Saturday 31 December 2016

III - Zoophobia: The Fear of Animals


“A natural aversion in healthy people for mice or dogs need be no indication of zoophobia. But the wild and ecstatic terror that grips some women in the presence of a mouse or before the amiable advances of a house-dog tells a story of strange and perverse fancy. These horrors of animals can be so astounding that they involve an element almost magical. I have seen a woman so morbidly afraid of cats that she could recognise a feline presence the moment she crossed a strange threshold, and be unable to complete her call.

“Sometimes this phobia undergoes a transformation, and the animal feared is ruthlessly hunted down. A well-known psycho-pathologist of my acquaintance has a tremendous aversion to cats (against which not even his own precise understanding of his malady is proof), and destroys them without compunction. He has been known to drive his car onto the sidewalk in wild pursuit of some inoffensive tabby. Creatures of the insect world often inspire this strange fear in humans, and the spider thus becomes a thing of loathing. It is possible that its habits of trapping and blood-sucking are projected as somewhat violent symbols of suppressed desires.

“The theory is that a victim of zoophobia fears a symbol of an unconscious desire. What one is inhibited from loving may be transformed by the unconscious into an object of hatred. So, the old maid violently afraid of mice shudders at the thought of contact with a man – yet desires it. Conversely, at times it is the human that is feared, and a fantastic attachment for a lesser creature springs up, giving outlet to the flames of desire. In Balzac’s ‘A Passion in the Desert’, a female panther is the object of such an unnatural love on the part of the man.”

John Vassos
New York City
May 25th, 1931

Wednesday 14 December 2016

400...

Since, as it transpires, my 400th post falls on the 105th anniversary of the reaching of the Southern (and shoggoth-infested) Pole, I thought I would share my favourite - and most inspirational, as far as Call of Cthulhu is concerned - image.


This is a photographic plate from Sir Leonard Woolley's Digging Up the Past, a 1930 publication which had a long publishing life in Penguin's Pelican imprint and which will make all archaeology students groan in remembrance (required reading always makes us feel that way). I think it's great: the clothes! Those hats! It just makes you want to jump into your Hispano Suiza and head out to join some dig in the Ancient Near East. After all, if there are secrets out there that only fools would dare to unearth, those fools may as well be our player characters! Am I right?

Uh, guys? Why are you running away...?

Thursday 8 December 2016

Review: The Diamond Lens and Other Stories


O’BRIEN, Fitz-James (Peter Orford, Ed.), The Diamond Lens and Other Stories, Hesperus Press Ltd., London, 2012.

Octavo; paperback with illustrated gatefold wrappers; 108pp. New.


Don’t worry too much if you’ve never heard of Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) before: he’s been largely forgotten in the scheme of things – an obscure Irish scribbler who moved to New York and made the questionable decision to fight for the Union Army in the American Civil War. Spoiler alert: he didn’t make it. Nevertheless, some people regard O’Brien as the “Father of Science Fiction”, so he’s kind of a big deal.

First things first, I should mention that this book is a release from Hesperus Press in London, one of two publishers I’ve discovered recently with a mission to dust off and re-animate old, obscure and interesting works of literature. The production levels are grand and the editorial content more than what you’d expect, especially - in this case - for such a relatively unknown writer. They seem to have gone out of their way to pair interesting writers with equally-interesting commentators – I’d kind of like to see what Margaret Drabble has to say about Baudelaire’s On Wine and Hashish...

O’Brien’s literary debt is clearly owed to Edgar Allan Poe: his stories are disturbing and macabre, clothed in grim atmosphere and generally fuelled by a wicked come-uppance. The science-fiction angle seems to stem from the fact that his narrators are either scientists, or are steeped in the scientific method, looking for explanations using a clear-sighted gathering of facts. The scientist of the “The Diamond Lens” is more a scientist of the mad variety however, and is possibly the initiator of that trope.

