Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

by Harms, Daniel

  [Misquamacus was Lovecraft’s creation, as he appears in one of the short fragments from Lovecraft’s notes that Derleth incorporated into “Lurker.”]

  See Billington, Alijah; Billington, Richard. (“The Lurker at the Threshold”, Derleth and Lovecraft (O); Return of the Manitou, Masterton.)

  M’NAGALAH. Being appearing as a mass of entrails, eyes, and tentacles. M’nagalah once dwelt on another world, later dwelling in the sea of Tethys between Laurasia and Gondwanaland. During telepathic contact with other beings, M’nagalah has claimed that its will gave rise to life on earth and created the savage side of human personality. When summoned, M’nagalah takes on the form of a growth on its summoner’s arm which quickly grows by devouring its host and other victims. This creature must reach its full size before the stars are right. M’nagalah is mentioned in the Revelations of Glaaki.

  (“The Tugging”, Campbell; Nightmare’s Disciple, Pulver; Swamp Thing #8, Weir and Wrightson (O).)

  MNAR. Land of the Dreamlands, though according to others, it is actually present-day Saudi Arabia. Wherever it may be, Mnar is a very ancient land which time has left untouched. Upon the winding river Ai in the land of Mnar, the towns of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron sprang up. The great cities Ib and Sarnath were also built within the land of Mnar, though neither survives today. An unknown being or beings took a grey-green stone from Mnar and created the artifacts called the “star-stones of Mnar.”

  See Brick Cylinders of Kadatheron; Elder Sign; Ib; Ilarnek; Ilarnek Papyri; Sarnath; star-stone. (“The Lurker at the Threshold”, Derleth and Lovecraft; “The Doom that Came to Sarnath”, Lovecraft (O); The Burrowers Beneath, Lumley; The Transition of Titus Crow, Lumley.)

  MNEMABIC FRAGMENTS. Work of which almost nothing is known. Its translator is supposedly one “deLancre”, perhaps a reference to the seventeenth-century witchcraft judge Pierre de Lancre.

  (“The Last Work of Pietro de Apono”, Aletti (O); “The Tree-House”, Pugmire and Price.)

  MNOMQUAH. God worshiped in both Theem’hdra and Earth’s Dreamlands who often takes the form of a bipedal saurian. In Theem’hdra, Mnomquah and the moon deity Gleeth were often linked, but the two were entirely different beings. Gleeth was the blind, deaf god who did not answer his worshiper’s prayers, while Mnomquah’s great influence made its cult rich and powerful.

  Mnomquah is imprisoned within the Black Lake of Ubboth at the moon’s core. At one time its power was much greater, but then a rogue spawn of Azathoth was sighted on a collision course with the Dreamlands’ moon. Working with the sorcerer Haon-Dor, Mnomquah wove a spell which kept the spawn at bay but drained most of his energy. Some day, Mnomquah will be freed from its prison, coming down from the moon to Sarkomand to mate with Oorn.

  The Thuun’ha and the creatures of the Nameless City once served Mnomquah. In the Dreamlands, the moon-beasts and their servitors from the Plateau of Leng worship the god.

  See Gleeth; Oorn; Ubboth; Yarnak. (“Mnomquah”, Carter; “Something in the Moonlight”, Carter (O); “Introduction” to The House of Cthulhu, Lumley; Mad Moon of Dreams, Lumley; “The Sorcerer’s Book”, Lumley; The Complete Dreamlands, Williams and Petersen.)

  MONSTRES AND THEIR KYNDE (also MONSTERS AND THEIR KINDE, full title Monstres and Theyr Kynde, Being a Compyled Historie of the Earlie Kings and Druids, Bifore Christendome Come to These Shores, and Also a Bestiarie of Theyr Unhallowed Servants and the Means by Which They Were Brought Forth and Bound Faste). Book compiled from a number of Mythos texts. It was most likely the work of a monk working for a rich patron. (Rumors linking it with a Protestant minister named William Pynchon are most likely apocryphal.) Censors destroyed the only published edition, from the press by Fisher’s Market, in 1577. The only known surviving copy was stolen from the British Museum in 1898, though some say the Marsh family of Innsmouth has another.

  Both the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon influenced the author of this book. Among other subjects, Monstres says much about the Dragon Kings, a line of cannibalistic warlords who ruled over Britain in prehistoric time, and an incantation which Eibon was said to have used to obtain knowledge.

  (“Sacraments of Evil”, Behrendt; “Horror at Vecra”, Hasse (O); Keeper’s Compendium, Herber; Mythos: Dreamlands Expansion, Krank and Vogt; Nightmare’s Disciple, Pulver.)

