Cthulhu Mythos Cosmology

## Introduction

In this blog, we'll be checking the Cosmology of the Cthulhu Mythos, but only relying on H.P Lovecraft's writings, in other words, we will not use the Extended Canon, but only Lovecraft's original Canon.

## The Physical Universe

From the very first section of the Mythos is the Physical Universe, for an example in the short story "The Trap" An occultist Wizard by the name of Axel Holm was able to create a 4-D dimensional mirror that will suck anyone into it nearby, like a miniature blackhole inside this mirror, space and time as a concept do not exist, preventing anyone from aging as long as they are inside of the mirror. what makes this seemingly minor 4D feat important for scaling the cthulhu mythos? It's important because all Dimensions inside of the Cthulhu Mythos can be accessed to via reflection:

Holm made a magnificent mirror, such as would be prized and carefully preserved; and in it deftly fused the strange whorl-configured relic he had acquired. Having thus prepared his refuge and his trap, he began to plan his mode of entrance and conditions of tenancy. He would have with him both servitors and companions; and as an experimental beginning he sent before him into the glass two dependable Negro slaves brought from the West Indies. What his sensations must have been upon beholding this first concrete demonstration of his theories, only imagination can conceive.
Undoubtedly a man of his knowledge realized that absence from the outside world, if deferred beyond the natural span of life of those within, must mean instant dissolution at the first attempt to return to that world. But, barring that misfortune or accidental breakage, those within would remain forever as they were at the time of entrance. They would never grow old, and would need neither food nor drink.
To make his prison tolerable he sent ahead of him certain books and writing materials, a chair and table of stoutest workmanship, and a few other accessories. He knew that the images which the glass would reflect or absorb would not be tangible, but would merely extend around him like a background of dream. His own transition in 1687 was a momentous experience; and must have been attended by mixed sensations of triumph and terror. Had anything gone wrong, there were frightful possibilities of being lost in dark and inconceivable multiple dimensions.

He could not touch any of the parts of these scenes—walls, trees, furniture, and the like—but whether this was because they were truly non-material, or because they always receded at his approach, he was singularly unable to determine. Everything seemed fluid, mutable, and unreal. When he walked, it appeared to be on whatever lower surface the visible scene might have—floor, path, greensward, or such; but upon analysis he always found that the contact was an illusion. There was never any difference in the resisting force met by his feet—and by his hands when he would stoop experimentally—no matter what changes of apparent surface might be involved. He could not describe this foundation or limiting plane on which he walked as anything more definite than a virtually abstract pressure balancing his gravity. Of definite tactile distinctiveness it had none, and supplementing it there seemed to be a kind of restricted levitational force which accomplished transfers of altitude. He could never actually climb stairs, yet would gradually walk up from a lower level to a higher.

So in the Physical World, there are an infinite number of universes, and each having infinite size and infinite-spatial dimensions:

From The Whisperer in Darkness, the universe is implicitly described as an “ingenuine infinity,” but still infinite; it is simply a lower infinity in the perspective of the “genuine infinity”, and the space-time continumm recognized by men is just an infinitesimal part of an infinite sea:

Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system—beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as “Yuggoth” in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers became sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.

In essence, there are infinite higher spatial dimensions in each universes, with everything in a lower-dimensional space being derived from an infinitesimal portion of something in a higher dimension, the latter of which corresponds to "substance and reality," while the former is "shadow and illusion." This hierarchy, as mentioned before, has no end, and extends up to the "dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity" (We'll see what this archetypal infinity is soon):

Within the universe, there is also what can be called the "ultimate" infinity:

Furthermore this "ultimate infinity" can denoted a "true" or a "prime" infinity that is the origin point of all possible infinities, so lets take an example, lets say that there is an infinite dimensional structure, however, that infinite dimensional structure can be denoted as aleph null, but the thing is that aleph null is a copy of what true infinity made, and then there is aleph 1, aleph 2, aleph 3 and etc, it will surpass and reach all larger cardinals and will surpass them ad infinitum, however, even these infinities are still copies of that ultimate infinity which is basically the source for these higher infinite-dimensional structures, therefore, denoting that the term "ultimate infinity" is basically is a philosophical interpretation of infinity which is similar to absolute infinity.

It's established that each hierarchy of universes is endless, and that each universe contains universes of its own. This is extended even further with each hierarchy of universes being contained within mere pebbles in an even larger hierarchy of universes. Until it exceeds any possible number of all these hierarchies, including an infinite or uncountably infinite number:

"There are worlds beyond worlds, universes within and without universes," said the ancient. "You are upon a different planet than that upon which you were born; you are in a different universe, doubtless in a different dimension,"

"Then I am certainly dead."

"What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans? But I have not said that you are dead."

"Then where in Valka's name am I?" roared Kull, his short stock of patience exhausted. "Your barbarian brain clutches at material actualities," answered the other tranquilly. "What does it matter where you are, or whether you are dead, as you call it? You are a part of that great ocean which is Life, which washes upon all shores, and you are as much a part of it in one place as in another, and as sure to eventually flow back to the Source of it, which gave birth to all Life. As for that, you are bound to Life for all Eternity as surely as a tree, a rock, a bird or a world is bound. You call leaving your tiny planet, quitting your crude physical form-death!"

