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(For each of these throughout the semester, remember, anyone can Google, so focus on your own response and thoughts about the reading! [Create one original post, which should include at least one quote from the story, and then connect with your classmates’ ideas in these forums.] Connect & Contribute by sharing your experience and engagement with the reading to expand the class’ discussion and discover each other’s insights.)
1st discussion about “The call of cthulhu”
2nd discussion about “I cthulhu”
once you give me the discussions I will give you two posts to replay for. For every discussion I need two replays.
This is for the essay:
Choose one of the following prompts and write a (minimum) 1000 word essay in response. You can write more than 1000 words: there is no maximum word count! To really flesh out your ideas it is likely you will need to exceed that minimum; don’t short yourself. You will need to include at least three quotes from the text (which you present, establish the context, and then deconstruct specific word choice and meaning, and reiterate the quote’s relevance to your point). The quotes should not be the copying of lengthy passages to add to the word count: this will result in being marked down for ‘padding.’ Be sure the majority of the writing in your submission is your words and insights into this work and 1) how it offers us a window into the 1920s [early 1900s] and 2) allows us to explore the experience of being human today…
Construction Instruction: Use Google Docs to draft, revise, and polish your work. Use the guidelines and helpful tips I provide on the full ADA accessible syllabus for essay construction. Put your name and information at the upper lefthand corner of the page per MLA format and then signal which choice you have selected (if I have to figure out on my own which choice it will not be as successful a submission). After you have finished writing your essay, create a title that is evocative and informative and specific to YOUR analysis and discovery in the essay. Put any narrative terms from our course into bold per those instructions. Nothing else should be in bold. Put quotes in “quotation marks” and use parenthesis to delineate the text and page number of that text as shown here (“Call of the Cthulhu” 3). Name your google Doc with your last name and the following as follows [Beckwith Essay Doyle / Gaiman]. Be sure to use that ‘Share’ button in the upper right corner to give me Editor permissions. On Moodle, you will do two things: 1) copy and paste your essay directly into the forum AND 2) provide a link to your google doc using the URL for that doc (if you create a direct link using the button, be sure to select ‘open in a new tab’ so clicking the link does not navigate the clicker away from Moodle – I won’t be able to grade your work that way, so be careful about this!). After 15 minutes, CHECK Moodle to be sure your copy&paste and link BOTH appear in the feed. Empty submissions that open the forum and allow students to see classmates’ work before submitting their own will be marked down.
Choice One
The narrator of “The Call of the Cthulhu” did not directly experience the encounters described in the story or directly observe the events. How does the way in which they collected their information about ‘what happened’ feed into the ‘horror’ or scariness of the story? How might this reveal to us anxieties and apprehensions readers would have felt in the 1920s? How might this translate to anxieties and apprehensions we feel today about information and the unknown?
Choice Two
In literary studies we often consider ‘setting’: here, you should consider the literal setting of earth and the environment. How does the earth, the environment, ecosystems, sciences, and/or exploration in “The Call of the Cthulhu” feed into the ‘horror’ or scariness of the story? How might this reveal to us anxieties and apprehensions readers would have felt about the planet and the universe (and what was known or unknown) in the 1920s? How might this translate to anxieties and apprehensions we feel today about our planet, the universe, and the known and the unknown?
Choice Three
Gaiman’s “I, Cthulhu, or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W)?” enters into dialogue or conversation with Lovecraft’s “The Call of the Cthulhu” in many ways. FanFic isn’t just recycling characters or plots, it also takes the original to task (while still paying homage to what obviously drew the reader/writer to the original in the first place). How does Gaiman’s short story, the decisions he makes in how he writes it as well as what he writes in it, increase and enrich your understanding of Lovecraft’s original? How does it allow you to see ‘issues’ in the crafting or content of the original? And what contemporary issues and problems in society today does Gaiman’s story illuminate for you? [For this choice, use at least three quotes from Gaiman and two from Lovecraft: do still be sure to have the majority of writing be your own words and ideas pertaining to these quotes!]
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The Call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
Originally published in Weird Tales in February 1928
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . .
consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing
humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.
Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.