Peter Orford’s analysis of O’Brien’s writing makes it clear that he could have been a great writer of his day, had he taken extra pains with his work. O’Brien was a deadline approacher of the last-minute variety, not using his time wisely but throwing down the words frantically as the time limit drew near. Orford makes the point that these stories are very good indeed; how much better could they have been if he’d taken the time to polish them as they deserved? Each tale has moral imperatives and grand themes which inform the action and the outcomes – slight as they inevitably must be considered, how incredible is it that they represent an author’s first drafts?

“The Diamond Lens” relates the activities of a self-taught scientist obsessed with microscopy and the discovery of unknown miniature worlds. As he tells of his past history and the awful events that his researches have caused to come to pass, we see the adamantine logic of his worldview begin to fray about the edges. In the end, he becomes the most unreliable of narrators and we become intimate with the scandalous acts of which he is the author. He justifies theft and murder, and the reliance upon a medium for his academic sources (using her to gain advice from Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope, no less) in his efforts to pierce through veils of diminutive worlds long unsuspected. Once he does obtain his goal, he discovers the microscopic woman Animula for whom he falls hopelessly in love. His romance is doomed however, because, unaware of him as she is, there is no way that they can ever meet and, before he thinks of a way to overcome the problem, the drop of water which is her world evaporates and she dies. All is lost and all was for naught.

The third tale in this collection prefigures H.G. Wells by several decades positing the arrival of an invisible person into an otherwise ordinary setting. Our narrator inhabits a guest house along with several other gentlemen. One night, after retiring to sleep, he is awakened by a strange sound and then the sharp surprise of a heavy object landing upon his person, an object that then grips his throat and tries to strangle him. He fights his way clear of the assailant, figuring in the darkness that it is some kind of sneak-thief; however, when the lights come up, he sees nothing – the being is completely invisible to the naked eye. With the assistance of some of the other lodgers, the creature is restrained and the gentlemen try to determine what it is and from where it originated; however, it dies of starvation before any of the mystery is revealed, leaving us only with the story’s title to contemplate - “What Was It?”

The second offering – “The Wondersmith” - I have purposely left until last. The tale involves a group of New York gypsies, led by the eponymous Wondersmith, who decide to launch a vicious attack upon the children of the city by smuggling homicidal wooden dolls – animated by dark souls obtained by a fortune-teller – into their Christmas stockings. The wooden dolls are rapacious and barely-controlled, each armed with a poisoned sword or dagger and, in a test-run of their murderous capabilities, make short work of the stock of a back-alley bird-seller. On the sidelines of all this deviltry, the Wondersmith’s adopted daughter – a young woman he stole from her original parents and treats as a servant – finds love with a hunch-backed bookseller and, at the climax of the tale, they find escape and freedom.

O’Brien’s shortcomings are clearly seen in this story. It’s patchy and there are many leads that are abandoned or only hastily followed-up upon. Primarily though, it’s horrifically racist, with the villains all of Jewish and Egyptian stock, Hell-bent on a dubious vengeance over the Christian populace of New York. We learn that the Wondersmith lost his son to an addiction to brandy, the first sip of which was offered to him by a Christian. At the end of the story, the villains are all undone by an inability to moderate their own drinking – they fall comatose and the manikins animate accidentally and turn their bloodlust upon their creators before a fire consumes them forever. During the chaos, the imprisoned servant girl and her paramour flee the scene and go on to live (we suppose) happily ever after.

The seeds of the evil plot and its eventual undoing are all traced back to the racial stock of the baddies. At the same time the purity and goodness of the non-Jews – in the form of the young lovers – is attributed to their Christian origins. Along the way there is revealed every poisonous anti-Semitic stereotype possible, with a nebulous suggestion of worldwide organisation of a terror-cell quality. This is not a fun piece at all. And it’s not standalone: in “The Diamond Lens” the young man whom the scientist steals the diamond from is highlighted as Jewish and, therefore, overly-emotional and of no consequence, allowing the narrator to execute the cruel murder and successfully stage it as a suicide. And Lovecraft cops stick for his racism! At least, unlike Fitz-James O’Brien, he had the good grace to keep it mostly off the pages of his published works.