"But I still have my body."
"I have not said that you are dead, as you name it. As for that, you may be still upon your little planet, as far as you know. Worlds within worlds, universes within universes. Things exist too small and too large for human comprehension. Each pebble on the beaches of Valusia contains countless universes within itself, and itself as a whole is as much a part of the great plan of all universes, as is the sun you know. Your universe, Kull of Valusia, may be a pebble on the shore of a mighty kingdom. "You have broken the bounds of material limitations. You may be in a universe which goes to make up a gem on the robe you wore on Valusia's throne or that universe you knew may be in the spiderweb which lies there on the grass near your feet. I tell you, size and space and time are relative and do not really exist."

All hierarchies of universes are but atoms within a super-cosmos:

A being from a higher dimension transcends all the concepts and boindaries of the lower one:

These dimensions can also have impossible structures (Which may fall to extended modal realism):

Theoretically speaking, a prisoner in the glass could in a few moments go anywhere on our planet-into any place, that is, which had ever been reflected in the mirror's surface. This probably applied even to places where the mirror had not hung long enough to produce a clear illusory scene the terrestrial region being then represented by a zone of more or less formless shadow. Outside the definite scenes was a seemingly limitless waste of neutral gray shadow about which Robert could never be certain, and into which he never dared stray far lest he become hopelessly lost to the real and mirror worlds alike.
Among the earliest particulars which Robert gave, was the fact that he was not alone in his confinement. Various others, all in antique garb, were in there with him-a corpulent middle-aged gentleman with tied queue and velvet knee-breeches who spoke English fluently though with a marked Scandinavian accent, a rather beautiful small girl with very blonde hair which appeared a glossy dark blue, two apparently mute Negroes whose features contrasted grotesquely with the pallor of their reversed-colored skins: three young men one young woman; a very small child, almost an infant, and a lean, elderly Dane of extremely distinctive aspect and a kind of half-malign intellectuality of countenance.
This last-named individual-Axel Holm, who wore the satin small-clothes, flared-skirted coat, and voluminous full-bottomed periwig of an age more than two centuries in the past-was notable among the little band as being the one responsible for the presence of them all. He it was who skilled equally in the arts of magic and glass working, had long ago fashioned this strange dimensional prison in which himself, his slaves, and those whom he chose to invite or allure thither were immured unchangingly for as long as the mirror might endure.
Holm was born early in the seventeenth century, and had followed with tremendous competence and success the trade of a glass-blower and molder in Copenhagen. His glass, especially in the form of large drawing-room mirrors, was always at a premium. But the same bold mind which had made him the first glazier of Europe also served to carry his interests and ambitions far beyond the sphere of mere material craftsmanship. He had studied the world around him, and chafed at the limitations of human knowledge and capability. Eventually he sought for dark ways to overcome those limitations, and gained more success than is good for any mortal.
He had aspired to enjoy something like eternity, the mirror being his provision to secure this end. Serious study of the fourth dimension was far from beginning with Einstein in our own era; and Holm, more than erudite in all the methods of his day, knew that a bodily entrance into that hidden phase of space would prevent him from dying in the ordinary physical sense Research showed him that the principle of reflection undoubtedly forms the chief gate to all dimensions beyond our familiar three and chance placed in his hands a small and very ancient glass whose cryptic properties he believed he could turn to advantage. Once "inside" this mirror according to the method he had envisaged, he felt that "life" in the sense of form and consciousness would go on virtually forever, provided the mirror could be preserved indefinitely from breakage or deterioration.
Holm made a magnificent mirror, such as would be prized and carefully preserved, and in it deftly fused the strange whorl-configured relic he had acquired. Having thus prepared his refuge and his trap, he began to plan his mode of entrance and conditions of tenancy. He would have with him both servitors and companions, and as an experimental beginning he sent before him into the glass two dependable Negro slaves brought from the West Indies. What his sensations must have been upon beholding this first concrete demonstration of his theories, only imagination can conceive

He could not touch any of the parts of these scenes-walls, trees, furniture, and the like but whether this was because they were truly non-material, or because they always receded at his approach, he was singularly unable to determine. Everything seemed fluid, mutable, and unreal. When he walked, it appeared to be on whatever lower surface the visible scene might have-floor, path, greensward, or such, but upon analysis he always found that the contact was an illusion. There was never any difference in the resisting force met by his feet-and by his hands when he would stoop experimentally-no matter what changes of apparent surface might be involved. He could not describe this foundation or limiting plane on which he walked as anything more definite than a virtually abstract pressure balancing his gravity. Of definite tactile distinctiveness it had none, and supplementing it there seemed to be a kind of restricted levitational force which accomplished transfers of altitude. He could never actually climb stairs, yet would gradually walk up from a lower level to a higher.
Passage from one definite scene to another involved a sort of gliding through a region of shadow or blurred focus where the details of each scene mingled curiously. All the vistas were distinguished by the absence of transient objects, and the indefinite or ambiguous appearance of such semi- transient objects as furniture or details of vegetation. The lighting of every scene was diffuse and perplexing, and of course the scheme of reversed colors-bright red grass, yellow sky with confused black and gray cloud-forms, white tree-trunks, and green brick walls-gave to everything an air of unbelievable grotesquerie. There was an alteration of day and night, which turned out to be a reversal of the normal hours of light and darkness at whatever point on the earth the mirror might be
hanging.

