우주의 구조[]
In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. CELEPHAÏS
크툴루 신화에서 각각의 우주의 크기는 무한하며 서로 다른 물리 상수나 법칙을 가질 수 있다.
“There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth,” whispered the voice. “Four kinds—three faculties each—makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are four different sorts of beings presented in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you’ll now and then find more cylinders and machines—cylinders of extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any we know—allies and explorers from the uttermost Outside—and special machines for giving them impressions and expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings’ main outposts all through the various universes, is a very cosmopolitan place! Of course, only the more common types have been lent to me for experiment. THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS: VII.
또한 이러한 우주가 어마어마하게 많다.
에클리는 전에도 소름끼치는 일들을 알고 있었지만, 외계의 존재와 화해를 한 이후 추가로 알게된것은 제정신으로 감당하기 힘들 정도였다. 절대적 무한의 구조, 차원의 뒤섞임, 그리고 우리가 잘 알고있는 시공으로 구성된 이 3차원 우주는 끝없이 이어진 우주 원자에 속해있다는 놀라운 설명과 함께, 그 우주 원자가 곡선, 각도, 그리고 물질 및 반물질의 전자공학적인 조직을 구성한다고 했다. 나는 아직까지도 애클리가 암시한 그 모든 이야기를 결코 믿을 수 없다. 어둠속에서 속삭이는 자 中
다중우주는 우주(무한함에도 불구하고)에 비해 무한대로 묘사되며 3차원 우주는 끝없이 이어진 우주 원자에 속해있다.
우리의 현실 세계는 거대하고 불길한 구조를 이루는 하나의 원자에 불과하며, 미지의 영역이 세계 도처에 밀려들어 어디든 자리를 잡고있다는 생각에 사로잡힌채, 청년 로덤은 형식적 종교와 신비학의 원천을 차례로 비워 버렸다. 후손 中
우주는 그것보다 더 거대한 구조를 이루는 하나의 원자이다.
"But what place is this? Is it Paradise or Hell? This is not the world I have known since birth. And those stars-I have never seen them before. Those constellations are mightier and more fiery than I ever knew in life." "There are worlds beyond worlds, universes within and without universes'," said the ancient. "You are upon a different planet than that upon which you were born; you are in a different universe, doubtless in a different dimension," "Then I am certainly dead." "What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans? But I have not said that you are dead." "Then where in Valka's name am I?" roared Kull, his short stock of patience exhausted. "Your barbarian brain clutches at material actualities," answered the other tranquilly. "What does it matter where you are, or whether you are dead, as you call it? You are a part of that great ocean which is Life, which washes upon all shores, and you are as much a part of it in one place as in another, and as sure to eventually flow back to the Source of it, which gave birth to all Life. As for that, you are bound to Life for all Eternity as surely as a tree, a rock, a bird or a world is bound. You call leaving your tiny planet, quitting your crude physical form-death!" "But I still have my body." "I have not said that you are dead, as you name it. As for that, you may be still upon your little planet, as far as you know. Worlds within worlds, universes within universes. Things exist too small and too large for human comprehension. Each pebble on the beaches of Valusia contains countless universes within itself, and itself as a whole is as much a part of the great plan of all universes, as is the sun you know. Your universe, Kull of Valusia, may be a pebble on the shore of a mighty kingdom. "You have broken the bounds of material limitations. You may be in a universe which goes to make up a gem on the robe you wore on Valusia's throne or that universe you knew may be in the spiderweb which lies there on the grass near your feet. I tell you, size and space and time are relative and do not really exist." 컬 왕 : 아틀란티스의 망명자 中
그럼 우주들이 모여 이루는 것은 정확히 무엇인가?
답은 바로 더 큰 우주이다.
상위 우주의 조약돌 속에는 무수히 많은 하위 우주가 들어갈 수 있다.
또한 다중우주가 우주(무한대)에 비해 궁극적인 무한대로 묘사되며 후에 상술할 이유 때문에 무수함은 단순히 많은 수가 아닌 무한을 의미하는 것일 수 있다.
상대적인 존재론적 초월성[]
공간 차원[]
The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the BEING had heard. And now there poured from that limitless MIND a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left.
