What do people know about the Mythos? Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

Last installment for a while, since as you'll see shortly I am really stretching what qualifies as the Mythos. But I suppose that is part of the point. Anyway, fun series, definitely will return to the format in the future (probably for public domain goodie roundups). 

Nodens

1) An obscure Celtic god, about whom next to nothing is known besides associations with healing, dogs, and syncretization with Mars. Ruins of a single dedicated temple survive at Lydbey Park in Gloucestershire. Potential connection with the mythological figure of Nuada Airgetlám.
 
2) One of the central deities of the Temple of Three Corners.
 

The Temple of Three Corners

Welsh neopagan group active 1963-1972, then resurrected June-November of 1995. Occasional splinter groups have claimed to practice a direct continuation or reformed version of the religion, but rarely grow beyond a dozen members or last more than a few years.
 
The Temple’s belief system is founded on the premise that human sapience is both an evolutionary and spiritual dead end; sapience cuts humans off from awareness of and participation in greater spiritual reality through the Three Impediments of symbol, speech, and self. Each Impediment is thought of as standing between the initiate and a god of the greater Greco-Roman world representing freedom from that Impediment.

• Hypnos exists beyond symbol; consciousness fills the mind with fictions and desires, which impede the ability to understand true reality through our dreams.
• Bast exists beyond speech; consciousness is a transmissible disease and its vector is language, which alienates man from its animal nature.
• Nodens exists beyond the Self; consciousness prevents the spirit from returning to the Abyss from which it was violently torn by the Great Division that formed the base and corrupt physical world.

The Temple’s exoteric ideology was deeply misogynist (sapience was the fault of women providing care for infants, women ought to be wholly controlled by men as property, etc) fascist-primitivist (post-agricultural societies have been a losing war against the forces of femininity and sapience, necessitating a return to hunter-gatherer bands consisting of a clutch of dominant men and their enslaved harem), and anti-natalist (new human life should not be brought into the world unless steps are taken to loosen the hold of the Three Impediments on them).
 
Surprising absolutely no one, they were just as bad as they sound.

‘Axhloo-Dhol Languages

Disputed linguistic theory positing a direct relationship between the extinct language isolates ‘Axhloo (spoken in British Columbia until 1824) and Dhol (spoken in eastern Tibet until 1846). The two languages are poorly documented, with only a single grammar compiled for each shortly before the deaths of the last native speakers. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a link was proposed, based on apparent lexical correspeondences in common root words too high for random chance.
 
If the languages are indeed genetically linked, they would represent the furthest time-depth ever reconstructed for historical linguistics; archaeological evidence from Dhol-speaking sites, though sparse, has been dated to 25,000 years before present. The leading hypothesis (beyond a hoax, misinterpreted data, or any number of conspiratorial rabbit holes) is that the ‘Akhloo and Dhol are highly conservative descendents of a potentially artificial ritual language, though without any further data this cannot be confirmed or ruled out.

Special Cross-Agency Investigation Program

An extremely boring-sounding program by which various agencies and departments of the United States federal government may cooperatively investigate an assortment of vaguely-defined incidents in the name of national security.

Dunwich

Farming community in central Massachusetts, historically associated with witchcraft due to repeated ergotism outbreaks in the late 17th/ early 18th century. The village was disincorporated on April 28th, 1938 as part of preparations for construction of the Quabbin Reservoir; the 16 remaining inhabitants were relocated to the nearby town of New Salem.
 
A 1928 Miskatonic University investigation of supposed supernatural cattle mutilations and other livestock loss around the farm of Zechariah Whateley (at that time owned by his grandson Wilbur) was adapted into the 1970 horror movie The Dunwich Horror.

Lavinia Whateley

Official documentation of Lavinia Whateley’s life is limited to a 1878 baptismal registry with the Dunwich Methodist Church, four appearances in the US census from 1880 to 1920, and a death certificate in absentia from 1933.
 
Interviews collected by Misk. U. professors Henry Armitage, Francis Morgan, and Warren Rice during their 1928 investigation provided little additional information: Lavinia was albino, unschooled, did not attend church past the age of 12, was only rarely seen in town, and had a reputation for promiscuity due the out-of-wedlock birth of her son Wilbur in 1913.
 
“Lavinia’s Stone”, a glacial erratic boulder found off the Quabbin Park hiking trail, was featured on Atlas Obscura in 2011. It was engraved by an unknown hand as follows:
 

LAVINIA WHATELEY
Lived and died near this stone
In the village of Dunwich
1878 - 1926
She deserved better.

Wilbur Whateley

While the discrepancies in accounts of Wilbur’s age have long been explained as a clerical error, the identity of Wilbur Whateley’s father has puzzled historians for decades. The Miskatonic investigation claimed external supernatural influence had greatly accelerated Wilbur’s early childhood development and deformed his body, but this has remained a fringe position since its inception. The interviewed inhabitants of Dunwich favored offhand explanations that Wilbur’s father was a passing tramp, and early academic study of Dunwich tended to favor the theory that Wilbur was a brother, cousin, or other relative of Lavinia’s instead of her son; the modern scholarly consensus from the 1970s onward claims that Wilbur was  Zechariah’s son by incest.

“Mom”

A figure supposedly appearing in the dreams of individuals from around the world. Descriptions generally align with that provided in the initial 2004 Livejournal post: a dark-skinned woman in her mid-to-late 50s with a robust build and black hair, dressed in hide clothing and shell-bead jewelry. Encounters, if remembered, are nearly always in the midst of an outdoors environment with no other signs of human presence.
 
A 2022 survey by the University of Kentucky polled nearly a thousand self-described contactees and split purported encounters into three broad categories:

1. Positive - the woman expresses sympathy, encouragement, support or guidance to the contactee; common in those who had been the subject of traumatic events, severe long-term stress, addiction, chronic illness, and sudden loss.
2. Scared Straight - the woman expresses disapproval, disdain, or disgust with the contactee’s actions; most commonly regards mistreatment of partners, children, or marginalized populations.
3. Nonverbal - the woman appears but does not speak; facial expression and body language may be positive or negative.

Tower of the Elephants

The primary residence of Andalusian alchemist and philosopher Ibrahim ibn al-Yara, gaining its name from the dual bas-reliefs that flanked the main entrance. The tower was torn down during the siege and capture of Toledo in 1085, though by that time it had been empty for nearly 90 years.
 
Among his many scientific and scholarly pursuits, al-Yara sought to make contact with entities of the upper heavens and exploit their greater knowledge of the cosmos; he claims to have succeeded in doing so and been gifted the “heart” of an entity he calls Y-G-K-SH. No elaboration has yet been found, due both to the fragmentary nature of the text and al-Yara’s subsequent death.

The Hound of Cimmeria

Scythian-Cimmerian mercenary who fought for both the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Medo-Babylonian alliance during the latter’s conquest of the former. Records from both sides portray him as an exceptionally skilled swordsman of few words, melancholic disposition, and unflinchingly direct problem-solving. A considerable folk tradition built up around his purported adventures, with stories surviving into the Greco-Roman period and beyond: the last known pre-modern portrayal of the Hound (in the form of the wandering swordsman MacAoinne) is found in the anonymous 12th-century Middle Irish romance The Sword and the Phoenix, which was not rediscovered until 1932.

The Craighten House

A supposedly cursed manor near the village of Craighten in County Galway, Ireland. Said to have been owned by a reclusive and elderly madman before it was destroyed by a sinkhole sometime in the 1830s. Local folklore associates the house with a variety of paranormal occurrences: inexplicable lights and sounds in the sky, deaths by seemingly unique fungal infection, the Craighten pig-men, and an incident where the sun appeared to turn green.

Hildred Castaigne

New York man who made national headlines in 1920 for the brutal murder of a recluse named Hobart Wilde. When arrested, Castaigne claimed to have also killed his psychiatrist Dr. Geoffrey Archer, his cousin Louis Castaigne, and Louis’ fiancee Constance Hawberk; none of these additional claims were true, though all three supposed victims told police that Castaigne had been acting more erratic and aggressive than usual in the days leading up to the murder.
 
Castigaine was declared unfit for trial, as he had suffered permanent brain damage while falling from horseback four years earlier.
 
During police questioning, Castaigne accused his targets of conspiring with Wilde to steal his birthright as the scion of the “Imperial Dynasty of America”. Dr. Archer corroborated that these delusions were the result of brain damage Castaigne had suffered four years prior after falling off his horse. Castaigne was declared unfit for trial on grounds of insanity, but escaped from police custody and committed suicide in a nearby phone booth via home-made cyanide pill before he could be moved to an asylum.

Kuangyuan (狂元)

The “crazy essense”; an oncoming historical epoch hypothesized by Chinese sociologist ███ █████ in 1996; characterized by global economic, ecological, and psychological collapse. Civilization would survive only through the efforts of a cadre of transhuman scientist-occultists imposing a new social structure on humanity, merging methods of esoteric Taoist cultivation with the principles of communism.

da_libre_liber.7zip

Collection of 153 (as of present) esoteric and occult works in plaintext format, including Kitab al-Layl, Liber Ivonis,  Cultes des Gouls, De Vermis Mysteriis, Dhol Chants 1-16, The Revelations of Galagi, The Black Book, On Healing the Sick, The Stellar Almanac, A Preliminary Grammar of the Aklo Language, A World Without Doors, The Testaments of Carnamagos and The Dyzan Dissection.
 
First iteration posted online in 2010: individual text files of the current collection were hosted on github until the maintainer pulled it down in response to widespread LLM-scraping of the site’s contents, stating “I’m not gonna be the guy who let Copilot learn how to turn people inside out”.

The Seven Cryptic Books of Xi’an

A series of seven jiǎndú texts dated to the late Western Zhou dynasty (800s BCE), each consisting of seven poems written as 49-by-49 grids of large seal script characters. Each poem is reversible and readable along multiple axes, and may be further subdivided into smaller component grids, giving each poem thousands of potential readings (See also the Star Gauge of Su Hui).
 