I’m not going to advocate this book as a ‘must-read’; it’s really for completists only, those who have an interest in the origins of genre literature generally, and science fiction in particular. It fulfils the requirements for weird literature but O’Brien’s lack of attention to polishing and editing – along with his outrĂ© racial attitudes – make it somewhat hard work. Kudos to the Hesperus Press for giving it an airing, but – as a curiosity - I can only give it two Tentacled Horrors.

Wednesday 7 December 2016

II - Astrophobia: The Fear of Storms


“Lightning, thunder, cloud-bursts, and hurricanes tore down the rude shelter of primitive man and bowed his progeny in awe. This, according to the genetic psychologists, is the reason so many of us, even today, still retain a wild terror of the more violent manifestations of nature. But then, why are we not all victims of astrophobia?  Stranger still, why do some of us feel, in place of fear, an actual fondness for these visible signs of heavenly powers? Here again, it seems to me, the explanation offered is too facile, too plausible, to be wholly true. Lightning is no longer the mysterious, incomprehensible agency it once was; nevertheless, the astrophobiac finds no sedative for his terror in the commonplaceness of electrical appliances. Let the lightnings begin to play, and however securely he may be housed, he seeks refuge in the deepest cellar, in the darkest closet, the remotest hiding-place.

“There would seem to be nothing wholly pagan in the composition of every phobia. The man whose soul guards no secret chamber filled with thoughts and desires that do violence to the commands of his god, has no abject terror of the storm. We are not dealing here with any simple fear – the disinclination to be struck by lightning which is the normal fear of normal persons. It is very possible that in the warped mind of the astrophobiac, as he hides in his closets and under beds, the lightnings of the storm are the bolts of an avenging God, striking surely for the one who has transgressed His decrees.”

John Vassos
New York City
May 25th, 1931

Rip It & Run! Ceding Control...


Early on when you start to referee your own (or someone else’s) games, you learn pretty quickly that nothing ever really goes to plan and that not every contingency can be provided against. In military terms there’s an old expression which covers it: “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. Of course, everyone in your game is a friend, otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting around a table with you, but some Keepers start to feel that, because every time you all get together something goes horribly wrong with your finely-crafted narrative, that your so-called ‘friends’ have truly become the enemy, Hell-bent on overturning your game for their own amusement.

It’s time to step back and take a long, deep, breath.

Firstly, your players are only one part of the equation here, but they’re a big part of it. Objectively speaking, the only reason that all of you are doing this is for your mutual enjoyment – if they didn’t show up, you wouldn’t have a story to tell; if you didn’t write your story, you’d all be sitting in front of your respective service providers each Saturday night, chugging chips and cola in your underwear. The thing to realise is that this is a consensual exercise; all of you contribute and all of you enjoy.

Given that epiphany, you might start to think that the amount of work involved in getting this to work is unfairly skewed towards the Keeper’s detriment. Damn’ players, you might think; I do all of this preparation and they just sit there rattling dice and bitching about subtracting hit points! Don’t they understand the effort I’ve taken? Well, no, in fact; they do not. From their perspective, your wonderful adventure might well have dropped – fully-formed – into your lap from passing space aliens, and you’re as in the dark as they are about what’s coming up. Keepers have a tendency to play things close to their chests. They clam up; become secretive, paranoid. They scuttle about the sidelines like Peter Lorre, clutching a stack of cross-referenced binders and dog-eared rules books and jumping hysterically when asked “so, what can I see?”

The thing is this secretive approach to the game goads players into breaking it. What they experience is mainly a wall of silence – between them and the Keeper is a quivering zone of expectation and every attempt to move beyond it gets thwarted or dismissed. Players don’t like to be hemmed in and eventually they will start to push back against the limitations. Sometimes their frustration becomes so extreme that they push really hard and the damage that they do to the game soon becomes irreparable. Then come the resentment, the arguments, the recrimination and that’s it for your Saturday night games session. Back to your service provider and the coke and chips.

