Cthulhu Mythos Downgrade

[LordNidhoggr]

Reading through it, it mostly seems to be a repeat of what I already said on this thread before, like Guardian Doge pointed out, and which I admitedly take some issue with now that I thought about it a bit further. I'll probably elaborate on that in a bit, after I finish doing some things IRL.

I know it's just dripping with irony that I say this, but maybe we should start a different thread if we're going to talk about my post. I'm fine leaving it here if everyone else is, but I don't want to derail the thread again...

 

[Antvasima]

Reading through it, it mostly seems to be a repeat of what I already said on this thread before, like Guardian Doge pointed out, and which I admitedly take some issue with now that I thought about it a bit further. I'll probably elaborate on that in a bit, after I finish doing some things IRL.

Okay. Thank you for helping out.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

So, I ended up lazing out for quite a bit, but here it is. I might have neglected to respond to an argument or two, but that's because I wanted to lay out my own points as concisely as possible in a single post, so, apologies in advance.

I know it's just dripping with irony that I say this, but maybe we should start a different thread if we're going to talk about my post. I'm fine leaving it here if everyone else is, but I don't want to derail the thread again...

Oh, don't worry, it's not derailing. Like I said, your post was basically just a repeat of my arguments, which I came to disagree with myself after a bit. So, to summarize that:

Basically, the bulk of my initial argument against this proposal was that equating the infinite spatial dimensions to the "Gates" introduced in Through the Gates of the Silver Key was erroneous on the premise that there are only two such gates separating the whole world from the Ultimate Abyss at the top of the cosmology. And, by extension, I also thought that equating the Gates to the hierarchy of "limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity" featured in Hypnos was equally wrong on the same grounds.

Although I still disagree with some of the arguments that Darksmash threw against that, I actually started to agree that there being only two Gates is a bit of an exaggerated idea, since, as per Hypnos, there are a bunch of "obstacles" residing beyond time and space that mark greater and greater levels of existence and have to be bypassed in order to ascend past them, which pretty much matches the definition of the Gates themselves: Metaphysical barriers whose existence separates our world from the planes transcending it, and which have to be successively unlocked through whatever means a traveller might have at their disposal.

For reference, interpreting the cosmology as only including two Gates would imply that the final, "incalculably dense obstacle" faced by Hypnos in his story would have to be the "First Gate" which Carter passes through during his travels to higher realms, and this wouldn't really work, seeing as said obstacle is said to be of the same nature as those before it, save for the fact that the narrator is unable to pass through it:

Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known. My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky, clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.

So, this interpretation of mine would imply that there are, in fact, "Gates" before the First Gate, which is kinda bad for obvious reasons.

For the matter, I still disagree with the idea that the Gates, the Vacua and the infinite spatial dimensions are the same hierarchy, but for different reasons, now. As for what those reasons are, we'd have to look back at some excerpts from the story that discusses the Gates in detail:

Then the waves increased in strength, and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing—the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where ’Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion, and is the cause of change, is an illusion. Indeed, it is itself really an illusion, for except to the narrow sight of beings in limited dimensions there are no such things as past, present, and future. Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously.
These revelations came with a godlike solemnity which left Carter unable to doubt. Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt that they must be true in the light of that final cosmic reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow partial views; and he was familiar enough with profound speculations to be free from the bondage of local and partial conceptions. Had his whole quest not been based upon a faith in the unreality of the local and partial?
After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the denizens of few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness, which views the external world from various cosmic angles. As the shapes produced by the cutting of a cone seem to vary with the angles of cutting—being circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any change in the cone itself—so do the local aspects of an unchanged and endless reality seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding.

