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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
ANIMAL ETHICS SERIES

Animality in
Contemporary Italian
Philosophy
Edited by
Felice Cimatti · Carlo Salzani
The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

Series Editors
Andrew Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK

Clair Linzey
Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Oxford, UK
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our
treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of
other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From
being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics
and in multidisciplinary inquiry. This series will explore the challenges that
Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional
understandings of human-animal relations. Specifically, the Series will:

• provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out
ethical positions on animals
• publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accom-
plished, scholars;
• produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary
in character or have multidisciplinary relevance.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14421
 Felice Cimatti • Carlo Salzani
Editors

Animality in
Contemporary Italian
Philosophy
Editors
Felice Cimatti Carlo Salzani
University of Calabria Messerli Research Institute
Arcavacata di Rende, Italy Vienna, Austria

The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

ISBN 978-3-030-47506-2    ISBN 978-3-030-47507-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
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publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional
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Cover illustration: Contributor: Lanmas / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Contents

1 Introduction: The Italian Animal—A Heterodox Tradition  1

Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani

Part I Animality in the Italian Tradition  19

2 Animality and Immanence in Italian Thought 21

Felice Cimatti

3 Aldo Capitini, Animal Ethics, and Nonviolence:

The Expanding Circle 51
Luisella Battaglia

4 What Is Italian Antispeciesism? An Overview of Recent

Tendencies in Animal Advocacy 71
Giorgio Losi and Niccolò Bertuzzi

Part II Animality in Perspective  95

5 Beyond Human and Animal: Giorgio Agamben and Life

as Potential 97
Carlo Salzani

v
vi Contents

6 Deconstructing the Dispositif of the Person: Animality

and the Politics of Life in the Philosophy of Roberto
Esposito115
Matías Saidel and Diego Rossello

7 Animality Between Italian Theory and Posthumanism143

Giovanni Leghissa

8 For the Critique of Political Anthropocentrism: Italian

Marxism and the Animal Question159
Marco Maurizi

9 Experiencing Oneself in One’s Constitutive Relation:

Unfolding Italian Sexual Difference185
Federica Giardini

10 Paolo De Benedetti: For an Animal Theology203

Alma Massaro

Part III Fragments of a Contemporary Debate 221

11 “Il faut bien tuer,” or the Calculation of the Abattoir223

Massimo Filippi

12 Philosophical Ethology and Animal Subjectivity243

Roberto Marchesini

13 From Renaissance Ferinity to the Biopolitics of the

Animal-­Man: Animality as Political Battlefield in the
Anthropocene263
Laura Bazzicalupo
 Contents  vii

14 The Animal Is Present: Non-human Animal Bodies in

Recent Italian Art281
Valentina Sonzogni

15 Animality Now303
Leonardo Caffo

Index323
 Notes on Contributors

Luisella Battaglia is Professor of Ethics and Bioethics at the University

of Genoa and the University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples. In Genoa
she founded the Istituto Italiano di Bioetica, of which she is scientific
director, and from 1999 is a member of the Comitato Nazionale per
la Bioetica. She is a co-founder and since 2017 director of the Festival
di Bioetica. Her publications include Etica e diritti degli animali (1997);
Alle origini dell’etica ambientale. Uomo, natura, animali in Voltaire,
Michelet, Thoreau, Gandhi (2002); Bioetica senza dogmi (premio Le Due
Culture 2010); Un’etica per il mondo vivente. Questioni di bioetica medica,
ambientale, animale (2011); Poterenegato. Approcci di genere al tema delle
diseguaglianze (2014); and Uomo, Natura, Animali per una bioetica della
complessità (2016).
Laura Bazzicalupo was Full Professor of Political Philosophy at the
University of Salerno and has retired in 2018. She works on the crossing
of aisthesis and politics. Her main topics of investigation are biopolitics,
the economy of the governance, the productivity of power, and the crisis
of democracy. She is on the editorial board of several political philosophical
journals and is editor-in-chief of Soft Power: Euro-American Journal of
Historical and Theoretical Studies of Politics and Law. Her recent publica-
tions include Il governo delle vite. Biopolitica ed economia (2006); Superbia
(2008, latest edition 2018; translated into Spanish and Bulgarian 2015);
Biopolitica, una mappa concettuale (2010; translated into Spanish 2016
and Portuguese 2017); Eroi della libertà (2011); Politica. Rappresentazioni
e tecniche di governo (2013); and Dispositivi e soggettivazioni (2014). Quite

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

recently she has published in English the essays “Economy as Logic of

Government” (Paragraph, 2016) and “The Scene of Politics in an Atonal
World: Hegemony, Contagion, Spectrality” (Politica Comùn 9, 2016).
Niccolò Bertuzzi is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Scuola
Normale Superiore and a member of COSMOS (Centre on Social
Movement Studies). His main research interests are political sociology and
social movement studies. He recently published the monograph I movi-
menti animalisti in Italia. Strategie, politiche e pratiche di attivismo
(2018). He also investigated other social movements, protests and forms
of participation, and in particular the one against Expo 2015. His articles
appeared in some international journals such as Modern Italy (“The
Contemporary Italian Animal Advocacy,” 2018), Social Movement
Studies (“No Expo Network: A Failed Mobilization in a Post-political
Frame,” 2017), Interface (“No Expo Network: Multiple Subjectivities,
Online Communication Strategies, and the World Outside,” 2017),
Relations (“Veganism: Lifestyle or Political Movement? Looking for
Relations Beyond Antispeciesism,” 2017), and Revista Crítica de
Ciências Sociais (“Urban Regimes and the Right to the City: An
Analysis of No Expo Network and Its Protest Frames,” 2017).
Leonardo Caffo is Adjunct Professor of Ontology at the Polytechnic
University of Turin and of Philosophy of Contemporary Art at Nuova
Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. His primary research is focused on ani-
mal philosophy, in the sense of a possible philosophy outside the human
atmosphere. In this framework he has worked and is working on simplic-
ity, the relation between form of life and space for life (philosophy of
architecture), ontology and individuals versus ecology and relations, a new
concept of posthuman and antispeciesism, and philosophy as a practice of
life. His latest books include An Art for the Other (2015), Only for Them
(2016), La vita di ognigiorno (Einaudi, 2016), Fragile Umanità (Einaudi,
2017), Vegan (Einaudi, 2018), and Il cane e il filosofo (Mondadori, 2020).
Felice Cimatti is Full Professor of Philosophy of Language and Mind at
the University of Calabria and also teaches at the Istituto Freudiano in
Rome. In 2012 he received the Premio Musatti from the Società
Psicoanalitica Italiana. He is one of the radio hosts of the radio pro-
grams Fahrenheit and Uomini e profeti on Rai Radio 3 and of the TV
program Zettel (Fare filosofia and Debate) for Rai (Radiotelevisione
Italiana) Scuola. His research interests, moving from the semiological
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

