The Xothic Legend Cycle

Out of the Ages by Lin Carter

THIS manuscript was found among the papers of Dr. H. Stephenson Blaine, then Curator of Manuscripts at the Sanbourne Institute, in 1928. It would seem to be pages from a journal or diary which Dr. Blaine had been keeping shortly prior to his unfortunate collapse. A note by Mr. Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, Dr. Blaine's assistant, who later succeeded him to the Curatorship, suggests that the material seemed to have some bearing on the deterioration of his health in the months prior to his nervous breakdown. Mr. Hodgkins therefore passed the manuscript along to the physician in charge of Dr. Blaine’s case, from whom this copy was obtained.

AS Curator of the Manuscripts Collection at the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities in Santiago, California, it was my pleasure and duty to conduct a general inventory of the Copeland Bequest, which was awarded the Institute by the estate of the late Professor Harold Hadley Copeland in 1928, two years after his lamentable demise in a mental institution in San Francisco.

The bequest was long and eagerly anticipated by the members of the staff at Sanbourne, and, in particular, by myself. When it arrived at last, we discovered the bequest to consist of several large trunks of miscellaneous and unsorted papers (including at least one book-length unpublished manuscript), and a modest but highly selective collection of artifacts which the Professor had accumulated over the many years of his long, distinguished career.

Dismissing my assistants, I devoted the remainder of the day to cataloguing the contents of the trunks and boxes. I decided to examine the artifacts and antiquities first of all, as the Directors of the Institute were most anxious to place the more choice and interesting articles from the Copeland Collection on public exhibition during the forthcoming 1928 season. With excitement and great anticipation, I began my work.

I opened the packing case containing the artifacts collection with mingled emotions. Beyond mere curiosity as to what I should find therein, my predominant feelings were chose of regretful respect. The Professor had been twice my own age, and I had never known him on a personal level, but no scientist can work in any area of the prehistory, archeology, myth patterns, or folklore of the Pacific islanders for long without encountering the work of Harold Hadley Copeland. His is undoubtedly the most distinguished name in the young field of the study of Pacific antiquities, and such has been the case ever since the first publication of his monumental book, Prehistory in the Pacific: A Preliminary Investigation with Reference to the Myth Patterns of Southeast Asia (1902), a book which remains the classic of its field and which has proved a source of inspiration to at least two generations of scientists, including myself. And there is much that is admirable, even brilliant, in his Polynesian Mythology, with a Note on the Cthulhu Legend Cycle (1906), although, as I have written elsewhere, "it reflects his unfortunate and growing enthusiasm for questionable occult theories, which led to the regrettable erosion of his scholarly reputation and is perhaps indicative of the mental aberration which dominated his declining years", to which I added that it "remains to this day a massive work of scientific research."

From that high-water mark, however, the Professor rapidly declined. His unfortunate mania centered about a bygone Pacific civilization of extreme antiquity, of which the mysterious stone images on Easter Island and the megalithic ruined cities of Ponape are mere vestiges. From what little I then knew of his mania, it focused upon certain patterns of myth found commonly throughout Micronesia and most of the more populous Pacific islands, which concerned a numerous pantheon of gods or devils or evil spirits of extraterrestrial origin who came down to this world in remote ages and dominated the planet in the pre-Pleistocene.

In particular, he was interested in those deities who had their dominion over his beloved ancient Pacific. Native legends described them as completely non-human. unlike even the beasts, and as generally aquatic in nature. They had fought some sort of war with another group of cosmic gods from the stars, had been defeated, and, in some manner, thrown either into exile or into trance-like slumber, from which at some unknown future date they would awake, arise, and attempt the conquest of the earth again. A ludicrous myth, surely, although with a surprising sophistication to it; not at all the sort of thing one would expect from the imagination of primitive islanders.

With Professor Copeland's third major text, alas, it became obvious that his obsession had assumed the overwhelming proportions of a mania. Still, there is much that can be admired in that book, The Prehistoric Pacific in the light of the Ponape Scripture (1911), and it is a monumental work of sheer scholarship. Two years following publication of this book, he led an expedition into the depths of Asia, and in 1916 he published, in a privately printed brochure, his "conjectural translation" of the ancient stone tablets he had found in the comb of a prehistoric central Asian shaman. The shocking and blasphemous nature of his Zanthu Tablets led co official suppression; the Professor himself was asked to resign from the archaeological association of which he had been cofounder and past president. His decline from that point on was rapid.

Unpacking the artifacts, I found a typed list in a file folder, which described and attempted to date them. I reproduce it here.

1) Tapa cloth, Tonga Islands, circa 1897. Note 5-pointed star motif. (Eld. Sign?)

2) "Fisherman's god" image, Cook Islanders, about 1900. Native name: Zataniaga (? Zatamagwa—ref. #7)

3) Sepik River Valley figure, New Guinea, date unk. bur after 1895. Note cone-shaped torso, suggestion of tentacles, mane-like hair.

1) Carven shell pendant, Papua. 1902? Occopoidal head.

5) Carven stone door-jamb or talé. New Caledonia, circa 1892. Note 5-pointed star motif in conjunction with serpent-maned head—native name "Hommogah”

6) Bushy-maned and bearded wooden mask, Ambrym origin, New Hebrides, date unk. Note suggestion of tentacles, not hair: "Medusa” motif observed in Carolines, New Guinea (Sepik R. area), also Marquesas.

7) Stone tiki, Marquesas, about 1904, but motif common in prev. generations, says Tillinghast. Note snaky hair, pyramidal body. Native name: "Z'otomogo" or "Zatamagwa.”

8) Carven lintel, New Zealand, very old Maori (bef, 1800?). Cone or pyramid body, surmounted by wavy-maned head. Note “Medusa" motif, as in #6. Old shaman called it “Sothamogha.”

9) Basalt image, Easter Island, undatable. No similarity to giant aku aku heads found on outer slopes of Rano-raraku; natives call it "god of ocean deeps” (Cthulhu? Zoth-Ommog?)

