Sawfish Wrote:
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> What I'd like additional help in nailing down is
> what is the temporal mechanism that gets us from
> Calaspa, on Hestan, to John Milwarp, in 20th C
> Earth?
Oh, so that's what you were asking about. I thought you meant Calaspa's influence on the universe at large, which the story mostly explained. Pardon my confusion!
> I think it's in the story, maybe, but it would be
> good to know if the descendants of Calaspa *each*
> end their lives by being fried unexpectedly, as if
> having a giant filament from a colossal light bulb
> wrapped around them (cyclical, infinite) and the
> light turn ON, or if the souvara was needed, and
> hence Milwarp was the last of Calaspa's lineage
> (diminshing ripple ending with Milwarp. In that
> case, he'd actually be having a *second* hour to
> relieve (execution), just as Calaspa had with
> Belthoris.
In that case, the priest sentencing Calaspa to his doom seemed to imply a curse has been placed on all of his future avatars, but it seems Milwarp is the only one who will remember the primal sin and suffer the burning punishment, perhaps due to the souvara.
Quote:"Thou shalt pass hereafter through other lives in Hestan, and shalt climb midway in the cycles of the world subsequent to Hestan in time and space. But through all thine incarnations the chaos thou hast invoked will attend thee widening ever like a rift. And always, in all thy lives, the rift will bar thee from reunion with the soul of Belthoris; and always, though merely by an hour, thou shalt miss the love that should otherwise have been oftentimes regained."
"At last, when the chasm has widened overmuch, thy soul shall fare no farther in the onward cycles of incarnation. At that time it shall be given thee to remember clearly thine ancient sin; and remembering, thou shalt perish out of time. Upon the body of that latter life shall be found the charred imprint of the chains, as the final token of thy bondage. But they that knew thee will soon forget, and thou shalt belong wholly to the cycles limited for thee by thy sin."
And at the end, Calaspa mentions only one nameless phantom (Milwarp) writing down his history.
Quote:Somehow, in another world, an exile phantom has written these words... a phantom who must fade utterly from time and place, even as I, the doomed priest Calaspa. I cannot remember the name of the phantom.
> A side observation I'd like to raise to other
> reader: did it seem to anyone else that the
> narrator, the guy who had Milwarp's diary, when he
> described Milwarp at the beginning, it was very
> close to a description of how the rest of the
> world may have seen HPL, or CAS, himself?
This did not pass my attention, but I see CAS in it more than HPL. CAS enjoyed a moment of fame in his life, when he knew George Sterling, before disappearing altogether from public attention. And, in a wider view of life, Lovecraft is almost famous now, at least enough to inspire Cthulhu t-shirts and Mythos movies, whereas CAS is still obscure, even among Lovecraft's fans. A large number of Cthulhu Mythos fans assume Tsathoggua was created by Lovecraft, and a larger number know Tsathoggua was created by someone else but don't care to read the stories he came from.
Though I did wonder, in light of my Yog-Sothoth comment, if CAS might have been influenced to some extent by HPL's "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" when he was writing "Aforgomon." He liked HPL's story enough to want to illustrate it.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 6 Sep 20 | 03:55PM by Hespire.