크툴루 신화에서 공간축은 상하, 좌우, 앞뒤를 포함한 무한한 방향이 있다.(이는 무한한 공간 차원이 존재함을 의미한다.)
Then the waves increased in strength, and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing—the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where ’Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality. THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY
2차원은 3차원의 단면이다. 이는 크툴루 신화의 차원이 공간 차원임을 확실히 한다. 크툴루 신화의 공간 차원은 더 높은 무한대 보단 인간이 이해할 수 없는 혼돈스러운 차원에 가깝다.
Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties. The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories. All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations. THE DREAMS IN THE WITCHHOUSE
길먼은 꿈을 꾸는 동안 특정 존재가 빈 공간에서 갑자기 나타나거나 완전히 사라지는 경향이 있다는 것을 보았다.
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. THE DREAMS IN THE WITCHHOUSE
길먼은 후에 자신이 있던 심연이 4차원이었다는 사실을 깨달았다.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern. Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space. THE DREAMS IN THE WITCHHOUSE
위에서 길먼이 보았던 빈 공간에서의 갑작스러운 등장은 4차원을 이용한 3차원에서의 순간이동이었다.
즉 더 많은 공간 차원을 가지는 것은 특정한 존재론적 초월을 주지만 그것은 어디까지나 변위나 범위에 대한 이점 혹은 이해하기 힘든 무시무시한 무언가이지 더 높은 무한대에 대한 묘사가 아니다.
또한 4차원 존재인 크툴루는 3차원에 존재하는데 자신을 무한히 억누르지 않는다.
시간과 시공간 연속체[]
들어가기 전에 알아둬야 할 건 틴달로스의 사냥개에서의 4차원이다.
틴달로스의 사냥개의 저자인 Belknap Long(러브크래프트 생전의 작가라 정사 범위에 들어간다.)은 시간을 4차원이라 작성했지만 러브 크래프트는 시간을 4차원이라 하지 않는다. 러브 크래프트의 4차원은 조금 다르다.
Time is merely our imperfect perception of a new dimension of space. Time and motion are both illusions. Everything that has existed from the beginning of the world exists now. Events that occurred centuries ago on this planet continue to exist in another dimension of space. Events that will occur centuries from now exist already. We cannot perceive their existence because we cannot enter the dimension of space that contains them. Human beings as we know them are merely fractions, infinitesimally small fractions of one enormous whole. Every human being is linked with all the life that has preceded him on this planet. All of his ancestors are parts of him. Only time separates him from his forebears, and time is an illusion and does not exist. THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS
시간은 환상이며 다른 시간대의 일은 다른 차원의 다른 공간에 존재한다. 즉 크툴루 신화에서 시간은 공간 차원처럼 존재한다.
I see everything. All of the billions of lives that preceeded me on this planet are before me at this moment. I see men of all ages, all races, all colors. They are fighting, killing, building, dancing, singing. They are sitting about rude fires on lonely gray deserts, and flying through the air in monoplanes. They are riding the seas in bark canoes and enormous steamships; they are painting bison and mammoths on the walls of dismal caves and covering huge canvases with queer futuristic designs. I watch the migrations from Atlantis. I watch the migrations from Lemuria. I see the elder races—a strange horde of black dwarfs overwhelming Asia, and the Neandertalers with lowered heads and bent knees ranging obscenely across Europe. I watch the Achæans streaming into the Greek islands, and the crude beginnings of Hellenic culture. I am in Athens and Pericles is young. I am standing on the soil of Italy. I assist in the rape of the Sabines; I march with the Imperial Legions. I tremble with awe and wonder as the enormous standards go by and the ground shakes with the tread of the victorious hastati. A thousand naked slaves grovel before me as I pass in a litter of gold and ivory drawn by night–black oxen from Thebes, and the flower–girls scream ‘Ave Caesar' as I nod and smile. I am myself a slave on a Moorish galley. I watch the erection of a great cathedral. Stone by stone it rises, and through months and years I stand and watch each stone as it falls into place. I am burned on a cross head downward in the thyme–scented gardens of Nero, and I watch with amusement and scorn the torturers at work in the chambers of the Inquisition. I walk in the holiest sanctuaries; I enter the temples of Venus. I kneel in adoration before the Magna Mater, and I throw coins on the bare knees of the sacred courtesans who sit with veiled faces in the groves of Babylon. I creep into an Elizabethan theater and with the stinking rabble about me I applaud The Merchant of Venice. I walk with Dante through the narrow streets of Florence. I meet the young Beatrice, and the hem of her garment brushes my sandals as I stare enraptured. I am a priest of Isis, and my magic astounds the nations. Simon Magus kneels before me, imploring my assistance, and Pharaoh trembles when I approach. In India I talk with the Masters and run screaming from their presence, for their revelations are as salt on wounds that bleed. I perceive everything simultaneously. I perceive everything from all sides; I am a part of all the teeming billions about me. I exist in all men and all men exist in me. I perceive the whole of human history in a single instant, the past and the present. THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS
때문에 크툴루 신화에서의 시공간 연속체란 과거, 현재, 미래의 모든 우주 그 자체라는 것을 알 수 있다.
