Encyclopedia of the unde.., p.29
Encyclopedia of the Undead, page 29
Others were added to these main allegedly magical tomes. These additions were simply portions of the books which had been copied or which had been combined with portions from other works. Many of them contained incantations and recipes, couched in quasi-mystical language and augmented by geometric illustrations, which resembled ancient symbols found elsewhere in the world, which seemed to give them an added authenticity. Many had fanciful names—Le Grand Grimoire, The Red Dragon, The Black Pullet, the Book of Secrets, all claiming great antiquity which stretched back as far as ancient Egypt and beyond. Most of them were fraudulent, put together by lively and imaginative minds and their pedigree was extremely questionable.
Lovecraft and his correspondents would, in all probability, been well aware of the existence of such books and many others like them, both quasi-mystical and scientific. They fitted in well with the notion of esoteric knowledge left by former civilizations and avidly pursued by the Gnostics and those who came after them, as late as the 18th century. The creation of a corpus of ancient and blasphemous lore was in many ways, central to the Cthulhu Mythos with its emphasis on vanished gods and lost civilizations.
Lovecraft and others picked up on some of these books and several of them also created their own in order add to the Mythos and to give it credibility beyond the confines of horror literature. Each one was a “terrible and blasphemous” volume, full of arcane secrets, which could only be correctly interpreted by those with a certain knowledge. This held echoes of the scholars of the Enlightenment as they tried to break the hidden “codes” of the alchemists. Many of his correspondents would send their ideas for “new” books to Lovecraft in his Providence retreat, and from time to time, he would incorporate them into his own fiction.
Book of Eibon
The most sinister of these additions, according to Lovecraft himself, was the sinister Book of Eibon, although no details about such a monstrous volume are available. This seems to be some sort of “fragmentary” work although no real detail about it is given. The title of the book was actually dreamed up by one of Lovecraft’s writer-correspondents, Clark Ashton Smith, although it was rumoured to have been based on an actual book. In the last years of his life, Lovecraft declared that there were two versions of this work—the Norman-French Livre d’Eibon (The Diary of Alonzo Typer) and a slightly later translation—the Liber Ivonis (The Haunter of the Dark). The translation from Latin into 13th century French was, according to Smith, completed by a monk named Gaspard du Nord. Smith was to make reference to the work himself in his tale Ubbo Sathla and was to refer to Eibon (who allegedly initially compiled the text) as a Hyperborean sorcerer in his story The Door Into Saturn.
Cultes des Ghoules
Another of the “abhorred books” was Cultes des Ghoules by the Comte d’ Erlette. This volume arose out of a connection to Lovecraft’s friend August Derleth, whose ancestors were French and were named Erlette. No specific details are given about this volume, but several alleged “pages” of it have been published as part of the materials for role-playing games in both Europe and the U.S. They seem to reveal a book, which is little more than a traditional French grimoire of possibly an 18th century printing.
De Vermis Mysteriis
A further addition to this catalogue of horrific books was Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis (Mysteries of the Worm), which is mentioned several times in Lovecraft’s work. Prinn was reputedly an elderly occultist who was burned at the stake as a witch after compiling the volume. In fact, the title of the book—Mysteries of the Worm—and its author are creations of Lovecraft’s correspondent Robert Bloch. Lovecraft, however, gave the book its Latin title and used it in his stories The Shadow Out of Time, The Diary of Alonzo Typer, and The Haunter of the Dark.
People of the Monolith
Another of Lovecraft’s correspondents, the famous Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian amongst others), created the book of poetry People of the Monolith and its insane author, Justin Geoffrey. Geoffrey was a Baudelairean poet who had travelled across Europe and had seen many strange things, especially in the area surrounding the Balkans, the knowledge of which had driven him mad. He died confined in an asylum. Howard was to make reference to the book and to Geoffrey in his short Lovcraftian story The Black Stone and was to quote from one of his poems in best Lovecraft tradition:
They say foul beings of Old Times still lurk,
In dark, forgotten corners of the world,
And gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,
Shapes pent in Hell.
