A Warning to Future Man

A Warning to Future Man was a manifesto written by Richard Sharpe Shaver in 1943.

Description

A Warning to Future Man was a manifesto submitted to the pulp magazine Amazing in 1943, written by Richard Sharpe Shaver, who claimed to have composed its contents after he'd begun hearing voices in his head while operating heavy machinery at a construction site. At first, the voices mostly took the form of being able to hear other people's thoughts, but before long, they began to take on a malevolent character: taunting, threatening, lunatic voices, and the agonized shrieking of people who had apparently been dragged down into caverns and tunnels underground to be tortured by malignant entities called Deros.

These are, of course, classic signs of schizophrenia, but Shaver would soon be abducted himself, dragged into the underworld by the sadistic idiot Deros for monstrous experiments and totures at the hands of his captors, and a bewildering variety of other entities which had apparently been invited to participate in the Deros' depraved entertainments. In his time among the Deros, Shaver would behold many wonders and horrors of the inner earth, including examples of the Deros' "Tamper Ray' technology, installed in the caverns in a prehuman era when the Deros were driven underground by an antediluvian change in the sunlight that proved toxic for the Deros; in the darkness of the inner earth, the immortal Deros would slowly go mad over the ages, turning their "tamper" rays - rays for thought-control, telepathy, paralysis, levitation, memory-wiping, cancer and the common cold, earthquakes, and many other horrible thngs - into instruments of destruction and misery for the Deros' hated mortal descendants remaining on the surface: modern man.

Shaver's manifesto would serve as the titular warning to future man that the Deros exist, and are interfering in the world above, in the hopes that humanity would be able to use the knowledge to turn the tide against their tormentors. The staff of Amazing scanned the first couple pages, and threw it in the trash as the work of a complete crackpot, but Raymond M. Palmer, editor-in-chief, followed a hunch and retrieved the pages from the garbage, read over them, and, impressed by the cosmic horror and imagination of what he read (or perhaps suffering from a corrupted sanity from the Mythos content within the manifesto), decided to teach his staff a lesson in thinking outside the box by editing and publishing A Warning to Future Man under a new title, with much of the Mythos content - described in lurid, sexually-explicit detail - toned down or removed entirely for the benefit of the magazine's audience, and added enough of a framing device and plot in the form of the intervention of a friendly race of aliens, the Teros, who descended from a common ancestor to the Deros and Man but managed to escape to the stars before the sun decayed and soured. This version of the tome is widely available and considerably tamed from the source version, but still managed to spark a wave of mass hyteria in the Amazing readership.

A Warning to Future Man is, then, essentially a prototype of the modern UFO abduction conspiracy theory, a first-run for the "UFO flap" of the 1950s, and the foundation for public interest in UFO conspiracies, alien abduction and recovered memory, reports of men-in-black, contactee cults, and so on, with Amazing magazine eventually being all but completely dedicated to catering to public interest in the "Shaver Mystery" and a spin-off magazine - FATE (magazine) - eventually appearing which would be dedicated entirely to UFOlogy and the dawning New Age movement.

A Warning to Future Man

• author: Richard Sharpe Shaver (1943)
• Language: English, Mantong
• Number of known copies (if rare): (one)
• Last known location of surviving copies (if rare): A single copy was mailed to Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing (magazine).

Physical Description: A hand-written "green ink" manifesto scrawled onto a random collection of various sorts of paper, wrapped in brown paper and bound in twine.

General Content: The paranoid ravings of Shaver, describing the inner workings of the Hollow Earth under the Deros, revealed to him through voices he was able to hear in his head while operating construction equipment, thanks to one of the Deros' many forms of rays used for "tamper" against the surface world. The manifesto, as the title suggests, is a warning to its readers about the existence of the hidden underworld civilization people by lunatic alien sadists, described in lurid, shocking, and sexually explicit detail. The manifesto was accompanied by a dictionary of the Deros' hidden language, Mantong.

Mythos Content

Spells: Contact/Summon Dero, Contact/Summon Man in Black, contact/summon Grey Alien, contact/summon Shadow Person, Contact/Summon Reptilian

• Sanity Loss: (minor)
• Mythos Knowledge: (minor)
• Occult Knowledge: (negligible)

I Remember Lemuria

• author: Richard Sharpe Shaver and Raymond M. Palmer, (1943)
• Language: English, Mantong
• Number of known copies (if rare): (unknown, but common)

Physical Description: A pulp novella in serial form, published in Amazing (magazine) in the early/mid 1940s.

General Content: This is a Bowlderrized version of A Warning to Future Man, renamed and edited for public consumption in the form of a pulp serial, removing much of the Mythos content, and adding an element of hope in the form of the "Teros", a benevolent counterpart to the evil race of idiot sadists dwelling at the center of the Earth.

Distribution: This tome - in serialized form as a collection of Amazing magazines dated 1943 and later, published and promoted to a general public that remarkably rece3ptive to this new, wild, cynical, and paranoid form of pulp literature, presenting a world of lurid and malignant influences barely concealed beneath the earth, who were secretly interfering with, experimenting on, and torturing human beings who were helpless to explain what happened without sounding like lunatics. I Remember Lemuria would prove to be one of the magazine's most popular subjects, driving up sales and seeing such a high demand for more of the "Shaver Mystery" that the magazine would eventually be all but converted to a dedicated magazine on the subject, publishing letters to the editor from readers who believed themselves to have been the victims of alien "tamper"; Amazing would later in the decade be reinvented as a magazine dedicated to the newly-discovered "UFO Flap" that was quickly sweeping the industrialized world with UFO sightings, close encounters, etc. - that is, this version of the tome would have been fairly easy to come by in the 1950s and 1960s, it helped spark a mass hysteria of UFO sightings and abduction claims which may have actually been the activities of any of a variety of Mythos entities, and widely helped to popularize assorted Mythos concepts.

Mythos Content

Spells: (none)

• Sanity Loss: (negligible)
• Mythos Knowledge: (minor, focused on the Deros and their role in the Hollow Earth)
• Occult Knowledge: (negligible)

Associated Mythos Elements

• races:
  • Deros
  • Teros ("Nordic Aliens")
  • Grey Aliens
  • Reptilian Aliens
  • Horla
  • People of K'n-yan
  • Shoggoths
• cult:
  • Men in Black
• locations:
  • Hollow Earth
• language:
  • Mantong
• artifact:
  • Tamper Rays

Heresies and Controversies

• The unedited original manifesto, A Warning to Future Man, appears to have been lost over the years, and its precise content - and how it differs from the published 'I Remember Lemuria - appear to be uncertain. For the intents of adaptation into the Cthulhu Mythos, it might have contained perhaps anything, including references to any of the races or deities of the Cthulhu Mythos, especially those that haunt the Hollow Earth. (YSDC)

Appearances

• story: SacredTexts dotcom (full text of I Remember Lemuria and The Return of Sathanas; the former is the pulp variation on A Warning to Future Man)