"The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon" / Numinous
This photograph was taken at Union Square, NYC.
H. P. Lovecraft is considered to be among the most influential horror writers of the last century. He has influenced writers such as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman and musicians such as Black Sabbath and Metallica. H. P. Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos and Necronomicon grimoire. Necronomicon, although a work of fiction, is believed by some to be a real book. Since Lovecraft's death, many books titled Necronomicon have been published. The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon written by Donald Tyson, seen in the picture above, is one such book.
In many stories written by Lovecraft and other Lovecraftian authors, reading or even possessing the Necronomicon is said to lead to insanity and has terrible consequences. That might explain...
One of the greatest opening lines of any book has to be the first two lines of Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
On a somewhat related note, in his 1917 book The Idea of the Holy, German theologian Rudolf Otto popularized the word numinous to describe the power or presence of a divinity, in which the Old One appears as a mysterium tremendum, i.e., a mystery before which man trembles in stupor and astonishment...
Song of the Day: The Thing that Should not Be - Metallica (1986)
