What did Lovecraft mean by "Cyclopean"?
hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk
Don't know if anyone's noticed this before... I always took
Lovecraft's use of "cyclopean" simply to denote something horribly,
inhumanly big. But I was reading Wikipedia and was surprised to see
the word "cyclopean" hyperlinked to its own article. It turns out
that, as well as being a synonym for "gargantuan", cyclopean is also a
specific style of architecture - basically just dry stone walling big
limestone boulders. I don't know whether Lovecraft knew of or
intended this meaning, but I quickly scanned a couple of his stories,
and so far, he has only used it to describe architecture:
"Behind the figure was a vague suggestions of a Cyclopean
architectural background." - The Call of Cthulhu
"On the right of the hole out of which they wriggled, and seen through
aisles of monoliths, was a stupendous vista of cyclopean round towers
mounting up illimitable into the grey air of inner earth." - The Dream
Quest of Unknown Kadath
"We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down
through black abysses to Cyclopean and many columned Y'ha-nthlei, and
in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory
for ever." - Dagon the Movie, taken from the Shadow over Innsmouth
"Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone,
and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous
masonry." - The Shadow Out of Time
Coincidence? Either way, does anyone (off the top of his or her head)
recall an instance where Lovecraft described something non-structural
as cyclopean? I would prefer it to just mean "horribly big" in his
stories, since if not, I'm going to have to substantially amend my
mental pictures of R'lyeh and other locations (the picture of a
cyclopean structure in Wikipedia looked distinctly *non*-Lovecraftian
to me).
John Goodrich
mortar", and also to invoke the sense of a pre-human giant, something
on a scale that was not human.
John Goodrich
hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk
Cheers - I think my vocabulary isn't quite sophisticated enough to
keep up. The harder I think about it, the more I think I was
picturing cyclopean as "very big, possibly a pale damp green."
Sheerluck
<hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote in message
news:0ab1197a-7a11-4250...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> Hey guys,
>
> Don't know if anyone's noticed this before... I always took
> Lovecraft's use of "cyclopean" simply to denote something horribly,
> inhumanly big. But I was reading Wikipedia and was surprised to see
> the word "cyclopean" hyperlinked to its own article. It turns out
> that, as well as being a synonym for "gargantuan", cyclopean is also a
> specific style of architecture - basically just dry stone walling big
> limestone boulders.
I've always taken it as the obvious meaning , damn big , with
mythological/supernatural overtones (The Cylcops)
Another turn of phrase HPL used quite a bit was "non-euclidean geometry".
Colin Wilson takes this as an example of HPL's mathematical ignorance as the
laws of mathematics apply throughout the universe .
While I'm a big fan of Wilson's , I think he underestimates HPL in this case
as non-euclidean geometry is quite valid and would have had quite a bit of
publicity about the end of the 19th and the early 20th century . I believe
HPL would have had an intelligent layman's awareness of this issue . In
"Dreams in the Witch House" HPL specifically mentions Riemann in the context
of his (Riemann's) equations .
Al Smith
When you're talking about Lovecraft, you can't go wrong with damp
green.
-Al-
Mark W
<hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote in message
news:0ab1197a-7a11-4250...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
>
> Don't know if anyone's noticed this before... I always took
> Lovecraft's use of "cyclopean" simply to denote something horribly,
> inhumanly big.
Me too. Something cacodaemoniacally big.
hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk
> <hubba_hubba_hoo_...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote in message
Like an immense, very flat stone surface that stretches endlessly in
all directions, further than the eye could see... but if you backed
away far enough, you'd eventually see the edges, and realise that it
was just a single, relatively unremarkable brick in towering wall of
equally huge bricks... and if you backed away even further, you'd see
some mind-boggling figure towering over it, about to kick it over...