Lovecraft himself was to briefly mention Geoffrey in one of his own stories—The Thing on the Doorstep.
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
Howard, who corresponded regularly with Lovecraft, is also credited with the creation of yet another volume. This is the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of the alleged German occultist Fredrick von Junzt. Not much detail is given concerning von Junzt except that he had made a study of ancient and terrible cults, which had survived since earliest times. He had catalogued them into a volume, which he called Nameless Cults. Shortly after its completion he was strangled and mauled by an unseen demon whilst in his locked chamber. The work is probably a creation of Howard’s (although some scholars state that this volume more than any other might have its origins in reality) although Lovecraft balked at his original suggestion for its title—Ungennte heidenthume. It was August Derleth who came up with the title, although his command of High German leaves something to be desired (the name literally means Unpronounceable Cults. Lovecraft, however, liked the idea and gave it at least three editions—Dusseldorf (1839), Bridewell, and a heavily expurgated version published by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909.
The Pnakotic Manuscripts
Last but not least amongst the texts was one of Lovecraft’s own creations—The Pnakotic Manuscripts. References to these texts were widely scattered throughout his stories—indeed they were second only to The Necronomicon in their number of mentions—although it is unclear as to exactly what they were. They are described as “fragmentary” but it is not clear as to whether they were scrolls, chapters of a single volume, or pieces of pottery. What is known is that they were pre-human and, according to Lovecraft, “inconceivably ancient.” They had existed, he went on, since “before the advent of Man.” He further describes them as being “mouldy” but gives no indication as to what form or material they might be.
The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan
To this basic corpus of foul literature, Lovecraft’s other correspondents and followers have added further blasphemous works. These were such terrible creations as The Eltdown Shards, the creation of Richard F. Searight, which have appeared in numerous Lovecraft pastiches as well as a couple of Lovecraft’s own tales—The Shadow out of Time and The Diary of Alonzo Typer. There are also a one of Lovecraft’s own creations—The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan briefly mentioned in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath—together with the R’lyh text which has appeared in a number of Lovecraft-related fictions. Amongst this was mixed a good number of actual literature on Witchcraft and the supernatural. For example, Cotton Mather’s Magalia Christi Americana (Picture in the house, Pickman’s Model, The Unnameable, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), and Wonders of the Invisible World, Pickman’s Model; Giovanni Batista della Porta’s De Furtivis Literarium Notis (The Dunwich Horror), Robert Fludd’s Clavis Alchemae (Case of Charles Dexter Ward), and Joseph Glanville’s Saducismus Trumphatus (The Festival) amongst others. The inclusion of actual devil books leant extra weight to the text and caused the reader to wonder whether any of the other grimoires might indeed exist. Indeed, many still wonder if there is not a grain of truth in the supposed existence of some of these books and perhaps there is. The inclusion of such tomes, whether real or imagined, has added a certain scholarly gravitas, which has characterised much of Lovecraft’s work.
American Degenerate Communities
A third strand of Lovecraft’s frightening fiction was drawn from American history. Much of his horror derives from the “degenerate, inbred families” who dwell in the remote areas of the New England landscape. Even the old stately families had their “decayed” branches with whom they seldom spoke and had little contact. Some of these ideas may, as already noted, have arisen from his mother’s family—the Phillipses, but there may have been more. It was not for nothing that he chose rural New England as the setting for the majority of his most horrific tales. Even in the 20th century an air of degeneracy and decay underlay some parts of East Coast society.
The American East Coast had largely been settled by the British and the Dutch, two countries that were not always exactly friendly towards each other. Therefore settlement had been extremely patchy. Today we think of bustling cities and busy freeways all along the coast—the New England of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries was extremely different. It was largely a wilderness of forest and swamp into which people might venture never to be seen again. There were a number of thriving cities to be sure—New Amsterdam (now New York) and Boston—but in many cases, settlers lived away in squalid and (by present standards) primitive settlements in the rural wilds. The isolation and insularity of such settlements produced a reclusive and suspicious people and sometimes allowed strange practices and beliefs to flourish, relatively unchecked.
