A Field Guide to the Great Old Ones

[ecosophia]

I’ve had several people ask about the Great Old Ones who appear in The Weird of Hali, my seven-volume epic fantasy with tentacles, and the other stories (some published, most still awaiting their fate) set in the same fictive world. While I borrowed them from H.P. Lovecraft and a few of his friends, notably Clark Ashton Smith, my versions of these vast and eldritch beings are not the same as the ones you’ll find in the stories of the Cthulhu mythos. Thus a few words of explanation might be entertaining for readers of these stories—oh, and a diagram.

 

These are the Great Old Ones who play central roles in The Weird of Hali and its tentacular kindred. (Yes, I know, some of these are considered Outer Gods or Elder Gods in other versions of the mythos, but not here.) There are other Great Old Ones in my fictional world—several hundred active on Earth, and unimaginably many in the cosmos as a whole—but this is the cast of divine characters readers of the series will want to have in mind.
 

Azathoth

The eldest of the Great Old Ones, a bubbling primordial chaos inhabiting a realm of being incomprehensible to humans. Does not manifest on Earth except under very special conditions, but forms the backdrop to the entire cosmos. Servitors: immense lumbering flute-playing beings of indescribable shape.  Worshiped by: some witches.  Form usually encountered: nothing you can possibly imagine.

Yog-Sothoth

The Gate and the Guardian of the Gate, a being who spans all space and time; the father, grandfather, or great-grandfather of most of the other Great Old Ones on Earth. Servitors: none. Worshiped by: some sorcerers, the Starry Wisdom church, the Tcho-Tchos. Form usually encountered: floating luminous spheres that reflect the entire universe.

Shub-Ne’hurrath

(Yeah, I know, Lovecraft spelled it differently, but then he could never miss a chance to slip in a racial slur.) The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, the great mother goddess of Earth, she can also manifest as the Black Ram with a Thousand Ewes. Most of the Great Old Ones are her offspring or descendants. Servitors: the Dark Young of Shub-Ne’hurrath, massive treelike beings with heavy legs below their huge bodies, and a forest of tentacles above; also the Thousand Young, who are humans or other intelligent beings strangely reshaped by Her power. Worshiped by: pretty much everybody.  Forms usually encountered: often puts on the appearance of an old woman, but may also be seen as a gigantic faunlike shape, female, with horns and shaggy hips and legs.

Nodens

The Lord of the Great Deep, he is not strictly speaking present on the Earth, but rules all movement to and from other realms of being, including the Dreamlands. Servitors: Night-gaunts. Worshiped by: some sorcerers, families descended from the people of drowned Poseidonis. Form usually encountered: a vast midnight-black male form, hoary and bearded, with eyes like moons.

Cthulhu

The high priest of the Great Old Ones, the only one among them capable of invoking those powers as far beyond the Great Old Ones as they are beyond human beings, Cthulhu lies, “dead yet dreaming,” in his temple-tomb in drowned R’lyeh until the stars are right. Servitors: Cthulhu-spawn, who are wingless but otherwise resemble him, and Deep Ones, who are aquatic hominids closely related to humans. Worshiped by: the Deep Ones, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, families descended from the people of drowned Poseidonis, the Starry Wisdom church, the Tcho-Tchos. Form usually encountered: he hasn’t been encountered awake since the end of the Cretaceous period, but when he rises from the sea at last, he will be a titanic bipedal figure with great dragonlike wings, many eyes, and tentacles descending from the lower half of his face.

Ithaqua

The Wind-Walker, lord of the world’s frozen places, Ithaqua is the god of limits; he is half-brother to Cthulhu and full brother to Hastur. He strides through the air and is accompanied by tremendous cold. Servitors: the gnophkehs, monstrous six-limbed hunters of the frozen wastes.  Worshiped by: nobody. You respect Ithaqua, but you don’t invoke him.  Form usually encountered: a gigantic, gaunt, naked human figure with flowing white hair and a long white beard, most often seen stalking through the sky; his eyes burn red like coals.

Hastur

The King in Yellow, ruler of the Great Old Ones on Earth, he dwells in the City of the Pyramids in far Carcosa. His face has been hidden behind the Pallid Mask for sixty-five million years. The Yellow Sign is his emblem. Servitors: the Fellowship of the Yellow Sign, an order of humans and other intelligent beings who are sworn to his service. Worshiped by: the Esoteric Order of Dagon, families descended from the people of drowned Poseidonis, the Starry Wisdom church, the Tcho-Tchos. Form usually encountered: tall and thin, pallid white in color, with flowing white hair. His face is covered by a mask the color of ivory; his hands have six fingers each; he wears tattered and scalloped robes of yellow.