더 큰 우주와 차원[]
“Now I remember,” said he, “I am Kull, king of Valusia -- but what am I doing here, without garments or weapons?”
“No man can bring anything through the Door with him,” said the other, cryptically.
“Think, Kull of Valusia, know you not how you came?”
“I was standing in the doorway of the council chamber,” said Kull, dazedly, “and I remember that the watchman on the outer tower was striking the gong to denote the hour -- then suddenly the crash of the gong merged into a wild and sudden flood of shattering sound. All went dark and red sparks flashed for an instant before my eyes. Then I awoke in a cavern or a corridor of some sort, remembering nothing.”
“You passed through the Door; it always seems dark.”
“Then I am dead? By Valka, some enemy must have been lurking among the columns of the palace and struck me down as I was speaking with Brule, the Pictish warrior.”
“I have not said you were dead,” answered the dim figure. “Mayhap the Door is not utterly closed. Such things have been.”
“But what place is this? Is it paradise or Hell? This is not the world I have known since birth. And those stars -- I have never seen them before. Those constellations are mightier and more fiery than I ever knew in life.”
“There are worlds beyond worlds, universes within and without universes,” said the ancient. “You are upon a different planet than that upon which you were born, you are in a different universe, doubtless in a different dimension.”
“Then I am certainly dead.”
“What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans? But I have not said that you are dead.”
“Then where in Valka’s name am I?” roared Kull, his short stock of patience exhausted.
“Your barbarian brain clutches at material actualities,” answered the other tranquilly. “What does it matter where you are, or whether you are dead, as you call it? You are a part of that great ocean which is Life, which washes upon all shores, and you are as much a part of it in one place as in another, and as sure to eventually flow back to the Source of it, which gave birth to all Life. As for that, you are bound to Life for all Eternity as surely as a tree, a rock, a bird or a world is bound. You call leaving your tiny planet, quitting your crude physical form -- death!”
“But I still have my body.”
“I have not said that you are dead, as you name it. As for that, you may be still upon your little planet, as far as you know. Worlds within worlds, universes within universes. Things exist too small and too large for human comprehension. Each pebble on the beaches of Valusia contains countless universes within itself, and itself as a whole is as much a part of the great plan of all universes, as is the sun you know. Your universe, Kull of Valusia, may be a pebble on the shore of a mighty kingdom.
“You have broken the bounds of material limitations. You may be in a universe which goes to make up a gem on the robe you wore on Valusia’s throne or that universe you knew may be in the spider web which lies there on the grass near your feet. I tell you, size and space and time are relative and do not really exist.”
“Surely you are a god?” said Kull curiously.
“The mere accumulation of knowledge and the acquiring of wisdom does not make a god,” answered the other rather impatiently. “Look!” A shadowy hand pointed to the great blazing gems which were the stars.
Kull looked and saw that they were changing swiftly. A constant weaving, an incessant changing of design and pattern was taking place.