study of the languages of non-human animals, mainly concern the

complicated relationships between language and human mind/body.
Recently he concentrated himself on the concept of “animality,”
focusing in particular on what a human animality could be. On such
a topic, he wrote Filosofia dell’animalità (2013) and several other
texts. His many other publications include Il volto e la parola (2008), La
vita che verrà. Biopolitica per “Homo sapiens” (2011), Il taglio. Linguaggio
e pulsione di morte (2015), Sguardi animali (2018), A Biosemiotic
Ontology. The Philosophy of Giorgio Prodi (2018), Cose. Per una filosofia del
reale (2108), La vita estrinseca. Dopo il linguaggio (2018), and Philosophy
of Animality: Unbecoming Human (in press). He also co-­edited the vol-
umes Filosofia della psicoanalisi. Un’introduzione in ventuno passi (with
Silvia Vizzardelli, 2012); Corpo, linguaggio e psicoanalisi (with Alberto
Luchetti, 2013); A come animale. Per un bestiario dei sentimenti (with
Leonardo Caffo, 2015); and Abbecedario del reale (with Alex Pagliardini,
2019). Felice is present on Academia.edu.
Massimo Filippi is Full Professor of Neurology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele
University, Milan, Italy; director of the Residency School in Neurology and
president of the Bachelor’s Degree in Physiotherapy at the same university;
chair of the Neurology Unit; chair of the Neurophysiology Unit; director
of the MS Center; and director of the Neuroimaging Research Unit
(NRU), Department of Neurology, Institute of Experimental Neurology,
San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan. He is member of various national
and international scientific societies and boards where he covered or is cov-
ering institutional roles. He is author of over 1000 papers and editor of
more than 20 books; he is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neurology and
member of the editorial boards of many international scientific journals.
He is very often requested as speaker and/or chairman in national and
international neurological congresses. In 2001, Prof. Filippi was awarded
the “Rita Levi-Montalcini Prize” for his outstanding contributions to the
study of MS. Massimo Filippi is also a thinker and militant antispecist and
author or coauthor of several essays on the animal question including Ai
confini dell’umano. Gli animali e la morte (ombre corte 2010); I margini
dei diritti animali (Ortica 2011); Natura infranta (Ortica 2013); Crimini
in tempo di pace. La questione animale e l’ideologia del dominio (Elèuthera
2013); Penne e pellicole. Gli animali, la letteratura e il cinema (Mimesis
2014); Sento dunque sogno (Ortica 2016); Altre specie di politica (Mimesis
2016); L’invenzione della specie. Sovvertire la norma, divenire mostri (ombre
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

corte 2016); Questioni di specie (Elèuthera 2017); and Genocidi animali

(Mimesis 2018). He co-edited Corpi che non contano. Judith Butler e gli-
animali (Mimesis 2015), the monographic issue of Aut Aut (n. 380,
December 2018) entitled Mostri e altri animali, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s La
sofferenza è animale (Mimesis 2019). He also translated several works of
Charles Patterson, Chris De Rose, Tom Regan, Jim Mason, Ralph
R. Acampora, Matthew Calarco, and Rasmus R. Simonsen. Massimo Filippi
is a founder of the Oltre la specie association and scientific director of
Liberazioni. Rivista di critica antispecista and collaborates regularly with Il
Corriere della Sera, il manifesto, and alfabeta2. In 2020 his new book with
Enrico Monacelli will appear: Divenire invertebrato. Dalla Grande Scimmia
all’antispecismo viscido (ombre corte).
Federica Giardini teaches Political Philosophy at the University Roma
Tre (Rome). She is the director of the Master’s program in “Gender
Studies and Policies” and has co-founded the Master’s program in
“Environmental Humanities.” As the general coordinator of the IAPh
Italia Research Center, she is supervising the EcoPol/Political Economics-­
Ecology Program. She has been working on the relational body confront-
ing feminist difference thought, Husserlian phenomenology and Lacanian
psychoanalysis (Relazioni. Differenza sessuale e fenomenologia, 2004);
on feminist genealogies; on commons; and on social reproduction.
Lately her research has been focusing on “cosmo-politics,” the tran-
sitional space blurring the boundaries between nature and politics
(Cosmopolitiche. Ripensare la politica a partire dal kosmos, 2013; I nomi
della crisi. Antropologia e politica, 2017).
Giovanni Leghissa is Associated Professor of Epistemology of the
Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Turin.
He graduated in Philosophy from the University of Trieste, and from the
same university, he holds a PhD in Philosophy. He was visiting professor
at the Institut für Philosophie of the University of Vienna and at the
Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany. His work focuses on
phenomenology, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis; postcolo-
nial, gender, and cultural studies; comparative philosophy; posthumanism;
epistemology of economics; and theory of organizations. At present his
main focus concerns a critique of the neoliberal model of rationality, as it
has been developed both by the School of Chicago and by the theory of
organizations. He has authored five books: L’evidenza impossibile. Saggio
sull’immaginazione in Husserl (1999); Il dio mortale. Ipotesi sulla religi-
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

osità moderna (2004); Il gioco dell’identità. Differenza, alterità, rappresen-

tazione (2005); Incorporare l’antico. Filologia classica e invenzione della
modernità (2007); Neoliberalismo. Un’introduzione critica (2012);
Postumani per scelta. Verso un’ecosofia dei collettivi (2015); and with
Giandomenica Becchio, The Origins of Neoliberalism (2017). He has co-
edited with Enrico Manera Filosofie del mito nel Novecento (2015). He
edited six collective volumes and special issues of journals, as well as the
Italian translation of works by Husserl, Derrida, Blumenberg, Hall, de
Certeau, Overbeck, and Tempels. He is member of the editorial board of
the journal Aut Aut and director of the online journal Philosophy Kitchen.
Rivista di filosofia contemporanea.
Giorgio Losi is a graduate student and assistant instructor at Indiana
University Bloomington. His interests lie in critical animal studies, Italian
literature, and cinema. Since 2013 Giorgio has been an activist with the
Animal Liberation Group “Oltre la Specie,” and he is part of the
editorial board of Liberazioni – Rivista di critica antispecista. In 2016
he got a master’s degree in Classics, with a thesis on Aristotle’s bio-
logical and political works. In 2018 he taught a class entitled
“Crossing Animal Borders: Animal Issues in the Italian and
International Debate” at IU Bloomington.
Roberto Marchesini is the director of SIUA (School of Human-Animal
Interaction) and of the Centro Studi Filosofia Postumanista (Center for
the Study of Posthumanist Philosophy), both based in Bologna, Italy. He
has been a prominent voice in the development of zooanthropology and
posthumanism in Italy and teaches human-animal interactions as dia-
logues between minded interlocutors in courses around the country.
He has written or co-written more than 30 books and 100 scientific
essays. Among his main publications for the English-speaking audi-
ence are Over the Human. Post-humanism and the Concept of Animal
Epiphany (2017); The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini (col-
lected essays edited by Jeffrey Bussolini, Brett Buchanan, and
Matthew Chrulew, 2017); and Beyond Humanism (2018). He runs an
ethology blog on the major Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera,
and he is also member of the following scientific and editorial boards:
Minding Animals International, the World Phenomenology Institute, and
the book series Numanities (Springer).
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Alma Massaro received a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Genoa

