What is Hyperborea? As I've mentioned before, fantasy fiction used to be set at some time on Earth. Using a known historical period, though, requires research and can constrain one's imagination. So some time after Helena Blavatsky popularized her new religious movement Theosophy, some fiction writers who didn't believe a word of it took her concept that humans had developed on a series of lost continents - Hyperborea, Lemuria, then Atlantis - as nearly empty playgrounds to set tales of magic and adventure in.
"For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zhothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life"
We start with some bad theology from The Book of Eibon: Ubbo-Sathla is praised as “the source and the end” because (she?) is the cause of Earth life’s single-celled prototypes, while Yog-Sothoth “came from the stars.”
In 1932, Paul Tregardis found an interesting crystal in the London curio shop of a Jewish small businessman. Asked about it, the owner “gave the impression of being lost to commercial considerations in some web of cabbalistic revery.” (Would this be considered multi-layered stereotyping? “Running a business is boring, I’d much rather think about the Kabbalah!”) It seems “A geologist found it in Greenland, beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule.”
Tregardis was startled. Sounds like something he read in The Book of Eibon, “strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes, which is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.” (How would one know that a book being the rarest or most obscure has any correlation to truth value? Hipster epistemology?) Tregardis is the sort of guy who owns a medieval French manuscript of it and has collated passages with the Necronomicon. There was a reference to the cloudy scrying crystal of the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, in Mhu Thulan. Dealer, I’ll take it!
Tregardis smiled at himself with inward irony for even conceiving the absurd notion. Such things did not occur—at least, not in present-day London; and in all likelihood, The Book of Eibon was sheer superstitious fantasy, anyway.
At home, he checked the one brief reference in The Book of Eibon: “he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth’s beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime…” but Zon vanished, and the crystal was lost. He stared into the crystal, which glowed with an inner light, and it hypnotized him into a sense of dreamlike duality where Paul Tregardis was also Zon Mezzamalech, who sought the crystal because all past years can be seen in it.
Zon Mezzamalech had dreamt to recover the wisdom of the gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultra-stellar stone; and the tablets were guarded in the primal mire by the formless, idiotic demiurge, Ubbo-Sathla.
When Paul regained consciousness as himself, he resolved never to to gaze into the magic crystal again. So of course, the next day, he gazed in!
Zon grew annoyed that he “beheld nothing more than a few fragments of the years of Mhu Thulan immediately posterior to the present-the years of his own life-time;” – time to disregard all dangers of magic and go diving into Deep Time! The orb past-life regresses him through Hyperborea’s rise from savagery to high civilization, then a man-like beast, a pterodactyl, an ichthyosaur, then a serpent-man who “bowed with hissing litanies to great serpent-idols”, then a crawling thing too primitive to build or dream. At last he becomes an amoeba-like thing in the shallows of landless primal Earth, somehow sensing Ubbo-Sathla and tilted in the mire the tablets of “the pre-mundane gods.” But a single cell has no eyes, and will only crawl mindlessly on the tablets, never read them.
Of Paul’s vanishing, there was a curt notice in several of the London papers. No one seems to have known anything about him.
This is a simple short story, condensing the meditation on Deep Time Lovecraft used as an element in several much longer tales. And as short story, its genre seems to be moral fable. Don’t be an occultist or you could die/vanish from what you mess with.
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