by Donald Tyson
(The Last Test)
A race of fungous and amorphous blasphemies called moon-beasts (sometimes called "moon-things") inhabit the far side of the Moon, but sail the seas of Earth's dreamlands in sinister black galleys, trading rubies for gold and slaves. The galleys are primarily slave ships. Because they are so hideous to look upon, the moon-beasts conceal themselves below decks when they come into a port in the dreamlands such as Dylath-Leen. Their agents in dealings with human beings, the enslaved horned-men of Leng, take care of all trading details. It is the moon-beasts who work the oars of the galleys, not the slaves. The galleys sometimes take the slaves to an island in the Cerenerian Sea called the Nameless Rock, where they are unloaded and tortured. These evil vessels have the extraordinary ability to sail off the edge of the world past the great cataract in the west, and through the gulf that separates the Earth from the Moon. The slaves that are transported to the Moon serve as beasts of burden or as food for the moon-beasts.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
A black cock and a black goat are mentioned in The Dreams in the Witch House in connection with a witch sabbat conducted by Keziah Mason in a black valley-probably the ravine beyond Meadow Hill near Arkham. They were destined for blood sacrifice, to be coupled with the sacrifice of a human infant.
Daniel Morris, who was descended from the wizard Nicholas Van Kauran on his mother's side, and who was widely known as Mad Dan, used to sacrifice a black goat on Halloween at the top of Thunder Hill, as is written in the story The Man of Stone.
In the Chronicle of Yath, a psychic text written by the German mystic and alchemist Rudolf Yergler, mention is made of the "year of the Black Goat" when a shadow that should not exist came down to Earth to feed on the souls of the men of Nath. The year of the Black Goat rolls around again in 1938, when the shadow is fought and defeated by the occultist Constantine Theunis, as described in Lovecraft's story The Tree on the Hill.
The Whisperer in Darkness relates that the Mi-Go who meet in Lee's Swamp, at the base of the western slope of Dark Mountain, in Virginia, with their cult of human worshippers, chant the titles of the Black Goat of the Woods, and the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. These are titles of Shub-Niggurath.
The black goat was a common fixture of descriptions of European witches' sabbats from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Sometimes witches were said to copulate with the goat, but it was assumed to be the Devil in disguise by the Inquisitors of the Roman Church, not an ordinary animal.
(The Dreams in the Witch House; The Man of Stone; The Tree on the Hill; The Whisperer in Darkness)
The black mass is a very specific occult ritual that is a parody of the high mass of the Catholic Church. It deliberately seeks to degrade and defile the ritual of the mass by perverting its elements-the mass is celebrated on the naked body of a whore instead of on an altar, the wine is urine or blood, the host feces or turnip, the priest who celebrates the mass is a defrocked priest, the cross in hung upside down, the words are recited backward, and so on. The purpose of this defilement of the high mass of the Church is to exalt the Devil and thereby win his aid in a specific action.
Genuine performances of the black mass were quite rare, and most frequently were done more as a decadent entertainment than with any serious expectation of infernal assistance. The Inquisition sometimes accused witches of performing the black mass, but in most cases the grounds of such accusations are unsound. Pagan celebrations performed by witches at their sabbats were not black masses. Witches were usually of low birth, whereas black masses, on those rare occasions when they actually took place, were enacted by educated persons of higher birth.
In The Diary of Alonzo Typer, members of the notorious van der Heyl family were said to have dabbled in the black mass "and cults of even darker significance"-presum- ably cults devoted to the worship of the Old Ones.
The clandestine assemblies of rural folk descended from "dark religions antedating the Aryan world," religions that are "hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults," are said in The Horror at Red Hook to appear in popular legends as black masses and witches' sabbats. Lovecraft here intimated that the actual practices at these gatherings were stranger and more horrible than anything described in the legends.
Lovecraft again mentioned "Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths" together in Medusa's Coil when he described the portrait of Marceline de Russy that was painted by Frank Marsh, which contained in the background a scene of some nightmarish rite of black magic from the ancient world, and which depicted the horror of Marceline's true form. The painting itself was burned in the fire that destroyed the house containing it, but the ghost of the painting survives.
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer; The Horror at Red Hook; Medusa's Coil)
Azathoth, the mindless god, "rules all time and space from a black throne at the centre of Chaos."
(The Dreams in the Witch House)
West of Arkham, Massachusetts, in the bottom of a spacious valley on the old road not far removed from the town of Bolton was a circular patch of withered ground of some five acres in extent, which was said to be "like a great spot eaten by acid." The ground was covered with a fine gray ash that never seemed to blow away on the wind. It has the look of a patch of ground burned over, but no forest fire had ever burned there. The locals avoided it. Settlers could not be induced to establish farms anywhere near it. Nothing would grow there. Curiously, the trees and undergrowth some distance away from this blighted spot flourished with unnatural luxuriance and denseness. The blasted heath lay on the north side of the old road, but a portion of it was apparent on the other side of the road as well, suggesting that it was expanding. In the midst of it were the ruins of the old Gardner farm, and in the midst of those ruins an old well.