10) Frag, lavastone bas-relief, S. Indo-China, perhaps Khmer? Used as idol for degenerate native cult in Singapore, circa 1900-1905. Cult-name “Z’mog” attached to central fig.; note serpentine hair motif.

11) Devil-mask. Sepik Riv. area, N. Guinea. Non-human, octopoid head, pyramid or cone body, tentacular arms. Missionaries in area report fighting native cult for 30 years; Rev. H. Wallace says native god named "Zhmog-yaa."

As for the artifacts on this list, described in the notes, they were for the most part excellent examples of South or Central Pacific native workmanship. Design motifs, however, were quite unusual and suggested sources in Pacific myth and legend unfamiliar to me. There was nothing about the stone images and carvings, the wooden masks or woven cloth samples, that seemed particularly bizarre or frightening ... except that, taken together in this proximity, they suggested a surprising and even disconcerting similarity of theme and design, which became all the more enigmatic when you consider the enormous distances involved.

That is to say, there is nothing really uncanny about a lavastone bas-relief fragment such as #10, which, if the Professor is correct in assigning Khmer origin, must come from the jungles of Cambodia; nor is there anything frightful or unnatural about the stone tiki, #7 on the Professor’s list, which is clearly of Marquesan craftsmanship.

What is a trifle disturbing, however, is to examine them in the light of distance ... for there are more than eight thousand miles of ocean between the Marquesas and Cambodia ... and it seemed perplexing, it not virtually inconceivable, that two so widely separated cultures could have carved images of a snaky-maned divinity with names so amazingly similar as Z’otomogo and Z'ntog.

AS for the twelfth item on the inventory that was much more surprising than all the rest put together. The Professor's notation read as follows:

12) Jade image, workmanship unidentified; disc. by native diver off Ponape, 1909. Note inscription on base (not Naacal—Tsath-yo or R’lyehian?). Definitely represents Zoth-Ommog!

This particular artifact arrested my attention almost immediately, indeed, among the jumble of carved and painted wood and crudely cut stonework, it stood out dramatically. As the "Ponape figurine" has never been photographed or displayed, I shall describe it in some detail, for it is most remarkable.

In the first place, it is an extraordinary rarity co find worked jade articles of such size among native Pacific artworks—unless they be mere trade craft exports from China, such being commonly found. This particular image or idol was certainly not of Chinese workmanship ... indeed, both from style and technique, to say nothing of craftsmanship, it is completely unique.

Briefly, the figurine, including base, stands about nineteen inches tall and is of worked and polished jade of an unfamiliar type. I am no authority on Chinese jade carvings, but I have never seen this sort of jade before anywhere. It is greasy gray-white, flecked or mottled with irregular spots of deep dark green, and both extremely dense and heavy. The image itself is not only non-humanoid, but virtually non-objective—hauntingly suggestive of some of the weird carved figures of the little-known amateur sculptor Clark Ashton Smith—and in detail and finish, to say nothing of conception and sophistication, weirdly reminiscent of the brilliant if degenerate work produced by the famed San Francisco sculptor Cyprian Sincaul.

It represents a peculiar creature with a body shaped like a broad-based, truncated cone. A flat, blunt, wedge-shaped, vaguely reptilian head surmounts this conical torso, and the head is almost entirely hidden behind swirling tresses. This hair, or beard and mane, consists of thickly carved and coiling ropes, like serpents or worms, and the workmanship is so uncannily naturalistic that you could almost swear the slithering tendrils are in motion. Through this repulsive Medusa-mane of ropy tendrils, two fierce, serpentlike eyes glare in a horrible mingling of both cold, inhuman mockery ... and what I can only describe as gloating menace.

The technique of the unknown sculptor is one of astonishing sophistication: There is not the slightest hint of the primitive about this puzzling and vaguely repellent figurine. It must have taken exceptional talent, virtual genius, to catch that expression of leering, icy, alien menace in the stubborn medium of slick, heavy jade. But caught it the artist has ... to an almost disquieting degree.

The base upon which this truncated, conical body rests is carved from the same unfamiliar speckled jade, and it is oddly angled, as if the sculptors culture possessed a completely non-Euclidean geometry. Deeply and cleanly cut in one side of this odd-angled base are two exceedingly complex hieroglyphs in no language known to me, symbols which bear no similarity to Chinese ideographs, Egyptian glyphs, Arabic characters, Sanskrit, or even common forms of Mesopotamian cuneiform, and certainly no slightest resemblance to any southern or central Pacific native writing known to me.

Rising from overlapping folds at the base of the image's neck, four bluntly tapering limbs or appendages rise from the torso. They are flat and resemble the arms of the common echinoderm of the class asteroidea—the familiar starfish of our California beaches—with the rather peculiar exception that the underside of these broad, flat, narrowing limbs bear row upon row of disc-like suckers. Remarkable how the unknown artist has combined suggestions of starfish and squid or octopi in his central conception ... and extraordinary, the cold sensation of unease amounting to a sort of psychic warning of actual physical danger I receive from the briefest contemplation of this idol! The combination of that fixed, gloating stare from those soulless, snake-like eyes half-veiled behind the coiling, worm-like tangle of its hair ... and those weird, bending arms or tentacles, half-raised and half-extended as ... as if to clutch their prey! ... well, it is quite unsettling.

PUTTING aside the jade figurine, I next turned to a cursory perusal of the miscellaneous manuscripts. I first leafed through the manila folder which had been inserted in the packing case which had contained the artifact collection, and whose first page consisted of the annotated listing of the collection.

Leafing rapidly through the bulky folder, I discovered its contents to be heterogeneous indeed, consisting of some personal letters from Professor Copeland to various institutions such as the Curator of Rare Books at the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, universities and libraries here in the United States; there were also bundles of newspaper clippings from a vast range of papers (generally having nothing in common, outside of the fact that they concerned missing or sunken ships in the Pacific, or news accounts of the temporary emergence of sunken islands of volcanic nature), and several pages of notes clipped together and bearing the heading Notes on the Xothic Legend Cycle, with References to the R’lyeh Text and Other Books.

