r/KinginYellow

yey :D

The second image is my reference image, trying to go for a different angle. I'm proud of my shading by far.

hii today ive woken up with this deja vu feeling about a symbol or something so i quickly sketched it from memory on my phone and it looked really familiar i just cant put a name to it
i sent it to my friend and he said something about a "yellow sign" (???) and that i should prolly ask some community if they recognize it
sorry for the shitty quality its really early in the morning lol

I started reading and got inspired and this is the result, drawn in procreate ✨️ I started with a theatre mask and just let it evolve. Hope you guys like my take on things.

2-3 Years ago i got Cassilda’s song as a tattoo on my hand! Hope you guys like it as much as i do. ;)

I saw at last the yellow hangings of the theatre,
and the yellow stage whereon I played my part.

And in the dim assembly beyond,
there watched familiar countenances grown terrible and unknown to me.
Their eyes were fixed upon us.
None did stir.

Then the yellow, pallid curtains closed.
Silence descended.

And my face slipped softly from my skull
and lay upon the stage.

I see it now.

It was but a mask.

I have made a few poems that are either directly or indirectly inspired by The King in Yellow and thought this would be a good place to share. The first one I found a while ago and tried looking up the author, but couldn't find them.

[This doesn’t start with The Golden Dawn and it's pretty long but don’t worry, I get there. Also, while there is no smoking gun, that Golden Dawn connection is looking more and more likely. And, well, there’s even more smoke pointing towards Chambers having lit a sort of literary bonfire too.]

Just as the Discordians probably didn’t know that Robert W. Chambers had written a novel called Eris in 1923, I’m willing to bet that Anton LaVey, founder of The Church of Satan and his own brand of Satanism, didn’t know that R.W. Chambers had his number around 10 years before he was ever born. Or maybe he did. I’m sort of kidding but before I tell you about another weird resonance, let me set the table. So yeah, The King in Yellow is mentioned in Anton LaVey’s magnum opus. Wikipedia describes said magnum opus in the following terms: “The Satanic Bible a collection of essays, observations, and rituals published by Anton LaVey in 1969. It is the central religious text of LaVeyan Satanism, and is considered the foundation of its philosophy and dogma.” But to be fair, TKiY is only brought up by Michael A. Aquino in the introduction (we’ll get back to him): 

"The [Satanic] Bible is a most insidious document. One is strongly tempted to compare it with that obscure, malefic mythology The King in Yellow, a psycho-political work that supposedly drove its readers to madness and damnation."

But not to worry, there is ample evidence that LaVey was himself a fan of TKiY and LaVey’s Satanic Rituals, a companion to his bible, even quotes Cassilda’s Song. The section concerned with "L'air épais - The Ceremony of the Stifling Air" starts with it. And interestingly enough, that ritual is said by LaVey to have originated from Knight Templars and the influence that the Yezidis have had on them. I say interestingly, because Rick Lai once made a pretty convincing case for Chambers’ The Slayer of Souls being the ur-text of the unfortunately slanderous depiction of the Yezidis which had become very popular in American pulp fiction of the 20th century and which has sadly influenced real-life perception of them; and because both the Templars and the Yezidis are an important component of Chambers’ Erlik/Yian/Tenedos/Marmora Mythos (of which The Slayer of Souls is part of) which relates to the last living heir of a lost throne which was started by a Templar of Marmora and Tenedos (see The Girl Philippa). LaVey says that The Templars "entered the Courtyard of the Serpent [serpent and dragon are “wyrms”, Court of the Dragon anyone?] and the Sanctuary of the Peacock [meaning Melek Taus]” and there are a couple more things about the ritual that feel quite TKiY-coded (oh, and LaVey also connects Carcosa to the mystical Shamballah). Btw, Rick Lai tackles the Yezidi/Assassins/Erlik Mythos and the RWC influence in one episode of the Lovecraft eZine podcast, I thought it was one about RWC and couldn't find it again but I just remembered that it might actually have been an episode on R.E. Howard because a lot of the Slayer of Souls influence seems to have found greater reach through R.E. Howard’s repurposing of it (his track record for having accidentally influenced conspiracy theories is second to none; you can thank Maurice Doreal thinking that Howard’s serpent-men from Valusia were real for the whole reptilian thing) and later William Seabrook (who took the slanderous Yezidi stuff to new heights, at least in terms of popularity). I’ll make sure to identify the episode in question as soon as I find it again.