As well as paradoxes and contradictions (Which also might refer to extended modal realism):

In the Physical Universe, mathematics/science are the same as magic. So when Occultists/Witches Like Axel Holm in "The Trap" and Keziah Mazon "The Dreams of the Witch-House" preform magic they are in reality playing around with higher mathematics.

So with all of this, I believe the Physical Universe should be at least **1-A+** or **High 1-A**, possibly **1-T+**

## The Infinite Voids

Beyond all of the Physical Universe is what is called "The Void" (No relation to the Ultimate Void) a place that transcends all of the dimensionality, concepts and the entire space-time continum of the Physical Universe. Source: The Challenge from Beyond" A mega collab project of several Sci-Fi writers including HPL Robert E Howard, Frank C.L Moore, Abraham Merritt, and Frank Benlknap Long.

This much, according to the learned occultist, the Eltdown Shards had said. What now made the account so obscurely frightful to Campbell was the minute accuracy with which the alien cube had been described. Every detail tallied-dimensions, consistency, hieroglyphed central disc, hypnotic effects. As he thought the matter over and over amidst the darkness of his strange situation, he began to wonder whether his whole experience with the crystal cube-indeed, its very existence- were not a nightmare brought on by some freakish subconscious memory of this old bit of extravagant, charlatanic reading. If so, though, the nightmare must still be in force; since his present apparently bodiless state had nothing of normality in it.

There an infinite amount of said Voids:

Again the vast doorway yawned before me, and I was sucked within that black, writhing cloud. I seemed to be staring at space unlimited. I saw a void beyond my vocabulary to describe; a dark, bottomless gulf teeming with nameless shapes and entities-things of madness and delirium, as tenuous as a mist from Shamballah.
My soul shrank. I was terribly afraid. I screamed and screamed, and felt that I would soon go mad. Then in my dream I ran and ran in a fever of utter terror, but I did not know what I was running from... I left that hideous temple and that hellish void, yet I knew I must, barring some miracle, return.
At last my eyes flew open. I was not beneath the tree. I was sprawled on a rocky slope, my clothing torn and disordered. My hands were bleeding. I stood up, pain stabbing through me. I recognized the spot-the ridge where I had first seen the blasted area! I must have walked miles- unconscious! The tree was not in sight, and I was glad.... Even the knees of my trousers were torn, as if I had crawled part of the way.
I glanced at the sun. Late afternoon! Where had I been? I snatched out my watch. It had stopped at 10:34.

What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham, but he threw
out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked
about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath
which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through
invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that
permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time
continua.
He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly
nonplussed me elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on
earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no
conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came 'from outside'; and his wife knew how to get
them. Sometimes-but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers he would suggest things
about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days.

## The Great Old Ones

The Great Old Ones are a group of unique, powerful and malignent beings that transcends the entire Physical Universe:

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity-never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed-from hints which made even my informant pause timidly-the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first whisperers of these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeley's Outer Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed visiting them.

Those Great Old Ones exists in an infinite hierarchy:

## The Dreamlands

   The Dreamlands or Dream Realm are a setting in a world that people enter through their dreams. It is a vast, alternate dimension or universe, with lands, seas, creatures, civilisations, and an extensive Underworld.

Hypnos, an Elder God, accompanied by his follower, the narrator, travel beyond dreams, infinitely ascending in hierarchies and realms beyond matter, time, and space. The Realms that Hypnos and his follower traverse are impossible to describe with any form of words or language. They eventually face the First Gate, stating that the previous sensations of infinity they experienced were nothing in comparison to it:

Even a single Dream from the Dreamlands is beyond the Great Old Ones:

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert’s heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.

Such skill this narrative does not have. If I might, I would reveal to you the hinted events which I perceived dimly, like one who peers into an unlit realm and glimpses forms whose motion is concealed. In my mural design, which then lay with a multitude of others in the building for which they were planned, I had striven equally to catch a trace of this elusive shadow-world, and had perhaps succeeded better than I shall now succeed. My stay in Ellston was to await the judging of that design: and when days of unfamiliar leisure had given me perspective, I discovered that-in spite of those weaknesses which a creator always detects most clearly-I had indeed managed to retain in line and colour some fragments snatched from the endless world of imagining. The difficulties of the process, and the resulting strain on all my powers, had undermined my health and brought me to the beach during this period of waiting.