As the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and terrifiedly, the ultimate background of that riddle of lost individuality which had at first so horrified him. His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have come upon him—splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly counterparts—inside the First Gate, had not the magic of ’Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the Silver Key with precision for the Ultimate Gate’s opening. Anxious for clearer knowledge, he sent out waves of thought, asking more of the exact relationship between his various facets—the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate, the fragment still on the quasi-hexagonal pedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of 1883, the man of 1928, the various ancestral beings who had formed his heritage and the bulwark of his ego, and the nameless denizens of the other aeons and other worlds which that first hideous flash of ultimate perception had identified with him. Slowly the waves of the BEING surged out in reply, trying to make plain what was almost beyond the reach of an earthly mind.
All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being—son, father, grandfather, and so on—and each stage of individual being—infant, child, boy, young man, old man—is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal “Carter” outside space and time—phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.

This is a bit long, so, to give context to it: In this scene, after Randolph Carter enters the Ultimate Void, his individuality is simply dissolved into many parts, and he starts to perceive all of his alternate selves throughout all of existence simultaneously, which makes him realize that the concept of "Self" or "Identity" does not exist whatsoever.

The reasoning which the story gives for this is that all forms of change and multiplicity are simply byproducts of the concepts of time and space, which are themselves just a function of the consciousness of entities from all finite-dimensioned spaces being unable to grasp the true nature of reality, and thus perceiving only infinitesimal "angles" of an unified whole, which, in turn, causes them to be caught within the illusion that they are separate from any other members of their lineage.

So, as you can gather, in the context of this specific story, "time" is treated as an universal constant that applies to all of dimensional space, instead of referring specifically to our a basic universe with 3 spatial dimensions + 1 temporal. This is important because, as I brought up in my posts before, time already ceases to exist in the Outer Extension, the realm that resides just past the First Gate, and as a result, entering it is already supposed to hit you with much of the existential horror that Carter went through after passing into the Ultimate Void, and the only thing that kept him stable in that place was 'Umr At-Tawil's power:

By the time the rite was over Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could be told by earth’s geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix. For the nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it in the cryptical Pnakotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred had taken on significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the Silver Key. A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

As the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and terrifiedly, the ultimate background of that riddle of lost individuality which had at first so horrified him. His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have come upon him—splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly counterparts—inside the First Gate, had not the magic of ’Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the Silver Key with precision for the Ultimate Gate’s opening.

And the realm itself being called the Earth's Outer Extension is pretty noteworthy, too, since the story itself names the reality bound by time, space and change (i.e all of dimensioned space) "the inner worlds," and the First Gate is likewise called an inner gate, in the singular and with capital letters putting emphasis on the term, even.

To this variety of angles of consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since with rare exceptions they cannot learn to control them. Only a few students of forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have thereby conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary, change-involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance with their will.

And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensioned earth. He realised that he had been using the Silver Key—moving it in accord with an unlearnt and instinctive ritual closely akin to that which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped his cheeks was, he realised, no more or less than the adamantine mass of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought with which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind determination, he floated forward—and through the Ultimate Gate.

And this forms a chain with tidbits from other stories, too, where Lovecraft places a firm distinction between our world, comprised of time, space and matter, and the "Outside," which has none of these things. For instance, Fungi from Yuggoth states that the Gates' function is to keep a plurality of undimensioned worlds at bay:

I do not know what windings in the waste
Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,
But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
I had the book that told the hidden way
Across the void and through the space-hung screens
That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,
And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

And The Whisperer in Darkness in turn states that the Ultimate Chaos, where Azathoth and his court reside (And which the Mi-Go, the antagonists of the story, come from), is the "uttermost Outside."

“There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth,” whispered the voice. “Four kinds—three faculties each—makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are four different sorts of beings presented in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you’ll now and then find more cylinders and machines—cylinders of extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any we know—allies and explorers from the uttermost Outside—and special machines for giving them impressions and expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings’ main outposts all through the various universes, is a very cosmopolitan place! Of course, only the more common types have been lent to me for experiment

And, of course, the fact that the former statement is addressing the same spheres of existence and utilizing the same term to describe them also means all of this supports the excerpt which I've been debating about in this thread, where the Outer Extension is described as an undimensioned reality:

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

In spite of that, someone may still argue that the Outer Extension's transcendence over time is relative, and not encompassing over the entire cosmology, particularly because of that tidbit at the end of the paragraph above, which describes it as "outside time and the dimensions we know," and in turn could be used as leverage to argue that the Outer Extension is just beyond regular 4-dimensional space.

