Cthulhu Mythos Downgrade

[Elizhaa]

From what I read, I think Ultima's and KingPing's points make more sense. I know this page also has additional quotes or evidence on the current accepted cosmology.

 

[KingPin0422]

We do, in fact, plan to change a lot of the lower-tiered profiles in part 2 (maybe with another part in-between since we found some more stuff that could potentially require a reevaluation of the verse), but let's talk about that when it comes.

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I am aware, however that does not mean dimensions are bound to the space time continuums.

If you mean that dimensions are not bound to individual space-time continua, then yes, that is literally what I just said. If you mean that dimensions are not bound to the multiverse as a whole, then... let's see how that holds up.

I can go ahead and say that since the Vacua work no different from the Gates, and the latter of which are called dimensioned and also make sense with the context, that indicates that the Vacua are dimensioned too. And for consistency of that interpretation I believe we already have an explanation that even you yourself acknowledged:

Uh... I'm gonna pass this over to Ultima. He can explain the problem with equating the vacua and the gates better than I could.

However, Instead of the 3 dimensional world, it would instead be outside the space time continuum itself, which contains an unknown number of dimensions.

Right.

I can’t understand what you are arguing here. Can you elaborate?

If the narrator is characterizing the process of their ascension as both "plunging" (going into a lower/deeper level, in this case) and "soaring" (rising into a higher area), then that suggests some level of aspatial shenanigans. One is used in the sense of going down, and the other means going up - you cannot go in opposite directions at the same time.

I think the context of that statement is clear in the argument itself, time became an illusion because they stopped aging. But I digress, the issue isn’t whether they went past space time or not. The issue is whether that would equate to being outside an infinite number of dimensions or not. Which based on what we have seen from the gates isn’t supported. I think we need more explicit evidence of these realms being beyond an infinite number of dimensions, which doesn’t appear anywhere to my knowledge.

First of all, you seem to have contradicted yourself by saying here that the vacua are indeed beyond space-time, when earlier in the same post, you implied that the "unbelievable elements of time and space" quote is valid evidence against them being beyond space-time. I may be misunderstanding you, but I couldn't help but to point this out.

Secondly, infinite dimensions are mentioned - in a quote that you yourself posted, no less:

“The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the BEING had heard. And now there poured from that limitless MIND a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shewn the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little gods of earth, with their petty, human interests and connexions—their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.”

As well as this:

Then the waves increased in strength, and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity.

Note that it specifies figures of space, i.e., it's referring to spatial dimensions. Coupled with the other quote I provided that mentions "indefinitely multiplied dimensions [...] within or outside the given space-time continuum," it should be reasonable to say that the infinite number of dimensions are indeed all part of the multiverse.

This entire sonnet from Fungi From Yuggoth pretty much also confirms that the Ultimate Gods are beyond all of these dimensions:

Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
“I am His Messenger,” the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master’s head.

Take note of the second part. This entire scene is an avatar of Nyarlathotep taking someone to the Ultimate Void, where they behold the dancing and music playing of the Ultimate Gods, and then said avatar punches Azathoth in the face. None of this could happen in a place where everything is unified into a static totality.

 

[Darksmash]

If the narrator is characterizing the process of their ascension as both "plunging" (going into a lower/deeper level, in this case) and "soaring" (rising into a higher area), then that suggests some level of aspatial shenanigans. One is used in the sense of going down, and the other means going up - you cannot go in opposite directions at the same time.

You are looking too much into it. Higher dimensions in Lovecraft are also called abysses. Plunging is the verb that suits going deeper into an abyss. At the same time they are also higher planes of existence, which utilizes soaring.

First of all, you seem to have contradicted yourself by saying here that the vacua are indeed beyond space-time, when earlier in the same post, you implied that the "unbelievable elements of time and space" quote is valid evidence against them being beyond space-time. I may be misunderstanding you, but I couldn't help but to point this out.

Ahh, I didn't respond to that quote because I didn't understand your point back then and thought it was related to the plunging stuff. I do think this will support the point I am about to bring up, so thanks for that.

Secondly, infinite dimensions are mentioned - in a quote that you yourself posted, no less:

I am aware of that. But the point is the revelation of these infinite dimensions was literally part of the Ultimate Mystery. And what I wanted was explicit proof of them falling below Vacua or Gates.

Note that it specifies figures of space, i.e., it's referring to spatial dimensions. Coupled with the other quote I provided that mentions "indefinitely multiplied dimensions [...] within or outside the given space-time continuum," it should be reasonable to say that the infinite number of dimensions are indeed all part of the multiverse.

This is where the main point comes up. Lovecraft tends to use descriptions like "Beyond space and time" or "Beyond dimensions" in a relative fashion, rather than an absolute one. The latter was already shown with the Gates.
For the former I can't recall an explicit mention of it, but it's makes a lot of sense in context of most stories.

For example:

Even now I absolutely refuse to believe what he implied about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organisation.

The cosmos of space and time was part of a bigger super cosmos, which possessed curves and angles(which are very consistently linked with dimensions in Lovecraft) and not only that but also material properties.

Your own quote can help us see the link with Vacua:

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments—inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told—for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space—things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence.

Their plunges explictly containing elements of time and space. We can also see it's link with higher Vacua archetyping the cosmos of the waking world, similar to the super cosmos we saw earlier.

As for the Ultimate Void stuff, it honestly feels a bit inconsistent. Because the fragmentary avatars of the Archetypes were explictly stated to exist to view the cosmos. Them having avatars in places qualitatively beyond all dimensions doesn't make sense in context of the story.

 

[Cropfist]

the name was due the outer gods? Really?

Outerverse is a Lovecraftian term.

 

[ShivaShakti]

Outerverse is a Lovecraftian term.

A bit off topic but this is actually a myth

The Ultimate Gods are never called "The Outer Gods", they're only called Ultimate Gods and Other Gods.

The only thing with the name "Outer" would be "Outer Void" or "Outer Extension"

 

[Ultima_Reality]

This wouldn’t exactly make sense with the context in TTGOTSK, where only the archetypes are stated to reside outside dimensions, and their fragmentary avatars only existing to view the “cosmos” from different angles, participating in change(Which I also highlighted in the OP). And the region beyond the Ultimate Gate which Carter went to was explicitly called dimensioned anyway, so this just means here the “Ultimate Gods” are likely referring to the Archetypes themselves.

Not really, since the Ultimate Void which Nyarlathotep took the narrator to is explicitly the version of it described often in stories outside of Through the Gates of the Silver Key, so much that Azathoth appears as a singular entity which Nyarlathotep directly interacts with, so them being their archetypal selves is unlikely.

And of course, there is also the trans dimensional quote, transdimensional literally being a synonym of higher dimensional stuff.

"Trans" obviously means "Beyond," "across," or "outside," so, given the multiple instances of the word "undimensioned" being utilized, it could be interpreted as a way to state that the Outer Extension is beyond dimensional space, too. So this piece of evidence is nowhere near as solid as you think it is. In fact, when you take it out of the tally, the descriptions that remain are:

For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath; and the glow of ’Umr at-Tawil’s quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.

And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the Forms could give—a terror from which he could not flee because it was connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realised in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.

While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses

As contrasted with:

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked with earth’s primal, aeon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.

I do not know what windings in the waste
Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,
But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
I had the book that told the hidden way
Across the void and through the space-hung screens
That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,
And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

At last the key was mine to those vague visions
Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood
Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth’s precisions,
Lurking as memories of infinitude.
The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,
The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.

In fact, the statement describing the Outer Extension as a "dimensional seething" is very clearly referring to what the last excerpt says: Form and position do not exist in that place, and can only be seen in vague hints when the reality itself chooses to manifest itself in the forms of symbols a human mind is capable of comprehending, so dimensional space itself "seething" would be an appropriate descriptor, and one which does not conflict with the text explicitly saying it is beyond dimensions entirely.

It wasn’t really suggested that it only lead to 4 dimensional space. They were said to lead to regions beyond the 3 known dimensions, and the regions mentioned in the story go upto even the Ultimate Void.

It was, yes. Throughout the story, Gilman's dreams alternate between images of the diseased witch whose house he started to live in and journeys through the aforementioned "twilight abysses," and early on, the narration clarifies that he eventually reached an intuitive understanding that said abysses were, in fact, the fourth dimension. Given that "twilight abysses" as a term remains constant in the story and refers to that location in specific, it's very clearly just a name for 4-dimensional space all-around.

In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.

The one in TTGOTSK can be different of course, since it leads outside the space time continuum itself. But it doesn’t need to have a different nature, since space time continuums are made up of dimensions too.

It does need to, yes. I've already shown that the First Gate is a construct that leads strictly to the Outer Extension and nowhere else, and you've already agreed that the "twilight abysses" refer to a different place altogether. So, as far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof is still on you to prove that they are connected or similar in nature to begin with, and, as it stands, you seem to be accepting that they're different things, in which case, there is no connection to be made.

...it doesn’t? How does multiple higher dimensions existing in a space time continuum mean that the space time continuum can hold any number of them? Space time itself is made up of dimensions. From how I see it, a single space time continuum in lovecraft consists of one time dimension and an unknown number of spatial dimensions.

Because it already construes dimensions as being properties of spacetime to begin with, which, then, certainly would not apply to realms that explicitly lay beyond these things in the first place, and I don't think it's very reasonable to assume that a dimensional space undergoes some shift in nature and suddenly becomes aspatial and atemporal when the number of dimensions is infinite. Though I have a feeling I might be strawmanning here.

He says that something would materialise in the Outer extension that would be visible to his own earthly eyes, which shows that the impressions he was forming of the Outer Extension were indeed generated by visual stimuli. And the descriptions were extremely specific to be something formed from an unrelated abstraction anyway.

That passage is out of context, and is referring not to the Outer Extension itself, but to a manifestation of the Ultimate Gate which the Ancient Ones created in order for Carter to pass into the Ultimate Void, more specifically by projecting their dreams into reality as Umr at-Tawil commanded them to do. To quote the excerpt that comes right after the one you quoted:

Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful Silver Key in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.
For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath; and the glow of ’Umr at-Tawil’s quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.
A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a thousandfold. The strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses, while about the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there hovered an air of the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far-off coast. But the moment of silence was broken—the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words.

And honestly I don’t get why you think Carter being unable to provide accurate descriptions of the space would mean they aren’t dimensioned, because earthly eyes are not meant to observe higher dimensional locations. It would give all ****** up kinds of visions. One of those dimensions being a temporal one is just an icing on the cake.

That's not what I am thinking or saying, no. You are arguing that the Outer Extension being described as having alien architectures and geometries within it is evidence that it is simply a higher-dimensional space, and I am arguing that this is not the case, since those geometries are explicitly just a product of Carter's imagination and not what the realm actually looks like. You've made a proposition, and I'm countering it, simple as that.

Their plunges explictly containing elements of time and space. We can also see it's link with higher Vacua archetyping the cosmos of the waking world, similar to the super cosmos we saw earlier.

"Elements" of space and time, yes, which does not indicate that space and time were existent in those regions, but just that they held some similarity to the things present in the physical world. The text itself describes the universe of dreams which Hypnos plunges into as "deeper than matter, time and space" in very generalized terms, too, and so it's very clear that it is referring to space and time as a whole.

I can go ahead and say that since the Vacua work no different from the Gates, and the latter of which are called dimensioned and also make sense with the context, that indicates that the Vacua are dimensioned too. And for consistency of that interpretation I believe we already have an explanation that even you yourself acknowledged:

That leads into the aforementioned issue I have with the current interpretation of the cosmology, yes. To be more specific, we currently act as if there are an infinite amount of Gates aligned hierarchically (First Gate, Second Gate, Third Gate, and so on until the Ultimate Gate), and use this passage from the story as evidence:

Randolph Carter’s advance through that Cyclopean bulk of abnormal masonry was like a dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From a great distance he felt triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness, and after that the rustling of great wings, and impressions of sound like the chirpings and murmurings of objects unknown on earth or in the solar system. Glancing backward, he saw not one gate alone, but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamoured Forms he strove not to remember.

And, as some of you may have noticed, not once is this "multiplicity of gates" stated to be arranged in an hierarchical manner. Furthermore, the Supreme Archetype itself states that Carter only passed through two Gates in his journey towards the absolute: Those being the first gate and the ultimate gate.

“Randolph Carter,” IT seemed to say, “MY manifestations on your planet’s extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kled, and to reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty toward a single red star in a firmament alien to your earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish loftier things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of secrets which lies behind all scenes and dreams.

Umr at-Tawil and the Ancient Ones are also directly stated to reside just past the First Gate:

The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing—the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where ’Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones.

Like I said above, given that the First Gate is implied to have a version of it residing in every world, which in turn, leads to a transdimensional extension of it, I'd say the "multiplicity of gates" is most likely referring to that: Variations of the First Gate, not intermediate barriers that stand between it and the Ultimate Gate.

So, yeah, the Gates aren't really an infinite hierarchy, and thus, I don't think they should be strictly equated to the Vacua which Hypnos passed through, and obviously not to the infinite dimensions described earlier in the story.

