by Donald Tyson
Professor Enoch Bowen, an archaeologist and occultist, acquired the church in July of 1844 for the purpose of housing the Shining Trapezohedron, which he had unearthed in Egypt a year earlier while excavating the ruins of the temple of the unknown pharaoh Nephren-Ka. The church acted as the meeting place for the Starry Wisdom sect, an occult brotherhood of some two hundred members devoted to the worship of the Shining Trapezohedron and of the terrifying being it summoned from beyond, known as the Haunter of the Dark. Above the altar of the church, an Egyptian ankh replaced the Christian cross.
The Trapezohedron itself was housed in the steeple tower of the church, which was shuttered tightly with opaque screens to exclude all light. No bells occupied its fifteen-foot square tower chamber. In the center of the floor, a stone pillar of curiously angled sides covered in strange hieroglyphics supported the unsymmetrical metal box that contained the Trapezohedron. Seven high-backed chairs surrounded this pillar in a circle. Behind each chair stood the representation of a monstrous image similar to the statues of Easter island, sculpted in black-painted plaster.
The church boasted an extensive library of rare esoteric texts. In 1877 the Starry Wisdom sect abandoned the church and fled from Providence to avoid mob persecution inflamed by rumors of blood sacrifices, and thereafter the church remained closed and unused, many of the occult book still on its shelves in a rear vestry. It was in a greatly decayed state when the writer and painter Robert Blake discovered it late in April of 1935.
(The Haunter of the Dark)
In The Quest of Iranon it is place, probably a city, that lies below the great cataract on the Xari river, but whether Stethelos is part of the dreamlands or of some distant world or time is not perfectly clear. In The Green Meadow is written, "beyond the deafening torrent lies the land of Stethelos, where young men are infinitely old." It seems to be part of the material universe in this latter story, since a book was sent by an ancient Greek from Stethelos "across the horrible immeasurable abyss" to modern Earth within a meteorite. The book probably took millennia to reach the Earth, but it may have traveled through dimensions rather than strictly across space.
The green meadow of Stethelos evokes thoughts of the Elysian Fields of the ancient Greeks, and also of the Summerland of European witches. The deathlessness of its inhabitants may refer to reincarnation.
(The Quest of Iranon; The Green Meadow)
The location of the old burying-ground outside the decaying and repellent New England town of Stillwater, where Tom Sprague and Henry Thorndike were buried alive on June 17, 1886. Their ghosts haunt the shuttered house of Sophie Sprague, who knowingly allowed them to be interred while still living but unable to move or speak, and a curse emanating from Swamp Hollow lies over the entire town of Stillwater.
(The Horror in the Burying-Ground)
A land not far from the land of Mnar that was famed ten thousand years ago for the excellence of its spice groves.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
Tanit, also sometimes spelled Tinith or Tinnit, is a Phoenician goddess of the moon who was worshipped at Carthage, a Phoenician colony founded in 814 BC in North Africa. This goddess was also worshipped on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Sardinia, and in Spain. She is depicted wearing the crescent moon on her head, holding a flowing cornucopia in each hand. Her image was erected over the funeral urns containing the cremation dust of children sacrificed to her. A more stylized symbol of Tanit shows a triangle surmounted by a horizontal bar with a circle above it. This represents a woman with her arms outstretched. Sometimes this symbol was crowned with an inverted lunar crescent. In addition to being a goddess of fertility, she was the consort of Baal and a war goddess. By the fifth century BC her worship in Carthage had become more prominent than that of Baal. A shrine to Tanit was established by Carthaginian colonists on the Spanish island of Ibiza, in the cave at Es Culleram on the mountain of Sant Vincent, after the Carthaginians settled on the island in 654 BC. Offerings are still given to the goddess there.
(Medusa's Coil)
A rather severe city on the sluggish river Zuro, built of granite, where the men are dark and stern, live in square houses, and frown more often than they smile. There is no laughter or song in Teloth. Singing is viewed as a folly. The Tower of Mlin dominates the center of the city. Before it is a large and open public square. By the laws of the city, all men in Teloth must labor. This is enforced by archons-men appointed to enforce the city laws. The inhabitants of Teloth worship gods who say that toil is a good unto itself, and that beyond death is an illuminated haven of crystal coldness where there is rest eternal. (The Quest of Iranon)
A mountain in the Catskills, occupied by the lonely and deserted Martense family mansion. The ground beneath and around the house is riddled with tunnels in which dwell in their thousands the degenerate and cannibalistic Martense clan, naked and hairy, resembling apes.
(The Lurking Fear)
The river Than flows through the valley of Nis. Its waters are red, but the source of this coloration is unknown. The river rises from hidden springs, and flows into subterranean grottoes. Its slow-moving waters are slimy and filled with weeds. Beside the river are the ruins of an ancient stone city, inhabited by numerous monkeys.
(Memory)
In the jungle of this nation are cyclopean ruins that the natives avoid. The megaliths are said to be older than mankind, and an outpost for the Fishers from Outside, and of the evil gods "Tsadogwa and Clulu" (Tsathoggua and Cthulhu). The natives claim they are associated with soul-stealing "devil-flies" and have a harmful influence on those who venture close.
