by Donald Tyson
(The Dunwich Horror; The Shadow Out of Time; At the Mountains of Madness; The Whisperer in Darkness; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Unnamable; The Hound; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Festival)
In the Necronomicon mythos, the gates are portals of transition between levels of reality, which may be separated distantly in time and space, or may overlap and exist simultaneously in the same location, the way two notes of music can exist upon the air at the same time. Certain places on the Earth are favorable for the formation of these gates, and as a result they have acquired religious significance. Randolph Carter called them places of "a dark polarity and induced gate." In ancient times the locations were marked by rings or rows of standing stones, such as those on the small island in the Miskatonic River not far from Arkham, or by sacrificial altar stones such as the one on top of Sentinel Hill outside of Dunwich, or by stone pillars. There are also gateways in caves beneath the earth. One such place is the cave known as the Snake-Den in the hills outside of Arkham, where Randolph Carter vanished with his silver key on October 7, 1928. At the back of this cave is a particular stone called by Carter the "mystic pylon."
The gates are presided over by Yog-Sothoth, a being that straddles all dimensions, existing everywhere simultaneously, and for this reason controls all portals between worlds. They can be opened by means of incantations and ritual magic, and are more easily opened at certain dates of the year, such as May-Eve or Halloween. Certain crafted devices, such as the Shining Trapezohedron once possessed by the forgotten Egyptian pharaoh Nephren-Ka, or the large silver key passed down to Randolph Carter by his ancestor, or the coffin-shaped clock with four hands owned by Carter's friend, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, can facilitate the opening of the gateways of Yog-Sothoth, but they are of no use to those lacking the knowledge of how to activate them. For example, the silver key must be held up to the setting Sun, and rotated in a specific way in the air nine times, and on the final rotation certain syllables must be correctly intoned on the breath into the opening void.
Randolph Carter used his silver key to pass through two special gates. The First Gate led him back to his childhood and his childhood dreams. The second gate, called the Inner Gate or Ultimate Gate, led him "from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time," in the vast cavern of the Ancient Ones, and to that dread guide spoken of by Alhazred in the Necronomicon, who guards the Ultimate Gate-he who is called the 'Umr at-Tawil, the Most Ancient One, the Prolonged of Life. The Ancient Ones occupy pedestals in an oddly curved line that is "neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola," but is akin to the lines drawn by the witch Keziah Mason on her jail cell the day she vanished from Salem Jail. Such lines bend space and time, and transcend three-dimensional reality.
With the aid of the dreaming Ancient Ones and the guidance of the 'Umr at-Tawil, Carter used the silver key in combination with a ritual he instinctively knew to open the Ultimate Gate in the wall of the cavern of the Ancient Ones. The opened gate allowed Carter to pass through solid rock as though it were warm water. Beyond the gate he realized that he was not a single being, but countless beings at different points of time and space existing simultaneously in a transcendent reality. Whereas the passage of the First Gate moved Carter backward in time, the passage of the Ultimate Gate caused Carter to transcend time and experience all times at once.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
This small, amber-colored crystal "cut in devious angles impossible to classify" has the power of revealing the true forms that lie beneath the material shadows of things in our world when a person gazes through it. It is said to be "curiously warm and electric" to the touch. The ancient gem was part of the collection of precious stones at a museum of unspecified location, although the curator of the museum could not have had any conception of its power.
In the Chronicle of Nath by the German mystic Rudolf Yergler, it is written that in the Year of the Black Goat a shadow from beyond the Earth that feeds on the souls of men comes to the Earth, promising those it entrances with the illusion of liberation in the alien Land of the Three Suns. By peering through the Gem it is possible to see the shadow's true shape, and the man who can do this and remain sane can send the shadow back to the "starless gulf of its spawning" until the next time the Year of the Black Goat comes.