 

[Roachman40]

I agree with Ultima on this

 

[Grand_Saver_Ritsuka]

hey ultima, are you for or against the downgrade?

 

[Darksmash]

Not really, since the Ultimate Void which Nyarlathotep took the narrator to is explicitly the version of it described often in stories outside of Through the Gates of the Silver Key, so much that Azathoth appears as a singular entity which Nyarlathotep directly interacts with, so them being their archetypal selves is unlikely.

Then that means we would have to rethink the way we treat Archetypes and the Ultimate Gods. The location beyond the Ultimate Gate which Carter went to quite explictly had dimensions:

While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man.

This is perhaps another instance of lovecraft giving descriptions in a relative manner, and the Archetypes may not be as absolutely changeless as we thought.

"Trans" obviously means "Beyond," "across," or "outside," so, given the multiple instances of the word "undimensioned" being utilized, it could be interpreted as a way to state that the Outer Extension is beyond dimensional space, too. So this piece of evidence is nowhere near as solid as you think it is. In fact, when you take it out of the tally, the descriptions that remain are:

In a general context Transdimensional refers to unknown dimensions outside the 3 known ones. And given how it being called "Trans-dimensional extension" is quite the same in terms of context with it being called "dimensional extension", that seems to be the context lovecraft was going for yes.

As contrasted with:

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

I will just quote what I previously said about "undimensioned"

Treating usage of the word “undimensioned” as being anything different from a 0 dimensional point by default strays from the meaning of the word.

In fact, the usage of "Vast" indicates conception of size exists.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked with earth’s primal, aeon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.

He had no "stable" form or position by then. That is why his mind was filling the gaps.

In fact, the statement describing the Outer Extension as a "dimensional seething" is very clearly referring to what the last excerpt says: Form and position do not exist in that place, and can only be seen in vague hints when the reality itself chooses to manifest itself in the forms of symbols a human mind is capable of comprehending, so dimensional space itself "seething" would be an appropriate descriptor, and one which does not conflict with the text explicitly saying it is beyond dimensions entirely.

Yes, it was called a "seething" because... it was seething chaos

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

The adjective "dimensional" quite explictly tells us this seething was "dimensional". After which it also makes it clear that his mind was filling the gaps because "no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape" outside the dimensions known to man. And that place wasn't explictly stated to exist beyond all dimensions not even a single time. "Undimensioned" means the exact opposite of beyond dimensions.

Actually, if we are really gonna go that route

Carter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the Most Ancient One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal, taller than the rest, and at the centre of the oddly curved line (neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola) which they formed. This, he guessed, was the Guide’s own throne. Moving and rising in a manner hardly definable, Carter took his seat; and as he did so he saw that the Guide had likewise seated himself.

Conception of size exists in the Outer Extension.

Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something—some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere or apparent sphere of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of earth.

Conception of time intervals exists

For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath; and the glow of ’Umr at-Tawil’s quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.

Outer Extension implied to be physical

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilisation. There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered down from a sky of no assignable colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined Shapes.

Conceptions of designs, geometries, colours, light, directions, curves, shapes they all exist.

It was, yes. Throughout the story, Gilman's dreams alternate between images of the diseased witch whose house he started to live in and journeys through the aforementioned "twilight abysses," and early on, the narration clarifies that he eventually reached an intuitive understanding that said abysses were, in fact, the fourth dimension. Given that "twilight abysses" as a term remains constant in the story and refers to that location in specific, it's very clearly just a name for 4-dimensional space all-around.

The regions that the "Gates" led to were not said to be limited to the twilight abysses. And the story talks about even blacker and vaster abysses beyond the twilight abyss, eventually going upto the Ultimate Void itself:

There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.

Funnily, the underlined part also provides possible context for the "lack of forms" in the region beyond the first gate. Because of following alien curves and shapes outside what the normal mind can comprehend. Which is consistent with the explanation that can be derived from TTGOTSK itself:

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

Which contained "extensions of shapes" outside what any "mind of earth" can grasp.

It does need to, yes. I've already shown that the First Gate is a construct that leads strictly to the Outer Extension and nowhere else, and you've already agreed that the "twilight abysses" refer to a different place altogether. So, as far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof is still on you to prove that they are connected or similar in nature to begin with, and, as it stands, you seem to be accepting that they're different things, in which case, there is no connection to be made.

My argument wasn't related to arguing whether the two regions are the same or not, it was about the similarities between the two. TDITWH shows that "Gates" are like generic portals that lead to higher dimensions, and TTGOTSK utilises the notion of Gates as well. Whether the Gate the silver key unlocks has to specifically lead to the twilight abysses, doesn't matter. It's also consistent with both the Twilight Abysses and Outer Extension having geometries, shapes, colours etc and the Outer extension being called dimensioned.

Because it already construes dimensions as being properties of spacetime to begin with, which, then, certainly would not apply to realms that explicitly lay beyond these things in the first place, and I don't think it's very reasonable to assume that a dimensional space undergoes some shift in nature and suddenly becomes aspatial and atemporal when the number of dimensions is infinite. Though I have a feeling I might be strawmanning here.

That wasn't what my arguments were about. I know that dimensions are a property of space and time, however does lovecraft even utilise the notion of being "beyond space time" in an absolute manner? I will just copy some portion of my reply to Kingpin:


This is where the main point comes up. Lovecraft tends to use descriptions like "Beyond space and time" or "Beyond dimensions" in a relative fashion, rather than an absolute one. The latter was already shown with the Gates.
For the former I can't recall an explicit mention of it, but it's makes a lot of sense in context of most stories.

For example:

Even now I absolutely refuse to believe what he implied about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organisation.

The cosmos of space and time was part of a bigger super cosmos, which possessed curves and angles(which are very consistently linked with dimensions in Lovecraft) and not only that but also material properties.

Your own quote can help us see the link with Vacua:

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments—inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told—for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space—things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence.

Their plunges explictly containing elements of time and space. We can also see it's link with higher Vacua archetyping the cosmos of the waking world, similar to the super cosmos we saw earlier.

That passage is out of context, and is referring not to the Outer Extension itself, but to a manifestation of the Ultimate Gate which the Ancient Ones created in order for Carter to pass into the Ultimate Void, more specifically by projecting their dreams into reality as Umr at-Tawil commanded them to do. To quote the excerpt that comes right after the one you quoted:

I am not exactly sure how this context opposes my point. Carter still considered said manifestation visible to his "earthly eyes", showing that the very specific descriptions of geometries,directions, shapes and colours he gave prior to this were indeed likely based on visual stimuli, which makes sense. There wouldn't really be any reason why an aspatial reality would induce images with such detailed spatial features into someone's mind.

There were also more instances indicating that he was indeed using his eyes to observe the reality:

Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful Silver Key in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.

even in the region beyond the Ultimate Gate his senses were still supplying stimuli, including his eyes, and imagination was filling the gaps:

While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man.

Prior to gaining stablisation in the Outer Extension, his imagination was doing the bulk of the work trying to make sense of the seething chaos. Memory played a part because one of the dimensions he had transcended was a temporal one, so some of the things he saw might have overlapped with his memories.

This isn't really something new in the verse, and even silver key offers some context on it:

"He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."

For a given person reality is just defined by a set of pictures or images in their brain. That does not mean said images aren't derived from external stimuli that objectively exists.

That's not what I am thinking or saying, no. You are arguing that the Outer Extension being described as having alien architectures and geometries within it is evidence that it is simply a higher-dimensional space, and I am arguing that this is not the case, since those geometries are explicitly just a product of Carter's imagination and not what the realm actually looks like. You've made a proposition, and I'm countering it, simple as that.

As I already explained above, it was his imagination filling the gaps. Even logically speaking there is no reason a truly aspatial reality would translate itself with such specific arbitrary spatial properties like geometries, colours etc.

"Elements" of space and time, yes, which does not indicate that space and time were existent in those regions, but just that they held some similarity to the things present in the physical world. The text itself describes the universe of dreams which Hypnos plunges into as "deeper than matter, time and space" in very generalized terms, too, and so it's very clear that it is referring to space and time as a whole.

This is bordering close to Ad Hoc territory. With the overwhelming context I have presented in favour of lovecraft using "beyond space time" in a relative sense, along with an explicit mention of those plunges containing elements of space time, should seal the deal here. "deeper than matter, time and space" can also just mean...you know... going deeper than the time and space of the waking cosmos, something which was also done in another story, with explicit mention of the super-cosmos after it containing curves and angles(spatial properties) and even material properties.

And, as some of you may have noticed, not once is this "multiplicity of gates" stated to be arranged in an hierarchical manner. Furthermore, the Supreme Archetype itself states that Carter only passed through two Gates in his journey towards the absolute: Those being the first gate and the ultimate gate.

This was a problem I had initially noticed too. However, given that the region beyond the Ultimate gate was explicitly said to be dimensioned in the story, it may as well be that the Ultimate Gate doesn't lead to the genuine ultimate void(something I believe we already accept) but just a reduction of it in the cosmos.

There is also the issue that the various "Carters" mentioned in the story only ever mention Three dimensional Carters, except one mention of a 4 dimensional one.

 

[Apex_Predator_GX]

I agree with this thread

 

[DaringAttitude4]

Gonna use this thread as a reference.

Blog post: LMAO

 

[Catzlaflame]

Good lord how long did it take y’all to write those replies

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you for helping out Ultima.

 

[ShivaShakti]

Elizhaa also said they agree with Ultima btw

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Then that means we would have to rethink the way we treat Archetypes and the Ultimate Gods.

Perhaps, yes, but I am strictly focusing on countering your current points, as of now. I'd like to discuss some other things once we finish the bulk of this argument, anyway.

Treating usage of the word “undimensioned” as being anything different from a 0 dimensional point by default strays from the meaning of the word.

Mathematically speaking? Yes, but that's evidently not what Lovecraft was going for, in this case, since the word is always used to denote a kind of superiority over structures that are dimensioned. We should, at the very least, interpret it in a way that aligns with the etymology of the word, instead of just slapping our own meaning onto it.

The adjective "dimensional" quite explictly tells us this seething was "dimensional". After which it also makes it clear that his mind was filling the gaps because "no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape" outside the dimensions known to man. And that place wasn't explictly stated to exist beyond all dimensions not even a single time.

"Undimensioned" is not a relative descriptor, especially not in the context of this verse's cosmology in specific, where dimensioned space includes infinitely-many directions. Comparatively, the usages of the word "dimensional" in relation to the Outer Extension (And I'm not counting you arguing that the Gates are higher-dimensional spaces, by the way) are far more brief and are superseded by more detailed descriptions of the realm's nature, which I'd say is grounds for disregarding them entirely.

In fact, the usage of "Vast" indicates conception of size exists.

That's irrelevant and basically the epitome of nitpicking: Through the Gates of the Silver Key, surprisingly enough, was written by a human, whose descriptive powers only went so far and who inevitably had to rely on spatial terms and intuition to convey things on a literary medium, even if the things he's describing are supposed to be beyond space to begin with. It's not evidence of anything, because that logic also applies even to the realms you admit are actually outside of dimensions. Needless to say, such ridiculously high standards aren't going to fly.

My argument wasn't related to arguing whether the two regions are the same or not, it was about the similarities between the two. TDITWH shows that "Gates" are like generic portals that lead to higher dimensions, and TTGOTSK utilises the notion of Gates as well. Whether the Gate the silver key unlocks has to specifically lead to the twilight abysses, doesn't matter. It's also consistent with both the Twilight Abysses and Outer Extension having geometries, shapes, colours etc and the Outer extension being called dimensioned.

Loose similarities aren't concrete evidence of anything, especially when you are attempting to connect together two completely disparate elements of the cosmology based on the vaguest possible terms and flimsiest comparisions possible, in spite of all of the overwhelming evidence that they are very much distinct (Such as the fact that the First Gate is treated as a singular barrier on Earth, for instance). These two things being similar in nature is an unfalsifiable statement, and unfalsifiable statements are naturally subject to the burden of proof.

Not to mention that you're contradicting yourself pretty hard right now, given that this argument in particular explicitly hinges on the Gates from Dreams of the Witch-House and the Gates from Through the Gates of the Silver Key being the same. Since you've apparently come to agree that they are not, there's probably nothing to be argued on that front anymore.

The cosmos of space and time was part of a bigger super cosmos, which possessed curves and angles(which are very consistently linked with dimensions in Lovecraft) and not only that but also material properties.

Connecting those to the Vacua that Hypnos passed through is pretty unfounded, since, as you said, they are explicitly said to hold both material and semi-material properties, while the Vacua are very directly stated to reside in non-material spheres of existence:

There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known. My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky, clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.

The regions that the "Gates" led to were not said to be limited to the twilight abysses. And the story talks about even blacker and vaster abysses beyond the twilight abyss, eventually going upto the Ultimate Void itself:

Given that these abysses are then referred to as "this farther void of ultimate blackness," that passage is pretty clearly referring to the ultimate void, to answer the point just after this one. Not to mention that Gilman's travels to the Ultimate Void were made possible because of Nyarlathotep's direct interference, and otherwise held no direct connection to his experiences in the "twilight abysses," since the latter came far, far before he made a contract with The Black Man and was thereby allowed to be personally taken into the Court of Azathoth.