Dan Clore
Cyclo-pe-us, Cyclo-pius < Cyclo-ps (root: Cyclo-p-) < Gr Kýklôps, circle +
eye] Of, pertaining to, or resembling a Cyclops (or one-eyed giant) in
any manner, as, for example, having a single eye. In particular, from
the 19th century on, constructed in the manner of certain prehistoric
ruins which the Classical Greeks believed had been built by the
Cyclopes. The Cyclopean style uses stones of immense size, which are
shaped to fit together without mortar. Apart from Greece, examples exist
in various parts of the world including China, Japan, Peru, Ireland, and
Micronesia. In a generalized sense, huge, enormous, gigantic,
Gargantuan, Titanic.
[The form Cyclopćan not in OED; Marlowe antedates the OED's first
citation by about fifty years.]
Titles: Richard Shaver, "The Cyclopeans"
Usage: Most properly, the word should be capitalized, spelt Cyclopean,
and the primary accent should fall on the third syllable.
"He heard, he took, and pouring down his throat,
Delighted, swill'd the large luxurious draught.
'More! give me more (he cried): the boon be thine,
Whoe'er thou art that bear'st celestial wine!
Declare thy name: not mortal is this juice,
Such as the unbless'd Cyclopćan climes produce
(Though sure our vine the largest cluster yields,
And Jove's scorn'd thunder serves to drench our fields);
But this descended from the bless'd abodes,
A rill of nectar, streaming from the gods.'"
Homer (trans. Alexander Pope), The Odyssey
The flagging winds forsook us, with the sun;
And, wearied, on Cyclopian shores we run.
Virgil (trans. John Dryden), Ćneid (1697)
Our quivering lances shaking in the air
And bullets like Jove's dreadful thunderbolts,
Enrolled in flames and fiery smoldering mists,
Shall threat the gods more than Cyclopian wars;
And with our sun-bright armor, as we march
We'll chase the stars from heaven and dim their eyes
That stand and muse at our admirčd arms.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great (1590)
There his eternal anvils first he rear'd;
Then, forged by Cyclopean art, appear'd
Thunders that shook the skies with dire alarms,
And form'd, by skill divine, immortal arms;
There, with this crippled wretch, the foul disgrace
And living scandal of the empyreal race,
In wedlock lived the beauteous queen of love;
Can such sensations heavenly bosoms move?
William Falconer, The Shipwreck
And there are times when burning memory flows
In on the mind, that saving it would slay,
As did the lava-floods which choked yore
The Cyclopean cities—brimming up
Brasslike their mighty moulds.
Philip James Bailey, Festus: A Poem (1838)
Then it fluttered up, and perched on a bough of the old oak, from the
deep labyrinth of whose branches the other birds had emerged; and from
thence it flew down and lighted on the broad druidic stone, that stood
like a cyclopean table on its sunken stone props, before the snakelike
roots of the oak.
J.S. LeFanu, "The Haunted Baronet" (1870)
There was a striking resemblance between the architecture of the
Peruvians and that of some of the nations of the Old World. It is enough
for me to quote Mr. Ferguson's words, that the coincidence between the
buildings of the Incas and the Cyclopean remains attributed to the
Pelasgians in Italy and Greece, "is the most remarkable in the history
of architecture."
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)
The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the
Lemurians of the last sub-races; and an occultist shows, therefore, no
wonder on learning that the stone relics found on the small piece of
land called Easter Island by Captain Cook, are "very much like the walls
of the Temple of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru," ("The
Countries of the World," by Robert Brown, Vol. 4, p. 43); and that they
are in the CYCLOPEAN STYLE.
H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion,
and Philosophy (1888)
Many harbours were successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick,
the chief disaster of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved
too strong for man's arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of,
and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now
stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from
John-o'-Groat's.
Robert Louis Stevenson, "Thomas Stevenson"
Heartless and hopeless I struggled on over the blasted and forbidding
plain, and still the mighty structure grew until I could no longer
compass it with a look, and its towers shut out the stars directly
overhead; then I passed in at an open portal, between columns of
cyclopean masonry whose single stones were larger than my father's house.