Complicating matters further, a 2010 study determined that poems may be formed with characters from different grids interlaced with each other at multiple levels of complexity and with different inter-textual patterns. An attempt to calculate all possible readings through AI analysis was started in 2025 by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, but the project was shuttered shortly after inception for unclear reasons.
 
The books were previously known as the Books of Hsan in the West due to an erroneous transcription of Xi’an (capital of Shaanxi and site of the books’ discovery): [ɕan] (rendered Hsan in Wade-Giles and Xan in Pinyin) is not a valid syllable in Mandarin.
 

Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten

1839 German text by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, based in large part on the 1610 witch-hunting manual of Solomon Kane. Concerned primarily with the methods of detecting, tracking, identifying, capturing, torturing and killing followers of “The Black Goat”. This entity has been conflated with Éliphas Lévi’s interpretation of Baphomet by later occultists, despite Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie being published in 1856.

The Alexis

Bulk carrier ship sailing under a Taiwanese flag of convenience found adrift in the southern Indian Ocean with all hands missing in 2018. No signs of violence or disturbance of the crew’s belongings, save that one of the cargo containers had been opened and its contents removed. Images of the large metal statue of a half-melted mass of wailing human figures quickly spread across social media, with amateur sleuths and conspiracy theories alike attempting to find some explanation or source for “The Screaming”. None, as of present, has been found.

The Red One

Purported encounter with a UFO (Close encounter, second kind) in the central highlands of Guadalcanal. Account written in 1916 and published in 1918, likely describes events a decade or more prior.
 
The entity or object is described as a large, deep red sphere without apparent marking or variation, that induced a violent mania in the local inhabitants wherein they would offer “the Red One” the severed heads of sacrificial victims.
 
An attempt to corroborate the account in 1953 resulted in nothing: the supposed landing site could not be located, and interviews with locals were split between no one living in that area of the island at all, or that a few very small villages died of an epidemic in the 1920s.

l'Ultimo Ridotto

A self-sustaining arcology, designed by the Italian futurist Alfonso Schiavio as humanity’s defense against the eventual cooling of the sun. Had it been completed (an act even admitted by Schiavio to be wholly impossible due to the sheer cost in resources, time, and sustained political will) it would have been a black pyramid nearly eight miles high and extending further underground capable of supporting 3 million inhabitants.
 
Construction of a four-person test model, three stories tall and designed for a ten-year experimental period, began in 1924 but was not completed until 1935: this bankrupted Schiavio and his associates (as support from the Fascists was predominantly verbal rather than material, and performative even then).
 
The site was bombed during the Allied invasion and buried beneath the resultant landslide: it has not been excavated.

The Skin Bibles

Legendary occult tomes bound in cured human skin. Four are dedicated to the “Old Gods” of prehistoric Europe (creation, destruction, the Earth and the Moon), while a later fifth book entailed the “forebearer to the Christ-myth” in the form of a figure called “All Mer”. A sixth text, Pavor et Famēs, was purportedly found and subsequently lost or destroyed by Soviet troops in Bohemia in 1945.
 
All currently known copies of the books are 19th century forgeries; the earliest mention of the texts is dated 1568, however.

Chthulus

“The earth-eater”: A minor demon from the occult works of John Dee with a reasonably sound but not entirely airtight etymological history.

Yog-Sothoth

A divine or semi-divine figure in the Latin and Greek Necronomicon, credited with producing the ordered cosmos from primordial chaos. The name does not appear in the fragments of the earliest known Greek recension, however: there it is rendered as the widely-known gnostic demiurge of Ialdabaoth. A cramped or sloppy hand, read in low light or from a deteriorating manuscript, might easily turn Ιαλδαβαώθ into Ιογζοθοώθ, and this would be well within the precedent of occult names and their notoriously unstable spelling.
 
Al-Hadrat uses neither term in the Arabic version of the text, either calling it Bāb al-Lanhaya (the Gate of Infinity) or using one of his signature asemic monograms.

Order of the Golden Bough

English occult fraternal society and new religious movement based on the mythic framework put forth by James Frazer. Two men affiliated with the group were convicted in the kidnapping and murder of lawyer Harvey Gates in the spring of 1918; the assailants believed Gates to be the unrecognized bastard son of Prince Albert Victor and sought to use regnal sacrifice of the true heir of England to bring an end to the Great War.

Horsehead and the Blind Girl

A pair of cryptids consisting of a horned, horse-headed giant and a blind albino teenager; supposedly first sighted in the backwoods of North Carolina during the summer of 2020. The initial photograph was quickly identified as a still from the Kickstarter trailer for the independent horror film Carvers; the producers of the film had ghosted their backers midway through the failed campaign, and weren’t able to be contacted despite concerted efforts by lost media enthusiasts. The campaign page was taken down in February of 2021.
 
In July of 2026, a candid video of the Blind Girl’s actress was posted to Threads by user @█████ (claiming to have shot the footage at the Richmond KY Buc-ee’s on July 16.); when asked “Hey, hey, I’m sorry, but were you in Carvers?”, the woman responds “Dunno. Maybe I dreamt I was a unicorn.” before walking off. A second woman (dark hair, Meshuggah t-shirt) flips off the camera before the two exit the aisle. @█████  does not follow them.

Sunny Smiles Farm

Defunct health food company (previously part of the Rochefoucauld Group business syndicate) specializing in free-range, cruelty-free meats. The former CEO was found murdered in his home in October 2019, having been stabbed over twenty times and then hung by a belt from the foyer banister. Police investigation found signs of four separate break-ins around the house and a three-minute gap in the house’s security system coinciding with the attack, but were unable to meaningfully identify the assailants; gallons of livestock blood mixed with barbershop hair refuse were dumped throughout the house to obscure any genetic material.

Shubbsy-Bubbles

Twitch streamer and v-tuber personality; self-described “world’s greatest big-titty goth mommy girlfriend”. Suspended five times for violation of Twitch’s Terms of Service (subsequently re-instated in all cases.)
 
SWATted mid-broadcast in December of 2022; the VOD was swiftly taken down by Twitch, which didn’t stop the relevant clip from appearing on social media hours later. The clip is limited to the mostly-incoherent sound, of the  SWAT team’s entry into the home office. Internet sleuths were able to extract a few fragments of Shubby’s response from the audio, though the only thing that could be reconstructed with any meaningful success is the streamer nonchalantly saying:
 
“Gentlemen, gen[tlemen] [...] [four?] at a [time?]”
 
Shubby was released from police custody hours later, with no charges filed. Police have consistently declined to comment about the incident. Damages were, according to Shubbsy in her first return stream, handled out of court.

Mu

A fictitious lost continent of the Pacific invented by Augustus Le Plongeon and further developed by James Churchward, Ignatius Donnelly, and other such luminaries of imagining shit that isn’t there. Despite its obvious nonexistence and second-fiddle position to Atlantis, Mu keeps attracting those who like their ancient pasts vague and pale skinned; one such group, the Holy Shaker Way gained significant notoriety for the mass suicide of the group’s 23 members on the uninhabited Samin Island, believing that in doing so their spirits would be  shepherded by the Muian god Kalanatoa and returned to the stars.

Eschatology and Genesis

Incomplete script of 2-act play performed across the American west during the 1870s by the pseudonymous patent medicine seller Dr. Talos. Highly controversial and thoroughly demonized in its day for its scandalous use of nude actors, inclusion of blasphemous religious content, and propensity to start riots.

The Claw

A 102.54 carat sapphire named for its distinctive shape. Purported by one hagiographical source to be a relic of 5th-century martyr St. Severian of Scythopolis, who received it during an angelic visitation and later used it to perform healing miracles. Currently held by the Pelerine Order of Our Lady of Concilliation at their mother-house in Buenos Aires.
 

4 Roads to R'lyeh

ProfDyer

Some alternate takes on Cthulhu and its return 

1. The Plaquemines Raid and the All-Souls Massacre

November 1907: New Orleans is gripped with a three-day spate of racially-motivated violence after a headline story in the Times-Democrat reports a police raid on a “voodoo cult” blamed for multiple kidnappings in Plaquemines Parish. Ghoulish descriptions of human sacrifice stir the public into a frenzy and by the evening of November 2nd, white rioters aided by police storm the city prison and embrace new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves. 45 of the 47 men arrested during the raid are murdered, and the rioters disperse into the city in mobs to root out other members of the perceived conspiracy. By the time the Louisiana National Guard is deployed on November 5th a further 172 people are confirmed dead and over 500 are injured, with the overwhelming majority of casualties inflicted on the city’s minority population.

The following year, inspector John Legrasse of the New Orleans Police Department presents an artifact supposedly recovered from the raid to a meeting of the American Archaeological Society. The malachite sculpture depicts a hunchbacked, winged, octopus-headed figure sitting atop a base inscribed with unidentified hieroglyphs, and is accompanied by Legrasse’s story of a heretofore unknown yet expansive and well-organized cult working towards the destruction of the world order.

Legrasse fails to convince most of the AAS members, and the Society declines his donation. Despite this, he manages to sell it sometime before his death in 1910, with the purchaser then selling it to Miskatonic University’s antiquities department in 1925. There the statue is the subject of several papers of increasingly-dubious hypotheses before it is quietly moved to a dusty corner and forgotten until the liquidation of the special collection in 1968 when it is sold to UC Berkeley.

The agreed-upon account, after hindsight takes its cut, is that the Times-Democrat had latched on to the presence of vodou paraphernalia at the site over evidence that the kidnappings were part of mundane hostage-taking between rival smuggling operations; as with most instances of racial violence in the US, the All-Souls Massacre has fallen into obscurity in the mainstream public consciousness, and is referenced mostly as another example of the dangers of yellow journalism.

