Yog-Sothoth, Hyperbolic Dimensional Geometry, and how Math (or a lack thereof) created the Cthulhu Mythos

By derivative work: Pbroks13 (talk) Hypersphere_coord.gif: Claudio Rocchini (Hypersphere_coord.gif) [CC-BY-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Richard Elwes, a visiting fellow in mathematics at the University of Leeds, has drawn some interesting parallels between descriptions of Yog-Sothoth, and current ideas of the geometry of higher dimension. Not only would a higher dimensional object look bizarre to us, as per Carl Sagan's famous take in Cosmos on Edwin A. Abbot's Flatland



but it might fold and morph in bizarre ways. One shape, called an exotic sphere, could resemble the "congeries of globes" Lovecraft used to describe the dimensional gate-thing known as Yog-Sothoth.

An even more intriguing parallel, to this curator, derives from Elwes' discussion of topology, and Henri Poincaré's conjecture that all basic shapes are reducible to spheres. This folding and stretching of shapes brings to mind the hyperspace forms of Keziah Mason and other travelers in other dimensions in "The Dreams in the Witch-House," a story completely concerning higher conjectural physics and mathematics:

"Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organization and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties."

"Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles"

The transformations of Keziah Mason, Walter Gilman, and others are very reminiscent of the topological twisting and exotic forms of spheres in higher dimensions that Elwes describes, like so



The amazing thing is that Lovecraft hated math. He wasn't bad at geometry, but had to retake algebra to get a mediocre grade. It was the subject that troubled him the most in high school, and there have even been suggestions (by at least S. T. Joshi) that Lovecraft's mysterious "breakdown" in his late teens and early 20s might have been due to the realization that his math scores likely prevented him from pursuing a career in science as he had planned for most of his young life. Lovecraft eventually turned his hand towards writing and fiction (an interest of his before, but largely put aside in his teens for astronomy and chemistry). Given his fixation on the Romans, I'm not sure why HPL didn't decide he could pursue history, Classical scholarship, or even archaeology, but he didn't, though as with the sciences, he kept himself somewhat educated on these topics throughout his life. So, instead of watching the heavens or diagramming the structure of materials, Lovecraft turned his aborted interest in science into his cosmic horrors, infusing a love of the exotic and weird with the jaw-dropping realities of space, time, and the nature of reality.

At Above Top Secret, Frater210 points to Thomas Hull's article "H. P. Lovecraft: A Horror in Higher Dimensions," in the February 2006 issue of Math Horizons. Hull notes that exotic math is an integral part of the Cthulhu Mythos, including staples such as hypergeometry and interdimensional travel masquerading as magic, non-Euclidean geometry, and vastly huge amounts of time measured in vigintillions. As Hull suggests, Lovecraft does seem to have followed relativity and other developments in physics in the early 20th century, at least as an auto-didactic layman. But whether Lovecraft grasped some of the weird ramifications of these new models, or if he simply got lucky in creating his strange entities and realms, he did it without any real formal training in math.

Houdini, Lovecraft, and Cthulhu

I've written a bit on the Houdini-Lovecraft-Cthulhu connection for this week's Cthulhu Cthursday over at Ectoplasmosis.

Head on over there for thrills, chills, killer robots, monstrous beasts, bizarre prophecies, lovely showgirls, and all the madness you can possibly want.

I will try to update some more *ahem* scholarly exhibits in the Museum. But for now, check out the playbill over at Ectomo.

Happy Birthday H. P. Lovecraft

120 years ago today.

The Nicholas Roerich Museum

Added a link to the Nicholas Roerich Museum, where you can see the paintings name-dropped in stories like At the Mountains of Madness. Roerich was, in addition to a painter, a Theosophist mystic, an archaeologist, and an activist for protecting world heritage. Lovecraft visited the Roerich Museum, located in New York in 1930.

Ancient Alien Fossils from Antarctica

(image from NASA, accessed from ESA Science and Technology)

Exhibit ANT001 - Martian meteorite ALH84001

In 1931, Miskatonic University's Antarctica Expedition relayed news of a tremendous fossil discovery in an Antarctic cave. As described in novelized form in At the Mountains of Madness (ebook, various formats):

"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions. Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved and specialized not later than a thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any life forms or normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took place."

Disaster struck the expedition soon afterward killing much of the expedition staff and destroying most of their specimens. But since that time, the notion that fossil traces of bizarre and possibly alien life forms might be found in the polar regions has recurred in speculative tales and captured the popular imagination. Not long after At the Mountains of Madness, John Campbell published his story "Who Goes There?" In turn this tale was made into one of the first flying saucer movies of the 1950s, The Thing From Another World (on Google Video here) and a later acclaimed film version The Thing, a movie often referred to as the most Lovecraftian mainstream film yet made. These are but the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, as there have been many novels, films, television programs, and other stories about the discovery of ancient alien life or technology in the polar regions and especially Antarctica, as well as the similar concept of discovering lost civilizations or an entrance to the hollow earth. They are too numerous to list here, but fortunately others have taken on the task, including Professor Laura Kay's polar website with lists and descriptions of polar fiction (broken into several groupings, the genre fiction page of most interest to this topic); Dr. Elizabeth Leane's Representations of Antarctica: A Bibliography; and The Antarctic Circle, with Fauno Lancaster Cordes' "Tekeli-li"Bibliography of Antarctic Fiction.

