The King in YellowMain article: The King in Yellow
The King in Yellow is a widely-censored play. Its author is unknown and is believed to have committed suicide after publishing it in 1889. The play is named after a mysterious supernatural figure featured in it, who is connected to a peculiar alien symbol, usually wrought in gold, called the Yellow Sign. Though the first act is said to be "innocent", all who read the play's second act either go mad or suffer another terrible fate. Its setting and events include mysterious places and entities such as Carcosa, Hastur, and the Lake of Hali, names that Chambers borrowed from the writings of Ambrose Bierce.
The play was first imagined in a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers also named The King in Yellow, published in 1895 and set in a hypothetical year 1920. Lovecraft was a fan of the book and included references to the Lake of Hali and The Yellow Sign in his short story "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930). August Derleth later expanded on this connection in his own stories, rendering Hastur as an evil deity related to Cthulhu and the King In Yellow as one of his incarnations.
Ponape ScriptureThe Ponape Scripture first appeared in Lin Carter's short story "Out of the Ages" (1975). The Scripture is a manuscript found in the Caroline Islands by Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag sometime around 1734. The book showed signs of great age—its pages were made of palm leaves and its binding was of an ancient, now-extinct cycadean wood. It was written in Naacal (the language of Mu) and appears to have been authored by Imash-Mo, high priest of Ghatanothoa, and his successors. The book contains details of Mu and of Zanthu, high priest of Ythogtha. With the help of his servant Yogash (hinted to be a Deep One hybrid[6]), Hoag managed to write a translation of the manuscript. But when he tried to have it published, his efforts were thwarted by religious leaders who strongly objected to the book's references to Dagon. Nonetheless, copies of the Scripture have circulated among secretive cults (such as the Esoteric Order of Dagon) and other occult groups. After Hoag's death, his granddaughter, Beverly Hoag Adams, published an expurgated version of the book.
In contemporary times, other versions of the Ponape Scripture have seen print. Harold Hadley Copeland, a leading authority on the Scripture, produced a translation of the book, published in 1907 by Miskatonic University Press. Copeland also cited the book in his work The Prehistoric Pacific in Light of the 'Ponape Scripture' (1911). The original version of the manuscript remains at the Kester Library in Salem, Massachusetts.[7]
The devilThe first description of Tsathoggua occurs in "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", in which the protagonists encounter one of the entity's idols:
He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; and the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth.[2]
Later, in Smith's "The Seven Geases" (1933), Tsathoggua is described again:
[In] that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth . . . abides from eldermost eons the god Tsathoggua. You shall know Tsathoggua by his great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad which he has eternally. He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice.—Clark Ashton Smith, "The Seven Geases"
Robert M. Price notes that "Lovecraft's Tsathoggua and Smith's differ at practically every point." Lovecraft, dropping Smith's bat and sloth comparisons, refers to the entity in "The Whisperer in Darkness" as the "amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton"[3]--the priest's name a tip of the hat to Tsathoggua's creator.
Later, in "The Horror in the Museum", a story ghost-written by Lovecraft, he writes, "Black Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet."
Wheel of fortune
high priestess
The story is written in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya.
The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. The extremely early date in the geological strata of these "fossils" is problematic because of their highly evolved features. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "Elder Things".
When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject, and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Dyer elects, then, to close off the area from which they took their samples.
Dyer and a student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien to any human architecture. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoths", things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding. Uncannily, the images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive.
As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six foot penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity, and which he is too fargone to describe.
Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since aeons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.
Deep Ones
“Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young feller—them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”)
“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”)
“We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”)
Nyarlathotep
“And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare.” (“Nyarlathotep”)
“What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity’s Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.” (“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”)
“There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the ‘Black Man’ of the witch cult, and the ‘Nyarlathotep’ of the Necronomicon.” (“The Dreams in the Witch House”)
“There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices.” (“The Haunter of the Dark”)
Chaugnar Faugn
“Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend—black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt.” (“The Horror in the Museum”)
Chaugnar Faugn is the creation of Frank Belknap Long.
Shoggoths
“Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,Heedless of all the cries I make,And down the nether pits to that foul lakeWhere the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.”(Sonnet XX, “Night Gaunts” in Fungi from Yuggoth, 1929-30)
“We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.” (At the Mountains of Madness, 1931)
“This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” 1931)
“I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . .” (“The Thing on the Doorstep,” 1933)
H.P. Lovecraft Tarot
A compelling and dark tarot deck, with sepia-toned artwork in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft, writer of horror and science fiction.
The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. The extremely early date in the geological strata of these "fossils" is problematic because of their highly evolved features. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "Elder Things".
When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject, and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Dyer elects, then, to close off the area from which they took their samples.
Dyer and a student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien to any human architecture. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoths", things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding. Uncannily, the images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive.
As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six foot penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity, and which he is too fargone to describe.
Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since aeons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.
Deep Ones“Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there’d be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young feller—them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”)
“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”)
“We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”)
Nyarlathotep“And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare.” (“Nyarlathotep”)
“What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity’s Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.” (“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”)
“There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers—the ‘Black Man’ of the witch cult, and the ‘Nyarlathotep’ of the Necronomicon.” (“The Dreams in the Witch House”)
“There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices.” (“The Haunter of the Dark”)
Chaugnar Faugn“Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend—black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt.” (“The Horror in the Museum”)
Chaugnar Faugn is the creation of Frank Belknap Long.
Shoggoths“Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,Heedless of all the cries I make,And down the nether pits to that foul lakeWhere the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.”(Sonnet XX, “Night Gaunts” in Fungi from Yuggoth, 1929-30)
“We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.” (At the Mountains of Madness, 1931)
“This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming.” (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” 1931)
“I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . .” (“The Thing on the Doorstep,” 1933)
H.P. Lovecraft Tarot
A compelling and dark tarot deck, with sepia-toned artwork in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft, writer of horror and science fiction.
This is a deck too dark for me to use. reminds me of the gothic tarot and is very very goth..... not for me. Maybe Wen would like it?
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