Humans have no knowledge we seek.
Then what —?
I sensed a lascivious energy. Your container is broken.
My soul froze.
Then its maw opened — empty and black as interstellar space. and I understood what Shub- Niggurath meant and more dire, what it sought on earth.
Humans were containers — for souls!
As I was sucked into that blackest of black holes, cheated of all hope of an afterlife, realization crystallized. All over the Earth the globe-girdling clouds hung poised to capture freshly liberated souls every time men died. And we are all predestined to die.
Around me, others like me continued collecting. Soon we began pulsating in resonance to our swelling host. All one. Yet also individual. Parasites, yet prisoners. Powerful, but helpless. Nothing but something. Something yet nothing. Neither matter nor energy. Not particles and not waveforms. Only blind self-aware voids in an unknowable plenum.
I send these thought-forms out to my surviving colleagues. Take drugs. Seek madness. Pray for the gift of amnesia. For there is no other escape.
Absorption finally came, and I became another cold, yet still conscious corpuscle of the insatiable, eternal void that is and always will be Shub-Niggurath.
THE NEW PAULINE CORPUS
Matt Cardin
Seated at a small wooden desk, a humble piece of cypress wood furniture elevated to veritably mythic status by a heaping of fabulously ornate decorative flourishes, he spreads out the papers on the smooth surface before him. A rushing murmur, like the sound of ten thousand voices melding into an oceanic hush, flows through the doorway that stands open and waiting on the far side of the equally ornate room.
The papers are crammed to capacity with a chaotic jumble of handwritten markings. Rows of text run from left to right and then, often, meet the edge of the page and instead of breaking to the next line simply continue on, rebounding from the barrier in curling coils and tracing the paper’s edge in circles that effectively form a written frame around the rest. Some lines appear in ink, others in pencil. Some words are minuscule to the point of near- indecipherability. Others shout hugely in hysterical looping letters.
None make sense. Not on their own, at least. Fragments. That is what he has in his possession. Pieces of a puzzle. Scraps of a portrait. Shards of a mirror, each reflecting and refracting the image of all the others to create a dazzling maze of meanings whose infinity encompasses enormous blank spaces.
* * * The more I dwell on it, Francis, the more I am convinced that the single most fruitful result of the frightful transition which has overtaken us is the resurrection of our collective passion for story, for the specifically narrative understanding of our lives on this planet. I now view the trajectory of my former theological writings toward an almost exclusive emphasis on ontological matters as an egregious error. More than any other religious tradition in human history, our own Christian faith, along with its Jewish forebear, has always been centrally rooted in a cosmic- narrative understanding of human life and the cosmos itself. A reverence for story — as we have now been forcibly reminded — is not symptomatic of a regressive intellectual and theological naivete but of an unblinking realism. It may simply be the case that the story in which we find ourselves existentially involved as living characters lacks any obvious correspondences with the charming drama we were told from childhood about the Eden- to-Fall-to-New Eden arc of our race. Or perhaps these elements are indeed discernable in our new tale, but in a jumbled order or — more likely — as inversions of themselves. I hope to say more about this in a future letter.
In any event, happily for me, since it means that I do not have to jettison the entirety of my former theological corpus, is the fact that theology-as-story does not preclude ontology but incorporates it. In fact, what has now been revealed to us in our dreadful recent disruptions is the express unity of these two categories of thought. That is, we are living the story of a war between levels of reality. Our metanarrative is the tale of how space-time, the cosmos, the created order, was usurped by a reality that is more fundamental, primary, and ancient.
This story, our story, is a tale of the deeply inner and primordial turning with hostility upon the objectively outer and evolved, and reshaping it according to a set of principles that are incomprehensible and, as we can see all around us in the fact of our wrecked cities with their new and growing populations of squamous, octopodan, and quasi-batrachian inhabitants, thoroughly revolting to the latter.
Under red-glowing smoke-filled skies I thread my way through a boulder field of shattered buildings. Fires blaze and smolder in places where no fuel ought to burn. Twisted chunks of steel and concrete burn like dry-rotten wood. Sparkling shards of shattered windows and doors and street lamps catch the flickering orange glow and ignite from the pressure of the images on their glassy surfaces. A sea of flaming rubble, fifty miles wide. This is what remains of my city and of all the others like it dot-ting the surface of the round earth like piles of autumn leaves raked together for burning.
Here is the heart of the matter, Francis, in a rush of analogies intended to distill the essence of the insights I lost when I shredded my manuscript on that terrible day.
ITS OMNIPRESENCE: my theological namesake quoted approvingly to his Greek audience a common bit of philosophical wisdom from their own cultural milieu when he spoke of God the Father as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Does not such a formulation recall Yog-Sothoth, who walks with the other Old Ones between the dimensions, and in whom past, present, and future are one? Does it not recall Azathoth, the primal chaos that resides not only at the center of infinity but at the center of each atom, each particle, perhaps serving as the unaccountable subatomic bond that has categorically escaped scientific explanation? But here I overstep the limits of my formal authority, so effectively does this demonic pantheon inspire a plethora of transgressive and exhilarating speculations.
ITS ANNIHILATING HOLINESS: in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the desert, under the merciless sun, the Israelites witness repeated outbreaks of Yahweh, Who “is a consuming fire,” an untamable force, a burning pestilence, a plague of serpents. And so is He revealed not just as the Holy Other but as Wholly Other, possessed of a cosmically singular sui generis nature that cannot and will not abide contradiction. In the words of Luther himself, if you sin “then He will devour thee up, for God is a fire that consumeth, devoureth, rageth; verily He is your undoing, as fire consumeth a house and maketh it dust and ashes.” As Otto wrote with such frightening clarity of apprehension, there is something baffling in the way His wrath is kindled and manifested, for it is “like a hidden force of nature, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near. It is incalculable and arbitrary.” To see His luminance shining from the face of Moses is a horror. To see His face is to die.
This incomprehensible, inconceivable, incalculable, arbitrary horror serves as the font, finish, and focal point of our entire tradition. I trust my attempts at commentary would only weaken the blow of the brute fact itself.
“My son.” The voice speaks behind him, and he looks sideways in acknowledgment of its presence without actually turning to face it. “Have you read them again?” The voice is thin as a reed, like a sick child, and also thick and murky, like a chorus chanting together in imperfect unison. But even now, with the world having passed beyond its own farthest extremity, the voice exudes a supernal calmness and control that still, astonishingly, serve to comfort and soothe.
“Some of them, yes,” he replies. “But something is eluding me. They seem to contain two different strands or stories. One of them is like a dream narrative that follows an alternative plot and — perhaps — posits a world in which the efforts of the other narrative have failed or were never made. But I’m not at all certain of any of this. I need to read the pages once more.”
“Then read,” the voice says. “But remember that we are waited upon.” As if in confirmation, the ocean roar
