HARPY

HARPY

"The steeples are white in the wild moonlight, And the trees have a silver glare; Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly, And the harpies of upper air,
That flutterand laugh and stare."
H.P. Lovecraft, Hallowe'en In a Suburb

“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—
but they were there before.
They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal."
Charles Lamb, Witches and Other Night-Fears
(H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror)

"Some say that they resembled birds with the heads and torso of ugly women...and having arms with talons for fingers."
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

"The first landing was at the island of the Harpies. These were disgusting birds with the heads of maidens, with long claws and faces pale with hunger."
Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch's Mythology

PECULIAR DOLPHIN

PECULIAR DOLPHIN

"Lieut. Klenze chafed under the strain, and was annoyed by the merest trifles—such as the school of dolphins which gathered about the U-29 in increasing numbers, and the growing intensity of that southward current which was not on our chart."
"We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only dolphins, swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in those dolphins; for though the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched one of the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not see him alter his submerged condition."
"His mind was tired, but I am always a German, and was quick to notice two things; that the U-29 was standing the deep-sea pressure splendidly, and that the peculiar dolphins were still about us, even at a depth where the existence of high organisms is considered impossible by most naturalists."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple

"He saw a city of grand marble edifices, fathoms below the surface of the sea and immemorially ancient, and he saw that it was peopled by a shining dolphin-headed race, whose only profession seemed to be conducting the hierophantic rites of radiant god."

"At first, I thought it swam away and that it had merely been sun-madness that had earlier made me hear its voice, but then, after the fishermen had paddled out of sight, the dolphin surfaced with a bulging leather satchel clutched in its beak. It contained gold and jewels that my new friend told me were gathered from shipwrecks on the ocean floor, and that I should use this wealth to outfit myself as a gentleman and buy passage back to England. The creature's only caveat was that, upon my arrival, I must once again visit the sea and return to one of its kin the ivory head, as our tutor had not, as it turns out been given the object." 

Molly Tanzer, The Infernal History Of the Ivybridge Twins

DRAGON

DRAGON

"If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu

"There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed."
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit 

But he loosed upon his foes the last desperate assault that he had prepared, and out of the pits of Angband there issued the winged dragons, that had not before been seen; and so sudden and ruinous was the onset of that dreadful fleet that the host of Valar was driven back, for the coming of the dragons was with great thunder, and lightning and ta tempest of fire." 
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion 

"The most general description of the Occidental Dragon is very similar to that of the Oriental Dragon, being an enormous, elongated, scale-covered body like that of a crocodile, often with vast wings like those of a bat, and having huge legs like those of a lizard with long claws. It may have a toothed dorsal ridge extending to a long serpentine tail, usually barbed. Its head may be like that of a vast lizard or crocodile but with either a crest or horns on the head, while its gross nostrils and huge fanged mouth breathe fire and noxious fumes."

Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

GOBLIN

GOBLIN

"Such nightmare Yarns we both have often writ, 

With goblin Whispers, and an Hint of IT"

H.P. Lovecraft, On The Thing In the Woods By Harper Williams 

"Out jumped the goblins, big goblins, great ugly-looking goblins, lots of goblins, before you could say rocks and blocks."

"Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make clever ones." 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

"In European folklore this is a grotesque, diminutive, and generally malicious earth spirit or sprite."
Carol Rose, Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns and Goblins 

"Like other spirits they have human form, but no human ever wore expressions of such malicious mischief and depraved cunning. A goblin smile curdles the blood; a goblin laugh causes milk to sour and fruit to fall from trees. Even a witch will not allow a goblin at her fireside. She has no fear of it but it is always such a meddling nuisance."
Michael Page & Robert Ingpen, The Encyclopedia Of Things That Never Were
 

SERAPHIM

SERAPHIM

"To go and see him laid to rest. 

