Episodes 104 -- 107: The Shadow Out of Time

[starblazie]

I think I found the original text that Lovecraft used for a source on this one. I could only find two texts that mention the term “Buddai”, the second text actually uses a piece of the excerpt below from the first text (the second mention was found in “The Eaglehawk and Crow” by John Matthew, 1899, but was mistakenly attributed to the author Andrew Lang, who was a well known expert on literature and folklore). 
The origin of the story appears to come from “Queensland, Australia” by John Dunne Lang (1861). 
   “There are certain traditions among the aborigines that appear to me to have somewhat of an Asiatic character and aspect Buddai, or as it is pronounced by the aborigines towards the mountains in the Moreton Bay district, Budjah (quasi Buddha), they regard as the common ancestor of their race, and describe as an old man of great stature who has been lying asleep for ages with his head leaning on one arm, and the arm buried deep in the sand.  A long time ago Buddai awoke and got up, and the whole country was overflowed with water; and when he awakes and gets up again he will devour all the black men.  Now this tradition is so remarkably similar to the following quoted by Bryant that one is almost necessitated to refer them to a common origin:---
   “Two temples are taken notice of by Hamelton, near Syrian in Pegu, which he represents as so like in structure,    that they seem to be built by the same model.  One stood about six miles to the southwards, and was called Kiackiack, or the God of god's Temple. The image of the deity was in a sleeping posture, and sixty feet in length,    and was imagined to have lain in that state of repose six thousand years. When he awakes,it is said, the world will be annihilated. As soon as Kiackiack has dissolved the frame and being of the world, Dagon, or Dagun (the deity    of the other temple) will gather up the fragments and make a new one.”*
   Bryant considers this eastern tradition to be a remnant of the tradition of the deluge - Dagon being Noah.  It is remarkably similar, at all events, to the tradition of the aborigines of Australia,    which is prevalent also among those of the Wellington district;  Buddai being there called    Piame.  Mr Bryant adds: ---
   “In the account of Sha Rokh's embassy to Cathai mention is made of a city Kam ju and of a temple whose    dimensions were very large.  The author says that each side was 500 kes or cubits.  In the middle lay an idol, as if it were asleep, which was fifty feet in length.  Its hands and feet were three yards long, and the head twenty one feet in circumference.  This great image was gilt all over, and held one hand under its head, and the other was stretched along down its thigh.”*
   When an eclipse of the moon takes place, the natives think it portends calamity to some distant relative and make a doleful lamentation. When they rob a wild bees' hive, they generally leave a little of the honey for Buddai. They have no sacred animals; but the coast natives have a great respect for porpoises, and will not suffer them to be killed, as they are very serviceable to them in driving the fish into the shallows, where they take them in their scoop-nets...
   *New System &co. by James Bryant, Esq. Vol. v. pg. 233.
   *Bryant, ubi supera, pg. 246.”

I also found Lang's mention of the god “Cush, or Cuth” in the book (appearing slightly before the text I quoted) and the mention of "Dagon" another interesting find.

As an aside, I did take a cursory glance at the book by John Mathew, and he does not make the same conclusions Lang did.
   “The question may be reasonably asked is this Buddai not as likely to refer to Daibaitah of the    northwest as to Budha.  In New Guinea, according to Marsden, the same deity is known as 'Wat,' the first and third syllables of the name being lopped off.  And further, may it not be possible that Baiame, of New South Wales, and Pundyil, of Victoria, refer to the same supernatural being?  Baiame, indeed, may be a local equivalent of Barma, another Sumatran deity.  The blackfellow Yangalla already mentioned recognised Daibaitah as Pundyil; the fancied resemblance may have been due to an impression that both were supernatural beings,    but, on the other hand, the names may be etymologically related, and if so, a unity is given to the native belief in a divinity.  The myths regarding the creation are numerous, and there are some which refer to a flood, but there is no common fixed account of either event, and both    classes of myths may be quite modern, the one being an attempt to explain the world's origin, and so far a reflection of the workings of the native mind, the other a recollection of an unprecedented local downpour of rain and consequent inundation.  I confess to having failed to    obtain in the south of Queensland any myth about the creation or the flood; the nearest approach to an account of the former was the personal conjecture which a blackfellow made regarding the origin of his race, which was that he thought they had sprung up like the trees -   uncommonly like Topsy's “I specs I grow'd.”  The Arunta tribe in central Australia have an intensely    interesting myth about the 'Alcheringa,'* the earliest period to which their traditions refer. 
   At the very beginning of this there were no true human beings such as now exist but only Inapertwa,' that is, almost shapeless beings in which just the vague outlines of the different limbs and parts of the body could be detected.  Two spirit beings who lived far away in the western sky and who were called 'Ungambikulla,' a word which signifies 'made out of nothing' or 'self-existing,' came down to earth and transformed the Inapertwa creatures into men and women.”    The men and women of the Alcheringa are also said to be “direct descendants or transformations of animals” whose names they respectively bear."    
      *”Notes on certain of the Initiation Ceremonies of the Arunta Tribe, Central Australia,” by Prof. W.B. Spencer and Mr. F.J. Gillen,
                  “Proc Roy Soc Victoria,” p. 146, et seq.”

