Hastur

Hastur the Unspeakable is a fictional deity in the Cthulhu Mythos. Although the being is associated with H. P. Lovecraft, it is only mentioned in one of his stories, The Whisperer in Darkness. It was originally the creation of Ambrose Bierce, whose short story "Haïta the Shepherd" describes Hastur as a god of shepherds. Hastur is the name of a city in the Robert W. Chambers short stories "The Yellow Sign" and "The Repairer of Reputations", which appeared in his short story collection The King in Yellow.
==Hastur in the Cthulhu Mythos==
Hastur is defined as a Great Old One, spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the half-brother of Cthulhu, and possibly the Magnum Innominandum (). In this incarnation, Hastur has several Avatars: 
*The Feaster from Afar, a black, shriveled, flying monstrosity with tentacles tipped with razor-sharp talons that can pierce a victim's skull and siphon out the brain (: "The Feaster from Afar", The Hastur Cycle (2nd ed.), pp. 272-82 [Joseph Payne Brennan]).
*The King in Yellow.
The Carcosa Foundation is a Stockholm-based coterie that worships Hastur.
(: Anders Fager, "Samlade Svenska Kulter")
Hastur is amorphous, but he is said to appear as a vast, vaguely octopoid being, similar to his half-niece Cthylla.
==Behind the Mythos==
===Inspiration===
In Bierce's "Haïta the Shepherd", which appeared in the collection Can Such Things Be?, Hastur is more benevolent than he would later appear in August Derleth's mythos stories. Another story in the same collection ("An Inhabitant of Carcosa") referred to the city Carcosa and a person named Hali, names which later authors were to associate with Hastur.
In Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895), a collection some of which are horror stories, Hastur is the name of a potentially supernatural character (in "The Demoiselle D'Ys"), a place (in "The Repairer of Reputations"), and mentioned without explanation in "The Yellow Sign". The latter two stories also mentioned Carcosa, Hali, Aldebaran, and the Hyades, along with a "Yellow Sign" and a play called The King in Yellow.
===Lovecraft's vision===
H. P. Lovecraft read Chambers' book in early 1927 (: An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia) and was so enchanted by it that he added elements of it to his own creations Pearsall, "Yellow Sign", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 436. However it is unclear from this quote if Lovecraft's Hastur is a person, a place, an object (such as the Yellow Sign), or a deity. (This ambiguity is recurrent in Lovecraft's descriptions of the Mythos entities.)
*In Chambers' "The Yellow Sign", the only mention of Hastur is "We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda..."
So, judging from these two quotes, it is quite possible that Lovecraft not only recognized Hastur as one of the Mythos gods, but even made him so recalling Chambers' book.
Derleth once entertained the notion of calling Lovecraft's Mythos the Mythology of Hastur—an idea that Lovecraft summarily rejected when he heard it. Robert M. Price, "The Mythology of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, p. i.
===In the Demonbane series===
In Demonbane, Hastur is the original Great Old One that the Deus Machina Lord Byakhee of the Anticross Claudius was modeled after, as well as the god from which Claudius derives his power. Similar to the settings of the Derleth Mythos, Hastur is the natural enemy of water-based Great Old Ones, notably Cthulhu and Othuum.
==In Popular Culture==
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Category:Characters Originating From Mythos-Adjacent Works
Category:Great Old Ones
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works