(Winged Death)
A street in Innsmouth, Massachusetts, on which is situated the half-decayed mansion of the Waite family. Ephraim Waite was a notorious magician. He took a Deep One for his wife and engendered a daughter named Asenath. The attic windows of the house were always boarded up, and strange sounds were heard to come from behind them.
(The Thing on the Doorstep)
The street in Kingsport where the Terrible Old Man has his cottage. It is one of the oldest streets in the town and runs along the harbor behind the wharves. The more ancient houses, such as that of the Terrible Old Man, which is described as "antediluvian," are set back from the street by front yards in which trees grow. Behind Water Street runs Ship Street, where the cottage of Granny Orne is located.
(The Terrible Old Man)
Library at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that holds a seventeenthcentury Latin edition of the Necronomicon. Wilbur Whateley went there in 1928 in an effort to gain access to the book, but was refused.
(The Dunwich Horror; Out of the Aeons)
This large old rooming house at Arkham, Massachusetts, located at the corner of Pickman Street and Parsonage Street, was once the residence of the notorious witch, Keziah Mason, who vanished mysteriously from a Salem jail in the year 1692. It had a reputation for being haunted. The familiar of the witch, a rat-like thing with a human face named Brown Jenkin, was often seen running through the halls of the house at night, and its tittering could be heard through the walls.
In 1927 Walter Gilman, a student of mathematics and folklore at Miskatonic University at Arkham, took an upper room in the boarding house, which was rumored to have been Keziah Mason's room. He discovered one corner of the room to be strangely angled, and learned that it was a dimensional portal still in use by the witch and her familiar, who were not dead, but who had escaped through the spaces between worlds. The witch attempted to recruit Gilman into her coven, but Gilman resisted. One morning Gilman was found dead in his room with a hole chewed into his chest and his heart missing.
The tenants and the manager of the rooming house refused to stay in it any longer and vacated it. Years later, the abandoned house was demolished, revealing behind the strangely angled corner on the north side of the witch-room a secret chamber with a boarded-up window that was filled with the bones of children, and an ancient sacrificial knife.
(The Dream
s in the Witch House)
An ancient Arab land that was the birthplace of the poet and necromancer Abdul Alhazred, author of the dread Necronomicon. It lies on the edge of the great desert once known as the Empty Space. The physician and biologist Alfred Clarendon referred to the country when speaking of an old man who had wandered alive out of the desert and made his way back to Yemen-"he had seen Item, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb."
(The Last Test)
Lovecraft referred to this place only once, as "vanished the in the Pacific." He associated it with an arch-mage, so it must have been the dwelling place of magicians. We may infer that the was probably an island that sank beneath the Pacific Ocean-perhaps it was one of the islands off the coast of the lost Pacific continent of Mu. Other writers elaborated on this cryptic hint after Lovecraft's death. Lin Carter wrote of the Rituals of Yhe, and in the Hay version of the Necronomicon there is something called the Talisman of the which is supposed to control the "Black one" and the "thousand Horned Ones"-it consists of squiggles inside a double hexagon inside a circle (Hay, p. 137).
(The Shadow Out of Time)
Yian is a city described in the 1896 fantasy story The Maker of Moons by Robert W Chambers. In the story, Yian is a city on a great river having a thousand bridges, where the flower-scented air is filled with the music of silver bells. It is obviously not a city in our dimension of reality, since it is said to be located across the seven seas and on a river longer than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Lovecraft was a fan of Chambers' work and sometimes referred to characters and places in Chambers' stories. He named a "forbidden city" on the plateau of Leng in honor of Yian, calling it Yian-Ho. In The Diary of Alonzo Typer Lovecraft described it as "that lost and forbidden city of countless eons whose place may not be told."
(The Whisperer in Darkness; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
A frigid river that flows through the valley of Narthos, which has the town of Sinara on its southern slope. Further downstream is the onyx-walled city of Jaren, a barracks for soldiers. Barges carry trading goods up and down the river. Further down, below Jaren, is a great cataract, and below that, the city or land of Stethelos.
(The Quest of Iranon)
This is not the nation that presently bears this name, but a lost African empire that was spoken about along with such places as Atlantis and Mu. In Medusa's Coil reference is made to "forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African civilizations-the great Zimbabwe." Lovecraft also referred to this lost kingdom in the poem "The Outpost," in which a king of Zimbabwe dreams of an alien city far to the west populated by the Fishers from Outside, amorphous beings half solid and half aether. S. T. Joshi wrote that Lovecraft had probably heard about Zimbabwe from Edward Lloyd Sechrist, who had actually visited the ruins of Zimbabwe (Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary, p. 279). The ruins of Great Zimbabwe are located near Fort Victoria, which has been renamed Masvingo, in the African country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. The ancient city of Great Zimbabwe was constructed of large stones between the years 1100 and 1500. There are many smaller ruins of stone constructions in the region that are simply referred to as Zimbabwes.
