Aforgomons chain
Aforgomonskette (English original title: The Chain of Aforgomon ) is the title of a fantastic horror story by the American writer Clark Ashton Smith , which he completed in January 1934 and published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in December of the following year . In 1942, she was in the anthology Out of Space and Time of the publishing house Arkham House added.
The work was published in 1971 in the short story collection Der Planet der Toten , which was reprinted in the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .
The complex story takes place on two levels, which are linked by the motif of reincarnation . She tells how the protagonist remembers his previous life with the help of a drug and thus suffers a gruesome death.
content
The narrator tells of the mysterious death of the writer John Milwarp whose works over the Far East come after a short time as forgotten as he was. Even the narrator finds it hard to remember the man who him as executor used and which he has to reconstruct as if from a dream .
On the day of his death the housekeeper was lured to the half-open door of his study by a flood of blinding light, saw him at his desk in a halo of flickering light, and believed that his clothes had caught fire. Soon it seemed as if the walls were going to disappear and Milwarp was sitting on the edge of a precipice, entwined with incandescent chains . After the room darkened again, she found him dead, sitting at the desk in the same pose, his skin covered with chain-like burns , while his clothes were completely intact.
The narrator now reproduces Milwarp's diary , which is located on two time levels, the writing slowly dissolves and which finally breaks off abruptly. It has to leave gaps, however, because the author, especially towards the end, repeatedly switches to a foreign alphabet that he cannot decipher even with the help of scholarly friends.
Milwarp writes about a drug called Souvara, which he uses to learn something about his earlier life on earth. Since childhood he has been haunted by gloomy premonitions about a past life, which have been reinforced by his travels and occult studies, while at the same time he is filled with a longing for a past beauty. One day he takes the drug and after a while notices how his eyesight sharpened, he sees objects in new colors and can soon see through them like through a light mist. Soon he sees the silhouettes of exotic landscapes, temples, medieval cities, tropical or northern forests, figures of the Levant , Persia, Rome and Carthage , the walls of Nineveh as well as the capital of Atlantis and knows that all these are only remnants of his earlier existences . On his spiritual journey into the past he sees himself as a warrior and troubadour, beggar or nobleman, without completely merging with these images because he is looking for an even older incarnation.
At some point he finds himself in a garden in the city of Kalood on the planet Hestan, which precedes the earth and is illuminated by four small suns . His former existence is forgotten, he is now Calaspa, a priest of the time god Aforgomon, whom he has served for years. Desperate about the death of his beloved Belthoris in the autumn of last year, he turns away from him and curses him and the stars of that season. To get back the lost time with her, he persuades a magician to give him insight into a sinister spellbook . He memorises a mantra and the name of Aforgomon's adversary. The magician urgently warns him of the consequences of disrupting the sacred flow of time. He ignores this, speaks the necromantic incantation and performs a blasphemous ritual by soiling the altar in the garden with his blood .
The adversary Xexanoth grants him an hour with his beloved, “on which no shadow of death has yet fallen.” He is transferred to a day of the past year which is illuminated by the sun, “which is tired and heavy as the fully ripe fruits of autumn “Are and live through the hour when he stood with Belthoris in the garden in front of the altar and plaited flowers in her hair, until he was suddenly thrown back into his time and haunted again by grief for her death.
In the present, Milwarp remembers the necromancy in spite of the past eons and feels the images of that other world nestling in his brain. Although he no longer takes the drug, he is put back in the dungeon twice, and the shelves around him are turned to stone.
The other diary entries in Hestan's calendar show that the act does not remain hidden, as it has forever messed up the structure of the solar system, indeed the entire universe . Calaspa is arrested, spends days in the temple dungeon, and is convicted of the iniquity of the time order. From now on he is to be haunted by chaos in all future incarnations until the memory of his original sin kills him and he is forgotten. Aforgomon's henchmen lead Calaspa to a ravine , force him to sit on a seat that protrudes over the abyss and wind an iron chain around his body. There he remains for eons and has to stare into the blackness. At some point he perceives that a phantom of another world is taken out of time as well as he writes words. Then it begins to shine in the depths.
Emergence
Smith made very slow progress with the story, which was initially entitled "The Curse of the Time God", spoke of a hell of a effort and believed that he had lost inspiration. He himself justified the difficulty with having to suggest the reality of an action that appears more like a dream . In addition to the lack of inspiration, Smith was also tied up in the family, since he had to take care of his ailing father and also of his mother, who had scalded her foot with hot tea. After completing the story, he offered it to Farnsworth Wright, extremely disheartened . But he declined on the grounds that it let up in the end, while for Smith it was more weak in the middle section. After a revision, Wright finally adopted it so that it could appear in the December 1935 issue of Weird Tales.
background
In addition to HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard , Clark Ashton Smith is often counted among the three musketeers of the pulp magazine Weird Tales , and some fans of the genre even rate them higher than Lovecraft himself.
As in his much better known story The City of the Singing Flame , Smith used the possibilities of a fictitious diary and flashbacks to a previous life of the protagonist as a narrative means. In his early poem The Star-Treader , published in 1912, the motif of reincarnation can already be found as well as the image of an infinite chain of incarnations.
For Steve Behrends, Aforgomon's necklace is one of Smith's most compelling works. He was particularly successful in the part of history that played on Hestan eons ago with its poetic tone, while Milwarp's present interests him less and he lets the individual epochs of the journey through time pass by too quickly.
literature
- Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work. Second Edition, Chapter Eight, Science Fantasies, Wildside Press LLC 2013 pp. 105-107
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Clark Ashton Smith: Aforgomonskette In: Der Planet der Toten, German by Friedrich Polakovics, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 77
- ^ Clark Ashton Smith: Aforgomonskette In: Der Planet der Toten, German by Friedrich Polakovics, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 77
- ↑ Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, Notes on the Stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 383
- ↑ Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, Notes on the Stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 384
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 18
- ^ Rein A. Zondergeld : Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur , Clark Ashton Smith, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 229
- ↑ Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, Notes on the Stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 384
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 105
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 106