Later in Satanic Rituals, LaVey writes of the Illuminati, the Hell Fire Clubs (there is one Hell Fire Club in Chambers’ The Rake and the Hussy and a Fireside Club whose occultist and bohemian members are jokingly referred to as "the Ancient and Unmitigated Order of Talkers" in The Talkers) and of the Golden Dawn (an esoteric secret society which Aleister Crowley belonged to). Of course, LaVey is an occultist and what he writes has sometimes very little basis in fact, but it’s interesting to note that he identifies Robert W. Chambers as being a member of “the Order” alongside W.B. Yeats who was an actual confirmed member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Speaking of which, Chambers name-drops Yeats in Iole (a book which mentions “the talkers”), alongside Bernard Haw (a parody of George Bernard Shaw, a friend of W.B. Yeats) and a certain Fiona. Meaning probably Fiona Macleod aka William Sharp since they were also a friend of Yeats and there aren’t that many notable writers with that name. Like I said elsewhere, Sharp was one of RWC’s firstliterary champions but also, the mention of a Fiona in Iole happened only a few months (May 1905 vs December 1905) before Sharp died and it was revealed that Sharp/Macleod were one person more publicly.

Not a proof that Chambers was a member of the Golden Dawn by any means, but I’m kinda starting to think he was at least privy to some of its goings on. Especially since Chambers was apparently acquainted with Algernon Blackwood (according to Blackwood biographer Mike Ashley, "Blackwood must have met Chambers at this time [in the early 1890s when he was sharing a studio with Gibson for whom Blackwood was modeling]"; and Blackwood was a member of the Golden Dawn; also his The Dance of Death is rather similar to Chambers' The Case of Mr. Helmer) and that his later novel The Talkers is very occult heavy. In fact, it mentions Oliver Lodge (one character is in the possession of a machine invented by Lodge) and Arthur Conan Doyle in the same breath (both were members of The Ghost Club to which Yeats also belonged and so did Blackwood; plus Doyle was alleged to have been in the Golden Dawn), as well as William Crooke (a member of the Golden Dawn and the Ghost Club) and a plethora of other people involved in occultism such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Edison (the machine to communicate with the dead-thing), R.L. Stevenson (through a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nod), Enrico Imoda, J.L.W.P. Matla and G.L. Zaalberg Van Zelst. Hell, the book is about apparitions and the supernatural and it mentions the Battle of Mons, there’s no way Chambers didn’t know about/have in mind the legend of the Angels of Mons when he wrote it. A legend which was conceived by Arthur Machen… another member of the Golden Dawn. Am I the only one who thinks that’s kind of a lot of Golden Dawn connections? I mean, nowadays we know a lot about that organization but back then you kinda needed to know the right people to know anything about it and its members.

