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Hastur (The Unspeakable One, Him Who Is Not to be Named, Assatur, Xastur, or Kaiwan) is a fictional character in the Cthulhu Mythos. Hastur first appeared in Ambrose Bierce's short story "Haïta the Shepherd" (1893) as a benign god of shepherds. Robert W. Chambers later used Hastur in his own stories to represent both a person and a place relating to the Aldebaran star.
Hastur in the mythos In Bierce's "Haita 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 place 'Carcosa' and a person 'Hali', names which later authors were to associate with Hastur. In Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895), a fin-de-siècle collection of horror stories, Hastur is the name of a potentially supernatural servant (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 and Hali, along with a 'Yellow Sign' and a play called the 'King In Yellow'. H.P. Lovecraft read Chambers' book in early 1927 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 (italics added for emphasis):
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. Derleth, however, developed Hastur into 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: Hastur's form is amorphous, but he is said to appear as a vast, vaguely octopoid being, similar to his half-niece Cthylla. Literature Hastur sometimes appears in literature outside of the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror. Comics Games Extrapolating from August Derleth's epithet for Hastur, "He Who Is Not to be Named", the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game suggested in the Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia supplement (TSR, ISBN 0-935-69622-9) that merely speaking Hastur's name brings doom to those who do so. This idea was later picked up by the ''Call of Cthulhu'' role-playing game. It also appears in the PlayStation game Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, where Hastur can be summoned by saying his name three times. Hastur is the main enemy in the Sega Genesis games Earnest Evans and El Viento. In both games, he's an evil god worshipped by a crazed cult using him to destroy New York City in the 1920s. The heroine of El Viento, Annet Myer, is descended from Hastur's cursed bloodline. The role-playing game Delta Green treats Hastur and his counterpart, the King in Yellow, as manifestations of entropy. Footnotes | ||||||||
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