God speed his soul! I trust he'll rove 

In peace 'mid Seraphim above-"

H.P. Lovecraft, On the Death Of a Rhyming Critic

"The name, a Hebrew masculine plural form, designates a special class of heavenly attendants of Yahweh's court. Many scholars prefer to derive it from the Hebrew noun saraph, "a fiery and flying serpent", spoken of in Numbers 21:6; Isaiah 14:29, and the brazen image of which stood in the Temple in Isaiahs's time."

The Catholic Encyclopedia

 

"Upon this, the Lord sent serpents among them, with fire in their fangs, that struck at many and killed many of them."
The Holy Bible, Numbers 21

"I saw the Lord sitting on a throne that towered high above me, the skirts of his robe filling the temple. Above it rose the figures of the seraphim, each of them six-winged; with two wings they veiled God’s face, with two his feet, and the other two kept them poised in flight."
The Holy Bible, Isaiah 6

 "The seraphim are frequently mentioned in the Book of Enoch, where they are designated as δράκονες ("serpents"), and are always mentioned, in conjunction with the cherubim, as the heavenly creatures standing nearest to God."
The Jewish Encyclopedia

BASILISK

BASILISK

"The old man had looked at him out of eyes that were basilisk and answered, "Boy, we do not speak of Sarah here."

H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, The Shuttered Room

"Of all the legendary monsters, none was deadlier than the basilisk, or cockatrice. Part serpent, part rooster, it came from an egg laid by a seven-year-old cock during the time that Sirius was high in the heavens. The egg was spherical and covered by a thick membrane, and sometimes it was hatched by a toad, who sat on it for nine years. This elaborate gestation produced a creature whose breath could scorch the earth and whose glance was lethal-even to itself."
Mysteries Of the Unknown, Mysterious Creatures

"Previously described as a serpent it was now said to have the head, neck and legs of a cockerel, the tail of a serpent and the wings of a dragon."
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

"To Aristotle the basilisk was the "king of snakes." To the Roman naturalist Pliny it was simply a snake that had some sort of crownlike structure on its head."
Daniel Cohen, The Encyclopedia Of Monsters 

UNICORN

UNICORN

" “The blue light!—the blue light! . . .” muttered the object, “always down there, before there were any living things—older than the dinosaurs—always the same, only weaker—never death—brooding and brooding and brooding—the same people, half-man and half-gas—the dead that walk and work—oh, those beasts, those half-human unicorns—houses and cities of gold—old, old, old, older than time—came down from the stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting, waiting. . . .” The object died before dawn."

H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Mound

"In India there are wild asses as large as horses, or even larger. Their body is white, their head dark red, their eyes bluish, and they have a horn in their forehead about a cubit in length. The lower part of the horn, for about two palms distance from the forehead, is quite white, the middle is black, the upper part, which terminates in a point, is a very flaming red." 

Ctesias, Indica 

SHUB-NIGGURATH

SHUB-NIGGURATH

"Yog-Sothoth's wife is the hellish cloud-like entity Shub-Niggurath, in whose honour nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young. By her he has two monstrous offspring-the evil twins Nug and Yeb."
H.P.Lovecraft, Lovecraft At Last

"'Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!'"
H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer In Darkness

"'Dan, for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps... the abomination of abominations... I never would let her take me, and then I 
found myself there - Iä! Shub-Niggurath!'"
H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing On the Doorstep

"Joe Mazurewicz - the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek - worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream - Iä! Shub-Niggurath! 
The Goat with a Thousand Young..."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dreams In the Witch-House

SHUDDE-M'ELL

SHUDDE-M'ELL

"During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feaster From the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter Of the Dark

"And might I further tell you what you saw on those unknown tunnel walls; that those oddly dimensioned designs depicted living creatures of sorts-like elongated octopuses or squids but without recognizable heads or eyes-tentacled worms in fact but of gigantic size?"

