Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Material culture

Books & artifacts

Brain cylinders

Brain cylinders are the portable containers offered as a means of extraterrestrial travel in The Whisperer in Darkness. According to the farmhouse speaker, they preserve an extracted brain and connect it to separate instruments for sight, hearing and speech. Wilmarth hears a demonstration from the container labeled B-67, but the unused cylinder bearing Akeley’s name becomes a much more disturbing clue to the visit’s real purpose.

5 min read · 1,039 words

Books & artifacts

Essential salts

Essential salts are the prepared residues from which dead organisms can be restored in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Curwen and his associates use the process to recover people whose knowledge they want to extract. The powders, their containers and the paired operations of summoning and dissolution connect the novel’s historical investigation with its final exposure of an impostor.

5 min read · 886 words

Books & artifacts

Necronomicon

The Necronomicon is Lovecraft’s invented book of dangerous knowledge, attributed within the fiction to Abdul Alhazred. Its authority grows through incomplete translations, suppressed editions, library copies and passages that help characters recognize threats they cannot fully control. It is both an object within particular plots and a shared reference connecting otherwise separate stories.

12 min read · 2,518 words

Books & artifacts

Pnakotic Manuscripts

The Pnakotic Manuscripts are a fictional body of extremely ancient writings used across Lovecraft’s dream and cosmic fiction. They preserve fragmentary lore about divine mountains and prehuman history, yet parts are too old to read. Their appearances connect Lomar and Ulthar with deeper suggestions about the Great Race and the survival of knowledge across immense periods.

6 min read · 1,070 words

Books & artifacts

Shining Trapezohedron

The Shining Trapezohedron is the dark, red-striated polyhedral object through which Robert Blake encounters remote worlds and awakens the Haunter of the Dark. Its unusual container, visionary effects and recorded passage through nonhuman and human civilizations make it one of the most extensively contextualized artifacts in Lovecraft’s fiction.

6 min read · 1,161 words

Books & artifacts

The jade amulet

The jade amulet is the stolen grave-object at the center of The Hound. Carved as a crouching winged, partly canine figure, it is recognized by the narrators through a passage in the Necronomicon. Its removal, display, theft and eventual return to the coffin organize the story’s chain of supernatural pursuit. The text supplies a precise visual description while leaving the exact mechanics of its power uncertain.

4 min read · 690 words

Books & artifacts

The Silver Key

The silver key is Carter’s inherited means of passing beyond the limits of his present life. The Silver Key introduces it as an object associated with ancestry and the recovery of childhood dream. Through the Gates of the Silver Key gives its operation and limitations a more elaborate account, in which the accompanying parchment proves as important as the key itself.

6 min read · 1,054 words

Books & artifacts

Tillinghast’s resonator

Tillinghast’s apparatus in From Beyond is an electrical machine that exposes observers to normally inaccessible forms of perception. Commonly described in later usage as a resonator, it makes the unseen environment perceptible while also making the observers vulnerable to beings within it.

3 min read · 599 words