Salem Village
For instance, in the largely Puritan Bay Colony in Massachusetts centred on Salem Village, a witchcraft hysteria was able to take hold during 1692. In the narrow, “pressure-cooker” atmosphere of the Salem community (now a part of Danvers, Massachusetts) nineteen women were to be hanged on the bare Gallows Hill outside the village, whilst one elderly man was crushed to death between stones on the say-so of a number of frightened and hysterical girls. Although it has attracted a great deal of interest, Salem was not unique amongst the introspective and often claustrophobic communities along the New England coast. Indeed, many were more bizarre and stranger beliefs and ideals flourished there. Scattered all across the Eastern American seaboard and away from the main settlements, were communities of what we today might call “peripheral people”—those who were driven out of the main settlements for various reasons. For example, there were communities of Quakers, shunned by the Puritans who dwelt on the edges of the major towns or in the forest. But we also have accounts of some even stranger communities, well beyond what constituted “civilization.” An example of these was the community of Dogtown.
Dogtown
On a grassy plateau overlooking Gloucester, Rockport, and Ipswich Bay in Massachusetts, a disparate and extremely motley collection of individuals had made their home in the mid-to-late 1600s. The settlement of Dogtown was reputedly found sometime in the 1660s by a number of widows of Gloucester seamen who had perished in the ocean. With no men to look after them, they had become a burden on the Gloucester society and were therefore cast out into the wild. Some of them were rather strange individuals and presumably this didn’t help their case. They were to be joined by the widows of soldiers who were lost in the various campaigns along the coast and soon the settlement began to grow. It was named Dogtown because of the amount of feral dogs which wandered about the “streets” of the community unhindered. The place became a magnet for the strange and the peculiar—both women and men—who were not wanted or who did not fit into a recognizable society. Many of them were either Irish or Scottish. Some of them were mentally unbalanced. They lived in sod huts or in falling wooden cabins along the side of a single track, which formed the community’s main “street,” or around an open patch of grass that served as Dogtown’s main common. Contemporary accounts speak of old beldames sitting on this green, cackling or talking to themselves in a most alarming manner. The smell of the place, according to commentators, was nauseating. This strange settlement would continue for almost two hundred years and was only finally cleared out during the 1830s when the last residents had left. What evidence of the place that had been left was swiftly demolished.
Local people from the Gloucester, Newbury, and Ipswich areas, had already branded Dogtown as a “witch village” and categorically stated that the Black Arts were worked there under public gaze. It may be that some of these old women earned a meagre living telling fortunes for the sailor-folk of the area, or that they may have issued curses against their neighbours, and this was essentially equated within the wider community as a practicing of the dark sciences. The majority of the village’s inhabitants were described as “crones” (evil-looking women)—some very old, some deformed, some generally hideous in aspect—and were strenuously avoided even when they ventured beyond Dogtown’s limits. In her book Romances of a Nonagarian (1897), Newbury’s Sarah Anna Emory conveys at least some suggestion of the eeriness with which the place was viewed:
“Dogtown was two miles distant from Crane-neck,” she wrote. “After passing Dale’s Pond, the road ran through thick woods. This, on some dark and stormy nights, was rather bug-a-booish.” Dogtown, she goes on, was a place that most people tried to avoid, even during daylight hours, for fear of the raddled hags that dwelt there. In his History of Dogtown (1896), Charles Mann mentions several of them: Judy Rhines (Ryan), a fortune-teller who allegedly met with the Devil in the surrounding woods (she had a queerly deformed mouth—“teeth like a dog”—and went about mumbling to herself); Cornelius Finson or “Black Neil” (who had long teeth protruding from his upper lip); Tammy Younger (with a long beard similar to a man that stretched almost to her waist and a very “choice vocabulary”), and Juliet Hawe or Hawthorne who walked about as if in a daze, cackling and shrieking with laughter (whilst in this state she claimed to see visions of the future). There is also reference to an “Old Mother Pike,” a massive, aggressive elderly woman, “filthy in both body and speech,” who brewed potions for ailments and to induce love of a discharged soldier, Nathaniel Bourke—“Hellish Natty”—who had part o his face blown away, leaving a side of it little more than a skein of scorched and twisted flesh. He made hooch for a living and seems to have been continually drunk. Dogtown, Mann continues, was “a resort of buccaneers and low men” that only added to its queer and supernatural reputation. There were also stories of connections between some of the settlement’s inhabitants and “strange societies” (usually connected to the Freemasons in some way), that had grown up in neighbouring communities such as Wellfleet (originally called Billingsgate) and Ipswich. The village may well have been America’s first “witch colony” and its inhabitants were both feared and shunned because of their strange and frequently grotesque appearances and unacceptable ways. They were often linked to the demonic and primeval powers that dwelt deep in the forests and swamps.
