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The 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.
the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.
the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass,
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space,
crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground
were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant?
if there be any rest in the universe.
an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.
a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides
through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk
serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.
the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen,
There seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage in several definite stages betwixt man and nameless infinity. The blasphemies which appeared on earth, it was hinted, came from the dark planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the solar system; but this was itself merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race whose ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time continuum or
greatest known cosmos.
the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos
cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organisation.
the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao.
the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth.
the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without their concomitant physical structure.
an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy.
Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore,
and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legend...
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lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such
lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She
the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know,
indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic.
the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness.
The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—but
possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our
step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness.
the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of
The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter.
This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed worlds of wonder within.
Shining Trapezohedron.”
These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.”
he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded
figures whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and
arcana of the worlds...
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to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices.
Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on