Before things get this bad, you need to stop and think hard about your workload. The story is yours to provide and yes, it’s not that interesting if the players know beforehand what it involves and where it’s heading – there has to be a certain level of confidentiality or there’s no surprise. However, think about what the players are bringing to the table – their characters. For them, their story personae are like shiny new cars – they want to take them out onto the road and see what they will do, and they also want you and their fellow players to see that too. This is fine; this is, in fact, the whole point of the exercise. However, the players’ characters don’t just begin and end with a marked-up piece of paper.

Is the player’s character a member of a London club? If so, which one? Do they have friends there? If so, how many and what are their details? Do the characters all live in the same town or village? If so, which one? Does it have a church? Of which denomination? Is there a police station? What are the officers’ names and backgrounds? Who else lives there, and perhaps the party members might take the time to note down some NPC statistics for them...?

The players’ contribution to your game is not just their characters, but everything about and around their characters. If they want to drive a certain make of car, or aeroplane, or if they want a special type of weapon, have them go out and do the leg-work. When was that car first made? What were the engine specifications of that aeroplane? How available was that type of gun? This type of research also applies to how your player wants their character to look, to eat and to explore their world. None of this information will impact upon your story to any great degree (although you never know!) and none of it is worth your time to organise. Have your players do it. Insist that you check it before signing off on it, but let them do the hard work. Your effort is better spent elsewhere.

This also applies to setting the mood while you play. Let your players find appropriate music for the session: this means you will have to reveal certain aspects of the game – that it’s set in Egypt; or that we’re going to a suspicious speakeasy in Harlem – but if your game is moving as it should, this information should be a fait accompli anyway. Is one of your players a good cook? Have them make an appropriate light meal, or snacks. Have one of the players bring candles if they’re keen, or incense if they really keen. Let the players work the ambience and this is yet another thing you don’t have to worry about.

Pretty soon, your players will be coming to you with all kinds of ideas about their characters and the world in which they live. As long as you’re open to them embroidering the tapestry of your universe, they will feel as if they’re connected to it, not just blindfolded victims standing against a wall. As a bonus, they’ll be generating all the “Long-Lost Friends” and back-up characters that you’ll all need to keep the campaign ticking over.

Remember: this is a mutual activity; it’s not all about you. Make sure everyone is involved, the work will be shared and it will feel less onerous...

Sunday 4 December 2016

The Rudraprayag Leopard - Part 3

(Un)Holy Men

By this stage the party has travelled far, settled in and seen the results of a leopard attack. Things are pretty straightforward so far, and the players may well be wondering what a team of ghostbusters like themselves are doing here. Well, now it gets interesting.

For this tale to work, the team has to get out into the villages and talk to the locals. As discussed previously, depending upon when the party arrives, the populace will be either in a state of excitement, or of panic, so the team may have difficulties in finding anyone to talk to. Still, they have servants at their dwelling-place who will act as an interface with the villagers and information will start to trickle in.


One of the first pieces of local knowledge that they will receive is that there is a holy man – a fakir – in the jungle nearby who seems to have no fear of the leopard and who is proffering blessings – protection from the big cat - to all comers who bring offerings. Terrified women and men are sometimes seen braving the wilderness to visit this fellow, carrying bowls of rice and other foodstuffs to obtain these mystical wardings. If the party decides to pay this person a visit, they will see that he is living very well indeed off the fear of the locals and that any blessings which he dispenses are cursory and – most likely - bogus. He slouches by a local spring, beneath a shading tree and lying comfortably upon village-provided cushions, self-satisfied and distended of belly. His hair is matted, he is mostly naked (apart from a loincloth) and he has three white horizontal lines drawn across his forehead in some type of pigment: this is a caste mark showing his adherence to Shiva.