2. Xenoteuthis megadaemon

Cthulhu’s sire species, before they became the Star Spawn, were a clade of extremely territorial, extremely aggressive, extremely intelligent and highly adaptable solitary ambush predators. They weren’t at the apex of the oceanic food chain, but they were easily the smartest and the nastiest things in the warm seas of their homeworld. Casual Geographic would have a field day with them.

This state of affairs went on for millions of years with only minimal changes.  As non-obligate sapients, xenteuthis were not dependent on their self-awareness for survival;  their massive brains provided enough success to justify the caloric cost, but their lack of sociality prevented any way to pass knowledge on from one generation to the next.

But in a statistical anomaly (though not an impossibility) xenoteuthis could Dream, and in Dreaming, they possessed the means to sire a Great Old One. Time took care of the rest.

The psychic gestalt of the species shaped a god in their own image, and it grew old and potent in the collective subconscious until at last it gained critical mass and transitioned into the Real. The species was remade, suborned into semi-autonomous extensions of their living god, and they expanded their reach to the stars. In finding the empire of the Elder Things there they did what their forebearers had always done: fight for territory.

The crusade ended with a whimper, in orbit around a backwater colony world. Cthulhu was crippled and sank beneath the sea, and there it rested for 444 million years, until at last the stars were right.

Humanity had no shield against Cthulhu's influence; no Great Old One of our own, no novel brain architecture to dampen the psychic onslaught, no miracles of parascience, no means of escape. And so for just under two minutes, every single human being on Earth had their psychology overwritten by that of an organism that kills and cannibalizes its own species as a matter of course.

When it had all passed, when those hundred-odd seconds were over and Cthulhu departed to the distant stars, everyone left alive remembered exactly what they had done.

3. The R'yleh Expeditions

R’lyeh rose from the sea in March of 1925, though its master has yet to emerge from its ancient vaults. Perhaps he is still sleeping, if indeed he truly exists; perhaps the city and its lord are one and the same. It ultimately doesn’t matter.

The ruined city has expanded steadily with each passing year, growing over the course of a century from a single island to an archipelago to a microcontinent. The surrounding ocean teems with life not seen for hundreds of millions of years, and more bizarre life that had been evolving in isolation in the hidden city for all those epochs. 

Reality is breaking down. More people succumb to his influence with each year; trapped in alien dreams, devoured by the things that slip between the thin places, broken beneath the unbearable psychic weight of his presence. There are wars and rumors of wars, famines and slaughters and the mad gnawing of a species with its foot in the trap. Many deny the reality, circling their wagons and declaring that it is all a hoax, or that it isn’t as bad as reported, or that it’s always been like this, or that Jesus is coming tomorrow. Many try desperately to make contact with the silent god through worship, hoping to save themselves if they cannot save the world. Many are simply resigned to the weary world’s slow apocalypse, scheduling their suicides in advance.

And there are those few who believe that the Lord of R’lyeh might be stopped. Perhaps even killed. There were more in the early years, before the scope of the danger was fully understood. Their expeditions to the island-city have failed, one and all: the Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese, the UN, the EU, dozens of others, all failed. Those that pushed past the storms and teeming waters still had to survive landfall; those that managed to set foot on the black beaches were rebuffed. Those that returned home did so bloodied and broken, clutching scraps of insight so brief and tenuous that hardly anything could be learned.

The budgets thinned with the decades until they were an anorexic whisper, and then nothing. The public-private partnerships failed to be realized, as corporate powers found it more profitable to monetize the rot than to hunt a solution that wasn’t there. Most NGOs went belly-up as the cost of attrition outpaced donations. Only the true believers and the truly desperate remain now, scraping together ramshackle missions on shoestring budgets and aiming themselves with a hope and a prayer to spit in the eye of God.

4. What is to Come

We created R’lyeh. Not with intention, but that’s no consolation. As industrial modernity slouched through history towards Bethlehem and was born, so too was born in our Dreaming the scion of all our sublimated terrors. We could see the shape of the future, where men would learn new ways to kill and revel in killing, and we recoiled. We built a fortress of denial, projected all our own failings on a savage Other pounding at the gates, but the enemy has been inside all along and no walls can hold back the coming century. They cannot hold back the abyss of the future, and the monster we made to fill it.

We need not worry about Cthulhu's rising: he is already here, and he is risen indeed.

She Sings at the End

 

crocutable

[Heads up: this one goes a bit harder than usual, enough so that I'd rather be safe than sorry and stick a warning up front. Gore, references to sexual violence, and a lot of 2026-grade hopeless bleak despair to follow.]

 

它餓

Interior. A TV kitchen set, illuminated by dim lights far above the sound stage. A pile of animal carcasses - endangered, exotic, unidentifiable - spills off the counter and onto the floor. Flies swirl in granular black clouds.

A woman stands at the chopping block, cleaver in hand, grinning out at an audience only she can see. Her apron reads:

 FUCK
 MARRY
 KILL
 THE COOK

She’s not wearing anything else.

"We really have to stop meeting like this: what will the neighbors think?"

She draws a bird of paradise from the mound and the blade falls with a wet sli-chunk. 

"The line that divides man from beast is abhorrence of the flesh. The beast harbors no illusions of its own nature; man glimpses the truth - that he is a machine designed to eat, fuck, and die - and recoils, screaming Lord take this thorn from my side!"

She sticks a feather in her hair and sweeps the mangled scraps of the bird off the counter and into a blue plastic bin.

"Desperate to prove that he is master of his own body, to prove that he is anything but a meat-fuck machine, he will kill and rape and consume and enslave and he will build a placid island of corpses on the black sea of infinity. With trembling hand and seething mind he will drive his knife deep between his ribs and carve out his own heart.”

She slices open an orangutan’s belly, pulls out its intestines, weaves them in her fingers like a cat’s cradle.

"But he can't resist the destiny of complex life, no matter how much he cuts away. He cannot rid himself of his desire and he cannot satisfy it. Sepsis blooms in his mutilated spirit… and he rots. "

She tosses the entrails off-screen and brings down the cleaver on a neat row of thylacine pups.

"Grunting in darkened rooms, they give obsequience to me."

Several heavy blows sever a giraffe's head from its neck; its purple tongue hangs out cartoonishly.

"The abyss stares back with the reflection of one's own face."

She sticks her hand up the stump of the creature's neck and puppets its mouth open and close. Glassy eyes roll in their sockets.

"NUMBER! GO! UP! YAAAAAAAAAAY!"

She smiles with gleaming teeth as the lights flicker out.

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn this way."

The screen fades to black. White text, jittering from the film reel, displays a real-time global death count of livestock updated by the second. 

 

**

 

 

Item OΔ-TS10B CINNABAR

Blue plastic milk crate containing twenty-eight Fujifilm VHS cassettes. Recovered via dead drop handoff in 1993, last documented in 2000, current whereabouts unknown. Prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong. 

Seven tapes currently in storage; three recovered during Operation HAVERSHAM in 2007 (prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong in 1995), one purchased from the 2010 Black Auction, two found during 2014-2016 field storage consolidation and inventory, and one recovered in 202█ during CSC team's investigation of Agent Merriweather’s death.

 

**

 

1982: Operation GRISTMILL - Emergency activation of Hong Kong assets to counter emerging threat in Kowloon Walled City. Primary and secondary vectors neutralized; all known Three Stars Movement members terminated. Three of four agents KIA; survivor considered unfit for continued duty and retired (d. 1988; self-termination via gunshot). No further activity detected during follow-up.

 

**

 

Crumpled piece of notebook paper:
SPELL LIST
1. Enlarge
2. Know Guilt
3. Octopus Flesh
4. Fear
5. Creeping Gloom (as Cloudkill)
6. Regenerate
7. Sculpt Flesh
8. Call Down the Void

 

**

truthFINAL.docx
(Hill, 202█)

1431-page manifesto/journal in over a dozen iterations dating back to 2014. From 2017 onwards, the document is dominated by Hill’s belief in what he calls the Empire to Come; an eternal fascist state formed at the culmination of human history by the economic and social fusion of China and the United States. By virtue of being the only technological civilization to survive anthropogenic climate change (through the violent purge of “degenerate elements”), the Empire to Come would be the de-facto great power of the post-Anthropocene world, enslaving or exterminating any of the remaining “racially-inferior subhumans of the new stone age”, and later making contact with the alien civilization that originally seeded earth with life.

Hill is convinced that he is in contact with one of the Empire’s semidivine “god-eater” inhabitants, and that this entity (referred to as “the Whore” in the document) speaks to him from the future through video media. He likewise believes that service to the Whore, in the form of feeding her through the MEAT BOX, will be rewarded with a place of honor in histories not yet written as a vanguard of the Empire not yet made: itemized lists of offerings begin with store-bought meat and swiftly escalate to include wildlife, stolen pets, livestock, and ultimately human beings. Hill views his patron with equally obsessive desire and disgust; significant space is devoted to his method of keeping himself free the Whore’s influence through ritualized semen retention and meditative fantasies of sexual violence against her. 

Viewed as a whole, the document indicates that Hill’s contact with the vector exaggerated and intensified pre-existing psychological trends, with sudden shifts in 2017 and 2019 correlating to his acquisition of untitled.mp4 from a file-sharing site as part of a bulk lot of pirated pornography and Tape #0 from an anonymous online seller, respectively. It is unclear, however, how much direct influence the vector had over Hill's mental and emotional deregulation and later physical mutations.

 

**

1968: The Cultural Revolution's anti-cult operations arrest and execute seventy-six members of the Great Lady Society in Shanghai. Two survivors manage to evade capture and smuggle themselves to Hong Kong.

 

** 

 

Tape #12

Exterior. Day. 