This, in my view, doesn't really work, because, as said above, TtGotSK defines "time" as an universal property of dimensional space as a whole, and not just the basic universe, and to complement that, the infinite chain of dimensions that Yog-Sothoth explains to Randolph Carter is described in purely spatial terms, seeing as the text uses the three usual directions that humans are familiar with as a reference point before introducing them, and describes that infinite regression of higher-dimensional objects as a collection of "figures of space."

We get a good look at purely spatial higher-dimensional planes in another one of Lovecraft's stories, too, (The Dreams In The Witch-House, discussed at length beforehand) and needless to say they are extremely different from how TtGotSK describes the planes beyond the First Gate. For one, the novel's protagonist, Walter Gilman, actually identifies the realm in which he spends the majority of his time as "the fourth dimension," and while he's in there, there is not a trace of the "awful revelation" that an individual is supposed to go through by passing through the First Gate unaided, even though his travels to that realm were explicitly done independently:

Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.

The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.

And, by the way, as Ex Oblivione shows, the existential revelation brought upon by traveling past the Gates can indeed completely erase an individual from existence. In fact, the whole theme of this story in particular is that the natural state of all things is "the nothingness of an illimitable void," which living beings are just snatched away from for brief moments:

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of drug and dream pushed me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hoped to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.

A bit later into TDITWH, said higher spatial dimensions are also defined as contained within a single spacetime continuum:

One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.

And, as said before, said spacetime continuums can also contain an indefinite number of higher dimensions, which, in this case, doesn't necessarily mean "Unknown finite number," since the context of the passage is that Gilman is speculating (Correctly, if his own experiences are anything to go by) that a lower-dimensional being is perfectly capable of surving in any higher-dimensional plane, regardless of its number of dimensions:

It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.

A possible counterargument to that, however, is this other passage, where Gilman considers the possibility that traveling through higher-dimensional angles could bring him straight to the Ultimate Void:

In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?

Even putting aside how this doesn't make much sense, since Azathoth's realm is explicitly described as beyond angled space altogether, we'd also have to consider the fact that, as the text states, Gilman was delirious and acting on pure subconscious instinct when he made these musings. Not only that, but this was occuring during the witches' Sabbath, which the story defines as a night where Nyarlathotep physically manifests on Earth and the reverberations from the outer chaos are thus stronger than ever within the lower layers, which you can see both in the excerpt above and in the passage below:

As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds.

And, from Dream-Quest to Unknown Death, we do know that the music of the Ultimate Void carries "outer magic" that can bring lesser beings straight into it:

“Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit forever, and once more will earth’s gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed seat. Go now—the casement is open and the stars await outside. Already your shantak wheezes and titters with impatience. Steer for Vega through the night, but turn when the singing sounds. Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable suck you into the gulf of shrieking and ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and terrible, and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.

“Hei! Aa-shanta ’nygh! You are off! Send back earth’s gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!”

And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous shantak, shot screamingly into space toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air and the clouds of earth’s dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat-wings beat multitudinous around him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that one might wonder one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of aether howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.

Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. And as that music grew, the shantak raised its ears and plunged ahead, and Carter likewise bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.

Faster flew the shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvels of strange gulfs, and whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warning of the evil one, the sardonic caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker beware the madness of that song.

And, for reference, dimensions as depicted in TDITWH are explicitly stated to be just other directions that exist adjacent to lower-dimensional spaces, but are normally inaccessible due to the fact that lower beings aren't capable of perceiving such angles. In fact, the story even implies that there are certain points where these directions are dimly visible and our world intersects with higher-dimensional spaces:

Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension?

Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman’s room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall.

Evidently, this is very different from the Gates, which, as mentioned above, are more akin to literal barriers that have to be unlocked by certain artifacts and lead to ontologically higher spaces, instead of other directions that are just inaccessible because of a limitation on the part of a lower entity.