Little Piney Fork Country
Similar settlements to Dogtown existed in other parts of America as well. In remote mountainous areas in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia, isolated communities with equal reputations and equally strange inhabitants might also be found. Some of these areas were very remote and isolated such as what was to become known as the Little Piney Fork Country in Kentucky. This was an area around Rutherford Mountain, near the Tennessee border—a region lying between the valleys of the Bear and Little Piney Fork rivers and which was, until as late as the 1940s, virtually inaccessible. This region formed part of Brake and Trundle Counties but few officials ever made their way up to the remote county seats. One traveller, passing through in the 1930s, described the region as being “nothing short of a wilderness.” And yet, this “wilderness” was home to many families who had lived there, pretty much in isolation, since Revolutionary days—the Talbots, Nesbitts, Baylanches, Parrigans, and Panningeses amongst many others. Many such families claimed a direct and unbroken descent from Revolutionary veterans who had settled deep in this relatively inhospitable region. There is no record of many of these people because few census takers ventured into the Piney Fork Country in order to count its inhabitants and few births or deaths were registered at the county seat. In fact for the year 1910, no real census records exist for the families living between Squaw Creek and the Mount Gilead area and there are no accounts of the formal establishment of a school at Coonsfork although one certainly existed “at the end of a dirt road that was too narrow for any vehicle except a horse” in the 1930s.
Waterfall
The main settlement in the area seems to have been Waterfall, a small town, but there were allegedly other villages hidden away in hollows and valleys, which considered themselves to be “self sufficient” and had little dealings with the outside world. These were communities that had “their own ways,” where shootings and murders were common but which dispensed their own form of “folk justice.” For example, the brutal murder of Jarvis Trunk and his sister Mary Ellen at their remote cabin at Bat Cliff Mountain in Brake County in 1886 was “solved” by the “folk hanging” of Bronston Nesbitt—who was quite probably guilty—without formal recourse to the authorities. This was also a place of intense superstition and supernatural fears. As late as the 1940s, few people would pass near an old hog wallow known as the Devil’s Hollow for fear of encountering a “headless” man-bat who lived there. Others avoided certain dirt roads and trails for fear of “boogers and haints” and an area of Rutherford Mountain was widely known as the “Booger Hole” because of something that dwelt deep in a cave. This was said to be a fearsome creature that grabbed passers-by on the lonely mountain tracks and was said to have existed there since earliest times. The more cynical stated that it was no more than an old story, designed to keep folks away from illegal moonshining operations up on the mountain. There were however, also tales of “Indian stones”—great rocks that might have been moved by glaciers or volcanic upheavals but which had a certain mystery and awe about them. These, it was said, had been raised by spirits back in the Indian times and that certain tribes had worshipped there, revering old gods, which had once lived in the forest and mountaintops. Such stones were also places to be avoided.
