Deep One
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the Cthulhu Mythos creatures. For the X-COM alien race, see Deep One (X-COM race).
The Deep One is a fictional creature in the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. The beings first appeared in Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931). The Deep Ones are a race of frog-like, ocean-dwelling creatures with an affinity for mating with humans.
Numerous Mythos elements are associated with the Deep Ones, including the legendary town of Innsmouth, the undersea city of Y'ha-nthlei, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and the beings known as Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. After their debut in Lovecraft's tale, the sea-dwelling creatures resurfaced in the works of other authors, especially August Derleth<ref>The Deep Ones are a popular fixture in Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos fiction, appearing in about half of his tales. ("Derleth's Use of the Words 'Ichthic' and 'Batrachian'", Crypt of Cthulhu #9.)</ref>.
Contents |
[edit] Summary
Lovecraft provides a description of the Deep One in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":
I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.
Lovecraft describes the Deep Ones as a race of undersea-dwelling humanoids whose preferred habitat is deep in the ocean (hence their name). However, despite being primarily marine creatures, they can come to the surface and can survive on land for some time. All Deep Ones are immortal; none die except by accident or violence. They are said to serve the beings known as Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, as well as Cthulhu.<ref>Robert M. Price suggests that "Dagon" and Cthulhu are actually the same entity, Dagon being "the closest biblical analogy to the real object of worship of the deep ones"--The Innsmouth Cycle, Robert M. Price, ed., p. ix.</ref> They are opposed by mysterious beings known as the Old Ones, whose powerful magic can keep them in check.
[edit] Deep One hybrid
The backstory of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" involves a bargain between Deep Ones and humans, in which the aquatic species provides plentiful fishing and gold in the form of strangely formed jewelry. In return, the land-dwellers give human sacrifices and a promise of "mixing"—the mating of humans with Deep Ones. Although the Deep One hybrid offspring are born with the appearance of a normal human being, the individual will eventually transform into a Deep One, gaining immortality—by default—only when the transformation is complete.
The transformation usually occurs when the individual reaches middle age. As the hybrid gets older, he or she begins to take on more and more attributes of the Deep One race: The ears shrink, the eyes bulge and become unblinking, the head narrows and gradually goes bald, the skin becomes scabrous as it changes into scales, and the neck develops folds which later become gills. When the hybrid becomes too obviously non-human, it is hidden away from outsiders. Eventually, however, the hybrid will be compelled to slip into the sea to live with the Deep Ones in one of their undersea cities.
In the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, the Deep Ones' unusual mating habits are attributed to the fact that as the population in a given undersea city increases, fertility decreases, because female Deep Ones begin eating their young.
[edit] Father Dagon and Mother Hydra
Father Dagon and Mother Hydra are both minor Great Old Ones; though it is possible that they are merely Deep Ones that have grown abnormally large. Together with Cthulhu, they form the triad of gods worshipped by the Deep Ones. (See Dagon, a Semitic fertility deity.)
Mother Hydra is the consort to Father Dagon. The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game suggests that Mother Hydra may not be a Great Old One at all, but merely a gigantic Deep One.
[edit] Y'ha-nthlei
"Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei"<ref>Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".</ref> is the only Deep One city named by Lovecraft. The name may have been inspired by the Lord Dunsany character "Yoharneth-Lahai", "the god of little dreams and fancies" who "sendeth little dreams out of PEGANA to please the people of Earth."<ref>Price makes this suggestion in the introduction of Dunsany's "Of Yoharneth-Lahai", The Innsmouth Cycle, p. 1.</ref>
In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", it is described as a great undersea metropolis located below Devil's Reef just off the coast of Massachusetts, near the town of Innsmouth. Its exact age is not known, but one resident is said to have lived there for 80,000 years. <ref>"For eighty thousand years Pht'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei" (ibid).</ref>.
In Lovecraft's story, the U.S. government torpedoed Devil's Reef in 1928 as part of a raid on the town of Innsmouth.
Other authors have invented Deep One cities in other parts of the ocean, including Ahu-Y'hloa near Cornwall and G'll-Hoo, near the volcanic island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland.<ref>Brian Lumley, "Rising With Surtsey".</ref>
[edit] Popular culture
The movie Dagon, inspired by "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", features Deep Ones hybrids as the primary antagonists. The Deep Ones hybrids in this movie though resemble the more tentacled Cthulu and lack the more piscene features of the Deep Ones in the book. It is The movie moves the action to a small coastal town in Galicia in northwest Spain. The town is named Imboca ("boca" is the Spanish word for "mouth"), though the main characters are American tourists. One of them wears a sweatshirt from Miskatonic University.
The second season of Digimon featured creatures that resembled the Deep Ones. Nicknamed the Digi-Dark Ones, they worshipped a greater being called Dragomon ("Dagomon" in Japan), their "Dark Undersea Master" (in the Japanese version, explicitly a god).
Deep Ones are featured as adversaries in video games like Alone In The Dark, X-Com 2: Terror from the Deep and, of course, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the decrepit xenophobic town of Hackdirt has a strange cult dedicated to the "Deep Ones". In the underground section of the town, there are townspeople who bear striking resemblances to Deep One hybrids (most notably the enlarged eyes).
[edit] References
[edit] Primary source
- Lovecraft, Howard P. [1931] (1984). “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, S. T. Joshi (ed.): The Dunwich Horror and Others, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
[edit] Secondary sources
- Harms, Daniel (1998). “Dagon”, The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, 2nd ed., Oakland, CA: Chaosium, pp. 73. ISBN 1-56882-119-0.
- —"Deep Ones", pp. 81–82. Ibid.
- —"Hydra (Mother Hydra)", p. 143. Ibid.
- —"Y'ha-nthlei", p. 340. Ibid.
- Kermit Marsh III (a pseudonym?) (Hallowmas 1982). "Derleth's Use of the Words 'Ichthic' and 'Batrachian'". Crypt of Cthulhu #9: A Pulp Thriller and Theological Journal Vol. 2 (No. 1). Robert M. Price (ed.) Bloomfield, NJ: Miskatonic University Press.
- Petersen, Sandy. Call of Cthulhu, 5th ed., Oakland, CA: Chaosium. ISBN 1-56882-148-4.
[edit] Notes
<references/>
