Strange Timing & Motive In Polanski Arrest

[Helen Reyes]

Oh, here it is:

Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud;

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

Tornasuk is a power Greenlandic shamans called on, neither God nor Devil, and together with his sometimes-consort the Mother of All Sea-Animals made up the entire pantheon for some Inuit there.

Olaus Wormius aka Olaf Wormskold or Wormskiold occurs in H. P. Lovecraft's History of the Necronomicon, The Festival and Chapter 5 of The Dunwich Horror. http://www.sacred-texts.com has a translation he did in Latin and the Texts section at http://www.archive.org has works on Greenland that cite Wormskold as a reference. http://www.runeberg.org has books about Arctic explorers (including Robert Peary who stole the Eskimo meteor in what was known as Thule district in Greenland).


A nearly 20 ton iron meteorite that fell nearly 10,000 years ago. It was found in 1963 by V.F. Buchwald near Agpalilik. This is a piece of the larger Cape York meteorite found in the same region by Robert Perry in 1894. The larger Cape York piece is in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
(from http://thulegreenlandsite.com/thule_summer.html)