Celephaïs

"Celephaïs"
Author	H. P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Published in	Rainbow
Publication type	Periodical
Media type	Print (Magazine)
Publication date	May, 1922

"Celephaïs" (/ˈsɛləfeɪs/) is a fantasy story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in early November 1920 and first published in the May 1922 issue of the Rainbow.

The title refers to a fictional city that later appears in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, including his novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926).

Inspiration

Like many of Lovecraft's stories, "Celephaïs" was inspired by a dream, recorded in his commonplace book as "Dream of flying over city."^[1]

The story resembles a tale by Lord Dunsany, "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap" in The Book of Wonder, in which the title character becomes more and more engrossed in his imaginary kingdom of Larkar until he begins to neglect business and routine tasks of daily living, and ultimately is placed in a madhouse. The imagery of the horses drifting off the cliff may derive from Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky" (1891).^[2]

Synopsis

Celephaïs was created in a dream by Kuranes (which is his name in dreams—his real name is not given) as a child of the English landed gentry. As a man in his forties, alone and dispossessed in contemporary London, he dreams it again and then, seeking it, slowly slips away to the dream-world. Finally knights guide him through medieval England to his ancestral estate, where he spent his boyhood, and then to Celephaïs. He became the king and chief god of the city, though his body washes up by his ancestors' tower, now owned by a parvenu.

In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Randolph Carter pays a visit to Kuranes, finding that the great dreamer has grown so homesick for his native Cornwall, he has dreamed parts of Celephaïs to resemble the land of his boyhood. Kuranes advises Carter, on a mission to find his own dream-city, to be careful what he wishes for—he might get it.

The city

In the original short story, Celephaïs described as being situated in the valley of Ooth-Nargai beside the Cerenerian Sea. Its most remarkable feature is that it is unaffected by the passage of time, and takes no decay or wear, so that a person may leave it and return many years later to find that nothing has changed.

Important landmarks in Celephaïs are the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath and the Street of Pillars. Nearby rises snow-capped Mount Aran, whose lower slopes are replete with ginkgo trees.

Galleys from the port of Celephaïs go everywhere in the Dreamlands, but especially to the cloud-kingdom Serannian, reaching its harbor by sailing into the sky where the Cerenerian Sea meets the horizon.

Notes

↑ Cited in Joshi & Schultz, "Celephais", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 36.
↑ Joshi & Schultz, p. 36.

References

Joshi, S. T.; David E. Schultz (2001). An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-31578-7.
Lovecraft, Howard P.
- [1934] S. T. Joshi, ed. (1987). "Celephaïs". Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-039-4. Definitive version.
- [1926] S. T. Joshi, ed. (1985). "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". At the Mountains of Madness, and Other Novels (7th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-038-6. Definitive version.

External links

Works related to Celephais at Wikisource
Works related to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at Wikisource
Celephais public domain audiobook at LibriVox

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