So it is fitting that the first potential evidence for alien life taken seriously by the scientific community was discovered neither in a flying saucer in the skies, a radio broadcast from the stars (the Wow! signal aside), nor a robotic probe in the solar system, but by geological survey in Antarctica. About one-tenth of one percent of meteorites that have been discovered on Earth originated on the planet Mars, and only a handful of these were discovered in Antarctica (many have been recovered from North Africa).


The Antarctic Search for Meteors (ANSMET) recovers a meteorite (not ALH84001) in 2000 - 2001. From NASA.


And one of this handful, discovered in 1984, is the most famous meteorite ever discovered. Dubbed ALH84001 due to its discovery in the Allan Hills of Antarctica, the rock may have crystallized very early in the formation of the Solar System, about 4.5 billion years ago. After being ejected from a meteor impact on Mars 4 billion years ago, it may have rested on the planet until another impact launched it out of Mars' gravity and into space 15 million years ago, around the time Antarctica started to cool substantially and glaciers formed the polar ice cap. ALH84001 did not land in Antarctica until approximately 13,000 years ago, during the end of Earth's Pleistocene, when humans had settled most of the planet and were about to begin or were beginning plant domestication. The great megafauna of the ice ages were going extinct or were gone, but Earth was about to get one last climactic shock in the sudden return to Pleistocene conditions in the Younger Dryas for several centuries, before conditions started to resemble those of the current Holocene.

A decade after its discovery, research into ALH84001 would shock the world by suggesting chemical and fossil evidence for Martian bacteria. While the most compelling element has always been the creation and disposition of magnetite in a manner similar to that created by bacteria on Earth, the scanning electron microscopy images of these structures, possible fossils, grabbed the public attention.

The purported Martian fossils in ALH84001. Image from NASA, via Wikicommons

A good detailed overview of the discovery and research, aimed at a popular audience, is Donald Goldsmith's The Hunt for Life on Mars

Since the 1996 announcement of these findings, other researchers have suggested terrestrial contamination and other non-biological explanations for the "fossils," the magnetite structures, and other chemical and physical elements of the claim that the rock is evidence of ancient life on Mars. For much of the last decade, this has left the claims surrounding ALH84001 somewhat up in the air, the life hypothesis neither specifically refuted nor substantially strengthened. Other Mars meteorites have been examined for similar evidence. One, which landed in Egypt in 1911, the same year Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen led the first expedition to successfully reach the South Pole in Antarctica, and that Hiram Bingham rediscovered Machu Picchu in Peru (one of the inspirations for Lovecraft's Elder Thing City in At the Mountains of Madness) has also been suggested as evidence for Martian life.

In the last month, new research with higher resolution electron microscopy has again focused on the magnetite formations, arguing that they are the product of biology. This will undoubtedly not be the last word on ALH84001, nor on the search for past Martian life. But it adds grist to the mill of a century of stories of dreams and nightmares about just such a discovery. HPL himself would have approved, between his occasional hobby of geological rock collecting, and his belief in primitive Martian vegetation. He furthermore specifically believed that interplanetary travel would be impossible, but that we might learn more of such life if some of it traveled via meteorite (he wrote as much in a letter to Nils H. Frome on February 8, 1937, a month before Lovecraft died; the letter is published in H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters. Necronomicon Press, West Warwick, Rhode Island, pp. 39 - 43, published in 1986).

At least we can be glad that so far there have been no incidents involving ALH84001 like those regarding Professor Lake's examination of the alien fossils found by the Miskatonic University Antarctica Expedition.

UPDATE: NASA thinks that they'll know for certain by the end of this year.

"We do not yet believe that we have rigorously proven there is [or was ] life on Mars." says David S. McKay, chief of astrobiology at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

"But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there," McKay tells Spaceflight Now.

Cthulhu Guest Appearance on The Venture Brothers

Another announcement-type post

That's right. They've already referenced the Necronomicon visually/conceptually but not by name, but this takes that up a notch.

Airs on the Cartoon Network/Adult Swim at Midnight EST Sunday December 6, and then will be available on Adult Swim after that

http://video.adultswim.com/promos/ve...etter-man.html

Cthulhu December at Tor.com

Not an exhibit, just a head's up.

Everyday this month, Tor.com is showcasing all things Cthuluvian.

The Taos Hum and "The Transition of Juan Romero"

Exhibit AUD001: Recording about the Taos Hum

It is generally agreed that discussion and naming of the "Taos Hum," a low-frequency sound many have claimed to hear in and around Taos, New Mexico, dates to the 1980s. Since popularization of the Taos Hum, other hums have been suggested around the globe. The Taos Hum has been blamed on any number of culprits, though a persistent one ties it to Dulce and the legends of a secret military and/or extraterrestrial underground base.