The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.

The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of ******* features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent.

I am not exactly sure how this context opposes my point. Carter still considered said manifestation visible to his "earthly eyes"

A symbolic manifestation, yes, not the real thing, as I've said. Why an aspatial reality would manifest itself in a space-like form is an irrelevant question, and not for me to answer, anyway, and if you want to look further into that you may as well just google what a Noumenon is.

"deeper than matter, time and space" can also just mean...you know... going deeper than the time and space of the waking cosmos, something which was also done in another story, with explicit mention of the super-cosmos after it containing curves and angles(spatial properties) and even material properties.

Already answered that up there.

This was a problem I had initially noticed too. However, given that the region beyond the Ultimate gate was explicitly said to be dimensioned in the story, it may as well be that the Ultimate Gate doesn't lead to the genuine ultimate void(something I believe we already accept) but just a reduction of it in the cosmos.

A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

In any case: Unless you want to argue that there are only two higher dimensions separating the physical world from the absolute of the ultimate void, this should be enough to prove that the Gates are in no way equatable to the hierarchy of dimensions.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

So, to disperse the derailment a bit, I'll just point out something else that I noticed recently:

My interpretation is that the perspective of the Ultimate Abyss that Carter went to was in itself just a vague dimensional reduction/intersection of the actual Ultimate Abyss where the Archetypes reside.This is supported by the fact Carter explicitly calls the space beyond the Ultimate Gate as having dimensions:

This, for the matter, is referring to this quote, which mentions that Carter finds himself in a space of incomprehension dimensions from which he can see "prodigious forms whose extensions transcend any conception of being, size and boundaries" that his mind was capable of holding beforehand, which the current profiles interpret as being the Archetypes themselves:

A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome silence full of the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed the illimitable vastness of the void, yet the seeker knew that the BEING was still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental substance he flung into the abyss:
“I accept. I will not retreat.”
The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the BEING had heard. And now there poured from that limitless MIND a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shewn the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little gods of earth, with their petty, human interests and connexions—their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.
While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantage-point he looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conception of being, size, and boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy Randolph Carter in the Arkham farmhouse in 1883, the misty form on the vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing the PRESENCE in the limitless abyss, and all the other “Carters” his fancy or perception envisaged.

As you can see, however, this happens immediately after the Supreme Archetype reveals the secrets of the cosmos to Carter through waves of knowledge and information translated in order to accomodate for the scope of an earthly mind, and Carter in fact perceives said prodigious forms right after the narration states that some of the waves were also translated in ways that his other senses could perceive, too.

Considering that this vision of his happens at the exact same time as the Supreme Archetype telling him that the world is actually made of an infinite number of dimensions, as well as how it seems to be a visual representation of things his mind was also interpreting as being words (Evidenced by how the Ultimate Void seemingly changes form to show him these things, from an "illimitable void" to a "sweep of creation"), it stands to reason that this region is just the entirety of the physical world and its dimensions being shown before him, and not necessarily anything pertaining to the region beyond the Ultimate Gate, and this becomes particularly obvious when you take into account how the latter is repeatedly described as "outside of dimensions," "beyond space and time," "the measureless gulfs where all dimensions dissolve into the absolute," and so on. And adding onto that, the various higher-dimensional spaces and objects which comprise the physical world are then immediately described using the exact same term: In this case, "forms."

Then the waves increased in strength, and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing—the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where ’Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

As contrasted with the ultimate abyss itself, which is explicitly formless:

Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics into which the siren song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time wherein black Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

He was in many places at the same time. On earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake-Den in the hushed evening light and running down the rocky slope and through the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher’s house in the hills beyond Arkham—yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in earth’s trans-dimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate.

The archetypes, throbbed the waves, are the people of the ultimate abyss—formless, ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the low-dimensioned worlds. Chief among such was this informing BEING itself . . . which indeed was Carter’s own archetype. The glutless zeal of Carter and all his forbears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a natural result of derivation from the SUPREME ARCHETYPE. On every world all great wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists, are facets of IT.

Admitedly, "beyond all conceptions of being, size and boundaries" may sound like a rather exaggerated way of describing higher-dimensional space, but do note that this is explicitly from Carter's perspective alone, and his life is directly stated to have revolved mainly around cryptic studies, not necessarily mathematical ones. In fact, when an actual mathematician gets his hands on obscure lore and starts studying the connections it has to mathematics, he quickly deduces that a single universe can have an indefinite amount of dimensions within itself, as you already saw up there.

 

[Darksmash]

Mathematically speaking? Yes, but that's evidently not what Lovecraft was going for, in this case, since the word is always used to denote a kind of superiority over structures that are dimensioned. We should, at the very least, interpret it in a way that aligns with the etymology of the word, instead of just slapping our own meaning onto it.

Yes, and the interpretation I offered isn't that far fetched. That lovecraft is using "undimensioned" to indicate a degree of freedom over the 3 dimensioned regions of space of earth in a relative fashion.

"Undimensioned" is not a relative descriptor, especially not in the context of this verse's cosmology in specific, where dimensioned space includes infinitely-many directions. Comparatively, the usages of the word "dimensional" in relation to the Outer Extension (And I'm not counting you arguing that the Gates are higher-dimensional spaces, by the way) are far more brief and are superseded by more detailed descriptions of the realm's nature, which I'd say is grounds for disregarding them entirely.

Using dimensioned and undimensioned for the same region of space does indicate it is relative, yes. Especially when "undimensioned" technically doesn't even hold the meaning you are assigning to it. And I think I have already discussed it's "detailed descriptions" at length too and how they also apply to higher dimensional spaces too in lovecraft, and how imagination is filling the gaps here. I don't really think I can add anything to that at this point.

That's irrelevant and basically the epitome of nitpicking: Through the Gates of the Silver Key, surprisingly enough, was written by a human, whose descriptive powers only went so far and who inevitably had to rely on spatial terms and intuition to convey things on a literary medium, even if the things he's describing are supposed to be beyond space to begin with. It's not evidence of anything, because that logic also applies even to the realms you admit are actually outside of dimensions. Needless to say, such ridiculously high standards aren't going to fly.

I can say the same for descriptions like the unstability of form and position, which were supposed to be lovecraft's way of describing the experience of a man suddenly finding himself in a higher dimensional space, confused and trying to make sense of the reality around him by filling gaps with memory and imagination. We later also see him explicitly use his eyes to observe said reality as well, and provide descriptions similar to what lovecraft uses for simple higher dimensions as well.

Loose similarities aren't concrete evidence of anything, especially when you are attempting to connect together two completely disparate elements of the cosmology based on the vaguest possible terms and flimsiest comparisions possible, in spite of all of the overwhelming evidence that they are very much distinct (Such as the fact that the First Gate is treated as a singular barrier on Earth, for instance). These two things being similar in nature is an unfalsifiable statement, and unfalsifiable statements are naturally subject to the burden of proof.

First of all I was only using it as supporting evidence. Secondly, two stories that take place in the same setting, talking about higher planes of existence, and utilising the term "Gates" is not exactly a comparison based on "vaguest possible terms". I already agreed that they are not the same, maybe not as explicitly, but the nature of what they are doing is the exact same. Gateways to higher existences.

Connecting those to the Vacua that Hypnos passed through is pretty unfounded, since, as you said, they are explicitly said to hold both material and semi-material properties, while the Vacua are very directly stated to reside in non-material spheres of existence:

I know it's getting a bit annoying at this point, understandably so, but I would say it's another instance of lovecraft using weird purple prose to talk about things that are relatively outside human conception. This is evident from the exact same story, where they say they go deeper than time and space but their plunges still held elements of time and space. This also makes sense from context presented in other stories:

Spoiler: Matter

Basically, lovecraft uses descriptions like "non material", similar to "undimensioned', for alien material properties of higher planes of existence which cannot be explained by human knowledge.

From the dreams in the witch house:

Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.

All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.

He was even taken to the Ultimate Void by some of said objects

As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.

Where they transformed to some kind of "milky mist" without any hints of change in their material nature throughout the way(which they must have crossed the vacuas at some point if they wanted to go to the Ultimate Void). This however, is obviously very vague and we cannot be sure that their material nature itself wasn't modified when they transformed in the ultimate void. Luckily we have more explict stuff from another story(The Whisperer in Darkness).

The fungi of Yuggoth, who explicitly came from the Ultimate Void(s?) itself:

“There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.

explicitly said to have organic/material properties:

The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and time—members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would record their images.

Although said properties are said to be completely alien and beyond comprehension to people of earth, which understandably explains why some would call them non material in purple prose. This was also the same story which talks about the super cosmos beyond the space time cosmos of human knowledge, which we have no reason to not equate to the Vacua(Also said to be beyond the cosmos of waking knowledge) at this point.

Given that these abysses are then referred to as "this farther void of ultimate blackness," that passage is pretty clearly referring to the ultimate void, to answer the point just after this one. Not to mention that Gilman's travels to the Ultimate Void were made possible because of Nyarlathotep's direct interference, and otherwise held no direct connection to his experiences in the "twilight abysses," since the latter came far, far before he made a contract with The Black Man and was thereby allowed to be personally taken into the Court of Azathoth.

but he also blatantly travelled to them by himself in later dreams, by following some objects on unknown curves and spirals:

He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.

Which wasn't any different from how they say certain angles/curves led them out of 3 dimensional space in the first place(which can be connected to the Gates).

A symbolic manifestation, yes, not the real thing, as I've said. Why an aspatial reality would manifest itself in a space-like form is an irrelevant question, and not for me to answer, anyway, and if you want to look further into that you may as well just google what a Noumenon is.

> A term lovecraft never used

Spoiler: Noumenon

Anyway, forgive me if I misunderstand something as I don't have much expertise on this term, however from what a google search told me it's basically the philosophy that Objective reality consists of Noumenal objects, while subjective experience is phenomenal reductions of this objective reality. This philosophy isn't exactly something new, I previously talked about how it's already explored in lovecraft.

Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.

For an individual, the universe is purely defined by the phenomenon observed by their senses, yes. But does this philosophy have any impact on the current discussion? No. Just because the image of a cube I observe in my brain is a phenomenal reduction of the noumenon cube, that does not change the fact that the cube does tangibly exist, and is physical. And I completely fail to see the relevance of even bringing this up as an argument. Carter was explicitly using his eyes to observe that reality, and he observed geometries and shapes similar to how we humans observe earthly geometries and shapes from objective reality into our perception. Nothing needs to be said beyond that.

A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

The only mentions of different universes I remember in that story were of parallel ones, and at this point it's hard to take any of lovecraft's descriptions at face value for me unless the overall context heavily points towards a single interpretation. However, given that it's the Ultimate Void we are talking about, you might be right I suppose, but that might result in necessary changes related to interpretations of how the archetypes relate to the Ultimate Gods.

This, for the matter, is referring to this quote, which mentions that Carter finds himself in a space of incomprehension dimensions from which he can see "prodigious forms whose extensions transcend any conception of being, size and boundaries" that his mind was capable of holding beforehand, which the current profiles interpret as being the Archetypes themselves:

As you can see, however, this happens immediately after the Supreme Archetype reveals the secrets of the cosmos to Carter through waves of knowledge and information translated in order to accomodate for the scope of an earthly mind, and Carter in fact perceives said prodigious forms right after the narration states that some of the waves were also translated in ways that his other senses could perceive, too.

Considering that this vision of his happens at the exact same time as the Supreme Archetype telling him that the world is actually made of an infinite number of dimensions, as well as how it seems to be a visual representation of things his mind was also interpreting as being words (Evidenced by how the Ultimate Void seemingly changes form to show him these things, from an "illimitable void" to a "sweep of creation"), it stands to reason that this region is just the entirety of the physical world and its dimensions being shown before him, and not necessarily anything pertaining to the region beyond the Ultimate Gate, and this becomes particularly obvious when you take into account how the latter is repeatedly described as "outside of dimensions," "beyond space and time," "the measureless gulfs where all dimensions dissolve into the absolute," and so on. And adding onto that, the various higher-dimensional spaces and objects which comprise the physical world are then immediately described using the exact same term: In this case, "forms."

I find it hard to digest that the "region" where Carter himself was existing would be part of the visions shown to him by the BEING, but I suppose in the overall context it makes sense. However, this will cause me to slightly change my interpretation of this. In that case this ultimate void should be the exact same as the space where the archetypes reside. Given how multiple conceptions of the Ultimate Void which say it is beyond dimensions also make it clear that it is the "last void", which should be the same as the "final cosmic reality" that Carter talks about.

As contrasted with the ultimate abyss itself, which is explicitly formless:

Well by this point you know my view on the various buzzwords that lovecraft uses, but in case of the ultimate void it can work I guess since the overall context also overwhelmingly supports that.