Another possible counterargument is this tidbit of the story, which states that certain higher-dimensional spaces reside outside of time entirely, and that stepping into them would allow him to stop his aging process and travel throughout history at will:

On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before.

Given that these higher-dimensional spaces are, once again, described as part of the overall spacetime continuum, and that those regions are contextually implied to be ones that Gilman hasn't accessed yet (Since he had already visited 4-dimensional space in his dreams by that point), it is very likely that this passage just refers to basic linear time (And implies higher temporal dimensions at best), and not to "time" as a whole.

One last possible counterargument, which also relates to a point Darksmash brought up earlier into this discussion, also centers around a certain plot element from TtGotSK: To be more specific, an important object in the story is a strange clock owned by one of the characters, which is constantly remarked to tick in an unnatural rhythm that abides by no measurements of time native to the Earth:

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bokhara rugs of impressive age and workmanship four men were sitting around a document-strown table. From the far corners, where odd tripods of wrought-iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged ***** in sombre livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there ticked a curious coffin-shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet.

Around the table in that strange room in the old French quarter sat the men who claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal advertisements of the conference in papers wherever Carter heirs were thought to live, yet only four now sat listening to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubbling of the courtyard fountain beyond half-curtained, fanlighted windows. As the hours wore on the faces of the four were half-shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods, which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed to need less and less attention from the silently gliding and increasingly nervous old *****.

Later on, the materialization of the Ultimate Gate into the Outer Extension is accompanied by the Ancient Ones (The Supreme Archetype's manifestations in that realm) carrying out a ritual involving an unearthly rhythm that occurs in bizarre and equally unearthly intervals, and Carter himself confirms that this rhythm is, in fact, the same pattern that marks the ticking of that clock:

Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something—some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere or apparent sphere of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of earth. There was a suggestion of chanting—or what human imagination might interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable colour Carter saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all the mitred, sceptre-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight, curious swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiable light—resembling that of the quasi-sphere—played round their shrouded heads.
The Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall, coffin-shaped clock with the four hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy ticking followed no known rhythm of earth.
“You, Mr. de Marigny,” he suddenly said to his learned host, “do not need to be told the particular alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on the hexagonal pillars chanted and nodded. You are the only one else—in America—who has had a taste of the Outer Extension. That clock—I suppose it was sent you by the Yogi poor Harley Warren used to talk about—the seer who said that he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of sinister, aeon-old Leng, and had borne certain things away from that dreadful and forbidden city. I wonder how many of its subtler properties you know? If my dreams and readings be correct, it was made by those who knew much of the First Gateway. But let me go on with my tale.”

So, this would suggest that the Outer Extension still operates within the concept of time, yes? Well, no. To elaborate on that, I should also point out the fact that this same rhythm was present in the Ultimate Void, too, the one location which the story goes out of its way to define as being timeless and changeless in all forms, and it is in fact how the Supreme Archetype communicates with Carter to begin with:

And now the BEING was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that smote and burned and thundered—a concentration of energy that blasted its recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that followed, with certain definite variations, the singular unearthly rhythm which had marked the chanting and swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the First Gate.

Later on, it's also revealed that the aforementioned clock is just, not actually a clock. It's some unknown device that made use of this alien ticking (Which is also said to underlie "all mystical gate-openings") in order to transport its user to other locations, and Carter himself makes use of it to vanish from the Earth at the end of the story. It just so happened to be disguised as a clock:

The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.
De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.

Branching off of this point, one could also argue that the Vacua would be equatable to the dimensional hierarchy, by virtue of them being described as having elements of time and space within them by the narrator, and as "dreams of abysmal time and unshackled space" at a later point in the story:

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments—inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told—for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space—things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence.

But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light—a shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret, innermost, and forbidden caverns of nightmare.