Hypnos and the Narrator travel through the various Layers of the Dreamlands with each layer being seen and treated like it was a mere fictional dream compared to the former. Continuing on both Hypnos and the Narrator transcend limitless vacau beyond all thought and entity passing through barrier after barrier of an infinite hierarchy of layers and with each perception of infinity they pass through they are filled with joy.

These Dreamlands are most likely the other dreamlands region that are talked about in "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" a region so vast that since time only 3 other human dreamers were able to transverse these regions with 2 out of the 3 having gone mad after ascending through the black gulfs of infinite layers that is the infinite dreamlands hierarchy.

Why are Hypnos and the Narrator doing all of this? The Reason is that Hypnos wants to be the ruler of the Entire Universe and to be the lord of all living things:

Like the Ordered Universe, the Dreamlands exists on an infinite hierarchy of infinite layers of the dreamlands and as shown earlier in "Hypnos" they possess a Reality>Fiction transcendence as each time you ascend to a higher plane into the dreamlands the previous one is the seen as a mere dream:

northeast."

Hypnos was able to reach the First Gate, but the mere sight at the creatures that resided there turned him insane, those were the Outer Gods:

Beyond the Dreamers are the Men of Leng and things called Moon-Beasts, they can enslave Dreamers:

Higher up on the pecking order are the Cats of Ulthar, which are just talking cats the zoogs and cats are regular enemies with a predator prey dynamic:

Right above The Cats of Ulthar we having beings like the Moon-Beasts who the Cats of Ulthar fear (Notedly they did ignore this fear when they rescued Randolph carter from the Moon-Beasts after he was kidnapped by the men of leng):

Next after the beings like the Moon-Beasts we have the Great Ones (Not to be confused with the great old ones) who are said to be unidimensional and walk in-between spaces. The Great Ones are so powerful that even Cthulhu himself can barely even see them:

After the great ones we reach the Nightguants who even the Great Ones fear. The Nightguants who are the servants of Nodens the Lord of the Abyss in his never ending war against Nyarlathotep (Sidenote: On who is Nodens we do not know if Nodens is a Great one or a Arch-Dreamer all we know is that he is an archaic deity in the dreamlands and he is the nemesis to nyarlathotep)

## The Court of Azathoth and the Ultimate Chaos

Now with that out of the way let's begin with the Ultimate Chaos, it's generally believed that what Hypnos saw, was the Court of Azathoth or the Ultimate Chaos, and by being gazed at and witnessing the outer gods he was drove to madness, and his eventual demise.

However Hypnos is not the only dreamer to have reached the Court of Azathoth. Kuranes the Arch-Dreamer was also said to have made it past the barrier, and reached the ultimate chaos. And not only that Kuranes is one of the few dreamers who not only survived the ultimate chaos but kept his sanity intact. (This feat alone puts him well above Hypnos a being who easily transcended the entire dreamlands with little to no effort.

Including Kuranes among these lucky few who survived the Ultimate Chaos is the Arch-Dreamer Randolph Carter. In "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" in which Randolph Carter in his journey to find The Great Ones reached Kadath only to find the city empty. however to his surprise a giant procession occurs and outcomes an Egyptian like pharaoh to greet him. As he is nyarlathotep the crawling chaos:

“Randolph Carter,” said the voice, “you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.
“When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kla to see the Great Ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom I need not name.
“But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth’s dreamland, and burn still with the flame of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous sunset city of your dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness; for verily, they craved the weird loveliness of that which your fancy had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot should be their abode.
“They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city. All through its palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets they go out in the perfumed gardens and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and silver-basined fountains, and wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows. And when night comes they climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale balustrades to gaze at the town’s steep northward slopes, where one by one the little windows in old peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely candles.
“The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods. They have forgotten the high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their youth. The earth has no longer any gods that are gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space hold sway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream’s gods away from the world of all men’s visions to that which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood’s small fancies a city more lovely than all the phantoms that have gone before.

Nyarlathotep informs Carter that the Great Ones had left their thrones of Kadath in order to live In Randolph Carter's Golden City.

After explaining this to Randolph Carter, Nyarlathotep makes a "deal" with Randolph Carter that he will provide him with Shantak (A bat bird creature thingy) in order to meet the Great Ones and return them back to Kadath:

"So, Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to serve my will. I charge you to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the dream-world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of lost things awesome and momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for truly, it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.

Randolph Carter believing he was being taken to the Great Ones in his golden city heads onto the Shantak only too realize too late that he is being brought to the Court of Azathoth, and is currently stuck inside of the Ultimate Chaos:

"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware, for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!"
And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous shantak, shot screamingly into space toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air and the clouds of earth's dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat-wings beat multitudinous around him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that one might wonder one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of aether howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.

However Randolph Carter in a desperate gamble to save himself jumps off the shantak. In which he experiences a similar dreamland like limitless infinite vacau that Hypnos traveled through in the dreamlands.