Admitedly, "beyond all conceptions of being, size and boundaries" may sound like a rather exaggerated way of describing higher-dimensional space, but do note that this is explicitly from Carter's perspective alone, and his life is directly stated to have revolved mainly around cryptic studies, not necessarily mathematical ones.

oh don't worry about that, from the very beginning my entire viewpoint has been fixated on the fact that most of the descriptions of the higher dimensions are flowery purple prose from the eyes of a earthly being who had no better way to describe them.

 

[Antvasima]

I deleted the derailing posts.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Yes, and the interpretation I offered isn't that far fetched. That lovecraft is using "undimensioned" to indicate a degree of freedom over the 3 dimensioned regions of space of earth in a relative fashion.

It is, yes, since, like I said, it doesn't fit even with the etymology of the term, nor with the context of the cosmology, where the hierarchy of dimensions and the hierarchy of gates obviously cannot intersect.

Using dimensioned and undimensioned for the same region of space does indicate it is relative, yes. Especially when "undimensioned" technically doesn't even hold the meaning you are assigning to it. And I think I have already discussed it's "detailed descriptions" at length too and how they also apply to higher dimensional spaces too in lovecraft, and how imagination is filling the gaps here. I don't really think I can add anything to that at this point.

"Undimensioned" obviously just means "Without dimensions," and in a real world context, such a descriptor would obviously default to a 0-dimensional space, but, again, that's visibly not what Lovecraft was going for, and most of your associations of those descriptions with higher-dimensional spaces (Like the "larger, blacker abysses without any suggestion of fixed position" beyond the twilight abysses, which you've argued are just other higher dimensions, and the "gates" from TtGotSK and TDITWH being the same) are things you seem to be basically conceding to, at this stage, given you didn't even counter some of them as far as I see, so, like you said, there's nothing I can add to that, either.

I can say the same for descriptions like the unstability of form and position, which were supposed to be lovecraft's way of describing the experience of a man suddenly finding himself in a higher dimensional space, confused and trying to make sense of the reality around him by filling gaps with memory and imagination. We later also see him explicitly use his eyes to observe said reality as well, and provide descriptions similar to what lovecraft uses for simple higher dimensions as well.

Answered that down below.

First of all I was only using it as supporting evidence.

That's irrelevant. It's bad evidence, supporting or not.

Secondly, two stories that take place in the same setting, talking about higher planes of existence, and utilising the term "Gates" is not exactly a comparison based on "vaguest possible terms". I already agreed that they are not the same, maybe not as explicitly, but the nature of what they are doing is the exact same. Gateways to higher existences.

They are not, no. Because, once again, the "gates" in Dreams of the Witch-House explicitly refer to strange angles present in lower-dimensional spaces that lead into higher-dimensional ones, and by the logic of that particular story, a "gate" would exist between each dimensional plane in the universe, of which there is a very large amount of. Meanwhile, Through the Gates of the Silver Key is very explicit in saying there are only two gates, one of which leads to a space beyond dimensions entirely, and the story goes as far as implying that they are not natural constructs but barriers forcibly imposed upon the external world by "alien-souled men," and so these two obviously cannot share the same nature. Background context matters more than vague similarities, like I said.

Basically, lovecraft uses descriptions like "non material", similar to "undimensioned', for alien material properties of higher planes of existence which cannot be explained by human knowledge.

From the dreams in the witch house:

None of these quotes are actually using the term "non-material" in order to refer to the Twilight Abysses. In fact, they say the exact opposite: That it does have material elements and objects both organic and inorganic within it, with those elements just so happening to be incomprehensible due to existing in more dimensions than three. Contrast with the Vacua, which are outright stated to not be physical spheres of existence with no ambiguity or additional caveats. They only support my point, if anything, since Lovecraft tends to make it clear if a realm of existence is indeed material in some way, as you can see from these quotes.

The fungi of Yuggoth, who explicitly came from the Ultimate Void(s?) itself explicitly said to have organic/material properties

The Mi-Go are weird cases, admitedly, but I'd say this is most likely due to the nature of entities who pass between the Ultimate Void and the physical world being altered to match with certain planes of existence. For instance, when Carter reaches the Outer Extension, before opening the Ultimate Gate, he ditches his physical form entirely and becomes just an impression of some vague entity named "Randolph Carter."

For the rite of the Silver Key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black, haunted cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and syllable an aura of strange, awesome mutation was apparent—a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognise as motion and duration. Imperceptibly, such things as age and location ceased to have any significance whatever. The day before, Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinction between boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain store of images which had lost all connexion with terrestrial scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.

And this is consistent with other stories, where "the realms of matter" are classified as their own sphere of existence which an individual surpasses far before they actually reach the center of chaos:

Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics into which the siren song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time wherein black Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

but he also blatantly travelled to them by himself in later dreams, by following some objects on unknown curves and spirals:

That passage is misinterpreted. It does not take place in "latter dreams," but rather is Gilman attempting to remember what happened in his dreams of that particular night after he signed a contract with The Black Man. The "little polyhedron," for instance, is obviously supposed to be a higher-dimensional projection of Brown Jenkin, the familiar of the witch who previously inhabited the house, and who starts to constantly haunt his dreams after he moves to it, and the "larger wisp" guiding them is likewise supposed to be The Black Man himself.

Which wasn't any different from how they say certain angles/curves led them out of 3 dimensional space in the first place

Again, they went to the Ultimate Void not because of some pathway contained in the Twilight Abysses, but because of Nyarlathotep's direct interference. That's one of the main traits of the character, even: The fact that even his avatars can travel to the ultimate abyss at will and bring others with him in those voyages. The poem dedicated to him even has a scene where he opens a crevice in the universe leading directly to the void and beckons a group of people into entering it:

My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

And I completely fail to see the relevance of even bringing this up as an argument. Carter was explicitly using his eyes to observe that reality, and he observed geometries and shapes similar to how we humans observe earthly geometries and shapes from objective reality into our perception. Nothing needs to be said beyond that.

I simply brought this up for the purpose of giving a potential answer to the question of why an aspatial reality would manifest itself in a space-like form, which, as I said, is an irrelevant querry, since we don't exactly know how an undimensioned reality (That's somehow not just a 0-D space) would behave in the first place, and whatever functionings it might have are left to the imagination of the person writing about it, so it's not too relevant, in any case.

More importantly, as evidenced by the quote above, the impressions which Carter were receiving weren't visual, but "cerebral," which we can infer means they were being directly implanted into his mind by the reality around him, and this is stated a couple of times in that sequence of the story. Which again, goes back to my previous point, that being the fact Carter was seeing an illusory manifestation of the Outer Extensions, while the true reality was invisible to his "earthly eyes":

For the rite of the Silver Key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black, haunted cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and syllable an aura of strange, awesome mutation was apparent—a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognise as motion and duration. Imperceptibly, such things as age and location ceased to have any significance whatever. The day before, Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinction between boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain store of images which had lost all connexion with terrestrial scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

 

[Darksmash]

It is, yes, since, like I said, it doesn't fit even with the etymology of the term, nor with the context of the cosmology, where the hierarchy of dimensions and the hierarchy of gates obviously cannot intersect.

Your meaning doesn't fit the etymology of the word either. And yes, it makes full sense in context of the cosmology. It's blatantly called dimensional twice, holds similar properties, and additional context which I talk about below.

"Undimensioned" obviously just means "Without dimensions," and in a real world context, such a descriptor would obviously default to a 0-dimensional space, but, again, that's visibly not what Lovecraft was going for, and most of your associations of those descriptions with higher-dimensional spaces (Like the "larger, blacker abysses without any suggestion of fixed position" beyond the twilight abysses, which you've argued are just other higher dimensions, and the "gates" from TtGotSK and TDITWH being the same) are things you seem to be basically conceding to, at this stage, given you didn't even counter some of them as far as I see, so, like you said, there's nothing I can add to that, either.

Yes, that's visibly not what Lovecraft was going for, and you won't know what he was going for unless you can summon him from afterlife. We have enough context to know where the Gates lie. One buzzword from purple prose won't affect that.

They are not, no. Because, once again, the "gates" in Dreams of the Witch-House explicitly refer to strange angles present in lower-dimensional spaces that lead into higher-dimensional ones, and by the logic of that particular story, a "gate" would exist between each dimensional plane in the universe, of which there is a very large amount of. Meanwhile, Through the Gates of the Silver Key is very explicit in saying there are only two gates, one of which leads to a space beyond dimensions entirely, and the story goes as far as implying that they are not natural constructs but barriers forcibly imposed upon the external world by "alien-souled men," and so these two obviously cannot share the same nature. Background context matters more than vague similarities, like I said.

where does it imply that?

None of these quotes are actually using the term "non-material" in order to refer to the Twilight Abysses. In fact, they say the exact opposite: That it does have material elements and objects both organic and inorganic within it, with those elements just so happening to be incomprehensible due to existing in more dimensions than three. Contrast with the Vacua, which are outright stated to not be physical spheres of existence with no ambiguity or additional caveats. They only support my point, if anything, since Lovecraft tends to make it clear if a realm of existence is indeed material in some way, as you can see from these quotes.

This argument completely missed the overall context of my point. Lovecraft is evidently using the term "non material" in a relative manner for material properties alien to men and their comprehension.

The Mi-Go are weird cases, admitedly, but I'd say this is most likely due to the nature of entities who pass between the Ultimate Void and the physical world being altered to match with certain planes of existence. For instance, when Carter reaches the Outer Extension, before opening the Ultimate Gate, he ditches his physical form entirely and becomes just an impression of some vague entity named "Randolph Carter."

Lol. So me connecting the nature of gates for two different realms is "bad argument". But now relating unrelated things is fine apparently. Besides, the quote itself completely debunks that:

The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and time—members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would record their images.

They are said to be the most marvellous "organic" things in or beyond all space and time. Showing that yes, "Organic" things hold definition "beyond" space time, even supplying it with the adjective "all", agreeing with the context that yes, they are the most marvelous organic things in the entire cosmology below the ultimate void, which is where they come from.

I am pretty tired at this point pretending that Lovecraft's purple prose are technical rocket science terms. We need to see the weight of the cosmology in terms of explicit size and context. Absolutely every story that Lovecraft writes only ever includes a single hierarchy. Not a single story shows these multiple hierarchies intersecting with each other. All conceptions of the Ultimate Void always begin with the introduction of some hierarchy, with it being the end of said hierarchy. Sometimes it's a series of "blacker abysses" leading to some "ultimate blackness", other times it's dimensions leading to some absolution beyond dimensions. Tell me, a single instance where these "obviously different hierarchies" intersect. Just a single instance.

That passage is misinterpreted. It does not take place in "latter dreams," but rather is Gilman attempting to remember what happened in his dreams of that particular night after he signed a contract with The Black Man. The "little polyhedron," for instance, is obviously supposed to be a higher-dimensional projection of Brown Jenkin, the familiar of the witch who previously inhabited the house, and who starts to constantly haunt his dreams after he moves to it, and the "larger wisp" guiding them is likewise supposed to be The Black Man himself.

Well, my bad on the misinterpretation. But it doesn't change the bulk of my argument. They travelled to the Ultimate Void using certain curves and spirals, which is the same as how Keziah accessed the 4D space in the first place. Hell, it shows the entire pathway to the Ultimate Void is dimensioned in the same way. Same as what I previously said, always including a single hierarchy. Hell, the blacker abysses beyond the 4D abyss were even to lack fixed suggestions of form in a similar way to the first gate. Supporting the fact that yes, they are dimensioned too, which even makes sense in the context of the story. There is no reason the first abyss would be 4D and the later abysses would just skip to some aspatial region. Which also ties back to the argument comparing the similar nature of the Gates.

Again, they went to the Ultimate Void not because of some pathway contained in the Twilight Abysses, but because of Nyarlathotep's direct interference. That's one of the main traits of the character, even: The fact that even his avatars can travel to the ultimate abyss at will and bring others with him in those voyages. The poem dedicated to him even has a scene where he opens a crevice in the universe leading directly to the void and beckons a group of people into entering it:

It's pretty clear that's not what was happening here. Gilman was led to the ultimate void not by some kind of portal, but by following curves and spirals, which had been previously linked in the story to the act of breaking into higher dimensional spaces in the first place.

I simply brought this up for the purpose of giving a potential answer to the question of why an aspatial reality would manifest itself in a space-like form, which, as I said, is an irrelevant querry, since we don't exactly know how an undimensioned reality (That's somehow not just a 0-D space) would behave in the first place, and whatever functionings it might have are left to the imagination of the person writing about it, so it's not too relevant, in any case.

I wouldn't really expect extremely spatio-specific properties like geometries, shapes, directions etc to show up in some phenomenal manifestation of an aspatial reality. Especially when we directly see these shapes can also have size differences when we see one of the columns was taller than the rest.

