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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[1] that we should voyage far. The sciences have harmed us little; but some day the piecing together[2] of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying views of reality, that we’ll either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age[3].
Theosophists[4] have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle where our world and human race form transient incidents. Their strange suggestions freeze the blood. Forbidden ages chill me when I think of them and madden me when I dream of them. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, appeared from an accidental piecing together of separated things: in this case, an old newspaper and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will make this piecing; certainly, if I live, I shall never add a link in that terrible chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent, and that he was going to destroy his notes but sudden death stopped him.
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Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His servants and resume His rule of Earth. This time would be easy to know, for then mankind would become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside. And all men would be shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the Earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and tell about their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the communication. But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then the black spirits of Earth would come out, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours. But old Castro dared not speak much of them. He became silent hurriedly, and said nothing more. He curiously declined to mention the size of the Old Ones, too. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars[66], dreams hidden and untouched. It was not connected to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever mentioned it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad arab Abdul Alhazred[67] which the initiated might read, especially the this couplet:
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