Randolph Carter fell through this abyssal vacua for an eternity, to the point that he got to see entire Aeon's go by, he saw universes become born and then decease, he saw all things become unreckoned kalpas before being spat at as matter and light were born anew as space, comets, suns. and worlds sprang into a primordial big bang, teaming with life, civilizations and gods, only to watch it wither away and see the cycle begin anew, in an endless infinite loop of reincarnation perpetuating the agony birth and death and rebirth.

Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns, and worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to no first beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer’s boyhood, and now there were re-made a waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify these things. Out of the void S’ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing his guidance from unhinted deeps.
Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him.

Additionally it is said in "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" when Randolph Carter speaks to a couple of priests on the whereabouts of the great ones and they inform Carter that The Court of Azathoth is outside of the Ordered universe and is a place that no dreams can reach, "that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemies and bubbles at the centre of all infinity" and that Azathoth is said to gnaw hungrily in inconceivable unlighted chambers beyond time:

Again this confirmed once again when Randolph Carter is flying on the Shantak to the ultimate chaos that Azathoth and his court resides in unhallowed pits where no dreams can reach:

The Court of Azathoth is where you can find, The Other Gods, Sometimes referred to as the Outer Gods or the Ultimate Gods (Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep, Cxaxukluth, Ycnágnnisssz, Ubbo-Sathla, Abhoth, Yhoundeh, D'endrrah, Noth-Yidik, Xexanoth, the Nameless Mist, the Darkness, Tru'nembra, and more), here they dance while play an unholy incomprehensible mess of flutes, drums, and whines to keep the daemon sultan docile. Additionally you could find some of Nyarlathotep's Minions like the Haunting Horrors these werid flying worm monsters that serve as Nyarlathotep's pitbulls.

Furthermore on the Court of Azathoth in "The Dreams of the Witch-House" Walter Gilman is bathing and while he is he reflects on the true nature on the ultimate chaos regarding it as an "Ultimate Blackness" above all other abysses (the Dreamlands) where all fixed suggestions of form were absent, and contains alien curves and spirals of ethereal vortexs, in which these ethereal vortices obey laws foreign to another known type of mathematics and physics in any conceivable cosmos:

This would be consistent with the idea that the Ultimate Void is being infinitely beyond the Dreamlands as the infinite transcendent hierarchy of the infinite layers of the sentient blackness, that an Ultimate Blackness would naturally surpass, this "ultimate blackness" can only be referencing the Court of Azathoth because he outright states the Name Azathoth as he calls him the lord of time and space who rules at the center of chaos on top his black throne.

It's heavily implied if not outright stated that Nodens and his Nightguants are able to reach the Court of Azathoth because they were able to save Carter while he was falling in the Ultimate Void from the Haunting Horrors. But there really is no reason to go to the Ultimate Void. Because it's just that, an infinite void of churning chaos and monsters as they dance around Azathoth as he sits on his throne as lord of all things while his servants play their chaotic flutes:

Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew-perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that encompassed him.

## The Gates

The physical world, the voids and the Dreamlands are only a small wholeness compared to the infinity that is the First Gate:

The Gates are ineffable, beyond dimensions, time, and the human mind:

It was also described as a realm beyond consciousness, reality, and comprehension:

Despite Randolph Carter reaching the court of azathoth and back, his connection to the Dreamlands starts to fade away and all but dissapears by the age of 30, as the mundane physical world rings the magical imagination he had in his younger years dissipate to nothingness:

In order to reclaim his ability to dream once he follows the advice of his long dead grandfather who informs in his sleep about the story of how their ancestor Edmund Carter after escaping the Salem witch trials placed a sliver key inside of a box that had been handed down by their ancestors for generations in order to reconnect with the dreamlands:

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel no person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That it held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's father had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood that he would find within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told him nothing
An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques, but of any legible explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an antique reed. Carter recognised the characters as those he had seen on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had vanished one midnight in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered
now
But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though shewing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay
In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across the road at the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic dream-laden sea in the farthest background.

Carter with the sliver key in hand enters the Snakeden (a cave inside of his childhood home that aids in deep sleeps to connect to the Dreamlands) and enters the world of dreams once more:

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne in Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.

Once Carter completes the ritual and crosses the sliver gate he is completely awestruck on the realm he is now finds which contains a trans-dimensional extension of the earth as he is now in the prescence of the Ancient Ones who function as the guardians of the Sliver Key:

By the time the rite was over Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could be told by earth’s geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix. For the nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it in the cryptical Pnakotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred had taken on significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the Silver Key. A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

Chief among these Ancient Ones is the dreaded Guide Known as Umr-At-Tawil who is stated to be beyond the Court of Azathoth as "all these Blacknesses are lesser then HE who guardeth the Gateway":

“And while there are those,” the mad Arab had written, “who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as a Guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may those who pass ever return, for in the Vastnesses transcending our world are Shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The Affair that shambleth about in the night, the Evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants within—all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE Who guardeth the Gateway; HE Who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable Devourers. For HE is ’UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE.”

despite his inclinations to return to his world of dreams Randolph Carter has found a realm that transcends its entirety as the blasphemous infinity fills his mind:

