“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and In 1904 the

In 1904 the death of Lovecraft’s grandfather, and the subsequent mismanagement of his property
interests are emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me and affairs, plunged Lovecraft’s family into severe financial difficulties. Lovecraft and his mother
there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and the local human were forced to move out of their lavish Victorian home into cramped quarters
Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka is the debut studio album by American death metal band
passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds or other
Nile.
universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or
The title of the album is a reference to the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Outsider". The phrase is
dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, featured in the song "Beneath Eternal Oceans of Sand" which has lyrics paraphrased from the
and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any aforementioned tale. In Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Nephren-Ka was an Egyptian Pharaoh whose
existence at all…but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the unspeakable cult worship led him to be stricken from almost all Egyptian records. The catacombs
shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism where he is buried are referenced in several Lovecraft stories as well as many stories by other
at the threshold.” mythos authors.

1. Letter from Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, 5 July 1927, in H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Binary opposition in the text:
Letters II, 1925-1929, ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City: Arkham
House, 1968), p. 150. Inside / Outside
Confinement / Freedom
Lovcraft was sickly child, so he spent many of his school years at home. He became an
avid reader, devouring works on a variety of texts. During his earliest childhood he gets Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched
enthusiasm for the Arabian Nights, at the age of five. And then he discovers Greek is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings
mythology through Bulfinch’s Age of Fable and through children’s versions of and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of
the Iliad and Odyssey. Indeed his earliest surviving literary work, “The Poem of Ulysses” grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far
(1897), is a paraphrase of the Odyssey in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse. But aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the
Lovecraft had by this time already discovered weird fiction, and his first story, the non- broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories,
extant “The Noble Eavesdropper,” may date to as early as 1896. His interest in the weird when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.
was fostered by his grandfather, who entertained Lovecraft with off-the-cuff weird tales in
the Gothic style. Lovecraft loved the works of Edgar Allan Poe and also developed a Imagery:
special interest in astronomy. Visual: almost all of it. “Coloured pictures” “mouldy books”
Auditory: “mute trees”; “the eerie echoes of its fall”
Olfactory: “and there was an accursed smell everywhere”
Tactile: “the slimy wall”; “portal of stone rough with strange chiselling”
In The Odyssey, Telemachus evoked the fate of his father Ullyses, and all the diners fell
into a deep melancholy. Then, Elena orders to the servant to put nepenthe, the drink of
forgetfulness, in the glasses. So they felt happiy again.
Elena brought the nepenthe from Egypt. She got it from Polydamna, queen of Egypt.

Etimologically “nepenthe” means “no pain”.