If you missed the last one…
The Devil’s Defile: Weird Tales From Devil’s Gulch is our Weird Western anthology, and to make it even more fun, a shared world. Edited by G. W. Thomas, it has a cover and four illustrations by M. D. Jackson. As you will see in this post, the idea of telling ghost stories in the Old West is not new, but it does require a certain balance between Western setting and chills and thrills. The mix doesn’t always get the applause you might think. (More on that below.) This collection has four novellas, including “The Ghost Gun”, a 25,000 worder with Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope who had appeared in four tales in Strange Adventures. Hope is back in the deputy role in the town of Devil’s Gulch, a place where the unusual is always lurking just out of sight. He acquires the ghost gun, an eldritch weapon that actually uses monsters for bullets. You follow him as he acquires the necessary ammunition to face a terrible black stranger who comes to claim all of Devil’s Gulch.
The Cthulhu Mythos is riddled with arcane statues and idols (along with the requisite temples), many of which are not stone at all but the actual gods themselves. Unlike the idols in the last post, these tend to be older than recorded history, sometimes even older than the human race. Lovecraft’s style of Cosmic Horror dates things in millennia while the totems of the jungle countries, Africa, South America, India, etc. tend to be more recent in time. (Sword & Sorcery is fond of the monster statues like Yama in this post. I haven’t included any of these here though since we have enough just looking at the Horror fiction. The Atlantean and Hyborian Ages are tangentially part of the Mythos but Sword & Sorcery can have its own post, I think.)
H. P. Lovecraft created the Mythos as a joke for friends. It was later named by August Derleth and made to be a more serious affair. The idols start as early as the first tales like “Dagon” and will become more and more important as time goes on. HPL’s correspondents and pals would add their own as well.
“Dagon” (The Vagrant, November 1919) by H. P. Lovecraft reprinted in Weird Tales, October 1923 is for many the beginning of the Cthulhu Mythos in Weird Tales. A lone survivor finds a section of the ocean floor raised up an earthquake and the terrible temple there:
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well…I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.
“The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, February 1928) by H. P. Lovecraft revolves around an image of Cthulhu found by Inspector LeGrasse. This idol leads to the thing it was carved from. It’s a long quote but I think it’s important since it shows up in several Mythos tales:
..With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head…
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
More interesting to me is that Lovecraft based the shape of his tale after Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1895), another classic that hinges on worshiping ancient things better left alone. HPL’s tale is more globe-spanning than Machen”s but I do see the same slow reveal in both stories.
“The Horror From the Hills” (Weird Tales, January February/March 1931) by Frank Belknap Long features Chaugnar Faugn, a Mythos deity who resembles an elephant. (Resembles, but C. C. Senf took that literally, making it look like an elephant. Senf never liked drawing monsters!) The idol proves to be a blood-drinking god who goes on a rampage. This was one of Long’s more Science-Fictiony Horror stories with fourth dimensions and everything thrown in.
Words could not adequately convey the repulsiveness of the thing. It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed, its resemblace to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal.
For more, go here.
“The Black Stone” (Weird Tales, November 1931) by Robert E. Howard has the narrator follow in the footsteps of the mad poet, Justin Geoffreys, as he investigates a village in the Balkans, Stregoicavar, that still worship a giant black stone:
It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction. Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced, but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed, calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.
The Black Stone calls a giant froggy Servitor of the Outer Gods to eat our nosy friend, but the stone appears in another Howard tale, “Worms of the Earth”, where Bran Mak Morn steals the slab to force the worms to do his bidding. That stone is smaller so perhaps it is another of the same type.
“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (Weird Tales, November 1931) by Clark Ashton Smith has the thief Satampra Zeiros sneak into the temple of Tsathoggua to do his illicit trade but he falls foul of some goopy guardians. The temple is rumored to have jeweled idols but Zeiros learns otherwise.
The temple, like the other buildings, was in a state of well-nigh perfect preservation: the only signs of decay were in the carven lintel of the door, which had crumbled and splintered away in several places. The door itself, wrought of a swarthy bronze all overgreened by time, stood slightly a-jar. Knowing that there should be a jewelled idol within, not to mention the various altar-pieces of valuable metals, we felt the urge of temptation.
“The Dweller in the Gulf” (aka “Dweller in the Martian Depths”) (Wonder Stories, March 1933) by Clark Ashton Smith has an idol that represents a terrible image. Later the explorers find the representation very accurate:
Hardened adventurers though they were the men would have shrieked aloud with hysteria, or would have hurled themselves from the precipice, if the sight had not induced a kind of catalepsy. It was as if the pale idol of the pyramid, swollen to mammoth proportions, and loathsomely alive, had come up from the abyss and was squatting before them!
Here, plainly, was the creature that had served as a model for that atrocious image. The humped, enormous carapace, vaguely recalling the armor of the glyptodon, shone with a luster as of wet white gold. The eyeless head, alert but sonmolent, was thrust forward on a neck that arched obscenely. A dozen or more of short legs, with goblet-shapen feet, protruded slantwise beneath the overhanging shell. The two proboscides, yard-long, with cupped ends, arose from the corners of the cruelly slitted mouth and waved slowly in air toward the earthmen.
This was one of a dozen tales CAS did for Hugo Gernsback with a more SF feel. For more, go here.
“The Horror in the Museum” (Weird Tales, July 1933) by Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft is one of HPL’s revision jobs. More thieves break into a museum to find:
Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of infinite cosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shewn starting forward from a Cyclopean ivory throne covered with grotesque carvings. In the central pair of its six legs it bore a crushed, flattened, distorted, bloodless thing, riddled with a million punctures, and in places seared as with some pungent acid. Only the mangled head of the victim, lolling upside down at one side, revealed that it represented something once human.