If the players confront the fakir and accuse him of extortion, he will become hugely indignant and threatening. Referring to himself as an agent of Shiva, he declares that it is within his ambit to bring down punishment upon the foreigners’ heads, calling the leopard spirits to dispatch them. Depending upon the level of anger this confrontation causes, the fakir may summarily kick over any offerings nearby and stomp off into the jungle abandoning the village. If this happens, the villagers will be dismayed and bear the Investigators more than a modicum of ill-will.

Regardless of the outcome, the party has now gained a bitter enemy and has drawn danger upon their heads. This fellow is in fact one of the Leopard Cultists, hell-bent on taking over the region for their own twisted ends. His proximity to the village means that he knows which of the villagers has been helping the party and he also knows (possibly, if this is an option for the story) about the party member who was targeted by the butterflies. These scraps of information will be the foundation upon which he builds his vengeance...


Scheming Fakir
char.
value
char.
value
char.
value
STR
15
POW
15
Age
38
CON
14
DEX
16
HP
12
SIZ
10
APP
8
Magic Points
15
INT
13
EDU
7
SAN
0
Damage Bonus: +1D4
Weapon:       Knife 65%;
Armour:        None
Skills:             Cthulhu Mythos 80%; Hide 75%; Make Bhang 70%; Sneak 65%; Wilderness                 Survival 75%
Spells             Brew Borfima
SAN Loss       It costs no SAN to see the fakir, untransformed


At some other point, the party will meet another holy man and hopefully this fellow will leave them with a distinctly different impression. Pandit Chandra is a small man of advanced years with spectacles and an air of constant mild amusement. He is a Brahmin scholar and his brow is marked by the single red dot which denotes his caste status; otherwise, he is dressed in a plain white dhoti and sandals (think of Ghandi and you’ll have a pretty fair idea of what he looks like).


It is up to the Keeper to decide when the party first encounters the pandit. They may meet with him in Rudraprayag, or even prior to heading out from Delhi. It’s likely, at some point, that the party might return to Delhi to perform research at the libraries there: If they do they can encounter Pandit Chandra and he will ask, since they are going back to Rudraprayag, if he might accompany them.

The pandit carries his possessions in a battered brown suitcase and it’s obvious that most of the space inside it is taken up by books. He is amiable and wise but also very scatterbrained and completely out of his depth outside of a city environment; nevertheless he is determined to make his way to Rudraprayag and the jungles beyond. If any party members ask him why this is so, he shows them a large conch shell, worked with silver and hanging at his hip by a leather thong running across his chest; he says that he must make a pilgrimage to Udar Kund (which is near the village of Guptkashi, however he won’t mention this fact), along the pilgrim trail to Kedarnath, and take, from the holy spring there, water to cleanse the countryside of evil. The conch shell is about the size of a coconut with a silver-mounted stopper and holds about a pint (600ml) of liquid.

If asked about the leopard problem, Pandit Chandra is dismissive. He says that a leopard is a natural creature and incapable of the harm that is afflicting the district; he mentions cryptically that the deaths are most likely the work of demons, or foolish men working for demons, rather than a single feline. He says, without any trace of pride, that it is his job to rid the region of the evil that afflicts it – here, he smiles and warmly pats his conch shell.

Once the party arrives at Rudraprayag, the pandit is met by several other Brahmin members of the community; he bows his farewell to the party and leaves with these others. Later, the team may encounter him again – or possibly for the first time, depending upon how the Keeper is using this NPC – sitting by the road to Ratura on his suitcase, waiting to join a group of travellers who are going his way.


Pandit Chandra
char.
value
char.
value
char.
value
STR
11
POW
17
Age
63
CON
13
DEX
10
HP
12
SIZ
11
APP
14
Magic Points
17
INT
16
EDU
20
SAN
85
Damage Bonus: +/-0
Weapon:       None
Armour:        None
Skills:             Cthulhu Mythos 15%; Hindu Theology 95%; Library Use 80%
Spells             Enchant Waters of Udar Kund
SAN Loss       It costs no SAN to see Pandit Chandra


With the introduction of these two major players, things will start to heat up tremendously!