"To make it short, Henri, I have been dreaming of subterranean beings, octopus-things apparently without heads or eyes, creatures capable of organic tunneling through the deepest buried rocks with as little effort as hot knives slicing butter! I don't know for sure yet just what they are, these burrowers beneath; "

For Ellis' mind was with Shudde-M'ell when in blind agony and indescribable rage, the Prime Burrower broke through the crust of the Earth-broke through to swim away deeper yet, into the inner magma, against strange tides of molten-rock oceans, those oceans which hold these lily pads we call continents afloat!"

"And Shudde-M'ell-what of the Prime Burrower now?"

It was octopoid, this dweller in the earth...flowing tentacles and pulpy gray-black, elongated sack of a body...rubbery...exuding a vilely stinking whitish slime... eyeless...headless too...Indeed I could see no distinguishing features at all other than the reaching, groping tentacles. Or was there-yes!-a lump in the upper body of the thing....a container of sorts for the brain, or ganglia or whichever diseased organ governed this horror's loathsome life! 

Brian Lumley, The Burrowers Beneath

  

OCEANUS

OCEANUS

"Sometimes I stand upon the shore 

Where ocean vaults their effuence pour, 

And troubled waters sigh and shriek 

Of secrets that they dare not speak."

H.P. Lovecraft, Cycle Of Verse: Oceanus

"Look you upon my daughter, mark how fair She is bedight as Cerce. I shall act 

The green Oceanus."

H.P. Lovecraft, Alfredo; A Tragedy

"Okeanos was depicted in ancient Greek vase painting as a bull-horned god with the tail of a serpentine fish in place of legs, similar to his river-god sons."

"In mosaic art he therefore appears simply as a sea-god or the sea personified, with crab-claw horns, and for attributes, a serpent and an oar."

Aaron J. Atsma, The Theoi Project: Greek Mythology

ABADDON

ABADDON

"Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place—what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-wind 

till oblivion—or worse—claims me."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

 

"Whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon-The name Abaddon means literally "destruction," and is the same as Apollyon."

"But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon-From ἀπόλλυμι apollumi-"to destroy." The word properly denotes "a destroyer," and the name is given to this king of the hosts, represented by the locusts, because this would be his principal characteristic."

Albert Barnes, Notes On the Bible

"So he went on, and APOLLYON met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold; he had wings like a dragon; and out of his belly came fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion."

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

"On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold.
They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. They had tails with stingers, like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months.

 Revelations 9:7-10 

CYBELE

CYBELE

"Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest."

"The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew something of the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so mixed with that of Cybele."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats In the Walls 

"The figure is that of a woman, her bare feet on a plain round base. She is wearing a long, sleeveless dress that suggests a toga but that would not look out of place against a number of backdrops. Her plump arms are bend at the elbows, her hands crossed over a belly that swells with a child ready to make its entry into the world."

"It is headless, deliberately so: the neck shows a cross-section of bone, throat, muscle, blood vessels."

"The Greeks had her from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, where she was known as Cybele, the Mother of the Mountain. She is very ancient and very terrible. He had opened one of the books and was turning onionskin pages. Les mysteres du ver, he said, 
nodding at the volume."

John Langan, Mother Of Stone 

"KYBELE (or Cybele) was the great Phrygian Mother of the Gods, a primal nature goddess worshiped with orgiastic rites in the mountains of central and western Anatolia."
Aaron J. Atsma, The Theoi Project: Greek Mythology 

 

DR. HENRY ARMITAGE by TREVOR HENDERSON

 
DR. HENRY ARMITAGE
"This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the librarian—the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph. D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world."

"During the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the grandfather’s last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet."

"In the end the three men from Arkham—old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan—ascended the mountain alone."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror 

Illustration by Trevor Henderson 



 

SABINE by JENN WOODALL

SABINE
"Gilies Grenier the sorcerer and his wife Sabine, coming into lower Averoigne from parts unknown or at least unverified, had selected the location of their hut with a careful forethought."