Yhoundeh

The Lady of the Beasts, she was worshiped as an elk goddess in old Hyperborea and has special rulership over all mammals. A daughter of Shub-Ne’hurrath by Ithaqua. Servitors: all wild animals. Worshiped by: families descended from the people of drowned Poseidonis, the Starry Wisdom church. Forms usually encountered: a winged elk, or a young woman with elk’s antlers. She can also take human forms when this is convenient.

Nyarlathotep

The soul and mighty messenger of the Great Old Ones, the One in Black is coeval with Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth. He is the Black Man of witchcraft lore, the crossroads devil of blues legend, and the messenger of the gods revered in many ancient faiths. Servitors: witches, human cultists, silent black dogs who appear and disappear as he wills. All animals obey him. Worshiped by: everyone who reveres any of the Great Old Ones. Forms usually encountered: a very tall man of Egyptian appearance, dressed in a long black coat and a broad-brimmed black hat.  In the Starry Wisdom church, he also takes the form of the Watcher in Darkness, a bat-winged horror with a three-lobed blazing eye.

Tsathoggua

The god of sorcerers and lord of voor (the life force), Tsathoggua is the oldest of the Great Old Ones on Earth. He dwells far underground and works mostly through his servitors, and through human sorcerers that venerate him. Some of his human worshipers call him Saint Toad.  Servitors: voormis, who are prehuman hominids who dwell underground, and the Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua, pools of fluid black shapelessness that eat Tsathoggua’s enemies. (According to the Pnakotic Manuscript, shoggoths were created by the Elder Things in imitation of the Formless Spawn.) Worshiped by: families descended from the people of drowned Poseidonis, the Starry Wisdom church, the Tcho-Tchos. Form usually encountered: an odd, huge, somnolent form, rather like a toad, something like a bat, a little like a sloth, with glowing red eyes usually half-closed.

Phauz

The youngest of the Great Old Ones on Earth, just nine million years old and so little more than a hatchling, Phauz is the daughter of Shub-Ne’hurrath by Hastur. She will be Queen of the Great Old Ones on Earth in the far future, when Hastur and Cthulhu have both withdrawn into contemplation. Her emblem in Hyperborean times was a woman-breasted cat. She is the mistress of cats; what any cat anywhere in the world knows, she knows. Servitors: cats. Worshiped by: families descended from the people of drowned Poseidonis, witches. Forms usually encountered: a cat, or a cat lady of indeterminate age.

***

Alongside the Great Old Ones stands another being who is not one of them, and so doesn't have a spot on the diagram, but has similar powers and characteristics. Back in the early Triassic, the Elder Things—a race of extraterrestrial critters who settled what is now Antarctica and several continents then nearby—set out to create a being comparable to the Great Old Ones but under their control. Their work succeeded rather too well, and the resulting entity—Nyogtha, The Thing That Should Not Be—rebelled against them. While he was defeated, he could not be reduced to subservience, and he fled into the deep places of the Earth. There he conspired with the shoggoths, the slave species the Elder Things made in imitation of the Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua, who had attempted unsuccessfully to win their freedom in the late Permian. The result of that conspiracy was the total extermination of the Elder Things. (If this suggests to you that Nyogtha is not an entity to mess with, why, yes, that's what it suggests to me, too.) Nyogtha remains active on Earth, and his pact with the shoggoths remains firm, so he can be added to the list above to make an even dozen:
 

Nyogtha

Known as The Thing That Should Not Be—the Elder Things called him that, and he adopted the title as a gesture of defiance—and the Dweller in Darkness, Nyogtha lurks in the deep places of the Earth and pursues intricately plotted plans of his own. Servitors: shoggoths. Worshiped by: shoggoths, and also small cults of human witches. Form usually encountered: sheer impenetrable blackness. 

Comments

The Weird of Hali- Kingsport is really good.

[(Anonymous)]

I liked the first one, but you've really hit your stride here. The library is perfect, the books are truly evocative, 'three numbers and a shoe size' is a great phrase and precisely descriptive of character- half through now and kind of sorry it will end.

I just read Fred Hoyle's old claim that Viruses from Space comets sweep across the Earth, sometimes just causing a flu, sometimes reshaping the whole ecology, last big change 65 million years ago, and my mind is connecting that to your book.

Re: The Weird of Hali- Kingsport is really good.

[ecosophia]

Thank you! I hadn't thought of Hoyle's book in this context, but I suppose it could work. What happened 65 million years ago was a struggle between Hastur and Cthulhu, the outcome of which is why Cthulhu is dead yet dreaming -- there's a long backstory to that, which will be partly explored in the fourth book of the series. Silly human scientists think an asteroid hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, but you know, humanity's only been around for half a million years and it's normal for species that young to have such quaint ideas... ;-)

Cthonic pantheon

[(Anonymous)]

Glad to see this, as it makes the Tree much more fun to study. Your reply last week that this reworked pantheon functions both magically and spiritually was sort of startling. Are they astral though-forms created as we imagine them? Or are they just different names for the usual deities (or those now answering for them)? Or is the Tree primarily a "gym" for developing higher states of awareness? I have to admit a certain thrill at the idea of actually being able to converse with Saint Toad!