with a dissertation devoted to the study of Christian animal ethics in
eighteenth-­century England. She now teaches History and Philosophy in
different high schools in Genoa. Her research interests range from animal
ethics to food ethics and from moral philosophy to veterinary ethics. Her
publications include two single-authored books, I diritti degli animali.
Una riflessione cristiana (2018) and Alle origini dei diritti degli animali. Il
dibattito sull’etica animale nella cultura inglese del XVIII secolo (forthcom-
ing), the edited book L’anima del cibo. Percorsi fra emozioni e coscienza
(2014) and the edited issue Animal Mundi. Le grandi religioni e gli ani-
mali of the journal Animal Studies (issue 13, 2015), and a number of
articles and book chapters. She translated into Italian the books Why We
Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy (2012) and Concern for
Animals by Deborah Jones (2013). She is also president of the Centro
Studi Cristiani Vegetariani (CSCV).
Marco Maurizi collaborates with the chair of Theoretical Philosophy at
the University of Tor Vergata in Rome. From 2007 to 2014, he was teach-
ing assistant at the University of Bergamo (Theoretical Philosophy,
Epistemology of Social Sciences, Social Philosophy) and at the
University of Tor Vergata (Institutions of Philosophy, Philosophy of
Religions, Philosophical Hermeneutics). In 2014 he won a scholar-
ship from the University of Bergamo to research on “The question of
animality in Adorno, Derrida and Heidegger.” His research interests
lie in the field of philosophy of history from the perspective of critical
theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse), Marxism (Marx, Lukács,
Žižek), and dialectical philosophy (Cusanus and Hegel), with a focus
on the nature/culture problem and its relevance for the definition of
the status of non-human animals in the contemporary bioethical dis-
course. He was a member of the editorial board of the journals
Liberazioni and Animal Studies. His publications include Adorno e il
tempo del non-identico (2004); Al di là della Natura: glia nimali, il capi-
tale e la libertà (2012); Cos’è l’antispecismo politico (2012); The Dialectical
Animal: Nature and Philosophy of History in Adorno, Horkheimer and
Marcuse (2012); Chimere e passaggi. Cinque attraversamenti del pensiero
di Adorno (2015); Altra specie di politica (with Michael Hardt and
Massimo Filippi, 2016); and Quanto lucente la tua inesistenza. L’Ottobre,
il Sessantotto e il socialismo che viene (2018).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Diego Rossello holds an MA and PhD in Political Science from

Northwestern University (specialization in political theory) and is an asso-
ciate professor at the Department of Philosophy, Adolfo Ibáñez University,
in Santiago, Chile. Former editor of Revista de Ciencia Política
(2012–2016) and current co-editor of Economía y Política, his work
focuses on the intersection between political theory and the critical
humanities, with emphasis on early modern political thought and
contemporary critical political theory. He has been a Fellow of the
Paris Program in Critical Theory (Northwestern) and of the Law and
Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop (Columbia). His work has
appeared in journals such as Ideas y Valores, Society & Animals, Philosophy
Today, New Literary History, Contemporary Political Theory, and Political
Theory, among others. He is finishing his book project, entitled
Political Theory at the Limits of the Human: Sovereignty, Animality, Rights.
Matías Saidel holds a PhD in Theoretical and Political Philosophy
(2011) from the Italian Institute of Human Sciences, with a thesis on the
ontological and impolitical perspectives on the common developed by
Nancy, Agamben, and Esposito. He works as a researcher at the Argentine
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and the
Catholic University of Santa Fe (Argentina) and as Tenured Professor of
Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Work of the National University
of Entre Ríos, Argentina. He has also taught postgraduate seminars on the
Common and on Neoliberal Capitalism. He has been visiting PhD student
at Cornell University (2010) and postdoctoral researcher at Complutense
University (Madrid, Spain, 2018). He was also a Fellow of the Summer
School in Global Studies and Critical Theory (Bologna, Italy, 2017). In
the last few years he has done research on the common and biopolitics in
contemporary thought. His work has appeared in journals such as Revista
de Estudios Sociales, Res Publica. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas,
Isegoría, Temas y Debates, Las torres de Lucca, Fragmentos de Filosofía,
Ecopolitica, Eikasia. Revista de Filosofía, Soft Power, and TRANS/FORM/
AÇÃO, among others. He was co-editor of Roberto Esposito: dall’impolitico
all’impersonale. Conversazioni filosofiche and has also published book chap-
ters on Agamben, Nancy, Esposito, and neoliberal capitalism.
Carlo Salzani is Gastwissenschaftler at the Messerli Research Institute of
the University of Vienna, Austria. He has widely published, both in Italian
and English, on Benjamin, Musil, Kafka, and Agamben—and also on the
animal question. His research interests presently focus on animal ethics,
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

posthumanism, and biopolitics. His publications include the single

authored books Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of
Commonality (2009); Crisi e possibilità: Robert Musil e il tramonto
dell’Occidente (2010); and Introduzione a Giorgio Agamben (2013) and
the edited collections Philosophy and Kafka (2013, with Brendan Moran),
Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben
(2015, with Brendan Moran), Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage (2017,
with Adam Kotsko), and Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (2018, with
Kristof Vanhoutte).
Valentina Sonzogni is an art and architecture historian. She obtained
her PhD at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and is pres-
ently director of the Archivio Piero Dorazio in Milan. She has worked in
several institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art at the
Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli-Turin; the Kiesler Foundation, Vienna; and the
Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Her articles have appeared in
various journals and books, and she has held conferences at interna-
tional universities. She is the co-founder and co-director, with
Leonardo Caffo, of the animal studies journal Animot. L’altra filosofia.
With Caffo she has published the book An Art for the Other: The
Animal in Philosophy and Art (2012).
 List of Figures

Fig. 14.1 Diego Perrone, Vicino a Torino muore un cane vecchio (Near
Turin an Old Dog Is Dying), 2003, still from computer
animation (length 5 min and 20 sec). (Courtesy Massimo De
Carlo)290
Fig. 14.2 Tiziana Pers, Art History Vucciria, 2018. (Photo by Umberto
Santoro, color print on Hahnemühle paper. Courtesy aA29
project room) 296
Fig. 14.3 Tiziana Pers, Art History Vucciria, 2018. (Photo by Umberto
Santoro, color print on Hahnemühle paper. Courtesy aA29
project room) 296

xvii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Italian Animal—A

Heterodox Tradition

Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani

1   Little History of a Belatedness

A few years ago, John Simons asserted the superiority of the Anglo-­
American approach to the animal question, claiming that “most wealthy
western societies outside the Anglo-American nexus have not developed
similar consciousness” and singling out Spain and Italy as examples of
attitudes to animals “long conditioned by the Roman Catholic Church
following the extremely animal-hostile theology of Thomas Aquinas”
(2002: 11). Simons’ thesis is accompanied by stereotypical statements
bordering the ridiculous, such as “it is, I believe, true that no woman in
France has ever won a case for sexual harassment at work,” or “it is clear
that health consciousness is far more a matter of public debate in the
Anglo-American sphere than it is more generally. The issue of tobacco
smoking is the best example here, but a concern with dietary matters also

F. Cimatti
University of Calabria, Arcavacata di Rende, Italy
C. Salzani (*)
Messerli Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