And that’s not all! Casimir Sadoul, one of the two central occultists from The Talkers (the other is Dr. Sydney Pockman), is said to write for The Wasp… a magazine for which Ambrose Bierce was once an editor. Now, to my knowledge Bierce was not a member of any esoteric organization (although he was apparently a member of the Bohemian Club which is sometimes mentioned in his stories) but he definitively had an interest in the matter (Theosophy and Blavatsky are mentioned in his horror fiction and a handful of his writings are addressed to/mention the Society for Psychical Research which several of the people mentioned earlier were also members of). And he’s mentioned by LaVey in Satanic Rituals. Plus, LaVey actually met both Fritz Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith (there’s even photos of LaVey, Smith and another Cthulhu Mythos writer, Robert Barbour Johnson, together). And, well, Smith actually knew Bierce. I mention Fritz Leiber because he wrote a really weird book called The Pale Brown Thing/Our Lady of Darkness which involves several real-life figures like Clark Ashton Smith and Ambrose Bierce (and his Bohemian Club friends) being part of an occult group whose name is in the book itself explained to be a pied-de-nez to the Golden Dawn (their’s is the Order of the Onyx Dusk). And although it’s assuredly only a coincidence, the fictional writing of the leader of that group, Thibaut de Castries, concerns the “magical” powers of cities, and his magnum opus is called Megalopolisomancy. And, well, some of it sounds like how the protagonist of Chambers’ Outsiders sees and writes about New York. He calls it The Iron City of The Iron Altar and describes it as if it was a malignant living thing with a will of its own. Outsiders concerns a sort of Bohemian commune/not-so secret society called the Monastery (and its members have parody titles reflecting its “monastic” character) which you have to be invited into and which is described in a very Rabelaisian way.

 
One of its members is the only Sydney except Dr. Sydney Pockman in all of RWC. He’s called Sydney Jaune (Jaune is Yellow in French). As for Sydney Pockman of The Talkers, he is first introduced dressed as a king with yellow fluttering robes (and he is thrice described as wearing a pallid smirk). Despite not liking each other, Sydney and Oliver Locke (the hero of Outsiders) are referred to as friends. And Sydney Pockman, Sutton (the hero of The Talkers) and Sadoul are a kind of trio which profoundly dislike each other and yet are somehow deeply connected. Especially through Gilda Greenway (whose aunt has the same surname as the heroine of Outsiders; Wyvern) aka “Queen in Green”/”the girl with two souls”.
Now that’s enough connections to warrant an entire Illuminatus-like book taking these real-life connections, pseudo-connections and references, mixing them with fiction and taking them into truly weird places. One could go wild and posit that the Sadoul-Pockman-Sutton-Greenway four-way is about W.B. Yeats, Lucien Millevoye, RWC and Maud Gonne or something like that (especially considering Gonne’s children's names, Sylvère (surname of the 1st) and Iseult (first name of the 2nd), and their fates, both of which resonate with a few recurring things in RWC). Then again, maybe it’s weird enough as it is and fiction isn’t needed. I mean, for example, the first Hell Fire Club had for motto the François Rabelais’ quote “Do what thou wilt” which appeared on his fictional Abbey of Thelema, his “anti-monastery”. A motto which would later be reused by Aleister Crowley (who was in the Golden Dawn). If you wanted to get Eris involved in this, you could also take into consideration that The Talkers was also released in 1923 (at least in book form) and that a poor 23-years old man died at Crowley’s real-life Abbey of Thelema in 1923. But honestly that part is just depressing and sad (and so is the stuff about Maud Gonne and her children). These weird guru-led cults often have tragic consequences, less we forget because of the morbid fascination they hold over our imagination.

To go back to something less dark, let’s tackle why I said Chambers had LaVey’s number at the beginning of this thing. Well, there’s actually a character called Professor Le Vey (“a cracked-brained chemist”) who appears in Chambers’ The Crimson Tide. (Anton LaVey’s real name is Howard Stanton Levey, btw.) And that’s one of his few books which mentions Erlik, a Satanic figure from Mongol folklore (at least, Chambers links him to Satanism; and as we’ve seen, Chambers' Erlik/Yian Mythos features the Yezidis and Templars which LaVey likes so much, not to mention it distantly connects to the Yellow Mythos itself). Anyway, here’s how Le Vey is described: “The professor rose from one of the benches on the rostrum and came forward—a tall, black-bearded man, deathly pale, whose protruding, bluish eyes seemed almost stupid in their fixity.” That picture of Le Vey is not so dissimilar with how one might describe LaVey. The professor then goes on to say the following (I removed the dialog tags): 

“Words are by-products [...] and of minor importance. Deeds educate. T. N. T., also, is a byproduct, and of no use in conversation unless employed as an argument—[...]Tyranny has kicked you into the gutter, [...] Capital makes laws to keep you there and hires police and soldiers to enforce those laws. This is called civilisation. Is there anything for you to do except to pick yourselves out of the gutter and destroy what kicked you into it and what keeps you there? [...] Only a clean sweep will do it[.] [...] If you have a single germ of plague in the world, it will multiply. If you leave a single trace of what is called civilisation in the world, it will hatch out more tyrants, more capitalists, more laws. So there is only one remedy. Destruction. Total annihilation. Nothing less can purify this rotten hell they call the world!” 

