"There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren—but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear."
"The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . ."
H.P. Lovecraft & Harry Houdini, Under the Pyramids
"The Sphinx was described as having the body and legs of a lion, with the wings of an eagle and its foreparts being the head and torso of a beautiful young woman."
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters & Dragons
So yesterday, I said this creature was often misinterpreted. Many people read that penultimate line "that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus" and assume this is meant to be one of HPL's amorphous, monstrous Old Ones. But the actual last line says "this it is the merest fore paw". Lovecraft meant that to be the reveal. That the creature in question was a sphinx. And it was so large that its forepaw was mistaken for a creature in and of itself. It's the confusion of seeing something out of context.
That said, I did try to make my sphinx more horrible in my first draft. I made it hairless, gave it crooked human teeth and horns. In honesty, it was lazy. I've never been happy with this interpretation. So I decided to go back and approach it as the mythological version.
Red clay sphinx, 5th century BC, Nola (Italy).
I embraced the idea that what's so horrible about it is its sheer size, not it's grotesque appearance. And I'm much happier with the new version. In some texts the sphinx has a serpent's tail but I left that out because I feel like that's come up a lot lately and I wanted to do a more traditional version of this creature. Most of the artwork surrounding these creatures depict them as having lion tails.
I also drew inspiration from the various sphinxes we've seen at cemeteries. They ubiquitous in rural cemeteries as part of the Egyptian Revival; it's why you'll see pyramids, obelisks, etc in lots of cemeteries in the US.
For those that don't know, this story was originally ghost written for Harry Houdini by H.P. Lovecraft and appeared in the Weird Tales of June 1924. The cover for this issue was illustrated by R.M.Mally and the interior illustration is, sadly, uncredited.
Next week we start with three weeks of redrawings of pure Lovecraftian invention.
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