The first page consisted of a list, in phonetic spelling, of the variant names of the aquatic deity whose representations in the plastic arts the Professor had collected so assiduously. As noted earlier, it was most surprising that cultures so widely scattered should share a divinity in common, or at least the very similar names the Professor had noted down—"Zatamaga", “Hommogah”, “Z'otomogo", “Sothamogha”, "Z’mog”, and so on—were so similar as to strongly suggest a common religious figure shared by obscure cults across the breadth of the Pacific.

The Professor had next tabulated the physical elements of this being as shown in the various artworks. In summation, they tallied in amazing detail with the appearance of the jade figurine I had set aside atop my filing cabinet.

Next he had carefully traced the two complicated hieroglyphs onto a sheet of notepaper, and underneath these followed a list of the phonemes contained in the composite name to which he had attached symbols from several languages I was not familiar with. These symbols were arranged in neat columns, and the columns were headed with odd. uncouth labels— which, from context, must be the names of languages. If so, they are of languages unlisted in Havering’s Alphabets of the World. Ancient and Modern—"Naacal"—"Hieratic Naacal"—"Tsath-yo"—"Rlyehian"—"Senzar"—"Conjectural Akio"—and others, several of them, not one of which was known to me. His purpose here was clear: He was attempting to find the phonetic meaning of the two Ponape figurine glyphs by comparison with similar phonemes in presumably culturally related tongues. The file folder bore no evidence of success in this endeavor.

Next followed a sequence of letters to and from officials at various institutions. The Professor was attempting to obtain certain obscure books, obviously of considerable rarity, either on library loan or in copy. I reproduce a specimen of this correspondence at random below:

MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Arkham, Massachusetts

Office of the Librarian

September 3rd, 1907

Dear Professor:

We are in receipt of your letter of August 29th, requesting information on the availability of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred on inter-library loan.

The Librarian begs me to inform you that the Kester Library is correct in its information. We have indeed a copy, in excellent state, of the Latin translation made by Olaus Wormius in the edition published in Spain in the Seventeenth Century, and to our knowledge this is the only copy of the "complete" Necronomicon (i.e., the Spanish edition of Wormius) at present in this country. Only five copies, in fact, are known to exist in the entire world.

The extreme rarity of this volume is such that the University Board of Regents has strictly forbidden us to circulate our Alhazred on inter-library loan, although it is available for personal examination to qualified scholars within the premises of the Library itself.

Since you are at present located in California, and a trip to Massachusetts might be difficult to one of your busy schedule, the Librarian suggests you contact Dr. Foster at the Huntington Library in your own state. I believe the Huntington possesses a Necronomicon in manuscript copy, but cannot be certain.

Yours most sincerely,

Thaddeus Pressley, Jun.

For the Librarian

After this came a series of notations in Professor Copeland's own hand, which appear to be a summary of correspondence missing from this file:

Sept. 17th. Contacted Huntington but they have not Nec.

Suggest Brit. Mus. Huntington has Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, in 1840 Düsseldorf edition, so may be worth a trip after all, since von Junzt has much data on Mu, and I suspect Z-O may turn out to he Muvian.

Oct. 11. Obtained good copies of relevant passages from Nec. courtesy of Wallingford in London, but must be from incomplete 15rh Century black-letter edition done in Germany—same edition Kester Lib. in Salem has. Must have Nec. passages concerning Xothic data in complete form!

Oct. 20. Writing today to Lib. Univ. Buenos Aires, Lib. of Univ, of Lima. Peru, and Bib. Nat. in Paris. Spanish edition reputedly in Buenos Aires and Paris; while Lima supposed co have the Italian edition of Theodorus Philetas' Greek trans.

These entries were followed by long passages in several different handwritings, of odd, rhythmic, seemingly mythological narratives. They are far too lengthy and obscure for me to bother copying them into this record, but as Copeland obviously found something important missing from certain of them—something which other copyists had eventually supplied—I will jot down the shortest of these, as follows:

Necronomicon, Bk. II, Chap, vii (excerpt): "And it was done then as it had been promised aforetime, that He [i.e. Chtulthu] was taken by Those whom He had defied, and was plunged into the nethermost depths beneath the Sea, and They placed Him within the barnacled Tower that is said to rise amidst the great ruin that is the Sunken City [R'lyeh] and He was sealed within by the Elder Sign; and, raging at Those who had imprisoned Him, He further earned Their wrath, and They, descending upon Him for the second time, didst impose upon Him the semblance of Death, but left Him dreaming there beneath the Great Waters, and returned to that place from whence They had come, which is named Glyu-Vho, or Ibt al Janzah as we would say [i.e. name Arabic astronomers of Alhazred's day used for the star we call Betelgeuze], and which is amongst the stars, the which looketh upon Earth from that season when the leaves fall to that season when the sowers-of-the-soil are accustomed once again to their fields. And there shall He lie dreaming forever in His House At R'lyeh, unto which withouten pause they who served Him swam, and didst strive against every obstacle, but then disposed themselves to await His Awakening, for that they had no power against the Elder Sign and were fearful of its great potency; but they knew that the Cycle returneth, and that He shall be freed to seize upon the Earth again and make it His Kingdom, and thus to defy the Elder Gods once more. And to His Brethren it chanced likewise, that They were taken by Those whom They too had defied and were hurled into banishment; Him Who Is Not To Be Named [i.e., Hastur] was thrust into the Outermost Emptiness that is beyond the Stars, and with the Others it was the same, until at last was the Earth free of Them, and Those who had come hither in the form of Towers of Flame returned whence They had come, and were seen on this World no more, and on all of the Earth peace came and was unbroken, yet ever the Minions of the Old Ones gathered and planned and sought ways whereby to free their Masters, and lingered whilst Men came to search into the Secret and Forbidden Places and fumble at the Gates. [Note: German edition text ends here and goes on to passage beg. 'But it shall not always be that'; whereas Spanish text continues with following portion omitted in black-letter edition.] And thus He slept unbroken ages by, whilst in the Dark City [i.e. Carcosa], against whose dim shores the cloud-waves break, Him Who Is Not To Be Named roared and writhed in His fetters, and in black, lightless N’kai, deep within the secret places that gape and yawn beneath the Earth, the Black Thing [prob. Tsatboggua] lay enchained, and Abhoth too, the Unclean One, even as didst They all, nor was it within Their power to free Themselves from the strictures imposed upon Them by the Lords of Glyu-Vho [the ’Elder Cods'}, aye, and thus while aeons lapse Ythogtha howls ever from his Abyss, and Ghatanothoa from His Mount, and Zoth-Ommog from His Deep, which is under the Great Waters off the Isle of the Sacred Stone Cities [?Yhe], and all Their Brethren, helpless as are They to free Themselves, and hungry for that freedom to which in the passing of ages They shall attain. In the meanwhile They lurk ever just beyond the threshold which They cannot pass, and hideous beyond the comprehension of mortal minds is the Vengeance that fills Their troubled dreams. CHAP. VIII. But it shall not be always thus, for it is written that the Cycle shall in time return in its appointed Round. ..."

