Etienne-Laurent de Marigny

Étienne-Laurent de Marigny is a fictional character invented by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price, and later referred to in other Cthulhu Mythos stories, including the works of Brian Lumley.
==In Lovecraft's Fiction==
In his first appearance, in the co-authored story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", de Marigny is identified as a "distinguished Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities," and as North America's "greatest mystic, mathematician and orientalist". Physically, he is described as "slim, dark, handsome, mustached, and still young".
The story takes place in 1932 in de Marigny's New Orleans home, where he is serving as the executor of Randolph Carter's will. He and Carter met in France during World War I, when they both served in the French Foreign Legion. They bonded over their "similar tastes and outlook", and sealed their friendship when de Marigny took Carter to Bayonne, where de Marigny "had shown him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial crypts that burrow beneath that brooding, eon-weighted city". Carter made de Marigny both his literary and financial executor.
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" also introduces de Marigny's clock, "a curious, coffin-shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet".
Lovecraft uses de Marigny again in his revision tale "Out of the Aeons", where he is described as "the famous New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny". In this story, he writes "a highly learned article" for The Occult Review about the scroll held by the Cabot Museum, linking its designs to "certain ideographs of horrible significance" reproduced in von Junzt's Nameless Cults.
==Other Appearances==
In "The Secret of Sebek", by Robert Bloch, de Marigny makes a cameo appearance as a member of the Coffin Club, a New Orleans occult society. 
Elsewhere, de Marigny is credited with the book The Tarot: A Treatise and a translation of the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan (source?). 
Brian Lumley makes de Marigny the father of his recurring character Henri-Laurent de Marigny. In Lumley's The Clock of Dreams, the elder de Marigny has become a Dreamer, one whose dreams "have carried him beyond hither to undreamed of regions -- not only in Earth's Dreamlands but in those of distant worlds and dimensions."
==Gallery==
Etienne-Laurent de Marigny 2.jpeg
Category:Dreamers
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works