Other Side
(a generic astral netherworld of shadow and darkness)
The Other Side, AKA Limbo, The Upside-Down, The Further, The Void, The Abyss, Outside, Anwynn, The Dark Side, The Dark, The Darkness, The Deep, The Deeps, The Great Deeps, The Nether, The Nether World, The Netherworld, Beyond the Gate, The Underworld, The Afterlife, Nar-Mattaru, The Astral Plane, The Dungeon Dimensions, The Shadowlands, The Shadows, The Spaces Between the Spaces, Deep Dendo, Ginnungagap
Contents
In the Mythos
Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit - a Dark Side.
- Introduction from Tales from the Darkside (1983 series)
The "Other Side", also known by a variety of other names, is a place of darkness and shadow, beyond our world in an astral plane, similar to reality but more like a reflection or shadow of it, not in the spaces we know, but between the spaces, bridged or sealed by metaphysical "gates" or "doorways" or "bridges", an alien place full of shapeless and shadowy monsters waiting in the dark for an opportunity to cross over the Abyss into our reality. Typically, someone who finds him/herself traveling to the Other Side runs a risk of either never returning, or "coming back wrong" as an incomplete or empty shell of his/herself, or as a shell fill with some alien purpose, personality, and mind....
The Nameless Mist pervades the Other Side, and in the furthest reaches of this vast dark territory lay the Ultimate Gate, beyond which stretches the Ultimate Abyss, the Last Void where Yog-Sothoth dwells hidden in darkness.
Faerie Land (Deep Dendo)
Arthur Machen's Little People appear to live in a strange, alien faerie land, "Deep Dendo", described in "The White People" as "...some great white place where they lived, where the trees and the grass were all white, and there were white hills as high up as the moon, and a cold wind...", "the sky... like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo..." (Arthur Machen, "The White People"). Much of the mythology about the faerie worlds these beings live in suggest that they normally exist in a parallel dimension and cross over into our world at times and places of uncertainty, of liminality, when the veil between worlds is thin (cemeteries as places between life and death, dawn and twilight as times that are neither night or day, equinoxes at times where neither day nor night are dominant, frontiers and wildernesses as places that are neither completely unknown nor completely civilized, etc.) A journey into the shadowy faerie lands seems a bit like a journey into through a portal into some nightmarish alien world.
Heresies and Controversies
Keeper Notes
Quotes
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...."
- Psalm 23:4
"I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death; to a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness."
- Job 10:21-22
Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit - a Dark Side.
- Introduction from Tales from the Darkside (1983 series)
...The darkness which filled the passage seemed to become suddenly of a dull violet colour; not, as if a light had been shone; but as if the natural blackness of the night had changed colour. And then, coming through this violet night, through this violet-coloured gloom, came a little naked Child, running. In an extraordinary way, the Child seemed not to be distinct from the surrounding gloom; but almost as if it were a concentration of that extraordinary atmosphere; as if that gloomy colour which had changed the night, came from the Child... running, with the natural movement of the legs of a chubby human child, but in an absolute and inconceivable silence. It was a very small Child, and must have passed under the table; but I saw the Child through the table, as if it had been only a slightly darker shadow than the coloured gloom. In the same instant, I saw that a fluctuating glimmer of violet light outlined the metal of the gun-barrels and the blade of the sword-bayonet, making them seem like faint shapes of glimmering light, floating unsupported where the table-top should have shown solid.... I saw the Child jump to one side, and hide behind some half-seen object, that was certainly nothing belonging to the passage. I stared, intently, with a most extraordinary thrill of expectant wonder, with fright making goose-flesh of my back. And even as I stared, I solved for myself the less important problem of what the two black clouds were that hung over a part of the table. I think it very curious and interesting, the double working of the mind, often so much more apparent during times of stress. The two clouds came from two faintly shining shapes, which I knew must be the metal of the lanterns; and the things that looked black to the sight with which I was then seeing, could be nothing else but what to normal human sight is known as light....
- William Hope Hodgson, "The Searcher of the End Room"
Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories. All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery—the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike....
- H.P. Lovecraft, "Dreams in the Witch House (fiction)"
"...some great white place where they lived, where the trees and the grass were all white, and there were white hills as high up as the moon, and a cold wind... the sky... like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo..."
- Arthur Machen, "The White People"
"Whatever it was, the effect was curious: it brought back the dream - he was beginning to think of it as the vision - of the evening before. The homely well known pasture seemed in a moment to widen into an illimitable grey expanse - an acute feeling of extreme loneliness and of being on a hopeless and aimless journey came over him and his whole being cried out for companionship and protection, and yet he felt that there was none, none whatever to be had: he was helpless in a world of hostile shadows. Nothing was interesting any more, nothing was or could be important, and for all that, there was an instant pressure of hurry and no time to stop and think. It was a bitterness of despair which could not, he said, be put into any human words..."
- M. R. James, "John Humphries" (Unfinished story.)
Associated Mythos Elements
- race: The Drowners: Bugg-Shash and Yibb-Tstll
- films: appears in...