Ambrose Bierce, "Visions of the Night"
There were Cyclopean turbines athwart the mountain torrents and long,
low, many windowed buildings that might serve some industrial purpose.
H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods (1923)
Ye powers volcanic,
Cyclopean forces,
Workers Titanic,
I know your courses.
By fury and panic,
By Dis and his horses,
Come forth! I invoke ye, volcanoes, arise from your cavernous sources!
Aleister Crowley, Orpheus: A Lyrical Legend (1905)
But she would dream of warmer gems, and so
Ere long her eyes in fastnesses look forth
O'er blue profounds mysterious whence glow
The coals of Tartarus on the moonless air,
As Titans plan to storm Olympus' throne,
'Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned,
Undominated firmament, and glare
Of Cyclopean furnaces unsunned.
George Sterling, "A Wine of Wizardry" (1907)
So that something preserves me: Something, Someone: and for what? . . .
If I had slept in the cabin, I must most certainly have perished: for,
stretched there on the chair, I dreamed a dream which once I had dreamed
in snows yonder in the beyond of that hyperborean North: that I was in
an Arab paradise; and I had a protracted vision of it, for I reached up
amid the trees, and picked the peaches, and pressed the blossoms to my
nostrils with breathless inhalations of fondness: until a sickness woke
me, and when I opened my eyes the night was gloomy, the moon down,
everything drenched with dew, the sky a jungle lush with stars, bazaar
of maharajahs tiaraed, begums arrayed in garish trains, and all the air
informed with that mortal afflatus; and high and wide uplifted before my
sight—stretching from the northern to the southern limit—a row of eight
or nine smokes, inflamed as from the chimneys of some Cyclopean forge
which goes all night, most solemn, most great and dreadful in the solemn
night: eight or nine, I should say, or it may be seven, or it may be
ten, for I did not reckon them; and from those craters puffed up gusts
of encrimsoned stuff, there a gust and there a gust, with tinselled
fumes that convolved upon themselves, glittering with troops of sparks
and flashes, all in a garish haze of glare: for the foundry was going,
though languidly; and upon a land of rock four knots ahead, which no
chart had ever marked, the Speranza drove straight with the sweep of the
phosphorus sea.
M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901; ellipsis in original)
Even as, to a climber, the mere vastness of the mountain becomes, as he
goes higher, a presence, unite and palpable, built up of successive
vastness of slabbed rock-face, vertiginous ice-cliff, eye-dazzling
expanse of snow-field, up-soaring ultimate cornice chiselled by the wind
to a sculptured perfection of line, sun-bright and remote against an
infinite remoteness of blue heaven above it, so here was all gathered to
an immobility of time-worn and storied magnificence: cyclopćan walls and
gateways; flights of stairs six riders abreast might ride down on
horseback and not touch knees; galleries, alcoves and clerestories cut
from the rock; perspectives flattening the eye down distances of corbel
and frieze and deep-mullioned windows six times the height of a man;
colonnades with doric capitals curiously carved, supporting
huge-timbered vaulted roofs; and domed roofs that seemed wide as the
arch of day.
E.R. Eddison, The Mezentian Gate (1958)
And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome of dull
gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something inhumanly alien,
baffling; sending the mind groping, as though across the deserts of
space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds,
coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar—yet never to be
translated into any symbol or thought of our own particular planet.
A. Merritt, The Moon Pool (1919)
The misty-edged circle had become an oval, a flattened ellipse another
five hundred feet high and three times that in length. And in its exact
center, shining forth as though it opened into a place of pale azure
incandescene was a Cyclopean portal, rectangular, to which the huge
megalithic gateway of that mysterious race whose fanes were time-worn
before the Incas learned to build upon them were but doorways for pygmies!
A. Merritt, The Metal Monster (1920)
There were those that tore great gaps in the horned giants—wounds that
instantly were healed with globes and pyramids seething out from the
Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles flashed and flew as
though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose that prodigious
barrage against the smiting rays!