However, not only does this come from a human narrator who explicitly struggles to articulate the sensations that he experienced in those times, beyond very general descriptions of the experiences themselves, but Lovecraft himself also flipped back-and-forth on the matter of spacetime within the verse. For instance, he once described the Ultimate Void as "spacetime seethings," and in another story, he described them as "beyond all spheres of space and time."

The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.

Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb’s cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind’s.

Given all of the context above, I wouldn't say it's a stretch to say that the story is simply defining some completely alien notion of "time" to these realms, even though our own is completely inapplicable to them. That, alongside the fact we have long dropped the need for a character to be fully aspatiotemporal in order to reach 1-A and above (There are mathematical caveats to this, as I've explained in another thread addressing the remnants of the Tiering System's revisions a while ago, but fiction does not always follow those), makes me think those things don't necessarily hold back anything.

So, yeah, needless to say, the current ratings for the Ultimate Gods and related entities are fine, for the most part, anyway. A consequence of this argument is that, as Darksmash pointed out at the start of this thread, dismissing the other, more personal portrayals of the Ultimate Gods as separate from the "Archetypes" described in TtGotSK is more or less impossible, since the point of the story is that change and multitudes are strictly just products of time and space, which even the less impressive portrayals of these entities are portrayed as beyond.

As a result, their Tier 0 key will have to go, either way, and the conflicting portrayals of the characters themselves would just be held as an inconsistency in Lovecraft's writing.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you for helping out Ultima.

Can you summarise the changes that you think need to be done to the CM pages please?

 

[ShivaShakti]

Thank you for helping out Ultima.

Can you summarise the changes that you think need to be done to the CM pages please?

I talked with him about it the other night. Basically he wants us to treat the cosmology as follows

Universe (High 1-B) < Multiverse (Low 1-A) < Outer Extension (Low 1-A) < Limitless Vacua / Gates (1-A+) < Ultimate Void (High 1-A) < Ultimate Mystery / Supreme Archetype (Tier 0)

The ratings for the most part will stay the same, however The Ultimate Gods and Their Archetype Keys will be merged into one, and will have a High 1-A rating. The Supreme Archetype will remain Tier 0 however.

The Ancient Ones will be changed to Low 1-A to 1-A+ due to the fact they exist in the Outer Extension, but can also manifest the gates.

The Night Gaunts and The Hunting Horrors will be losing their High 1-A and we have yet to decide what to do with their ratings.

 

[Abu2411]

wouldn't the outer extension be 1-A?

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. That is probably fine to apply then, but we may need him to start a new CRT first.

 

[ShivaShakti]

wouldn't the outer extension be 1-A?

The Outer Extension isn't really beyond the Multiverse as The Gates / Vacua are. The Outer Extension does transcend the multiverse's conception of Space-Time but still beholds it to some extent.

 

[Abu2411]

Then I must have been confused. I thought that transcending space-time was no longer required for 1-A.

 

[ShivaShakti]

Then I must have been confused. I thought that transcending space-time was no longer required for 1-A.

Well it varies from verse to verse, but alot of the time Higher Dimensions / Hierarchies of Size are usually intertwined with Space-Time.

In the case of Twin Peaks for example, The Black Lodge transcends all conceptions of Space-Time native to The Physical Universe, however it still has it's own flow of Non-Linear time present in it's domain, compared to the later introduced "Nonexistence" which makes it explicitly clear that it has absolutely no flow of time whatsoever and is not bound by the same logic as The Black Lodge is.

 

[DaringAttitude4]

S̶o̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶S̶u̶p̶r̶e̶m̶e̶ ̶A̶r̶c̶h̶e̶t̶y̶p̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶T̶i̶e̶r̶ ̶0̶?̶

 

[Ovy7]

Seems so

 

[ShivaShakti]

S̶o̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶S̶u̶p̶r̶e̶m̶e̶ ̶A̶r̶c̶h̶e̶t̶y̶p̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶T̶i̶e̶r̶ ̶0̶?̶

Unfortunately yes but I hate using the word "baseline" for High 1-A and up Reeee

 

[Abu2411]

The chrome reflects our image I guess

 

[Antvasima]

@Ultima_Reality

Do you wish to create a new revisions thread for your new conclusions? After which we close this one.

