Hastur

Hastur is a fictional character from the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft's short stories; the name was borrowed from Robert W. Chambers, who, in turn, had borrowed it from Ambrose Bierce.

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In Bierce's short story Haita the Shepherd, Hastur is the god of shepherds, a far more benevolent entity than would later appear in August Derleth's Mythos stories.

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In Chambers's The King in Yellow, a fin-de-si?cle collection of horror stories, Hastur is the name of a city (in "The Repairer of Reputations") and the name of a potentially supernatural servant (in "The Demoiselle D'Ys").

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H. P. Lovecraft read Chambers's book in 1926, and was so enchanted by it that he added elements of it to his own creations. There is only one place in Lovecraft's own writings that mentions Hastur:"I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions – Yuggoth, 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

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As can be seen from this quote, it is unclear whether Lovecraft's Hastur was a person, a place, an object, such as the Yellow Sign, or a deity. Derleth, however, developed Hastur into a Great Old One, spawn of Yog-Sothoth and theoretically the Magnum Innominandum. In this incarnation, Hastur has several avatars:

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• The Feaster from Afar
• The King in Yellow
• The High Priest Not to Be Described, who wears a yellow silken mask

Usually, his appearance is amorphous, or that of a vast, vaguely octopoid being, similar to his half-niece, Cthylla.

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Hastur: Other contexts ►



 

Fictional character: A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction. More accurately, a fictional character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods or, occasionally, inanimate objects. C...

Cthulhu Mythos: Cthulhu mythos is the term coined by the writer August Derleth to describe the shared themes, characters, and elements in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, his proteg?s, and writers influenced by him. Together, they form the mythos that authors, writing in the Lovecraftian , have used—and continue ...

H. P. Lovecraft: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy and horror fiction, noted for giving horror stories a science fiction framework. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, but his works have become quite important and influential among wr...