A Shoggoth – vile servants of the Great Ones

The Shoggoth were first described in Lovecraft’s 1931 Antarctic adventure novella, At the Mountains of Madness. (Note: that was one of my own influences for Beneath the Dark Ice.)

In the story, Lovecraft describes them as huge amoeba-like creatures made out of glistening black ooze, with multiple eyes that formed and popped open all over their surface. These eyes could float freely over the lumpen body mass. In another description, they are said to lack any formal or base body shape and instead could produce limbs, eyes and mouths at will (if you have ever seen John Carpenter’s movie The Thing you’ll get an idea of the influence Lovecraft had on this film director’s work).

The character of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, found the mere idea of their existence on Earth to be horrifying enough to drive a person to insanity.

The Gates of the Hidden City

R’lyeh is a fictional lost city that first appeared in “The Call of Cthulhu”. R’lyeh is sunken deep under the Pacific Ocean. Lovecraft put the coordinates at approximately Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W. The water there is impenetrably deep, and warm.

In 1997 Navy sensors detected a very large noise, picked up on two different marine sensors thousands of miles apart, being produced at Latitude 50° S, Longitude 120° W, close to Lovecraft’s R’lyeh. This sound (known as a Bloop) is not thought to correspond to any known living or non-living source.

To this day, the phenomenon is still unexplained, and no agreed or adequate explanation has ever been provided.

Forbidden knowledge

Secrets and knowledge that are buried, sunken, long forgotten or forbidden, is a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s works. Many of his characters (usually scientists or professors) are driven by curiosity or scientific endeavor, and in many of his stories what they uncover in their searches usually proves to be a Pandora’s Box, with the secrets they reveal (release?) usually destroying their discoverers both physically and mentally.

The Old Gods’ influences on us

The creatures of Lovecraft’s universe will often have humans who act as servants. Cthulhu, for instance, is worshiped as a god by many secret cults in both the Western world and among the Greenland Eskimo (Inuit) and the voodoo covens of Louisiana.

Lovecraft was like many of his turn of the twentieth century contemporaries, in that he saw modern man as being closer to science and rigid thinking, and the indigenous natives as being closer to the spiritual-supernatural knowledge unknown to civilized man. This closeness to the natural world was what he saw as making the “savages” the keepers of the ancient (and long forgotten in the modern world) lore.

Miskatonic University

The university where Matt Kearns finally deposits the Book first appeared in Lovecraft’s 1922 story “Herbert West–Reanimator”. It is a fictional university located in Arkham, a made-up town in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River (also made up).

Miskatonic University was supposedly known for its fantastic library collection of ancient occult books. The Miskatonic library also holds one of the very few surviving copies of The Necronomicon. But this wasn’t the only fantastic tome it held locked away in its vaults. It was also said to include the mysterious Book of Eibon – that strangest and rarest of occult volumes that was said to have come down through a series of translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.