The Deep Ones are creatures in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. The beings first appeared in Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931), but were already hinted at in the early short story "Dagon". The Deep Ones are a race of frog-like, ocean-dwelling creatures with an affinity for mating with humans which occurs regularly along the coast.
Numerous Mythos elements are associated with the Deep Ones, including the legendary town of Innsmouth, the undersea city of Y'ha-nthlei, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and the beings known as Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. After their debut in Lovecraft's tale, the sea-dwelling creatures resurfaced in the works of other authors, especially August Derleth.[1]
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Lovecraft provides a description of the Deep One in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":
I think their predominant color was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible.
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Lovecraft describes the Deep Ones as a race of undersea-dwelling humanoids whose preferred habitat is deep in the ocean (hence their name). However, despite being primarily marine creatures, they can come to the surface and can survive on land for some time. All Deep Ones are immortal; none die except by accident or violence. They are said to serve the beings known as Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, as well as Cthulhu.[2] They are opposed by mysterious beings known as the Old Gods, whose powerful magic can keep them in check.
The backstory of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" involves a bargain between Deep Ones and humans, in which the aquatic species provides plentiful fishing and gold in the form of strangely formed jewellery. In return, the land-dwellers give human sacrifices and a promise of "mixing"—the mating of humans with Deep Ones. Although the Deep One hybrid offspring are born with the appearance of a normal human being, the individual will eventually transform into a Deep One, gaining immortality—by default—only when the transformation is complete.
The transformation usually occurs when the individual reaches middle age. As the hybrid gets older, he or she begins to acquire the so-called "Innsmouth Look" as he or she takes on more and more attributes of the Deep One race: the ears shrink, the eyes bulge and become unblinking, the head narrows and gradually goes bald, the skin becomes scabrous as it changes into scales, and the neck develops folds which later become gills. When the hybrid becomes too obviously non-human, it is hidden away from outsiders. Eventually, however, the hybrid will be compelled to slip into the sea to live with the Deep Ones in one of their undersea cities.
Father Dagon and, his consort, Mother Hydra are both Star-spawns of Cthulhu. Together with Cthulhu, they form the triad of gods worshipped by the Deep Ones (their names are inspired by Dagon, the Semitic fertility deity, and the Hydra of Greek mythology). This group of gods is referenced in At the Mountains of Madness where they waged a war against the Elder Things; Lovecraft was himself inconsistent with his names from story to story, as he wasn't exactly as interested in building a consistent mythology as much as he was in writing a good story, and in this story he called the beings Old Ones, but today they are more often known as Elder Things.
"Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei"[3] is the only Deep One city named by Lovecraft. The name may have been inspired by the Lord Dunsany character "Yoharneth-Lahai", "the god of little dreams and fancies" who "sendeth little dreams out of PEGANA to please the people of Earth."[4]
In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", it is described as a great undersea metropolis located below Devil's Reef just off the coast of Massachusetts, near the town of Innsmouth. Its exact age is not known, but one resident is said to have lived there for 80,000 years.[5]
In Lovecraft's story, the U.S. government torpedoed Devil's Reef in 1928 as part of a raid on the town of Innsmouth.
Other authors have invented Deep One cities in other parts of the ocean, including Ahu-Y'hloa near Cornwall and G'll-Hoo, near the volcanic island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland.[6]