by Donald Tyson
An aquatic race of beings described as "bearded and finny" who dwell in labyrinths they build in the dark sea below the hollow glass cliffs that support the town of IlekVad, in the dreamlands.
(The Silver Key; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
Hairy gigantic creatures who erected stone circles and made sacrifice to the Other Gods and Nyarlathotep. For this outrage, the gods of Earth, who rule in the dreamlands at the sufferance of the Other Gods, banished them to a cavern beneath the ground. They have a great city composed of "cyclopean round towers," and their doorways are thirty feet high. In the center of the city is a great tower bearing the sign of Koth with a stair that leads upwards to the upper dreamland and the enchanted wood.
A single gug corpse will feed a ghoul community for almost a year. The ghouls sometimes toss stripped gug bones over the edge of the high plain on which the ghouls have their burrows, and the bones fall into the Vale of Pnath. Gugs have black fur over their bodies, paws that are two and a half feet across with long talons, a head the size of a barrel from which jut out to the sides bony ridges containing pink eyes, and a mouth filled with yellow fangs that opens vertically rather than horizontally. Each of their hairy arms has two forearms with a paw upon each end. They are voiceless, but communicate with each other by means of facial expressions.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
Partly human, the gyaa-yothn are genetically engineered creatures used by the people of blue-litten K'n-yan in place of horses for transportation. They are carnivorous and feed on the flesh of genetically bred human slaves used by the people of K'n-yan as cattle. Lovecraft described them as floundering white things with black fur growing along their backs, and a single rudimentary horn in the center of their foreheads. Their faces are vaguely humanoid, but with flat noses and bulging lips. Their intelligence is less than that of a man, but more than that of a beast.
(The Mound)
In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, this enigmatic and inhuman resident of the dreamlands dwells on the plateau of Leng alone in a squat and windowless stone monastery surrounded by a circle of stone monoliths, where it prays to the Other Gods and to Nyarlathotep. The walls of the monastery are frescoed with "frightful scenes older than history." Randolph Carter is led captive into the monastery by the servant of the high-priest, a horned man of Leng, for an audience with the high-priest.
Deep within the monastery is a domed chamber, its walls decorated with bas-relief carvings, in the midst of which sits a "lumpish figure" on a throne of gold atop a stone dais, robed in yellow silk figured with red silk threads, wearing over its face a mask also of yellow silk. The same silk covers its hands. It uses a flute of carved ivory to make sounds by which it communicates with its servant, raising the bottom edge of the silk mask to blow into the flute. The domed chamber is unilluminated by any window or lamp, other than the lamp carried by the servant, and "evil-smelling." In front of the five steps that lead up to the dais of the high-priest's throne is a well that is rumored to extend down to the underworld of the dreamlands, even to the fabled Vaults of Zin. A ring of six blood-stained altars surrounds the mouth of the well.
Randolph Carter glimpses one of the "greyish-white paws" of the priest when its silk covering slips, and he recognizes the identity of the creature. In a sudden outburst of acute terror, he pushes his captor into the open well and flees from the vaulted cham ber. By thus escaping the high-priest, he joins a select company. In the story Celephais, Kuranes, who is a dreamer of London, is said to have barely escaped from this same inhuman priest.
Its identity is never revealed in either story. Lovecraft always referred to the highpriest as "it" rather than "he." It seems to be related to the moon-beasts that conquered the inhabitants of Leng, and who use ivory flutes to communicate. Some have speculated that it is Nyarlathotep or one of his avatars, but Lovecraft explicitly stated that the high-priest prays to the Other Gods "and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep," and it seems unlikely that Nyarlathotep would pray to himself. By its use of the flute for communication, we may assume that the high-priest is incapable of normal speech, presumably because its inhuman body does not possess the required vocal apparatus.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; Celephais)
In his long conversation with Albert Wilmarth in The Whisperer in Darkness, what remains of Henry Wentworth Akeley conveys the essence of the Hounds of Tindalos, though he does not reveal their origin. These demonic creatures come across the dimension of time through angles to punish those who transgress the distant past in which they dwell. There is something in the basic nature of humanity that awakens in them a cosmic hunger, and they will pursue tirelessly and ceaselessly those who attract their notice. They can manifest into our reality through any corner more acute than 120 degrees, but not through flat surfaces or curves. The deathless Hounds inhabit the angles of time, whereas normal living things inhabit the curves of time.
The Hounds originated in the 1931 short story of Frank Belknap Long, The Hounds of Tindalos, where their shape is never clearly described, but since they are mentioned in passing by Lovecraft, they have earned their place in his Necronomicon mythos.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
A race of warriors described by Lovecraft as "squat, hellish yellow fiends" who came out of the west to attack the ancient northern kingdom of Lomar. The tall and grayeyed men of Lomar detested the invaders as being without honor. There is no indication that the Inutos succeeded in conquering Lomar, which was weakened by an advancing glacier and eventually fell to the predations of the cannibal Gnophkehs. It is suggested by Lovecraft that the Inutos are the ancestors of the modern Inuit.