AS I find that mythological mumbo-jumbo interminable, I shall let this single sample suffice, it being the briefest of them all. From the context and appearance of the documents. I gather that the Professor found a friendly colleague willing to copy the passages he desired from a copy of this book, the Necronomicon, most likely at the Bibliothèque Nationale, from the Paris letterhead on the notepaper used. This scholarly friend would seem to have been familiar with this curious mythology, for his parenthetical interpolations indicate a close familiarity with the symbolism used.

It was apparent to me that it would be the labor of many days sorting through this mélange, so I set the folder aside for the remainder of the afternoon and bent my attention to the other duties which awaited me. Ever and anon, however, I had the distinct feeling of eyes upon the back of my neck—a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, doubly so as there was no other person in the room with me at the time.

Finishing work early. I went home that night to my lodgings in Curwen Street in a strange mood of depression and vague unease—although why I should feel depressed or uneasy I cannot say, unless it was from thinking of Professor Copeland’s unhappy fate. He spent the last eight years of his life in a madhouse, and died screaming of things coming down from the stars to wipe all earth clean of life in order to house their own hellish spawn.

In bed I somehow could not keep my mind on the book I was reading—I am lamentably addicted to "thrillers", and was halfway through a novel by one Richard Marsh called The Beetle, which I had been devouring with relish. Unable to fix my attention on the page, I took from the briefcase the manila file folder from the Copeland Papers which contained the data on the "Xothic Legend-Cycle" and turned again to perusing the documents, having brought both folder and jade figurine home with me for further study.

There was page after page of mythological material laboriously hand-copied from books with the most strange and unwholesome titles imaginable—the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, something called the Pnakotic Manuscript, the Ponape Scripture, von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, many more pages copied from the Necronomicon, some typed material from Wynorth’s Tangarva, and Other Pacific Myths, the R'lyeh Text, and some material which appeared to be from a dissertation or unpublished manuscript by one Dr. Laban Shrewsbury of Miskatonic, of whom I had heard vaguely.

As for the copied material itself, I could make no sense out of it—more confused and chaotic mystical nonsense had never spewed from a disarranged intellect! What is one to make of incoherent ravings about gods or devils with such unpronounceable names as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Gharanothoa, Lloigor, Y’golonak, Shub-Niggurath, Hastur, Idh-yaa, Ythogtha, Azathoth, Ithaqua, Glaaki, Tsathoggua, Iod, Yig, Gol-goroth, Nyarlathotep, Ubbo-Sathla, and so on?

In the main, the Professor seemed to have attempted to isolate in one place all the scattered references to four of these demons or divinities from the full range of this immense literature. The beings in which he was interested were Cthulhu, Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog; to a lesser extent he was also gathering references to Yig, Shub-Niggurath, Vorvadoss, Nug, and Yeb. I gathered from some of the material through which I leafed rapidly that these various beings were known to obscure cults scattered all over the world—there were references to "black Zimbabwe" and "weed-grown Y’ha-nthlei", to the Plateau of Leng somewhere in Asia, to certain ancient ruins in Yucatan and Peru, to a certain region in the unexplored deserts of Australia, to a primordial city of “the Yuggoth-spawn” in Antarctica—of all places!—and to the myths of the Wendigo, or Wind-Walker, common among the North Pacific Indian tribes of Canada and Alaska, to the Tcho-Tcho people of Burma, to the "Abominable Mi-Go", which I assumed from the context refers to the so-called Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, to “Fabulous Irem, City of Pillars”, which I recalled from my boyish reading of the Arabian Nights and the Rubaiyat, and thus doubtless belongs to Islamic legendry.

The members of the "Great Old Ones” (as the devil-beings from the stars were most commonly called), upon which Copeland had fixed his attention, were those gods of primal and legended Mu, and in particular, some sort of trinity composed of Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog. These beings were supposed to be brothers, and had for their sire that same Cthulhu of whom I had seen such frequent mention in these excerpts from the literature. One quotation in particular seemed central and pertinent; it came from a remarkable manuscript which, according to Copeland's notes, had been inscribed "in the Elder Aeon", on some sort of palm-leaf parchment, and which had been discovered during diggings on Ponape about 1734 by a Yankee trader, one Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag of Arkham, Mass. Hoag's bodyservant, obviously a half-breed Polynesian or Oriental (Copeland calls him a "hybrid human/Deep One"—whatever that means’) translated this ancient book-scroll from "the primal Naacal" and it was circulated secretly to certain cultists and occult students in the United States, Europe, and Asia for many years. Eventually both the original parchment and a copy of the translation somehow got into the Kester Library, from which the Professor obtained his texts.