Re: Cthonic pantheon

[ecosophia]

That's one of the great questions of magical spirituality, and it's not one to which anyone has been able to provide a definite answer. All we know for sure is that some things work. I suspect, though, that if you were to take up Jenny's practice morning and evening, you would get a response from Saint Toad...or from something that answers to the same name, and is effectively indistinguishable from Tsathoggua.

[(Anonymous)]

I get the impression that if you were to pray to one of these, you would be reasonably likely to get an answer.

[ecosophia]

I've had that sense since the first book basically downloaded itself into my head. Of course it helps that Lovecraft had a very good working knowledge of Greek mythology, and used standard archetypal patterns to construct his Yog-Sothothery, as he called it.

[(Anonymous)]

When selecting a deity to worship, is the quesited a 9th House issue, rather than an 8th House for a magical working?
Thank you!

Flavored rather like an RPG manual

[tunesmyth]

Nice tree of life! I do hope that you're already in talks with Miskatonic Press to write an officially sanctioned "Wyrd of Hali" Call of Cthulhu expansion manual, and this is an excerpt from it.

Re: Flavored rather like an RPG manual

[(Anonymous)]

I’d love it if JMG were to write an essay about wyrd in general, or better still, a book!

Anyways, the Weird of Hali, already on my to-read list, just moved up a few notches.

Re: Flavored rather like an RPG manual

[ecosophia]

A game master I know is working on a campaign that will use the fictive universe of The Weird of Hali, but he's not using the CoC system. I haven't contacted Chaosium yet about this; I'd have to work with someone who knows the current CoC system, which I don't -- I played First Edition back in the day!

Buying the books

[(Anonymous)]

OK, you have finally inspired me to buy the books!

-Tude

Re: Buying the books

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear it. I hope you enjoy them!

Crazy cat lady APPROVES!

[(Anonymous)]

Was Phauz in the original Mythos? I don't remember ever reading of her, and as a follower of Bastet I'd likely have noticed. Glad to hear she will be showing up! She will be a treat. Can I hope she will appear in book 3?

-Dewey

Re: Crazy cat lady APPROVES!

[ecosophia]

Phauz was invented by Clark Ashton Smith; to my knowledge she only appeared in a letter he wrote to Robert Barlow. The Mythos pantheon has a goddess shortage, though, and a cat goddess is too useful an addition to miss -- especially a cat goddess who is the Great Old One equivalent of a very strong-willed nine-year-old. She doesn't appear until the fifth book, The Weird of Hali: Providence, but she's central to that book and also has a major role in the final volume, The Weird of Hali: Arkham.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, this effectively convinced me to read The Weird of Hali series....

I don't suppose a Cthulhu-centric version of the LBRP and Middle Pillar might come next?

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear it.

As for the rituals, hmm. I'm not sure whether that would work. Still, something similar using the Vach-Viraj incantation might be viable...

[(Anonymous)]

I'm kind of digging Youndeh the Elk Goddess. And like some of the other commenters, this has got me interested in the books.

A notion popped into my head as I read another person's comment about Saint Toad. Maybe the Tree of Life could be seen as a metaphysical radio dial, enabling a person to tune into Yesodic frequencies - thus when you send out a call for Tsathoggua, something may just answer.

Could Nyogtha be seen as a Qlipphotic force?

And if Lovecraft had devised his own Tree of Life, would it more likely have been an unnatural pattern that hurt the eyes to see and caused those who contemplated it to go mad?
-Cliff

[ecosophia]

That's certainly a workable way to see the Tree of Life. It's also been compared to a filing cabinet; there's a Yesod drawer, and once you know that Saint Toad fits in that drawer, you know what you're going to get when you call on him by name.

Nyogtha isn't Qlippothic, as he's not wildly unbalanced. (That's what the Qlippoth are -- the energies of each sphere unequilibrated, unbalanced, and flinging themselves to destructive extremes.) In magical terms, he's one of the creations of the created, an elemental force without any inherent spiritual dimension. Part of the plot in The Shoggoth Concerto and The Nyogtha Variations has to do with how Nyogtha, in his own subtle and indirect way, works out a modus vivendi with the Great Old Ones.

As for Lovecraft, sure, but he was on the other side. You know those blasphemous runes and hellish tomes and images that drive you mad, et al? From the point of view of the cultists, those drive you sane -- they shake you out of the delusion that humanity is the conqueror of nature, the summit of evolution, the measure of all things, and all that insane drivel; you read the Necronomicon, say, and it really sinks in that humanity is just one not especially important life form crawling around the damp film that covers the third lump of rock out from an ordinary star, and that the universe does not revolve around our wants, much less around our notions of our own importance.