  MONTAGNY, PIERRE-LOUIS. French courtier who was old in the time of King Louis XIII and who is known for his “secular meditations.”

  (“The Terror from the Depths”, Leiber; “The Shadow Out of Time”, Lovecraft (O); “The Adventure of Exham Priory”, MacIntyre.)

  MOON-BEASTS. Creatures native to the Dreamlands’ moon. They are slippery white toad-like beings whose only sensory organs are pinkish tentacles protruding from their snouts. (How the moon-beasts perceive their surroundings is unknown, though they seem to communicate by playing flutes.) They prefer to dwell on the dark side of the moon, but may also be found aboard the black galleons of the men from Leng as rowers and officers.

  Unlike the same region in the waking world, the dark side of the Dreamlands moon has vast forests and oily seas, providing an ideal habitat for the moon-beasts. Here these creatures have reared great cities, built with the labor of many different slave races, and plied the oceans of their home in their black galleons, which may also fly them through space to other worlds. In addition to this body, the moon-beasts are known to have colonies on earth, especially on the nameless rock in the Cerenerian Sea.

  The moon-beasts realize that the civilized folk of the Dreamlands would not abide their presence if they came to trade openly. Therefore, these creatures have enslaved many people from the Plateau of Leng. Unlike the moon-beasts, the Lengites can usually pass for humans if they wear the proper attire. These almost-human agents usually disembark at ports to sell the rubies mined by their masters and obtain slaves with their profits, though the moon-beasts themselves remain below-decks during this time.

  These creatures are known to be allied with the cats from Saturn, and at times serve Nyarlathotep and Mnomquah as well.

  See High Priest not to be Described; Leng; Mnomquah; Sarkomand. (“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, Lovecraft (O); Mad Moon of Dreams, Lumley; The Complete Dreamlands, Williams and Petersen.)

  MOON-LENS. Device built by worshippers of Shub-Niggurath and stationed in Goatswood. The mysterious Glass from Leng was used in its construction. The lens is usually set on a high tower with several mirrors positioned about it to concentrate a beam of moonlight on a certain spot.

  The moon-lens is used so that Shub-Niggurath may be summoned at full moon, instead of the dark of the moon, the normal time for her summoning.

  See glass from Leng; Goatswood; Shub-Niggurath. (“The Moon-Lens”, Campbell (O); “Dark Harvest”, Ross.)

  MORDIGGIAN. Dark god who is revered through ritual cannibalism and other unsavory activities. This being usually takes the form of a cloud of darkness which changes shape at will.

  Mordiggian was at one time the god of the ghouls, though only one faction of older ghouls openly support him today. His cult was once strong in the catacombs beneath Paris before relocating to South America, from which it has spread. The god travels around the world in search of corpses to eat and has spent the past century in Egypt. Mordiggian is said to provide his worshipers with the ability to speak with the dead, immortality, and reversal of aging. His cult among humans will be revived in Zothique, centered in the city of Zul-Bha-Sair.

  In 1804, a heresy began among the worshipers of Mordiggian. A ghoul from Calcutta named Daggaggibree claimed that the next stage of ghoul evolution will occur when his fellows devour their god. Most ghouls view this position with disgust and animosity.

  (“Reflections of Dust and Death”, Ambuehl; Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, Cook and Tynes; Realm of Shadows, Crowe; Delta Green, Detwiller, Glancy, and Tynes; “Identity Crisis”, Kruger; Cthulhu Live: Lost Souls, Salmon et. al.; “The Charnel God”, Smith (O).)

  MORGAN, (DOCTOR) FRANCIS. Professor of
Medicine and Comparative Anatomy (or Archaeology) at Miskatonic University. Along with Professors Rice and Armitage, Morgan was one of the three individuals who confronted the Dunwich Horror, and he is believed to have had a greater role in that matter than many scholars have hitherto believed. Morgan was driven insane and vanished during the ill-fated Miskatonic expedition to British Honduras in 1937 but eventually reappeared to be recruited into the OSS during World War II. He was still active in university affairs as late as 1993. Many of the older faculty members at Miskatonic considered him to be untrustworthy and watched him carefully.

  See Armitage, Henry; Dunwich; Emeritus Alcove. (Arkham Unveiled, Herber et. al.; A Resection of Time, Johnson; “To Arkham and the Stars”, Leiber; “The Dunwich Horror”, Lovecraft (O); Other Nations, Marsh and Marsh; “Stacked Actors”, Worthy.)

  MORTON, JAMES. Expert in both bacteriology and chemistry at the Partridgeville Chemical Laboratories. He analyzed certain material found on the corpse of Halpin Chalmers and vanished shortly after completing his analysis.

