Physics from Hell - Gallileo and Dante's Inferno

The mix of science, history, and creepy horrifying literature in this analysis rings true with what we're trying to do here at the Miskatonic Museum with Lovecraft.

More information at the Boston Globe.

Richard Upton Pickman's Studio Found in Boston?

"Mystery Skulls" discovered in Boston basement. It's not the North End where Pickman's secret studio apartment is supposed to be, but Thurber said he couldn't find the place again if he tried.

Why Cthulhu Isn't On That Gravestone: A Sympathetic Response to io9

Here at Miskatonic Museum, we curate and display objects and cases where the real world parallels or at least calls to mind the works of H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos. So we were amused when io9's Jess Nevins recently pointed out a tombstone from Duxbury, Massachusetts that to his eye resembled one of the common icons for Cthulhu. This is very much up our alley, and is comparable with our most famous piece, the Moche Headdress, possibly from La Mina, Peru, which may provide additional insight into the Cthulhu Cult.

But as with our Red Rain of Kerala exhibit, examined through the lens of "The Colour Out of Space," we do try to also educate our visitors regarding more mainstream interpretations of these objects. In the case of the Duxbury Stone, there seemed to be more that might be said in this regard.

One of the comments on the io9 article, by greenivygrey, notes that the border is a gourd and floral design, and points to similar iconography on a 1695 tombstone. Another example, from 1697 was photographed by jlbriggs in Newport, Rhode Island. This design is also known as "fig and pumpkin" and in these examples this is more obvious than on the Duxbury Stone (which includes the figs, but not the pumpkin). Another example from 1705 Ipswich can be seen here. PrimaryResearch has a visual glossary of colonial-era headstone elements which you can view. If you are a student of these designs, please feel free to add further information or corrections in the comments.

You may notice that all of these examples cluster together. This brings us to the Death's Head design on the Duxbury Stone, and the work of archaeologist James Deetz. James Deetz was a pioneering historical archaeologist, author of, amongst other works the book In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Deetz's most famous work may be his seriation, conducted with Edwin S. Dethlefsen, of New England headstone iconography. You can read the article here. This seriation did not directly address border designs such as the fig and pumpkin, but is a classic case study on seriation of material culture. The article tracks the waxing and waning in popularity of three basic headstone designs, and then goes into detail into the specifics of the evolution of these designs, and how demographics, settlement pattern, religious beliefs, and economics affected this evolution. This article has led to other projects, including those utilizing the study to educate children in history and how to conduct research, such as Dean Eastman's "Tiptoeing Through the Tombstones" which has another illustration of the fig and pumpkin motif.


Seriation is a technique developed over a century ago that is in many ways the backbone of everyday archaeological chronology (anchored in time with absolute dating techniques such as radiocarbon). The style of material objects generally changes through time, and in most cases, it changes in a relatively predictable and common sense way. Elements of style or whole styles are innovated or introduced, they become popular and widespread, and then they drop off as another new fad or trend emerges. The sequence of these changes can be compiled and used to date when an object was probably made. We do this all the time, recognizing that a car or a pair of pants or a building is from a particular decade or century based on other examples we know from that time. We know that Mad Men takes place in the early 1960s not from seeing a calendar, but from the clothes, and we recognize the show's advance through time as the clothes change. And when we see something we believe to be out of place, even if it is not, we find it jarring, as in the recent meme of finding "time travelers" in old photos or video clips.

Deetz and Dethlefsen seriated these grave markers not just to study them in particular, but as a larger test of seriation. The article was published in 1967, an era when explicit testing of the rigor of archaeological methods had reached a fever pitch in what historians of archaeological theory call "The New Archaeology" or processual archaeology, contrasting it with "culture historical" archaeology that had preceded it. The headstones are dated, and some of the carvers are known from the historical record. It was an ideal case to determine whether seriation, regularly applied to prehistoric artifact populations, actually worked like everyone thought it did. Below is a video of archaeologist Dave Wheelock carving an 18th century style headstone for the late Deetz.



This headstone may feature pumpkins and figs rather than Cthulhu, but I suspect HPL would have appreciated what has been learned about these tombstones in the intervening decades. He wrote extensively about changes of style and elements of architecture, both in his letters and in some travelogues, unpublished during his lifetime with an antiquarian bent (most famously his purposely archaic "Quebeck" study). He wrote about small bits of old Dutch material culture in New England, liked the idea of a museum of folkways, and went on in an amateur fashion about regional English-language dialects in America.