As Randolph carter is dealing with this the world shifts as giant masses of towering stone appears made in alien and incomprhensinble designs and disposed to laws of unknown inverse geometry as a light of unassignable color filled the sky in contradictory directions they defy logic and it played over almost sentiently over what seemed to a curved line of geographic hiergloypthical pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise and summonted by cloaked, ill-defined shapes finally the Ancient Ones appear before Carter with the Guide the redereth of the prolonged life Umr-At-Tawil Appears and offers Carter the ability to continue his journey to the Ultimate Gate:

There was another Shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed to glide or float over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not exactly permanent in outline, but held transient suggestions of something remotely preceding or paralleling the human form, though half as large again as an ordinary man. It seemed to be heavily cloaked, like the Shapes on the pedestals, with some neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not detect any eye-holes through which it might gaze. Probably it did not need to gaze, for it seemed to belong to an order of being far outside the merely physical in organisation and faculties.
A moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to his mind without sound or language. And though the name it uttered was a dreaded and terrible one, Randolph Carter did not flinch in fear. Instead, he spoke back, equally without sound or language, and made those obeisances which the hideous Necronomicon had taught him to make. For this Shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea and the Winged Ones came to earth to teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed the frightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate—’Umr at-Tawil, the ancient one, which the scribe rendereth the Prolonged of Life.
The Guide knew, as he knew all things, of Carter’s quest and coming, and that this seeker of dreams and secrets stood before him unafraid. There was no horror or malignity in what he radiated, and Carter wondered for a moment whether the mad Arab’s terrific blasphemous hints, and extracts from the Book of Thoth, might not have come from envy and a baffled wish to do what was now about to be done. Or perhaps the Guide reserved his horror and malignity for those who feared. As the radiations continued, Carter mentally interpreted them in the form of words.
“I am indeed that Most Ancient One,” said the Guide, “of whom you know. We have awaited you—the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though long delayed. You have the Key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now the Ultimate Gate is ready for your trial. If you fear, you need not advance. You may still go back unharmed the way you came. But if you choose to advance . . .”
The pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carter hesitated not a moment, for a burning curiosity drove him on.

Once Randolph Carter accepts to take Umr-At-Tawil as his guide the Anicent ones offer his a pedestal to sit on as they accept him into his own, as they begin what could only be called by the human imagination as a chant as the Anicent ones channel their power to enter an ever greater dream to ascend to the Ultimate Gate:

At this reply the Guide seemed to make a sign by certain motions of his robe which may or may not have involved the lifting of an arm or some homologous member. A second sign followed, and from his well-learnt lore Carter knew that he was at last very close to the Ultimate Gate. The light now changed to another inexplicable colour, and the Shapes on the quasi-hexagonal pedestals became more clearly defined. As they sat more erect, their outlines became more like those of men, though Carter knew that they could not be men. Upon their cloaked heads there now seemed to rest tall, uncertainly coloured mitres, strangely suggestive of those on certain nameless figures chiselled by a forgotten sculptor along the living cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary, while grasped in certain folds of their swathings were long sceptres whose carven heads bodied forth a grotesque and archaic mystery.
Carter guessed what they were, whence they came, and Whom they served, and guessed, too, the price of their service. But he was still content, for at one mighty venture he was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath upon mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him
with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres, and radiating a message which he understood: "We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has made you one of us
Carter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the Most Ancient One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal, taller than the rest, and at the centre of the oddly curved line (neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola) which they formed. This, he guessed, was the Guide's own throne. Moving and rising in a manner hardly definable, Carter took his seat, and as he did so he saw that the Guide had likewise seated himself.
Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something-
some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of
the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere or apparent sphere of some obscurely iridescent
metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and
fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of earth. There
was a suggestion of chanting-or what human imagination might interpret as chanting. Presently the
quasi-sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of
unassignable colour Carter saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then
all the mitred, sceptre-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight, curious swaying in the
same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiable light-resembling that of the quasi-
sphere-played round their shrouded heads

The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructions in some subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things which he wished the Companions to dream; and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured the prescribed thought, there would be born the nucleus of a manifestation visible to his own earthly eyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes had achieved a oneness, that manifestation would occur, and everything he required be materialised, through concentration. He had seen such things on earth—in India, where the combined, projected will of a circle of adepts can make a thought take tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaanât, of which few men dare speak.
Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful Silver Key in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.

Randolph Carter is then pushed through immeasurable depths as if he was trapped inside of vast expansive sea in a terrible pit of silence, only for the silence to be ushered out by a voice that was not a voice and produced in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words. Upon hearing the advice of the voice he realized that the Sea he was trapped in was actually the ultimate gate and he had just past through it. When Randolph Carter passes through the Ultimate gate.