But while the story of the Taos Hum may not be that old, it bears a striking resemblance to the central feature of one of H. P. Lovecraft's earliest stories, "The Transition of Juan Romero," written in 1919 though not published until the 1940s.

Specifically in the story, the secret of a mysterious lineage comes to a head after the dynamiting of a mine in the Southwestern United States, probably Arizona, in 1894. Soon afterwards, a low rumbling sound emerges from the abysses opened by the explosion. Lovecraft writes

"It was Romero’s voice, coming from the bunk above, that awakened me, a voice excited and tense with some vague expectation I could not understand:

"Madre de Dios! - el sonido - ese sonido - oiga Vd! - lo oye Vd? - señor, THAT SOUND!"

I listened, wondering what sound he meant. The coyote, the dog, the storm, all were audible; the last named now gaining ascendancy as the wind shrieked more and more frantically. Flashes of lightning were visible through the bunk-house window. I questioned the nervous Mexican, repeating the sounds I had heard:

"El coyote - el perro - el viento?"

But Romero did not reply. Then he commenced whispering as in awe:

"El ritmo, señor - el ritmo de la tierra - THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!"

And now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep, deep, below me was a sound - a rhythm, just as the peon had said - which, though exceedingly faint, yet dominated even the dog, the coyote, and the increasing tempest. To seek to describe it was useless - for it was such that no description is possible. Perhaps it was like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of the life and consciousness. Of all its qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me."

Things only get worse from there.

A mechanical sound, emanating from deep underground, in the American Southwest, and as noted in the story, tied into occult traditions?

That's the Taos Hum.

The Fairie Cursed Goblet in H.P. Lovecraft's Family

Exhibit HPL001: The Luck of Eden Hall

Much is made of H. P. Lovecraft's ardent materialist skepticism and atheism. It was a defining element for the man. Personally, one of the great "what if's" of Lovecraft's life, in my opinion, revolves around the debunking book on superstition that Lovecraft was writing for Harry Houdini, an item we will perhaps return to in the future. But while Lovecraft may have rejected the supernatural, it doesn't mean he couldn't have a bit of magical lore in his family background.

In March 1934, Lovecraft wrote a letter to one of his regular correspondents Robert Barlow, who would go on to be an anthropologist of Mesoamerica, specializing in rare Nahuatl texts and Aztec hieroglyphic writing. In this letter, Lovecraft discusses his genealogy, including ties to the Musgrave family. While Lovecraft regularly discussed his genealogy (including jokingly producing Roman and other ancestors to satisfy his historical interests), in this case he went into the specifics of an unusual item associated with the Musgrave family: The Luck of Eden Hall. As Lovecraft put it himself:

“This is the legend of Eden Hall in Cumberland, seat of the family until quite recent times. It is given erroneously in a German poem by Uhland and thence paraphrased in a verse of Longfellow’s – but the original version of the tale is as follows: A drinking-glass was stolen by a Musgrave from the fairies, who thereafter made futile attempts to recover it. In the end, the fairies pronounced the following prophecy – indicating that disaster would overtake the house of Musgrave unless the glass was kept intact:

‘If the glass either break or fall
Farewell to the luck of Eden Hall’

In the family there actually existed an old glass, supposed to be the one of the legend, which was guarded with the most extreme care. Upon the breaking up of the estate and the sale of Eden Hall after the World War, this glass was placed in the South Kensington Museum, London. I hope no one will smash it, since that would doubtless bring me some sort of evil through my Musgrave side!”

Selected Letters: 1932 – 1934. Volume IV. Edited by August Derleth and James Turner. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin p. 392, Letter 692

More extensive versions of the story note that the cup was found by one or more humans, possibly by a servant, who disturbed a group of fairies partying near a well. As the fairies fled, one of them (in at least one version, the Queen of the Fairies) uttered the curse.

The drawing at the top of the page appeared in the Halloween entry of Chamber's Book of Days (1869)

While not an actual magical fairie cup, the Luck of Eden Hall nonetheless has an impressive pedigree. In reality the cup is an ornate gilded and enameled drinking cup made in Syria in the thirteenth century. It seems to have left the Middle East not long after that date, as a custom case was made for it, likely in fourteenth-century France. While the manner in which it reached England is uncertain, returning participants in one of the later Crusades seems a possible option. It is not the only legend of a fairie cup, nor the only supposedly fairie item, ranging from elaborate luxury goods to "elfshot" interpretations for prehistoric projectile points.

It was clearly very carefully curated, only brought out of its case for special occasions, though there are family accounts of ancestors throwing it into the air as if to tempt fate. It can be traced back in the Musgrave family to at least a published mention of it in 1791.

While the Hall was demolished in 1934, the cup exists intact to this day in the Victoria & Albert Museum. The cup was loaned to the museum in 1926, and would later become a permanent part of the museum collection in 1956.

You can learn more about the Luck, as well as see recent color photographic images, at the Victoria & Albert Museum page on the Luck. A modern Musgrave discusses the legend here.