A. Merritt, The Metal Monster (1920)
He looked out over a grass-covered plain strewn with huge, isolated
rocks rising from the green like menhirs of the Druids. There were no
trees. The plain was dish-shaped; an enormous oval as symmetrical as
though it had been molded by the thumb of some Cyclopean potter.
A. Merritt, The Face in the Abyss (1923)
Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean
monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude
sculptures.
H.P. Lovecraft, "Dagon" (1917)
With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit,
blinding and deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Lurking Fear" (1922)
My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for
poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient
streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and
waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and
in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly
Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of
horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and
annihilate me.
H.P. Lovecraft, "He" (1925)
Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean
cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green
ooze and sinister with latent horror.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926)
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations
of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient
indeed. There had been ćons when other Things ruled on the earth, and
They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless
Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on
islands in the Pacific.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926)
Randolph Carter's advance through that Cyclopean bulk of abnormal
masonry was like a dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs
between the stars.
H.P. Lovecraft & E. Hoffmann Price, "Through the Gates of the Silver
Key" (1932-33)
From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable fśtor; and it
is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and
argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its
lair.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror" (1928)
"To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am going there. The
black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean
bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the
beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to
make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what
he has seen."
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930)
He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins
in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down
to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through
invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous
exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and
forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933)
Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through
titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with
grotesque fishes as my companions.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)
We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through
black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that
lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone,
and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow out of Time" (1935)
Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean
blocks left from nameless and forgotten ćons.
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow out of Time" (1935)
A rain of curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf,
felling two ghouls and slightly wounding another; but at this point all
the hatches were thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring
night-gaunts which swarmed over the town like a flock of horned and
Cyclopean bats.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)
Suddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous
chuckle, and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till
they half resembled some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare.
H.P. Lovecraft & Adolphe de Castro, "The Last Test" (1927)
Among the scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly artificial
shaping, and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that
prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain Pacific islands and
forming a perpetual archćological puzzle.
H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, "Out of the Ćons" (1933)
This preternatural landscape was appallingly distinct in every detail,
under a greenish-black sky that was over-arched from end to end with a
triple cyclopean ring of dazzling luminosity.
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Door to Saturn" (1930)
Fearfully, as one who confronts an apparition reared up from nether
hell, Gaspard beheld the colossus that lay inert as if in Cyclopean
sleep on the castle flags. The thing was no longer a skeleton: the limbs
were rounded into bossed, enormous thews, like the limbs of Biblical
giants; the flanks were like an insuperable wall; the deltoids of the
mighty chest were broad as platforms; the hands could have crushed the
bodies of men like millstones. . . . But the face of the stupendous
monster, seen in profile athwart the pouring moon, was the face of the
Satanic dwarf, Nathaire—remagnified a hundred times, but the same in its
implacable madness and malevolence!
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Colossus of Ylourgne" (1932; ellipsis in original)
Geologists deny it a volcanic origin; yet its outcroppings of rough,
nodular stone and enormous rubble heaps have all the air of scoriac
remains—at least, to my non-scientific eye. They look like the slag and
refuse of Cyclopean furnaces, poured out in prehuman years, to cool and
harden into shapes of limitless grotesquerie.
Clark Ashton Smith, "The City of the Singing Flame" (1931)
He was standing on a road paven with cyclopean blocks of gray stone—a
road that ran interminably before him into the vague, tremendous vistas
of an inconceivable world.
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Planet of the Dead" (1930; aka "The Doom of
Antarion")
Mounting the marble steps, the jewelers entered a vast, roofless hall
where cyclopean columns towered as if to bear up the desert sky.
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Tomb-Spawn" (1933)
Well, it seemed there was no place to land in that interminable
bristling wilderness of cyclopean growths.