An orange wall of burning rainforest rises above a line of blackened earth. A woman stands facing the inferno, her back to the approaching camera. As the camera turns to view her in profile, she raises a curled pangolin to her mouth and bites through its armor; scale shards cut into her gums and blood drips down her chin. She crunches for an uncomfortable minute, winces as she swallows.

“Sure hope that guy enjoys his 20,000 pictures of Rouge the Bat's big stinky feet.” 

**

2014: Photograph posted to r/urbanexploration in a thread titled "Nope. Not today, Satan." Image is of a darkened doorway with no room visible beyond. Two phrases are painted on the concrete wall: "AN ABYSS” in black, and below that in red “A MIRROR".

**

Item recovered during investigation: Black 3-ring binder with no identifying marks or labels; 55 sheets of blank looseleaf paper plus a single page containing an anonymous account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Irregularities and errors in the text indicate machine translation. 

The passage details the arrival of an unnamed woman with noblewoman’s clothes but “a vulgar manner”. She announces that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions; when the villagers say they have nothing to give and have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. With the villagers unsure how to respond, the woman reaches into her sleeve and throws a single dumpling into the mud. “Let’s see which of you is favored.”

Violence erupts among the villagers as she departs, laughing as she twirls her parasol.

 

**

 

1869: A young man, hollow-faced and grim, arrives in Shanghai. He finds work on the docks - it pays little, but he is a stranger to neither poverty nor hunger. He looks no one in the eye, only past or through them, as if forever watching something that isn’t there. Perhaps it was, once. Perhaps it will be.

**

One-star Amazon reviews for The Seventh Goddess: Reconstructing Matriarchal Anatolian Religion in Light of Recent Discoveries at Boncuklu Tarla (Iverson, 2018)

• "A meandering cavalcade of bad archaeology, worse sociology, Jungian psychoanalysis and second wave gender-essentialism. The evidence provided for the central hypothesis is cherrypicked and spurious at best, and easily disproven with other sources." 

• "Reads like a parody."

• "I’m disappointed that it doesn’t go full ancient aliens. If you’re going to be a nutjob might as well lean into it and throw some nephilim in there.

• "Author had a meltdown and deleted their twitter over one piece of fanart whomp whomp

• "Was honestly expecting an ad for yoni eggs at the back.

• "The seated woman of Catalhoyuk has never been done this dirty."

• "𒈠𒄠𒁲𒄑𒌍𒀀𒉿𒂗𒋾𒀊"

• "Spends an entire chapter desperately trying to explain how a male skeleton buried in women’s clothing is anything else."

• "They got they’re tits are out"

**

Tape #5

Snow clarifies into grainy footage of a grimy strip club. Neon lights; music bass-boosted into atonal thumping. An enormous woman sits cross-legged on the stage, surrounded by the limp bodies of naked men. She tears a big bloody chunk from a man’s neck with her teeth, bobs her head in time with music that’s not playing as she chews. Then she stands up, stretches, yawns, and looks down the camera and out of the screen. She smiles, winks, and cartwheels off the stage, bolting towards the door in the back of the club with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. The door shatters and she vanishes from view.

Tape continues for eight minutes before police sirens are heard in the distance and the screen fades back into snow.

 

**

1873: A Shanghai dockworker describes visions of heaven to those who will listen. He tells them how the weight of humanity's evil deeds has grown so great that the cycle of karma has become unbalanced. There can be no escape through virtuous acts: the Middle Way is closed off, the course of the Tao is askew. Even the foreign Christ cannot absolve what has been committed. The only means of salvation is to cast all one’s deeds onto the Great Lady, the sin-eater who takes all debaucheries and grotesqueries into herself. There is no forgiveness in service to her, but there is freedom.

 

**

Tape #17

Exterior. Night. Dead of winter.

A woman in a backless black silk dress stands in foot-deep snow underneath the arch of the Union Stockyard Gate. Wind howls, snowflakes whirl. She doesn’t react to the cold as she sharpens a knife against an obsidian whetstone. A trussed bison hangs from a noose originating out of frame, slowly drifting, twisting, back and forth. 

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing folks that he existed in the first place. Sinners don’t want forgiveness, they want someone to blame. They want a man with a sharp suit and a bladed tongue, stepping into their life like a pharaoh of old to offer them just enough rope to hang themselves. Someone they can outwit before the debt comes due. But they never do, and you and I both know that it’s all coming from inside the house.”

The camera pans up, following the rope to its vanishing point. A black hole and its wan orange accretion disk dominates the sky, pulsing and thrashing and lashing out with fuligin tendrils. Stars fall towards it in long, curved arcs and vanish beyond the event horizon. Low moaning grows in intensity until the endless crashing wave of noise threatens to consume all other sensory input and the camera snaps back down to the woman and the silence of deep winter. She holds a bloody finger up to her lips.

“Shhh. Don’t wake the baby.”

 

**

 

1922: An old man, now, bedridden and fading, looks out the window and watches the rain. He hasn’t worked on the docks for forty years; he hasn’t given a sermon in ten. Whether human frailty or his brushes with the divine that have brought him here, it doesn’t matter. The Great Lady Society devours itself; factionalism among the inner circle has made the situation unstable, untenable; there will be a mad, violent scramble for power the moment he dies, and some of his lieutenants might not wait that long.

But the men walking up to that precipice are no more than far-away shadows passing through his vision. He sits and watches the rain, and sixty-some years ago he huddles in the same downpour in a half-collapsed shack that he never left. Clammy and burning with fever, he is bones and rags and a pit that devours itself.

Just a few feet away, a woman lies curled in the mud, the faint rise of her ribs the only sign of life. She’d been here when he staggered in and collapsed hours ago; she might have done the same, just a few hours before that.

He prays, but his mouth is too dry for words and his thoughts slur together into meaningless chaos. Sense-memories blur together: farm, sermon, baptism, hunger, an angel in the upper air…

The woman’s lips twitch; he hears her voice, clear and steady like starlight and still water…

“Take this and eat of it; this is my body, which will be given up for you.”

He reaches out a trembling hand, and drags himself towards her.

 

**

Item found in field storage: Grey sweatshirt, XXXL. Cuffs stained with dried blood.

Item found in field storage: Article printout from a Japanese paranormal website (May 02 2018) describing sightings of a "starving woman" (ue-onna) cryptid in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures.

Item found in field storage: Polaroid photograph of archaeological dig site. Headless skeletons lie in spokes around a small cavity containing voluptuous female figurine.

Item found in field storage: Carrying case containing 8cm black granite figurine of masturbating, obese woman. 

 

**

707 CE: A novice at Samye monastery suffers a manic episode while fasting. He steals dyed sand from the storeroom, locks himself in his cell, and when the elder brothers last they force the door open, find the novice weeping inconsolably: he has painted a mandala of the eight hot hells and at their center there is a voluptuous goddess, nude but for the black veil covering her face and the golden symbol in its center. 

 

**

Tape #10

Exterior. Day.

Howling wind; choking dust. Brown clouds veil the sun’s silver disk. A tattered American flag flaps on the other side of three layers of chain link and barbed wire. Dark shadows of low buildings are barely visible through the shroud. 

A man speaks, his voice pasted in from a lower-quality recording.

“This criticism of the president’s executive order is baseless: Class-III demographics have historically been a drain on the nation’s resources, and the federal work-settlement program finally presents an opportunity for those individuals to engage as productive members of society.”

A woman with a black umbrella walks into frame from the left. The camera moves to follow her, settling about ten feet behind as she walks through a maze of rusted vehicles in what is presumably a parking lot, past an empty guard station with a shattered barrier, and down an empty road for three hours forty-four minutes.

The empty road turns into a cluster of empty buildings. Many burned, all empty.  Shattered storefronts like broken teeth. A jackknifed semitruck blocks an intersection. Woman and camera turn right for a few blocks, then she stops and points up at a desiccated corpse hanging from a streetlight by a cargo belt. The camera zooms in to a plywood sign fastened around its neck, but whatever was painted on it has long been worn away.

“Drought is God’s punishment for sexual deviancy, or so I heard on the news. They cut to commercial right after, so I couldn’t catch the rest. The divine pleuroma hates anal penetration and loves same-game parlay, you learn new things every day.”

A gust of wind sends the corpse swinging and tears the umbrella from the woman’s hand. She watches it tumble away like a dandelion seed.

“Dingaling-ding, Dr. Pavlov; I want strange fruit for dinner.”

 

** 

 

244 BCE: A petitioner from a village outside of Sarnath, arrives in Pataliputra. He pleads with the guards to grant him an audience with the great Ashoka, telling them that his village is tormented by a mahāpreta, a ghost so hungry that it feeds on the living and ignores all offerings made to appease it. He is turned away as another beggar and madman, but for three desperate days he returns until a young captain takes pity on him and passes word to Tivala. By the time the prince persuades his father to see the pilgrim, it is already too late: the man has starved to death on his own feet.

**

 

Video #12

Interior. The camera pans over hundreds of naked, emaciated people packed into the antiseptic stainless steel of a meatpacking plant. Men with face shields and submachine guns stand along an elevated walkway and stare down at the trudging mass, implacable, bored. A man’s voice ripples over shitty loudspeakers: “And the ʟᴏʀᴅ said: “Tx’uragh dzmllik a’andlat! Again I say unto you: if a man should lay down his life in service of the Great Ones he shall be lifted up! For it is written that you shall love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you!”

Video ends abruptly.

**

Tweet: Cartoon depiction of the Venus of Boncuklu Tarla in Pride flag bodypaint, captioned “Getting kinky with it since 10,000 BC”; Posted June 15 2021 by @████████.

**

 

Tape #9

Heavily-degraded footage of a room, dimly lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb. Cracked concrete wall covered in graffiti. A pile of corpses fills the frame. A cardboard sign sits on a wooden chair, displaying an RCA test pattern and the text PLEASE STAND BY. Occasional humming and heavy footsteps can be heard from offscreen. No apparent end to footage.