"The hut was close to those marshes through which the slackening waters of the river Isoile, after leaving the great forest, had overflowed in sluggish, reed-clogged channels and sedge-hidden pools mantled with scum like witches' oils. It stood among osiers and alders on a low, mound-shaped elevation; and in front, toward the marshes, there was a loamy meadow-bottom where the short fat stems and tufted leaves of the mandrake grew in lush abundance, being more plentiful and of greater size than elsewhere through all that sorcery-ridden province. The fleshly, bifurcated roots of this plant, held by many to resemble the human body, were used by Gilles and Sabine in the brewing of love-philtres."

"He had killed her one evening in autumn, during a dispute of unbearable acrimony, slitting her soft, pale throat in self-defense with a knife which he had wrested from her fingers when she lifted it against him. Afterward he had buried her by the late rays of a gibbous moon beneath the mandrakes in the meadow-bottom, replacing the leafy sods with much care, so that there was no evidence of their having been disturbed other than by the digging of a few roots in the way of daily business."

"It appeared to issue from a strange, half-withered root, cloven in the very likeness of a woman's body and legs — a root that was partly pale, and partly black with cauldron-smoke. One of the constables thought that he recognized the voice as being that of Sabine, the sorcerer's wife. All swore that they heads the voice clearly, and were able to distinguish these words:

"Dig deeply in the meadow, where the mandrakes grow the thickliest."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Mandrakes

Illustration by Jenn Woodall

GASPARD DU NORD by LIZ PRINCE

GASPARD DU NORD
"This man was Gaspard du Nord, himself a student of the proscribed sciences, who had been numbered for a year among the pupils of Nathaire but had chosen to withdraw quietly from the master's household after learning the enormities that would 

attend his further initiation."

"The cathedral nave was packed with worshippers, and solemn masses were being said by priests whose voices faltered at times with inward panic. Unheeded by the wan, despairing throng, Gaspard found a flight of coiling stairs that led tortuously to the gargoyle-warded roof of the high tower."

"Here he posted himself, crouching behind the stone figure of a cat-headed griffin. From his vantage he could see, beyond the crowded spires and gables, the approaching giant, 

whose head and torso loomed above the city walls."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Colossus Of Ylourgne

Illustration by Liz Prince

RANDOLPH CARTER by ALAN BROWN

RANDOLPH CARTER
"At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns and public places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath’s shore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

Illustration by Alan Brown

News....

Hey guys! I know it's been quiet here for a week but I've got a bunch of announcements to make today.

First off, the last component for the Collection arrived in the mail today, which means I can start assembling them. COLLECTION I will go on sale WEDNESDAY JULY 10th, 11am EST. More info about them as the date approaches.

Also, if you're gonna be in San Diego during the Comic Con, I'll have two pieces up in the Creature Feature show at Left Hand Black gallery.

Also, I will be in one of the gallery shows organized around NecronomiCon in Providence this August. AND I will be tabling the last day of that Con.

Lastly, since the reveal of Collection I, I've been talking about another secret project that's in the works. I'm calling this project Guests In the Witch House:
Since I broke my finger and haven't been able to make monster drawings I asked a few of my friends to help me out with content for the blog while I heal up. I didn't want more monsters though, so I asked a few artists to give me their interpretations of Lovecraftian heroes. So, Trevor Henderson, Alan Brown, Jenn Woodall, and Liz Prince will give their renditions of some of HPL's (and other pulp writers within the mythos) more...human characters starting tomorrow. You always see monsters but not often enough do you see the protagonists of these tales.

I can't thank these guys enough for helping me out when I really needed. I love doing this blog and the idea of not being able to work on it (or freelance for that matter) has been driving me crazy. I'm glad I've got cool friends that would step up when I need it.

Speaking of which. I have been able to draw again! However, I'm not really read to ink yet...so it'll still be some time before I can post new monsters. Check out the photo below and you can see that my right middle finger is still pretty swollen even though it's been over a month. The doctor told me that even though it was a clean break with no vascular damage or need to set it, that my proximal phalanx completely snapped in half. Sighhhhh......