Episodes 42-44 / Reading 6 - The Call of Cthulhu

[old book]

...The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria was a Theosophical book (compiled from W. Scott-Elliot's articles in a Theosophical magazine, if I'm not mistaken), and they also had some things to say about the lost continent of Mu, although they may have equated that one with Lemuria, I can't remember.

...
Blavatsky's book also contains some decidedly Lovecraftian views on race, that even tie in to the "degenerate" races who make up the Cthulhu and Dagon cults...

Elliott's book is actually two, both found on-line at sacred-texts.com under the Atlantis section. On race: somewhere Lovecraft mentions the term "Turanian" and some critics have latched onto it as the HPL/HPB missing link. HPB was racist against bushmen, Australian aboriginees and maybe some other isolated groups who, she wrote, don't have souls and don't belong to any of her "root races," although Turanians do have a "root race" all their own (2 in fact, if I remember right).

Theosophy was certainly "in the air" and there are a lot of parallels with certain things in Lovecraft's writing. His California colony of theosophists who don robes to await the apocalypse remind me of the rumour about Fawcett's disappearance when he was searching for the Lost City of Z in the Mato Grosso ; some said he had vanished on purpose and was leading a theosophist commune down there. His brother was a big occultist, maybe that had something to do with the rumour, and of course Arthur Conan Doyle was his bud and wouldn't let the story rest in peace. But that's another author and I already mentioned it before.

Machen's quote at the beginning and some of Lovecraft's hints of humans secretly serving as a priestcraft for the avatars of the Old/Great Ones on earth also find some echoes in the yellow peril literature about evil world councils in the Orient (Maker of Moons is an early example and contains the Plateau of Leng I believe) and, not surprising at all, inside Theosophy proper, specifically in the Mahatma letters (wikipedia has a superficial treatment of that controversy).

If you want to get really occult about it all, go back to Asoka's legend of the Nine, follow it through the European cleric in India in the Middle Ages to Theosophy to Talbot Mundy to Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, Project Paperclip, the JFK assassination. Project Blue Beam and Peter Levenda's recent books about parapolitics and American political witchcraft. Peter "Alhazred" Levenda

PS R'lyeh is pronounced trilled R+liquid L then YEH with a rising intonation, so that the RL form the first unstressed syllable and YEH the second stressed. The apostrophe is superfluous but was used in an early rendition to mark a palatized trilled R ; it does not represent a glottal stop. I just made that up, but that's how I say it.

[Kaelestes]

I've always imagined the "true" pronunciation of Cthulhu to be a mashing of abrasive, organic, and strangely melodic sounds; something like a siren, a screaming woman, and a nuclear explosion all in extreme slow motion. And I also envisioned the experience of hearing Cthulhu speak its own name to be something akin to having your eardrums punctured and torn out with a screwdriver.

[Bulbatron]

Excellent, been looking forwards to starting on the Cthulhu stuff.  Still can't decide which is my favourite story in the 'Mythos'.  Probably 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', but if you asked me again next week, I might say something else.

[Viatorium Press]

I feel rude about stepping into this forum without first saying how much I truly appreciate this podcast. I spend a lot of lonely hours in the studio, and have burned through all the episodes in an addictive manner. I find myself laughing out loud frequently at your play on these stories. I've been listening on headphones, and the quality of the readings (Lehman!), and the sound design, are absolutely first rate. Episode 42 was sequestered away on the ipod and spirited into the studio, waiting for the deepest part of the night to unveil it. It made my work go smoother and for that I am most grateful.

Thanks for infusing my late hours with Lovecraftian joy and good humor.

[Hastur The Incorrigible]

Call me morbid, but this was so good it made me realise that this whole project has an inbuilt dead end.

Now that's what I call a mind-bendingly traumatic confrontation with reality.

Unless you guys retool the podcast and do Raymond Chandler next, of course.

hint sledgehammer hint

[paraman52]

Outstanding episode, guys! I particularly enjoyed the reunion of the cast of Call of Cthulhu. BTW, ask Andrew to do a reprise of his role as the "The Unhelpful Bureaucrat."

I agree with Chris' thesis that C of C is a tightly written story with nothing wasted. Each element of the story supports the other. However, I would disagree that C of C is HPL's greatest story (even though I love hearing it read to me by Wayne June, over and over again). The title of greatest story has to be awarded to "At the Mountains of Madness," because that story paints an almost complete picture of the Mythos. Everything that you wanted to know about the Mythos, but were afraid to ask....

[old book]

Can't wait to hear this one, just downloaded it. Part 1 was excellent.

Came across a slideshow of photographs of Providence in 1976 by a then-student of the RHode Island School of Design. Some of the photos are very interesting. I didn't realize Providence was such a city, I always thought of it as smaller somehow.

http://www.re-vision.com/photography/providence1976/slideshow/

[Kaelestes]

Jeez guys, that first minute made my skin tingle.

Old Book, here's a shot of Providence at the Crawford Street Bridge c.1900-somethingorother. By HP's time there were around about 200,000 residents, which actually made it one of the country's bigger cities. I'm not entirely sure why I know this.

[Genus Unknown]

Niiiiiiiiice work, fellas.  Nice damn work.

I'm so excited about this stage of HPL's career.  Just looking at the chronological list of stories... check out what we've got coming up after this:

- Pickman’s Model
- The Silver Key
- The Strange High House in the Mist
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
- The Colour Out of Space

Now, I love "Pickman's Model," "The Silver Key," and "The Strange High House in the Mist." They're all fine stories. But "Kadath," "Charles Dexter Ward," and "The Colour Out of Space," back to back to back?  Are you sh*tting me?  Not to mention, just a few weeks later, "The Dunwich Horror," "The Curse of Yig," and "The Mound" (if you're doing the Zealia Bishop stories, which you have to, I demand it). And then a little later, "The Whisperer in Darkness," "At the Mountains of Madness," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," again, back to back to back.  He wrote those three stories one after the other.  Talk about a hot streak.

