There are many Great Old Ones. This is the case because
Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a group of friends and fellow writers that he
exchanged ideas with, resulting in the rampant growth of a shared body of mythological
lore marked with substantial breadth and depth. Clarke Ashton Smith, August
Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, and Thomas Ligotti have
all contributed to Lovecraft’s Mythos universe, for better or for worse,
producing a powerful symbol set for the practicing chaos magician. Although
there is much dissent as to whether or not extra-Lovecraft contributions to the
lore are relevant to the literary tradition of the Cthulhu Mythos, It is clear
to me that we are really short-changing ourselves if we do not consider the grand
possibilities of making magical use of these new offerings.
Among the lesser known of the Great Old Ones is a being
known as Y’Golonac. Appearing for
the first time in Ramsey Campbell’s Cold
Print (1985), the personage of Y’golonac is one of festering disease and
visceral, predatory sexuality. His body
is a great knot of slime-covered corpulence in the shape of an obese, naked man
without a head. The head has not been severed, it was never there, or if it
was, it has been reduced to naught but a pucker of fat. Although deprived of a face, the image of
Y’golonac is not without its facial features as the god’s most telling
iconography is a pair of great gnashing mouths in the palms of its hands. Y’golonac’s weeping genitals are hidden deep
beneath folds of fetid lard.
Beyond descriptions of its startling physicality, Campbell
gives us as an excerpt from the dreaded twelfth volume of The Revelations of Glaaki:
"Beyond the gulf in the subterranean night a passage leads
to a wall of massive bricks, and beyond the wall rises Y’golonac to be served
by the tattered eyeless figures of the dark. Long has he slept beyond the wall,
and those which crawl over the bricks scuttle across his body never knowing it
to be Y’golonac; but when his name is spoken or read he comes forth to be
worshipped or to feed and take on the shape and soul of those he feeds upon.
For those who read of evil and search for its form within their minds call
forth evil, and so may Y’golonac return to walk among men and await that time
when the earth is cleared off and Cthulhu from his tomb among the weeds, Glaaki
thrusts open the crystal trapdoor, the brood of Eihort are born into daylight,
Shub-Niggurath strides forth to smash the moon-lens, Byatis bursts forth from
his prison, Daoloth tears away illusion to expose the reality concealed behind.[1]"
It is important to
note that the reading of this sort of material from The Revelations is believed to be an essential component of the
Y’golonac invocation. In fact, the
manifestation of Y’golonac must be through invocatory method as avatars of this
Old One are to some extent defined by not only the form of the host, but also
by the host’s psychosexual topography.
Thus, the manifestations of the Headless Duke are as many as there are adorants
of his creed. And as such, each initiation into his mysteries is a subjective
experience produced by the interfacing of a viciously chaotic and destructive
force blended seamlessly with the most base and dangerous portions of the
primordial self. Upon first glance, the symbol of Y’golonac is the open hand –
a gesture associated with protection, charity, and renunciation (variation depending
on the angle of the palm and wrist). However, in this Old One’s case, the palm
is marked with the stigmata of Y’golonac – a hideous set of “wet red mouths”[2].
And so it is the peace and welcome of
the open palm concealing the predation of the sexualized maw – sex and death
concealed by the plumage of compassion.
It is interesting to view Y’golonac as an initiating force
with its own inherent Grail quest. In the story Cold Print, a unique trait (a repressed appreciation of esoteric
pornography) draws the seeker out of the sane, uninitiated world and into his
own private reality that is defined by the steps and symbols of his quest. As Sam Strutt follows his desire through the
labyrinth, beset by obstacles, he eventually finds the final bookstore in which
he meets an adept of Ygolonac’s mysteries that transubstantiates Strutt’s body
(through the physical metamorphosis) and mind (by way of madness) through an
initiation brought on by the reading of passages drawn from the twelfth volume
of the Revelations of Glaaki . The final
line of the story describes Strutt staring in horror as the blood-mouth
stigmata manifests through his own hands. The gnosis of this invocation appears
to be one of abased exaltation – perfection through surrender to corruption.
To further extrapolate the personage of Y’golonac, I will
compare him to an aesthetically similar but functionally opposite entity drawn
from the Tantric tradition. Chinnamasta – perhaps the most cryptic of the Ten
Mahavidyas – is a being of the most holy gnosis. She stands upon the bodies of Rati and Kama in
a gesture of conquest over desire. The three streams of blood that pour from
her neck model the marriage of nadis
necessary for the highest levels of yogic attainment. Nonetheless, she is a
headless deity flanked by a pair of bloody mouths – albeit attached to dancing
dakini rather than imbedded in the palms of her hands.
In contrast, the head of Y’golonac is erased, not severed.
Whereas Chinnamasta’s is a gesture of conquest over the trickery of senses, Y’golonac’s
posture embodies a negation of becoming and a pre-aware/pre-thought state that
characterizes the first chaos and primordial beings of many creation tales.
Rather than conquer desire, he is defined by deviance aspiring to its most
complex terminus. The mouths of dakini
represent the dovetailing and completion of divine pranic circuits whereas the
mouths of Y’golonac represent blind and terrible hunger. The perfected desire of starving wolves.
Here we are given a strange hint insofar as Campbell’s ideas
about Y’golonac’s relationship to the rest of the Mythos:
“…for even the minions of Cthulhu dare not speak of Y’golonac;
yet the time will come when Y’golonac strides forth from the loneliness of
aeons to walk once more among men…”[3]
Here we are left with questions to consider. Why would the
minions of a world-ending deity such as Cthulhu fear the base, limited human
corruption of Y’golonac? Is there a supernal form of Y’golonac that has yet to
be described? Perhaps a form void of its human anchor…
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