**

461 BCE: The magus, his hands shaking, steps into the garden to collect himself. The night air is cool but brings no comfort: the exorcism failed. The merchant’s wife is dead, her body burst open like a rotting fruit. Jahi and Bushyasta had resided in her, and they had laughed at every invocation of Ahura Mazda until their host had choked on blood and vomit. The magus attempts to pray, but finds no solace in it. The daevas’ laughter renews itself in his mind at each mention of the holy name.

**

 

Video #3

Exterior. Dusk.

Waves sussurate on sand. From out of frame, the voice of an elderly man deliriously mumbles over and over in Koine Greek: "Lord, take this thorn from my side..."

His pleading goes unanswered and eventually fades into soft, stuttering whimpers. A large, dark shape rises from the water, backlit by the last smear of orange in the west. The tape degrades into static and then nothing.

 

**

 

3581 BCE: The men of the koryos, drunk on glory and exuberant red thoughts, put the village to the sword. A cheer goes up as flames erupt in thatch. Sky Father smiles on them today: it is a day for slaves and plunder, cattle and sheep, lamentations and gore. 

Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, strikes down an old man with a spear; Hsulaʕwes barks “Posti bhebhudhi!” off to his left and Kuonikos spins to face the burning longhouse. His brain shorts for a moment struggling to square how the woman emerging from the structure even managed to stand up, let alone walk: Kuonikos has never encountered obesity before. 

Before a second thought can command his body, the woman raises her arm and points a thick finger at him. A single word booms in Kuonikos’ thoughts like the memory of thunder…

Ṕ̴̰̰̇Ḧ̴̺̓’̷̜̘̎N̶̗͔̾G̶̥̿L̷̗̹̈́U̵̬̾̈́I̶͓̿̐X̴̤͋́H̸͎̥͑Ŗ̸͔̄

…and Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, is struck with the greatest pain he has experienced or imagined. All thought, all awareness, all sense of self evaporate in violence as his skin is degloved scalp to toe, his anal sphincter collapses, his guts fall out in a shower of blood and shit, his lungs rot in his chest.

It still takes three days for him to die.

**

Tape #20

Exterior. Day.

Handheld camcorder footage date stamped MAY 03 1996; recorder walks along a dirt path next to a creek. Mountains bear down over the greenery, claustrophobic. Light fog; no birdsong.

A woman speaks from off-camera:

“In times of need, when the earth and sky gave no aid, they came to the caves. Priestesses fattened on pemmican and mammoth meat, spirits ablaze with sacred psilocybe, would descend alone into the dark places to speak with the dead and the spirits of things older than the moon and sun.”

The camera emerges from the woods to a clearing at the head of a valley. The overgrown ruins of an Orthodox chapel abut the cliff-face. Warning signs in Russian and Georgian demand the reader turn back or be shot. The lopsided bulk of a Soviet troop carrier rusts where it came to rest. Faded graffiti tags splatter vehicle, church, rock wall in acrylic petroglyphs.

Stepping around brush and rubble, the camera enters the chapel through a hole in the wall. Time has reduced the iconostasis to a pile of rotting wood, bird shit, saints peeled of paint until they are faceless shapes. The altar and the stone it rested on lie disturbed, thrown aside by some moment of violence to reveal an open pit into the rock, sloping away into darkness. The camera goes just up to the edge, peering down into the gloom.

“You can fly too close to more than just the sun.”

The camera drops suddenly into the hole; the tape ends with a flash of black and then static.

 

**

 

Tape #26

Totalizing, featureless dark. Raspy breathing, footsteps on stone, the brush of a hand against an unseen wall. No light has ever reached this place.

At 11 seconds, a woman begins speaking. Unidentifiable words, flat intonation. Echoes bounce in irregular, chaotic waves. Yellow subtitles flicker at the bottom of the screen.

“My name is ████, of the ████████; my mother was ███████; her mother was █████. I was inducted into the mysteries by █████████████████. ██████ son of █████ was the love of my heart. I have no daughters nor sons.”

The mantra goes on. Her voice grows rough as recitation wears at her throat. She stumbles and skips over words, chokes on her breath, repeats phrases or names in loops, stops suddenly and starts anew from the beginning. Acoustic analysis provides the lightest implication of her surroundings.

On the 23rd cycle, she pauses midway and then resumes after an extended exertion. 

Running water is briefly audible on the 58th cycle.

On the 71st cycle, she slips and falls, and lays still for two minutes and ten seconds. All following cycles are recited with severe discomfort.

By the 110th cycle, there’s not enough space for an echo. Her footsteps transition into the shuffle of hands and knees, and then a sporadic dragging.

During the 135 cycle, she stops moving at all.

She stops speaking midway through the 294th cycle, repeating “the love of my heart” twice before falling silent. Ragged breathing continues for another seven hours and twelve minutes; footage continues indefinitely afterwards.

**

1925: China has been in a state of war, civil and otherwise, for nearly a century. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. J. Elias arrive in Shanghai by steamer ship. They will leave a string of corpses in their wake as they attempt to dismantle the Great Lady Society, and by week's end three of them will be dead, two will be in jail, and one will vanish into the night. On July 7th 1962, he will emerge from the Siberian forest, approach a Soviet guard station, request a doctor in perfect Russian, and keel over dead on the spot.

**

Tape #??

City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman in an oversized sweatshirt sits atop a throne of corpses underneath the shade of a yellow umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill the background. She is eating a charred shank of meat with a human foot attached. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says:

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”

She’s speaking in English, this time. Her subtitles are a meaningless snarled jumble: Hanzi, Mkhedruli, Avestan, Latin, Devanagari.

"You know the line already, I won’t bore you by repeating it."

She swallows her mouthful, but doesn’t take another bite. A butterfly lands on her shoulder; she ignores it.

“There were seven of us, once. The mother. The hunter. The witch. The warrior. The exile. The fool. And me. Seven sisters, not of blood but of bond, all gone. Now there’s just me. They left me behind, or I went on ahead.”

She flicks the butterfly away.

"I appreciate the company."

She resumes eating in silence, with no apparent endpoint.

**

Basement
Concrete and cinder block. High enough to stand upright, but you cannot shake the instinct to duck. Buzzing incandescent bulb; murky gold-orange light. Cool, wet air reeks of meat, shit, and fear.

• Handcuffs dangle from a pipe affixed to the wall.
• Floor drain caked in brown-black sludge.
• Bear-resistant trash disposal. MEAT BOX scribbled in paint pen over every available inch of surface space.
• CRT television with built-in VCR player on dusty workbench.
• Light blue plastic milk crate containing one VHS tape; cardboard box labeled in Hanzi by two different hands
• Bold permanent marker: DO NOT VIEW
• Shaky pencil: SHE SINGS AT THE END

  

**

Video #NaN

Exterior. Day. 

A woman in a blood-crusted Vikings jersey stands in knee-deep snow, suburban housing behind her, and stares directly down the camera barrel.

“I regret to inform you that the future is an illiterate fascist in a bunker raping his lobotomized daughters, forever. The LLM side-loaded into his proprietary brain implant showers him with praise. His sons, arrayed like the shining hosts of heaven in their electric trucks, will ride out into the concentration camps for sport and will stack the dead like buffalo skulls.” 

She stumbles sideways, as if struck by a heavy wind. The snow is undisturbed.

“A quart of wheat for a dogecoin, and three quarts of barley for an etherium; but do not damage the soylent or Mr. Beast’s kitchen.”

She grimaces, as if straining to keep down vomit. Words struggle for purchase.

“The last men on Mars will eat each other. An agoge will be built on the National Mall. The mighty ones shall cry out ‘Father! Father!’ to a god that died before the sun was born.”

Somewhere in the distance, a dog bays. She staggers towards the camera. An eye has changed: black sclera, red iris, gold pupil like an inverted Y.

“There is a worm in the heart of the universe and its law is red.”

She steps back, closes her eyes, and takes a long, deep breath. In. Out. Again. Then she opens her eyes and shrugs.

“But what are you gonna do? I’m just the-”

A gunshot cracks; the bullet hits her in the back of the head and bursts out from her right temple. She falls forward in a limp pile with a soft whumph.

She doesn’t get back up.

Twenty seconds later, two men in tactical gear and balaclavas enter the frame. They inspect the body, exchange a few muffled words, and the tape ends.

**

The final act is upon us. With the poise and elegance of a kalpa's practice, the soprano takes the stage for one last aria. She smiles at the shadowed audience, raises a hand…

It is the end of the last opera in the world.

**

Well then, here we are. This post took three years to write, possibly a bit longer, and there’s an entire scrapped essay about the process. (I still have the draft, if folks want to read it: let me know in the comments.)

(Edit: Essay written, here it is.)

Tā È will be a familiar face to longtime readers of the blog (if I haven’t borked it, those characters at the top should translate as “she is hungry” - this isn't technically her name, just the label on that first tape, but it works in a pinch). The form she takes here is an amalgamation of sources: her first iteration was a minor mod / reference to 2016 shotgun scenario Do Not View by Trung Bui (see Operation HYACINTH) where I swapped out Y’golonac for the Bloated Woman from Masks of Nyarlathotep. Then she shows up in untitled.mp4 in the Lighthouse Field Guide and TAKE-HOME CONTAINER, and then once (possibly twice, depending on how you interpret the Secret Mark recitation) in my anomalous media post.

Anyway, surprising absolutely no one, the Bloated Woman’s writeup in Masks of Nyarlathotep and the Malleus Monsteorum is absolutely terrible, and it's that special kind of bad where the part of my brain that has dumb ideas is compelled by its badness goes "you should totally make a good version of this idea as a writing challenge / for style points." 