As with most Mythos tales, the idol is often the monster.
“The Seven Geases” (Weird Tales, October 1934) by Clark Ashton Smith was one of several stories CAS wrote that he also illustrated. For more on authors who illustrated their own tales, go here.
…Somewhere beneath that four-coned mountain, the sluggish and baleful god Tsathoggua, who had come down from Saturn in years immediately following the Earth’s creation, was fabled to reside; and during the rite of worship at his black altars, the devotees were always careful to orient themselves toward Voormithadreth. Other and more doubtful beings than Tsathoggua slept below the extinct volcanoes, or ranged and ravened throughout that hidden underworld; but of these beings few men other than the more adept or abandoned wizards, professed to know anything at all.
Lin Carter would later write several posthumous collaborations with Smith featuring the god Tsathoggua. In Carter’s version, the idol is the god.
“The Dark Eidolon” (Weird Tales, January 1935) by Clark Ashton Smith is another by the poet and artist. Smith would leave fiction writing for carving, where his strange little heads would inspire August Derleth (below).
So, after this, there was silence in the hall where Namirrha sat before the eidolon; and the flames burned darkly, with changeable colors, in the skull-shapen lamps; and the shadows fled and returned, unresting, on the face of the statue and the face of Namirrha. Then, toward midnight, the necromancer arose and went upward by many spiral stairs to a high dome of his house in which there was a single small round window that looked forth on the constellations. The window was set in the top of the dome; but Namirrha had contrived, by means of his magic, that one entering by the last spiral of the stairs would suddenly seem to descend rather than climb, and, reaching the last step, would peer downward through the window while stars passed under him in a giddying gulf. There, kneeling, Namirrha touched a secret spring in the marble, and the circular pane slid back without sound. Then, lying prone on the interior of the dome, with his face over the abyss, and his long beard trailing stiffly into space, he whispered a pre-human rune, and held speech with certain entities who belonged neither to Hell nor the mundane elements, and were more fearsome to invoke than the infernal genii or the devils of earth, air, water, and flame. With them he made his contract, defying Thasaidon’s will, while the air curdled about him with their voices, and rime gathered palely on his sable beard from the cold that was wrought by their breathing as they leaned earthward.
“The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, December 1936) by H. P. Lovecraft was written as a joke for Robert Bloch. Bloch killed HPL off in “The Shambler From the Stars” so Lovecraft returned the favor with this story.
Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’s spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.
“The Doom That Came to Sarnath” was written in 1920 (Marvel Tales of Science and Fantasy, March-April 1935) and reprinted in Weird Tales, June 1938. This classic tale by Lovecraft has the statue of Bokrug come to life and devour the town of Sarnath.
Thus of the very ancient city of Ib was nothing spared save the sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took back with them to Sarnath as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Ib, and a sign of leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was set up in the temple a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone, and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign of DOOM.
“The Mound” (Weird Tales, November 1940) by Zelia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft is a story with a confusing history, but it does include an underground kingdom with an idol.
For a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the all-covering dust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering winged things, the shriekingly loathsome sculptures on the walls, the bizarre form of the many basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal altar with the hollow top, or the monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality in some strange, dark metal leering and squatting broodingly on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of even the power to give a startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this—but merely the fact that, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things, and the gigantic emerald-eyed idol, every particle of substance in sight was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.
For more on “The Mound”, go here.
“The Weirds of the Woodcarver” (Weird Tales, September 1944) by Gardner F. Fox was one of the few unauthorized Mythos tales that August Derleth failed to stop after creating Arkham House. C. Hall Thompson was the other Weird Tales author who got a notice. I think it’s cool that Matt Fox (no relation) did the illustration. Fox has a building filled with carvings of all living things through out history and pre-history including The Primal Ones!
First you see the tiny figurines standing on their shelves, painted and carved in exact similitude to living beings. They stand there, row on row…I saw many things I cannot describe: things I caught bare glimpses of, back there. Mankind possesses no language that will tell of them, for they were spawned by something alien. Who can describe something man has never seen, or imaged up, or conjured from the purple realms of sleep? Those shapes were bulbous and many-polpyed, legged and viscid and oozing, jellied and shaking, amorphous and obscene. Some of them crawled, some flew,some fought and ate what they killed. Some were carven as they sacrificed! and that, I think, was the most horrible of all
“Something In Wood” (Weird Tales, March 1948) by August Derleth was a tale inspired by the carvings of Clark Ashton Smith. Derleth names him and even certain carvings at the beginning of the tale. The only thing wrong with them is they are not “something in wood”. That idol proves to be a more Ctulhuian piece…
I have described the “creature” as “octopoid”, but it was not an octopus. What it was I don’t know; its appearance suggested a body much longer than and different from that of an octopus, and its tentacular appendages issued not only from its face, as if from the place where a nose ought to be—much as in the Smith sculpture, Elder God—but also from its sides and the central part of the body.
Conclusion
Horror fiction loves to embody evil in objects. Think of the Monkey’s Paw or The Screaming Skull. The physical object becomes a loci for bad things to happen, as well as operates as a “MacGuffin” to lead the characters (often) to their doom. Idols are no different. They can bring bad energy. They can turn into the monster itself and kill. In Mythos tales, they are often a psychic link between the people who possess them and terrible entities lurking in space, or under the sea, or in another dimension. Conversing with such horrible things leads to insanity (and maybe good poetry in the case of Justin Geoffreys). To quote old Frankenstein: “There are things man was not meant to know”. As there are things that were not meant to be worshiped.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
