THE DEEP ONES: "Out of the Aeons" by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft

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THE DEEP ONES: "Out of the Aeons" by Hazel Heald and H.P. Lovecraft

2RandyStafford
Jul 26, 2024, 1:54 pm

Been awhile since I've read this and I forgotten how much Lovecraft crams into this story including allusions to Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.

I got the sense, since he was operating under another name, Lovecraft felt, at times, like indulging in some over-the-top adjectives.

I do have some questions though. Do the cultists trying to revive the memory think T'yog can help them fight a still extant Gathanothoa? Or are they operating under the direction of that god? By being petrified by Gathanothoa, is T'Yog now possessed by him? Do the two cultists present at the revival hint at two warring groups of cultists?

3housefulofpaper
Aug 1, 2024, 5:35 pm

I don't know if I found the language over-the-top (I liked "ballyhoo" although perhaps it should have only been used once), but it seems to me that HPL has more playful and expansive with his Mythos in his ghostwritten stories. There's even a suggestion of Gods kindly-disposed to mankind, which is usually considered a Derlethian heresy.

It was good that I came to reread this story late, because I've just finished reading Ghosts of the British Museum which although its is at heart a polemic against museums (especially the British Museum) holding sacred objects and human remains belonging to other cultures and obtained by force or subterfuge during colonial times, it is packed with allegedly eye-witness accounts of apparitions and poltergeist activity, including reports that the Egyptian mummies move restlessly when the cleaners are at work on their display cases at night.

>2 RandyStafford:
For what they're worth, my thoughts are: It's not clear why the cultists would want to revive T'yog. I presume that like the priests in the Mu "flashback", they want to raise Gathanothoa but have the reassurance of some hold over him - but they have that, they have the correct scroll. I suppose they might have hoped that Y'yog has a lot of useful information (like the Soviets snatching a Western scientist in a Cold War thriller). HPL would surely think that anyone would jump at the chance of quizzing someone from a different time.

I presumed that T'yog isn't possessed but suffering agonies, trapped in his undying body. (As an aside, did the imprinted image on his eyeballs inspire part of the film Horror Express, I wonder?).

Two warring cult groups would be likely. It's hard to imagine any religion or cult continuing for tens of thousands of years without any schism. But HPL's paranoid imagination, I think, would be more likely to imagine a bloc of foreigners and fifth-columnists all secretly working together for their evil ends. So I think the two were working together, the man holding the scroll (fortunately, for the purposes of the plot) dying of fright at the sharp, unfaded image of Gathanothoa whilst his colleague gets the petrification treatment.