TOTEM-BEAST

TOTEM BEAST

"These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

"The word (totem) is from the Algonquian and signified originally a brother-sister blood relationship. As used by anthropologists, it may denote any one or all of a number of related concepts and associated customs stemming from the nuclear idea of a blood covenant between the human and the animal species. Primarily, the anthropological term denotes (1) a mythological identification of the ancestor of a given human family, clan or tribe with the ancestor of some local animal species; but it has also been used to signify either (2) the identification of some particular animal with the guardianship or heraldic sign of some social group or class or (3) the recognition of some particular animal as the guardian, servant, or alter ego of an individual-which is more properly known as nagualism, from the Nahuatl noun nahualli ("sorcerer").
Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas Of World Mythology

OGRE

 OGRE

"Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City 

"This is a name given in folklore to a particular class of giant. In general an ogre is a gigantic humanoid male of verly little intellect, enormously strong bulk, cannibal tendencies, and easily outwitted by a clever human."

Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

 

HOWLING WIND-WRAITH

HOWLING WIND-WRAITH

"I think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

STRANGE-TONGUED FIEND

STRANGE-TONGUED FIEND

"Presently those voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

ABADDON

ABADDON

"Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place—what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-wind 

till oblivion—or worse—claims me."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

 

"Whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon-The name Abaddon means literally "destruction," and is the same as Apollyon."

"But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon-From ἀπόλλυμι apollumi-"to destroy." The word properly denotes "a destroyer," and the name is given to this king of the hosts, represented by the locusts, because this would be his principal characteristic."

Albert Barnes, Notes On the Bible

"So he went on, and APOLLYON met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold; he had wings like a dragon; and out of his belly came fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion."

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

"On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold.
They had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the thundering of many horses and chariots rushing into battle. They had tails with stingers, like scorpions, and in their tails they had power to torment people for five months.

 Revelations 9:7-10