A local man, Ammi Pierce, related the story that in the 1880s a meteorite fell to earth on the farm of Nahum Gardner. It attracted the lightning, which utterly destroyed it, but not before it leaked some alien gas or essence into the Gardner farm's well. The water of the well became poisoned in a particularly insidious way-animals that drank it, or plants watered with it, grew more rapidly than was natural, but there was a sickness in their growth that made them unfit to eat. When human beings drank the water, or ate of things watered with it, they went slowly insane and their bodies deteriorated. It may be that the blasted heath continues to expand to this day, but if so, it does so underwater, for the valley was flooded and became part of the reservoir that serves the good people of Arkham.
(The Colour Out of Space)
The Mi-Go dwelling in secret at Round Hill in Virginia had the ability to cut out the brain of a man and insert it into a fluid-filled metal cylinder, so that the brain remained conscious, and was able to see, hear, and speak by means of electrodes connected with machines that simulated these human senses. Brains preserved in this way were nearly deathless. The cylinders were of no metal recognized on Earth, about a foot high, and slightly less in diameter. On the curved front of the cylinders were three sockets for hooking up the sensory machines. The Mi-Go used this method to convey the brains of other species through space from star system to star system. It was necessary because the bodies of these beings were too frail to survive the journeys.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
This horrific little sprite is the familiar of the witch Keziah Mason, who while under sentence of execution for witchcraft in 1692 escaped from Salem Jail by slipping through an inter-dimensional portal. She created this gateway by drawing in blood on her cell wall certain lines and curves that point out "directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond." She seemed to vanish from the face of the earth, but she returned periodically to work her mischiefs, and Brown Jenkin was her helper. At the time of her disappearance, her jailor went mad and began to babble about a "small white-fanged furry thing" that skuttered out of her empty cell when he opened the door to check on her.
(The Dreams in the Witch House)
The shore of Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained, which lies in the dreamlands, appears from a distance at sea to be a pleasant place of "flowery meadows and leafy woods," but a closer approach reveals the stench of decaying corpses hanging over the land. Randolph Carter referred to its "charnel gardens." It must be assumed that something in the scent or touch of the flowers, or in the water, or in the air of that accursed place, is deadly.
(The White Ship; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
On the plateau of Leng there exists a cult of corpse-eating necromancers. They wear around their necks small green jade amulets carved in the shape of a crouching hound with a malevolent expression on its semi-canine face. The mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, wrote about this cult in veiled terms in his Necronomicon. The amulets are bound to the very souls of the necromancers who wear them.
(The Hound)
This material is mentioned only once, in the story The Horror in the Museum, as part of a rambling, abusive curse. "Fool! Spawn of Noth-Yidik and effluvium of K'thun! Son of the dogs that howl in the maelstrom of Azathoth!" From context is would seem to be some loathsome bodily secretion or excretion of a reviled being named K'thun.
(The Horror in the Museum)
When the narrator of The Outsider realizes that he is a walking corpse, he learns to enjoy his condition, and revels in "the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid," which are feasts on the flesh of the dead. Nitokris (or Nitocris) is the ghoulqueen who rules the catacombs beneath the pyramids with her undead husband, the pharaoh Khephren.
(The Outsider; Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)
Beneath the deserted city of the Elder Things in Antarctica live a race of giant, blind albino penguins that stand six feet tall. They inhabit the subterranean sea beneath the city and provide food for the shoggoths that sometimes pass through the tunnels that connect the cavern with the abandoned buildings.
(At the Mountains of Madness)
Genetically modified beasts used as beasts of burden by the subterranean race of bluelitten K'n-yan. The are described as "great floundering white things" that have black fur growing on their backs and a small horn extending from their foreheads. Evidence of some human strain in their composition is revealed by their faces, which have a humanoid appearance. They are carnivorous, and feed on the slave-class of K'n-yan, a race of degenerate human beings bred to be almost mindless. Wild gyaa-yothn had first been discovered in Yoth, the vast red-litten cavern that lies below the cavern of K'n-yan. Originally they had possessed reptilian characteristics, but they were crossbred with human slaves to be more mammalian in appearance, and were domesticated by the men of K'n-yan.
(The Mound)
The Herd is described by Alhazred in the Necronomicon as standing guard over the secret portal that exists within every tomb, and thriving on the things that grow out from the corpse.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
Under the eaves in the attic of the deserted house beside the old burying-ground in Arkham, the writer Randolph Carter discovered a cache of monstrously deformed bones. The skull was humanoid in appearance but had four-inch horns. Carter gathered up the bones and placed them into an open space in the tomb in the old buryingground behind the house, which was the tomb of the former owner of the house, who had died in 1710. Ancient records revealed that the bones had belonged to an illegitimate child of the man's daughter, who was identified as the mother of the monstrous baby by a defect in one of its eyes, which was also in one of the mother's eyes.