(Medusa's Coil; "The Outpost")
Land to the north of Lomar that was crushed beneath the advance of the great ice sheet that drove its inhabitants southward. The Zobnarian Fathers were noted for their great wisdom.
(Polaris)
The Key to the Fifth Gate
Sun passes through Aries: April 18-May 14
Constellation is represented by a reclining ram.
Right Pillar: Sheratan (Arabic name: Al Sharatain-The Signs). Astronomical designation: Beta An. Astrological nature: Mars-Saturn. Influence: acts of violence. Magnitude: 2.6. Color: pearl-white. Sun crosses: April 20. Location: left horn of the ram. Comments: Considered by the ancients in unison with Mesarthim, a star of magnitude 5 further down the left horn-the pair was known to the Persians as The Protecting Pair.
Left Pillar: Hamal. (Arabic name: ras al-hamal-Head of the Ram. Also called: El Nath (Arabic: an-nath-The Butting Horn). Astronomical designation: Alpha An. Astronomical nature: Mars-Saturn. Influence: unfortunate, associated with danger, violence, and injuries to the head. Magnitude: 2-slightly variable. Color: yellow. Sun crosses: April 25. Location: forehead of the ram. Comments: Two thousand years before the birth of Jesus, this star was located near the vernal equinox, and was considered to mark the beginning of spring.
The astral gate of Aries lies between the star of its right pillar, located on the left horn of the ram, and the star of its left pillar, on the forehead. The sun enters the gate around April 20 when it crosses the longitude of Sheratan, the star of the right pillar, and leaves the gate around April 25, when it crossed the star of the left pillar, Hamal. The transition of this narrow gate takes five days.
The key to the Fifth Gate opens the constellation Aries, allowing entry into the section of the walled city of the Necronomicon that contains the dwelling spaces of humanity. Use it for divining information or receiving dreams about the houses, villages, cities, and other places where human beings live and travel that are mentioned in Lovecraft's writings.
Seal of the Fifth Key on the Fifth Gate
Face the direction of the compass ruled by the Fifth Gate, which is southeast by souththat is, slightly to the right of the southeast point. Visualize the closed gate of the walled city before you just as though it were a real gate in an ancient walled city, expanding it in your imagination and drawing it nearer so that it is large enough for you to walk through. Take the time to create it on the astral level in full detail, being aware of all its minor imperfections and marks.
With the image of the gate sustained clearly in your mind and projected astrally toward the compass point southeast by south, speak the following invocation to Yog-Sothoth, taking care to insert those references that are specific to the Fifth Gate:
Guardian of the Gate! Defender of the Door! Watcher of the Way! Who art the stout Lock, the slender Key, and the turning Hinge! Lord of All Transition, without whom there is no coming in or going out, I call thee! Keeper of the Threshold, whose dwelling place is between worlds, I summon thee! Yog-Sothoth, wise and great lord of the Old Ones, I invoke thee!
By the authority of the dreaded name, Azathoth, that few dare speak, I charge thee, open to me the gateway of Aries the Ram that lies between the blazing pillar Sheratan on the right hand and the blazing pillar Hamal on the left hand. As the solar chariot [or, lunar chariot] crosses between these pillars, I enter the city of the Necronomicon through its Fifth Gate. Selah!
Visualize the key of the Fifth Gate in your right hand some six inches long and made of cast silver. Feel its weight, texture, and shape as you hold it. Extend your right arm and use the key as a pointer to project upon the surface of the gate the seal of the key, which should be visualized to burn on the gate in a line of white spiritual fire. Point with the astral key at the center of the gate and speak the words:
In the name of Azathoth, Ruler of Chaos, by the power of Yog-Sothoth, Lord of Portals, the Fifth Gate is opened!
Visualize the gate unlocking and opening inward of its own accord upon a shadowed space beyond. On the astral level, walk through the gateway and stand in the dark space beyond. Focus your mind upon the house, church, library, village, city, or other human place of habitation related to the mythos that you wish to investigate and open yourself to receive communications or impressions from within the place. In a more general sense, the ritual of the Fifth Gate may be used to scry the history or psychically read the atmosphere of any house, road, plaza, or ruin where men live, or once lived.
After fulfilling the purpose for which this gate was opened, conclude the ritual by astrally passing out through the gate and visualizing it to close. Draw the seal of the Fifth Key on the surface of the gate with the astral key in your hand, and mentally cause it to lock itself shut, as it was at the beginning of the ritual.
Speak the words:
By the power of Yog-Sothoth, and authority of the supreme name Azathoth, I close and seal the Fifth Gate. This ritual is well and truly ended.
Allow the image of the gate to grow pale in your imagination and fade to nothingness before you turn away from the ritual direction.
The Sixth Gate
here is more to the world of the Necronomicon mythos than meets the eye. The Sixth Gate open on the secret and hidden places where dwell monstrous creatures and forgotten alien races. They are all around us, even though we usually pass through life without ever becoming aware of their existence. Lovecraft believed that what we consider to be the real world is nothing more than a comforting illusion, a mask on the face of reality that prevents us from seeing the horror that lies beneath. As he wrote at the beginning of his story, the Call of Cthulhu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