At any rate, the key quotation came from this so-called Ponape Scripture, which I will copy out here:

As for Ghatanothoa, the Thing on the Mount, He and His Brethren, Ythogtha, the Abomination in the Abyss, and Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deep, are the Sons of the mighty Cthulhu, Lord of the Watery Abyss and dread and awful Potentate of drowned R'lyeh; and, like unto Their Terrible Sire, Who yet shall come again in future time, They have Their Dominion over the great fish and the serpents of the Deeps, and They too be scaled away under the terrific spell of the Elder Sign for that They dared to challenge Them From Glyu-Vho for the domain of the Earth. Sons be They to great Cthulhu and His Spouse, Idh-yaa, with Whom He copulated awesomely in the nightmare darknesses between the Stars, and these Three, the Spawn of Cthulhu, came down from remote and ultra-telluric Xoth, the dim green double sun that glitters like a daemonic eye in the blacknesses beyond Abbith, to whelm and reign over the steaming fens and bubbling slime-pits of the mist-veiled dawn aeons of this Earth, and it was in primordial and shadowy Mu that They were great.

I set the folder aside as weariness began to creep over me.

That night I did not have wholesome dreams.

IN a desultory fashion, over the next three months or so, I worked my way through the various notes and documents. One by one the pieces in this puzzle began to fall into place.

This Demon Trinity, and its dread Sire, interested Copeland most because the Pacific was the area of their greatest power. Obviously, in his explorations, researches and excavations, he had come across this cult or its remains, which had led him on and on through the mazes of this weird and horrible mythology.

As for the name wherewith he had labeled the cult material, the derivation was obvious. “Xothic”, because the legends centered around three devil gods engendered by Cthulhu upon an entity who dwelt upon or near the double star the cultists knew as Xoth. Ghatanothoa and Yrhogtha and Zoth-Ommog, and perhaps Cthulhu and his monstrous mate, Idh-yaa, as well, had come down from space to this world in the dawn ages and their empire had covered that primal Pacific civilization known to the occultists as Mu. When Mu broke up and submerged—oh, I have dipped into the wild pages of Colonel Churchward, too!—their worship and their legends lingered on among certain degenerate cult survivals of the most staggering antiquity.

It was to the task of chronicling this dread, prehistoric empire (which reputable scientists, needless to say, shrug off as mere legend-mongering), that Copeland had devoted the labor of his final years. Among the miscellaneous papers of the bequest was a vast, untidy bundle of manuscript, in length the size of a weighty tome, which thankfully was left still unfinished at the Professor’s death. I say "thankfully left unfinished", because I have—to the considerable detriment of my wholesome slumber—actually dared to glance into the chaotic pages of screaming lunacy which comprise this monumental work—the spewings of a mad brain, a diseased intelligence—the wild ravings of a once-brilliant mind sadly gone teetering over the brink of cataclysmic insanity.

Few eyes, I think, save for my own, will ever have peered into this final production of a blighted, once productive, career. This particular work, to which the Professor affixed the title of The Civilization of Mu: A Reconstruction in the Light of Recent Discoveries, with A Synoptic Comparison of the R'lyeh Text and the Ponape Scripture—this manuscript, I say, for all that it is an incoherent jumble of hideous blasphemy and nightmarish cosmic speculation, yet traces the rise and decay and destruction of a civilization which, however imaginary, however purely mythical, does at least provide a seemingly viable hypothesis whereby to account for the puzzling and cyclopean masonry wherewith so very many of the jungle-clad Pacific islands are mysteriously and unaccountably encumbered.

The collapse of this primal or prehuman race, and the destruction of the so-called "Lost Continent" which some even now conjecture to have been its cradle, was (in poor Copeland’s view) survived by obscure, shadowy cults which worshiped with decadent rites these Xothic demon gods.

This mysterious survival, his documents reiterate again and again, was simply because the Demon Trinity and their Sire had not perished after all in the destruction of Mu, indeed, could not of their very nature die or be slain, but somehow lived on eternally under the trance-state forced upon them by their adversaries, the Elder Gods. In this supernal trance-state, they live forever but are impotent to act: except that in dreams they could somehow sway and infect with madness the minds of men. Those men whose mental natures were somehow susceptible to their insidious influence, whether drawn thereto by scholarly curiosity, the lust for unholy power, or a certain artistic sensitivity amounting almost to innate instability, they could pervert to their worship ... like Faust, tempted from the study of Divinity by desire for the promised powers of black magic.

It was a hideously suggestive premise, and weirdly persuasive. But something about it bothered me, like the missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle. Some fact was lacking from the mosaic which Harold Hadley Copeland had so ingeniously constructed—why did the sleeping devil-gods even need human converts?

That was the unanswered question that baffled me and stuck in my craw. Of what conceivable use were fragile, ephemeral, mortal men to such as the Xothic Triad and their Sire?

The answer came to me quite suddenly, in a flash of recollection that left me oddly uneasy. It had been lurking in my mind all the while ... suggested by that first interminable quotation from the blasphemous and shocking Necronomicon, a passage which I have already copied out at length into this journal, but will repeat here: "Yet ever the Minions of the Old Ones gathered and planned and sought ways whereby to free their Masters, and lingered whilst Men came to search into the Secret and Forbidden Places and fumble at the Gates."

I understood it at once—the Elder Sign, whatever it was, was a material thing, some sort of talisman or sigil, imbued with psychic force which repelled both the Old Ones and their unhuman Minions—but did not repulse men. It was men and men alone who could open the "Gates” and set the Old Ones free!

VERY much of Copeland’s research had been geographical, trying to pin down the location of the imprisoned Old Ones in the Pacific area. There was quite a sheaf of newspaper clippings—inexplicable to me when I first leafed through them, though now they took on an ominous and sinister meaning.