The girl was hanged by the horrified and superstitious people of Arkham, and her unnatural child was locked away in the attic of the house under the care of her father. Even after its death from starvation and neglect, following the death of its grandfather in 1710, the ghost of the creature continued to haunt the old abandoned house and the surrounding houses of the town. In 1793 a boy who entered the old house was driven mad by what he saw there. Lovecraft's story implies that the monstrous child was a hybrid birth resulting from a union between the daughter of the owner of the old house and something inhuman.
The crack in the brickwork of the grandfather's tomb, into which Carter inserted the bones of his grandson, was caused by the root of a willow tree that had grown up and engulfed the unmarked tombstone of his daughter, which was close to his gravesite. The willow sprouted the year the girl was buried in her unmarked grave, and later the expanding trunk of the tree half-surrounded the stone. It was upon the very tomb in which Carter had placed the deformed bones that Carter and his friend Joel Manton were sitting when attacked at twilight by the ghost of the creature. They were knocked unconscious and carried a mile by the ghost, or whatever unnatural thing it may have been, which deposited them in a field beyond Meadow Hill. Both men had claw wounds on their bodies, and Carter's skin received the impress of a cloven hoof.
Manton, who saw the creature, described it as "a gelatin-a slime yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes-and a blemish." It seemed to come from both the attic window of the house and the fissure in the brickwork of the tomb, perhaps reuniting itself with its bones. Lovecraft mentioned that the place where the two unconscious men were deposited had once been the location of a slaughterhouse. The significance of this detail is not obvious, unless it may be assumed that the girl, who was a drunkard, is supposed to have had a sexual coupling with a beast such as a goat or bull.
(The Unnamable)
These disembodied beasts served the wizards of the corpse-eating cult of the plateau of Leng as familiar spirits and guardians. In some mystical way that was never clearly explained by Lovecraft, the essence of one of these monstrous creatures was bound up with the soul of the wizard who wore its jade talisman, called the "soul-symbol," around his neck. They resemble nothing on the Earth, but look somewhat like a giant hound with wings on its back. It may be that the hounds of Leng are manifestations of the souls of the wizards in animal form. Alhazred wrote in the Necronomicon that the "sinister lineaments" of the hounds are shaped by the souls of those who gnaw the dead-that is, by the wizards of the corpse-eating cult of Leng who wore the soul-symbols.
It is a common theme in Western magic that magicians have the power to project their astral forms through space, and that they can, if they wish, mold their astral bodies into the shapes of beasts such as wolves. Indeed, this is one explanation given for the worldwide myths of the werewolf and other were-animals. The winged hound may well be an astral projection of the soul of the ghoul, living or dead, who wears its jade amulet around his neck. The souls of wizards were believed to persist after death in their places of burial because they were stronger or more vital than the souls of ordinary human beings.
(The Hound)
Psamathe, daughter of King Crotopus of the town of Argos, had an affair with the god Apollo and gave birth to a son, whom she named Linus. In fear of her father's wrath, she set the baby out to die, but the king learned of his daughter's indiscretion, had her executed, and fed the infant to his dogs. In fury, Apollo sent the monster Poene (Punishment) to devour all the children of Argos.
(The Electric Executioner)
A monstrous howling thing with four human hands in place of paws, and a human face. It was the issue of the witch Goody Watkins, hanged in 1704, though what its father may have been Lovecraft did not speculate. It or its ghost continues to inhabit the upstairs room of the old Watkins cottage on the Brigg's Path to Zoar. Its resemblance to Brown Jenkin should be noted.
(Fungi from Yuggoth)
Beneath the mansion of Robert Suydem, alchemist and worshipper of the demoness queen of Hell, Lilith, were found four woman chained in cells with infants at their breasts of inhuman aspect. When these unnatural and deformed babies were carried into the light, they quickly died. Lovecraft intimated in The Horror at Red Hook that they were the product of matings between demons and the unfortunate women, all of whom were completely insane when released from their prisons by the police.
Wilbur Whateley of the stor
y The Dunwich Horror was the product of a union between Yog-Sothoth and Lavinia Whateley, the daughter of old Wizard Whateley. As he matured, his inhuman side became dominant and began to transform his body into something monstrous and not wholly of this dimension of space.
Perhaps the most notable example of hybrids is the children of the marriages between the people of Innsmouth and the Deep Ones, which the people of Innsmouth were obligated to enter into by the terms of the third oath they swore in the church of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. At birth the babies seemed completely human, but as they grew older, amphibious characteristics began to show themselves, until around the age of seventy years they were able to live permanently in the depths of the ocean and left the land forever, or to return only at rare intervals.
The unfortunate Arthur Jermyn killed himself after learning that he was descended from a hybrid offspring resulting from the union between an Englishman and a hybrid white ape of Africa-herself the result of an ancient cross-breeding between true apes and a true human beings. Even though he was far removed from this taint, in a genetic sense, Jermyn could not live with the knowledge of it.
In The Curse of Yig, a woman named Audrey Davis, traveling with her husband from Arkansas in 1889 through the Indian Territory to settle in Oklahoma, angers the god of serpents by killing four baby rattlesnakes. Later, she gives birth to four offspring that are partly humanoid and partly serpentine. The one that survives cannot speak, but merely writhes on its belly and hisses.