 

[LordNidhoggr]

@Ultima_Reality

Do you wish to create a new revisions thread for your new conclusions? After which we close this one.

Hey, would you mind letting me respond a bit? I would have earlier, but I have had a bad migraine all day. I will say that I agree with most of what Ultima said, there are just a couple ideas I'd like to put forward. If nobody is really going to consider whatever I say, then just say so and I won't bother. You don't need to humor me.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that you seem well-informed about this subject, so feel free to try to help Ultima with his evaluations.

 

[Shadyboi0]

leaning on agree

 

[LordNidhoggr]

I think that you seem well-informed about this subject, so feel free to try to help Ultima with his evaluations.

Thank you, I appreciate it. I will try to respond tonight, but there's a good chance I won't be able to finish until tomorrow. My migraines and the meds to treat them make it very hard for me to form full, coherent thoughts; not to mention I can't look at a screen for more than a couple of minutes at a time without hurting myself/risking worsening everything.

 

[BrackishBrineBroth]

Does this mean that Azathoth will no longer have a tier 0 key?

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you, I appreciate it. I will try to respond tonight, but there's a good chance I won't be able to finish until tomorrow. My migraines and the meds to treat them make it very hard for me to form full, coherent thoughts; not to mention I can't look at a screen for more than a couple of minutes at a time without hurting myself/risking worsening everything.

Okay. I am sorry to hear that.

 

[Saiyan40009]

we should wait for dark smash

 

[Antvasima]

Okay.

 

[LordNidhoggr]

Ok, so I've been reading and re-reading parts of this thread, the original changes thread, terminology, and others in an attempt to say what I want to say. And I've discovered that one, I don't know much if anything about Cardinal numbers, transfinite vs infinite vs absolute infinity, etc. And two, the Mythos are very interpretational. So, I don't know that I'm comfortable providing any personal interpretations whilst I feel under-prepared to do so. If I decide I might have anything new to discuss, I can create a thread for it then.

That said I did want to put forth one thing: Lovecraft's inconsistencies. Lovecraft wrote a new mythology, a real one, one that fits the classic definition of mythology. His stories are all in a shared universe and there are characters and concepts between them, but these shared elements have differences based on the teller and the aim/type of the story. So, deciding what to use can be tricky, as some things are contradictory or wholly different between stories. So, I think that loosely speaking, everything in his stories is true, and so whatever we do has to keep that in mind. Personally, given the tone of the Mythos and how Lovecraft describes their relationship to science (even when he doesn't understand the science he's writing about), that the Mythos are supposed to be beyond any concept or set of rules that humans can come up with. Beings like the Great Old Ones are described as being beyond dimensions altogether, not being made of matter, and outside of time's influence. Fodder created by Ultimate Gods/UG-level beings have multiversal feats. Every aspect of the Mythos' setting is described as infinite; infinite universes, infinite dimensions, infinite extensions, and infinite chaos. To me, it's pretty clear that Lovecraft wrote his gods and monsters to be superior not only to man, but to any idea man could come up with. He just didn't know how much more sophisticated science and mathematic are/were, being able to describe the previously indescribable.

I guess what I'm saying is that maybe the Cthulhu Mythos aren't a great fit for power scaling in general. Regardless, thanks for waiting on me (even if it turned out to probably not be worth it) and sorry, again, for my behavior earlier.

 

[DaReaperMan]

It's fine! We all have our low points, Just take your time and prepare if you feel like doing it!

 

[Bernkastelll]

Does this mean that Azathoth will no longer have a tier 0 key?

Doesnt Azathoth also has a ''supreme archetype'' key? if yes, that key would still remain as 0, but not above baseline

 

[Antvasima]

You could just have clicked the "Watch" button at the top of the thread.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. No problem.

 

[Antvasima]

Anyway, what are the conclusions here so far? Are you planning to start a new content revisions thread @Ultima_Reality ?