From there she also inherited some theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives: I totally understand why he got dropped from the show (having the most prominent Chinese character be a cannibalistic monster does skew close to some old Yellow Peril tropes), but! in 2/3 of his on-air appearances, Tom dabbles in Christianity-flavored flesh horror; I was expecting his plot to have some connection to the Taiping Rebellion (since that would be the historical context where you'd most likely get all three factors in one place), but TMA didn't go that route and I kept it in my back pocket. Hopefully I didn't fuck it up. 

I guess I do need to finish that essay now: this outro is getting bogged down with me summarizing it.

It took so much self-control to not have her drop "This is your coming century!" in the last tape.

What do people know about the Mythos? Part 2

Picking up from where we last left off.

Tlācayoh

A headless spirit, said to have been born from the anger of a woman murdered by her wicked husband for trying to escape with her lover. While frightening, she is depicted as a neutral or even helpful figure so long as she is treated respectfully. Petitioners will occasionally receive direct aid from her in the killing or cursing of abusive fathers or husbands.

The Classical Nahuatl name listed above is a compound of tlācatl (“human being”) and the suffix -yoh (“made of, full of, covered in”).

n!Kai

A hapax legemenon, claimed to be the name of a legendary subterranean city in the journals of an anonymous Franciscan friar writing in New Mexico province c. 1680. The friar claims to have heard the term from the local Pueblo in reference to a mythic underworld reserved for monstrous creatures and humans who have transformed into them, but this is not substantiated by either Spanish or indigenous sources. The brief description of the word’s pronunciation is sufficient enough to identify an alveolar nasal click; no known language of the Americas, extant or historical, features click consonants of any kind.

The Slave Market at Dylath-Leen

An 1874 painting by artist and professional dilettante Sir Calvin Halsey that is nothing short of a crowning achievement in how many orientalist stereotypes one can fit onto a single canvas. It depicts a short, dark-skinned and narrow-faced man with an orange turban pacing through a moonlit plaza, inspecting the unclothed bodies of a line of captive women. Cloven feet and the tufts of furry ankles peek out from beneath the man’s silk robes and an opium pipe smolders in his ringed and jeweled hand.

Draft sketches of the painting were discovered by chance in 1996, revealing that the slaver had undergone significant revisions in design; the first iteration was an unclothed, rotund, furry creature with a flat face, wide mouth, short horns, enormous ears and six eyes, described by one art historian as “the cousin that Ewoks buy their meth from”.

The Venus of Boncuklu Tarla

8cm black granite figurine of an obese, masturbating woman. The announcement of its discovery in 2018 was immediately beset by controversy on all fronts:

• The discovery was neither announced nor verified by the Mardin Museum, which oversees excavations at the site.
• The discovery was published in the Journal of Truth-Centered Archaeology and Anthropology, which regularly espouses fringe and conspiratorial theories of human history.
• While the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture would potentially have had the means to shape granite with flint or emery, it is unlikely that they could do so with such precision and realistic proportion at such a small scale.

All together, the figure is considered a modern forgery. But, while she failed to revolutionize archaeology, she has gained some small online fame both for the expected reasons, and for triggering the Twitter meltdown and resignation of the Journal's head editor after the Venus was depicted in fanart as a protestor against UK gender-essentialist legistlation.

Tablet 65

Fragmentary Akkadian-era cuneiform tablet describing an exorcism performed on a man that had started eating the dead and speaking in their voices, and who had only been captured after the killing and consumption of a six-year-old boy. The lack of formality in the text indicates that the text was a private missive, but beyond the address of the recipient as “my brother priest of Nanna-Sin” there’s no identifying information present for either party. The author asks for guidance, feeling that he is unfit to continue in his office, as well as aid with a matter obscured by a lacuna in the text. 

H.P. Lovecraft

A prolific but forgotten-in-his-time writer of gothic fantasy and historical romance stories, who gained post-mortem fame when he was used as a shared pen-name by over two dozen science fiction authors as the center point of an elaborate metafictional shared universe / comedic bit.

Bigfoot (Austrolopithicus gigantus pattersoni)

A descendent of the robust austrolopith lineage, averaging 6-8 feet tall. Migrated out of Africa ~2 mya and underwent relatively rapid gigantism to adapt to the Tibetan Plateau and northeastern Siberia, with populations migrating to the Americas through Beringia ~100 - 80 KYA. Driven to extinction by arrival of H.  sapiens, with the most recent remains dated to ~11 KYA.

History of the Kings of the Divs

1868 French 'translation' of a supposed Classical Persian text detailing the sordid three-thousand year-long political history of the demonic dynasties of Mazandaran (separate from the Iranian province of the same name) and culminating in the defeat of Div-e Sepid by the hero Rostam. 

While near-certainly a modern invention (no source text or substantiating manuscripts have ever emerged), the author was at least familiar with the Shahnameh and had a solid grasp of the language. With that factored in, it is a surprisingly solid fantasy epic filled with grotesque monsters, daring-do, a crumbling empire, wicked sorcerer-viziers, and mild-to-moderate period-appropriate racism.

Tape #53 (08-14-76)

8-track cassette tape recording of a conversation overheard by amateur radio enthusiast Charles “Chuck” Angstrom of Coconino County, Arizona sometime between 1:30 and 3:00 AM on August 14th, 1976.

The six-minute conversation, spoken entirely in Navajo, consists of four men (callsigns Bear, Fox, Owl, and Turtle), coordinating the hunt of a presumably-rabid coyote. All four speakers use both conversational and coded speech, indicating that at least one of them had been trained as a code talker.

The original 8-track cassette was in poor condition at the time its contents were digitized by Charles’ son in 2007; much of the conversation is difficult to understand even for native speakers, and several sections have yet to be deciphered. The tape ends mid-conversation with Owl saying “Two, no, three up ahead. Yeah, three of them,” followed by the slam of a car door.

The Pohnpeian Mermaid

Daguerreotype of a hairless, fish-tailed hominid, taken in 1852 by missionary Laurence Douglas  in situ on the shoreline where it was discovered. Subject appears deceased. Douglas later wrote in his journal that he believed the being to be pregnant, and he gave it a Christian burial in an undisclosed location on the island rather than let the corpse be burned per the wishes of the local Pohnpeians.

Sagart & Carey Plastics

A small plastics manufacturing company headquartered in Jackson’s Hole, Wisconsin. Made national news in March of 2023, when a DEA raid turned into a 3-hour long siege and gunfight. An estimated 60-80 employees escaped the premises and remain at large.

Aihoat

Signature monster of the 1973 horror movie God In the Labyrinth - a many-legged and many-eyed off-white blob inhabiting a seemingly endless maze outside normal time and space (see: Navidson Tapes). The effects aren’t great, but the puppeteer and cameraman do their best with the resources they have. The film is somewhat infamous in cult horror circles for the suicide of the writer-director during editing, with the last three sequences prior to his death being the “tunnel chase”, “human pens” and “Cistine (sic) chapel contact”.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that Aihoat’s luring of humans into its maze and subsequent implantation of parasitoid larva is the monster’s attempt to preserve some of humanity against nuclear war. The surviving characters are offered a choice: live as a zombified host for Aihoat’s larva, try to survive on their own in the labyrinth and find other survivors, or brave a return to the now-irradiated surface. The film ends before choice is made.

“The Majestic 12”

Informal name for a group of US Air Force officials affiliated with Project Blue Book and the investigation of unidentified flying organisms.

First and Last Dynasty of Mu

1974 science-fantasy novel by Alphonse Lowe about the collapse of the titular lost continent’s royal family. One is unlikely to find a more corrupt collection of incestuous backstabbers than this horrid lot, and Lowe revels in the grossout horror of it all to a degree most modern readers would find concerning.

The Harvestman

Urban legend: a gigantic arachnid that, when seen at a distance and under low light conditions, appears as an exceptionally tall human with obscured or blank facial features. Also called “Mr. Long Legs”.

Point Nemo Anomalous Exclusion Zone

An 850 km diameter no-sail, no-fly zone maintained around the oceanic pole of inaccessibility. The cordon began as an American endeavor (with support from the United Nations) in 1962, with Soviet ships present under the Nautilus Treaty from 1972 to 1979.

No verifiable information has been produced regarding the purpose of the cordon or the Zone’s contents. Photographs taken from the ISS and leaked to the press in 2006, if not doctored, indicate an island in the center of the Zone that is otherwise not accounted for in public-facing satellite imagery.

All civilian attempts to breach the cordon have been rebuffed with force.

The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan

An early roleplaying game in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons, set in a tyrannical sci-fantasy empire of far-future Earth. While never particularly popular, the novel setting attracted a small and dedicated fan base until posthumous revelations that its author had kidnapped and imprisoned a woman in his basement for over a decade before burying her dismembered body on his property. 

The Navidson Tapes

Handheld camcorder footage chronicling  the discovery and exploration of a featureless, lightless and seemingly-infinite labyrinth within the home of a man who introduces himself as “Will Navidson”. Five copies of the tape were found in storage at the University of Richmond’s film department in the fall of 2000, leading most to assume that it is either an abandoned student film or an elaborate hoax; None of the persons in the film have been identified due to intentional face-blurring of all involved parties, though the place and time of shooting have been narrowed down to Virginia in the spring of 1990. 

Ixion

15 Jupiter-mass brown dwarf orbiting at a distance of 1.68 light years from the Sun, discovered by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer in 2011. This discovery spawned a wave of panic among the public due to its similarities with the Nemesis hypothesis and it was immediately tied to apocalyptic theories regarding the end of the Mayan long count calendar in 2012; the available evidence does not support its involvement in a mass-extinction cycle on Earth, but subsequent observations have confirmed at least two major moons, the larger of which is estimated at 0.84 - 1.2 Earth masses. Unmanned missions to Ixion have been proposed, but have been judged unfeasible by multiple space agencies given the time cost.