  (“The Wild Hunt”, Ballon; “The Hounds of Tindalos”, Long (O).)

  MOTHER HYDRA. See Hydra.

  MOUNTAINS. See under name of mountain.

  MTHURA. Dark world whose inhabitants are of a crystalline nature. Wizards of Yaddith visited this place while searching for the formulae that would save their home world. Mthura is the home of the Great Old One Q’yth-az.

  See Q’yth-az. (“An Early Frost”, Aniolowski; “Shaggai”, Carter; Visions from Yaddith, Carter; “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, Lovecraft and Price (O).)

  MU. Sunken continent one thousand miles south of Easter Island. Mu rose from the Pacific Ocean in the time of the Elder Things. It was later colonized by the Cthulhu-spawn, who retained it after the war with the Elder Things until they sank beneath the waves with R’lyeh.

  Mu was supposedly the land where humans first appeared, spreading from there to the rest of the world. In Hyperborean times, Mu paid tribute to the polar kingdom, but at the same time even the wizard Eibon acknowledged the potency of Mu’s incantations. Mu’s civilization reached its heyday around 200,000 years ago, when its nine kingdoms were in full flower.

  The gods were much closer to the people of Mu than to those of later times. Alongside humanity lived another more powerful species, described in various sources as the lloigor, another resembling the Great Race in material form, or the serpent people. Most of the population of Mu viewed these as deities and worshiped through their intermediary, the god-priest K’tholo of Souchis. Aside from these, the Muvians called on a thousand different gods, including Cthulhu, Iod, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, Byatis, and Vorvadoss (who saved the continent from an invasion of extradimensional beings). The three most popular gods, however, were the three “brothers” Zoth-Ommog, Ghatanothoa, and Ythogtha. The Muvian’s devotion to these beings may have led to their downfall.

  Over time, the cult of Ghatanothoa became more powerful, until the Year of the Red Moon (173,118 B. C.) T’yog, priest of Shub-Niggurath, set out to challenge their authority by entering the god’s prison in Mount Yaddith-Gho in the kingdom of K’naa. T’yog failed in his mission, and the Ghatanothoa cult became even more powerful until it threatened to close down the temples of all of Mu’s other gods.

  The causes of Mu’s destruction remain a mystery. Explanations include the following:

  1) Gas pockets beneath the continent exploded, causing it to sink beneath the ocean. (Churchward)

  2) The species which lived alongside the humans attempted to reach the next stage in their spiritual evolution too quickly. This attempt released psychokinetic forces so powerful that they sank Mu, and these beings were forced to knock themselves unconscious to prevent themselves and the world from being destroyed. (Wilson)

  3) According to the Zanthu Tablets, in the Year of the Whispering Shadow (161,844 B. C.) Zanthu, high priest of Ythogtha, tried to summon up his god to counter the power of Ghatanothoa. The Elder Gods took notice of this offense and sank Mu before Ythogtha could be unleashed. (Carter)

  4) The humans of Mu and the serpent people spliced together their genes to create a new hybrid species embodying the best of both species. These creatures not only sought to become gods through the worship of Ghatanothoa, contacted Yig and ridiculed him, leading the Great Old One to destroy the continent. (Dziesinski)

  The survivors of Mu fled to the regions around the Pacific, where most of them remain to this day. The high priest K’tholo traveled from Mu to South America, and thence to Yucatan, where he was killed in a volcanic explosion. Zanthu made his way to the Plateau of Tsang, where he was buried. Evidence of Mu may be found in the ruins on Ponape and Easter Island, and also in the books Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the Ponape Scripture, the Zanthu Tablets, and the works of Harold Hadley Copeland.

  [The source of Mu lies in the priest Diego de Landa’s mistaken attempts to reconstruct a phonetic Mayan alphabet. Much later, the Abbé Brasseur tried to read the Troano Codex using this alphabet and believed that it told how a land called “Mu” sank beneath the ocean (the book is actually an astronomical treatise). Some earlier Muvian scholars such as Augustus Le Plongeon thought Mu and Atlantis were the same. The most famous proponent of Mu, “Colonel” James Churchward, placed it in the Pacific, where most subsequent authors of both occultism and fiction have left it. See Lemuria.]