These clippings were fastened together with a paperclip in three bundles, tagged "R'lyeh", "Yhe", and "Z-O; Ponape." The bundle marked "R'lyeh" was by far the bulkiest and must have contained thirty or more news items, going as far back as 1879. The most recent clipping was from the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. Under the headline "Mystery Derelict Found at Sea" were details of a confused and seemingly innocuous maritime tragedy concerning a two-masted schooner, the Emma, which sailed into the unknown from Auckland on February 20th, three years ago; on the twelfth day of the following month, a lone survivor was rescued from the waves by the Morrison Company freighter Vigilant. This man, a Norwegian named Gustaf Johansen, told of encountering a ship manned by villainous Kanakas and half-castes, of a battle at sea, followed by the discovery of an unknown island not found on any chart. To this yellowed newspaper clipping were attached some typewritten papers—the text of a sort of diary by the sailor Johansen—obtained, surprisingly enough, by the grand-nephew of one of my old teachers, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University; both Gammell and his grand-nephew had, it seemed, interested themselves in much the same sort of borderline studies as had formed Professor Copeland’s chief preoccupation. I shall not go into the text of the Johansen narrative in any length—he describes their sightings of the unmapped island at about S. Latitude 47°9′, W. Longitude 126°43'—their landing on a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weed-grown blocks of enormous stone masonry—a confused and nightmarish struggle with enormous things he shudderingly refuses to describe.

This reference to latitude and longitude Copeland underscored heavily with his fountain pen.

Turning back to the earliest clipping, a yellowed scrap of newsprint from the Boston Register, dated November 15, 1879. I read that certain articles from a prehistoric tomb were to be on public display in the Cabot Museum. Boston; these articles had been found on May 11, 1878, by crewmen from the freighter Eridanus, bound from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, which had sighted "a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin." The newspaper article gave latitude and longitude readings identical with those the Sydney Bulletin printed in its story about the schooner Emma—forty-seven years later!

The second bundle of news clippings, only half as thick as the first, contained much similar material, but located infrequent emergences from the deeps of an island containing a great chasm some thousands of miles to the south of the "R'lyeh emergences."

It was the third bundle, however, which caught my attention the most. These clippings, about a dozen in all, were about odd disappearances of sailing ships in the waters off Ponape. The earliest of these told of the disappearance at sea of the whaling ship Nebuchadnezzar, out of New Bedford, which vanished in the vicinity of Ponape with all hands in 1864. No storm was reported in the vicinity of Ponape—no storm anywhere in the Pacific on the date in question for a thousand miles—nothing but a peculiar, heavy, low-lying bank of fog.

A more recent clipping, from the Singapore Times for April 8, 1911, discussed the mysterious disappearance with all hands of the French warship Versailles. Again, no storm was reported, but heavy fog had overlaid the waters off Ponape.

One clipping in particular the Professor had marked with a large exclamation point. It came from the Honolulu Sentinel for June 17, 1922, and told a nightmarish and rambling story of a fleet of fishing boats manned by Ponape natives caught in a thick fog off the island and attacked by monstrous and horrible sea slugs, swollen to fantastic proportions, which slithered into the boats in some cases, catching the native fishermen in their mouths and dragging them over the side. More than forty unfortunates were lost in this manner, and the survivors, who were hospitalized in states ranging from incoherent raving hysteria to complete catatonic shock, repeated over and over again the meaningless word or exclamation “Hug!” or “Ugh!”

In the margin of this story, in Copeland’s hand, was written: “Yuggya! See Zan. Tab., IX, 2, lines 120-150.” This note referred to the puzzling and cryptic set of inscribed tablets Professor Copeland had brought back from the prehistoric stone tomb of a priest or wizard in the Tsang Plateau region of central Asia in 1913. I recalled that the publication in 1916 of his brochure The Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation, with its unholy and repulsive picture of the dawn age of civilization, had been thunderously condemned as “cosmic blasphemy" from press and pulpit, and had given the death-blow to his scientific reputation. Two years later he was committed to a madhouse; eight years after, he died raving.

We had a copy of the Zanthu Tablets in our library section, although I had never dared look within its innocuous green leatherette cover; I did so now, however, and quickly found the passage to which the handwritten note refers. It is close to the end of the ninth tablet—there are ten in all—and the relevant passage must be that in which the hierophant Zanthu invokes "the Father of Worms ... even undying and putrescent Ubb, leader and progenitor of the dreaded Yuggya—the loathly and prehuman servitors of (Ythogcha), who squirm and slither in the slime about His feet.”

But the central passage reads thusly: “The Yuggya serve my lord Ythogtha and His Brother, Zoth-Ommog, even as the Deep Ones serve Cthulhu and the Tcho-Tchos their lords, Zhar and Lloigor; and as the Flame-Creatures strive ever to free Cthulhu and the Serpentmen of Valusia sought to unchain their lord, Yig, so do the Yuggya tirelessly gnaw at the bonds that hold Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog."

This reminded me of something in one of those lengthy and chaotic passages from the Necronomicon. I turned to those manuscripts and found the quotation—“Within the five-pointed Star carven of grey stone from ancient Mnar lies armor against witches and daemons, against the Deep Ones, the Dholes, the Yuggs, the Voormis, the Tcho-Tcho, the Abominable Mi-Go, the Shoggoths, the Valusians, and all such people and beings who serve the Great Old Ones and their Spawn.”

I put away the Copeland papers with a little shudder of disgust. The fascination this repulsive and chaotic mythology had begun to exert on my imagination was distinctly unhealthy: I had been sleeping badly these past several nights, and my dreams—nightmares really—I, who have not had nightmares since I was an adolescent!—my dreams (which never, upon waking, could I remember in detail, save that they were frightful) were filled with shadowy terrors that left me weak and shaken at dawn. It was time I forgot about poor mad Copeland and his horror gods and their slithering horde of worm-like worshipers, and turned my mind to sane and sunlit matters.

Shoving the papers away with a determined gesture, I reached for my pipe ... and found myself staring directly into the carved glare of gloating, icy menace some unknown genius had sculpted in that weirdly horrible idol from Zoth-Ommog’s waters.