He then unrolls a manuscript and reads a ten point communist-type manifesto (not quite the Nine Satanic Statements of LaVey’s bible). LaVey might not have liked the communist part but the Social Darwinist aspects of that previous speech probably would have appealed to him. Anyway, Professor Le Vey is made to leave the stage by the police but not before he says the following (in an "emotionless voice") : “I told you how to argue[.] Anybody can talk with their mouths.” And as soon as he leaves the stage, an unnamed man cranks up that Social Darwinism by declaiming: “There is only one real law in the world! The fit survive! The unfit die! The strong take what they desire! The weak perish. That is the law of life!” Very Arthur Desmond/Ragnar Redbeard-like. And you know what? Desmond's Social Darwinist self-help book was an influence on LaVey; he even thanks him in the Satanic Bible. In fact, Desmond's book also influenced the Industrial Workers of the World Workers' rhetoric in the early 20th Century. Which, who knows, might be what influenced Chambers' own depiction of industrial labor unions in The Crimson Tide. At the very least, Professor Le Vey is explicitly addressing the Workers of the World and his rhetoric is very Desmond-like. Here’s a thorough article on that aspect of it (note the Dreams & Dynamite essay title). Oh, and there's this bit in The Crimson Tide which I rather like and which I’ll quote because it concerns Satan: 

But already the eternal signs were pointing to the end. [...] Gradually it became apparent to the girl that the great conflagration was slowly dying down beyond the seas; that there was to be no chance of her returning; that there was to be no need of her services even if she were already equipped to render any, and now, certainly, no time for her to learn anything which might once have admitted her to comradeship in the gigantic conflict between man and Satan. She was too late. The world’s tragedy was almost over.

All of this is pretty wild, no? At least, I think it’s wild. And just to be clear, Chambers would probably have hated LaVey despite their shared anti-communism; and there’s even a few things that the voice of reason coded characters say in Crimson Tide that would be labelled as communistic in the USA of 2026. But this is already too long to get into that. Because this is not quite done! There’s also the Aquino connection to tackle. It’s interesting to note that he called TKiY a “psycho-political work” and that later, in his The Temple Set Books, Aquino writes that LaVey would keep the “pact” he made with Satan in a metal strongbox, one which also contained his copy of TKiY. Plus, Aquino quotes LaVey’s comments on TKiY:

“First on my list, as it is the work of a writer of cheap romances who became demonically possessed after being involved in espionage work of a delicate nature, the implications of which are still cycling. Chambers, in his literary emergence from the Impressionists of his day, cast a die for Lovecraft, Orwell, Huxley, and many others. Yes, the reading of The King in Yellow in its entirety can drive one mad, if one realizes the insidiousness of the thing.”

Before he himself writes that it “may be read by the non-Initiate with consequences no worse than confusion, but to the Adept this book is exceedingly dangerous if misapplied.”

