The Festival

[J-WO]

Well that's fair enough. I'm drinking far too much as it is these days. I work nights so its kind of part of the culture.

I'll tell you guys one thing though- what the scientists have been saying about caffeine having mild hallucinogenic properties is quite right. I'll be walking down the hotel corridors and suddenly see movement in the corner of my eye. Turn to look- nothing. All very Shining. But it only occurs when I've got the coffee judders.

I'm sure if some skeptics look into this they might see a correlation between people who 'sense' spirits and their visits to the hot drinks machine.

Erm, I've gone off topic, 'ain't I? Sorry...

 

[dask]

Thank goodness I'm not addicted to coffee, I can quit any time I want.

 

[Tinsel]

There is a D20 "Call of Cthulhu: Kingsport the City of Mists" guide written by Kevin Ross and published by Chaosium.

I looked at the first page and the map, and it actually sounds fairly good. I see "The Festival" is included in the guide, anyway the point that I wanted to make is that it mentions Marblehead Massachusetts of 1929 and cites a population of no more than 8,000 people.

Okay so this suppliment is a good reference, but just by reading "The Festival" alone, there is no information about Marblehead.

 

[w h pugmire esq]

There is a D20 "Call of Cthulhu: Kingsport the City of Mists" guide written by Kevin Ross and published by Chaosium.

I looked at the first page and the map, and it actually sounds fairly good. I see "The Festival" is included in the guide, anyway the point that I wanted to make is that it mentions Marblehead Massachusetts of 1929 and cites a population of no more than 8,000 people.

Okay so this suppliment is a good reference, but just by reading "The Festival" alone, there is no information about Marblehead.

That supplement is my all-time favorite and I return to it often just for entertainment. I used it heavily when I wrote my first Kingsport tale, "The Phantom of Beguilement." I had borrowed my friend's copy of the book, but it so charmed me that I had to purchase my own. It's great.

 

[j d worthington]

Okay so this suppliment is a good reference, but just by reading "The Festival" alone, there is no information about Marblehead.

I'll have to disagree with you, at least to some degree. The descriptions of Kingsport are all very close to HPL's descriptions of Marblehead in his letters; and as Wilum has noted, it is relatively easy to trace the narrator's journey through the one within the streets of the other, making it obvious (even if HPL himself had not specified that they were the same in other letters) that his Kingsport is a fictional analog to the very real Marblehead.

However, on a literal level of references in the tale, you have it right... there is no actual mention of the name "Marblehead" anywhere in the text.

Incidentally, if you'd like to see some of the sites which likely inspired Lovecraft here, you ought to look up a copy of Henry L. P. Beckwith's Lovecraft's Providence & Adjacent Parts and (for all its faults) Philip A. Shreffler's H. P. Lovecraft Companion (which has a wealth of photos of such sites):

Lovecraft's Providence and Adjacent Parts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Sorry, no link to the latter, but it's not difficult to find via most library systems, and really is worth looking into when it comes to this aspect....)

 

[Tinsel]

Is anything known about what H.P. Lovecraft read having to do with Paganism? I would rather look into that because his stories feel like they are fairly legitimate, at least compared to contemporary horror.

 

[j d worthington]

Is anything known about what H.P. Lovecraft read having to do with Paganism? I would rather look into that because his stories feel like they are fairly legitimate, at least compared to contemporary horror.

I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. At HPL's period, paganism wasn't even considered an extant form of religion in industrial societies (though there may well have been people celebrating pagan religious rites and observances, they were seldom noted save in scholarly works or extremely lurid newspaper stories, such as those dealing with human sacrifice and the like). So most of what he read would have been either from an anthropological standpoint (i.e., Frazer's Golden Bough, Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe), or completely lumping such things in with occultism in general, such as Lewis Spence's An Encyclopaedia of Occultism and the like.

There are some indications of what he read, but I'd have to look them up to give you a decent list. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll start hunting... though a fair amount of time can be saved by my looking at Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue, which has a section noting what he himself owned on various occult matters. This, of course, does not take into account all he might have read in libraries or on loan from friends, but his letters help with that aspect....

