The Temple (Lovecraft short story)

"The Temple"
Author	H. P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Short story
Published in	Weird Tales
Publication date	September 1925

"The Temple" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1920, and first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales #24 in September 1925.

Synopsis

The story is narrated as a "found manuscript" penned by Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, a lieutenant-commander in the Imperial German Navy during the days of World War I. It documents his untimely end at the bottom of the ocean.

Altberg begins by declaring that he has decided to document the events leading up to his final hour in order to "set certain facts" before the public, aware that he will not survive to do so himself.

The manuscript states events from June 1917 to August 1917 in the North Atlantic, after sinking SS Victory, a British freighter, and thereafter sinking its surviving crew's lifeboats, the cruel and arrogant Altberg commands his U-29 u-boat to submerge, surfacing later to find the dead body of a crew member of the sunken ship, who died clinging to the exterior railing of the sub. A search of the body reveals a strange piece of carved ivory. Because of its apparent great age and value, one of Altberg's officers keeps the object, and shortly thereafter, strange phenomena begin to occur - such as the dead man apparently swimming away rather than sinking.

An uncharted oceanic current pulls the sub southward, and several members of the crew suffer the sudden onset of severe fatigue and disturbing nightmares. One even claims to have seen the corpses of the dead seamen from the British freighter staring at him through the U-boat's portholes. Altberg has him brutally whipped, rejecting the pleas from some of his men to discard the ivory charm. He eventually resorts to executing a couple of them when it is clear that they have gone insane from fright, ostensibly to maintain discipline.

Next, a mysterious explosion irreparably damages the U-boat's engines, leaving them without the ability to navigate, only the ability to surface and dive. They soon encounter a United States warship, and several of the terrified crew plead with Altberg to surrender, but instead, Altberg has these "traitors" killed. Later, the submarine faces ominous waves from a violent storm and Altberg orders the U-boat to submerge. Afterward, it is unable to surface when its ballast tanks fail to repressurize, leaving the submarine being pulled southward without resistance while slowly sinking deeper into the ocean; they never see the light of day again.

With the U-boat's batteries running low, and their chance of rescue non-existent, the six remaining, delirious crewmen attempt a mutiny, successfully disabling the U-boat by destroying several key instruments and gauges, even as they rave on about the curse of the ivory talisman, but all are murdered by the venomous Altberg. His lone companion, Lieutenant Klenze, grows increasingly unstable and paranoid. Certain of their fate, the two pass the time in their drifting vessel by sweeping the sub's powerful searchlight through the dark abyss, noting that dolphins follow them at depths and for lengths previously unheard-of.

The Temple, artwork by Mihail Bila.

Soon after, Klenze goes completely mad, claiming that "He is calling! He is calling!" Unable to soothe his insane companion, and unwilling to join him in suicide, Altberg agrees to operate the airlock, grateful to send Klenze to an assured death in the airless, crushing pressure of the deep. Altberg, alone at last, drifts for a couple more days before his U-boat finally lands on the ocean floor, where he is amazed to see the sunken remains of an ancient and elaborate city, deciding that it is the ruins of Atlantis.

Overcome with excitement, Altberg dons a deep-sea diving suit, exploring the breathtaking, indescribable beauty of the ruined city, discovering a mysterious rock-hewn temple, amazed to find the image of the ivory carving within. He spends the next couple days in darkness as the sub's last reserves of battery power and air are expended. In the end, he acknowledges that even with his mighty "German will", he is no longer able to resist the powerful visions and auditory hallucinations, nor his madness-inspired impulse to depart his U-boat and enter the temple, now impossibly illuminated by what seems to be a flickering altar flame. Slipping on his diving suit, he releases his sealed manuscript in a bottle (which is later found on the coast of Yucatan), and goes willingly to his death.

Connections

Like Dagon, The Temple is a nautical story with a World War I background.

The theme of submerged cities with non-human worshipers recurs in Lovecraft's later works, most notably The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It is subtly implied that the city Altberg finds is actually R'lyeh (from the former).

A sort of sequel in the form of a RPG "The City in the Sea" where up to 4 "investigators" must journey by submersible to the temple of the Mythos god Gloon (the malign force behind the events in The Temple whose human disguise is depicted by the ivory carving in that story) and end his threat to the human race. This game and its play mechanics may be found in Cthulhu Now published 1987 by Chaosium Inc.

Critical reaction

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia judges "The Temple" to be "marred by crude satire on the protagonist's militarist and chauvinist sentiments", and by "an excess of supernaturalism, with many bizarre occurrences that do not seem to unify into a coherent whole."^[1]

Notes

↑ Joshi and Schultz, p. 261.

References

Helgason, Guðmundur. "WWI U-boats: U 29". German and Austrian U-boats of World War I - Kaiserliche Marine - Uboat.net.
David E. Schultz, « Exploring "The Temple" », Crypt of Cthulhu, no 38, 1986, p. 26–31,

External links

The full text of The Temple at Wikisource
Radio Adaptation of "The Temple" by Macabre Fantasy Radio Theater, performed live at The H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, San Pedro, September 2013 https://macabrefantasy.com/2014/02/20/episode-2-the-temple/

Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"

Juvenilia	"The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth

Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

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