Miskatonic Arcihves

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Tagged: Petrification

Entities & creatures

Ghatanothoa

Ghatanothoa is the being beneath Mount Yaddith-Gho whose appearance inflicts a petrification more terrible than ordinary death in Out of the Aeons. Its victims retain living brains inside immobilized bodies. The tale connects an ancient priest’s attempt to defeat this power with a mysterious museum specimen in twentieth-century Boston. Ghatanothoa acts through the danger of being seen, the authority of its priests and an image preserved across an almost inconceivable span of time.

6 min read · 1,216 words

Literature

Out of the Aeons

A mysterious mummy in a Boston museum becomes the focus of publicity, occult investigation and fatal attempts to reach its display case. The records connect it with T’yog, an ancient priest who climbed a forbidden mountain to challenge Ghatanothoa. Written by H. P. Lovecraft for Hazel Heald, Out of the Aeons turns the preservation of a body into the possibility of consciousness trapped across almost unimaginable time.

9 min read · 1,729 words

Characters

T’yog

T’yog is the priest who challenges Ghatanothoa in the ancient history recounted by Out of the Aeons. A servant of Shub-Niggurath, he believes he can protect himself and humanity from the god’s petrifying appearance. His failure results from the secret replacement of his protective scroll. The modern museum mystery gradually identifies a supposedly dead specimen with the lost challenger and makes his fate far worse than a simple death on the mountain.

4 min read · 801 words

Literature

The Man of Stone

The Man of Stone begins with apparently impossible sculptures in the Adirondacks and ends with a record of deliberate poisoning, domestic abuse and retaliation. Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft combine a found-notebook investigation with a fictional petrifying substance drawn from an insert in the Book of Eibon. The final change of handwriting gives the victim a voice that overturns the murderer’s account of his marriage.

9 min read · 1,712 words

Literature

The Mask

The Mask is Chambers’s story of a sculptor’s discovery that can turn living things into marble and of a concealed love that breaks apart a circle of friends. Appearing second in The King in Yellow, it combines dangerous art, fevered visions and apparent death with an ending that differs sharply from the collection’s more unrelieved catastrophes.

6 min read · 1,054 words