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:
- 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.
- Scared Straight - the woman expresses disapproval, disdain, or disgust with the contactee’s actions; most commonly regards mistreatment of partners, children, or marginalized populations.
- 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.
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