Cthulhu Mythos Cosmology and Gods

Randolph Carter

Randolph Carter is the protagonist of several stories written by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as the focus of Lovecraft's first novella, The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath. His bloodline had lived in Arkham for many years, dating all the way back to the wizard Edmund Carter, who had come to Arkham in order to escape the Salem Witch Trials. On top of all this, Carter began to visit the mysterious Dreamlands at an incredibly young age, further driving his lifelong love of mysticism and the paranormal. Throughout his life, Carter has been one of the few mortals to encounter beings such as Nyarlathotep, Nodens, and even The Supreme Archetype.Upon traversing the First Gate, Randolph Carter finds himself completely detached from the limitations of space and time, and loses his physical form entirely in the process, becoming identifiable neither as a child nor as an adult, but only as a vague, abstract impression of an 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."

As Carter sits upon the Ancient Ones' pedestal, he is greeted by the other Ancient Ones, who then tell him that his ambitions have allowed him to become one of them.

"Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres, and radiating a message which he understood: "We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has made you one of us.""

This is supported much later on in the story, when Carter recalls that the Silver Key's magic transformed him from an adult into a child, and then again into a vague entity outside of time and space.

"As the waves paused again he pondered in the mighty silence, thinking of strange tributes, stranger questions, and still stranger requests. Curious concepts flowed conflictingly through a brain dazed with unaccustomed vistas and unforeseen disclosures. It occurred to him that, if those disclosures were literally true, he might bodily visit all those infinitely distant ages and parts of the universe which he had hitherto known only in dreams, could he but command the magic to change the angle of his consciousness-plane. And did not the Silver Key supply that magic? Had it not first changed him from a man in 1928 to a boy in 1883, and then to something quite outside time? Oddly, despite his present apparent absence of body, he knew that the Key was still with him."

So, given that the magic of the Silver Key allowed Carter to untether himself from space and time and become one of the Ancient Ones. While meeting The Supreme Archetype, Randolph Carter is presented with a choice: he may either turn back and descend from the Gates back to material reality, continuing to live in ignorance with the Veil (as spoken of by the Necronomicon) left untouched for him; or, he may penetrate the Veil and behold the Ultimate Mystery, obtaining complete knowledge of the cosmos. Carter, of course, chooses the latter.

""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.""

Among many other things, Randolph Carter learns that every life he has ever lived and will live, as well as every stage in each one of these lives, is an infinitesimal phase of one ultimate, eternal "Carter" archetype, which we learn is actually chief among the Archetypes - The Supreme Archetype itself.

"All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being—son, father, grandfather, and so on—and each stage of individual being—infant, child, boy, young man, old man—is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal "Carter" outside space and time—phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.

A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of yesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard Edmund Carter who fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanil itself, or a still remoter creature of trans-galactic Shonhi, or a four-dimensioned gaseous consciousness in an older space-time continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a dark radio-active comet of inconceivable orbit—and so on, in the endless cosmic circle.

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."