© The Author(s) 2020 1

F. Cimatti, C. Salzani (eds.), Animality in Contemporary Italian
Philosophy, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9_1
2 F. CIMATTI AND C. SALZANI

stands out” (2002: 5, 11). However, and despite the justified remonstra-
tions of Damiano Benvegnù (2016: 42), from a purely historical point of
view, this thesis is not entirely false: on the one hand, the precedence and
primacy of British animal protection movements and associations in mod-
ern history is indisputable; on the other, these movements also established
a sort of philosophical “orthodoxy,” which has marked for a long time the
history of animal advocacy—even in the sexist, chain-smoking countries of
Southern Europe. Simons’ thesis, moreover, reflects a long-standing bias,
and in order to dispute it, one needs more than outraged and righteous
protests.1
A cursory look at the history of animal protection in Italy in a sense
even confirms Simons’ prejudices. Giulia Guazzaloca has thoroughly
researched this history and repeats Simons’ argument that a deeply rooted
Catholic, anthropocentric, and creationist tradition played against the ani-
mal protection cause—together with the persistence of a predominantly
peasant society, economic backwardness, widespread illiteracy, and the
proud defense of local traditions (2018: 45–46 and passim).2 All of this
reflected abroad into the image of a country essentially disrespectful of
animal welfare, a bias which has evidently persisted to these days. Moreover,
Guazzaloca repeatedly insists that “it was very often thanks to British
noblemen and noblewomen that an animal-friendly sensibility was brought
to Italy” and that Italian animal protection societies “for a long time ben-
efited from the financial and organizational support of foreigners” (2018:
17–18). The foremost example is the foundation of the Società torinese
per la protezione degli animali (Turinese Animal Welfare Society, later to
become the Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali—ENPA), whence cus-
tomarily the history of animal protection in Italy is said to begin: the
Society was created on April 1, 1871, by the physician Timoteo Riboli at
the instigation of national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi and of Lady Anna
Winter, Countess of Sutherland, thanks to whom it established a fruitful
relationship with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, and in 1897 even received the honorary patronage of Queen
Victoria. And this was not an isolated case: the analogous Roman Society
was founded in 1874 by Terenzio Mamiani and Lady Paget, wife of the
British ambassador and vice-president of the London Vegetarian Society;
the Neapolitan Society was created in 1891 at the initiative of Elizabeth
Mackworth-Praed; and even much later, in 1952, the Società vegetariana
italiana (Italian Vegetarian Society) was founded in Perugia by Aldo
Capitini and the British citizen Emma Thomas (Guazzaloca 2018: 18–20,
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE ITALIAN ANIMAL—A HETERODOX TRADITION 3

110). The essential and enduring involvement of British gentry had the
effect that animal protection was long perceived in Italy as a foreign phe-
nomenon, supported mainly by bourgeois and liberal elites—and to some
extent this holds even today (Guazzaloca 2018: 61).
Guazzaloca argues however that, despite this little delay (the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in Great
Britain in 1824 and the Société Protectrice des Animaux in France in
1845), the Italian animal protection movements basically followed a
development similar to that of their Anglo-American counterparts. If the
animal cause was highjacked by official propaganda during the Fascist era
(not, however, to the extent of the German case), the economic boom of
the postwar years brought both the country and animal advocacy on a par
with the other “civilized” countries. On a philosophical level, animal
advocacy remained obviously a fringe phenomenon, but also presented
some emblematic figures: for example, Piero Martinetti (1872–1943), an
anti-Catholic and antifascist, better remembered for being one of the very
few academics who, in 1931, refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the
Fascist Party. The same did (or rather didn’t) also Aldo Capitini
(1899–1968), like Martinetti anti-Catholic and an advocate of vegetarian-
ism and a major figure in Italy’s postwar nonviolent movement. As Luisella
Battaglia argues in her contribution to this volume, though perhaps mar-
ginal figures, Capitini (and Martinetti) laid the groundwork for what will
later become the Italian philosophical reflection in animal ethics.
The emancipative unrest of the late 1960s and 1970s resulted, in Italy
just as in all other Western societies, in the flourishing of many “libera-
tion” movements, among which also appeared a galaxy of animal protec-
tion groups (mostly directed against vivisection). If Peter Singer’s Animal
Liberation (1975) was translated into Italian only in the late 1980s,3 the
antivivisection pamphlet Imperatrice Nuda (Naked Empress, initially trans-
lated into English as Slaughter of the Innocent) by the Italian-Swiss activist
Hans Ruesch was published in 1976 with great national and international
impact, and in 1982 the architect and cofounder of the LAV (Anti-­
Vivisection League), Alberto Pontillo, even coined a new term, “animal-
ismo” (today the most used in animal advocacy discourses), to identify a
new, rational rather than merely compassionate and emotional way of
relating to the animal question (cf. Guazzaloca 2018: 124).4
The delay in the translation of Singer’s founding text seems therefore
to reflect again the general (albeit slight) delay of Italian thought in
absorbing, and conforming to, the Anglo-American “orthodoxy.” The
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genuine gravity, which, no doubt, formed the basis of the prevailing
odd rumors; and after their departure the party of officials decided
that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative.

So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious

conference in Mr. Ward's office, after which the utterly bewildered
father summoned Dr. Willett in a kind of helpless resignation. Willett
looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques,
and compared them in his mind with the penmanship of that last
frantic note. Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet
there was something damnably familiar about the new writing. It
had crabbed and archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and
seemed to result from a type of stroke utterly different from that
which the youth had always used. It was strange—but where had he
seen it before? On the whole, it was obvious that Charles was
insane. Of that there could be no doubt. And since it appeared
unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with
the outside world much longer, something must quickly be done
toward his oversight and possible cure. It was then that the alienists
were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence and Dr. Lyman of
Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave the most exhaustive
possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in the now
unused library of their young patient, examining what books and
papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of his
habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and examining the
meaningless note to Willett, they all agreed that Charles Ward's
studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary
intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his more
intimate volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they
could do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett
now reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this
time that he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen
Charles find the Curwen documents, and that he collated the
incidents of the destroyed newspaper items, looking up the latter at
the Journal office.
On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman and
Waite, accompanied by Mr. Ward, paid the youth their momentous
call; making no concealment of their object and questioning the now
acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness. Charles, though he
was ordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent
of strange and noxious laboratory odors when he did finally make his
agitated appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject; and
admitted freely that his memory and balance had suffered somewhat
from close application to abstruse studies. He offered no resistance
when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed,
indeed, to display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere
memory. His conduct would have sent his interviewers away in
bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of his speech and
the unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his
consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the
normal. Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors
than he had formerly said to his family and to Dr. Willett, and his
frantic note of the previous month he dismissed as mere nerves and
hysteria. He insisted that the shadowy bungalow possessed no
library or laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in
explaining the absence from the house of such odors as now
saturated all his clothing. Neighborhood gossip he attributed to
nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiosity. Of
the whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did not feel at liberty to
speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the bearded and
spectacled man would return when needed. In paying off the stolid
Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in closing the
bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets, Ward
shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to
pause as though listening for something very faint. He was
apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if his
removal were the merest transient incident which would cause the
least trouble if facilitated and disposed of once and for all. It was
clear that he trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of
absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into which
his twisted memory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive
and eccentric behavior had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was
not to be told of the change; his father supplying typed notes in his
name. Ward was taken to the restfully and picturesquely situated
private hospital maintained by Dr. Waite on Conanicut Island in the
bay, and subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the
physicians connected with the case. It was then that the physical
oddities were noticed; the slackened metabolism, the altered skin,
and the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett was the most
perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended Ward all his
life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his
physical disorganization. Even the familiar olive-mark on his hip was
gone, while on his chest was a great black mole or cicatrice which
had never been there before, and which made Willett wonder
whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the "witch
markings" reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnal
meetings in wild and lonely places. The doctor could not keep his
mind off a certain transcribed witch-trial record from Salem which
Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and which
read: "Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget
S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P.,
Mehitable C., and Deborah B." Ward's face, too, troubled him
horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified.
Above the young man's right eye was something which he had never
previously noticed—a small scar or pit precisely like that in the
crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting
some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a
certain stage of their occult careers.
While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital, a
very strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to
Dr. Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered delivered at the family home.
Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since any
communications of a vital nature would probably have been
exchanged by messenger; but in the latter part of March there did
come a letter from Prague for Dr. Allen which gave both the doctor
and the father deep thought. It was in a very crabbed and archaic
hand; and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed
almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of
young Ward himself. It read:

Kleinstrasse 11,
Altstadt, Prague,
11th Feby. 1928.
Brother in Almousin-Metraton!—
I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Salts I sent
you. It was wrong, and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been
chang'd when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often so, as you
must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye King's Chapell
ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde Bury'g Point in 1690,
that was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75 yeares
gone, from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in
1924. As I told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you can
not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond.
Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be
sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have. Stones are all
chang'd now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never sure till you
question. I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble with the
Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass'd from Hungary to
Roumania, and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel weren't so fulle
of What we Knowe. But of this he hath doubtless writ you. In my
next Send'g there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from ye East
that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget not I am desirous of
B. F. if you can possibly get him for me. You know G. in Philadelphia
better than I. Have him up firste if you will, but doe not use him soe
hard he will be Difficult, for I must speake to him in ye Ende.

Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin

Simon O.
To Mr. J. C. in
Providence.
Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent
bit of unrelieved insanity. Only by degrees did they absorb what it
seemed to imply. So the absent Dr. Allen, and not Charles Ward, had
come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet? That must explain the
wild reference and denunciation in the youth's last frantic letter. And
what of this addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as
"Mr. J. C.?" There was no escaping the inference, but there are limits
to possible monstrosity. Who was "Simon O."; the old man Ward had
visited in Prague four years previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries
behind there had been another Simon O.—Simon Orne, alias
Jedediah, of Salem, who vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar
handwriting Dr. Willett now unmistakably recognized from the
photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which Charles had once
shewn him. What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and
contraventions of nature, had come back after a century and a half
to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes?
The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or
think, went to see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as
delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, and the Prague visit, and
about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem. To
all these inquiries the youth was politely non-committal, merely
barking in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr. Allen to have a
remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and
that any correspondent that the bearded man might have in Prague
would probably be similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr.
Willett realized to their chagrin that they had really been the ones
under catechism; and that without imparting anything vital himself,
the confined youth had adroitly pumped them of everything the
Prague letter had contained.
Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much
importance to the strange correspondence of young Ward's
companion; for they knew the tendency of kindred eccentrics and
monomaniacs to band together, and believed that Charles or Allen
had merely unearthed an expatriated counterpart—perhaps one who
had seen Orne's handwriting and copied it in an attempt to pose as
the bygone character's reincarnation. Allen himself was perhaps a
similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him
as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen. Such things had been known
before, and on the same basis the hard-headed doctors disposed of
Willett's growing disquiet about Charles Ward's present handwriting,
as studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by various
ruses. Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at last, and
that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of old
Joseph Curwen himself; but this the other physicians regarded as a
phase of imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort,
and refused to grant it any importance either favorable or
unfavorable. Recognizing this prosaic attitude in his colleagues,
Willett advised Mr. Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived
for Dr. Allen on the second of April from Rakus, Transylvania, in a
handwriting so intensely and fundamentally like that of the
Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician paused in awe
before breaking the seal. This read as follows:

Castle Ferenczy,
7 March 1928.

Dear C.—
Hadd a Squd of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say.
Must digg deeper and have less Hearde. These Roumanians plague
one damnably, being officious and particular where you cou'd buy a
Magyar off with a Drinke and food. Last Monthe M. got me ye
sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where He whome
I call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What
was therein inhum'd. It will go to S. O. in Prague directly, and thence
to you. It is stubborn but you know ye Way with Such. You shew
Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was no Neede
to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off their Heades, and it made
much to be founde in case of Trouble, as you too welle know. You
can now move and Worke elsewhere with no Kill'g Trouble if nedful,
though I hope no Thing will soon force you to so Bothersome a
Course. I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside;
for there was ever a Mortall Peril in it, and you are sensible what it
did when you asked Protection of One not dispos'd to give it. You
excel me in gett'g ye formulae so another may saye them with
Success, but Borellus fancy'd it wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes
were hadd. Does ye Boy use 'em often? I regret that he growes
squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when I hadde him here nigh fiften
Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him. You
can't saye him down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon
such as ye other Formula hath call'd up from Saltes; but you still
have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves are not harde
to digg, nor Acids loth to burne. O. sayes you have promis'd him B.
F. I must have him after. B. goes to you soone, and may he give you
what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis. Imploy care in
what you calle up, and beware of ye Boy. It will be ripe in a yeare's
time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then there are no
Boundes to what shal be oures. Have Confidence in what I saye, for
you knowe O. and I have hadd these 150 yeares more than you to
consulte these Matters in.

Nephreu—Ka nai Hadoh

Edw: H.
For J. Curwen, Esq.
Providence.
But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the
alienists, they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves. No
amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the
strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom Charles' frantic
letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace, was in close and
sinister correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom Ward
had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or
avatars of Curwen's old Salem colleagues; that he was regarding
himself as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he
entertained—or was at least advised to entertain—murderous
designs against a "boy" who could scarcely be other than Charles
Ward. There was organized horror afoot; and no matter who had
started it, the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it.
Therefore, thanking Heaven that Charles was now safe in the
hospital, Mr. Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to learn all
they could of the cryptic bearded doctor; finding whence he had
come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possible discovering
his current whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the
bungalow keys which Charles had yielded up, he urged them to
explore Allen's vacant room which had been identified when the
patient's belongings had been packed; obtaining what clues they
could from any effects he might have left about. Mr. Ward talked
with the detectives in his son's old library, and they felt a marked
relief when they left it at last; for there seemed to hover about the
place a vague aura of evil. Perhaps it was what they had heard of
the infamous old wizard whose picture had once stared from the
paneled overmantel, and perhaps it was something different and
irrelevant; but in any case they all half-sensed an intangible miasma
which centered in that carven vestige of an older dwelling and which
at times almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation.
 5. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm
And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its
indelible mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has
added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was even then
far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had
come to an agreement with him on several points which both felt the
alienists would ridicule. There was, they conceded, a terrible
movement alive in the world, whose direct connection with a
necromancy even older than the Salem witchcraft could not be
doubted. That at least two living men—and one other of whom they
dared not think—were in absolute possession of minds or
personalities which had functioned as early as 1690 or before was
likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of all known
natural laws. What these horrible creatures—and Charles Ward as
well—were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters
and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in
upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages,
including those of the world's wisest and greatest men, in the hope of
recovering from bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and
lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffic was going on among these nightmare ghouls,
whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness
of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this
centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond
anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man
or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive,
either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently
achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they
gathered together. There had, it seems, been some truth in
chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the
most antique remains certain "Essential Saltes" from which the shade
of a long-dead living thing might be raised up. There was a formula
for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down; and it had
now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully. One must
be careful about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not
always accurate.
Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to
conclusion. Things—presences or voices of some sort—could be
drawn down from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in
this process also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitably
evoked many forbidden things, and as for Charles—what might one
think of him? What forces "outside the spheres" had reached him
from Joseph Curwen's day and turned his mind on forgotten things?
He had been led to find certain directions, and he had used them. He
had talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the
creature in the mountains of Transylvania. And he must have found
the grave of Joseph Curwen at last. That newspaper item and what
his mother had heard in the night were too significant to overlook.
Then he had summoned something, and it must have come. That
mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those different tones in the
locked attic laboratory. What were they like, with their depth and
hollowness? Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the
dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass? Yes, that was what
Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talk with the man—if
man it were—over the telephone!
What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence,
had come to answer Charles Ward's secret rites behind that locked
door? Those voices heard in argument—"must have it red for three
months"—Good God! Was not that just before the vampirism broke
out? The rifling of Ezra Weeden's ancient grave, and the cries later at
Pawtuxet—whose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered
the shunned seat of elder blasphemies? And then the bungalow and
the bearded stranger, and the gossip, and the fear. The final madness
of Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to explain, but
they did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth
again and was following its ancient morbidities. Was demoniac
possession in truth a possibility? Allen had something to do with it,
and the detectives must find out more about one whose existence
menaced the young man's life. In the meantime, since the existence
of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually beyond
dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward,
conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during
their final conference to undertake a joint secret exploration of
unparalleled thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the bungalow on
the following morning with valises and with certain tools and
accessories suited to architectural search and underground
exploration.

