was applied by the French to all the islanders in the South Pacific, both Melanesian and Polynesian. It is likely that Lovecraft had this larger usage in mind when he wrote of the Kanakys.

  (The Shadow Over Innsmouth)

  The character of Charles Dexter Ward elicits both our pity and our revulsion-pity because he was the puppet of forces beyond his comprehension, and revulsion because he knowingly called forth horrors from beyond the grave. Born in 1902, he grew up in a privileged family environment in a Georgian mansion on Prospect Street, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was fascinated from early childhood by history and by ancient things. This was no accident. Late in the eighteenth century his ancestor Joseph Curwen had worked occult rituals taught to him by Yog-Sothoth to ensure that one of his descendants would turn his attentions backward in time.

  In 1918 Ward confirms through his researches into old town records that he has an unacknowledged ancestor named Joseph Curwen, who had been buried in the year 1771 under a dark cloud of infamy. There were rumors that Curwen was a necromancer. His irresistible passion to learn about Curwen becomes the fanatical center of his existence, just as Curwen had planned it to be, so many years before. In August of 1919 he discovers some papers belonging to his black-sheep ancestor behind the paneling of a house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, that had once been owned by Curwen. This discovery transforms his obsession for genealogy into a mania for the occult.

  He begins a dogged search for Curwen's grave that does not attain its end for another eight years. During that time he studies anything he can acquire about necromancy. After using the information left by Curwen in his old house to resurrect Curwen from his essential salts, Ward aids the necromancer in continuing his dark researches, until at last his better nature rebels at some of the things Curwen requires him to do, things that are too horrible even for him to stomach. Curwen cannot risk exposure, so he murders poor Ward and assumes his identity. By the rituals of magic worked by Curwen during his first life, Ward had been born almost the twin image of Curwen, which made this impersonation possible.

  However, the parents of young Ward are not entirely deceived, nor is the family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett. They assume that Charles has lost his mind, based on his strange manner of expression and his failure to remember recent events. Curwen is locked into an asylum for the insane. Willett investigates the catacombs beneath the old Curwen property where the two necromancers had worked, discovers the horrors hidden there, and learns enough necromancy to reduce Curwen once again to his essential salts by using the same magic formula of Yog-Sothoth that Ward had used to raise him, but in its reverse order.

  (The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward)

  A native of South Carolina, student of the occult, and an expert on the lost Naacal language, with whom Randolph Carter lived and studied for a period of years, until Warren descended down a flight of stone steps beneath a tomb in an unnamed graveyard in Big Cypress Swamp, Florida, where he was killed by a legion of inhuman creatures. He obtained a book from India in 1919 written in unknown letters similar to those on the parchment that Carter would later discover in an old oak box containing the silver key of his ancestor Edmund Carter. It is intimated that this book may have been responsible for Warren's death. He had it with him when he descended into the sepulchre. Warren would not speak of the book to his friends Carter and Phillips, saying only that it was better they knew nothing about it, and hinting that it might have come from somewhere other than the Earth.

  There is a discrepancy in the period of time Lovecraft says Carter studied with Warren. In the Silver Key he states that it was seven years, but in the opening of the Statement of Randolph Carter, the narrator Carter claims that it was five years. There may be a plausible explanation for this discrepancy. The seven-year period with Warren occurred during Carter's first life, which was lived before he used the silver key to travel back in time to his boyhood, from which he relived his life a second time. It may be that the five-year period with Warren occurred during Carter's second life.

  (The Statement of Randolph Carter; The Silver Key; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

  A brilliant medical student studying at the Miskatonic University Medical School, West has the obsession of finding a way to bring the dead back to life. His experiments, in which a reanimating fluid is injected into the veins of the corpse, have the unfortunate consequences of transforming the recently dead into homicidal maniacs. West is described as small and slender, with eyeglasses, blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice.

  (Herbert West-Reanimator)

  Daughter of Old Whateley, the wizard. Her mother died violently when she was twelve, probably murdered by her father. She was an albino, and twisted in a way that made her appearance unattractive. At age thirty-five she participated in a ritual on top of Sentinel Hill conducted by her father, and was impregnated by one of the Old Ones with the twin brothers Wilbur and the invisible nameless one who resembled his alien father. She was murdered by her son, Wilbur, on Halloween night in 1926-probably by being fed to his monstrous brother. The whippoorwills carried her soul off to Hell.

  (The Dunwich Horror)

  Born on Candlemass (February 2), 1913, nine months after his conception on May-Eve (Walpurgis Night), 1912. On the night he was born, noises came from the hills, all the dogs in the region began to bark, and a hideous screaming was heard. Wilbur was the son of Lavinia Whateley, of the decayed Whateleys of Dunwich, a thirty-five year old albino with a twisted body, the daughter of Old Whateley the wizard. His father was the Old One invoked by Old Whateley, Yog-Sothoth. Wilbur had a twin brother who is never named in the story, who took after his father's line. The brother was invisible to normal sight and grew rapidly from consuming the blood of live cows, and sometimes the blood of Lavinia Whateley and Old Whateley, until he filled the gutted Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur Whateley was a planned hybrid who was intended to be the primary mover in a plot to bring the Old Ones back to the Earth.

