The Xothic Legend Cycle

IN “The Dweller in the Tomb”, we read the journal entries of Harold Hadley Copeland, thus seeing what he sees only shortly alter he himself sees it. What we are seeing is an eerily ineluctable process whereby, even against impossible odds of hardship, Copeland is irresistibly drawn to a predetermined conclusion/destination. What is the nature of that fate? It is that his own soul’s history must repeat itself. At the climax he recognizes that Zanthu is himself in an earlier incarnation, and that his mission was simply to replay his own actions from this earlier life. He says he “should have guessed it“, because he was already very close to experiencing his moments of ominous anticipation as memories. By reading his journal we are reliving his story, which in turn was a reliving of his own story as Zanthu. This makes Carter’s retitling significant in retrospect. Why is the adventure of Harold Hadley Copeland called by the name of Zanthu? Why isn’t it named for the actual protagonist? It is—Copeland is Zanthu! (“So why’d you nix Carter’s title change, Price?” Because I happen to like Mythos stories with corny, campy titles better than those with a single piece of mute glossolalia as a title. I’ve done the same thing with “Zoth-Ommog”, as you’ll note.)

“The Thing in the Pit” is presented as a rediscovered first-person memoir of horrific events of the remote past, making it a window on the past. “Our of the Ages”, on the other hand, is another case of infinite regress. Here we are reading another journal, a dream diary by Henry Stephenson Blaine, so we are leeching off his perceptions. Through his dreams Blaine himself seems to be reliving ancient perceptions, visions, of the ocean-depth blasphemies that are slowly but surely making their insidious return through the whole story cycle. In the next installment, “The Horror in the Gallery” (“Zoth-Ommog”), we see yet more, but through still a different window. We read over narrator Hodgkins’ shoulder as he reconstructs the outlines of the "Alhazredic demonology" from the pages of shunned texts, including the Necronomicon. Finally, in “The Winfield Heritance", we will join the narrator as he begins to relive the spiritual seduction that befell his late uncle once he takes possession of his ancestral home. Each rare and evil volume he discovers hidden away behind the library shelves and within the furniture of secret rooms brings him further down the perilous path to the past.

Lin had originally intended to spread the events of this story over two tales. The first would have been “The Papers of Stephenson Blaine”, a collation of Mythos data derived from (= divided among) various sources, including Copeland's journals, ancient grimoires, etc., much of which probably wound up in "The Horror in the Gallery"/"Zorh-Ommog" instead. The second was “Out of the Ages”, of which the notes say, “Abhorrent idol from the waters off Ponape, brought back in 1937 by Stephenson Blaine from his expedition to Yhe, causes strange dreams of weird landscapes and curious suggestions ... this too is from the Blaine papers.” Here Blaine would have been a doublet of Copeland, rather than, as he turned out to be, the inheritor of the aftermath of Copeland’s discoveries.

Let no one think that the obvious borrowing of the title “Out of the Ages” means Carter unimaginatively copied from Lovecraft’s "Out of the Aeons." The similarity is so obvious that surely we are meant to mark it and to understand it as a salute to the flagship revision tale which has inspired the whole Xothic cycle. This tale first appeared in the Arkluim House anthology Nameless Places in 1975.