 

[Tinsel]

It is a higher priority subject for referencing and locating books for if there is a more serious intent to interpret his writing. I see that I am at the moment setting up shelves, including shelves for books, so after that I will almost be ready to read in more depth, but not quite yet. I will get back to this post in a couple of days with an update. I do have a couple books on witchcraft; the history of.

The other area is artifacts. I've had some supernatural experiences in my past, not many but that ring was certainly an object of note, and books like the Talmud had some spiritual value (I burned my whole set), although I would never touch them now. I guess I just wonder if he wore any special jewelry or special books, etc, merely for curiosity sake.

 

[j d worthington]

No, nothing of that nature. His attachment to such things were either as heirlooms (the few remnants of his father, whom he scarcely knew, as the man went insane and was placed in an asylum when HPL was not quite three, dying there some five years later), or some other sentimental attachment, as with the very old books he found in his family's attic storeroom. When it came to any sort of beliefs in anything beyond the material universe (save for when he was very young), it would be difficult to find a more thoroughgoing skeptic than H. P. Lovecraft.

He did, though, do some research on occult subjects in order to familiarize himself with some of the genuine traditions, in hopes of finding material which could be used fictionally... but ended up feeling that the bulk of it was so ridiculous, strained, illogical, and ill-matched, that it was better to create such supposed "traditions" for his tales out of whole cloth (in most instances), as they would be more consistent and artistically sound.

However, I should have clarified that he knew a good deal about classical paganism from his deep reading in the classical tradition from a very early age... both via Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable and the eighteenth-century classical translators, and in many cases from reading things in the original Latin. (Greek was another matter, as he was not that well acquainted with the language, having not even completed Xenophon.) In fact, when he was a very young lad, he himself had "a half-sincere" belief in the old pagan deities... a charming story he tells in many places and one which, if you are interested, I will send along to you.

 

[Tinsel]

I see that I have two books here to start with. I did look up a couple of the titles that you mentioned and they are available, I can get them, but I will wait. There is plenty to start with here, although in the next few weeks I will probably order a couple of those titles since they are fairly inexpensive. I'm not an advanced reader, but I will be able to study as I set up a nice room for doing just that. I'll look at a number of the classics and history, but this goes beyond H.P. Lovecraft.

I suppose that you can't lose if you are familiar with the Greek and Roman Pantheon, and that is good enough for a basic source of Paganism.

 

[Tinsel]

....actually, I could go the Egyptian route too. I have a few books on their Gods and Goddesses. Now that would be a twist, certainly that was a different culture, but the Greeks were also very interesting. Well, I will try to relate it all back to H.P. Lovecraft's stories.

 

[j d worthington]

Well, HPL was also familiar with the Egyptian pantheon, too, and had an interest in that aspect of things, as can be seen by his creation of Nyarlathotep (which originated in a dream):

"Nyarlathotep" by H. P. Lovecraft

This is especially true given the specifics of Nyarlathotep's origins in Egypt, rising up "from the blackness of twenty-seven centuries", placing him in the twenty-fifth dynasty. As George T. Wetzel points out, "the Ethiopian invasion of Europe", adding, "Nyarlathotep must then have beeen incarnate in some Ethiopian ruler of Egypt -- must have been the driving power behind the Ethiopian armies that suddenly rose up and made their conquest" (Four Decades of Criticism, p. 83).

For those interested, it was Robert Bloch however, who truly developed this theme in his tales of the Crawling Chaos, which were collected together (along with all his other Mythos writings save the novel Strange Eons) in Chaosium's Mysteries of the Worm....

Wilum has also shown an interest in "the mad faceless god" in several tales, which will be collected together with some new material (such as the story "The Strange Dark One" which he is currently writing and which is to be the title story of the volume, I believe) sometime soon.

 

[Tinsel]

In "The Festival" they entered the earth as a womb, rather than a tomb, as one of my books on mythology says under the heading of Mother Goddess. That also reminds me of Mother Hydra in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", but this story does not name any Old Ones.

It just seemed like a strange festival, but looking at it as a feast and this other mythological view begins to build some perspective toward understanding what happened. The narrator also reacted in an odd manor.

 

[J-WO]

In "The Festival" they entered the earth as a womb, rather than a tomb, as one of my books on mythology says under the heading of Mother Goddess. That also reminds me of Mother Hydra in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", but this story does not name any Old Ones.