The feeling is the equivalent passing through a measureless gulf Randolph Carter felt triumphant only to turn backwards awestruck to see that there wasn't just one gate or two or even three gates that he past through but an entire multiplicity of gates behind him that the former immeasurable depths of that rose-tinctured sea was:

A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a thousandfold. The strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses, while about the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there hovered an air of the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far-off coast. But the moment of silence was broken—the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words.
“The man of Truth is beyond good and evil,” intoned a voice that was not a voice. “The man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.”
And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensioned earth. He realised that he had been using the Silver Key—moving it in accord with an unlearnt and instinctive ritual closely akin to that which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped his cheeks was, he realised, no more or less than the adamantine mass of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought with which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind determination, he floated forward—and through the Ultimate Gate.

## The Ultimate Void and the Outer Gods

The Ultimate Void is beyond the Ultimate Gate, where the true form of the Outer Gods reside, the Outer Gods reside beyond the hierarchy of Gates. They are described as outside the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos:

They are beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination, and resides within the abysses through the Gates:

The Outer Gods transcend any conception of being, size, and boundaries:

There are an infinite amount of said Outer Gods:

Azathoth, one of the most significant Ultimate Gods, is the ruler of all time and space from his black throne at the center of chaos, and is the ruler of all things as well:

## Misconceptions about Azathoth

So the common idea that Azathoth dreams the cosmos into existence and will destroy it when he wakes up is a misconception.

As has been known for quite a while, by now, this whole concept is quite frankly pure headcanon that has little basis to actually back it up. For reference, this is the excerpt that serves as the primary piece of evidence supporting it:

Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
“I am His Messenger,” the daemon said,

As we can see, there is not much suggesting that all of existence is Azathoth's dream in here, especially when this quote is viewed in a vacuum and with no preconceived notions in mind. Instead, it just says that Azathoth lies dormant in the center of the Ultimate Void, and mutters the contents of his own dreams, which are things that even he cannot understand, which isn't evidence for all of reality being Azathoth's dream.

Eldrich entities existing in a state of "dreaming" is a common motif in Lovecraft's stories, as shown with Cthulhu's "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" (In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming) and the Ancient Ones partaking in cosmic dreams; there's no reason for Azathoth to be any different.

Ample evidence exists for him existing on the same general level as his servants despite being superior to them; the Outer Gods play music and dance around him, Nyarlathotep strikes his head, and he's only tiered higher than them due to additional context regarding the Ultimate Mystery and Supreme Archetype.

## The Ultimate Mystery and the Supreme Archetype

    Once he crossed that final frontier that was the ultimate gate. Carter was horrified to the realization that he was not one single being but many, He discovered that he was not only Himself from all parts of his life from boyhood to where is now. There were Carters in every possible part of earth's history incorporating all possible biological forms. Human, non-human vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, with some even exhibiting traits that no "earthly logic" could explain.

All of these Carters were equally himself as they exist in every single possible planet, galaxy and universe. Faced with this realization Carter reeled in the despair that this loss of identity had brought upon him:

He was in many places at the same time. On earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake-Den in the hushed evening light and running down the rocky slope and through the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher’s house in the hills beyond Arkham—yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in earth’s trans-dimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the local manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate.
There were “Carters” in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of earth’s history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility. “Carters” of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were “Carters” having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua. Spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalled dreams—both faint and vivid, single and persistent—which he had had through the long years since he first began to dream, and a few possessed a haunting, fascinating, and almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.
Faced with this realisation, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supreme horror—horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.

Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter’s beyond-the-gate fragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of horror to black, clutching pits of a horror still more profound. This time it was largely external—a force or personality which at once confronted and surrounded and pervaded him, and which in addition to its local presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and likewise to be coexistent with all time and coterminous with all space. There was no visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept of combined localism, identity, and infinity lent a paralysing terror beyond anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of existing.

However the horror of this revelation quickly dissipates as it turns to wonder when the "All In One" and "One in All" appears before him. It's physical manifestation addressed it in prodigious waves that smote burned and thundered energy from them. speaking in the similar rhythmic chants the ancients ones had done beforehand with it's flickering as a monstrous light. Leaving Randolph Carter in pure awe at it's all encompassing ineffable magnitude. The Being praises Randolph Carter for instead of abandoning this Endeavor to return to his idolized dreamlands he chose to continued his path in learning the ultimate mystery, in which the being presents the opportunity for Randolph carter to choose what he desires:

And now the BEING was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that smote and burned and thundered—a concentration of energy that blasted its recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that followed, with certain definite variations, the singular unearthly rhythm which had marked the chanting and swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the First Gate. It was as though suns and worlds and universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space they had conspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But amidst the greater terror one lesser terror was diminished; for the searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the beyond-the-gate Carter from his infinity of duplicates—to restore, as it were, a certain amount of the illusion of identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into speech-forms known to him, and his sense of horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only ineffably majestic.
“Randolph Carter,” IT seemed to say, “MY manifestations on your planet’s extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kled, and to reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty toward a single red star in a firmament alien to your earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish loftier things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of secrets which lies behind all scenes and dreams.
“What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet—five times only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to shew you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes.”