Yeah, some people with too well-developed a sense of entitlement crack up when that sinks in, but to your ordinary member of the Starry Wisdom church, say, that realization comes as a profound relief. We really don't have to live up to the bizarrely inflated notion of our species that we've been taught; we can just live our lives in a universe that doesn't have to make sense. Wheee! ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have any idea how happy this makes me?

I think I may have just squealed as I read this. These are the books I've been waiting for.

-Dudley Dawson

[ecosophia]

Glad to hear it. I think a lot of people in their heart of hearts are on the side of the tentacled horrors -- Cthulhu wouldn't have become anything like so big a pop culture phenomenon if there weren't plenty of us whose reaction to him wasn't "Cool!"

[neonvincent]

I was wondering if you were the first to map the beings of the Cthulhu Mythos onto the tree of life. You weren't. I found two, one at Beatnik Witchery and another at The Great Horned Goat, both of which are on Tumblr. That doesn't make your effort either lesser or redundant. This is for your own interpretation of the mythos for your own purposes and I applaud it.

By the way, given the issues with Tumblr, which are prompting users there to migrate to Dreamwidth, your version may survive longer than the two on that platform other than their copies on Pinterest.

[ecosophia]

Thanks for these! I note that Kenneth Grant's version, the second one you gave, gives Nodens as a Daath influence and Tsathoggua as Yesod, and of course everyone puts Nyarlathotep as Hod. Of course Grant was working with his own weird blend of Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft, so went zooming off in one direction as I'm zooming off in another. I'm not at all sure what to make of the Beatnik Witchery version, but hey, since we're dealing with soul-shattering mysteries incomprehensible to human beings, accounts are going to be different.

[isabelcooper]

I blame excessive family and booze for not seeing this until now--it's awesome, and thank you!

(This has also made me realize that I'd mentally been reversing the positions of Chokmah and Binah--not which came first, but the right-left orientation--which doubtless says something about my own inclinations. :P)

[ecosophia]

You're most welcome. Oddly enough, quite a few people get Chokmah and Binah reversed -- I think it's because we're used to reading left to right.

And the Red Ceremony?

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the Solstices gift :-)

Owen was right it makes the world bigger and much more interesting..

Now who will work up the Green, White and Red ceremonies?

Re: And the Red Ceremony?

[ecosophia]

You're most welcome!

Hmm. All those ceremonies were originally mentioned in Arthur Machen's "The White People," the story that most makes me want to slap him across the face -- though it's a hard-fought contest! I know the White and Green Ceremonies are brief, just a few words, steps, and gestures, and I think the Red Ceremonies are the same, but done by two people rather than one. I suppose you could invoke Tsathoggua and ask him!

Cheers

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks John, this background data helps significantly. I'm half way through Kingsport and its a complete joy to read. I love the more realistic approach to magic, and ponder if any of the practices within the book could be adapted to 'normal' spiritual practice in the 'real' world. The Hali series, is soooo much better than anything JK has pumped out. Cheers Averagejoe

Re: Cheers

[ecosophia]

You're welcome and thank you. Most of the practices in the books are modeled on actual magic, of course -- I'm an occultist, and I write what I know! -- though "modeled on" does not mean "identical to." (And I don't recommend trying to duplicate any of Nyarlathotep's actions unless you happen to be a Great Old One.) In particular, the method of working with deities that Jenny learns from her great-aunt and uses to commune with Tsathoggua is based on a very common form of spiritual practice, and you can do it with any deity you like.

Ubbo-Sathla's Kingsport cameo.

[jpc_w]

Is (was?) Ubbo-Sathla one of the Great Old Ones, a direct creation of theirs, or a naturally occurring phenomenon that Tsathoggua adopted as a sort of pet?

Re: Ubbo-Sathla's Kingsport cameo.

[ecosophia]

The third. You can read the original source of Ubbo-Sathla -- I suppose that would make it the original source for the original source! -- in this Clark Ashton Smith story. Shub-Ne'hurrath had something to do with its genesis, since she's the goddess of life and fertility and all naturally occurring biological phenomena are basically what she does when she's not paying attention to anything in particular. Tsathoggua, strolling on that primal beach two billion years ago, doubtless noticed it lurking there in the Archaean tidepool and thought, "Hmm, that could be mildly interesting."

I'm pretty sure that the gray primordial foulness Abhoth, who pops up in this exceptionally funny Smith story, is what was left of Ubbo-Sathla when the surface got too crowded for it and it slid away into deep Hyperborean caverns to bubble mindlessly to itself in peace.