What I find fascinating is that assuredly fabricated mention of espionage work. Perhaps influenced by the fact that Chambers would later write several books about espionage or that have important spy-fiction elements to them, including The Slayer of Souls which even has a recurring spy character which we first meet in the supremely weird In Secrets which partly takes place in Isla, Scotland (Isla[y]? Like the Islay which Sharp/Macleod loved to write about? Maybe. Lots of weird stuff going one with the letter “y” in RWC and in general there is a lot of one letter-away stuff in RWC (Auros/Auris; Ausone/Aulone; Ker-Is/Ker-Is; Ylven/Elven)). But LaVey and especially Aquino, who was “a specialist in psychological warfare for military intelligence and an officer in the U.S. Army” according to Wikipedia, could have pushed the fun even further if they had known more about Chambers and his “cheap romances”. To quote a recent comment by one of our most knowledgeable Chambersian, HildredGhastaigne on the subject of RWC’s wife: 

“She's [Elsie Vaughn Moller) quite the enigma: uncited assertions online say she was the daughter of a French diplomat, and I can confirm she was born in France to a French father and American mother, speaking French at home until emigrating to America at four years old. Very young, and both French and American: how could she possibly be more Robert W's type? They got their marriage license in Washington, DC, which fits with the diplomat story. But that's all I have: no parent names, and a trifling few events, like her solo presence on a ship manifest in 1923, probably returning from a visit to Robert H. [their son] at school in England.”

And well, those diplomatic/espionage aspects (which just to be clear are, like H.G. said "uncited assertions" and LaVey's claims are even more suspect) could have been mined very well for other tantalizing fabrications if LaVey/Aquino had wanted to (and if they knew about that stuff). Because there is a recurring character-type in Chambersian fiction of the woman spy with conflicting French/German affiliations. That type appears with variations but it’s still quite recognizable. You have Sylvia Elven (like in TKiY), aka Sylvenne Duhamel (a French woman whose caught in a web of diplomatic intrigue with Germany; she’s also an actress), from Maids of Paradise (a book which RWC introduces like it was a roman à clef), you have Ilse Dumont from The Dark Star (which forms a diptych with The Slayer of Souls and which is part of that larger Mythos) who is a spy for the German and also an actress and you have the very Ilse Dumont-like Helsa Kampf (who is German but mistakenly believed to be a French spy) from In Secrets. Already there’s something kind of suggestive with those Elsie-like names and the German aspects (Elsie Moller was French-American but her name definitively sounds Germanic). But there’s also the German Karen von Reiter in Who Goes There who is also an actress and who changes her name to Karen Girard (a French-sounding surname) and who is hiding a cipher (which is explained and resolved in the story) that contains sensitive geopolitical information. Not to mention that I think there are only three Wyvern(s) in RWC. In Outsiders and in The Talkers, like I said, but also in Who Goes There (it’s a boat in Who Goes There and it sinks if I remember correctly; lots of submerged identities/treasures/secrets in Chambers). 

I mean, what a missed opportunity to play that chord for more esoteric grandstanding! Especially since there’s an entire web of cipher-related stuff in Chambers which involves the Carcosa, Seventh Seal, The Seal of Solomon and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (I’ve written a little more about this here and in the document I link to). Now, I do think there’s something hiding behind those ciphers and that decade-long web of connections (like you don’t put those kind of connections in your work and make references to hidden secrets, the place of the artist in his work, ciphers, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and clueless critics/readers for decades for nothing), but I’m thinking it’s more in the lines of a literary project (maybe a literary sigil, if you want to get esoteric) or at best a sort literary proto-ARG with elements of autobiography. Not geopolitical secrets.

But if I were a 20th Century occultist trying to look cool, I might have thought about playing that hidden Great Game secret chord and hint at the fact that there’s a lot of treasure hunting in late Chambers for a reason. Especially since there’s another Sylvia/Ilse/Helsa/Karen like character in The Moonlit Way called Nihla Quellen aka Thessalie Dunois, a dancer who is explicitly said to not be French but Alsatian (that German/French duality again). She is accused of spying because her husband used her name and signature to conduct his pro-Germany/Turkey spying business (a variation of that plot-point shows up in The Girl Philippa; Philippa being revealed to be the lost heir of the Marmora/Tenedos throne). That dancer escapes to America and is helped out by an American painter who lives in a Monastery-like complex (like the one from Outsiders, I mean) called Dragon Court. And, well, that book is full of little resonances with TKiY. And there’s a cat in it named after August Strindberg, another Bohemian/occultist. Like I said, no smoking gun but, like, that’s a lot. Still, all of it has an air of plausible deniability and a lot of that web of connection could be coincidences and apophenia. It would be cool to find something tangible but I’m not a code-breaker yet.