(Polaris)
The Kallikanzarai, more properly Kallikantzaroi (singular form: Kallikantzaros), are monsters half-human and half-animal, that dwell beneath the ground, but emerge to wander the Greek countryside on the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany, which are known as the Twelve Nights of Christmas, or Twelve-tide. The period begins the night of December 25 which runs past midnight into the early morning hours of December 26, and ends on the night of January 5, which runs past midnight into the early morning hours of January 6.
Any man or domestic beast they find they tear apart, and any house in their path they assault and destroy unless its doors and windows are protected by the sign of the cross, and a propitiatory offering of food or other items is left outside the front door. Fires were kept burning in the fireplace to prevent them coming down the chimney. Sometimes a colander was put outside the door on the step, because these foolish creatures cannot resist counting the drain holes. Since three is a sacred number, they can only count up to two, and then must begin again. In this way they are kept occupied all night, and the security of the house is preserved.
Throughout the year they remain hidden beneath the ground, sawing at the roots of the world tree with the intention of causing it to collapse, so that it will destroy the world, but at Christmas they forget this occupation and come forth to terrorize human beings. When they return at the Epiphany, they discover that the world tree has healed its wounds, and they must begin their forever-futile task all over again.
They are generally said to have hairy bodies, horse legs, and boar-like tusks, but descriptions of them vary from region to region. Children born during the week of the Saturnalia (Dec. 17-23) are at risk of turning into Kallikantzaroi when they reach adulthood. To prevent this horrible fate, their mothers bind the babies in straw or garlic stalks, and singe their toenails with fire.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
In the dreamlands described in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, when the black galleys of the moon-beasts sail beyond the Basalt Pillars of the West, and pass over the ultimate cataract at the edge of the world to rise into the void between worlds enroute to the far side of the Moon, they are surrounded by shapeless black things that "lurk and caper and flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may pass." Sometimes they fumble those on
the passing ships with "slimy paws" but they do no injury. They are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, as sightless and as mindless as the Other Gods themselves, who dance around the black throne of Azathoth at the center of chaos, but they are said to possess "singular hungers and thirsts."
The concept of larvae comes from the tradition of Western occultism. A larva is a spirit of the astral realm that has been created unintentionally by strong thoughts and emotions. Larvae can be generated by individuals, or by groups of people all thinking or feeling the same things. Their emotionally energized thoughts, charged by fear or desire or rage, impress themselves on the plastic matrix of the astral realm and shape it into whatever may be the subject of those thoughts. The created things are mindless, and drift about the lower astral plane like jellyfish in the sea, but they are not completely lacking in basic urges and desires. They will seek to interact with and feed upon the energies of those who venture into the astral realm, and even those in the waking everyday world, who remain oblivious to their presence because to ordinary waking sight they are invisible.
A person who broods with great intensity on any of the lower impulses or desires will create these larvae, and they will remain clustered around him in his daily life, in the place where he does his brooding, and will draw energy from his constantly repeated and reinforced emotion-laden thoughts. Others who enter such an environment, and possess even a small degree of psychic ability, will be oppressed and sickened by the thickly clustered presence of these larvae, even though they cannot see them.
Most Western occult traditions accept the reality of larvae with various minor distinctions. This includes the traditions of the Golden Dawn, Thelema, the OTO, witchcraft ,and Theosophy.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
The race native to Venus, who worship small crystal energy eggs. They have flat heads with snouts like those of a tapir, green and slimy frog-like skin, and walk on thick stumps with suction-disks on the ends. They stand seven or eight feet tall and have four tentacles on their chests that they wave around for communication with others of their species, which is neither related to men nor to lizards, in spite of the chance resemblances. Lovecraft's protagonist in his story Within the Walls of Eryx, co-written with Kenneth Starling, speculates that this race was not the oldest intelligent species on Venus, but that an unknown much more ancient and more advanced species once inhabited our sister planet.
The Venus of Lovecraft's story, which the man-lizards dominate, has a climate that is almost suitable for human life, so it is obvious that the story cannot describe a time period close to our own. This was a common error for science-fiction writers who wrote about Venus in the 1920s and 1930s, and even as late as the 1950s-they portrayed Venus as a tropical jungle world, warm and wet. The conception of Venus as a mist-shrouded jungle world in popular literature was complimented by the persistent conception of Mars as a dry, cold desert world.
Most authorities on the mythos of Lovecraft would probably not classify this story as a part of the mythos at all, but I believe it deserves inclusion because it suggests that Venus was inhabited by an older, more advanced lost race that left traces of its existence in the form of ruins and artifacts. This is very much a mythos theme. This story may be considered a part of the mythos if we assume that it is set in a distant future time period when the climate of Venus is very different from its present climate.
(Within the Walls of Eryx)
The three gorgons (Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale) were sisters. Ancient Greek myths made them daughters of a sea monster, although the identity of their father varies. Sometimes they were said to be the daughters of Typhon with Echidna. In their earliest form, the gorgons were monstrous, with wings, talons, fangs, and serpents for hair. They had the power of turning to stone anyone who looked upon their faces. This may have originally been intended in a metaphorical sense, since in the earliest legends the gorgon is solitary, and inspires intense, paralyzing terror. For this reason her severed head was affixed to the aegis of Zeus, to terrify his foes. In Ovid's Metamorphosis, Medusa was romanticized into a beautiful priestess of Athena who had sex with Poseidon in the temple of the goddess, thereby incurring her fury. Athena changed Medusa's hair to snakes and made her so hideous to look upon, the sight turned men to stone.