Just as a side note on the io9 article, while Innsmouth does indeed have some elements of Ipswich and Gloucester in it as Mr. Nevins notes, much of it was openly based on Newburyport. Like Arkham, which is a mix of Salem and Providence (especially Brown University), it has several components.

Now on Twitter - Miskatonic Museum and Other Strange News

Sometimes something weird comes across my desk, and I don't have too much to say other than "Hey, look at this weird thing, but don't touch it you fool!" If headlines such as "Whitest Voodoo Priests Ever Team Up to Fight Hitler" or "US Military to Weaponize Flying Snakes" pique your interest, just follow me on Twitter by hitting the button on the right. These and other strange stories will show up in your electro-tickertape fresh from the workshop.

I'll also be retweeting stuff I write as Cthulhu Cthursday for Ectoplasmosis, which might be of interest to readers of this blog.

Looking for a Necronomicon Cheap? It's a Buyer's Market

I don't have one, and I suspect the Ritman library, aka the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica doesn't either, as it focuses mostly on the Christian Hermetic, Gnostic, alchemical, and other traditions, and other aspects of the Western occult tradition. And many of those works, currently housed together in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam, may be split up on the auction block to cover the owner's debts. Some of the works there are quite important for these topics, and the current crisis was signaled by the offering for sale of The Grail of Rochefoucauld, the oldest account of the myth of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, a story still alive in our culture centuries later. If you want to check out more, or sign the petition if you believe it might help, check out The Wild Hunt's post on this for more info.

But seeing the troubles of the Ritman made me wonder what ancient grimoires and works of "occult poetry" might float about in economic chaos.

Update: The library is indeed being broken up.

Mi-Go Flight Abilities: Insights from Fungal Air Jet Production

MIG002: Apothecial fungus propulsion (Video from Marcus Roper of the University of California, Berkeley, and New Scientist)

The ability of the beings known as the Fungi from Yuggoth to move through both the atmosphere and vacuum on ungainly wings has always been puzzling.

The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the aether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them about on earth.

- Henry Akeley, May 5, 1928 in a letter to Albert N. Wilmarth, as recorded in "The Whisperer in Darkness"

While still a mystery, perhaps the capabilities of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum provides a clue. Marcus Roper and a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that apothecial fungi are capable of coordinating to produce an air jet when ejecting their spores. A video of this phenomenon can be seen above. While the relationship between Earth fungus and extraterrene fungus is still unknown, such a development would surely have been noticed by the keen biological mindset of the creatures known in Nepalese as the Mi-Go.

Perhaps this ability lies behind the cryptic text of the poem "Fungi from Yuggoth," specifically from the section on "Star-Winds" (emphasis added)

It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,
Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,
But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.
The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,
And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,
Heeding geometries of outer space,
While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.

This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!

Esoteric Order of Dagon Conclave in Ohio

Exhibit INS002 - The Loveland Frog (image by author)

The people of the pleasant little town of Loveland Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, are gathering together this weekend to celebrate the infamous Loveland Frog. In 1955, in the midst of a larger wave of sightings of odd humanoids, three misshapen "troll" like beings (labeled as such by Loren Coleman in his Mothman and Other Curious Encounters were sighted carrying odd equipment that gave off electric sparks. Further down the Ohio River in Indiana, one of these encounters involved a swimmer grabbed by a claw-like-hand from underwater, leaving a green stain on her leg. In 1972, in two separate incidents police officers saw, and in one case fired upon, a four foot tall frog like humanoid. In the time since then, one of the officers has said he only saw (and fired upon) an iguana.

This is a drawing made by the sister of one of the officers in 1972, based on his description


Frog people, using strange devices? Robert Olmstead, the famed visitor to Innsmouth in 1927, was a resident and student in Ohio. The Marsh family sent a relative, Olmstead's grandmother, to Ohio in 1884. Robert Olmstead's cousin Lawrence was kept in an asylum in Canton, Ohio. Robert Olmstead decided to free his cousin and journey with him to Innsmouth, and then to Y'ha-nthlei. But what if they never made it? Perhaps the escape went badly, or the pair decided the waters of Ohio and the Great lakes were sufficient. Or perhaps these are simply blood relatives?

I visited Loveland two years ago, and did not have any time to really look around. But I did get some pictures of the area in which one of the 1972 sightings, the one depicted in the sketch above, occurred.

The area of the sighting, on Riverside Avenue


While perhaps ideal for a frog-fish-man, no sign of one here