More importantly, as evidenced by the quote above, the impressions which Carter were receiving weren't visual, but "cerebral," which we can infer means they were being directly implanted into his mind by the reality around him, and this is stated a couple of times in that sequence of the story. Which again, goes back to my previous point, that being the fact Carter was seeing an illusory manifestation of the Outer Extensions, while the true reality was invisible to his "earthly eyes":

That is not him on the Outer Extension, that's him during the process of ascending to it in the first place. You can't really connect it to what happens after he gained stablization in the Outer Extension, especially when we have blatant statements of him using his eyes in the act of observing details in said reality in the first place, with said details obviously having multiple very specific spatial properties like I already said above.

 

[DaReaperMan]

Reading through the entire thread I agree with Ultima here, though I dont know enough about CM to give further input

 

[CrystalValley]

i agree with Darksmash. a lot more convincing so far.

 

[Saiyan40009]

I agree Darksmash your points are more consistent with the story and the arguments

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Yes, that's visibly not what Lovecraft was going for, and you won't know what he was going for unless you can summon him from afterlife.

I think I do know it, actually, after reading some of the passages more closely. So, keep scrolling, I suppose. And, by the way, the order of some of my responses is going to be a bit scrambled in this post, since I'll first tackle the individual points I disagree with, before moving onto something that I find more relevant.

We have enough context to know where the Gates lie. One buzzword from purple prose won't affect that.

You seem to be contradicting yourself again. Beforehand, you said you had agreed that the Gates from TtGotSK were different constructs from the gates in TDITWH, but now you seem to be convinced that they're the same. I've already outlined how the two are very distinct elements of the cosmology, so, what do you propose is the connection between them, exactly? As well as the standing of the Gates themselves within the cosmology. Just to make things clear between you and I.

I am pretty tired at this point pretending that Lovecraft's purple prose are technical rocket science terms. We need to see the weight of the cosmology in terms of explicit size and context.

Absolutely every story that Lovecraft writes only ever includes a single hierarchy. Not a single story shows these multiple hierarchies intersecting with each other. All conceptions of the Ultimate Void always begin with the introduction of some hierarchy, with it being the end of said hierarchy. Sometimes it's a series of "blacker abysses" leading to some "ultimate blackness", other times it's dimensions leading to some absolution beyond dimensions. Tell me, a single instance where these "obviously different hierarchies" intersect. Just a single instance.

Let me put it like this, then: The First and Ultimate Gates are very explicitly portrayed in TtGotSK as the absolute last sections of the cosmology that an individual crosses before finally entering the ultimate abyss beyond all individuality, forming thus a finite hierarchy. Meanwhile, the infinite higher-dimensional planes are, well, infinite in number, and hence cannot intersect with the Gates in terms of where they stand in the cosmology. Thus, this contextualizes the statements describing the Outer Extension (Or, more specifically, the realms covered by the Gates in general) as undimensioned. If the First Gate falls into any point of the dimensional hierarchy, then there would logically be infinite dimensions separating it from the real apex of existence, which would contradict the notion that the place leads directly to the Ultimate Gate.

where does it imply that?

I'm referring to this excerpt, although I admit that, on a second reading, the phrase itself, so I retract that statement for now. Rest of the point still stands, though.

The hills behind Arkham are full of a strange magic—something, perhaps, which the old wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth when he fled there from Salem in 1692. As soon as Randolph Carter was back among them he knew that he was close to one of the gates which a few audacious, abhorred, and alien-souled men have blasted through titan walls betwixt the world and the outside absolute.

This argument completely missed the overall context of my point. Lovecraft is evidently using the term "non material" in a relative manner for material properties alien to men and their comprehension.

And, as the evidence for that, you are using passages from another story describing realms which are simply never stated to be non-material in the first place? I agree to what you said about the Mi-Go, for the matter, but Lovecraft does use the term "material" in reference to things that are comprised of the same kind of matter which entities of our spacetime continuum are made of. Take this excerpt from Through the Mountains of Madness, for example:

It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum; whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath.

And we do know that the higher dimensions from TDITWH are within the spacetime continuum, and fully spatial in nature, at that, so it'd make perfect sense for them to be material in nature, just arranged in a way beyond what humans can grasp. My issue with equating those to the Vacua is that, regardless of whether or not "non-material" was fully literal in the latter's case, it's still a completely different description from that of the former. So it's inconsistent regardless of how you cut it.

By the way, more as a curiosity than an actual counter, for the moment, how would you reconcile the cosmos of spacetime in which humanity resides being described as part of a chain of "cosmos-atoms" comprising the immediate super cosmos, under the assumption that the latter is the same as the higher-dimensional planes mentioned elsewhere? An infinite universe being finite from the perspective of a larger world and perceived as an atom from within the latter, ala The Dark Tower, is quite different from a lower-dimensional cross-section of some n-dimensional object, after all.

And, while the same story admitedly also states that "the space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic entity" is only an atom in the infinity of the Ultimate Void, the context is quite different in that passage, and the one that mentions the "super-cosmos" mentions electronic organizations immediately after, which leads me to think that the description is meant to be quite literal there.

I wouldn't really expect extremely spatio-specific properties like geometries, shapes, directions etc to show up in some phenomenal manifestation of an aspatial reality. Especially when we directly see these shapes can also have size differences when we see one of the columns was taller than the rest.

And, again, so? Why would a lesser manifestation of a given construct be able to hold properties that the construct itself is unbound by?

That is not him on the Outer Extension, that's him during the process of ascending to it in the first place. You can't really connect it to what happens after he gained stablization in the Outer Extension, especially when we have blatant statements of him using his eyes in the act of observing details in said reality in the first place, with said details obviously having multiple very specific spatial properties like I already said above.

You seem to be focusing on the "Neither wall nor absence of wall..." part of the excerpt, which is my bad, since I put it in bold to begin with. The point was moreso to show that those "impressions" through which Carter perceived the Outer Extension weren't visual, but cerebral, regardless of whether or not they had stabilized into a concise form by that point. Given that a great part of this point relies on the idea that Carter was physically perceiving it all with his own eyes, that's already enough to render the point invalid, in my view.

Well, my bad on the misinterpretation. But it doesn't change the bulk of my argument. They travelled to the Ultimate Void using certain curves and spirals, which is the same as how Keziah accessed the 4D space in the first place

It's pretty clear that's not what was happening here. Gilman was led to the ultimate void not by some kind of portal, but by following curves and spirals, which had been previously linked in the story to the act of breaking into higher dimensional spaces in the first place.

They were already within the Ultimate Void when the narration describes them as passing through said curves and spirals. The "progress" which these curves recorded was their pathway towards the Court of Azathoth in specific, which resides at the very center of the ultimate chaos instead. Granted, this just leads to something that you seemingly didn't take into account when making your argument, and which would probably convey your point far better than these quotes: Namely the fact that the abyss is described as the "ultimate space-time seethings," and as "beyond the time and space that we can comprehend."

The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.

Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.

Of course, I don't really agree with taking the latter statement at face value, since the Ultimate Void may as well be a 5-dimensional space if we do so, which is obviously absurd, and "outside the time and space we comprehend" would technically be correct even if it resided outside of spacetime entirely, anyway. However, I do think the former is an interesting descriptor, mainly because the same story also has this tidbit (Just as a heads-up: I'll also be laying out a few excerpts which I already posted above, too):

That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness.

And that description coincidentally aligns with how the Outer Extension is described: That is, as I brought up above, a "dimensional seething."

And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the Forms could give—a terror from which he could not flee because it was connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realised in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.

And the Outer Extension, in turn, has the same kind of statements as the above as well. Quoting this passage again:

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked with earth’s primal, aeon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.

And, as a reminder, we also have this excerpt which states that all dimensions dissolve into the absolute of the ultimate void:

Before that dank, dripping wall he stood silent and awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed. Was that stony bulge above the keystone of the imagined arch really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then he drew forth the Silver Key, and made motions and intonations whose source he could only dimly remember. Was anything forgotten? He knew only that he wished to cross the barrier to the untrammelled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute.

And Azathoth's Throne being described as "beyond angled space," and "without form or place."

The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth.

Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

So, it seems to me that, by "undimensioned," Lovecraft consistently refers to locations where space and time both dissolve into an incoherent state and the idea of position or place becomes inapplicable. He doesn't seem to ever use that word to refer to what are explicitly higher-dimensional spaces, or have properties that we could assign to those.

 

[Darksmash]

You seem to be contradicting yourself again. Beforehand, you said you had agreed that the Gates from TtGotSK were different constructs from the gates in TDITWH, but now you seem to be convinced that they're the same. I've already outlined how the two are very distinct elements of the cosmology, so, what do you propose is the connection between them, exactly? As well as the standing of the Gates themselves within the cosmology. Just to make things clear between you and I.

Not really. What I meant was that they are dimensional in nature in a similar way. The gates in TDITWH were no different from angles/curves used to access higher spaces, and curves in the same story even go upto the Ultimate Void. They aren't the exact same but their nature is pretty similar.

Let me put it like this, then: The First and Ultimate Gates are very explicitly portrayed in TtGotSK as the absolute last sections of the cosmology that an individual crosses before finally entering the ultimate abyss beyond all individuality, forming thus a finite hierarchy. Meanwhile, the infinite higher-dimensional planes are, well, infinite in number, and hence cannot intersect with the Gates in terms of where they stand in the cosmology. Thus, this contextualizes the statements describing the Outer Extension (Or, more specifically, the realms covered by the Gates in general) as undimensioned. If the First Gate falls into any point of the dimensional hierarchy, then there would logically be infinite dimensions separating it from the real apex of existence, which would contradict the notion that the place leads directly to the Ultimate Gate.

I mean that can be explained in a different way. We know that if the hierarchy was indeed infinite Carter would have never been able to cross to the top. It would make sense for it to directly skip to the Ultimate Void. This isn't even the only time something like this happens. Even in Hypnos they eventually just skip to a barrier "incalculably" denser than all the others.

And, as the evidence for that, you are using passages from another story describing realms which are simply never stated to be non-material in the first place? I agree to what you said about the Mi-Go, for the matter, but Lovecraft does use the term "material" in reference to things that are comprised of the same kind of matter which entities of our spacetime continuum are made of. Take this excerpt from Through the Mountains of Madness, for example:

Well I mostly used those passages in order to contextualize the argument about the Fungi, which now you seem to agree with. If anything, this should show further that we shouldn't look too deeply in Lovecraft's purple prose, instead we should focus more on what hierarchies make sense in the overall context, which as I pointed out almost every story involving the Ultimate Void only ever delves into a single hierarchy which seems to get apparently varying descriptions in the prose.

And we do know that the higher dimensions from TDITWH are within the spacetime continuum, and fully spatial in nature, at that, so it'd make perfect sense for them to be material in nature, just arranged in a way beyond what humans can grasp. My issue with equating those to the Vacua is that, regardless of whether or not "non-material" was fully literal in the latter's case, it's still a completely different description from that of the former. So it's inconsistent regardless of how you cut it.

While they were material in nature, said material was also repeatedly said to be beyond comprehension and completely alien. So that seems like the most plausible explanation in this scenario. And yes, while they both hold very different descriptions, it seems to be a theme in Lovecraft that different stories describe the same hierarchy leading to the Ultimate Void in different ways, presumably because different humans might explain higher dimensional spaces in different ways depending on their own life experience(Gilman, a mathematician gave more technical descriptions for instance).

By the way, more as a curiosity than an actual counter, for the moment, how would you reconcile the cosmos of spacetime in which humanity resides being described as part of a chain of "cosmos-atoms" comprising the immediate super cosmos, under the assumption that the latter is the same as the higher-dimensional planes mentioned elsewhere? An infinite universe being finite from the perspective of a larger world and perceived as an atom from within the latter, ala The Dark Tower, is quite different from a lower-dimensional cross-section of some n-dimensional object, after all.

I mean we can just take it as a metaphor for lower worlds being infinitesimal in comparison(Again, don't look too deep in the prose), however if I were to try to force an explanation onto it I would go with this: Lovecraft uses the notion of curved space time:

Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.

This curved space time might be arranged as atoms in a comparatively higher dimensional bulk.

And, again, so? Why would a lesser manifestation of a given construct be able to hold properties that the construct itself is unbound by?

The point was that said properties are too space-specific. Too specific for an aspatial reality.

You seem to be focusing on the "Neither wall nor absence of wall..." part of the excerpt, which is my bad, since I put it in bold to begin with. The point was moreso to show that those "impressions" through which Carter perceived the Outer Extension weren't visual, but cerebral, regardless of whether or not they had stabilized into a concise form by that point. Given that a great part of this point relies on the idea that Carter was physically perceiving it all with his own eyes, that's already enough to render the point invalid, in my view.

That was, as I said, only during the act of ascending to that location in the first place. It was more so because the entity Carter, which was an amalgamation of all instances of Carter throughout time, was taking shape. It makes that clear even:

A moment before, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.

They were already within the Ultimate Void when the narration describes them as passing through said curves and spirals. The "progress" which these curves recorded was their pathway towards the Court of Azathoth in specific, which resides at the very center of the ultimate chaos instead.

Ehh, I don't think it's explicitly implied to be talking about the Ultimate Void, since during that portion description Gilman was more so recalling the different details of the endeavour, for example:

There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos.