NOTE by Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins: Up to this point Dr. Blaine's manuscript is neatly written, on consecutively numbered sheets of office stationery, and develops a chronological narrative that is logical and coherent, although it betrays a level of emotional uneasiness just beIow the narrative surface. However, at this point the neat, logical portion of the manuscript ends abruptly, and the hastily scrawled and clumsily scribbled pages which follow are in no particular order, and describe the rapid and frightful degeneration of his mind toward a final, shattering climax of mad ravings. I have attempted to sort the following fragments into some sort of order, based on internal evidence, but without much success.

(DREAM ONE)

Extraordinary and terrifying dream tonight—first one I can remember clearly enough to set down. Dim, moonlit vistas of stone city of Cyclopean architecture—titanic stone blocks graven with sprawling and monstrously uncouth glyphs—rows of immense pylons marching the length of flagstone-paved squares—ziggurats or angular pyramids with smoky flames at summits, like altar fires.

Hooded and robed shapes about the upmost tiers of one colossal pyramid, and the sound of rhythmic chanting—over and over, the same inexplicable phrase—woke suddenly, dripping with cold sweat, with the irresistible urge co write down what I had heard (which is why I am describing the dream). Probably utterly meaningless, bur here goes—

The phrase is: “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

(DREAM TWO?)

Tonight I returned again in my dreams to that Cyclopean stone city of monstrous angular pyramids and tall pylons, and to the vision of queer, squat, robed and hooded celebrants worshiping at some awful Rite ... the Moon seized my attention ... it was frightfully huge, and its shining face oddly unmarked by the many craters which pockmark its visage in our day ... it made me wonder (in my dream) if this was a vision of some remote, preCambrian era—just then a horrible flying Thing flashed across the silver face of the full Moon—ribbed, membranous wings and hideously elongated beak or proboscis—surely a living pteranodon of the remote Mesozoic skies!

(PERHAPS DREAM 5 OR 4)

—I am in an immense building of monolithic stone, the blocks perhaps sixty or seventy feet on a side ... it is a colossal hall, lined with monstrous huge columns, like the hypostyle hall at Karnak ... and like the colonnades of Karnak, the pillars are covered with weird ideographs in some unknown, surely not human, language.

I am approaching the great altar, which is rayed like a starfish, hollowed and scooped out in the center, and filled with some red fluid (blood?). My attention wanders to the vast bas-relief cut on the wall behind this curious star-shaped altar, and with a thrill of unearthly and mind-chilling horror I recognize thereupon the ghastly likeness of that primordial jade image from the waters off Ponape—but ten thousand times more huge, and incredibly detailed, with almost photographic clarity—oh my God! The thought suddenly seizes me that it is a likeness done from a living model—I awake screaming, my throat raw, with my housekeeper clutching her kimono about her bosom and asking me if I am well. Well? I hardly know ... such dreams as this cannot originate in my mind ... unless put there by Another!

(DREAM 4; PERHAPS 3)

On another night, I find myself approaching a great monolithic temple on the summit of an immense height. It is again night, and an evil, sickly moon leers down through coiling medusa-mists ... people are all about me as I ascend the height—weeping, kneeling, huddled. They are not quite completely human—squat, hunched, anthropoid, with very much more body hair than is normal today, almost amounting to a pelt. There is a vaguely Asiatic look to them, lemon-yellow skin, slanted eyes black and liquid, prognathous jaws and heavy brow-ridges.

The worshipers are striving to avert some threatened doom or punishment, purhaps natural; and as I advance up the long slope (covered, I notice, with what looks like Jurassic conifers!), the ground shudders beneath my heel and thunder growls in the mist-veiled sky—suddenly, a line of black mountains on the horizon burst into flame, one by one! A range of volcanoes, sulfurously alit in sequence, like a row of candles ignited in turn by some unseen Hand! The people around me—or subhumans—are moaning some hellish, grunting litany—"Idh-yaa, Ythogtha; Cthulhu; Nug—”

Suddenly a crevice opens in the earth at my very feet—world deep, black as the Pit itself! It fills rapidly with gurgling slime and the hunched and moaning worshipers shrink back in nameless dread from the immense, wet, glistening, white, pulpy, worm-like—I can not stand it; I force myself awake ....

(DREAM 5)

In this dream I am descending slowly through graduated levels of green light, which grow steadily more dim; it is as if I am sinking (or being drawn down?) into the depths of the ocean. The sensation of cold wet darkness pressing upon me is stifling, oppressive ... then I am floating above a mounded plain of slick black mud. It is drowned in green-black gloom, and little is visible ... now I approach a truly immense crater or chasm in the ocean's floor ... I glide over the lip and descend, it seems, for a very long rime ... the crater seems to be miles deep ... the last vestiges of emerald light slowly fade into utter and abysmal blackness.

When at last I reach the floor of the great depression I can somehow see again—I think the oily ooze that covers the crater floor is dimly phosphorescent with decay or radioactivity ... now I am nearing a huge mound in the center of the crater ... it resolves gradually our of the all-but-impenetrable gloom ... it is a structure of some kind, but it has not the workmanship of human hands, the stone blocks are Cyclopean, and the rows of truncated pillars are ... it is the Temple of which I have dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed, before! It is the House of Zoth-Ommog—oh Christ save me—that sickening light! Thar gloom-piercing light that blazes from the Elder Sign on the Door—No, damn you, I will not touch it ... remove it ... release ...—I must WAKE UP—

(DREAM 6 OR 7)

The drug that Wollstone prescribed has done me no good at all, I perceive, for I have now for seven consecutive nights dreamed the same dream, precisely identical in all respects: I am standing in my nightclothes on the beach at Wexton Pier on the outskirts of Santiago; I am shivering with the cold, but brimming with a weird and terrible exaltation ... clenched in my hands is a sheet of written matter—something I searched and searched for in the Copeland papers—the Invocation of the Yuggya—the Great Invocation from the damnable and loathsome copy of the Yuggya Chants that raving idiot Copeland purchased from the Lascar sailor on the San Francisco waterfront—oh, God, I am going to read it aloud—with a terrific effort of will that leaves me shaking and gasping with exhaustion, I wrench myself awake ... I must burn that copy of the Invocation—yes, and the filthy old book, too! I ... must ....