To Be Continued...

Saturday 3 December 2016

I - Nichtophobia: The Fear of the Dark


“There are a few people who fear the light of the day – for whom the sun is the enemy and who will not emerge from their houses until the man-made lights are lit. But the almost universal fear of the dark is intensified in hundreds of individuals into a real phobia. For them a dark room is actually filled with spectres ready to mutilate, to rape, and to slay. The victim of this phobia probably suffers from an inner conviction of guilt, a conviction that he has sinned in thought and word and deed; it is punishment that he fears, and yet desires because it will make him clean again. In this common and comparatively mild form of phobia is clearly demonstrated the conflict (between the victim’s terror of retribution for his self-confessed transgressions and his longing for the expiation that will liberate him), which is characteristic of so many of the more complicated forms.

“We have long had our childhood and adolescent fear of the dark explained to us by parents and teachers as a result of dimly remembered bedtime stories about tigers who roam in deep jungles; or else as a racial inheritance of our ancestor the caveman’s dread of the very real perils he constantly endured. But this theory, while it undoubtedly explains a great deal, can be made to explain too much. Some people shun the dark for actual and personal reasons. In their twisted minds they are guilty of sin, and the formless blackness, that to the normal mind is only absence of light, is transformed into a perilous other-world when conscience and nature are at odds.”

John Vassos
New York City
May 25th, 1931

Friday 2 December 2016

Library Generation Tables - Cabbalistic


Most cabbalistic works are medieval in origin; there are others, however, with a modern resurgence of interest prompting further titles. While many early sources are Jewish, various modern groups have adopted the Cabbala to their own purposes – from the Golden Dawn, to the New Age, to Madonna – so new works about the Cabbala are continually appearing.

Cabbalism is a form of Jewish mysticism which exoterically deals with the nature of the universe and its construction. Primarily it deals with the notion that creative powers are embodied within certain layers of being known as “sephira” (sing. “sephiroth”) and that the power of God welled over spilling through all of these layers in turn finally creating the universe. In order to commune with God, the mystical practitioner must move back upwards through these layers to reach the Divine. Central to this practise is the Hebrew alphabet which – lacking vowels – has a numerical association in Cabbalism which allows to mystic to work the “Tree of Life” – the arrangement of the sephira – like some kind of spiritual toolbox.

This correlation between numbers and letters – a transformative system called “gematria” – translates across many fields of mystical endeavour and cabbalistic interpretations of astrology and the Tarot – in fact any system of western or eastern esoteric thought – has been accomplished at one time or another. Cabbalistic works can be found in many other types of libraries, so the Keeper can feel free to throw a work from this list into any one of the others presented.

01-10%
Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin
11-20%
De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum
21-30%
The Golden Dawn
31-40%
I Ching
41-50%
The Key of Solomon
51-60%
The Occult Sciences
61-70%
The Sixth & Seventh Book of Moses
71-80%
Steganographia
81-90%
The Tarot: A Treatise
91-00%
The Zohar

The I Ching

The I Ching, or ‘Book of Changes’, is one of the five noble books of Confucian thought. Legend has it that the Yellow Emperor derived the I Ching from observing the markings on the shell of a turtle while he was bathing in a river. The combinations of broken and unbroken lines led him to write 64 prophecies based on the interpretations of these sequences. Each series of lines (or hexagram) is composed of six stacked horizontal bars comprising yang lines (unbroken) or yin lines (broken), with a gap in the centre. These hexagrams fall into two different camps: either ‘fixed’ or ‘moving’, according to the interpretation. Contemplation of these 64 verses is said to aid in the process of attaining enlightenment and to allow the philosopher to better evaluate the world and his place within it. The writing is dense and abstruse, with a multiplicity of interpretations.