  See Black Seal of Iraan; Copeland, Harold Hadley; Cthulhu; D’horna-ahn Energies; Ghatanothoa; Ghorl Nigral; K’naa; Lloigor; Naacal; Nug and Yeb; Remnants of Lost Empires; Rituals of Yhe; Shamballah; Thasaidon; Tiania; Tsang, Plateau of; Tsathoggua; T’yog; Ubb; Vorvadoss; Yaddith-Gho; Ygoth Records; Yhe; Ythogtha; Zanthu; Zuchequon. (Manuscrit Troano, Brasseur de Bourbourg (O); “The Book of the Gates”, Carter; “The Dweller in the Tomb”, Carter; “The Fishers from Outside”, Carter; “The Offering”, Carter; “Out of the Ages”, Carter; “The Thing in the Pit”, Carter; “The Papyrus of the Dark Wisdom”, Carter and Smith; “The Utmost Abomination”, Carter and Smith; The Lost Continent of Mu, Churchward; Secrets of Japan, Dziesinski; “The Invaders”, Kuttner; “Out of the Aeons”, Lovecraft and Heald; Elysia, Lumley; The Philosopher’s Stone, Wilson; “The Return of the Lloigor”, Wilson.)

  MÜLDER, DOCTOR PROFESSOR GOTTFRIED (or HERMANN) (c. 1795-1858). Scientist from Heidelberg, friend of Friedrich von Junzt, and publisher of Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The two men met in 1815, most likely at the University of Berlin, and became close friends, a bond which grew even stronger after Mülder saved von Junzt’s life after a botched occult experiment. Mülder accompanied von Junzt in his Asian travels in 1818-9, but the two grew apart after their return to civilization.

  Von Junzt did not re-enter Mülder’s life until the mid-1830s. At that time, Mülder was operating a publishing house in Dusseldorf, and von Junzt made arrangements with him to have Unaussprechlichen Kulten published. Mülder received the book in 1837; why he waited two years to publish it remains unclear, but it did appear in 1839 with an introduction by Mülder himself. Mülder had commissioned von Junzt to write a second book, but these plans were cut short by his friend’s death.

  Mülder’s publishing house never recovered from the scandal that attended von Junzt’s death and soon went bankrupt. Mülder went on to Leipzig, where he used hypnotism to recall von Junzt’s conversations with him and published this information as The Secret Mysteries of Asia in 1847. Unfortunately for him, this printing led to trouble with the authorities. Mülder escaped to Metzengerstein, where he was incarcerated in a madhouse until his death.

  [Mülder was originally the creation of Willis Conover who wrote about him in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft. According to Conover, Dr. Prof. Hermann Mülder was an individual who was still alive in 1937. Lin Carter did not see Conover’s side of the correspondence and created an alternate history—and first name—for Mülder. It is possible that one of the doctor’s descendants might have joined the FBI.]

  See Ghorl Nigral; Secret Mysteries of Asia; Unaussprechlichen Kulten; Von Jun
zt, Friedrich. (“Zoth-Ommog”, Carter; Lovecraft at Last, Conover (O); “The History of Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten”, Harris; “The Von Junzt Timeline”, Harris.)

  MUM-RATH PAPYRI. Documents translated and commented upon by Ibn Shoddathua. They are said to deal with the Great Old Ones, and provide advice for those who would deal with them.

  (“The Book of Preparations”, Carter; “The Fairground Horror”, Lumley (O).)

  MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE GREAT BOOKE. Book by Joachim Kindler written in English and published in Buda in 1641. The book purports to gain its material from a Gothic version of the Necronomicon.

  See: Necronomicon (appendices). (“The Lurker in the Crypt”, Miller (O).)

  MYLAKHRION. Greatest magician to have ever lived in Theem’hdra. Originally from the land of Tharamoon, Mylakhrion studied under such masters as the ice-mages of Khrissa. Despite his great mastery of sorcery, he followed many other wizards of his time in seeking immortality. Through his magic, Mylakhrion could prolong his life for hundreds or even thousands of years, but eternal life continued to elude him.

  After many years of futile research, Cthulhu contacted him and offered Mylakhrion his long-sought goal in exchange for freeing the Great Old Ones from their prisons. When Mylakhrion refused to follow through on his part of the bargain, Cthulhu destroyed him.

  See Exior K’mool; Teh Atht; Theem’hdra. (“Cryptically Yours …”, Lumley (O); Elysia, Lumley; “Kiss of the Lamia”, Lumley; “Mylakhrion the Immortal”, Lumley; “The Sorcerer’s Book”, Lumley; “Told in the Desert”, Lumley.)

  MYSTERIES OF THE WORM. See De Vermis Mysteriis.

  MYTH PATTERNS OF THE SHONOKINS. Work by New York occultist John Thunstone dealing with a supposed race of creatures, human-like in appearance, who populated North America before the arrival of the Native Americans. They were reputed to be great wizards, but the newcomers annihilated them for their wicked ways. Some say the Shonokin still exist in small colonies, and Thunstone has much to say about what lies beneath certain mounds on the Plains.