The Moon is the main antagonist of the Dream Cycle and a minor character in the Cthulhu Mythos by the late legendary weird fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.
It's a celestial object and the sole natural satellite of the Earth, having orbited it since approximately billions of years ago. While it may at first seem like a mere planetary-mass object, the Moon's actually something of a herald/harborer of several cosmic entities, even being able to indirectly drive people mad by guiding them to corpse cities.
Biography[]
Origins[]
The Moon's origins in view of the existence of species like the Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, and Elder Things are murky, but in disregarding their possible involvement in its advent, we can say that the Moon formed, according to some scientific theories, from a collision between Theia and proto-Earth around the Hadean eon.
The Doom That Came To Sarnath[]
After an unspecified amount of time, the celestial body began to house the souls of the Thuum'ha whom the men of Sarnath massacred. How did this come to be? No one knows, but perhaps, in an attempt to preserve his worshippers, Bokrug somehow linked their essences to the gibbous gleam.
Then, upon the one-thousandth anniversary of the destruction of Ib, where the Thuum'ha once dwelt, the Moon lingered above the lake by the great temple of Sarnath and either released the souls or served merely as witness to their departure there. Shadow-like souls descended into the water, a green mist rose from it to meet the body in the sky, and the vengeance of the dead commenced, for the shadow-wraiths turned the royals of Sarnath into Thuum'ha and obliterated the city after submerging the grey rock Akurion.
Dagon[]
The war to end all wars, the Great War, has come, and as a result, ships are being sunk. One such ship has been assaulted by a German vessel, and its crew taken into custody; however, a man manages to escape, taking a boat for himself, only to end up in a hellish waste of black mire that could only be considered cosmic. He doesn't know how he ended up like this; he didn't ask for this, yet here he is, in a dark, sea-borne hell constantly accosted by the sun. That is, only during the day, of course, for whenever night descends upon the Earth, the Moon makes sure to crown the sky. Expectedly, the Moon heralds the protagonist's encounter with the great monolith and the gigantic fish-man, going as far as to remind him of it whenever night would come, even after said encounter. This doesn't do favors for the man's sanity, leading to him throwing himself out of a window in fear of an imagined fish-man.
What the Moon Brings[]
It's the Roaring Twenties (as the poem was published around 1923), and a man is strolling around in a lovely garden! So what does the Moon do? It guides him to a corpse city, of course! No joke, it makes itself shine in such a way that the man is entranced into following lotos-blossoms down a stream, a stream that leads down a river, a river that leads down a dark vastness, and a dark vastness that reveals itself to be the sea. The man doesn't stop; he's powerless to stop himself from following the lotos-blossoms, that is, until he stumbles upon an odd eikon so stout that its very head starts to poke out of the water. And so suddenly does the vile Moon begin to draw down the waters that he might witness the eikon's maddening power. As the water sunk lower, he realized he wasn't anywhere near sand or soil; then he could only wish he couldn't smell, as an evil odor, a great foulness, filled the air. The eikon slowly unveiled itself, stripping the dark blue drowning it so that a mortal might meet its gaze, but the man, out of fear, fled into the deep, opting rather to have his soul feasted upon by the dead city than the peeking face. And so, the Moon knew glee, for spirits were drowned that night, and its terror known.
Trivia[]
- This page's image came from a portion of Cthulhu Moon by the Gus Fink Visionary Artist.