I'm with Chris: I don't know what the hell happened to HPL when he moved back to Providence, but it evidently flipped some kind of crazy genius switch, and some kind of Eldritch Light Bulb From Beyond lit up above his head.  The sudden spike in quality is really remarkable.  It's like he found his voice and his vision all at once.

The first thing he wrote after moving back to Providence was "Cthulhu," and with a few stinky exceptions, he pretty much spent the rest of his life spinning stellar fungi into gold.

[old book]

Jeez guys, that first minute made my skin tingle.

Old Book, here's a shot of Providence at the Crawford Street Bridge c.1900-somethingorother. By HP's time there were around about 200,000 residents, which actually made it one of the country's bigger cities. I'm not entirely sure why I know this.

Hmm, it didn't show up on the screen, there seem to be internet interruptions at the moment, thanks though! I'll see it later, hopefully.

I'm still in the middle of listening to the podcast by I can't resist commenting on the Eskimo stuff a little.

The idea of renegade Eskimos comes up in the literature in a strange way. Olaus Wormius aka Olaf Wormskiold wrote about the lost Norse colonies in Greenland. The early thinking was that the East and West Colonies in Greenland might have survived. It was easier to land in West Greenland, East was all choked up with ice and icebergs, and so it was determined first that the Norse colony there didn't survive, but the people looking for the colonies had made a geographical mistake: East and West Colonies were both on the SW coast of Greenland, but they thought one was on the west coast and the other on the east coast.

OK if you're still with me this far: Hans Egede went to find the lost Norse, to convert them to Lutheranism or whatever, since they'd adopted Catholicsm back in AD 1000 or so, long before the Reformation. He couldn't find any but di dconvert the Eskimo in West Greenland. The whole time he was thinking the East Colony might exist on the east coast, but it was inaccessible. Actually there was some commerce from the east coast down at Cape Farewell in the southern tip, but European ships couldn't really get there. So there were tales among the West Greenlanders that a degenerate group inhabited the east side of Greenland, that they were cannibals and would eat anyone who went there.

Regarding Tornasuk, Greenland had a relatively simple mythology before Egede converted the Inuit. There was Sea Woman and there was another god who basically lived in the earth in a warm place. Tornarsuq is supposed to be the same deity, and he rules over a group of deities called tornat. Angakuit or shamans would communicate through them to Sea Woman to make sure the seal harvest was good, I believe. There are other names for Tornarsuq that begin with Torn-. Anyway, someone came up with the theory once that Tornasuq is a Norse survival in Inuit and refers directly to Thor. Tornat doesn't sound a thing like Asgaard to me, but who knows, it's possible, if the name came from Greenland into other North American Inuit groups rather than the other way around.

When Professor Webb is looking for Runic inscriptions, it reminded me of the Jessup expedition in Greenland sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I think they stole an Eskimo meteorite and took it back to New York.

Another interesting connection between the renegade Eskimo in CoC and real Eskimo shamans/angakuit is the use of a special language by the shamans, containing euphamisms, strange ways to say common things and archaisms. The idea is the spirit world uses a special language. In other cultures magicians and shamans use entirely different languages to communicate with the spirits, the origins of which are largely unknown (Japan, Peru). This is sort of what Dee did with Enochian in England, btw.

OK I'm going back to listen.

[Chris Lackey]

Holy Eskimo, Batman! That's flippin' amazing! HPL know about this stuff or is this just putting stuff together after the fact?

[old book]

Chris:--

I think he knew.

1) He uses Olaus Wormius in his work, he probably read his works. Wormius aka Wormskiold dealt with the Norse colonies in Greenland in some work.

2) He uses real Inuit words in CoC. "angakok" or whatever he wrote is singular, angakuit is plural. Tornasuk is Tornarsuq, there's a crater on the Jovian moon Callisto with the same name HPL used (maybe JPL thought they'd toss a bone his way?). Greenland had a simplified version of Inuit mythology which wasn't really rich in gods and goddesses anyway, the alternate names can be found under Inuit mythology on wikipedia or through Related links there.

3) He was interested in the probable Norse colonies in New England, aka Vinland, the Old Stone Mill, the French fort in Maine, the legend about Boston being the site of the mythical city Norumbega (see The Norse Discovery of America by Arthur Middleton Reeves, North Ludlow Beamish and Rasmus B. Anderson, 1906, http://sacred-texts.com/neu/nda/index.htm )

4) Shamanic language: HPL gave Dee a medeival (I always spell that wrong) copy of the Necronomicon in vulgar Latin, possibly it was the Wormius translation, I forget (Wormius did use Latin, Wormius is just a Latinization of Norse Wormskiold), and Dee did invent or discover the angelic language Enochian. HPL's "Turanian" excerpts ("fhtagn" et al.) represent the mirror counterpart of Dee's angelic Enochian, the primal demonic language which is not understand by the spirit but rather the gut, the base instincts.

I'm STILL listening to the podcast btw, real life keeps intruding and interrupting! So far it's GREAT!

[Cacodaemoniacal]

Was looking up Henry Clews Jr. and found this:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=7792567&PIpi=2866218

Geez Louise!

[Genus Unknown]

Guys, please.

It's spelled "Esquimaux."

[dadavoodoo]

I love this part of the story because It takes place in my home town! I am going to go over H.P.L in New Orleans some place else. He did come to New Orleans in the 1930's so much of what he knows about it had to come from books and the like. Keep up the good work!