Other Reference Texts — Index
TL;DR: Other Reference Texts — Index: A collection of linked stories centered on a forbidden play called The King in Yellow. Anyone who reads the second act goes mad. The play functions as a memetic weapon — a text that seizes minds and overwrites personality. Downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
Files
| File | Title | Author | Year | Words (approx) | Source |
the-king-in-yellow-chambers.txt | The King in Yellow | Robert W. Chambers | 1895 | ~75,000 | Gutenberg #8492 |
the-coming-race-bulwer-lytton.txt | The Coming Race | Edward Bulwer-Lytton | 1871 | ~55,000 | Gutenberg #1951 |
gods-of-pegana-dunsany.txt | The Gods of Pegana | Lord Dunsany | 1905 | ~18,000 | Gutenberg #8395 |
Robert W. Chambers — The King in Yellow (1895)
HIGH RELEVANCE: Art as Remote Mind-Control
A collection of linked stories centered on a forbidden play called The King in Yellow. Anyone who reads the second act goes mad. The play functions as a memetic weapon — a text that seizes minds and overwrites personality.
Key mechanism: A work of art so perfectly constructed that it bypasses rational defense and restructures the reader’s mind. The play spreads “like an infectious disease” from city to city. The King in Yellow is not just a character — he is an entity that rules through the play.
“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.”
“It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent.”
“Oh the sin of writing such words,—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis!”
Story Breakdown
- “The Repairer of Reputations” — Future New York where suicide is government-sanctioned. A man claims to control the royal succession of the Imperial Dynasty of America, empowered by reading The King in Yellow. Unreliable narrator — is he mad, or has the play given him real knowledge?
- “The Mask” — A sculptor discovers a fluid that turns living things to marble. A woman is accidentally exposed. The play hovers in background.
- “In the Court of the Dragon” — Organist’s music in a church becomes conduit for the King in Yellow. “The King in Yellow had laid its pallid mask upon me.”
- “The Yellow Sign” — Artist and model discover a mysterious Yellow Sign amulet. The play is central. The watchman at the church is something other than human.
- “The Demoiselle d’Ys” — Time-slip story: man meets a medieval woman while falconing. She vanishes.
- Later stories move away from the supernatural entirely (Parisian romances).
Predictive programming angle: The play within the story is precisely what predictive programming is — a work of art that reprograms its audience. Chambers encoded the mechanism of memetic warfare in 1895. The “Yellow Sign” functions like a brand or sigil — recognition triggers the programming. Compare to modern “awakening” content that claims to free while potentially re-encoding.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton — The Coming Race (1871)
HIGH RELEVANCE: Vril / Underground Civilization
A mining engineer falls into an underground world inhabited by the Vril-ya, a race of beings descended from pre-diluvian humanity. They possess Vril — a universal force that unifies electricity, magnetism, galvanism, and mental influence. Through Vril staffs, they can destroy cities, heal the sick, control weather, and dominate minds.
Key mechanism: Vril is presented as a unified field theory made operational. The Vril-ya have achieved mastery through eugenics (selective breeding for Vril-conductivity) and technology (Vril staffs as amplifiers). Their children can wield destructive power casually.
“These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies… the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin.”
“By one operation of vril… they can influence the variations of temperature… they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.”
“In the bowels of the inner earth… might be discovered the remains of human habitation—not in huts and caverns, but in vast cities whose ruins attest the civilization of races which flourished before the age of Noah.”
Structure
- Chapters I-IV: Discovery of the underground world
- Chapters V-XI: Description of Vril-ya society (government, customs, religion)
- Chapters XII-XVIII: Vril explained; technology; relationship with surface
- Chapters XIX-XXIX: Romance subplot; narrator’s escape
Predictive programming angle: Bulwer-Lytton was a Rosicrucian and prominent figure in British occult circles. The novel was widely read by the Theosophical Society, the Golden Dawn, and later by the Thule Society and Vril Society in pre-WWII Germany. Helena Blavatsky cited Vril in Isis Unveiled (1877) as if it described a real force. The “Vril Society” legend — whether real or manufactured — directly shaped Nazi occult mythology. A fictional force became the basis of a real (or attributed) secret society program.
Lord Dunsany — The Gods of Pegana (1905)
MEDIUM RELEVANCE: Dreaming God Cosmogony
A mythological cycle about the gods of Pegana. The supreme deity MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI created the gods and then fell asleep. Skarl the Drummer drums continuously to keep MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI asleep, because if he wakes, he will unmake everything. The gods created the worlds, but they are themselves dreamed by the sleeping god.
Key mechanism: Reality as the dream of a sleeping cosmic entity. Compare directly to Lovecraft’s Azathoth (the “blind idiot god” at the center of chaos) and to the Call of Cthulhu (sleeping entity whose dreams influence the waking world). Also compare to Hindu cosmology (Vishnu dreaming the universe).
Lovecraft explicitly cited Dunsany as a primary influence: “No one has ever approached Dunsany’s prose style.”
Predictive programming angle: The “sleeping god whose dream is our reality” is a recurrent motif: Brahma’s dream (Hindu), MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI (Dunsany), Azathoth (Lovecraft), Cthulhu’s dream-transmission, the Matrix’s simulated reality. If reality is a projection/dream, then “remote control” is simply influence on the dreamer.
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