The Gem was used by the esoteric writer Constantine Theunis for this purpose in 1938, after the shadow from Outside had manifested to his friend, Single, at 10 AM on June 23 of that year in the form of a strange tree growing on a hill seven miles south of Hampden, Idaho, in the region of the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve known as Hell's Acres. June 23 is the day after the summer solstice. Single had taken photographs of the tree, and Theunis later constructed a kind of camera obscura in a black box in order to view the photographs through the Gem, which he borrowed from the museum. The Gem was fixed to an opening on one side of the box, and the photograph was placed on the opposite side. In this way, Theunis was successful in sending the shadow back to the starless gulf, although it put him in the hospital. He used the Gem to make a pencil sketch of the shadow, which had the true shape of a giant hand, even though it appeared to normal human vision to be a tree.
(The Tree on the Hill)
Alien hieroglyphic writing appears several times in Lovecraft's stories. In Dagon, the cyclopean monolith on the risen island consisted of aquatic symbols in the shapes of "fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like." Some of the marine creatures in the symbols did not resemble any life forms known to modern science.
The Dreams in the Witch House features near the end of the story a carving in bluish stone of one of the Elder Things, with undecipherable hieroglyphics written on its base, which was owned by the witch Keziah Mason.
A bas-relief stone carving by Henry Anthony Wilcox that depicts Cthulhu bears hieroglyphic writing in the story The Call of Cthulhu. Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, dreamed of the hieroglyphics engraved on the stones of the city of R'lyeh, under the influence of Cthulhu's telepathic dream projections.
The large black stone removed from Round Hill, east of Townshend, Vermont, by Henry Wentworth Akeley in The Whisperer in Darkness was covered with unknown hieroglyphics. Akeley's friend, Albert Wilmarth, recognizes some of the symbols from the Necronomicon.
The parchment that accompanied the silver key inherited by Randolph Carter was covered in hieroglyphics. According to Colonel Churchward, an expert on lost Mu, they were not Naacal, or the hieroglyphics of Easter Island. However, according to Carter's friend, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, they did resemble the writing in the book Harley Warren received from India in 1919.
In Out of the Aeons, a two-foot-long scroll less than four inches wide containing a single vertical line of hieroglyphics was found inside an iridescent cylinder of Yuggothian metal that lay inside a crypt on an island heaved up from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in 1878. Both the cylinder and the mummy discovered beside it in the crypt were sold by the Orient Shipping Company to the Cabot Museum of Archaeology at Boston in the following year. The hieroglyphics resemble some that appear in the book Nameless Cults by von Junzt.
(Dagon; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Call of Cthulhu; The Whisperer in Darkness; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; Out of the Aeons)
A change of appearance in those men and women of the town of Innsmouth who are the offspring of intermarriage between human beings and the amphibious race of Deep Ones. It only begins to show itself in maturity, but is easily noticeable in the early thirties. It is characterized by creases in the sides of the neck that are the beginnings of gill slits, and by a narrow head, bulging eyes that seldom blink, and cease to blink entirely at a more advanced stage, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, underdeveloped ears, a wide mouth with thick lips, and a gray-blue skin complexion. The hair of the head and face begins to fall off with patches of skin. The hands and feet enlarge and the fingers shorten and curl close to the palm. The posture be
comes hunched. Eventually in most but not all cases the look progresses to such an extent that those afflicted can no longer pass for human and must hide themselves away until around age seventy, when the change reaches a stage that allows them to dwell permanently beneath the surface of the sea.
(The Shadow Over Innsmouth)
A race of insect-philosophers crawls "proudly" over the surface of the fourth moon of Jupiter, which for Lovecraft was probably Ganymede, although Callisto is often supposed to be the moon he intended.