He first talks about the impressions of the vaster abysses, then says he was taken there by the bubble and polyhedron. So it's not unlikely that the description was talking about their progress on the journey. However, even if we assume it is talking about the ultimate void, this kinda shows that curves and spirals exist there as well, more evidence why Lovecraft's prose shouldn't be taken at face value.

Granted, this just leads to something that you seemingly didn't take into account when making your argument, and which would probably convey your point far better than these quotes: Namely the fact that the abyss is described as the "ultimate space-time seethings," and as "beyond the time and space that we can comprehend."

Hmm....
I mean, that would be consistent with my initial proposition that the Ultimate Void's transcendence isn't vast enough for a jump to proper 1-A.

And that description coincidentally aligns with how the Outer Extension is described: That is, as I brought up above, a "dimensional seething."

I don't think the Outer Extension's "seething" was meant to be anything more than shenanigans of a man suddenly finding himself in higher dimensional space(since it was used for the state Carter found himself in immediately after transitioning to the Outer Extension). Lovecraft seems to be using seething to signify chaos in general, which will hold true for anyone that finds himself in an unfamiliar world of higher dimensions.

And, as a reminder, we also have this excerpt which states that all dimensions dissolve into the absolute of the ultimate void:

That's only for the Ultimate Void though, and looking past the prose it makes sense because of the position of the Outer Void in the cosmology.

So, it seems to me that, by "undimensioned," Lovecraft consistently refers to locations where space and time both dissolve into an incoherent state and the idea of position or place becomes inapplicable. He doesn't seem to ever use that word to refer to what are explicitly higher-dimensional spaces, or have properties that we could assign to those.

I don't think it being called 'undimensioned" had anything to do with it being called a seething, the latter of which seems to just signify chaos in general. Overall it's a pretty reaching connection. Especially considering it being called a "dimensional extension" is blatantly referring to the earth being an intersection/phase of the higher dimensional extension of earth.

as bonus lovecraft also considers things beyond 3 dimensional world as full of contradictions and beyond logic:

What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic dreams, and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Not really. What I meant was that they are dimensional in nature in a similar way. The gates in TDITWH were no different from angles/curves used to access higher spaces, and curves in the same story even go upto the Ultimate Void. They aren't the exact same but their nature is pretty similar.

Even if we entertain that, it just leads to another crack in your point, though, namely that the "gates" in TDITWH are just specific angles and lines in which higher-dimensional space intersects with spaces that have more than three dimensions, and, by that logic, there would be an infinite amount of Gates. Meanwhile, the Gates which Carter goes through are two (2) literal barriers separating our world from higher ones, so much that Fungi from Yuggoth refers to them as "space-hung screens," and you have to unlock them using the Silver Key.

I mean that can be explained in a different way. We know that if the hierarchy was indeed infinite Carter would have never been able to cross to the top. It would make sense for it to directly skip to the Ultimate Void. This isn't even the only time something like this happens. Even in Hypnos they eventually just skip to a barrier "incalculably" denser than all the others.

That would contradict the Supreme Archetype explicitly stating that Carter only passed through two gates to reach those regions, and the story making it clear that the only "Gate" that exists past the first one is the Ultimate Gate:

A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

I mean we can just take it as a metaphor for lower worlds being infinitesimal in comparison(Again, don't look too deep in the prose), however if I were to try to force an explanation onto it I would go with this: Lovecraft uses the notion of curved space time

Like I said, the exact same paragraph refers to electronic organizations, so, it seems pretty literal to me. To add onto that, The Striking of the Gong (A story which I used as reference for the cosmology in the previous thread) talks about countless universes being contained within, and comprising larger universes, too, and said universes are pretty clearly 3-dimensional from their own perspective, which differs quite a bit from the higher-dimensional planes that Lovecraft describes, once again making me think that this hierarchy wouldn't necessarily coincide with the dimensional hierarchy (Especially since the latter is described and indeed shown to be a single, continuous structure, which is restricted to individual spacetime continuums):

"But what place is this? Is it Paradise or Hell? This is not the world I have known since birth. And those stars-I have never seen them before. Those constellations are mightier and more fiery than I ever knew in life."

"There are worlds beyond worlds, universes within and without universes," said the ancient. "You are upon a different planet than that upon which you were born; you are in a different universe, doubtless in a different dimension,"

"But I still have my body."

"I have not said that you are dead, as you name it. As for that, you may be still upon your little planet, as far as you know. Worlds within worlds, universes within universes. Things exist too small and too large for human comprehension. Each pebble on the beaches of Valusia contains countless universes within itself, and itself as a whole is as much a part of the great plan of all universes, as is the sun you know. Your universe, Kull of Valusia, may be a pebble on the shore of a mighty kingdom. "You have broken the bounds of material limitations. You may be in a universe which goes to make up a gem on the robe you wore on Valusia's throne or that universe you knew may be in the spiderweb which lies there on the grass near your feet. I tell you, size and space and time are relative and do not really exist."

The point was that said properties are too space-specific. Too specific for an aspatial reality.

Yes, and? Once again, a manifestation of an aspatial reality (Especially one specifically constructed so a human is capable of making sense of it) being unable to hold properties that said reality lacks on its own is a claim that you're not really substantiating in any way.

That was, as I said, only during the act of ascending to that location in the first place. It was more so because the entity Carter, which was an amalgamation of all instances of Carter throughout time,

Not really, since the things Carter observes in the Outer Extension are later referred as "impressions," too, which just so happened to stabilize as he approaches the seat of the Ancient Ones:

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilisation. There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered down from a sky of no assignable colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined Shapes.

He first talks about the impressions of the vaster abysses, then says he was taken there by the bubble and polyhedron. So it's not unlikely that the description was talking about their progress on the journey.

I find that kinda unlikely, especially since, as said before, Nyarlathotep can simply take humans from 3-dimensional space to the Ultimate Void if he so desires, and we see that same ability in action here.

However, even if we assume it is talking about the ultimate void, this kinda shows that curves and spirals exist there as well, more evidence why Lovecraft's prose shouldn't be taken at face value

I don't think spatial terms being utilized should be taken as priority, though, especially coming from the thoughts of a human who visited the place and was recalling his own limited perception of it. No more than any description that vaguely implies a sense of space ("Outside" and "outer," for instance) should.

Hmm....
I mean, that would be consistent with my initial proposition that the Ultimate Void's transcendence isn't vast enough for a jump to proper 1-A.

That's only for the Ultimate Void though, and looking past the prose it makes sense because of the position of the Outer Void in the cosmology.

Yeah, I am aware. I was moreso steelmanning your point there and drawing a connection between the characteristics of every place which Lovecraft explicitly described as "undimensioned" to find some concrete meaning for the term itself, within the context of the cosmology.

I don't think the Outer Extension's "seething" was meant to be anything more than shenanigans of a man suddenly finding himself in higher dimensional space

It does gain context with the tidbit describing that place as holding no true conception of form or position beyond what Carter's imagination can provide him, so, again, dimensional space itself "seething" is a descriptor which makes sense in that context, especially when the narration emphasizes that the only thing making him "a fixed point" in that place was his own sense of identity.

Especially considering it being called a "dimensional extension" is blatantly referring to the earth being an intersection/phase of the higher dimensional extension of earth.

And, as you said, I think we can look past the prose here to analyze things based on where the realm logically stands in the cosmology, which I already explained up there.

as bonus lovecraft also considers things beyond 3 dimensional world as full of contradictions and beyond logic

Yeah, a world which doesn't obey laws inherent to three-dimensional space and has no linear causation would indeed be pretty wacky. Not exactly that exaggerated of a description.

 

[Darksmash]

Even if we entertain that, it just leads to another crack in your point, though, namely that the "gates" in TDITWH are just specific angles and lines in which higher-dimensional space intersects with spaces that have more than three dimensions, and, by that logic, there would be an infinite amount of Gates. Meanwhile, the Gates which Carter goes through are two (2) literal barriers separating our world from higher ones, so much that Fungi from Yuggoth refers to them as "space-hung screens," and you have to unlock them using the Silver Key.

I mean that's fine. I also already talked about the infinite gates thing. It would make sense for them to just skip to the Ultimate Gate directly, but eh not like this point was major evidence in the first place.

That would contradict the Supreme Archetype explicitly stating that Carter only passed through two gates to reach those regions, and the story making it clear that the only "Gate" that exists past the first one is the Ultimate Gate:

Yes, Carter "passed" through two Gates, but for all we know the Ultimate Gate just skips to the top.

Like I said, the exact same paragraph refers to electronic organizations, so, it seems pretty literal to me. To add onto that, The Striking of the Gong (A story which I used as reference for the cosmology in the previous thread) talks about countless universes being contained within, and comprising larger universes, too, and said universes are pretty clearly 3-dimensional from their own perspective, which differs quite a bit from the higher-dimensional planes that Lovecraft describes, once again making me think that this hierarchy wouldn't necessarily coincide with the dimensional hierarchy (Especially since the latter is described and indeed shown to be a single, continuous structure, which is restricted to individual spacetime continuums):

I also don't think they coincide, however I think the hierarchy of universes in The Striking of the Gong isn't even a hierarchy of transcendences in the first place. It seems more like a fractal of universes that arises in a single infinity. It was heavily implied these universes follow the same timeline, the context on "space, time and size' being relative being that different cosmic things can experience things like time differently. For example:

Kull looked and saw that they were changing swiftly. A constant weaving, an incessant changing of design and pattern was taking place. "The 'everlasting' stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade. Even as we watch, upon those which are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds. All life and a part of life. To them it seems billions of years; to us, but a moment. All life."

Implied again at the end:

"But surely," said Kull, "that was hours agone."

Brule laughed. "You are still mazed, lord king. From the time he leaped and you fell, to the time I slashed the heart out of him, a man could not have counted the fingers of one hand. And during the time you were lying in his blood and yours on the floor, no more than twice that time elapsed. See, Tu has not yet arrived with bandages and he scurried for them the moment you went down."

"Aye, you are right," answered Kull. "I cannot understand-but just before I was struck down I heard the gong sounding the hour, and it was still sounding when I came to myself.

"Brule, there is no such thing as time nor space; for I have travelled the longest journey of my life, and have lived countless millions of years during the striking of the gong."

With the overall theme being that, in the face of infinity all finite relative measures are useless and illusory:

"All is illusion," Kuthulos was saying. "All outward manifestations of the underlying Reality, which is beyond human comprehension, since there are no relative things by which the finite mind may measure the infinite. The one may underlie all, or each natural illusion may possess a basic entity. All these things were known to Raama, the greatest mind of all the ages, who eons ago freed humanity from the grasp of unknown demons and raised the race to its heights."

So this hierarchy isn't exactly that relevant in the first place.

Yes, and? Once again, a manifestation of an aspatial reality (Especially one specifically constructed so a human is capable of making sense of it) being unable to hold properties that said reality lacks on its own is a claim that you're not really substantiating in any way.

It was a supporting point in addition to other things that heavily imply this reality is still dimensional.

Not really, since the things Carter observes in the Outer Extension are later referred as "impressions," too, which just so happened to stabilize as he approaches the seat of the Ancient Ones:

Again, this connection blatantly ignores the context in which those impressions were called "cerebral"

A moment before, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.

The flux of impressions came because he was transforming from a linear human shifting through phases of time to a combined entity outside time, which is why it says he experienced all the perceptions his mind revolved on, yet lost the sense of chronology due to going past time. Saying that all the impressions were mental blatantly ignores the multiple instances where Carter made use of his eyes.

I find that kinda unlikely, especially since, as said before, Nyarlathotep can simply take humans from 3-dimensional space to the Ultimate Void if he so desires, and we see that same ability in action here.

in the context of this particular story it seems equally likely to may or may not be the case, since angles/curves were previously linked to breaking to higher spaces in the first place.

I don't think spatial terms being utilized should be taken as priority, though, especially coming from the thoughts of a human who visited the place and was recalling his own limited perception of it. No more than any description that vaguely implies a sense of space ("Outside" and "outer," for instance) should.

...I mean almost all the descriptions that Lovecraft uses are from the perspective of humans. That's what my point about the Outer Extension was from the very beginning.

Yeah, I am aware. I was moreso steelmanning your point there and drawing a connection between the characteristics of every place which Lovecraft explicitly described as "undimensioned" to find some concrete meaning for the term itself, within the context of the cosmology.

It does gain context with the tidbit describing that place as holding no true conception of form or position beyond what Carter's imagination can provide him, so, again, dimensional space itself "seething" is a descriptor which makes sense in that context, especially when the narration emphasizes that the only thing making him "a fixed point" in that place was his own sense of identity.

That description, like all others, was from the perspective of a human that suddenly transitioned to a higher state of being. His mind is not meant to grasp forms and positions described in a higher dimensional space, which is why his imagination is filling the gaps. Seething is just generally being used to signify chaos, and it's not like "seething of dimensions" will complement "undimensioned" in any way, without making up new meanings for the latter word.