Lovecraft mentioned Medusa in connection with tentacles on the head of a sixlimbed monster from Yuggoth in the story The Horror in the Museum, co-written with Hazel Heald-but the description of the monster is pure Lovecraft: "On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be longer and thicker, marked with spiral stripes-suggesting the traditional serpent-locks of Medusa." Earlier in the same story he referred to images of gorgons. In Medusa's Coil, co-written with Zealia Bishop, a living incarnation of the being who served as the source for the myth of Medusa marries Denis de Russy, the son of a southern plantation owner, and leads him to madness and death. Her long coil of hair has an unnatural life of its own, and when cut from her corpse continues to move about like a giant serpent. Her father-in-law commented that she was the thing from which the first dim legends of Medusa and the Gorgons had sprung."
(The Horror in the Museum; Medusa's Coil)
Fungous beings from an ancient port city on the far side of the Moon who sail across space in black galleys, capturing slaves and conveying sacrifices. The moon-beasts, who are sometimes called toad-things or moon-things, worship and serve Nyarlathotep. They conquered the horned, semi-human race of Leng and enslaved them. In their dealings with the inhabitants of the dreamlands at the port of Dylath-Leen, they employ the humanoid men of Leng as intermediaries to trade rubies for gold and slaves, while they conceal their hideous forms below the decks of their galleys.
The moon-beasts maintain an outpost on an island of Earth's dreamlands in the Cerenerian Sea that is known only as the Nameless Rock. To this place they take unfortunate slaves. The screams of the slaves are heard by the mariners of ships that sail incautiously close to the island. The moon-beasts feed upon the flesh of these human and semi-human slaves, but what else they do to them on the Nameless Rock is unknown. They are in league with the giant cats of Saturn, who war against the cats of Earth on the far side of the Moon.
Lovecraft described them as "polypous and amorphous blasphemies that hopped and floundered and wriggled," and also wrote that they were "great greyish-white slippery things which could expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape-though it often changed-was that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with a curious vibrating mass of short pink tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague snout." It should be noted that white is one of the colors of the Moon, and that the toad is a lunar creature. Things soft, pale, and fungous occultly express the nature of the Moon. The dark, high-walled city of the blind moon-beasts has no windows, since none are needed. Although they have no voices, they play a weird sort of music on carven ivory flutes.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
A kind of ghoul named in a Greek incantation to the goddess of witches, Hecate, that was recorded by the third-century Greek writer Hippolytus in his Refutation of All Heresies (bk. 4, ch. 35). Lovecraft used the incantation in his story The Horror at Red Hook, but omitted the name "Hecate" because he wished the incantation to apply to the demoness queen of Hell, Lilith.
(The Horror at Red Hook).
In the story The Last Test, Doctor Alfred Clarendon threatens his servant Surama with the Nemesis of Flame, should the servant, who is a necromantically resurrected priest of Atlantis, ever follow through on his threat to end Clarendon's life. The Nemesis of Fire is the name of a short story by Algernon Blackwood, published in 1908 in the anthology collectionJohn Silence, Physician Extraordinary. It concerns a salamander, or fire elemental, a being composed of pure flame. Lovecraft mentioned this story in his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, remarking "a hideous elemental is evoked by new-spilt blood." Lovecraft finished his essay in 1927, the same year The Last Test was written, so it seems clear that Blackwo
od's elemental spirit was what he had in mind.
(The Last Test)
Black creatures with rubbery bodies, bat-like wings, curved horns, barbed tails, and no faces. They dwell high in caves in the gray mountain range that separates the plateau of Leng from the land of Inquanok, and worship hoary Nodens as their god. They give no allegiance to Nyarlathotep. The Great Ones fear them. Even the monstrous shantak-birds who make their nests midway up the slopes of these mountains shun the night-gaunts. They fly unceasingly between the Vale of Pnath and the passes to the outer world.
The night-gaunts have a special place in the Lovecraft mythos. They are the product of Lovecraft's dreams at a very early age. In 1915 he wrote in a letter to M. W Moe, "When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculier type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me "Night-Gaunts"-I don't know where I got hold of the name) used to snatch me up by the stomach & carry me off through infinite leagues of black air over the towers of dead & horrible cities. They would finally get me into a grey void where I could see the needle-like pinnacles of enormous mountains miles below. Then they would let me drop-& as I gained momentum in my Icarus-like plunge, I would start awake in such a panic that I hated to think of sleeping again."
He described these beings in this letter as "black, lean rubbery things" with bat-like wings, horns on their heads, a barbed tail, and no faces at all. They never spoke, but before snatching him into the air by the stomach they tickled him unmercifully. They came in his dreams in flocks of twenty-five or fifty members, and as they carried him through the night sky would toss him back and forth for sport. They were voiceless. In his dreams Lovecraft knew that they lived in burrows honeycombing the peak of a some unnamed high mountain.