The morning of April sixth dawned clear, and both explorers were at
the bungalow by ten o'clock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and
cursory survey were made. From the disordered condition of Dr.
Allen's room it was obvious that the detectives had been there
before, and the later searchers hoped that they had found some clue
which might prove of value. Of course the main business lay in the
cellar; so thither they descended without much delay, again making
the circuit which each had vainly made before in the presence of the
mad young owner. For a time everything seemed baffling, each inch
of the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an
aspect that the thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be
entertained. Willett reflected that since the original cellar was dug
without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, the beginning of the
passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward
and his associates, where they had probed for the ancient vaults
whose rumor could have reached them by no wholesome means.
The doctor tried to put himself in Charles' place and see how a delver
would be likely to start, but could not gain much inspiration from this
method. Then he decided on elimination as a policy, and went
carefully over the whole subterranean surface both vertical and
horizontal, trying to account for every inch separately. He was soon
substantially narrowed down, and at last had nothing left but the
small platform before the washtubs, which he had tried once before
in vain. Now experimenting in every possible way, and exerting a
double strength, he finally found that the top did indeed turn and
slide horizontally on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete
surface with an iron man-hole, to which Mr. Ward at once rushed with
excited zeal. The cover was not hard to lift, and the father had quite
removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his aspect. He was
swaying and nodding dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air which
swept up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognized
ample cause.
In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor
above and was reviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded
feebly, but it could be seen that the mephitic blast from the crypt had
in some way gravely sickened him. Wishing to take no chances,
Willett hastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon
dispatched the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests; after
which he produced an electric torch, covered his nostrils with a band
of sterile gauze, and descended once more to peer into the new-
found depths. The foul air had now slightly abated, and Willett was
able to send a beam of light down the Stygian hole. For about ten
feet, he saw, it was a sheer cylindrical drop with concrete walls and
an iron ladder; after which the hole appeared to strike a flight of old
stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat
southward of the present building.

Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old
Curwen legends kept him from climbing down alone into that
malodorous gulf. He could not help thinking of what Luke Fenner had
reported on that last monstrous night. Then duty asserted itself and
he made the plunge, carrying a great valise for the removal of
whatever papers might prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as
befitted one of his years, he descended the ladder and reached the
slimy steps below. This was ancient masonry, his torch told him; and
upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries.
Down, down, ran the steps; not spirally, but in three abrupt turns;
and with such narrowness that two men could have passed only with
difficulty. He had counted about thirty when a sound reached him
very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count any
more.
It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of
nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-
dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken
flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential
loathesomeness and soul-sickening overtones. Was it for this that
Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed? It was the
most shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued
from no determinate point as the doctor reached the bottom of the
steps and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls
surmounted by Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black
archways. The hall in which he stood was perhaps fourteen feet high
to the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its
pavement was of large chipped flagstones, and its walls and roof
were of dressed masonry. Its length he could not imagine, for it
stretched ahead indefinitely into the blackness. Of the archways,
some had doors of the old six-paneled colonial type, whilst others
had none.
Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett
began to explore these archways one by one; finding beyond them
rooms with groined stone ceilings, each of medium size and
apparently of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the upper
courses of whose chimneys would have formed an interesting study
in engineering. Never before or since had he seen such instruments
or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand
through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half, in
many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders. For many
of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must
have represented the earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph
Curwen's experimentation. Finally there came a room of obvious
modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There were oil heaters,
bookshelves and tables, chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled high
with papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness.
Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several places; and finding
a match safe handy, Willett lighted such as were ready for use.
In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less
than the latest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the
doctor had seen many before, and a good part of the furniture had
plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was a
piece well known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became so
great that he half forgot the noisomeness and the wailing, both of
which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps.
His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize any
papers which might seem of vital importance; especially those
portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind the
picture in Olney Court. As he searched he perceived how stupendous
a task the final unraveling would be; for file on file was stuffed with
papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that months
or even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and
editing. Once he found large packets of letters with Prague and
Rakus postmarks, and in writing clearly recognizable as Orne's and
Hutchinson's; all of which he took with him as part of the bundle to
be removed in his valise.
At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home,
Willett found the batch of old Curwen papers; recognizing them from
the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted him so many years ago.
The youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had
been when first he found them, since all the titles recalled by the
workmen were present except the papers addressed to Orne and
Hutchinson, and the cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot in
his valise and continued his examination of the files. Since young
Ward's immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake, the
closest searching was done among the most obviously recent matter;
and in this abundance of contemporary manuscript one very baffling
oddity was noted. That oddity was the slight amount in Charles'
normal writing, which indeed included nothing more recent than two
months before. On the other hand, there were literally reams of
symbols and formulae, historical notes and philosophical comment, in
a crabbed penmanship absolutely identical with the ancient script of
Joseph Curwen, though of undeniably modern dating. Plainly, a part
of the latter-day program had been a sedulous imitation of the old
wizard's writing, which Charles seemed to have carried to a
marvelous state of perfection. Of any third hand which might have
been Allen's there was not a trace. If he had indeed come to be the
leader, he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis.
In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae,
recurred so often that Willett had it by heart before he had half
finished his quest. It consisted of two parallel columns, the left-hand
one surmounted by the archaic symbol called "Dragon's Head" and
used in almanacs to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand
one headed by the corresponding sign of "Dragon's Tail" or
descending node. The appearance of the whole was something like
this, and almost unconsciously the doctor realized that the second
half was no more than the first written syllabically backward with the
exception of the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-
Sothoth, which he had come to recognize under various spellings
from other things he had seen in connection with this horrible matter.
The formulae were as follows—exactly so, as Willett is abundantly
able to testify—and the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable
latent memory in his brain, which he recognized later when reviewing
the events of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year.
So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come
upon them, that before the doctor knew it he was repeating them
under his breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all the
papers he could digest to advantage for the present; hence resolved
to examine no more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en
masse for an ample and more systematic raid. He had still to find the
hidden laboratory, so leaving his valise in the lighted room he
emerged again into the black noisome corridor whose vaulting
echoed ceaselessly with that dull and hideous whine.
The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned or filled only with
crumbling boxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed
him deeply with the magnitude of Joseph Curwen's original
operations. He thought of the slaves and seamen who had
disappeared, of the graves which had been violated in every part of
the world, and of what that final raiding party must have seen; and
then he decided it was better not to think any more. Once a great
stone staircase mounted at his right, and he deduced that this must
have reached to one of the Curwen outbuildings—perhaps the
famous stone edifice with the high slitlike windows—provided the
steps he had descended had led from the steep-roofed farmhouse.
Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead, and the stench and
the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon a vast
open space, so great that his torchlight would not carry across it; and
as he advanced he encountered occasional stout pillars supporting
the arches of the roof.
After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths
of Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in
the center; and so curious were the carvings on that altar that he
approached to study them with his electric light. But when he saw
what they were he shrank away shuddering, and did not stop to
investigate the dark stains which discolored the upper surface and
had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, he found
the distant wall and traced it as it swept around in a gigantic circle
perforated by occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of
shallow cells with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains
fastened to the stone of the concave rear masonry. These cells were
empty, but still the horrible odor and the dismal moaning continued,
more insistent now than ever, and seemingly varied at times by a sort
of slippery thumping.