 

[LordNidhoggr]

I've been doing some reading, and I have a thought, specifically about gates. We know for sure that there are two Gates and we get pretty clear details on how they work thanks to TtGotSK. However, there are other gates, or objects/obstacles described such that they are passable barriers just like gates, in stories like Hypnos and Witch-House. My thought is this: I believe that there are two "Gates," but that there are infinite "gates" within these tiers (at least in dimensional/angled space) that connect the various dimensions, uni/multiverses, and outer realms (the vacua and Dreamlands) to each other, but not to anything outside their tier of existence. This fits the different ways gates and barriers are described and more or less fit the stories they come from.

The big, obvious one that seems to contradict this explanation is Hypnos, in which a God gets annihilated by something beyond a gate/dense barrier. That has to be either the First or Ultimate Gate, right? Not necessarily. Consider that almost every time the "gods of the earth," and "gods of men," are mentioned they are described as being small, weak, and limited. Given that we know that there are an infinite number of dimensions and that lower dimensions are essentially simplified fragments of higher ones, is it really such an outlandish idea that Hypnos "dug too deep," and hit a level of complexity that even his substantial power became essentially meaningless? The Great Old Ones are said to be greater than the weak gods of men, thus their cults, and we know for a fact they are nowhere close to being the big fish in the pond.

My opinion (and I'm putting this here for people to know where I stand, not declare it to be truth) is that the Great Old Ones are high Tier 1B to Tier 1-A, the Ultimate God's be high Tier 1-A to baseline Tier 0, and the Archetypes and Supreme Archetype are above everything else. A thought I have to explain some of my reasoning is this: Yog-Sothoth is tied to all of existence, yet also acts as the archetype for existence itself, and beyond that, he both simultaneously exists in and as the absolute realm of Ultimate Chaos, to which all other aspects of existence are but fragmentary illusions. The Archetypes can experience existence as both its illusory and absolute states simultaneously. Yet they merely reside in Ultimate Chaos, Yog-Sothoth/The Supreme Archetype transcends even that, with the Ultimate Void being a part of him. That means that, to the smallest degree, Yog-Sothoth/TSA is greater than the absolute of existence, like the skin of a soap bubble around a pocket of air. I might just be rambling nonsensically, but it seems like logic to me. I'll let people weigh in or ignore this as they please.

Also: 1984 is an excellent book, and required reading in my humble opinion.

 

[Maskofthedragon]

Me simple ape
Can I get a TL;DR for what's happened in this thread?

 

[Antvasima]

I deleted the derailing posts, and for the record, 1984 simply warns people about what happens when oligarchies of totalitarian governments and corporations together control all available information to the point of completely rewriting history, and break all human minds to refashion them to their own purposes via systematic brainwashing, as this is what has been done repeatedly throughout history for the elites to stay in power. That's it. The other subject brought up above has nothing to do with the topic. That's just about being respectful and polite.

Can we please return to the main subject matter here now, so we get something done?

 

[Antvasima]

@Ultima_Reality

Are you going to start a new thread about revision the Cthulhu Mythos statistics, and if so, should we close this one?

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Are you going to start a new thread about revision the Cthulhu Mythos statistics, and if so, should we close this one?

Likely, yeah. Some of the things discussed in this one overlap with the planned Part 2 of the revisions, so, that's pretty convenient, too.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. Thank you for helping out. Should we close this thread then? Since you are a sysop, you should still be able to post a link to the new thread here later on.

 

[DivineAura44]

So... what's happening with this thread? Just kinda died.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that @Ultima_Reality plans to start a new Cthulhu Mythos revisions thread.

 

[DivineAura44]

This is technically Darksmash's revision but if is a wide revision covering this topic (meaning Darksmash can rebuttal), is there a point keeping this open for the time being? As it has been massively losing interest among people, it could be closed and reopened. (Or left closed if everything is sorted on the other content revision thread.)

 

[Antvasima]

I think that we can close this thread. Ultima is able to post a link to his new thread here later if he wishes though.

 

[Araheem]

I had interesting thoughts but, ahh, how I hadn't noticed this earlier...