However, given the possibility of generating the hexagrams by ostensibly arbitrary systems, people came to believe that the book was a means of divination. Originally, yarrow stalks were tossed from a bamboo container and the way they fell determined which hexagram was pertinent to the questioner’s predicament. This mode of random determination was later replaced during the Han Dynasty by the better expedient of tossing six coins to determine the appropriate hexagram; the corresponding verse was thought to be pertinent to the questioner’s situation. Strict Confucians disdain this use of their sacred text as they believe that a person’s destiny depends upon their own good conduct and not upon outside forces; the divinatory use of the book became strictly a marketplace service peddled to the peasant Chinese...and to gullible foreigners.

In one of his rare scholarly moments, Aleister Crowley translated the I Ching into English, complete with annotations designed to make the work relevant to his Thelemite theories of ‘magick’. Unlike many of his other translations, it fortunately does not attempt to ‘improve’ upon the original text.


The Tarot: A Treatise

This is a standard work on the symbolism and methods of divination of the tarot deck and, as such, closely resembles many other such works. It is significant for its use of Cabbalism in interpreting the imagery and also because it was written by Étienne-Laurent de Marigny, a famous New Orleans mystic and friend of Randolph Carter. Whether it has any significant Mythos content is a decision left up to the Keeper.



Next: Christian Mystical

Phobia, by John Vassos


John Vassos (1898-1985) was an American immigrant famous as a designer at the height of the Art Deco movement. He worked extensively with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) designing radio units before moving on to such things as televisions and computers. He was born in Romania to Greek parents and grew up in Istanbul. He became notorious as a newspaper cartoonist before joining the Royal Navy to fight for Britain in World War One. Afterwards, he moved to Boston in 1919 to study art, then went to New York in 1924 to start work as a designer, creating murals, architecture and advertising. He began working for the RCA and spent the next forty years as their lead consulting designer.

Along the way he produced several illustrated books, incorporating his pure line aesthetic to augment various texts. These include Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” amongst others. The most unique item in his oeuvre, however, must be Phobia, a collection of 23 Art Deco images illustrating various well-documented fears. Fascinated by the burgeoning insights provided by psychology, Vassos embarked upon this personal production with zeal and the results are stunning. First published in 1931, the book is quite scarce nowadays and generally expensive if encountered. That being said, the good people at Dover Publications Inc. have seen fit to produce reprints, one in 1976 and another in 2009, in order to keep the work alive in peoples’ minds.

In the spirit of this proliferation, and keeping in mind the tradition of phobia lists throughout editions of the “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying game, I offer the art of John Vassos as inspiration for all players out there. In this post are Vassos’s Preface along with the book’s original frontispiece; later posts will highlight a single illustrated phobia with its written description. Enjoy!


Preface

“I must begin by apologising. I am not a psychiatrist, and my apparent presumption in publishing this venture into the unreal world of phobia necessitates some explanation. However, I can only plead in extenuation my keen personal interest in a subject whose fascination has claimed my attention for many years. I here offer the results of that interest, in a series of drawings in which I attempt to portray some of the fears by which mankind is harassed. The phobias I have selected for illustration are only those which best lend themselves to my purpose and which have interested me strongly. Nor does the text pretend to any great authority. This is not a treatise on psychopathology. I have written the text merely as an aid to the understanding of the drawings and as a suggestion of some of the underlying factors by whose agency a phobia may be produced.

“A phobia is essentially graphic. The victim creates in his mind a realistic picture of what he fears, a mental image of a physical thing. The sufferer from acrophobia, for example, sees his body hurtling through space, the aichmophobiac projects an image of himself in the act of stabbing; in this mental picture the thing that he fears becomes actual, for all that its projection is purely imaginative. It is this mental picture that I have endeavoured to set down – the imaginal, graphic annihilation that the phobiac experiences each time his fear is awakened. The illustrations should be considered first as a whole and then in their component parts, to arrive at the complete meaning. They are intended to be inclusive – that is, to depict both worlds of the phobiac’s existence: the physical and the imaginary, the actual and the projected. The real world is replaced by the unreal as the pictorial pattern of the sufferer’s destiny parades ceaselessly through his mind.