 

The Gollynack

Urban legend emerging in the mid-80s nightclub scene of southwest England with a core narrative as follows:

A woman returning home alone after a night out is stalked and then attacked by a man (usually described as a serial rapist and murderer escaped from a nearby prison or mental institution) who pursues her into an abandoned house. Cornered in the cellar, the woman decapitates her attacker with an axe and buries the still-moving body behind an unfinished brick wall. There the killer transforms into a flabby, headless monster with mouths in its palms that incites victims of its influence to acts of violence and sexual depravity (though stories differ on whether the creature’s influence forces its victims to act, or simply encourages tendencies that were already present.)

The creature’s popularity has remained relatively consistent over time, thanks to the Aristocrats-style one-upmanship that flows naturally from the premise, but has never been particularly high for the same reason.

 

Liao

Opium derivative encountered by American troops during the Vietnam War, predominantly in the highlands by the Laotian border. Users commonly report highly distorted perception of time and hallucinations of threatening entities; additional effects include extreme paranoia, an irrational fear of man-made enclosed spaces, and seizures triggered by sustained observation of right angles, all of which may persist after the drug’s other effects have worn off.

Copycat street drugs (Reverb, Black Lotus, Dog’s Paw,  Picasso, etc) have occasionally surfaced in the United States since the 1970s; these have thus far all been invocations of liao’s mysterious reputation applied to ordinary and often adulterated heroin, LSD, or ecstasy.

Crom

Celtic name of unclear provenance; known only from a single Primitive Irish inscription along the blade of a bone knife found alongside the body of Gallagh Man II: “By Crom (this thing) is done”. 

Scholars are divided as to whether the name is in reference to a deity or a human figure, and further divided as to whether it is related to Old Irish cromb (“bent, stooped”), the PIE root *ker- (“host, warband”), or a substrate borrowing.

Liber Ivonis

Purported pre-Roman grimoire, though no copies can be dated to earlier than the 1620 Venetian manuscript. It was predictably banned from publication by the church and later elevated as a core text by the 19th century occult revival, despite its actual contents being a biting and unsubtle satire of European esotericism. The egomaniacal, bloviating Hyperborean’s increasingly absurd attempts at avoiding his creditors, compounded with his repeated failure to accomplish any of the fantastic feats he claims to be able to do and the total indifference of the spiritual entities he encounters, make for a remarkably funny book even 4 centuries after it was written. The trip to Saturn episode in particular has earned the text a spot in many histories of science fiction.

The Witch House of Keziah Mason

Tourist attraction in Arkham, Massachusetts; a supposedly cursed house that once sheltered the witch Keziah Mason as she fled execution in Salem. While all signs point to the Mason narrative as a fabrication to draw in tourists, the house was the centerpoint of the very well-documented 1928 kidnapping and killing of 7-month old Bernard Hamm by Walter Gilman, a graduate student of mathematics at Miskatonic University. Gilman was judged unfit to stand trial due to insanity, and died shortly afterward in the Arkham Sanitarium.

50 Things You Heard Online About Aklo

One would be hard-pressed to find a language more beset by crankery than Aklo. For well over a century it has been the cornerstone of an entire subgenre of bullshit, and the forecast shows no signs of letting up. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are flooded with claims that it:

1. Is the original human language
2. Confirms hard Sapir-Worf
3. Contains no word for love
4. Grants its speakers magical powers
5. Was inherited from aliens
6. Was inherited from angels
7. Was inherited from demons
8. Was inherited from neanderthals
9. Is a memetic virus from space
10. Is Proto-Indo-European
11. Is Proto-Dene-Yeneseian
12. Is Proto-Nostratic
13. Is Proto-Dene-Sinitic-Caucasian
14. Was spoken by dwarflike pre-Celtic inhabitants of Europe 
15. Was spoken by pre-Christian witch-cults
16. Was spoken in Atlantis and / or Lemuria and / or Mu
17. Was spoken prior to the Tower of Babel
18. Was invented by the Soviet Union in order to destabilize the United States
19. Was invented by the Nazis in order to speak to esoteric Hyperborean intelligences
20. Was invented by the child-eating secret societies of the English aristocratic elite
21. Was invented by the United States in order to destabilize the Soviet Union
22. Was invented by Yakub so white people could conspire in secret
23. Was invented by linguists to perpetuate the hoax of Proto-Indo-European
24. Was invented by John Dee
25. Was invented by Noam Chomsky
26. Was invented by the Freemasons
27. Was invented by the Jesuits
28. Was invented by medieval kabbalists
29. Was invented by the United Nations
30. Has grammatical features found in no natural human language
31. Has no numbers
32. Doesn’t permit recursion
33. Violates linguistic universals
34. Isn’t truly pronounceable by humans
35. Is completely without phonemic vowels
36. Is the original language of the Necronomicon
37. Is the language of the Voynich Manuscript
38. Is instinctively understood by children deprived of language
39. Can only be properly translated by AI
40. Is an AI-generated hoax
41. Was spoken by at least two of the 9/11 hijackers
42. Is actually bastardized Sanskrit
43. Is actually bastardized Hungarian
44. Is actually bastardized Basque
45. Is the only oligosynthetic natural language
46. Features no grammatical or semantic ambiguity
47. Can be translated into any language with no loss of meaning
48. Was spoken by God to create the universe
49. Contains a word that will end the world if read aloud
50. Is an elaborate worldbuilding project that got out of hand.

Cursory review of even moderately-reliable sources indicates few to none of these claims has even minimal backing in mainstream linguistics.

What do people know about the Mythos?

I don't buy into the premise of a masquerade between the mundane and supernatural. False dichotomy, Enlightenment hubris, strains disbelief, requires too many extra parts, no conspiracy is airtight, removes potentially interesting interactions, etc etc. Essay for another time. People are going to know something.

Anyway, this post is "what can your DG agents / hapless bystanders / plucky investigators / meddlesome kids find with 30 seconds and a Wikipedia tab". They're meant to be trailheads and initial breadcrumbs - maybe it's a real lead to the real Mythos, maybe it isn't. Just because people know something doesn't mean it's accurate, but it will be something, and that's a sight better than the constant vagaries this genre subjects its readers to.

Been too long since I've done a post like this; the last Lighthouse Field Guide was four years ago. Don't know why I stopped; I wrote enough entries for this one that I had to split it into multiple posts.

 

Innsmouth, Massachusetts 

Historical fishing hamlet along the north coast of the state, rendered a ghost town in 1927 after an FBI raid to break up a bootlegging and gold-smuggling operation. The site was never resettled and was declared a nature reserve in 1937. Hobbyist explorers would occasionally “make pilgrimage” to the ruins of the town, but this ended when the last standing structure (the meeting Hall of the Esoteric Order of Dagon fraternal society) collapsed during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Peaslee-Boyle Syndrome

An extremely rare psychological disorder where the subject will experience a sudden and totalizing shift in personality that will last anywhere from several weeks to several years. Affected individuals will obsessively study niche topics despite no previous interest, neglect existing relationships and occupations, demonstrate both uncharacteristic knowledge and ignorance about topics, and drastically shift the manner and content of their speech.

Episodes will end without warning or apparent cause; affected individuals will return to their previous personality with no memory of the intervening time.

The Mammoth Caves Sloth-Man

Cryptid hailing from south-central Kentucky, first reported by a trio of backpackers in October 1971. Described as a huge, black-furred creature combining the body of a prehistoric ground sloth with the face of a vampire bat. Fairly popular among cryptid fandom. The nearby town of Hoker’s Mill has a festival / farmer’s market / craft fair in his honor the first weekend of October every year. Claims that it was known to the Cherokee as tsatokokwa are, to the best of anyone’s research, wholly fabricated in 2012 by a now-deleted tumblr account.

Black Hat, Red Scarf

A string of purported encounters with a supernatural individual or individuals. The figure varies in appearance and sex (though is usually male), but is always seen wearing a suit, a black hat, and a red scarf, necktie or handkerchief (leading to the common abbreviation of BHRS). 

Encounters typically fall into one of three categories; happenstance meeting, sudden appearance, or conspicuous recurring observation. Many contactees claimed that BHRS possessed intimate knowledge of and familiarity with them, and nearly all of them claim to have received some form of cryptic message. 

Sightings of BHRS have occurred from the mid 1940s to the present, with spikes in the 1970s and late 2010s. The majority of these have been written off as fiction (including all supposed sightings prior to 1945), hoaxes, or pranks; the consistent and easily-replicated wardrobe has ennobled generations of copycats.

Roswell Incident

The June 1947 crash of a high-altitude listening balloon associated with the USAF’s Project Mogul, which over the course of nearly 80 years has proven to be the single most effective piece of disinformation ever devised by human beings entirely by accident. You can tell people the truth, you can put all the evidence in front of them in 8 by 10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows on them, and they will downright refuse to believe that reality could possibly be that fucking boring.

Zhào Zhāo / 兆𬬿

“Graveyard sickle”; a monster (appearing alone or as a group) that occurs sporadically in Ming-dynasty gods-and-demons fiction. Described as a reclusive tribe of cannibal dwarfs from the southern uplands (modern Vietnam and Laos) who desecrate graves, attack travelers with darts covered in paralytic poison, and carve up their still-living victims with heavy iron sickles. While lurid, these narratives are repetitive and occasionally plagiarized, with the trope of the unlucky traveler realizing that their dumplings contain human flesh just before the trap is sprung being particularly rote. No evidence linking the Zhào Zhāo to a real-world cultural group has ever been found; the narratives themselves petered out around 1610 and the monster remained obscure until its inclusion in the 1986 Japanese RPG Tower of Lictor for the PC-88.

March Technologies

American defense contractor that made it big in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Weapons R&D, surveillance, AI development, private security. They have fingers in pies, irons in the fire, and a “Controversies” subheading on Wikipedia the length of a moderately-sized novel. 