[old book]

starblazie:--

You've got it. I was using slightly newer texts from sacred-texts.com, because it was handy. The writers around the turn of the century to about 1925 talk a lot about a cultural hero/god called Bumeia (I think), which must be related to the similar name in your sources. I might have got the Sleeping Buddha right, at least. Good work. When I'm not so tired I'll try to look those sources up on archive.org.

Pray tell what did that one source say about Kush/Kuth?

[starblazie]

starblazie:--

You've got it. I was using slightly newer texts from sacred-texts.com, because it was handy. The writers around the turn of the century to about 1925 talk a lot about a cultural hero/god called Bumeia (I think), which must be related to the similar name in your sources. I might have got the Sleeping Buddha right, at least. Good work. When I'm not so tired I'll try to look those sources up on archive.org.

Pray tell what did that one source say about Kush/Kuth?

You know, the sleeping Buddha came to my mind too.  I actually did the search through Google books, limiting the results to the 19th century (figuring that most of what HPL read is now public domain).  Unfortunately, with these early writers, they often tended to muddle things rather than enlighten when it comes to describing other cultures and religions; often doing so through the filter of Christianity and their own cultural prejudices.  I figured it would be a shot in the dark at best.  I was very surprised to have actually come up with a book that he may have read; the excitement made me a little hyper, actually.  

(edit) As far as Cush/Cuth (Kush/Kuth), Cush is mentioned seven times, and I am only linking to images of the three most relevant passages.  The 2nd and 3rd images hold the the most interesting passages, I think.  

[Jape]

ON A DIFFERENT NOTE

You suggesting HPL was having a dig at Warren G. Harding?

Anyway, fascinating research old book, some interesting stuff

[Jake W]

Hi Chris & Chad,

Just want to add my thoughts on the issue of tangents within the show.

In my view they make the show something special, not just a stuffy literary review show, but a conversation between old friends where the listeners are friends listening in. You guys, plus guests, talk the way I and my friends do and I dare say that's the case for many if not most of your listeners.

When you did Call of Cthulhu you stayed very focussed and on-track, I imagine out of respect for the iconic status of the story, and I felt the show was a little poorer for it. I missed the tangents and felt it was all over far too quickly.

Your enthusiasm for the good stories and your comments on the bad ones, the way you fit them in to the wider cultural background, both contemporary and modern and including more obscure parallels like Quantum Leap, makes the show hugely enjoyable. I listen to a lot of podcasts and even after a hundred and whatever episodes I still listen to HPLLP as a preference. Haven't missed a show, it's still my favourite and I'm currently trying to work out how I can get from Brighton to Leeds cheaply on April 4th!

[old book]

You know, the sleeping Buddha came to my mind too.  I actually did the search through Google books, limiting the results to the 19th century (figuring that most of what HPL read is now public domain).  Unfortunately, with these early writers, they often tended to muddle things rather than enlighten when it comes to describing other cultures and religions; often doing so through the filter of Christianity and their own cultural prejudices.  I figured it would be a shot in the dark at best.  I was very surprised to have actually come up with a book that he may have read; the excitement made me a little hyper, actually.  

You got it, nailed it. Lovecraft got it from that book, almost certainly. I was excited to read that you had managed to find it and it made me a bit hyper too.

The book is on archive.org, it's called queenslandaustr00langgoog.pdf/djvu, you can find it by searching for "Queensland Lang" under the Texts category, or just searching for "queenslandaustr00langgoog". They don't seem to have Eaglehawk and Crow by Matthew. I read the cannibalism bits just after Buddai, fascinating stuff. Cush afaik iirc means too things in the Old Testament and then has some other synotope in the Himalayas or something. I liked the speculations in the Queensland book linking the aborigine beliefs with Syria and so on, very interesting.

I think or at least assume the earlier informants and writers on aborigine religious beliefs had to play a guessing game when it came to phonology, and that N and D could be easily confused. As Westerners became interested in aborigine religion, the peoples themselves were busily being driven to extinction. Iiirc the Arunta people no longer exist as such, as just one example. I don't see a problem with associating Buddai with the Bumeia (spelling?) hero-god, neither with the Bunyip monster (loosely assocaited with the Crees' Wendigo in some writings), but the story itself suggests something just a bit different, reading between the lines and speculating:

If Buddai were an old man asleep with one arm under his head, and the other stuck down into the sand, we are probably dealing with one of those creatures who wander and create as they go, the ancestors in the dreamtime. Now if he moves in his sleep and the landscape shifts, we are talking about a tectonic event. The future apocalypse envisioned, that if he moves again the world of the "blackmen" will come to an end, means a future cataclysmic tectonic event glimpsed in the dreamtime, with dire consequences for the local population.

