Hastur

Also Known As: Hastur the Unspeakable; Him Who Is Not to Be Named; the Unspeakable One. An invented name with no attested etymology, coined by Ambrose Bierce in 1891 and passed on to Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A god who began as the kindly patron of shepherds and was rebuilt by later hands into a wind-borne cosmic horror whose name is held to be unsafe to speak.
Role in Mythos: He is the figure four American weird-fiction writers passed between them across fifty years, each one keeping the name and discarding what the last one meant by it.
Relation to Humans: In his earliest form he answered the prayers of a single shepherd and could be argued into mercy by an ultimatum. In every later form he reaches people through cults, borrowed bodies and the Yellow Sign, and the contact ends in madness or worse.

Dawn in a narrow valley with two blue hills for a gateway, and a young man kneeling at a stone shrine before he unbars the gate of the sheepfold. He carries curds and an oat cake for the walk, and stops on the way to pick berries still cold with dew. The god he is praying to has never once shown himself. The boy does not seem to mind.

This is Hastur in his first and only kindly form, and he lasted about four thousand words. Ambrose Bierce set him down in “Haïta the Shepherd” in January 1891 and gave him a single function, which was to hear and be pleased. He is the god of shepherds. He does not appear, he does not speak, and Bierce never once describes him. What the story gives instead is the shape of a relationship: a boy who plays a reed pipe well enough that the shy sylvan spirits lean out of the copse to listen, and a god who stays behind the world rather than in it.

Then Bierce does something odd with him, and it is the best moment Hastur ever gets. The rain comes down hard, the stream leaves its banks, and Haïta drives his terrified flock uphill to safety. From there he thinks about the cities on the plain, which he has never seen, and prays. It is kind of thee, he says, to give me mountains so near my fold that I and my sheep can escape the angry torrents, but the rest of the world thou must thyself deliver in some way that I know not of, or I will no longer worship thee. A shepherd blackmails a god on behalf of strangers. And Hastur, knowing that the boy was one who kept his word, spared the cities and turned the waters into the sea.

That is the whole of him at the start. A god who can be leaned on, who takes the point, who moves an ocean because a teenager threatened to stop showing up.

Four years later Robert W. Chambers went through Bierce’s stories and took the sounds he liked. Carcosa, Hali, Hastur. He kept none of the meanings. In *The King in Yellow*, published in 1895, Hastur turns up three times and is a different kind of thing on each occasion. In “The Demoiselle d’Ys” he is a falconer, a man with a name and a hawk. In “The Yellow Sign” the word is dropped without explanation, the way a password is dropped. And in “The Repairer of Reputations” he is not a person at all but somewhere out past the edge of the sky: the maimed little Mr. Wilde, running his fingers down a manuscript on the Imperial Dynasty of America, speaks of the establishment of the Dynasty in Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of the Hyades. Hildred Castaigne, mad in his rented room with a jewelled crown on his head, thinks of Hastur and of his own rightful ambition, and declares that the time has come, the people should know the son of Hastur, and the whole world bow to the black stars which hang in the sky over Carcosa.

A place, a man, a lineage, a syllable in a litany. Chambers is not being careless. The vagueness is the machinery, and it works because a name that means four incompatible things at once cannot be checked.

Lovecraft read the little yellow book in early 1927 and helped himself in turn. Hastur appears twice in his own writing, both times in “The Whisperer in Darkness”, drafted in 1930. Once in a list, wedged between Nyarlathotep and Yian and the Lake of Hali, among names the narrator has heard in the most hideous of connections. Once in a letter, where a correspondent notes a whole secret cult of evil men, and says that a man of mystical erudition will understand him when he links them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign. That is it. Lovecraft never says what Hastur is. He passes the word along, still sealed.

August Derleth opened it. In “The Return of Hastur”, printed in *Weird Tales* for March 1939, Hastur becomes a Great Old One with a family tree: spawn of Yog-Sothoth, half-brother of Cthulhu, Him Who Is Not to Be Named, imprisoned in a stretch of sky near Aldebaran and waiting for a way back. Derleth fitted the whole mythos with a borrowed Paracelsian grid of four elements, and Hastur drew the air. The story itself is a slow, cold, well-built thing. A dying book collector outside Arkham leaves instructions that his house be destroyed. His heir ignores them, reads what he should not, and hears, through a stone cellar floor, chanting in no language that exists. There is a fishlike stench in the dark, and a heaviness moving in flooded tunnels underneath. The haven the old man had promised turns out not to be the house at all but his own body, and after that his nephew’s. The lawyer sets off the charges at five minutes to ten and watches something enormous get thrown up into the sky.

Derleth wanted to call Lovecraft’s entire invented cosmology the Mythology of Hastur. Lovecraft, who was alive at the time and had to hear the suggestion, said no.

His powers, such as they are, all belong to that last layer. Air and the spaces between the stars, wind as his medium, cults as his hands, and the Yellow Sign as the thing that opens the line. He works by occupation rather than assault, taking a prepared body and wearing it out, which is why the fatal move in Derleth’s story is not a summoning but a promise. The taboo on the name is presented as protection and functions as advertising.

His limits are older and stranger than his powers. He cannot come unless someone builds him somewhere to arrive, which makes every one of his catastrophes an inside job. He is fixed to a patch of sky he did not choose. And the deepest constraint is one no writer put there deliberately: he has never held a single shape for two consecutive authors, so there is nothing under the name to be frightened of except the accumulated implication that there should be. When Joseph Payne Brennan finally supplied a body in 1976, a shrivelled black flying thing with talons on the ends of its tentacles that punches through a skull and draws the brain out, it read as one more guess. Eighty-five years after a shepherd left oat crumbs at a shrine, and still nobody knows what they are praying to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hastur?

Hastur is a fictional god created by the American writer Ambrose Bierce in his 1891 short story “Haïta the Shepherd”, where he is a benevolent god of shepherds. The name was later borrowed by Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, each of whom used it differently, until Derleth turned Hastur into a malevolent Great Old One of the Cthulhu Mythos in 1939.

Is Hastur the same as the King in Yellow?

Not originally. Bierce’s Hastur and Chambers’ King in Yellow are separate creations, and Chambers never identifies them with one another; he simply uses both names in the same book. The identification of Hastur with the King in Yellow was made by later writers, and Lovecraft himself never says what or who Hastur is.

Why is Hastur called Him Who Is Not to Be Named?

August Derleth gave Hastur that epithet, along with “the Unspeakable”, when he wrote him into the Cthulhu Mythos in “The Return of Hastur” in 1939. The idea is that speaking the name draws the attention of the thing named. Neither Bierce nor Chambers nor Lovecraft attached any taboo to the name.

What powers does Hastur have?

In the Derleth version Hastur is associated with air and the interstellar spaces, and he acts through human cults and through the Yellow Sign, which functions as a means of contact. His characteristic method is possession, taking over a body that has been deliberately prepared for him rather than attacking directly.

Was Hastur ever a good god?

Yes. In Bierce’s original story Hastur hears the prayers of the shepherd Haïta, and when floods threaten the cities on the plain the boy threatens to stop worshipping him unless he saves them. Hastur spares the cities and turns the floodwaters into the sea.