From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention
could no longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in
the great pillared hall than anywhere else, and carried a vague
impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world of
subterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps
leading further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the
stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular
intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in
no definite arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long
ladder carelessly flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough,
appeared to cling a particularly large amount of the frightful odor
which encompassed everything. As he walked slowly about, it
suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odor seemed
strongest directly above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be
crude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of horror.
Kneeling by one, he worked at it with his hands, and found that with
extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch the moaning
beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did
he persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnamable
now rose from below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid
back the slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of
gaping blackness.
If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate
abomination, Willett was destined to be disappointed; for amidst that
foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-faced top of a
cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid of
any ladder or other means of descent. As the light shone down, the
wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps; in conjunction
with which there came again that sound of blind, futile scrambling
and slippery thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even to
imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss; but in a
moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn
brink; lying at full length and holding the torch downward at arm's
length to see what might lie below. For a second he could distinguish
nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into
that half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished
frenzy; and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily
and frantically up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which
must have been from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor
where he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see
what manner of living creature might be immured there in the
darkness of that unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through
all the long month since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly
only one of a vast number prisoned in the kindred wells whose
pierced stone covers so thickly studded the floor of the great vaulted
cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their
cramped spaces; but must have crouched and whined and waited
and feebly leaped all those hideous weeks since their master had
abandoned them unheeded.
But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for
surgeon and veteran of the dissecting-room though he was, he has
not been the same since. It is hard to explain just how a single sight
of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and
change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain
outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts
frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible
hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind
the protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett
saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was
undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite's private
hospital. He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of
muscular power or nervous coordination, nor heeded the sound of
crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He
screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto
panic no acquaintance of his would ever have recognized, and though
he could not rise to his feet he crawled and rolled desperately away
over the damp pavement where dozens of Tartarean wells poured
forth their exhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane
cries. He tore his hands on the rough, loose stones, and many times
bruised his head against the frequent pillars, but still he kept on.
Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and
stench, and stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the
burst of yelping had subsided. He was drenched with perspiration and
without means of producing a light; stricken and unnerved in the
abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a memory he never
could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still lived, and from
one of the shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he had
seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the
thought that some obscure foothold might exist.

What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the
carvings on the hellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made
it in this form, for it was too palpably unfinished. The deficiencies
were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of proportion
could not be described. Willett consents only to say that this type of
thing must have represented entities which Ward called up from
imperfect salts, and which he kept for servile or ritualistic purposes. If
it had not had a certain significance, its image would not have been
carved on that damnable stone. It was not the worst thing depicted
on that stone—but Willett never opened the other pits. At the time,
the first connected idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from some
of the old Curwen data he had digested long before; a phrase used
by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to
the bygone sorcerer:
"Certainly, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest Awfullness in That which
H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a Part of."
Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there
came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumors anent the
burned and twisted thing found in the fields a week after the Curwen
raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of
that object; that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to
any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.
These words hummed in the doctor's mind as he rocked to and fro,
squatting on the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and
repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself; eventually trailing off into a
mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic "Waste Land" of Mr. T. S.
Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had
lately found in Ward's underground library: "Y'ai 'ng-'ngah, Yog-
Sothoth," and so on till the final underlined "Zhro." It seemed to
soothe him and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting
bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of
light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would not; but
he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or
reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library. After
awhile he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely far
away, and toward this he crawled in agonized caution on hands and
knees amidst the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he
collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble into the
abominable pit he had uncovered.
Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be
the steps leading to the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in
loathing. At another time he encountered the pierced slab he had
removed, and here his caution became almost pitiful. But he did not
come upon the dread aperture after all, nor did anything issue from
that aperture to detain him. What had been down there made no
sound nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had
not been good for it. Each time Willett's fingers felt a perforated slab
he trembled. His passage over it would sometimes increase the
groaning below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since
he moved very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow
ahead diminished perceptibly, and he realized that the various
candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by one. The
thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this
underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his
feet and run, which he could safely do now that he had passed the
open pit; for he knew that once the light failed his only hope of
rescue and survival would lie in whatever relief party Mr. Ward might
send after missing him for a sufficient period.
Presently, however, he emerged from the open space into the
narrower corridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a
door on his right. In a moment he had reached it and was standing
once more in young Ward's secret library, trembling with relief, and
watching the sputterings of that last lamp which had brought him to
safety.

In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from

an oil supply he had previously noticed, and when the room was
bright again he looked about to see if he might find a lantern for
further exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense
of grim purpose was still uppermost, and he was firmly determined to
leave no stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind
Charles Ward's bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose
the smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with
candles and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil, which
he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory
he might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean
altar and nameless covered wells. To traverse that space again would
require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it must be done.
Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near
the vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area, and
whose black mysterious archways would form the next goals of a
logical search.
So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and
anguished howling; turning down his lamp to avoid any distant
glimpse of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced
stone slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small
chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as store rooms; and
in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations of
various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales
of spare clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was
unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before. In another
room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, as if
gradual provisions were being made to equip a large body of men.
But what he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats which
occasionally appeared; these, and the sinister incrustations upon
them. He liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls
whose ruins retained such obnoxious deposits and around which
clung repellent odors perceptible above even the general
noisomeness of the crypt. When he had completed about half the
entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from
which he had come, and out of which many doors opened.
This he proceeded to investigate; and after entering three rooms of
medium size and of no significant contents, he came at last to a large
oblong apartment whose businesslike tanks and tables, furnaces and
modern instruments, occasional books and endless shelves of jars
and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of
Charles Ward—and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him.
After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr.
Willett examined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest
interest; noting from the relative quantities of various reagents on the
shelves that young Ward's dominant concern must have been with
some branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be
learned from the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-
looking dissecting table; so that the room was really rather a
disappointment. Among the books was a tattered old copy of Borellus
in black-letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had
underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good
Mr. Merritt at Curwen's farmhouse more than a century and a half
before. That older copy, of course, must have perished along with the
rest of Curwen's occult library in the final raid. Three archways
opened off the laboratory, and these the doctor proceeded to sample
in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to small
storerooms; but these he canvassed with care, remarking the piles of
coffins in various stages of damage and shuddering violently at two
or three of the few coffin-plates he could decipher. There was much
clothing also stored in these rooms, and several new and tightly-
nailed boxes which he did not stop to investigate. Most interesting of
all, perhaps, were some odd bits which he judged to be fragments of
old Joseph Curwen's laboratory appliances. These had suffered
damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still partly recognizable
as the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian period.

