AS I find that mythological mumbo-jumbo interminable, I shall let this single sample suffice, it being the briefest of them all. From the context and appearance of the documents. I gather that the Professor found a friendly colleague willing to copy the passages he desired from a copy of this book, the Necronomicon, most likely at the Bibliothèque Nationale, from the Paris letterhead on the notepaper used. This scholarly friend would seem to have been familiar with this curious mythology, for his parenthetical interpolations indicate a close familiarity with the symbolism used.
It was apparent to me that it would be the labor of many days sorting through this mélange, so I set the folder aside for the remainder of the afternoon and bent my attention to the other duties which awaited me. Ever and anon, however, I had the distinct feeling of eyes upon the back of my neck—a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, doubly so as there was no other person in the room with me at the time.
Finishing work early. I went home that night to my lodgings in Curwen Street in a strange mood of depression and vague unease—although why I should feel depressed or uneasy I cannot say, unless it was from thinking of Professor Copeland’s unhappy fate. He spent the last eight years of his life in a madhouse, and died screaming of things coming down from the stars to wipe all earth clean of life in order to house their own hellish spawn.
In bed I somehow could not keep my mind on the book I was reading—I am lamentably addicted to "thrillers", and was halfway through a novel by one Richard Marsh called The Beetle, which I had been devouring with relish. Unable to fix my attention on the page, I took from the briefcase the manila file folder from the Copeland Papers which contained the data on the "Xothic Legend-Cycle" and turned again to perusing the documents, having brought both folder and jade figurine home with me for further study.
There was page after page of mythological material laboriously hand-copied from books with the most strange and unwholesome titles imaginable—the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, something called the Pnakotic Manuscript, the Ponape Scripture, von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, many more pages copied from the Necronomicon, some typed material from Wynorth’s Tangarva, and Other Pacific Myths, the R'lyeh Text, and some material which appeared to be from a dissertation or unpublished manuscript by one Dr. Laban Shrewsbury of Miskatonic, of whom I had heard vaguely.
As for the copied material itself, I could make no sense out of it—more confused and chaotic mystical nonsense had never spewed from a disarranged intellect! What is one to make of incoherent ravings about gods or devils with such unpronounceable names as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Gharanothoa, Lloigor, Y’golonak, Shub-Niggurath, Hastur, Idh-yaa, Ythogtha, Azathoth, Ithaqua, Glaaki, Tsathoggua, Iod, Yig, Gol-goroth, Nyarlathotep, Ubbo-Sathla, and so on?
In the main, the Professor seemed to have attempted to isolate in one place all the scattered references to four of these demons or divinities from the full range of this immense literature. The beings in which he was interested were Cthulhu, Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog; to a lesser extent he was also gathering references to Yig, Shub-Niggurath, Vorvadoss, Nug, and Yeb. I gathered from some of the material through which I leafed rapidly that these various beings were known to obscure cults scattered all over the world—there were references to "black Zimbabwe" and "weed-grown Y’ha-nthlei", to the Plateau of Leng somewhere in Asia, to certain ancient ruins in Yucatan and Peru, to a certain region in the unexplored deserts of Australia, to a primordial city of “the Yuggoth-spawn” in Antarctica—of all places!—and to the myths of the Wendigo, or Wind-Walker, common among the North Pacific Indian tribes of Canada and Alaska, to the Tcho-Tcho people of Burma, to the "Abominable Mi-Go", which I assumed from the context refers to the so-called Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, to “Fabulous Irem, City of Pillars”, which I recalled from my boyish reading of the Arabian Nights and the Rubaiyat, and thus doubtless belongs to Islamic legendry.
The members of the "Great Old Ones” (as the devil-beings from the stars were most commonly called), upon which Copeland had fixed his attention, were those gods of primal and legended Mu, and in particular, some sort of trinity composed of Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog. These beings were supposed to be brothers, and had for their sire that same Cthulhu of whom I had seen such frequent mention in these excerpts from the literature. One quotation in particular seemed central and pertinent; it came from a remarkable manuscript which, according to Copeland's notes, had been inscribed "in the Elder Aeon", on some sort of palm-leaf parchment, and which had been discovered during diggings on Ponape about 1734 by a Yankee trader, one Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag of Arkham, Mass. Hoag's bodyservant, obviously a half-breed Polynesian or Oriental (Copeland calls him a "hybrid human/Deep One"—whatever that means’) translated this ancient book-scroll from "the primal Naacal" and it was circulated secretly to certain cultists and occult students in the United States, Europe, and Asia for many years. Eventually both the original parchment and a copy of the translation somehow got into the Kester Library, from which the Professor obtained his texts.
At any rate, the key quotation came from this so-called Ponape Scripture, which I will copy out here:
As for Ghatanothoa, the Thing on the Mount, He and His Brethren, Ythogtha, the Abomination in the Abyss, and Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deep, are the Sons of the mighty Cthulhu, Lord of the Watery Abyss and dread and awful Potentate of drowned R'lyeh; and, like unto Their Terrible Sire, Who yet shall come again in future time, They have Their Dominion over the great fish and the serpents of the Deeps, and They too be scaled away under the terrific spell of the Elder Sign for that They dared to challenge Them From Glyu-Vho for the domain of the Earth. Sons be They to great Cthulhu and His Spouse, Idh-yaa, with Whom He copulated awesomely in the nightmare darknesses between the Stars, and these Three, the Spawn of Cthulhu, came down from remote and ultra-telluric Xoth, the dim green double sun that glitters like a daemonic eye in the blacknesses beyond Abbith, to whelm and reign over the steaming fens and bubbling slime-pits of the mist-veiled dawn aeons of this Earth, and it was in primordial and shadowy Mu that They were great.
I set the folder aside as weariness began to creep over me.
That night I did not have wholesome dreams.