It just seemed like a strange festival, but looking at it as a feast and this other mythological view begins to build some perspective toward understanding what happened. The narrator also reacted in an odd manor.

Not that I've read the festival in a long while, but the 'womb' concept might have its roots in Greek myth and religion, with regards to the oracle of Delphi. The oracle's cave was occasionally identified with the womb of the Earth Mother, and--if my memory isn't altogether faulty--was referred to as Omphalos, literally- 'bellybutton'*.

Caves as places of worship play a large part in ancient Greek culture, from the mystery cult of Eleusis to the birthplace of Zeus in Crete.

(*In modern times, of course, it has come to refer to a thoroughly decent chap native to these very forums.)

 

[Tinsel]

I read something that said that the oracle of Apollo at Delphi was a priestess, the Pythia, which Apollo spoke through. The site was considered the geographical center of the world and the stone there was the same stone mistakenly swallowed by Cronus in the place of Zeus. Here is what I think. People visited the oracle willingly, but in "The Festival"; the narrator did not know what he was getting into or why, just that he was fulfilling some ancestral obligation. The underground cavern seemed evil and he did attempt to escape at the end, but the group did not appear overtly evil nor malicious, and the beasts were tame. It felt a bit like the reader was succored into following towards some end which it appears might be a matriarchy of some kind. Added: In the case of the Oracle at Delphi, the God is a patriarch (Apollo), but in the case of "The Festival" it is not clear, and you have the tiara in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth";.

 

[j d worthington]

The idea of the womb rather than tomb posited here is interesting, but I think it may be slightly erroneous. I would argue that the celebrants enter it as both. As they are themselves originally grave-worms who, through their ingestion of the corpses of wizards and the like (and, according to that passage from the Necronomicon, thus the assimilation of their knowledge), have grown to human proportions and taken on the intelligence (or at least cunning) of human beings as well, the grave (or tomb) is their place of birth, their womb. Thus, in entering the tomb, they are returning to their origins, as well.

I suppose you could argue this as symbolically representing the circle of death and life, which itself is supported by that same passage ("till out of corruption horrid life springs"), and how life feeds on and grows from death, and vice versa... certainly a theme which saw its embodiment in plenty of myths.

 

[Tinsel]

Was the narrator going to be feasted upon?

 

[Tinsel]

I read it again. Okay there are references to a serpent setting or landscape; "[SIZE=-1]Up, up, up the eerie columns slithered", "[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]Only once in a while a lanthorn bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys..." and "[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers"[/SIZE]. Remember in the Bible where the serpent was punished and made to crawl on it's belly? That makes more sense out of what the Necronomicon said about things learning how to walk that aught to crawl. Did the original serpent have wings?

It is still an odd story however, and why for example did the masked guide possess the narrators ancestors watch?

 

[j d worthington]

Not serpents. Maggots. Grave-worms.

For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it.

Etc. Snakes are not, by and large, considered scavengers. Maggots are, as they feed on corpses, or other decaying matter. The use of the term serpentine in the text is because maggots, too, have such a sinuous, slithering, serpentine motion. Snakes are also not "pulpy", "soft", "flabby", etc.; words used to describe the inhabitants of Kingsport. Maggots, on the other hand, fit these descriptives very well.

But at any rate, the connection is made very explicit in the quote given above that the souls of wizards do not leave their corpses but feed and "instruct" the very worms which devour their corporeal form, until such scavengers are themselves a new form of life for these undead beings.

 

[Tinsel]

The Necronomicon only says:

[SIZE=-1]Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]

It is saying that the soul is not quick to leave the dead body: [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1] For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay....[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]

Than there is talk about wizards, so in order to get a full understanding I think that a person needs to study the Egyptian pantheon because it deals with souls traveling in the underworld and it also deals with souls casting spells in order to protect themselves from demons, etc. I didn't really understand [/SIZE][SIZE=-1]Nyarlathotep either because of the Egyptian side which I have little understanding of, because there was no reason to study. Having that knowledge would be valuable here when reading Lovecraft.

I guess that they all came from that graveyard that the narrator sees on his way to the site. They were wizards.



[/SIZE]