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Immeasurable Horror" (1930)
It was smaller but nearer than the igneous orb of history and legend. In
its center, like a Cyclopean eye, there burned a single spot of dusky
red fire, believed the mark the eruption of some immense volcano amid
the measureless and cinder-blackened landscape.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Phśnix" (1953)
From out the everlasting womb sublime
Of cyclopean death, within a land
Of tombs and cities rotting the sun,
He is reborn to mock the might of time,
While kings have built against Oblivion
With walls and columns of the windy sand.
Clark Ashton Smith, "The Mummy"
The brazen empire of the bournless waste,
The unstayed dominions of the brazen sky—
These I desire, and all things wide and deep;
And, lifted past the level years, would taste
The cup of an Olympian ecstasy,
Titanic dream, and Cyclopean sleep.
Clark Ashton Smith, "Desire of Vastness"
I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before—in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.
Robert E. Howard, "The Black Stone" (1931)
As in twilight shadow I saw the ruined temple, cyclopean walls
staggering up from masses of decaying masonry and fallen blocks of stone.
Robert E. Howard, "The Valley of the Worm"
"I could tell you things that would shatter your paltry brain! I could
breathe into your ear names that would wither you like a burnt weed!
What do you know of Yog-Sothoth, of Kathulos and the sunken cities? None
of these names is even included in your mythologies. Not even in your
dreams have you glimpsed the black cyclopean walls of Koth, or shriveled
before the noxious winds that blow from Yuggoth!"
Robert E. Howard, "Dig Me No Grave"
To the resounding background of sea and wind that beat upon barren
Easter Island, Graham started out in early morning and walked along the
giants' memorial graveyard. The cyclopean monuments and statues seemed
inordinately oppressive; their very presence was a burden that overcast
his thoughts.
Donald Wandrei, The Web of Easter Island (1929-31)
The window goes blond slowly. Frostily clears.
From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters
—Two—three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk
The sun, released—aloft with cold gulls hither.
Hart Crane, The Bridge (1930)
In the gloom they could see nothing save faintly visible terraces of
stone, like cyclopean steps on the mountainside, sheer expanses of white
granite walls, and beyond, the black bulk of the mountain.
Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, "The City of Dread" (1955)
He rose upon his four feet, towered above them, resembling, if anything,
a cyclopean sofa, and slowly opened his pinions.
Eden Phillpotts, The Lavender Dragon (1923)
To one side a higher heap of stone, which was all that was left of the
western wall, obstructed his view of what lay beyond. Over the fallen
blocks before him he could see a vast paved square dotted with other
buildings fallen into ruin. And beyond these, under a heavily clouded
sky through which the obscured sun poured in a queer, grayly radiant
light, buildings of barbaric colors and utterly alien architecture
lifted their Cyclopean heights, massive as the walls of Karnak, but too
strangely constructed to awake any memories.
C.L. Moore, "Tryst in Time" (1936)
Blazing white light blinded him. He had a flashing, indistinct vision of
tremendous forces, leashed, cyclopean, straining mightily to burst the
bonds that held them.
Henry Kuttner, "Spawn of Dagon" (1938)
I seemed to be standing in a vast amphitheater of jet, and around me,
towering to a sky sprinkled with an infinite multitude of cold stars, I
could see a colossal and shocking city of scalene black towers and
fortresses, of great masses of stone and metal, arching bridges and
cyclopean ruins. And with racking horror I saw teeming loathsomely in
that nightmare city the spawn of that alien dimension.
Henry Kuttner, "The Invaders" (1939)
So in blind and trembling haste I chanted the obscure litany and
performed the necessary obeisances demanded in the ritual I had learned,
and at their conclusion the cyclopean portal swung open.
Robert Bloch, "The Secret in the Tomb" (1934)
Damn the heat! Sand all around him. Hills of it, mountains. All alike
they were, like the crumbled, cyclopean ruins of titan cities. All were
burning, smoldering in the fierce heat.
