EXCERPTS FROM CARCOSA: THE SEVENTY-TWO DEMONS OF THE ARS GOETIA

More excerpts from Impossible Landscapes. First, the goals and "methods" of the King in Yellow. Then, the Seventy-two demons of the Ars Goetia.

THE OUROBOROS

“Ah," she said, "to come is easy and takes hours; to go is different — and may take centuries.”
―Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow

The purpose of the cult of Cthulhu is to wake their slumbering “god” so it may reign over the ruins of our world. What is the purpose of the King in Yellow? The sane can never answer this question. Its insanity follows no guidelines and obeys no rules. It runs rampant, and what it can’t destroy, it sweeps away in a primal tide of madness. 

What does the King in Yellow appear to be doing? 

Spreading. Like a virus, the power of Carcosa feeds, redoubles itself, and expands so that it might find a foothold farther afield. It finds vibrant human minds and settles, pooling ever outward, staining their reality with impossibilities. When enough of it is brought through to our world through them, that location joins with Carcosa; a realm perhaps composed of many such worlds consumed in the past. 

The arts and sciences are a haven for the King, and those that make a life of the mind seem the most susceptible to its strange call. Luckily, those that truly hear the call of Carcosa — artists, savants, deep thinkers — are few and far between. 

Those in service of Carcosa create copies of The King in Yellow, they sell them, they outfit the costumes of those that enact the play, they manufacture the items used to abase themselves to it. Worst of all, those that serve the King in Yellow often don’t know that they serve. 

It is a Rube Goldberg machine independent of time and space whose only function is to create itself, like the ouroboros, except it is continuously vomiting itself out in wider and wider gyres. A pattern of horrors whose surfaces snap, split, and multiply like a puzzle that can never be solved; and is always in fascinating, terrible, motion. 

And it all begins as only a symbol, or a specific sequence of words.

DISINFORMATION: The Truth of the King in Yellow

Though Agents may struggle to understand the secrets presented here, the truth is, they can never understand them and remain human. Understanding of the threat means consumption by that threat — a fact that most Agents learn too late.

But, if that core truth at the heart of the King in Yellow could be summarized, it might be best summarized as: The impossible horrors presented here are not the exception, they are the rule. They are not some wispy shadows on the fringes of our ordered existence, in fact, there is no such thing as order, space, time, being, identity or reason. These are all momentary illusions, cast against a very real backdrop of infinite disorder. Those in the “real” world are the ones that exist and persist in a dream-like illusion. Only those in the Night World and Carcosa are approaching something as permanent as “reality” purports itself to be. 

Reality is the side-effect. It is as malleable, fluid and fleeting as oil on water, a tiny bubble of momentary stillness in a roiling, limitless, chaos that will soon be snuffed out forever.