“Expect poison from the standing water.”“The Apocalypse of Arcturus” is my tribute to the two of the strangest books I have ever read: The Revelation of St John the Divine (1st century A.D.), from the New Testament, and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), both of which I recommend highly to all admirers of Clark Ashton Smith. I am relying on serendipity to produce occasional faint echoes of their genius, because the text that follows is autographic; that is, it writes itself using the computer language Javascript, and will be different each time the page is loaded. To read it, either click on one of the four links below, invoking an individual season and its mood, or use the radio-buttons to select one or more seasons (click again to deselect), choose the length of the text using the drop-down menu, then click on “Apocalypse of Arcturus”.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3).
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Readers may find that the text speaks to them of events in their own lives, whether past, present, or to come, and may care to employ it as a sortes apocalypticae by loading the page with eyes closed and head bowed, then pointing at the screen to select a prophetic sentence or phrase.
Note
I’d like to apologize to anyone who might have emailed me viâ the Eldritch Dark in mid-2005 and failed to receive a reply. I’ve discovered recently that any mail sent that way was treated as spam by Yahoo and never reached my inbox. (To ensure that mail does reach me, please write “eldritch” somewhere in the body of the email.)