"The Emerald Tablets of Thoth": A Lovecraftian Plagiarism

Yesterday I talked a bit about the Shaver Mystery, the 1945 hoax in which writer Richard S. Shaver claimed that he had descended under the earth, encountered a fantastically ancient race possessed of high technology, and reported the shocking truth only under the guise of fiction. In reality, of course, the hoax was the joint work of Shaver, a former mental patient, and Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer (who wrote more than two-thirds of the Shaver material and soon after started Fate magazine, the nonfiction title that launched the Kenneth Arnold UFO claims), but I didn’t know when I discussed this yesterday was the debt that Palmer and Shaver owed to H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, whose tales of lost civilizations and underground races (cf. Lovecraft and Heald, “The Mound,” or Lovecraft, Shadow Out of Time) were the direct predecessors of Shaver’s, mitigating and transmitting earlier claims from sources like Bulwer-Lytton’s Coming Race, Frederick S. Oliver’s Dweller on Two Planets, and various hollow earth theories from the Victorian era. From Lovecraft, too, we see echoes in the idea that the ancient people were a space-faring race and that the Elder Race (his words: cf. Lovecraft’s Elder Things, Ancient Ones, and Old Ones) would return from the stars.

In discussing this with Jeb J. Card yesterday, Card pointed me toward facts I was not aware of but which help to confirm the important role the Lovecraft Mythos played in the development of fringe history and ufology. Card told me about the Lovecraftian influence on the neo-Theosophist Maurice Doreal (Claude Doggins), the author of the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, often cited in fringe literature as genuine ancient texts from Atlantis. From Dweller on Two Planets Doreal incorporated into his vision of the cosmos the alleged lost civilization hiding out beneath Mount Shasta in California, and he adopted the Shaver Mystery as part of his own burgeoning mythos as the 1940s progressed and Palmer began recommending Doreal’s work to Shaver fans.

Doreal wrote a pamphlet called “Mysteries of the Gobi” about an underground race beneath that desert, and I wonder if that wasn’t a source for some of Peter Kolosimo’s Gobi claims. I’ve never read it, so I don’t know. What I do know is that Doreal’s claims were explicitly Lovecraftian. His underground race were serpent people, and they were ancient aliens from another world—essentially Robert E. Howard’s serpent people. Both shared the same description: humans with snake heads. In a later pamphlet, “UFOs: An Occult Perspective” (1948), they were asserted to be primeval and entombed under the earth in suspended animation—just like the reptilians of “The Nameless City,” which Lovecraft wrote in 1921 but which Doreal would have read in Fanciful Tales in 1936 or Weird Tales in 1938. Doreal appropriated from Howard the idea that the snake men masquerade as humans and have taken positions of power in human society.

But even more interesting is Doreal’s more or less explicit plagiarism of Lovecraft in Emerald Tablets, in which he has reimagined the serpent race in terms Lovecraft associated with the Old Ones, apparently equating the two groups in a way Lovecraft only occasionally and partially implied. I had never read these tablets in their entirety because, frankly, they are fakes so I never had any incentive to read so much drivel. It turns out that they contain some very interesting evidence.

Although Doreal claims that he found and translated these tablets—named for the ninth-century Hermetic text to which it bears little resemblance—in the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1925, this is an almost certain fiction, and the “translations” weren’t published until the late 1930s or 1940s. I want to take a look at a passage from Tablet 8 side-by-side with the parallel text from the Necronomicon fragment given in “The Dunwich Horror” and the Cthulhu theogony in “Call of Cthulhu” to show the textual dependency of Doreal on Lovecraft. The passage begins with a paraphrase of Old Castro’s claims from “The Call of Cthulhu,” rendering the Old Ones as “children of shadow” but preserving the claim that they are to be found under the earth. From there, he plagiarizes “Dunwich,” but almost certainly from the version given by August Derleth in The Lurker at the Threshold, which alters the text in small but significant ways, emphasizing the punishment of the Old Ones by his Elder Gods. It is Derleth’s version of Lovecraft that informs Doreal, though Doreal has inverted the relationship between the Old Ones and their human servants, subordinating the supernatural to the mortal.

EMERALD TABLETS

Far in the past before Atlantis existed,
men there were who delved into darkness,
using dark magic, calling up beings
from the great deep below us.
Forth came they into this cycle.
Formless were they of another vibration,
existing unseen by the children of earth-men.

LOVECRAFTIAN FICTION

Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. (Lovecraft, “Dunwich”)

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape - for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that shape was not made of matter. (Lovecraft, “Cthulhu”)

“You will, of course, realize that all my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on one fundamental lore or legend: that this world was inhabited at one time by another race, who in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.” (apocryphal quote attributed to Lovecraft in various printed sources by August Derleth after 1937, based on a letter from Harold Farnese)

Only through blood could they have formed being.
Only through man could they live in the world.

