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"Hastur" is a name with many
associations, and none of them clear. It first appears in Ambrose Bierce's story
"Häita the Shepherd" as the name of a pastoral deity, presumably like
Pan. Marion Zimmer Bradley suggests that the name was probably derived from
"Asturias", an ancient province of Spain. Robert W. Chambers picked up
the name in The King in Yellow, where it was noticed by HPL. Lovecraft
merely listed it in a catalogue of exotic names in "The Whisperer in
Darkness". August Derleth saw it there and combined it with Lovecraft's
reference in "The Mound" to "The Not to be Named One" and
came up with "Hastur the Unspeakable".
The resulting Great Old One became the
chief of Derleth's band of "air-elementals", a rather incongruous
arrangement, since Hastur is pictured in "The Gable Window" as
octopoid and tentacled! This aquatic nature is also implied in Derleth's
"The Return of Hastur", where Amos Tuttle takes on ichthyic features
after making a pact with Hastur.
In The Trail of Cthulhu we find
Hastur giving generous aid to humans in order to foil his
"half-brother" Cthulhu. And this brings us to an interesting wrinkle
in the Derleth Mythos.
Derleth's pantheon of "Elder
Gods" (which included HPL's Nodens, a real Roman sea-god by the way)
sometimes intervened to confute the designs of the Old Ones, but so did Hastur
and his minions the Byakhee. In fact, Hastur came to the rescue so often, and
seemed to pose so little a threat to humanity, that one wonders why Derleth did
not go the whole way and make Hastur one of the Elder Gods. This would have made
a lot more sense and is almost implied in the stories anyway.
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