Essential Saltes
Essential Saltes ("Essential Salts") originate in H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (fiction).
Description
He turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and saw that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous eflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapour of surprising volume and opacity.
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (fiction)
A sorcerer might use a terrible spell to reduce a corpse to its "Essential Saltes" and compounds, a bluish-grey powder, or reverses the process to yield ultimately the form and soul of the deceased. Being Resurrected in this manner costs the victim sanity. A complete corpse is necessary; if only part of the ashy powder is available for the spell, the sorcerer gets "onlie the liveliest awfullness" from what's then made flesh. But the successfully resurrected need not be all in one piece: as long as the coffin is intact and sufficient care is taken to scrape together all the fragments and dust within, the spell succeeds. Reciting the spell backward returns the resurrected entity to dust, the dust can be retained for further abuse, or thrown away.
Appearances
- fiction: H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (fiction)
- sourcebook: "Call of Cthulhu (RPG)"