But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies […] the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. (Lovecraft, “Cthulhu”)

In ages past were they conquered by Masters,
driven below to the place whence they came.
But some there were who remained,
hidden in spaces and planes unknown to man.
Lived they in Atlantis as shadows,
but at times they appeared among men.
Aye, when the blood was offered,
for they came they to dwell among men.

In the form of man they amongst us,
but only to sight were they as are men.
Serpent-headed when the glamour was lifted
but appearing to man as men among men.
Crept they into the Councils,
taking forms that were like unto men.
Slaying by their arts
the chiefs of the kingdoms,
taking their form and ruling o'er man.
Only by magic could they be discovered.
Only by sound could their faces be seen.
Sought they from the Kingdom of shadows
to destroy man and rule in his place.

But, know ye, the Masters were mighty in magic,
able to lift the Veil from the face of the serpent,
able to send him back to his place.
Came they to man and taught him the secret,
the WORD that only a man can pronounce.
Swift then they lifted the Veil from the serpent
and cast him forth from the place among men.

Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again. (“Dunwich”)

To this we must add the paragraph that follows this in Lurker at the Threshold, written entirely by Derleth, which imposes the “Fall of Cthulhu” narrative where the Elder Gods defeat Cthulhu and the Old Ones, reflected in Doreal’s defeat of the shadow powers by the Masters:

’Twas done then as it had been promis’d aforetime, that He was tak’n by Those Whom He Defy’d, and thrust into ye Neth’rmost Deeps und’r ye Sea, and placed within ye barnacl’d Tower that is said to rise amidst ye great ruin that is ye Sunken City (R’lyeh), and seal’d within by ye Elder Sign, and, rag’d at Those who had imprison’d Him.

And from “Through the Gates of the Silver key”:

And while there are those who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as a Guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. (Lovecraft, “Through”)

Yet, beware, the serpent still liveth
in a place that is open at times to the world.
Unseen they walk among thee
in places where the rites have been said.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. (“Dunwich”)

Again as time passes onward
shall they take the semblance of men.

By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them.

Called may they be by the master
who knows the white or the black,
but only the white master may control
and bind them while in the flesh.

And at their coming again none shall dispute them and all shall be subject to them. Those who know of the gates shall be impelled to open the way for Them and shall serve Them as They desire, but those who open the way unwittingly shall know life but a brief while thereafter. (Derleth, Lurker)

Note the careful reversal Doreal imposed here, making humans masters over the subterranean powers.

It’s probably worth noting that in the passage quoted above from “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” Lovecraft makes the Necronomicon refer to a semi-fictitious Book of Thoth (found in references in Ptolemaic texts to a book that allows for perception of the gods), which must in Doreal’s mind be identical with the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean.

You might say that all of this is a coincidence, but after this, Doreal goes on to plagiarize the Hounds of Tindalos from Frank Belknap Long’s 1929 short story of the same name in all their essential details, in a way that is unmistakeable:

List ye, O man,
to the depth of my wisdom.
Speak I of knowledge hidden from man.
Far have I been
on my journey through SPACE-TIME,
even to the end of space of this cycle.
Aye, glimpsed the HOUNDS of the Barrier,
lying in wait for he who would pass them.
In that space where time exists not,
faintly I sensed the guardians of cycles.
Move they only through angles.
Free are they not of the curved dimensions.

Strange and terrible
are the HOUNDS of the Barrier.
Follow they consciousness to the limits of space.
Think not to escape by entering your body,
for follow they fast the Soul through angles.
Only the circle will give ye protection,
save from the claws
of the DWELLERS IN ANGLES.

[Speaking in a trance in which the speaker travels space-time]: I watch the migrations from Atlantis. I watch the migrations from Lemuria. I see the elder races […] By simply straining I can see farther and farther back. Now I am going back through strange curves and angles. Angles and curves multiply about me. I perceive great segments of time through curves. There is curved time, and angular time. The beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. It is very strange. […] But they (the Hounds) scented me. Men awake in them cosmic hungers. We have escaped, momentarily, from the foulness that rings them round. They thirst for that in us which is clean, which emerged from the deed without stain. […] The Hounds of Tindalos [can] only reach us through angles. We must eliminate all angles from this room. I shall plaster up all of the corners, all of the crevices. We must make this room resemble the interior of a sphere. (Long, “Hounds”)

I don’t think there’s any mistaking the dependence of Doreal on pulp fiction. How any ancient astronaut theorist or fringe historian could read this and not recognize the textual origins of the passage is beyond me, except through the relatively strong wall that kept science fiction and fantasy stories confined to a literary ghetto through the middle twentieth century.

But what we see here is proto-science fiction feeding into Theosophy, which in turn inspires Lovecraftian fiction before feeding back into neo-Theosophical fringe history and ufology. No wonder Helena Blavatsky chose the ouroboros as the symbol of Theosophy. The whole sci-fi fringe history complex is a closed loop.