P.S.: Concerning other cool coincidences/synchronicities. Argento’s Suspiria and Our Lady of Darkness (which mentions LaVey and Crowley btw) came out the same year. Both are very indebted to Thomas de Quincey (who might also have been an influence on Chambers, see the Ann(e)/Out of the Depths thing from The Restless Sex) and both are very alchemy-influenced. And long-time Dario Argento collaborator Luigi Cozzi himself directed a meta-sequel to Suspiria called The Black Cat/De Profundis. There were also two related comic book series: Le adventure di Stella Holmes—Detectivo dell'occulto (1990-1991) and Il museo degli orrori di Dario Argento (c.1990s), which appeared in the Profondo Rosso/Dario Argento Presenta magazine, and which centered around the character of Stella Holmes (I wrote a little something about Italian Lovecraftian cinema which tackles that amongst other things). Both series were created by Cozzi and later continued by other authors and artists. One of the Stella Holmes stories is about La Terza Madre (the second sequel to Suspiria) and another one involves Thibaut de Castries from that Leiber book! A great idea to bring it full-circle like that. Kudos to Cozzi or whomever thought of that idea. Also, Leiber wasn’t even the first author to write a book called Our Lady of Darkness which starts with an epigraph that’s an excerpt from that bit from Suspiria de Profundis by De Quincey where Our Lady of Darkness is introduced. Bernard Capes also did so in 1899 and a quick overview of the book seems to reveal that it also mixes “genuine” occult stuff and fictional occult stuff. There’s even another one from 1910 by Albert Dorrington and A.G. Stephens!

P.P.S.: Also, I’ll get to it soon enough, but now that I’ve read it, I think Ambrose Bierce straight up lied about the other 1895 Carcosa-related book. I’m also probably going to write something longer about the Mcleod/Sharp-Chambers connections because at the very least they had a lot of interests in common. They even seemed to have been interested in the Ker-Is legend for the same reasons; meaning the duality of the Dahut/Ahès character. For Chambers there’s the water/fire duality of the Jeanne d’Ys/Jeanne-la-flamme types which recurs in his work (Michelle d’Aulone and Athalie, Countess of Elven being the most explicit ones) and Mcleod wanted to write two plays, one called Dahut the Red and the other, Ahès the White. I also found out that Chambers makes a weird reference to The Maids of Paradise in The Young Man’s Girl just as its characters come across the Saint Graal stream. No idea why, but there’s enough conspicuous mentions of bodies of water and submerged secrets in Chambers to make me wonder. In fact, characters (meaning Hastur and Piriou Louis and Michelle d’Aulone) come across a river called L’Ombre during a hunt in The Drums of Aulone and the context is also very conspicuous there (Hastur cries “Game afoot” and L’Ombre just so happen to be the name of a story that’s a variation of Demoiselle d’Ys (which you know, is where Hastur and Piriou Louis first appear) and which also mentions d’Ys). I kind of took it as a “clue” to something else but I go into details about that in that long-long document of mine. I think I’ll have to reread those two books at some point. Not sure when I’ll ever have time to but we’ll see.

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

The shadows lengthen

ㅤ In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is

ㅤ Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

ㅤ Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

ㅤ Lost Carcosa.

“I dream of a sleeping world where endless black sand stretches across a windless shore. A sky circling with twin suns, and weeping dark stars. Where endless spires pierce the heavens, and the shadows lengthen unending. Am I the dreamer, or the dreamed? — The Diary of Raoul Adnet”

^(PS. Genuine coincidence that the last few posts have a character named Raoul too lmao)

Willem Dafoe is my pick

im not an actual digital artist at all, i quite suck at drawing, but i liked the concept too much to not bring it to life to the best of my abilities

This is the most fun ive ever had with this color palette.