Despite doing extremely well for themselves over the last two decades, the company has been showing signs of internal chaos in recent years. C-suite turnover is high, lawsuits are numerous, media scrutiny is high, shareholders are antsy, at least one high-cost classified project for the Air Force has been scuttled, and capping it off the CFO was assassinated in February 2025 and the head of marketing was incriminated on sex trafficking charges through his connection with Jeffrey Epstein in emails released in November of the same year. Public opinion, already at the bottom of the barrel, has managed to dig through the bottom and find a new barrel.

Book of Azathoth

Anonymous High German grimoire, written in Nuremberg during the late 17th century. Composed of three books:

• Book 1: Instructions on summoning various spirits of earthly / heavenly / infernal forces.
• Book 2: A treatise of alchemic principles, mathematics, and natural law.
• Book 3: A treatise on astrology and astronomy, including charts, tables, and observational data.

The author demonstrates vocal support of Copernicus and Galileo, and spends considerable time in Book 3 compiling a new method of divination for his bespoke heliocentric cosmos. Presaging the later development of the galactic model, the author supposes the existence of a central divine-motive force around which the sun orbits in conjunction with the other stars. This force, referred to interchangeably as “azoth”, “azathoth”, “azimuth” and “atziluth”, is claimed by the author to be the originator of both material and spiritual reality, and the engine by which it moves, changes, is destroyed, and renewed.

The Cornucopia House Killings

Quadruple homicide of the staff of a Maryland orphanage on February 5th, 2001. Emergency responders called to the scene by reports of a fire on the property found 19 nonverbal children, nightmarish conditions, and the bodies of four adults shot and thrown into the fire that consumed one of the buildings on the property. That the extreme abuse at Cornucopia House had flown under the radar of the Maryland DCS for years gave police and governmental officials good reason to minimize what they gave to the media, and so the full details of the case were not known by the public until over a decade later.

The initial police investigation was unable to identify or find the killers: all that could be said for certain was that there were multiple assailants, they had prepared for the attack beforehand, and they cleaned up after themselves. A car believed to have been used in the attack was found in the afternoon of Feb 6th, having been dumped into the Chesapeake, but this provided no further leads.

“The French Play”

A 2-act drama supposedly written in Paris during the 1890s, said to drive its readers, actors, and audience mad. Any further details of the characters and plot are vague and inconsistent, besides its placement in the royal court of a far-away and fantastic country,  decadence as both atmospheric feature and artistic style, and the presence of a central figure variously called “Golden Phantom”, “Dandelion King”, “Lord Midra” “Monarch of Masks”, “Aurelius Le’garde”, and similar appellations.

“Atlantean Minotaur” 

Skeleton of a highly-deformed male individual found on the island of Crete in 1923. Subject suffered from gigantism (likely as a symptom of Proteus Syndrome), alobar holoprosencephaly, and heavy cutaneous horn growth, and died at around 14-17 years of age. Skeleton found in a sealed underground chamber at palace site. Cell walls decorated with bull iconography. Trace organic compounds present, analyzed as fecal matter.

 

Verde Arrowhead Cave

A paleolithic site in Portugal, noteworthy for the presence of both homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis bones dated to approximately 54,000 years ago. Surviving cave paintings depict handprints, human figures, fauna, abstract shapes, and a single anomalous inclusion: a row of three triangles painted with a malachite-based green pigment.

Dog-Face

Low-quality photograph circulated as part of various creepypasta stories since 2005. Depicts a hunched figure with a skeletal, dog-like head. The figure’s mouth is open, and most associated pastas claim that it is smiling or laughing. While regarded as a hoax, it has resisted attempts to identify how it was made: the oldest version of the file displays no obvious artifacts of digital manipulation and is believed to be a scan of a physical photo.

 

1930–31 Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition

Disastrous geological survey mission, led by Dr. William Dyer and funded by the N. D. Pickman Foundation. Of the original 20 members (4 faculty, 7 graduate students, 9 mechanical support staff), 12 died after Dr. Thomas Lake split the party to pursue excavations at a secondary location. Survivors claimed that there had been signs of violence at the Lake campsite, though no bodies were recovered nor photographs taken to confirm.

Dr. Dyer dedicated the remainder of his life to unsuccessfully dissuading further expeditions to Antarctica, claiming to have seen a ruined city dominating a mountainous plateau in central East Antarctica;  the 1935 Starkweather-Moore Expedition performed two flyovers of the provided coordinates and found nothing. 

The Necronomicon

A Latin translation of a supposed Greek recension of Abdul al-Hadrat’s Kitab al-Layl, with a later partial English translation of the Latin by John Dee and a full translation of the Greek by Miskatonic University Press in 1938. The most famous grimoire in the world, beyond even the Ars Goetia, the Necronomicon has long been held by both occultists and the public alike as a madness-inducing lodestone of all that is evil in the cosmos.

This is, ultimately, an exaggeration born of absence. With so few manuscripts surviving, European occultists and church authorities filled the gap with an arms race of who could invent the more lurid and blasphemous secrets to slip between its covers. The only madness it is liable to produce would be born of the reader’s exasperation with its tedious bloviating and manic self-contradiction.

The rediscovery of a nearly-complete first-generation manuscript of the Kitab al-Layl in 2008 revealed that nearly nearly 80% of the Necronomicon was original material written centuries after al-Hadrat’s death, based on the Great Circle school of Byzantine occultism which was in many cases only lightly and spuriously based on the original text.

 

Abd al-Hadrat

The 1) pseudonymous 2) pseudopigraphic 3) wholly fictional 4) actual author of the Kitab al Layl. Credited with dozens of other texts and a life so full of portentous occult happenings that it would be a miracle if he had any time to eat, sleep or shit amongst it all. Also known as Abdul Hadrat, or the Latinized Alhazred.

Tsalal

Volcanic island located on the Balleny Hotspot south of Australia. At only 150 miles from the Antarctic coast, it is the southernmost location permanently inhabited by humans. The island’s volcanic soil and hot springs allow for an ecosystem density sufficient to sustain an estimated 800 individuals; the origin of the inhabitants is unknown, with the two leading hypotheses being that they are descended either from a Polynesian or Australian group.

The Tsalal-islanders have rebuffed all outsiders to the island with violence since the island’s discovery in 1828 by the Jane Guy; it is unclear if “Tsalal” is the indigenous word for the island, the people, the ground in general or “What?”, as the only source is the journal of Arthur Gordyn Pym and the eyewitness account of Dirk Peters.

The most recent cruise-by was made by a South Korean vessel on the way to Jang Bogo Station in 2022. Video taken by the crew and later leaked online showed a group of islanders armed with spears and bows emerging from the treeline. One member of the war party, wearing a masked turtleshell helmet and woven coconut-fiber robe, gained a moment of internet popularity (and a long conspiratorial tail) as “Spaceman”.

 

“Dagon”

A humpback whale encountered off the Newfoundland coast in 1836 by the whaler Marcus Green. If the crew’s accounts are accurate, it was potentially the largest member of its species ever observed. Named by the ship’s spotter, Jed Marsh, after the Mesopotamian deity commonly misidentified as a sea god up through the 1920s.

Stephen Alzis

New York nightclub owner, alleged antiquities smuggler and suspected kingpin of semi-apocryphal criminal organization “the Fate”. Shot and killed in 2002 by an unhoused man who believed him to be Satan. The NYT obituary described Alzis as “a peddler of human misery with a narcissist's insufferable charm, whose death will be celebrated by many and mourned by only a hypothetical few.”

 

Miskatonic University

A private liberal arts college in Arkham, Massachusetts. 2024 enrollment: 1049 students. Division-III basketball team with a record that would be hilarious were it not deeply pitiable. Possesses a not-unwarranted reputation as a dumping ground for cranks and failsons; has been pumping out / hiring spiritualists, theosophists, and UFO cultists since the Second Great Awakening and onwards.

Founded in 1741 as the Arkham Presbyterian Seminary, granted a charter as Arkham College in 1785, changed name to College of the Miskatonic in 1803 and finally  became Miskatonic University in 1849. Closed the medical school and sold off most of the infamous “special collection” in 1968 to cover mounting debts.

 

Pentacanthus protomegas (Yéye)

Extremely well-preserved fossil remains of an enormous Cambrian-era echinoderm, unearthed from the Maotianshan Shales in 2014 and overturning the evolutionary history of Earth ever since. Affectionately nicknamed Yéye (“grandpa”) by the research team, pentacanthus possessed a long, cylindrical body with five-fold radial symmetry. Pronounced ridges (the source of its genus name) ran the length of the body, each serving as anchorpoint for a long, winglike fin used for locomotion and terminating in five short tentacles around the mouth opening (each outfitted with a complex and well-developed eye) and five longer tentacles at the posterior end. At over two meters in length (and nearly double that with the tentacles included), Yéye would have been the largest organism on Earth when it was alive, and is believed to have been a suspension feeder similar to the radiodont Aegirocassis.

 

 **

 

I didn't intend for 2025 to turn into the Year of Lovecraft, but turn it did. As frustrating as I find so much of the source material, the remixing is consistently very fun. "Shit makes for good fertilizer" proves itself a reliable truism once again. Special thanks to friend of the blog MysterySpice for pointing out the al-Hadrat replacement for al-Hazred, which turns our beloved ur-occultist from a nonsense name to "servant of the presences" and that's a fucking winner right there.

Also worth shouting out at the end is this post I found linked in a Deep Cuts review, about how HPL and REH built on Machen and off of each other in their stories about prehistoric little folk, which gave us the Tcho-Tcho via Derleth and Schorer. Never have I been more glad that Tolkien hijacked an entire concept so completely than with hobbits: what came before was fucking dire. 

The next post is well under way, and will be incorporating some non-Mythos but thematically appropriate material. Stay tuned.