Abhoth

Clark Ashton Smith was a friend of H. P. Lovecraft, though the two never met--they only corresponded by mail. Like Lovecraft, Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft called him) was a writer of weird fiction. He was also a painter and a sculptor.

In one of his stories--The Seven Geases--Smith tells the tale of a prehistoric and supremely overconfident hunter named Ralibar Vooz, who messes with a wizard and, for his trouble, gets himself put under a "geas" (a kind of magical bond or imperative; the term is taken from Irish folklore). The geas is to go to present himself to the furry toad god Tsathoggua and allow himself to be eaten as a sacrifice.

Fortunately for Ralibar Vooz, the furry toad god isn't hungry at the moment and so puts a new geas on Vooz, sending him to another magical being. He is in turn sent to several more magical beings until he finally has a seventh geas put on him (hence the title of the story).

It's a very creative tale!

I was particularly struck by the magical being Vooz encounters that puts the seventh geas on him. It's a creature named Abhoth, which is a kind of squirming pool-like mass that fissions off from itself countless misshapen creatures that scamper about in the darkness of its cave, deep in the Earth. Here's what Ralibar Vooz sees when he encounters it:

Here, it seemed, was the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes' fins; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that grew in size as they departed from the neigbborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore when they fell into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk.

Abhoth is thus a kind of primordial biosphere deep in the bowels of the Earth.

Fortunately, nothing like that exists in real life.

FREAKY IDEA #2

Maybe something does.

One of the concommitant theories associated with Thomas Gold's abiogenic theory of the origin of oil is the idea that there is a "deep hot biosphere" down in the bowels of the Earth.

More from his interview (link forthcoming) with WIRED:

In his nineties, Gold is championing the idea that the creatures living on or near the surface of the Earth - plants, people, possums, porpoises, pneumonia bacilli - are just part of the biological story. In the depths of the Earth's crust, he believes, is a second realm, a bacterial "deep hot biosphere" that is greater in mass than all the creatures living on land and swimming in the seas. Most biologists will tell you that life is something that happens on the Earth's surface, powered by sunlight. Gold counters that most living beings reside deep in the Earth's crust at temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius, living off methane and other hydrocarbons.

Wired: You published your ideas about the deep hot biosphere in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. What evidence since then has confirmed your beliefs?

Gold: A large number of people have found more microbial life in deep boreholes.

And in deep caves?

Yes, that's important.

So the buildup of evidence and interest must be gratifying.

Oh yes, it's certainly nice. But what I find a little distressing is that even though I published that article in '92 - I'd already submitted it to Nature in '88, but they wouldn't publish it - a lot of people describe their work as if they had made the discovery of a deep hot biosphere and it had never been thought of before.

You saw what you thought was evidence when you drilled in Sweden and found signs of life 6 kilometers down in the form of sludge and tiny grains of the mineral magnetite. What was the significance of that finding?

Magnetite is a chemically reduced form of iron oxide, which means it has less oxygen bound to the iron than more common iron oxides. The whole story of the deep hot biosphere is that oil coming up from below, without biology, will be food material for microbiology when it gets to a relatively shallow level where the temperature is not too high. For the microbes to use that oil as food when there's no atmospheric oxygen, they have to find oxygen in the rocks. There is plenty there, but there is not all that much in an easily removable form.

But what is easily usable is in common iron oxides - and when that's used, magnetite gets left behind.

Yes.

What first made you think that there might be life at such depths?

It was in response to the long debate over how helium, which is concentrated in oil, could be associated with petroleum and biological debris. Helium has no affinity chemically with biological stuff. My argument was that the helium must have been swept up from below by petroleum from deep down, and that led me to the whole notion of the deep biosphere.

Pretty freaky, eh kids? We may have a layer of life down there that's more massive than all the life we see up here--if Gold is right about things, though as usual, his ideas are sharply criticized by mainstream folks.

MORE ON THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE IDEA.

Now wait until the other shoe to drops.

Comments

[R.V. Miole]

Freaky indeed, my friend, freaky indeed...

[Maureen]

So that's where Dungeons and Dragons got the dang "geas = forced quest" idea!!!

For those who don't know Irish folklore --

It never made _any_ sense, since geasa are really more like giving someone a taboo. (You might have a geas that you had to eat whatever food you were offered.) Women and druids and the like could give you new geasa on top of the old. (And you were in trouble if you had a geas that you had to eat whatever food you were offered, and then got another that said you could never eat dog meat. Because of course somebody was going to offer you dog meat, and you'd break either one or the other geas, which would mean you were Doooooomed.)

The closest thing to a forced quest was in the story of Diarmuid and Grainne. Grainne fell in love with Diarmuid and put a geas on him to take her with him when he left her father's house (on pain of being Dooooooomed). But that was about it.

[John F. Kennedy]

My mistake. You DO read Lovecraft.

John F. Kennedy