The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with
shelves and having in the center a table bearing two lamps. These
lamps Willett lighted, and in their brilliant glow studied the endless
shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper levels were
wholly vacant, but most of the space was filled with small odd-
looking leaden jars of two general types; one tall and without handles
like a Grecian lekythos or oil-jug, and the other with a single handle
and proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and
were covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief. In
a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with
great rigidity; all the lekythoi being on one side of the room with a
large wooden sign reading "Custodes" above them, and all the
Phalerons on the other, correspondingly labeled with a sign reading
"Materia." Each of the jars or jugs, except some on the upper shelves
that turned out to be vacant, bore a cardboard tag with a number
apparently referring to a catalogue; and Willett resolved to look for
the latter presently. For the moment, however, he was more
interested in the nature of the array as a whole; and experimentally
opened several of the lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view
to a rough generalization. The result was invariable. Both types of jar
contained a small quantity of a single kind of substance; a fine dusty
powder of very light weight and of many shades of dull neutral color.
To the colors which formed the only point of variation there was no
apparent method of disposal; and no distinction between what
occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the Phalerons. A bluish-
gray powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one, and any
one in a Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos. The
most individual feature about the powders was their non-
adhesiveness. Willett would pour one into his hand, and upon
returning it to its jug would find that no residue whatever remained
on his palm.
The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why
this battery of chemicals was separated so radically from those in
glass jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper. "Custodes,"
"Materia"; that was the Latin for "Guards" and "Material," respectively
—and then there came a flash of memory as to where he had seen
that word "Guards" before in connection with this dreadful mystery. It
was, of course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from
old Edward Hutchinson; and the phrase had read: "There was no
Neede to keep the Guards in shape and eat'g off their Heades, and it
made much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle
Knowe." What did this signify? But wait—was there not still another
reference to "guards" in this matter which he had failed wholly to
recall when reading the Hutchinson letter? Back in the old non-
secretive days Ward had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording
the spying of Smith and Weeden on the Curwen farm, and in that
dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations
overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the
earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden insisted, terrible colloquies
wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the guards of
those captives. Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar,
had "eaten their heads off," so that now Dr. Allen did not keep them
in shape. And if not in shape, how save as the "salts" to which it
appears this wizard band was engaged in reducing as many human
bodies or skeletons as they could?
So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of
unhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such
submission as to help when called up by some hellish incantation, in
the defense of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those
who were not so willing? Willett shuddered at the thought of what he
had been pouring in and out of his hands, and for a moment felt an
impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their
silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the
"Materia"—in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room.
Salts too—and if not the salts of "guards," then the salts of what?
God! Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the
titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from
crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck
and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some
still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles
had hinted in his frantic note, "all civilization, all natural law, perhaps
even the fate of the solar system and the universe?" And Marinus
Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands!
Then he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room, and
calmed himself enough to approach it and examine the crude sign
chiseled above. It was only a symbol, but it filled him with vague
spiritual dread; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn
it on paper and told him a few of the things it means in the dark
abyss of sleep. It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above
the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilight—and
Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its
powers. But a moment later he forgot the sign as he recognized a
new acrid odor in the stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather
than animal smell, and came clearly from the room beyond the door.
And it was, unmistakably, the same odor which had saturated Charles
Ward's clothing on the day the doctors had taken him away. So it was
here that the youth had been interrupted by the final summons? He
was wiser than old Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett,
boldly determined to penetrate every wonder and nightmare this
nether realm might contain, seized the small lamp and crossed the
threshold. A wave of nameless fright rolled out to meet him, but he
yielded to no whim and deferred to no intuition. There was nothing
alive here to harm him, and he would not be stayed in his piercing of
the eldritch cloud which engulfed his patient.

The room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture
save a table, a single chair, and two groups of curious machines with
clamps and wheels which Willett recognized after a moment as
medieval instruments of torture. On one side of the door stood a rack
of savage whips, above which were some shelves bearing empty
rows of shallow pedestaled cups of lead shaped like Grecian kylikes.
On the other side was the table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad
and pencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves
outside set down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste.
Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad to see what
notes young Ward might have been jotting down when interrupted;
but found nothing more intelligible than the following disjointed
fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light
on the case as a whole:
"B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.
"Saw olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt ye Way.
"Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.
"F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from
Outside."
As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw
that the wall opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing
appliances in the corners, was covered with pegs from which hung a
set of shapeless looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But
far more interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were
thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiseled in
the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of
carving; and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge
pentagram in the center, with a plain circle about three feet wide
halfway between this and each corner. In one of these four circles,
near where a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there
stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the shelves above the
whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron
jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This
was unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty; but the
explorer saw with a shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow
area, and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in this
sequestered cavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-greenish
efflorescent powder which must have belonged in the jug; and Willett
almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he
correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents of the
scene. The whips and the instruments of torture; the dust or salts
from the jug of "Materia," the two lekythoi from the "Custodes" shelf,
the robes, the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints
from letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and
suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of
Charles Ward—all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror
as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the
pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began
studying the formulae chiseled on the walls. From the stained and
incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in Joseph
Curwen's time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to
one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into
the history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognized as what Mrs.
Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year
before, and what an authority had told him was a very terrible
invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It
was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from
memory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the
forbidden pages of "Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was unmistakable,
and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik
sent a shudder of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt
so much of cosmic abomination just around the corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-
hand wall was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of
recognition as he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently
occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly
speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of "Dragon's Head"
and "Dragon's Tail" heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the
spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if
old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later
study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the
invocations in question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiseled
version with the one which still ran persistently in his head, and
found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorized began "Y'ai
'Ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth," this epigraph started out as "Aye, cngengah,
Yogge-Sothotha"; which to his mind would seriously interfere with the
syllabification of the second word.
Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy
disturbed him; and he found himself chanting the first of the
formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with
the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of
antique blasphemy rang his voice! its accents keyed to a droning
sing-song either through the spell of the past and the unknown, or
through the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits
whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance
through the stench and darkness.

But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very
outset of the chant? The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the
gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wall nearly faded from
sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odor which quite drowned
out the stench from the far-away wells; an odor like that he had
smelt before, yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He turned
from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and
saw that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous efflorescent
powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black
vapor of surprising volume and opacity. That powder—Great God! it
had come from the shelf of "Materia"—what was it doing now, and
what had started it? The formula he had been chanting—the first of
the pair—Dragon's Head, ascending node—Blessed Saviour, could it
be—
The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed
scraps from all he had seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of
Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. "I say to you againe, doe
not call up Any that you cannot put downe.... Have ye Wordes for
laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any
Doubte of Whom you have—Three Talkes with What was therein
inhum'd—" Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting
smoke?

Marinus Bicknell Willett has no hope that any part of his tale will be
believed except by certain sympathetic friends, hence has made no
attempt to tell it beyond his most intimate circle. Only a few outsiders
have ever heard it repeated, and of these the majority laugh and
remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised to
take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental
disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks
only a horrible truth. Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in
the bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home overcome and ill
at eleven o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the
doctor in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not
driven to the bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend
unconscious but unharmed on one of the beds upstairs? Willett had
been breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes slowly when Mr.
Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he
shuddered and screamed, crying out, "That beard—those eyes—God,
who are you?" A very strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-
shaven gentleman whom he had known from the latter's boyhood.
In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the
previous morning. Willett's clothing bore no disarrangement beyond
certain smudges and worn places at the knees, and only a faint acrid
odor reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day he
was taken to the hospital. The doctor's flashlight was missing, but his
valise was safely there, as empty as when he had brought it. Before