Carter, Accepts the proposal of the BEING as he marches forward to understand the ultimate mystery. He was shown just how small the gods of earth (Great Ones) are in comparison to the wider world. He was enlightened on just how fractional that world he once like all other men proclaimed to be reality. He finally understood why he was able to exist at the same time as his past selves and all the other Carter's that he discovered when he crossed that final frontier of the Ultimate Gate:

“I accept. I will not retreat.”
The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the BEING had heard. And now there poured from that limitless MIND a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shewn the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little gods of earth, with their petty, human interests and connexions—their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.
While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantage-point he looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conception of being, size, and boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy Randolph Carter in the Arkham farmhouse in 1883, the misty form on the vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing the PRESENCE in the limitless abyss, and all the other “Carters” his fancy or perception envisaged.

Randolph Carter is revealed that all things are just a fragment cut from an archetypal infinity, as all things are derivations and fragmentary pieces of it's dizzy and reachless heights. This archetypal infinity would represent a type of true infinity that is separated from all bad infinities as because it is the archetypal infinity, all things would be a mere derivation or copy of said archetypal infinity We're later given additional confirmation that the world of men (the Physical Universe) and of the gods of men (the Dreamlands) are merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing (the Court of Azathoth) which all make up the small 3-Dimesional wholeness of what man hails as reality:

This one is from the Supreme Archetype's article of this Wiki:

In Lovecraft's letters he elaborates on the theme of the ultimate reality being forever beyond human conception. Due to Humanity's local and limited range of sense-equipment. The Absolute reality is forever beyond us, we cannot form even the vaguest conception of what such a thing could be like, for we have no means to envisage it, apart from its subjective aspects that reside within our own limited range of understanding. with all these finite explanations and reasoning being mere shadows whose substance and nature we can never hope to approximate stating that we have only an extremely fragmentary and illusionary specialized projection of it and can form no idea of any principle of reference by which to define or envisage the absolute reality apart from the few sensory manifestations of it that we are in fact capable of understanding. All we can do is to judge the relationships which those manifestations bear toward one another and accept our fractional vision as having some fixed proportion of relationship to whatever inconceivable whole may be there.

A basic restatement that due to mankind's finite capabilities we can never hope to comprehend the ultimate reality.

itself —the stark, cosmic reality which lurks behind our varying subjective perceptions. I don’t need to tell you what a tremendous force this
conception necessarily is, in any maturely developed and fully civilised
mind. The search for ultimate reality is the most ineradicable urge in
the human personality—the basis of every real religion, and the foundation of all that nobly poetic body of philosophy which has its fount in
Plato. Anything which enhances our sense of success in this quest, be it
art or religion, is the source of a pricelessly rich emotional experience
—and the more we lose this experience in religion, the more we need to
get it in something else. In stark intellectual truth, this experience is an
illusion; since it is absurd to fancy that the narrow range of visions afforded by different artists within the human species could give even
the merest hint of an ultimate reality known to us only from the restricted point of view (or closely related points of view) of mankind
with its local and limited range of sense-equipment. Absolute reality is
for ever beyond us—we cannot form even the vaguest conception of
what such a thing could be like, for we have no terms to envisage entity
apart from those subjective aspects which reside wholly inside our own
physiology and psychology. Solid, liquid, gas; size, dimensions, matter,
energy, ether; time and space; eternity, infinity, finiteness, relativity; all
are, in the last analysis only shadows whose substance and nature we can
never hope even to approximate. We have only extremely fragmentary
and illusorily specialised projections to go by, and can form no idea of
any principle of reference by which to define or envisage such a thing as
absolute entity or reality apart from its few sensory manifestations. All
we can do is to judge the relationships which those manifestations bear
toward one another, and accept our fractional vision as having some
fixed proportion or relationship to whatever the inconceivable whole may be. The mind of man can never —this is the one absolute certainty
in our knowledge —get any futher than this, since the limits of the five
senses are a fixed and insurmountable barrier beyond which we have no
possible avenue of access. Religion pretends to satisfy by assuming
man’s possession of mystic information-channels apart from the senses,
but we are outgrowing the possibilities of this benign delusion. Only the
subtler illusion of art is left—the illusion that our ability to command
slightly different points of view within the human radius gives us a
triangulation-base large enough to permit of mensurational guesses regarding absolute reality. This illusion we must keep as long as we can,
for life without it would be sterile indeed for most of us; yet I do not
think we can keep it always. Science is the great destroyer of beauty,
and this phase will have to go in time. But that does not lessen its predousness now, and we may still feel an emotional surge of approximation to the divine comprehension when a new artistic experience
suddenly enlarges our horizon and shews us a familiar thing in the
fresh, strange, and seemingly significant light of another man’s vision.

## Conclusion

The Lovecraft Universe is an interesting horror one be it in terms of power or writing, it is a very complex and powerful one, and while using any Tiering System, be it of that Wiki or any other one like VSBW or CSAP, it is easily among the most powerful franchises of all Fiction.

But for now, the cosmology is at **1-T+** while the Supreme Archetype sits in a good **High 1-T+** Tier.