(this is an aside but slightly further down in the google search results is an old forum thread from 2006 where a few people are quite seriously discussing interdimensional portals and wondering how lovecraft knew about them. fascinating stuff)
cocthulhu.proboards.com/thread/549/lov
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the text of "dreams in the witch house" is linked below. the main character travels to eldritch places in his dreams by exiting the universe through a fourth dimension and coming back in somewhere else. he ties this to old magic + weird angles
hplovecraft.com/writings/texts
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the descriptions of the dreams themselves kinda reminds me of what i've read people write about DMT experiences which is striking 🧐
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the wikipedia article about dreams in the witch house says lovecraft was inspired by a lecture given by de sitter called "the size of the universe," and a book by eddington called "the nature of the physical world". i can't make heads or tails of the septimius felton thing
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in "the size of the universe" de sitter describes how to produce a state-of-the-art-for-1932 estimate of the radius of the universe, he says between 2 and 20 billion light years (current estimate is 46ish, they didn't have inflation yet)
adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1932PASP.
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(interesting science history thing here: in 1932 the word "galaxy" was apparently not yet used to refer to galaxies other than the milky way! its etymology just refers to the milky way. de sitter describes here how to infer that the milky way is a "spiral nebula")
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tbh i don't have a clear sense of what exactly lovecraft was getting out of de sitter's work here. maybe a general sense that mathematics is capable of telling you surprising and nontrivial facts about the structure of the universe 🧐
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apparently i would know more if i read "dispatches from the providence observatory: astronomical motifs and sources in the writings of h.p. lovecraft" but i can't find even a pirate copy of it anywhere, just a preview on jstor. anyone wanna help me out?
jstor.org/stable/26868370
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the second source cited by wikipedia is eddington's "the nature of the physical world" (1929) which is a whole book so it's been taking awhile to pick through but it's beautiful writing. i wish physicists still wrote like this
henry.pha.jhu.edu/Eddington.2008
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probably not relevant to lovecraft but TIL: this is the book that introduces the concept of the arrow of time! nice
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i am going to guess that the chapter of this book most relevant to lovecraft is VIII. Man's Place in the Universe. beginning covers some similar material as de sitter. eddington briefly describes heat death which i imagine had an impact on lovecraft's imagination
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then he speculates a bit about alien life, 20 years before the fermi paradox and 30 years before the drake equation. some beautiful sentences here - "how many acorns are scattered for one that grows to an oak? and need [nature] be more careful of her stars than her acorns?"
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the other chapter that might be relevant to lovecraft is "XV. Science and Mysticism" which is again lovely. i have never seen a differential equation and a poem presented on the same page in direct contrast like this. gorgeous. where has sir arthur eddington been all my life
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then he takes the poem seriously as a subject of philosophical inquiry. he asks: in what sense can the *waves* be blown to *laughter*? whence the impression that "the gladness in ourselves was in Nature, in the waves, everywhere" given, y'know, hydrodynamics etc.?
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"If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone..."
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"..., but are glimpses of a reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness ⎯ that the harmony and beauty of the face of Nature is at root one with the gladness that transfigures the face of man."
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"The mystic, if haled before a tribunal of scientists, might perhaps end his defense on this note. He would say, 'The familiar material world of everyday conception, though lacking somewhat in scientific truth, is good enough to live in; in fact...'
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'...the scientific world of pointer readings would be an impossible sort of place to inhabit. It is a symbolic world and the only thing that could live comfortably in it would be a symbol. But I am not a symbol; ...'
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'...I am compounded of that mental activity which is from your point of view a nest of illusion, so that to accord with my own nature I have to transform even the world explored by my senses. But I am not merely made up of senses; ...'
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'... the rest of my nature has to live and grow. I have to render account of that environment into which it has its outlet. My conception of my spiritual environment is not to be compared with your scientific world of pointer readings; ...'
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'...it is an everyday world to be compared with the material world of familiar experience. I claim it as no more real and no less real than that. Primarily it is not a world to be analyzed, but a world to be lived in.'"
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