Robert Bloch, "The Faceless God" (1936)
Those forms—they were spawned only in delirium; only in nightmares and
dreams of the Pit. There were grinning demons that skulked on padding
claws across that endless moving plain; there were shapeless toadstools
with tentacles ending in Cyclopean eyes; there were fanged heads that
rolled towards me, laughing; great hands that curled and crawled like
mad spiders. Ghouls, monsters, fiends—the words sprang to my
consciousness. And a moment ago they had been mathematical figures!
Robert Bloch, "The Sorcerer's Jewel" (1939)
And I went into the sunset with Her sign, and into the night past
accursed and desolate places and cyclopean ruins, and so came at last to
the City of Chorazin. And there a great tower of Black Basalt was
raised, that was part of a castle whose further battlements reeled over
the gulf of stars.
Jack Parsons, The Book of Antichrist (1949)
Beyond this meadow to my certain knowledge a path, then a field and
finally the ramparts, closing the prospect. Cyclopean and crenellated,
standing out faintly against a sky scarcely less sombre, they did not
seem in ruins, viewed from mine, but were, to my certain knowledge.
Samuel Beckett, "The Calmative" (1946)
Ahead of me I caught one flashing glimpse—incredible sight! A colossal,
banded globe of brown and orange flame, with a cyclopean eye of fire!
Lin Carter, Jandar of Callisto
He undressed and, after carefully laying his pants between the mattress
and springs for pressing, fell asleep and began to dream his familiar
dreams of vertiginous geometries and cyclopean half-gods, vivid dreams
which would have been anyone else's sweat-drenched nightmares.
Fred Chappell, "Weird Tales" (1984)
What was most striking was that these "cyclopean cities" of the great
old ones (not the polypus race, which they replaced) fitted what we now
knew of our own underground city. According to Lovecraft, these cities
had no stairs, only inclined planes, for their inhabitants were huge,
cone-like creatures with tentacles; the base of the cone was "fringed
with a rubbery grey substance, which moved the whole entity through
expansion and contraction". The probe had revealed that this city below
Karatepe had many inclined planes, but apparently no stairs. And its
size certainly merited the adjective "cyclopean".
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites (1966)
I thought of those great underground cities, described by Lovecraft,
cities with "cyclopean blocks" of masonry and huge inclined planes.
Colin Wilson, The Philosopher's Stone (1967-68)
K'tholo was one of the few men who ever their underground cities—the Old
Ones built underground, because they knew that man would eventually
penetrate to every corner of the earth. And what impressed me most when
I "saw" these cities was the accuracy of Lovecraft's time-vision. For he
had described them very much as they were—and as they still exist, miles
below the surface of the earth. These cities were built of immense stone
blocks—Lovecraft speaks of them as "cyclopean". It was easier for the
Old Ones to handle huge blocks than small ones, so their buildings were
somtimes a mile high.
Colin Wilson, The Philosopher's Stone (1967-68)
They all said it was genuine. But they could not say where the thing had
come from. It was, however, native to the planet: thirty feet in height,
Cyclopean, as hard as rhinoceros horn . . . but human.
Harlan Ellison, "On the Slab" (1981)
I was stiff and sore and tired from a night of driving. The only rest
I'd gotten was fitful dozing in which cyclopean ruby eyes looked at me
till I awoke in terror.
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1969-71)
00005, in fact, was in an enormous marbled room deliberately designed to
impress the bejesus out of any and all visitors. Pillars reached up to
cyclopean heights, supporting a ceiling too high and murky to be
visible, and every wall, of which there seemed to be five, was the same
impenetrable ivory-grained marble.
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1969-71)
The Novelist was working on a huge, Cyclopean sword-and-sorcery epic set
in 18th-century Europe, full of duels and seductions and revolutions and
a cast that included such egregious gentry as Napoleon and the Marquis
de Sade.