(DREAM 7; PERHAPS 6)

Tonight as I fell asleep, I passed into a very deep slumber as if drugged, although I have taken none of the prescription the last two nights, fearing the after-effects, which leave me lax and unresponsive and curiously lacking in will. ... From this heavy slumber I came gradually half-awake within my dream, and Someone was whispering to me in a soft, guttural, seductive voice—had been whispering to me for a long time before I wrenched myself half-awake—suddenly I awoke completely, found myself trembling before the wide-open window, incoherently repeating over and over, "No! No! I will not do it!"

But what was the window doing open? Surely, I closed and locked it before retiring—as I do every night, when the wind blows in from the sea ... and what was that slime or jelly smeared all over the window-sill—like slime from a snail-track, but if so, it was the very Father of all Snails ....

I must see a doctor—soon.

(DREAM 8)

My condition is steadily deteriorating; now, somnambulism is included among my symptoms, for Mrs. Wilkins says she has found me walking in my sleep seven times in the past week and a half, and once she found me lurching down the driveway toward the street ... I asked her (half-dreading to hear the answer), which direction was I heading? She says the Waterfront—toward the Pier.

I must burn that Invocation; and the horrible ancient book I copied it from; and I would to God I had not let the Directors persuade me to print that lengthy narrative from Copeland’s translation of the Zanthu Tablets or that hellishly suggestive excerpt from his Asian diary in the Journal of Pacific Antiquities! Why in God’s name didn't I tell them how much I know—I could at least have hinted at the mind-blasting TRUTH behind his cursed Xothic legend-cycle!

Some things we were not meant to know.

Some things it is ... dangerous to learn ....

Last night the Voice came again and whispered to me for hours as I lay half-conscious. ... Oh, I would like to see far Addith where the Metal Brains dwell, and Zaoth with its old books cut on plates of lagb metal from Yuggorh, books that predate the creation of the earth by thirty-seven million years. ... God help me, I would like to see primal and doom-fraught Mu before the Towers of Fire from Betelgeuze whelmed and trampled it down beneath the rolling waves ... the Yuggya can disembody my thought-lattice (they whisper) and set me free in time and space ... to visit Celaeno and Yith and Ymar, and horrible Shaggai ... but I will not be the agent of the Old Ones, nor burden my soul with the massive guilt of the slaughter of this planet ... which will certainly follow if I do Their bidding, and loose frightful Zoth-Ommog from his Deep ... Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name—

POSTSCRIPT: On the night of August 3rd, a Santiago police car saw a man in white pyjamas standing knee-deep in the surf near Wexton Pier, apparently reading a letter by the light of a match. Approaching him, Officers Harlow and Kellar shone their flashlights in his face. He seemed to be asleep, but the blinding light awakened him and he realized suddenly where he was and what he was doing. Paying no attention to the patrolmen, he suddenly, with white, shaking fingers, touched the burning match to the sheet of closely written paper he held, and hurled the blazing sheet into the dark, foaming waters. In that same instant, following the flight of the burning paper, Officer Kellar turned his light on the black waters, and reports that he glimpsed something enormous, round and slick, and white—but not remotely suggestive of a human body, he is certain.

At that moment, the wild-eyed man—later identified as Henry Stephenson Blaine, Ph.D., manuscript collection curator for the Sanbourne Institute in this city—apparently saw the thing in the surf—and much clearer than did either of the officers. For he staggered back with a horrible wailing screech that one of the officers, who has been both a prison guard at San Quentin and a security guard for an insane asylum, describes as the cry of a damned soul—"the most horrible sound I ever heard come from a human throat," he said, swearing and pale.

As the two patrolmen waded out to him, Dr. Blaine fell on his knees in the foaming surf and clapped both hands over his face, covering his eyes, screaming hoarsely: “God! God! Horrible—I have seen a Yugg! A Yugg!—Jesus—God—a Yugg!—God—lä! Zoth-Ommog!—cf'ayak ghaaa yrrl'th tho-Yuggya! Yaaaaaa-n'gh—”

The police closed with him and grappled with him; he reportedly made no resistance, but was so shaken with uncontrollable spasms of trembling that he could not stand and had to be carried to the patrol car. Along the way, he babbled with desperate urgency to his two captors—or rescuers: "I am mad or going mad—get to Hodgkins at the Institute—the stone thing from Ponape—God damn that mad fool, Copeland!—tell Hodgkins the jade idol must be destroyed—must be smashed, d'you hear me?—Kill it. kill it, kill it. killllllllllll—"

Dr. Blaine then collapsed in utter exhaustion and was admitted to Mercy Hospital Psychiatric Emergency Ward at 3 o’clock in the morning. He has been there now for two months; in all that time he has not spoken a single word, except for a gobbling sound he repeats over and over, which sounds like, “Yugg—Yugg-Yugg!"

He is now kept under forcible restraint for his own protection.

I have perused the manuscript found among the papers on his desk and forwarded to me by his assistant, Mr. Hodgkins. I have reached, and can reach, no final conclusion regarding it and its chaotic Contents.

With one remark found therein I heartily concur.

Some things we were not meant to know; and some things it is dangerous to learn. To which, recalling the horror and loathing suggested in the patient’s data on the monstrous worm-things he calls “Yuggs”, one of which he believes he saw clearly in the blaze of the policeman’s flashlight: Some things it is death and madness to see.

For since that night of cataclysmic horror Dr. Blaine has attempted to blind himself eleven times.

(signed) Robinson Dambler. M.D.

Physician-in-Charge