Nan Madol Ruins which inspired HP Lovecraft

[Still Waters]

Off the coast of a remote Micronesian island lay the ruins of a once-great city of man-made stone islands that inspired the city of R'lyeh in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Impressive in their own right, these ruins represent the remains of megalithic architecture on an unparalleled scale in Micronesia.

http://www.atlasobsc...laces/nan-madol

[DeWitz]

I read the article, but it doesn't tell us in what format Lovecraft read about the place. Travel journals? Sea captain memoirs? Was it fully explored and detailed by the 1930"s? Or did he visit there (he was a notorious homebody)?

[seaturtlehorsesnake]

i tried looking that up, szentorgy, and so far, i haven't found anything that explains how he learned about them. every site i find just says that they "may have served as the inspiration for", or some version of that phrase. that said, they were first found by Europeans in the early 19th century, so i'm sure he could have read about them.

[Oniomancer]

A bit of informed speculation it seems, based in part on the fact he names the Island in another story:

In 1972, the year The Satanic Rituals was published, Aquino wrote in the Church of Satan’s newsletter the Cloven Hoof an article attempting to identify the location of R’lyeh.(83) Aquino identifies this as Nan-Madol, Ponape in Micronesia, Ponape being a destination for sea captain Ahab Marsh in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.(84) The immense and still mysterious stone walls of Nan-Madol, considered by the islanders to be haunted, is a convincing location, given that it matched key features for R’lyeh given by Lovecraft as an island in the Pacific with mysterious megalithic structures. Aquino states that island tradition tells of the city having been created by a race of gods, the Anti-Aramach, ‘who came down from the sky in great canoes’, while the great stones of the city flew down from the sky.

Quote Source: http://irishgothicho...tOccultism.html

And the original cited article: http://www.esoterico... R'LYEH.pdf

Edited November 21, 2013 by Oniomancer