1. The Horror in Clay.
T
HE most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its
contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant
that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little;
but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and
of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light
into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human
race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if
not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden
eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread
glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old
newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;
certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too,
intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not
sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my grand-uncle, George
Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted
to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by
many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been
stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled
by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside
which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were
unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the
heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the
time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than
wonder.
As my granduncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers
with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in
Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archeological
Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from
showing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the
personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but
when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be
the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found?
Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search
out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously
of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although
the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity
which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be;
though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to
identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic
execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a
monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant
imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with
rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.
Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most
recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed
“CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so
unheard-of. This manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and
Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.,” and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John
R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s
Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of
different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Eliott’s
Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults,
with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden
Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
T
HE first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a
thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular
clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony
Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him,
who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the
Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great
eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in
the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient
commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped
gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from other towns. Even
the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his
host’s archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy,
stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in
replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archeology. Young
Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a
fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found
highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities;
and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the
fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most
considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected. Upon
retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung
monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls
and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic
sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost
unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He
questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on
which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his nightclothes, when waking had stolen
bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing
both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor,
especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not
understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of
membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became
convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor
with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript
records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose
burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two
sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.
On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that
he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street.
He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then
only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that
time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he
learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor
shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly
dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered about. He at no time
fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor
that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture.
Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into
lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole condition was
otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p. m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed,
astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since
the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to
Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his
recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts
of thoroughly usual visions.
H
ERE the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me
much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy
can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the
dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange
visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst
nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their
dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to
have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man
could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes
formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and business—New England’s
traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy
but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23rd and April 2nd—the
period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague
description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of
something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken
loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the
compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what
he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the old
data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from
esthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very
bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the
sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not
unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic
nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad.
The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane
on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be
saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely
by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I
succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often
wondered if all the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no
explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given
period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous,
and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone
sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a
paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from
California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment”
which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of
March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in
the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by
hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumor and legendry,
and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring
salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a miracle can have
stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms, and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird
bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set
them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the
professor.
2. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
T
HE older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed
the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen
the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the
ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connection that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archeological
Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and
attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by
the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and
problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a
commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had traveled all the way from New Orleans for certain special
information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by
profession an inspector of police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and
apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine.
It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archeology. On the contrary, his wish
for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or
whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans
during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it,
that the police could not but realize that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and
infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the
erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be
discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the
frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the
thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they
lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of
genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized school of
sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in
its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between
seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of
vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly,
rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing,
which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence,
and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of
the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the center, whilst the long, curved claws of
the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward
the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers
brushed the backs of huge forepaws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole
was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast,
awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with any known type of art
belonging to civilization’s youth—or indeed to any other time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its
golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The
characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half
the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship.
They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we
know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our
conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the inspector’s problem, there
was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and
writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late
William Channing Webb, professor of anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note.
Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of
some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had
encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship,
chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Eskimos knew
little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient eons
before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer
hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a
careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as
best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and
around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a
very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could
tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting
to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied
an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshipers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to
remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then followed an
exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist
agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart.
What, in substance, both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred
idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase
as chanted aloud:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had
repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something
like this:
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
A
ND now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his
experience with the swamp worshipers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound
significance. It savored of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing
degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and
lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s
men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was
voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women
and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the
black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams,
soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand
it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the
shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in
silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging
nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall
intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet
combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and
hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms
was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind
shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of
forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to
advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen
colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and
untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a
huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils
flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville,
before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was
nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away.
The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad
enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking
sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they plowed on through
the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men,
and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the
other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and
squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from
the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a
well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle
itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of
the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood
trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and
tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but
a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing
about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the center of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of
flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its
diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a center hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the
helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshipers jumped and
roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanals between the
ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an
excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot
deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and
questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of
great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but
I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although
there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms
and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond
description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was
able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between
two rows of policemen. Five of the worshipers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away
on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of
a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and
mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a coloring of
voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many