Yes, he was a fixed point because he was still the entity Randolph Carter, not because he had a sense of identity. Lovecraft doesn't seem to use the idea of loss of identity as literally as you are thinking. It's not like Carter conceptually exceeded the meaning of "me" or "I' when he went past the ultimate gate. It merely meant that he lost the identity which he previously held about himself. Even directly compared himself to multiple headed creatures:

He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be sure whether he—the fragment or facet of an earthly entity beyond the Ultimate Gate—had been that one or some other. His self had been annihilated; and yet he—if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as he—was equally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was as though his body had been suddenly transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern which was the original and which the additions—if indeed (supremely monstrous thought) there were any original as distinguished from other embodiments.

And, as you said, I think we can look past the prose here to analyze things based on where the realm logically stands in the cosmology, which I already explained up there.

Yes and that's not what I meant by looking past the prose. You are still clinging onto particular buzzwords(which aren't even consistent) and trying to ascertain the position of the realm in the cosmology based on that. Looking past all the vague descriptions in an overarching context the Outer Extension is blatantly just some arbitrary higher dimension which the earth was some infinitesimal phase of. The only point you made like this was the point about there being just 2 gates, which is debatable but can be explained as just directly skipping to the top with the Ultimate Gate, since climbing an infinite hierarchy would be meaningless in the context of exploring the cosmology, as you will always be equally far away from your destination.

Yeah, a world which doesn't obey laws inherent to three-dimensional space and has no linear causation would indeed be pretty wacky. Not exactly that exaggerated of a description.

Yes, and this description was literally used in context of what happened with the silver key, providing more context in favour of the previous point that all the buzzwords were just in relation to a 3D mind, since this directly implies anything beyond 3 dimensional existence to be above "logic" and full of contradictions and anomalies that cannot be described in normal language.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

I mean that's fine. I also already talked about the infinite gates thing. It would make sense for them to just skip to the Ultimate Gate directly, but eh not like this point was major evidence in the first place.

Hasn't talked about the difference in portrayal between them, though, which as I outlined above, clearly makes them out to have very different natures. Your response to the "infinite gates" countargument is something I've already addressed down below, so, go answer it, I guess.

Yes, Carter "passed" through two Gates, but for all we know the Ultimate Gate just skips to the top.

That's an assumption, and you'd have to bring in actual evidence to support it, particularly in light of the excerpts I posted myself, which make it clear that there is no hierarchy between the First and Ultimate Gates whatsoever (["I]and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter[/I]," as well the fact that the Ancient Ones' seat resides just past the First Gate, after which there is no existential jump of any kind until you reach them). At least, not one that can strictly be described as comprised of more gates.

I also don't think they coincide, however I think the hierarchy of universes in The Striking of the Gong isn't even a hierarchy of transcendences in the first place. It seems more like a fractal of universes that arises in a single infinity. It was heavily implied these universes follow the same timeline, the context on "space, time and size' being relative being that different cosmic things can experience things like time differently.

I don't see any implication of them sharing the same timeline in here, especially since, as you pointed out, the same story also states that entities from a given universe can experience moments in what seem like billions of years to denizens of another universe, hence why time, along with space and size, is a relative concept which doesn't truly exist. And when Lovecraft himself alludes to a similar hierarchy of universes being contained within larger universes, he refers to the "cosmos of space and time" in its entirety as being a part of this hierarchy, instead of just the 3-dimensional part of the continuum.

And the hierarchy being part of a single infinity doesn't really work, either, given that even the "baseline" 3-dimensional plane of the universe is described as being infinite as well, such as in Celephais:

In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist.

And in TDITWH itself:

What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.

It was a supporting point in addition to other things that heavily imply this reality is still dimensional.

Yeah, and that's fine by me, but it doesn't answer my question.

The flux of impressions came because he was transforming from a linear human shifting through phases of time to a combined entity outside time, which is why it says he experienced all the perceptions his mind revolved on, yet lost the sense of chronology due to going past time.

And that, in turn, ignores the fact that this statement comes right after the narration describes Carter losing any sense of his surroundings, which is evident by how it immediately succeeds the text stating that "Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall." Not only does this interpretation flows better with the structure of the text, but it also fits in much better with the narration explicitly laying out that these images were being built directly into Carter's consciousness.

Saying that all the impressions were mental blatantly ignores the multiple instances where Carter made use of his eyes.

"Multiple"? As far as I recall, there is only a single instance remotely suggesting that, which is the following passage:

The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructions in some subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things which he wished the Companions to dream; and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured the prescribed thought, there would be born the nucleus of a manifestation visible to his own earthly eyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes had achieved a oneness, that manifestation would occur, and everything he required be materialised, through concentration. He had seen such things on earth—in India, where the combined, projected will of a circle of adepts can make a thought take tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaanât, of which few men dare speak.

Which, again, doesn't exactly refer to the Outer Extension itself, but to a manifestation of the Ultimate Gate that the Ancient Ones were making visible by projecting their own dreams into reality under 'Umr at-Tawil's commands. And even then, this could easily just be more another of the impressions which the vast reality around him was building within his mind, given that he still perceived all of these aforementioned images as being visual, even if what he saw wasn't necessarily coming from his eyes so much as all of his senses being directly manipulated by intelligent design.

...I mean almost all the descriptions that Lovecraft uses are from the perspective of humans. That's what my point about the Outer Extension was from the very beginning.

That description, like all others, was from the perspective of a human that suddenly transitioned to a higher state of being. His mind is not meant to grasp forms and positions described in a higher dimensional space, which is why his imagination is filling the gaps.

The Outer Extension's case is quite different, since the parts of it with space-like features are, once again, manifestations constructed specifically so Carter would be capable of making sense of the reality around him, which would fall under the caveat of "This is only a fragmented perception of the place," while the statements referring to it as "undimensioned" and "with no stable form or position" are the narration talking about what lies beyond Carter's limited view in the first place, and so they wouldn't fall under it.

Given that the context of what I posted is Gilman tried to remember things that he saw in his dreams, the same would apply here.

Yes, he was a fixed point because he was still the entity Randolph Carter, not because he had a sense of identity. Lovecraft doesn't seem to use the idea of loss of identity as literally as you are thinking. It's not like Carter conceptually exceeded the meaning of "me" or "I' when he went past the ultimate gate. It merely meant that he lost the identity which he previously held about himself. Even directly compared himself to multiple headed creatures.

It's very much literal, yes, given that the gradual loss of stability, both physical and mental, that an individual goes through as they pass through the Gates is already stated to be related to this revelation, which is why even going past the First Gate already made Carter unsure on exactly how separate he was from the objects surrounding him (Which also contextualizes the place itself having no sense of form or position, by the way), while passing through the Ultimate Gate just made it so his awareness dissolved entirely and witnessed all of his facets throughout all of reality.

Looking past all the vague descriptions in an overarching context the Outer Extension is blatantly just some arbitrary higher dimension which the earth was some infinitesimal phase of.

I disagree. If you read the actual story, it becomes blatantly obvious that the Outer Extension is, in fact, the archetypal counterpart of the Earth itself, hence why it already carries much of the existential revelation which the Ultimate Void hits you with, with the only difference being the fact it's restricted to the Earth, in this case:

His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have come upon him—splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly counterparts—inside the First Gate, had not the magic of ’Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the Silver Key with precision for the Ultimate Gate’s opening.

The only point you made like this was the point about there being just 2 gates

That was indeed largely what I was referring to in that post, yes, which you didn't seem to properly counter beyond making an unfalsifiable proposition that would naturally fall under the Burden of Proof, like I said before. Of course, it can potentially be substantiated if you argue that the Gates in TDITWH are the same constructs as the Gates from TtGotSK, but that leads to quite a few contradictions in how they are defined, added to how you seem to go back and forth between "They are the exact same thing" and "Actually, they are not the same thing, but share the same nature," which makes it kinda hard to tell what exactly you're trying to argue in the first place.

 

[Darksmash]

Hasn't talked about the difference in portrayal between them, though, which as I outlined above, clearly makes them out to have very different natures. Your response to the "infinite gates" countargument is something I've already addressed down below, so, go answer it, I guess.

That's an assumption, and you'd have to bring in actual evidence to support it, particularly in light of the excerpts I posted myself, which make it clear that there is no hierarchy between the First and Ultimate Gates whatsoever (["I]and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter[/I]," as well the fact that the Ancient Ones' seat resides just past the First Gate, after which there is no existential jump of any kind until you reach them). At least, not one that can strictly be described as comprised of more gates.

I mean such a skip happened in Hypnos as well,

Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known. My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky, clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.

While crossing the obstacles they eventually hit one incalculably denser than the rest, which has no reason not to be the Ultimate Gate/last barrier before the Ultimate Void. So unless you are suggesting it can be reached from below, such skips should be possible.

I don't see any implication of them sharing the same timeline in here, especially since, as you pointed out, the same story also states that entities from a given universe can experience moments in what seem like billions of years to denizens of another universe, hence why time, along with space and size, is a relative concept which doesn't truly exist. And when Lovecraft himself alludes to a similar hierarchy of universes being contained within larger universes, he refers to the "cosmos of space and time" in its entirety as being a part of this hierarchy, instead of just the 3-dimensional part of the continuum.

Yes exactly. They all follow the same linear worldline. The only difference being that different levels in the cosmic hierarchy of size experience time differently. It even blatantly gives the example of how in the time it takes stars to change civilizations rise and fall.

Kull looked and saw that they were changing swiftly. A constant weaving, an incessant changing of design and pattern was taking place. "The 'everlasting' stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade. Even as we watch, upon those which are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds. All life and a part of life. To them it seems billions of years; to us, but a moment. All life."

it's pretty clear that the context is that the experience of time is relative for different things in this hierarchy, but still following the same direction of time.Even reinforced at the end:

"But surely," said Kull, "that was hours agone."

Brule laughed. "You are still mazed, lord king. From the time he leaped and you fell, to the time I slashed the heart out of him, a man could not have counted the fingers of one hand. And during the time you were lying in his blood and yours on the floor, no more than twice that time elapsed. See, Tu has not yet arrived with bandages and he scurried for them the moment you went down."

"Aye, you are right," answered Kull. "I cannot understand-but just before I was struck down I heard the gong sounding the hour, and it was still sounding when I came to myself.

"Brule, there is no such thing as time nor space; for I have travelled the longest journey of my life, and have lived countless millions of years during the striking of the gong."

In the original world, only a very short amount of time had passed, but the protagonist had experienced millions of years in that short time.
The context on space, time and size being illusory:

"All is illusion," Kuthulos was saying. "All outward manifestations of the underlying Reality, which is beyond human comprehension, since there are no relative things by which the finite mind may measure the infinite. The one may underlie all, or each natural illusion may possess a basic entity. All these things were known to Raama, the greatest mind of all the ages, who eons ago freed humanity from the grasp of unknown demons and raised the race to its heights."

The idea being that finite relative measures are all illusory in the face of infinity, which makes sense.

And the hierarchy being part of a single infinity doesn't really work, either, given that even the "baseline" 3-dimensional plane of the universe is described as being infinite as well, such as in Celephais:

Even Lovecraft himself doesn't use these labels consistently, with the meaning of "cosmos" changing from local space time to everything below the Archetypes, or "All of space time" also changing from local space time to everything below the Ultimate Void, I would say we should see the context of the terms in the story they appear in first, and given that this story was from a different writer in the first place just makes that even more important.

however, even if we allow the assumption that they are all infinite, all it really does is add a hierarchy of redundancy, since the jumps in that hierarchy aren't vast enough to be a transcendence given they don't even follow different timelines.

Yeah, and that's fine by me, but it doesn't answer my question.

Redundancy. There is no reason the writer would provide extremely specific properties for something if said properties don't even apply in the first place. Besides, if the reality willingly wanted to translate itself in a way Carter could understand it should have gone for something more simpler that Carter could comprehend, I wouldn't really expect something like this:

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilisation. There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered down from a sky of no assignable colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined Shapes.

Coincidentally, the description about what happened after the silver key activated has similar word usage:

What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic dreams, and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic. As the Hindoo continued his tale, he had difficulty in avoiding what seemed—even more than the notion of a man transferred through the years to boyhood—an air of trivial, puerile extravagance. Mr. Aspinwall, in disgust, gave an apoplectic snort and virtually stopped listening.

And makes it extremely clear that these words would apply to anything above 3 dimensional world, consistent with other usages of higher dimensions having similar descriptions of unknown colours, weird shapes, geometries etc. All context blatantly points to the fact that this is a man who has found himself in a higher dimensional space beyond his comprehension and ability to make sense of.

And that, in turn, ignores the fact that this statement comes right after the narration describes Carter losing any sense of his surroundings, which is evident by how it immediately succeeds the text stating that "Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall." Not only does this interpretation flows better with the structure of the text, but it also fits in much better with the narration explicitly laying out that these images were being built directly into Carter's consciousness.

Which again, misses further context:

The day before, Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinction between boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain store of images which had lost all connexion with terrestrial scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.