  In the mythology of the ancient Greeks there are many stories about children born of women impregnated by god-like beings from the sky. The sky-god Zeus is rumored to have fathered numerous sons from mortal women, and these sons went on to become heroes of Greek myth, such as Herakles. In the Hebrew Book of Enoch, a class of angels known as the Watchers is said to have looked down upon the Earth and lusted after the daughters of men because of their beauty. Against the orders of God, the Watchers descended to the Earth and engendered a race of great heroes on the mortal women they married. It was this race with the blood of the Watchers in its veins that learned the secret arts and sciences of heaven. God ultimately punished the Watchers by casting them down into an abyss, and he destroyed their unnatural descendants with the Great Flood, washing the Earth clean of the stain of this mingling of angels and mortals.

  It would not be unreasonable to speculate that these persistent tales of hybrid offspring that result from the coupling of mortal women and sky beings who are regarded as divine or semi-divine had its origin in the actual sexual unions between mortals and aliens from elsewhere, whether beyond the stars or beyond our dimensions of space. The myth has not ended, but persists into modern times. Over the past few decades, many individuals have reported being abducted, taken on board UFOs, and raped by aliens. At times the sex is consensual. Some of these abductees claim that they have been shown hybrid babies that resulted from sexual couplings between aliens and humans.

  We may laugh at the alien abduction stories, but they are the same in their essential details to what Greek women were reporting three thousand years ago had happened to them while they were out walking in the meadows. Clearly there is something very basic going on here that cuts across historical and cultural barriers. Whether it is unfolding solely in the depths of the human psyche, as most people would probably wish to assume for the sake of their own sanity, or whether it has an elusive physical component that remains on the very edges of our known experience, can only be conjectured. If proof has ever been offered for the material existence of human-alien hybrids, modern research has rejected it, and it has never become an accepted part of the scientific record.

  Wilbur Whateley was a member of the decayed Whateleys of Dunwich and surrounding farmlands. We are not informed by Lovecraft why they are described in this manner, but there is an intimation of incest and inbreeding that Lovecraft is never indelicate enough to state openly. Clans that have lived for many generations in relative isolation often fall prey to inbreeding. In the case of the Whateleys, there is something more at play-the use of wizardry of the blackest kind. Their decay is at least in part occult, as well as genetic. The decayed Whateleys had allied themselves with the demonic beings who move in the shadows of our reality.

  Wilbur's very existence, as well as that of his invisible brother, were part of a great plan by his maternal grandfather, Wizard Whateley, to bring the Old Ones back to the surface of the Earth, so that they could consummate their ultimate purpose-wiping the world clean of all living things, and returning our lifeless planet back through a great dimensional doorway to the higher space from which it fell untold aeons ago. We may guess that the sterilization of the Earth is necessary because living things of ordinary flesh and blood cannot make this dimensional transition, and would prevent it from taking place.

  Wilbur was taught from a very early age, both by Old Whateley and by things less natural, what his destiny would be, and he embraced it without a qualm. He was an evil child, by all the usual measures. It is intimated that he murdered his own mother. There is a dark suggestion that Lavinia Whateley was abused physically, and perhaps sexually, by Wizard Whateley, and that Wilbur was imitating his grandfather's treatment of her. His physical deformities and unnatural composition caused him to be ostracized by his peers, shunned by the townsfolk of Dunwich, and instantly attacked by any passing dog. Why dogs hated Wilbur with such a passion was never stated, but it may be observed that in At the Mountains of Madness the dogs transported to Antarctica by the Miskatonic University Expedition reacted in very much the same way when they smelled the alien scent of the crinoid race. They attacked the Elder Things savagely with no regard for their own safety.

  In keeping with the fables concerning changelings-fairy infants substituted for human infants in their cradles-Wilbur not only grew much more rapidly than normal, but matured more rapidly. He acquired a sly knowingness both unnatural and repulsive in a young child. Although his education was spotty and unconventional, it is obvious from what he wrote in his diary that his latent intellect was superior to that of the average human being.

  Lovecraft's changelings, to use the word in a general sense, are not static but evolve fluidly from a
condition almost human to a condition horrifyingly alien. Pickman went from what was, in outward appearance at least, a normal human infant to what was in maturity indistinguishable from a ghoul. Wilbur Whateley underwent a similar transition from a baby quite normal in appearance to a giant who only vaguely resembled a human being above the waist, and bore no resemblance to humanity below the waist. The waist symbolically defines a plane that cuts Wilbur Whateley in half. What is above, in the light, is sane and close to normal, but what lies below concealed in the darkness is the stuff of nightmare. The upper part is the human side of the hybrid, the lower part the alien side.

  Wilbur was nearly nine feet tall at the time of his death. His voice was so deep, it could not have been produced by a human voice box. He carried with him a foul odor that is characteristic of the Old Ones. His blood had become a greenish-yellow ichor. No doubt when he was younger, it more closely resembled human blood. His face, at the time of his death by the teeth of the watchdog in the library of Miskatonic University, was described as goatish and chinless. In spite of his young age he was bearded. The skin on his chest was leathery and reticulated, like the hide of an alligator; the skin on his back was piebald yellow and black, and said by Lovecraft to resemble the "squamous covering of certain snakes." By this, Lovecraft meant scaled.

  The term "piebald" may be noted. It was a popular myth that when a Negro and Caucasian mated, their offspring might be piebald or spotted, like a painted pony, with patches of dark skin and light skin. This does not occur. Inter-racial marriages produce children of an intermediate and uniform skin shade. The appearance of birthmarksirregular and often large patches of miscolored skin-in interracial children may possibly have given rise to this fable. Birthmarks are common, and occur in children of all racial backgrounds. Lovecraft deliberately used the term "piebald" to conjure up this interracial myth in the minds of his readers.