“Usually, the layman makes no distinction between normal fear, complex, mania, and phobia. It must be remembered that in the last, while the fear of an actual thing is the symbol, the fear itself is psychotic and so abnormally exaggerated that it stops just this side of madness. The phobias here presented are arranged more or less in the order of their intensity, progressing from the comparatively mild nichtophobia, or fear of the dark, to the awful hypnophobia, the fear of sleep, removed from true insanity by a margin so slight as to be hardly discernible.

“The text attempts to convey something of the mood of each picture as well as to afford an explanation (necessarily scant and incomplete) of the meanings of the various phobias. It must be borne in mind that no unanimity of opinion on this subject has yet been achieved by the psychopathologists, and I have tempered the extent of my temerity by adhering to a middle ground which, if not comprehensive, at least lies within the bounds of probability. Phobias do not lend themselves to solution or analysis with the same readiness of algebraic problems, although psychiatrists who pretend to omniscience are unfortunately not lacking. We are dealing here with the imaginings of diseased minds, and many of their manifestations are irreducible to law. Certain characteristics, however, seem to have been fairly well established by one or another of the various schools of modern psychology – enough, at any rate, to enable us to grasp the beginnings of comprehension.

“At the bottom of all phobias there seem to be a few fundamental desires: the desire for sex-gratification, the desire for suicide, and the will-to-power. The inhibitory restraints – whether social, religious, or moral – which prevent the satisfaction of these desires, set up a fear in the individual of some real object or condition that becomes the symbol of his maladjustment. There can be little doubt that our heritage of the Puritanic concept of sex as sin has much to do with the origin of many of our phobias today. As primitive man trembled before the shafts of lightning – which aeons later were to become the bolts of Jove – so now we tremble before an inherited moral code by whose tenets the generative act is robbed of both meaning and pleasure. A grim retribution attends us, a punishment for the enjoyment of what we still unconsciously regard as sin. We have rid ourselves, to a large extent, of superstition and witchcraft, but we still do private homage to irrational terrors where once there was ritual awe of the supernatural. The Christian peoples, whose Saviour was born of a virgin, that is, without ‘sin’, have for centuries maintained an unnatural ideal of chastity and have at length fallen victims to the demands of their thwarted natural desires. The desire for suicide is present in nearly all phobias because the phobiac generally feels an imperative need for release from his disordered life. Yet because he fears death he also fears those conditions that are favourable to its consummation. So also the exigencies of our modern social structure, with its tremendous premium on worldly success, have taken their toll of sufferers – the weaker-spirited among us who cannot achieve the positions to which they aspire or else fear to make the effort that will segregate them from the comforting obscurity of the crowd. Any of these fundamental impulses, acting independently or together, may serve to produce one or more of the various phobias.

“We know everything but how to live, and our success at everything else leaves us a prey to monstrosities born within us. Our unsatisfied desires, at variance with our archaic concepts of life, come to us wonderful in terror and temptation. A man who has a phobia fears a figment of fancy. He desires what he doesn’t want to desire, and he fears the symbol of his desire even as he clasps it to his breast. He cannot take what he wants nor can he cease to want it. Such is the law of diseased symbolism which is phobia.

“For the preparation of the text I am greatly indebted to friends among the psychopathologists who generously helped me to correlate my ideas and to check my conclusions; and to my wife, Ruth Vassos, for her invaluable assistance in the actual writing. How my scientific friends may ultimately assess the value of my encroachment of their preserves I do not know. I do know that they agree with me that genius seldom springs from so-called normal minds, but frequently from those whose tremendous imaginative power leads them along strange by-ways.”

John Vassos
New York City
May 25th, 1931.