The reason it states stuff like "Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall", is because in the transition from human Carter to entity Carter, he had lost all connections with terrestrial scenes and the circumstances with the outside world, along with the chronological order in which he obtained those images. Quite literally this was Carter's all instances throughout space time merged into a single amalgamation.

"Multiple"? As far as I recall, there is only a single instance remotely suggesting that, which is the following passage:

There was also this instance:

Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful Silver Key in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.

Which, again, doesn't exactly refer to the Outer Extension itself, but to a manifestation of the Ultimate Gate that the Ancient Ones were making visible by projecting their own dreams into reality under 'Umr at-Tawil's commands. And even then, this could easily just be more another of the impressions which the vast reality around him was building within his mind, given that he still perceived all of these aforementioned images as being visual, even if what he saw wasn't necessarily coming from his eyes so much as all of his senses being directly manipulated by intelligent design.

Yes, it doesn't refer to the Outer Extension, but it was talking about something that would have manifested there(even blatantly compared to materialization) that would have become visible to his eyes. And with the overwhelming context, all these impressions weren't really the reality building up senseless images in his mind, but quite clearly him observing the reality with his own senses. Hell, it even makes clear that the conception of visual stimuli still exists in this reality(Although the beings don't need these senses):

There was another Shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed to glide or float over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not exactly permanent in outline, but held transient suggestions of something remotely preceding or paralleling the human form, though half as large again as an ordinary man. It seemed to be heavily cloaked, like the Shapes on the pedestals, with some neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not detect any eye-holes through which it might gaze. Probably it did not need to gaze, for it seemed to belong to an order of being far outside the merely physical in organisation and faculties.

Funnily the same quote also shows forms still exist in the Outer extension, quite literally even considering it went as far as to specify the size.

The Outer Extension's case is quite different, since the parts of it with space-like features are, once again, manifestations constructed specifically so Carter would be capable of making sense of the reality around him, which would fall under the caveat of "This is only a fragmented perception of the place," while the statements referring to it as "undimensioned" and "with no stable form or position" are the narration talking about what lies beyond Carter's limited view in the first place, and so they wouldn't fall under it.

If they were specifically constructed for Carter to make sense of them, then as I explained above, he should not have detected contradictions and incomprehensibility in everything. And the multiple usages of eyes also counters that completely. "No stable form and position"...maybe because Carter's mind wasn't developed to be able to quantify forms and positions in that place in the first place? Makes a lot of sense to me considering they also call things above the 3 dimensional world beyond logic.

It's very much literal, yes, given that the gradual loss of stability, both physical and mental, that an individual goes through as they pass through the Gates is already stated to be related to this revelation, which is why even going past the First Gate already made Carter unsure on exactly how separate he was from the objects surrounding him (Which also contextualizes the place itself having no sense of form or position, by the way), while passing through the Ultimate Gate just made it so his awareness dissolved entirely and witnessed all of his facets throughout all of reality.

My bad, it is indeed literal, but what I wanted to convey was that it isn't literal in the way you were making it out to be. It's not like they are losing identity in some conceptual manner. Carter being called a multiple headed creature/entity makes that clear, as if he had lost the concept of identity literally there wouldn't be any singular entity anymore.

The first gate being part of his revelation makes sense, considering the entire point was that every local phase/conception was just a part of a bigger whole, with change being illusory. The first gate showed this relatively, with earth and human Carter being phases of the dimensional extension of earth.

He was unsure about his relationship to the surroundings because....once again, like I already talked above, his mind isn't made to make sense of these things in a higher dimensional reality. Same for having no stable form or position(. Besides that portion of the text was specifically talking about the state Carter found himself in immediately after ascending to the Outer extension, before achieving stablization

Also just as a bonus, Outer Extension having both mental and physical aspects:

For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath; and the glow of ’Umr at-Tawil’s quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.

I disagree. If you read the actual story, it becomes blatantly obvious that the Outer Extension is, in fact, the archetypal counterpart of the Earth itself, hence why it already carries much of the existential revelation which the Ultimate Void hits you with, with the only difference being the fact it's restricted to the Earth, in this case:

I agree with both things. It was the archetypal dimensional extension of earth, which the 3D world was just an intersection/phase of. And I already explained about the revelation. What I fail to see is how this leads you to disagree with me.

That was indeed largely what I was referring to in that post, yes, which you didn't seem to properly counter beyond making an unfalsifiable proposition that would naturally fall under the Burden of Proof, like I said before. Of course, it can potentially be substantiated if you argue that the Gates in TDITWH are the same constructs as the Gates from TtGotSK, but that leads to quite a few contradictions in how they are defined, added to how you seem to go back and forth between "They are the exact same thing" and "Actually, they are not the same thing, but share the same nature," which makes it kinda hard to tell what exactly you're trying to argue in the first place.

I did provide an example from Hypnos, aside from that all I can really say is assuming the first gate is beyond the entire hierarchy based on there being just two gates is just as much of an assumption as assuming the Ultimate Gate skips to the top of the hierarchy.

 

[Ovy7]

After reading the entire thread over the past week, I agree with Umy.

 

[Livinmeme]

agree with the downgrade

 

[AKUTO123]

is this over or is it still going on

 

[Catzlaflame]

is this over or is it still going on

Still going lol

 

[Ultima_Reality]

While crossing the obstacles they eventually hit one incalculably denser than the rest, which has no reason not to be the Ultimate Gate/last barrier before the Ultimate Void. So unless you are suggesting it can be reached from below, such skips should be possible

The very fact that the Vacua form an hierarchy of their own already disproves their connection to the Gates which Carter passes through. As described in Hypnos, there were various such obstacles that each caused the narrator and his friend to become more and more distanced from the physical world as they broke away from the limitations of matter and form. Meanwhile, as I said above, the Gates only provide two losses of stability as an individual passes though them: The one that occurs after the First Gate, which is supposed to shatter one's ego across all of their earthly counterparts, and the one that occurs after the Ultimate Gate, which shatters their ego across all realities instead. This is even reinforced by the Supreme Archetype itself, who states that, should Carter have refused to partake in the Ultimate Mystery, he would just return to his world through the same two Gates that he had just crossed:

“What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet—five times only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to shew you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes.”

Even then, what Hypnos experienced wasn't exactly a "skip" at all: Him and the narrator just rapidly clawed through several of the aforementioned obstacles in rapid succession until they reached the last one, which only Hypnos could penetrate. Meanwhile, Carter just walked through the Outer Extension for a while and found the Ancient Ones, who then unlocked the Ultimate Gate for him.

Yes exactly. They all follow the same linear worldline. The only difference being that different levels in the cosmic hierarchy of size experience time differently. It even blatantly gives the example of how in the time it takes stars to change civilizations rise and fall.

How does time being relative across the different levels of these universes even remotely suggest that they exist within the same timeline, though? Of course, time being relative across different locations is something that could indeed happen within a single spacetime, but the presence of a similar phenomenon doesn't at all suggest that on its own.

Even Lovecraft himself doesn't use these labels consistently, with the meaning of "cosmos" changing from local space time to everything below the Archetypes, or "All of space time" also changing from local space time to everything below the Ultimate Void, I would say we should see the context of the terms in the story they appear in first, and given that this story was from a different writer in the first place just makes that even more important.

The former was referring to the space inhabited by Kuranes, a regular human who obviously comes from three-dimensional space, and the latter passage was likewise referring to Gilman's own studies on the act of stepping into a higher-dimensional plane and using it as a way to descend back into some faraway point of the third dimension, hence the "cosmic framework" was described as having celestial bodies and whatnot. Both statements are pretty clearly referring to 3-dimensional space alone.

however, even if we allow the assumption that they are all infinite, all it really does is add a hierarchy of redundancy, since the jumps in that hierarchy aren't vast enough to be a transcendence given they don't even follow different timelines.

Of course they are. You are well aware that being larger than an infinitely-sized space by a finite or countably-infinite amount is not a thing, yes? In order for it to be meaningfully "larger," it has to be equatable to a higher-dimensional space. And given that the higher-dimensional spaces which Lovecraft himself introduced are obviously very different from what's being described in The Striking of the Gong and also defined as directly connected to lower-dimensional ones, it seems all but fair that these two hierarchies would be in different spots of the cosmology. Not to mention that the hierarchy mentioned in Kull, again, fits much better with the description of the "super-cosmos" from The Whisperer in Darkness, as I've said above.

Redundancy. There is no reason the writer would provide extremely specific properties for something if said properties don't even apply in the first place. Besides, if the reality willingly wanted to translate itself in a way Carter could understand it should have gone for something more simpler that Carter could comprehend, I wouldn't really expect something like this:

If they were specifically constructed for Carter to make sense of them, then as I explained above, he should not have detected contradictions and incomprehensibility in everything.

All of this just seems to hinge on ignoring the logic of the text in favor of your own: It explicitly states that what Carter saw were simply the only symbols that he could comprehend, which is really all we need to know here; there's a difference between analyzing the text with more scrutiny and going for the complete opposite of what it states. If those properties were only stated to exist in relation to manifested images of the Outer Extension, and not to the Outer Extension itself, then we don't need to assume that to begin with. You're basically just saying "The text is actually lying because what it's saying doesn't make sense to me."

And makes it extremely clear that these words would apply to anything above 3 dimensional world

Yes, which wouldn't necessarily be excluding locations that surpass dimensioned space to begin with. As you pointed out before, the Outer Extension is described as "beyond time and the dimensions we know," yes, but as TDITWH showcases, even a single spacetime continuum is comprised of a lot more spatial dimensions than the three which human beings are familiar with, so saying that wouldn't really be a restrictive statement, especially since the time dimension, in this case, encompasses all of those spatial axes.

The reason it states stuff like "Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall", is because in the transition from human Carter to entity Carter, he had lost all connections with terrestrial scenes and the circumstances with the outside world, along with the chronological order in which he obtained those images. Quite literally this was Carter's all instances throughout space time merged into a single amalgamation.

Yes, and this amalgamation of his is of the same nature as the Outer Extension itself: Just like the entity of "Randolph Carter" is an amalgamation of all of Carter's earthly instances throughout time and space, so too is the Outer Extension an archetypal form of all of the Earth's versions throughout all of time and space, which, again, is why the images that Carter witnesses within it are described as somehow related to the planet's forgotten past.

And with the overwhelming context, all these impressions weren't really the reality building up senseless images in his mind, but quite clearly him observing the reality with his own senses.

It was not exactly random nor senseless, no, but, again, it was indeed the Outer Extension itself projecting images directly into his mind. The text states as much, in the most explicit terms possible. The tidbit stating that Carter was utilizing his eyes to observe those images is literally just a case of Perception Manipulation, and nothing else:

Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping.

Makes a lot of sense to me considering they also call things above the 3 dimensional world beyond logic.

Beyond 3-dimensional logic, yes, which is not as exaggerated of a description as you're claiming it to be.

He was unsure about his relationship to the surroundings because....once again, like I already talked above, his mind isn't made to make sense of these things in a higher dimensional reality.

Or, alternatively, it was due to the fact that crossing the Gates results in a gradual loss of individuality and sense of self, with the crossing of the Ultimate Gate ultimately resulting in complete dissolution across all realities. The "loss of stability" is pretty clearly treated as being part of a single continuous process related to the nature of the Gates.

The first gate being part of his revelation makes sense, considering the entire point was that every local phase/conception was just a part of a bigger whole, with change being illusory. The first gate showed this relatively, with earth and human Carter being phases of the dimensional extension of earth.

I agree with both things. It was the archetypal dimensional extension of earth, which the 3D world was just an intersection/phase of. And I already explained about the revelation. What I fail to see is how this leads you to disagree with me.

Because a higher-dimensional object is not an archetypal form within Lovecraft's cosmology. The cosmology provided by TtGotSK more or less hinges on the logic that, since a 3-dimensional object is derived from a 4-dimensional object, then so, too, is a 4-dimensional object logically derived from a 5-dimensional object, and this recursion goes on infinitely, until it culminates on an archetypal level of reality from which all such phases are derived and dimensionality itself becomes irrelevant.

aside from that all I can really say is assuming the first gate is beyond the entire hierarchy based on there being just two gates is just as much of an assumption as assuming the Ultimate Gate skips to the top of the hierarchy.

Not really, no, since we always default to a negative, until something comes up and allows us to accept the positive. You are the one who has to substantiate the claim that there is in fact an hierarchy between the First Gate and the Ultimate Gate.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

is this over or is it still going on

Bold of you to assume it will ever be over.

 

[Bernkastelll]

Bold of you to assume it will ever be over.

Hey, are u arguing against the downgrade or in favor of it? I can't read all these posts for now

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Against.

 

[Yar_R_agi_7k]

ufff I'm really curious about any scientist's opinion after them seeing these articles...

 

[ShivaShakti]

But who is Umy?

Umy is Darksmash

 

[Antvasima]

Ultima seems to make sense to me, but I am not a very good person to ask about this subject.

Are there any other staff members that I should call here to help with evaluations? Perhaps Ultima and his opponent in this discussion can both explain their respective arguments in easy to understand manners to make the staff's work easier?