lederhosen

Answers to yesterday's Hastur quiz below the cut (if you haven't tried the quiz and want to, do that before reading on).

Both of these questions were (deliberately) ambiguous, with multiple correct answers:

The first appearance of Hastur, AFAIK was in Ambrose Bierce's 1893 short story 'Haita the Shepherd'. And yes, back then he really was a benevolent god of shepherds.

The story appeared in Bierce's collection Can Such Things Be?. The next story, 'An Inhabitant of Carcosa', is about a sinister ruined city of that name; it also mentions 'Hali' (apparently a person), Aldebaran and the Hyades.

Two years later, Robert W. Chambers published The King in Yellow, a collection of loosely connected short stories that borrows bits and pieces from Bierce. Several stories in the collection mention a play titled 'The King in Yellow', which brings suffering to those who read it; 'The King in Yellow' also seems to be the title of some sort of deity. Various stories within the collection identify 'Hastur' as a sixteenth-century falconer, and as a place connected to Carcosa, the Hyades, Aldebaran, and the Lake of Hali, as well as the 'King in Yellow' and the 'Yellow Sign'.

Lovecraft's own contribution to the Hastur mythos was very small. In 1930, he made brief mention of Hastur and some of these other names in a laundry list of sinisterness, without enough context to indicate whether Hastur is supposed to be a being or a place:

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections — Yuggoth, Great 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... 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)... - 'The Whisperer in Darkness'

Then along came August Derleth, who wrote several short stories involving Hastur ("The Unspeakable"). By this stage Hastur had become a god again, and connections to the King in Yellow, Yellow Sign, Lake of Hali, Carcosa, Aldebaran, and the Hyades had become canon.

Somewhere between Derleth and his appearance in the D&D Deities and Demigods book, Hastur picked up a cute little superstition: the idea that speaking his name three times would summon him with awful consequences*. I think this is a big part of why such a vaguely-defined creature has become so popular - it makes for a good in-joke.

Most of the other authors in the list used some version of Hastur in at least one story; the only ones who didn't, AFAIK, were Blackwood, Poe, and Dunsany. Most of them bore more resemblance to the Derleth version than the Bierce one... but if you picked any of Bierce, Chambers, or Derleth, give yourself points. [I think MZB's version may also have been distinct enough to count as a significant 'creation', but haven't read it for myself.]

So, in less than a hundred years Bierce's kindly shepherd-god mutated into an amorphous monstrosity from beyond the stars, picking up a mythos along the way. Let that be a warning to you all, and an object lesson in how quickly stories can change and their original creators can be forgotten :-)

(Much of the above cribbed from Wikipedia, but then I put a lot of it there in the first place...)

*My copy of the Very Scary Solstice songbook suggests substituting 'Hastert', but warns that the consequences may be just as horrendous.