Summary: Is “Recovered Ancient Memories” in the DSM-5?<br> ⁓The Voice before the Void<br> “Bothon”<br> Henry S. Whitehead with H.P. Lovecraft<br> part 3<br> Not only not within the memory of living men, but, as the records indicated, during its entire history over thousands of years as the metropolis of the civilized world, had there been any previous hostile manifestations against the great city of Alu. That anything like this terrible campaign which the renowned General Bothon of Ludekta set in motion against her might come to pass, had never even remotely occurred to anyone in Alu. So promptly did Bothon launch his attack that the tortured bodies of the members of his delegation to the Emperor had not yet ceased writhing on their row of crosses before he had penetrated, at the head of his trained legionaries, to a point within two squares of the Imperial Palace which stood at the center of the great city.<br> There had been virtually no resistance. This intensive campaign would have been triumphantly concluded within twenty minutes, the Emperor probably captured along with all his Palace guards and household, the person of the Lady Ledda secured by this ardent lover of hers, and the entire objective of the expedition accomplished, save for what in modern legal phraseology would have been described as An Act of God.<br> The premonitory earth-shakings which had accompanied this armed invasion culminated, at that point in the advance of Bothon’s army, in a terrific seismic cataclysm. The stone-paved streets opened in great gaping fissures. Massive buildings crashed tumultuously all about and upon the triumphantly advancing Ludektans. The General, Bothon, at the head of his troops, dazed and deafened and hurled violently upon the ground, retained consciousness long enough to see three quarters of his devoted following engulfed, smashed, torn to fragments, crushed into unrecognizable heaps of bloody pulp; and this holocaust swiftly and mercifully obliterated from before his failing vision by the drifting dust from millions of tons of crumbled masonry.<br> He awakened in the innermost keep of the dungeon in Alu’s citadel.<br> Coming quietly into Meredith’s bedroom about ten o’clock in the morning, Dr. Cowlington, who had made up his mind overnight on a certain matter, quietly led his initial conversation with his observation-patient around to the subject which had been most prominent in his mind since their conference of yesterday over the strange linguistic terms which Meredith had noted down.<br> “It has occurred to me that I might very well tell you about something quite out of the ordinary which came under my notice seven or eight years ago. It happened while I was chief intern in the Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane. I served there for two years under Dr. Floyd Haviland before I went into private practice. We had a few private patients in the hospital, and one of these, who was in my particular charge, was a gentleman of middle-age who had come to us because of Haviland’s enormous reputation, without commitment. This gentleman, whom I will call ‘Smith,’ was neither legally nor actually ‘insane.’ His difficulty, which had interfered very seriously with the course of his life and affairs, would ordinarily be classified as ‘delusions.’ He was with us for nearly two months. As a voluntary patient of the institution, and being a man of means, he had private rooms. He was in every way normal except for his intensive mental preoccupation with what I have called his delusions. In daily contact with him during this period I became convinced that Mr. Smith was not suffering from anything like a delusive affection of the mind.<br> “I diagnosed his difficulty—and Dr. Haviland agreed with me—that this patient, Smith, was suffering mentally from the effects of an ancestral memory.<br> “Such a case is so rare as to be virtually unique. The average psychiatrist would go through a life-time ...