I came upon something like this once in Washington state. On the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula there are several hot springs sites. One is along the Elwha River. I think the other is on the Soleduc River (So-leh-dook or So-leh-duck). There is some legend passed down from now extinct tribes who were more or less overwhelmed by the Salish invasion long before Columbus that these two river systems are serpents who are battling in opposition under the ground. The association between seismically active regions and dragons, ancient subterranean or chthonic currents, is known from China and elsewhere. The Olympic Peninsula was probably one of the ice-free portions of the west coast of North America during the last Ice Age glaciation, so the time-frame is not completely beyond comparison with the beliefs of the aborgines of Australia, who were presumably part of a radiation of the original modern humans out of the Borneo/Papua New Guinea genetic hearth.

Lovecraft seems to be taking some liberties with the diversity of aboriginal belief in Australia, although I haven't put push-pins into the map to chart everything in this regard, and so puts Buddai into a sort of generalized racial belief system shared by Australian natives. His Old Man Buddai lingers underground like the ever-perplexing hidden and blocked passages to the lower levels of the cities of the Great Ones, representing an undercurrent of a more primeaval race, whose tapering black stone megalithic towers were glimpsed by Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee during his sojourn in that strangely curvilinearally built city whose roof-top gardens bespoke of an elder tradition of rock gardening with lichens and eldritch seed-fern, cycad and lepidendronic topiary, not to mention a lost art of fitting the strangely black stones together such that betwixt the masonic members nary a slip of paper might be slipped.

That which sleeps is not dead.

[old book]

ON A DIFFERENT NOTE

You suggesting HPL was having a dig at Warren G. Harding?

Anyway, fascinating research old book, some interesting stuff

Digging...Warren...I don't know.

There appears to be a real political aspect to the story, however. Wasn't Warren G. Harding accused by his detractors of having Negro blood? A side note, that. Lovecraft ALMOST descends into a sort of standard-utopian style (as in Coming Race) just where he talks about a the Great Race enjoying a sort of mild socialist fascist decentralized government (read: national socialism), but then ceases and desists from the standard utopia genre and continues on in a more correctly Lovecraftian style. Waren G. Harding's campaign speech is all about disengaging from geopolitics for the sake of domestic American placidity against an hallucinatory backdrop of chaos and fever, with a perfunctory swipe at the banksters. Lovecraft is placing the drama within the period, prior to, during and I suppose after Harding's presidency, but is writing from a time when the Nazis are already making steady inroads into German politics (I haven't looked at the date of SOOT's writing but I'm guessing it's after 1933 and near the end of his life in '37). References to race, fascism, aliens, the epic return to one's homeland and so on cannot be coincidental.

[starblazie]

You got it, nailed it. Lovecraft got it from that book, almost certainly. I was excited to read that you had managed to find it and it made me a bit hyper too.

The book is on archive.org, it's called queenslandaustr00langgoog.pdf/djvu, you can find it by searching for "Queensland Lang" under the Texts category, or just searching for "queenslandaustr00langgoog". They don't seem to have Eaglehawk and Crow by Matthew. I read the cannibalism bits just after Buddai, fascinating stuff. Cush afaik iirc means too things in the Old Testament and then has some other synotope in the Himalayas or something. I liked the speculations in the Queensland book linking the aborigine beliefs with Syria and so on, very interesting.

Oh good, it wasn't JUST me.    I did a quick search and I was able to find "Eaglehawk and Crow" under "eaglehawkandcro00mathgoog" at archive.org. 

I need to brief, but your post is interesting; what is myth but to bring meaning to a greater world.  I may have a lead on another book HPL read (in another story) ....

[old book]

starblazie:--

Thank you for the file name on archive.org, and forgive my long-windedness.

[starblazie]

old book,
thanks for sharing my excitement.  No apologies necessary. 

[Elphantasmo]

Loving these episodes, I think this story is one of my top 5 of HPL's. It makes me wish there were more stories set in the land of the Yith and their adventures in time.


Just as a side note, wasn't sure it was mentioned, the Yithians (sic?) make an appearance in the game "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth", in the beginning of the game, the protagonist wakes up in an asylum after having done the whole yith-switch. And they appear throughout the game as he remembers things, and even play a huge part in the ending depending on which ending you get. I personally thought the way they were imagined in the game was done well.

[old book]

Randomness follows.

I wonder what leprous looks like in the line "The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil." Do lepers have a special kind of aura or halo? Does it mean the light has the quality of broken shards? Is it simply sickly-looking?

Regarding Pnakotic and Pnakotus, I can't help associating it with two modern acronyms that have come into somehwat general use over the last few years, PNAC and POTUS. "Rebuilding Rl'yeh's Defenses," "a new Devil's Reef," Project for a New Aeon of Cthulhu, etc., etc.

[Genus Unknown]

Is it simply sickly-looking?

Probably that, yeah. A pale, greenish tinge like a frog's belly. Maybe the shadows and craters on the lunar surface could be said to look like flaking, scaly skin.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Yeah, but that scaly look doesn't translate into uneven lighting on earth. I think Lovecraft just wanted to use an adjective that gave the reader a bit of a nauseated feeling.

Bob

[Jape]

Yeah, but that scaly look doesn't translate into uneven lighting on earth. I think Lovecraft just wanted to use an adjective that gave the reader a bit of a nauseated feeling.

Bob

That was my guess, simply to suggest a 'sickly' sensation.