Robert Anton Wilson, "The Persecution and Assassination of the
Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the
Amazing Randi" (1980)
This is how the broadcast ended: "Mists are clearing—something big
towering up dead ahead—is it a mountain range? No, the shapes are too
regular. My God! It can't be! It's a city! Great tiers of terraced
towers built of black stone—rivers of pitch that flow under cyclopean
bridges, a dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities—an
unknown world of fungous life—forbidden Yuggoth!"
James Wade, "Planetfall on Yuggoth" (1972)
Phipps then disappeared under the bridge, and through his continued
chanting rang the sound of metal scraping on stone. Upon this sound came
a subterranean commotion, with a rising chorus of voiceless croaking and
a sound as if of Cyclopean bodies slithering against one another in some
charnel pit, with a nauseating rise of that alien reptilian odor.
Ramsey Campbell, "The Horror from the Bridge" (1964)
"And what of the poisoned waste, Elwood? From beneath the cyclopean
walls of our scores of power plants . . ."
Bruce Sterling, "The Unthinkable" (1991; ellipsis in original)
He told of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods, beneath
which stone staircases lead down to abysses of antehuman secrets.
Harry S. Robbins, "The Smoker from the Shadows" (1990)
Subterranean regions of the continent excavated in cyclopćan caverns,
cathedralspace fractal networks, labyrinthine gargantuan tunnels, slow
black underground rivers, unmoving stygian lakes, pure & slightly
luminiferous, slim waterfalls plunging down watersmooth rock,
cataracting round petrified forests of stalactites & stalagmites in
spelunker-bewildering blind-fish complexity & unfathomable vastness . . .
Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), "Hollow Earth" in T.A.Z.: The
Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
(ellipsis in original)
He gazed at the cyclopean thing in a trance of horror, until its
mountainous mass began to move, slowly stretching out some part of
itself, flexing what might have been a misshapen arm.
Thomas Ligotti, "The Prodigy of Dreams"
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/3akhhr
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/clorebeast/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk
*snip* enormous (dare I say Cyclopean? - or better yet Cyclopedian?)
post - cheers :o)
Mark W
<hubba_hub...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote in message
news:0ab1197a-7a11-4250...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> Hey guys,
>
> Don't know if anyone's noticed this before... I always took
> Lovecraft's use of "cyclopean" simply to denote something horribly,
> inhumanly big.
Surely Lovecraft realised that all his effort to produce atmosphere and a
sense of the weird might be undone when his reader came across 'that' word
for the umpteenth time.
Magister
> <hubba_hubba_hoo_...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote in message
Yes, he does use it quite a number of times -- 76 times, if my count
is correct. The texts where it appears most often are "The Call of
Cthulhu", "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", "At the Mountains of
Madness".
Yrs
Martin
ram...@ramsey-campbell.com
> Phipps then disappeared under the bridge, and through his continued
> chanting rang the sound of metal scraping on stone. Upon this sound came
> a subterranean commotion, with a rising chorus of voiceless croaking and
> a sound as if of Cyclopean bodies slithering against one another in some
RamseyCampbell, "The Horror from the Bridge" (1964)
Oh no! The Lovecraftian past rises up! I fear that at fifteen years
old I was simply parroting Lovecraftian usages without any very clear
idea of what some of them meant.
Al Smith
I don't know, that's prose you can really sink your teeth into.
Maybe a bit fattening, but chewy good.
-Al-
Grendelvs
Mark W
>>
>> Surely Lovecraft realised that all his effort to produce atmosphere and a
>> sense of the weird might be undone when his reader came across 'that'
>> word
>> for the umpteenth time.
>
> Yes, he does use it quite a number of times -- 76 times, if my count
> is correct. The texts where it appears most often are "The Call of
> Cthulhu", "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", "At the Mountains of
> Madness".
>
> Yrs
> Martin
I think that he never expected his stories to ever be gathered together and
published as compilations. Certainly there's a cumulative effect in reading
several in one sitting which you might not have if you read one a month, as
published in the magazines.
Al Smith
The effect is overpowering. One might even say, Cyclopean.
-Al-
icarp...@aol.com
Thanks, Dan
Matt