(Beyond the Wall of Sleep)
A hollow cylinder some four inches long and seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, made of an iridescent metal impervious to acids and impossible to analyze. Van Junzt in his Nameless Cults identified the substance as lagh metal, brought to this planet from Yuggoth by the Mi-Go. Its outer surface was covered in engraved figures with a strange geometry and unknown hieroglyphics. It was fitted with a tight cap of the same metal, which when removed revealed a tightly rolled scroll some two feet in length composed of a thin, bluish-white membrane, that was wrapped around a slender rod of the same metal. According to van Junzt, the scroll was made of pthagon membrane, the inner skin of the extinct yakith-lizard of lost Mu. A single line of undecipherable hieroglyphics extended down the center of the scroll in a thin column that was penned or painted onto the scroll with a gray pigment. These hieroglyphs resembled those found in Nameless Cults, and consisted of a protective magic formula against the demon Ghatanothoa.
(Out of the Aeons)
When the British freighter Victory is sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by a German U-boat in 1917, one of the dead crew found clinging to the deck rail of the U-boat has in his possession a small but beautifully carved piece of ivory in the shape of a youth's head crowned with a laurel wreath. The olive-skinned seaman is not English, but of some Mediterranean country. The first officer of the German submarine takes the carving for his own when the body is cast into the sea.
Almost at once sickness falls upon the crew of the U-boat, and they are troubled by apparitions of the British dead. They come to believe that the submarine is cursed by the presence of the ivory talisman. Bad luck and madness plague the boat. An explosion in the engine room cripples the controls, preventing the boat from surfacing. When the remnants of the crew mutiny, the commander shoots them and ejects their bodies through the air lock. Soon after, his first officer goes insane and demands to be released from the boat, to which the commander agrees merely to be rid of him.
The boat drifts and settles into the ruins of a great submerged city that the commander assumes must be Atlantis. In the city is an immense temple carved from the solid rock face of a cliff, and on the facade of the temple are statues of a radiant god whose features are identical to those of the ivory head. The god represented by the ivory head, who is evidently housed within the undersea temple, is not identified by Lovecraft, but may perhaps be Phaethon, son of Helios, who was cast down into the sea when he was about to burn up the world with his father's fiery chariot. Phaethon is mentioned in Plato's account of Atlantis, as presented in the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly (see Donnelly, p. 7), with which Lovecraft was familiar.
(The Temple)
This metal is not found in the mines of Earth. Long ago it was carried to this planet from Yuggoth (Pluto) by the Elder Ones, who may be the Mi-Go, or are possibly the earlier race that inhabited Yuggoth before the coming of the Mi-Go. At any rate, the Mi-Go used it to fashion the metal cylinders into which they put the living and conscious brains they extracted from human beings in Vermont. This cylinder metal is not named-Lovecraft called it only "a metal mined in Yuggoth"-but it is very likely lagh metal.
(Out of the Aeons; The Whisperer in Darkness)
A pair of winged lions carved from diorite occupy a round plaza at the end of a colonnade in the ruins of the ancient city of Sarkomand. Between them there is a darkness that marks the entrance to the subterranean staircase leading to the Great Abyss.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
This person or place is mentioned only once, in Lovecraft's story The Whisperer in Darkness, in the midst of a long list of obscure names of persons and places. Its meaning is unknown. Lovecraft scholars have attempted to find meaning in the resemblance of its parts to the words "Lemuria" and "Cthulhu" but this is no more than conjecture.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
A cylinder of lustrous yellow Tulu-metal, strongly magnetic to objects of its own alloy, and covered with strange figures and unknown hieroglyphics in bas-relief, was discovered buried in an artificial earthen mound on the plains of Oklahoma in 1928. It was about a foot long and four inches in diameter. Among the figures on the cylinder were images of Cthulhu and Yig. It had a cap that unscrewed, to reveal a roll of yellow paperlike material written over in green ink. The scroll, dated 1545, contained the testament of Panfilo de Zamacona y Nunez, a member of the Spanish expedition of Francisco Coronado into the wilds of North America. Zamacona was captured by the mound people of Oklahoma and taken below to their blue-litten world of Xinaian (K'n-yan).