“The ‘everlasting’ stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade. Even as we watch, upon those which are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds. All life and a part of life. To them it seems billions of years; to us, but a moment. All life. And a part of life.”
Kull watched fascinated, as huge stars and mighty constellations blazed and waned and faded, while others equally as radiant took their places, to be in turn supplanted.
KULL: STRIKING OF THE GONG
상위 우주에서 하위 우주는 입자에 불과하다.
343. TO FRANK BELKNAP LONG
Young Man:—
Feby. 20,1929
Glad you found the commonplace-book and cuttings of interest. Have you started your novel, or any short tales? Another thing you could use is that Hispano-Roman dream I described a year ago October. I proba-bly shan't ever get around to writing it up, so if you can find the letter containing it, you're welcome to the thing.
.. The actual cosmos of pattern'd energy, including what we know as matter, is of a contour and nature absolutely impossible of realisation by the human brain; and the more we learn of it the more we perceive this circumstance. All we can say of it, is that it contains no visible cen-tral principle so like the physical brains of terrestrial mammals that we may reasonably attribute to it the purely terrestrial and biological phae-nomenon call'd conscious purpose; and that we form, even allowing for the most radical conceptions of the relativist, so insignificant and tem-porary a part of it (whether all space be infinite or curved, and trans-galactic distances constant or variable, we know that within the bounds of our stellar universe no relativistic circumstance can banish the ap-proximate dimensions we recognise. The relative place of our solar sys-tem among the stars is as much a proximate reality as the relative posi-tions of Providence, N.Y., and Chicago) that all notions of special rela-tionships and names and destinies expressed in human conduct must necessarily be vestigial myths. Moreover, we know that a cosmos which is eternal (and any other kind would be a paradoxical impossibility)can have no such thing as a permanent direction or goal; since such
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SELECTED LETTERS would imply a beginning and ending, thus postulating a larger creating and managing cosmos outside this one-and so on ad infinitum like a nest of Chinese boxes. This point remains the same whether we con-sider eternity as a measure of regular pattern-movements (time) or as a fourth dimension. The latter merely makes all these intimations of a cosmos which our senses and calculations present to us. We must admit at the outset that the spectacle gives us no indications of a central con-sciousness or purpose, and suggests no reason why a cosmos should pos.sess such; that it renders the notion of special human standards and des.tinies absurd; and that it makes the idea of a permanent direction or goal improbable to the point of impossibility. Theoretically it can be al-most anything--but when we have not the faintest shadow of reason for believing certain specific things exactly contrary to all the principles of probability and experience in our limited part of space, it becomes a piece of hallucination or affectation to try to believe such things. Here are we-and yonder yawns the universe. If there be indeed any central governor, any set of standards, or any final goal, we can never hope to get even the faintest inkling of any of these things; since the ultimate reality of space is clearly a complex churming of energy of which the human mind can never form any even approximate picture, and which can touch us. only through the veil of local apparent manifestations which we call the visible and material universe. So far as analogy and probability go, there is strong presumptive evidence on the negative side-evidence based on the observation of small material systems like the electrons of an atom or the planets circling the sun. This evidence tells us that all small units of mass-energy are (that is, all humanly visible and conceivable presentations of such units are) rotating systems orga-nised in a certain way and preserving a balance and dovetailing of func-tions, absolute regularity and the exclusion of chance, (and hence of vo-lition or conscious action) and the infinite uniformity of this system of interlocking rotations and forms of regularity, seem to confront us wherever we delve beneath the surface; so that these circumstances ac-tually form the sum total of all our knowledge of the composition and administration of infinity. To say that such an array of evidence suggests a central will, a one-way direction, and a special concern for any one of the infinitesimal temporary force-combinations which form incidents of the eternal cycles within cycles of constant rearrangement, is to utter simple and unadulterated damn foolishness.
러브 크래프트의 편지
이러한 구조는 무한히 계층화 되어있다. 또한 위에서 말했다시피 3차원 우주는 더 큰 우주를 이루는 무한 원자 사슬의 일부이다. 따라서 저차원 우주가 모인 더 큰 무한대의 우주를 고차원의 우주라고 하는 것은 비합리적인 것은 아닌 걸로 보인다.