Hastur

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Hastur (The Unspeakable One, Him Who Is Not to be Named, Assatur, Xastur, or Kaiwan) is a fictional character in the Cthulhu Mythos. Hastur first appeared in Ambrose Bierce's short story "Haïta the Shepherd" (1893) as a benign god of shepherds. Robert W. Chambers later used Hastur in his own stories to represent both a person and a place associated with the names of several stars, including Aldebaran.[1]

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[edit] Hastur in the mythos

In Bierce's "Haita the Shepherd", which appeared in the collection Can Such Things Be?, Hastur is more benevolent than he would later appear in August Derleth's mythos stories. Another story in the same collection ("An Inhabitant of Carcosa") referred to the place 'Carcosa' and a person 'Hali', names which later authors were to associate with Hastur.

In Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895), a fin-de-siècle collection of horror stories, Hastur is the name of a potentially supernatural character (in "The Demoiselle D'Ys"), a place (in "The Repairer of Reputations"), and mentioned without explanation in "The Yellow Sign". The latter two stories also mentioned Carcosa, Hali, Aldebaran, and the Hyades, along with a 'Yellow Sign' and a play called 'The King in Yellow'.

H.P. Lovecraft read Chambers' book in early 1927[2] and was so enchanted by it that he added elements of it to his own creations[3]. There is only one place in Lovecraft's own writings that mentions Hastur (italics added for emphasis):

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections — Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum — and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.... There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of the monstrous powers from other dimensions.
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"

It is unclear from this quote if Lovecraft's Hastur is a person, a place, an object (such as the Yellow Sign), or a deity. Derleth, however, developed Hastur into a Great Old One[4], spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the half-brother of Cthulhu, and possibly the Magnum Innominandum. In this incarnation, Hastur has several avatars:

  • The Feaster from Afar, a black, shriveled, flying monstrosity with tentacles tipped with razor-sharp talons that can pierce a victim's skull and siphon out the brain[5]
  • The King in Yellow.
  • The High Priest Not to Be Described, an entity that wears a yellow silken mask[6])

Hastur's form is amorphous, but he is said to appear as a vast, vaguely octopoid being, similar to his half-niece Cthylla.

[edit] Popular culture

[edit] Literature

Hastur sometimes appears in literature outside of the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror.

  • Hastur is a god with a royal family descended from him in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series.
  • In Paul Edwin Zimmer's Dark Border series, the mysterious Hastur are guardians and protectors of the world.
  • In Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Hastur is a Duke of Hell who becomes trapped in an answering machine. He later escapes when a telemarketer phones, and promptly devours the entire staff of the telemarketing office (unintentionally spreading a "wave of low-grade goodness" throughout the population).
  • The Doctor Who novel All-Consuming Fire equates Hastur with Fenric.
  • In the Stephen King short story "Gramma", the titular "Gramma" invokes Hastur to impregnate her when she is found to be incapable of having a child, and can be made to sleep by being told to "Lie down in the name of Hastur."

[edit] Comics

  • The comic strip User Friendly proposes that Hastur used Usenet as an avatar. Hastur appears in the strip as a sentient blob of very strong coffee made from "Distilled Usenet Bitterness". [1]
  • The comic weekly '2000 AD' featured a story that centred on a vast cruise liner, Leviathan that was lost in a featureless sea for years. Hastur was a demon captured in the bowels of the ship, and was the reason for the misfortune.

[edit] Games

Extrapolating from August Derleth's epithet for Hastur, "He Who Is Not to be Named", the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game suggested in the Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia supplement (TSR, ISBN 0-935696-22-9) that merely speaking Hastur's name brings doom to those who do so. Players will sometimes jokingly doom their compatriots by stating "my dying words are 'hastur, hastur, hastur...'"

This idea was later picked up by the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. [7] It also appears in the PlayStation game Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, where Hastur is a usable persona that can be made using the special material card "King In Yellow".

Hastur is the main enemy in the Sega Genesis games Earnest Evans and El Viento. In both games, he's an evil god worshipped by a crazed cult using him to destroy New York City in the 1920s. The heroine of El Viento, Annet Myer, is descended from Hastur's cursed bloodline.

The role-playing game Delta Green treats Hastur and his counterpart, the King in Yellow, as manifestations of entropy.

The board game Arkham Horror provides Hastur as one of several potential Great Old Ones the investigators may struggle against.

The trading card game Hecatomb features Hastur "The Unspeakable" as a God Card. It was released in Series Three, card #72.

[edit] References

  • Harms, Daniel (1998). "Hastur", The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, 2nd ed., Oakland, CA: Chaosium, pp. 136–7. ISBN 1-56882-119-0. 
  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon, 1st ed., Tempe, AZ: New Falcon. ISBN 1-56184-129-3. 
  • Price, Robert M. (ed.) (1997). The Hastur Cycle, 2nd ed., Oakland, CA: Chaosium. ISBN 1-56882-094-1. 

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Harms, The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, p. 136.
  2. ^ Joshi & Schultz, "Chambers, Robert William", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 38
  3. ^ Pearsall, "Yellow Sign", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 436.
  4. ^ Derleth once entertained the notion of calling Lovecraft's mythos the Mythology of Hastur—an idea that Lovecraft summarily rejected when he heard it. (Robert M. Price, "The Mythology of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, p. i.)
  5. ^ Joseph Payne Brennan (1976), "The Feaster from Afar", The Hastur Cycle (2nd ed.), pp. 272–82.
  6. ^ In Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), this character may be identified with Nyarlathotep.
  7. ^ Harms, The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, p. 136.

[edit] External links

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