(The Mound)
Joseph Curwen, resurrected from the dead by a necromantic ritual involving his essential salts, bore on his chest a "very peculiar mole or blackish spot." This was the skin blemish known as the Devil's Mark, impressed upon his body by the finger of the lord of the witches' sabbat, who was known as the Black Man. It was a sign of fidelity and obedience. The Devil's Mark was supposed to be completely insensitive to pain.
Lovecraft pretended to quote from the transcript for August 8, 1692, of the Salem witch trials concerning this mark: "Mr. G. B. (Rev. George Burroughs) on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon 0., Deliverance W, Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B." After searching through the Salem transcripts for 1692 I find no mention of a Joseph C. It was the practice in the Salem witch trail transcripts to write the last names out in full, not to abbreviate them with the initial letter. I also find no mention of the Devil's Mark, although there is mention of accused witches making a red mark with their finger in a book.
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
In At the Mountains of Madness, a graduate student of Miskatonic University named Danforth makes the mistake of looking back as he is flying away from the mountains of Antarctica that support the ice-encased city of the crinoid Elder Things. He is driven temporarily insane, and begins to babble. One of his babblings is the "the moon-ladder." This is never explained by Lovecraft.
Moon-ladders are a part of the mythology of various peoples. For example, in Bantu mythology, the spider on the moon weaves a thread that links the moon with the Earth, allowing the Moon Princess to descend upon it "rung after silvery rung" with her retinue (Knappert, p. 48). In one of the Native American legends about Coyote, a crafty animal god, Coyote makes a ladder and climbs up to the moon, from which he uses his bow and arrows to rearrange the stars into the constellations.
(At the Mountains of Madness)
A wine favored by the Zoogs that is uncommonly heady and powerful. Randolph Carter uses it to loosen the tongue of Atal, priest of Ulthar, concerning the forbidden secrets of the gods of Earth known as the Great Ones.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
The scientist Crawford Tillinghast builds a machine designed to stimulate latent but normally unused senses, allowing human beings to perceive the world of strange creatures that always surrounds us, but remains unnoticed. The stimulation of the pineal gland causes an extension of the faculty of normal sight, and opens an interdimen- sional vista of floating jellyfish-like creatures that pass through solid objects as men of flesh pass through air.
Lovecraft derived this lore on the pineal gland from Western occultism, where this gland is supposed to be associated with the third eye in the forehead between the eyebrows, the opening of which allows spiritual vision. Those who have activated their third eye can see into the astral realms that surround us, and can view the stra
nge inhabitants of these realms. Among the beings dwelling in the astral world are the larvae, floating but mindless semi-formed spiritual creatures that arise from obsessions and strong or repeated emotions. The jellyfish-like things seen in the story From Beyond were probably based on Theosophical teachings about larvae.
(From Beyond)
A magic powder that allows Wilbur Whateley to view the shape of his invisible brother when blown on his breath over his brother's body. The scholar of Miskatonic University, Dr. Henry Armitage, used it in a mechanical sprayer to reveal the same shape of the creature on Sentinel Hill.
(The Dunwich Horror)
Abdul Alhazred wrote in the Necronomicon that each tomb has a secret portal guarded by a Herd that feasts on the things growing out of the decaying corpse. The secret portal is probably a dimensional gateway, although the reference may be to ghouls, who have the ability to slip in and out between our world and the dreamworld. Arguing against this interpretation is the detail that the Herd feasts on things growing from the corpse, not on the corpse itself. This inclines me to believe that the secret portal is nonphysical, and that the Herd is made up of spiritual beings.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
Chicomoztoc ("place of the seven caves") is the womblike place of racial origin in the mythology of the Aztecs of central Mexico. Within it are seven linked caves that can be accessed through a single opening. Its physical location is a mystery the solution of which explorers have sought in vain for centuries.
(The Electric Executioner)
