(NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS NOT INTENDED TO OFFEND ANYONE OF ANY BELIFE I JUST WANT POINT OUT HOW WEIRD SOME BEINGS ARE)
Prior to the introduction of HP Lovecraft Their were many odd creaturs that exitsed in all world mythologies and Religions for the next moments turn not a blind third eye at what you see:
Abrahamic (Along with The Bible and The Quran). God himself could fit this description Because The "old guy" we represent in our paintings is, in fact, just one of many forms. The Bible gives us no actual physical description of God as such, but it is clear that his visage is not something that mortal men can comprehend. Let's try to describe: Omnipotent, omniscient, an eternal living paradox who is beyond all reason and exists simultaneously at every point in space and time. Which is already weird
As I mentioned much ealier God is a Omnipotent (All knowing), omniscient (All seeing), an eternal living paradox who is beyond all reason and exists everywhere simultaneously at every point in space and time, God is the All-in-One and One-in-All, connected to all existence itself - in fact the very existence of existence
God is able to use something known as a The Sephiroth are described in the Kabbalah as the manifestations of God that allow Him to manifest in the physical and metaphysical universes and simultaneous exists in all realms
is nothing more than His handwave from absolute nothingness thus creating the universe for "who-knows-what-purpose", will never die and could likely
claim that it had been around since the dawn of eternity to the point where even with strange aeons even Death itself will die, and has existed before time
itself began and will exist long after the fabric of space and time itself has died yet He himself is not exactly bound by time, this is because God is literally the
beginning and the end of all things and thus has seen the beginning of history and will usher in the end of history as well, and on top of that He never changes and is the same yesterday, today, and forever despite changing his ideas every chapter and then, and... That's all i can think of.
However he is by all means a good person.
. To a Lesser Extent the Angles, they look very odd, how odd you ask see for yourself
The ancient depictions of angels are more like traditional Cosmic Abominations than the fluffy cute angels we see nowadays on lovely Christmas decorations.
The Prophet Muhammad was terrified when he saw Gabriel in his true form; God, through Gabriel, spends the first few verses of the Sura (chapter) Al-Muddathir calming him down.
This is why every time an angel appear to a mortal, the first thing it says is always "be not afraid".
They are divided into several catagories:
.The Cherubim (Yes, those cuties we all know today on valentines cards) have four faces - a lion on the right, an ox on the left, a human forward, and an eagle backward. They have four wings, with HANDS under the wings, their legs described as simply "straight", and they have hooves. Also, the eyes. Everywhere. Even in the spaces between the eyes. Furthermore, "Cherubim" means "the living ones". This means, in the eyes of the Hebrews, the most outstanding characteristic amongst the other orders of angels was that they are alive. The others are not even living. Not so harmless now right?
.the Seraphim are described as dragon/serpent like. They consistently have six wings, and one of them is used to cover their feet. In spite of the fact that they are snake-like. That the wings that are on fire. Some interpretations of Seraphim hold that their divine fire radiates a light so ineffably potent that it willl SEAR FROM EXISTENCE anything that approaches too close, including, presumably, lesser angels. That's still nothing compared to God Himself, for whom the Seraphim are the mundane equivalent of matches, basically shining as tokens of His glory.
.the Ophanim that take this to the extreme, being wheels intersecting themselves while turning, also flying with six wings, somehow attached while they're turning, whose name means "Wheels". Remember, neither of these were understood to be alive by the Hebrews. Add to all this that God's guard for the Garden of Eden was a cherub armed with a flaming sword that turned in all directions.
.Behemoth and Leviathan are also worthy of mention. It is to the world's great benefit that these two great beasts are mortal enemies, since it is said that their offspring would be the end of the world. This is because Leviathan is also said to be 300 miles long, and that is on top of breathing fire, having impenetrable scales, and glowing eyes. Behemoth is descibed so vaguely that all that is clear is that it is a herbivore, incredibly strong, and invulnerable to anything that is not omnipotent (God). Not being able to describe it properly is a sure sign of an Cosmic abomination. This is surely a bad thing. However, It gets better. Part of the prophecies concerning the End of Days is that these two beasts will kill each other...and afterwards the righteous will eat them in a great feast. Weird
. Another example is the Ziz, a gryphon-like bird whose wingspan would block out the sun. The Ziz once threw away a rotten egg, and thirty cities were flooded by the liquid of it, and 300 cedars were broken by the shock of the falling egg. If the Ziz would stand in the middle of the ocean, the water would only reach his knees.
(NOTE: DEMONS ARE NOT THIS BECAUSE THEY ARE INFERIOR TO MAN IN EVERY WAY)
Greco-Roman.Khaos, when portrayed as a deity and not a giant void that reality came from (and one of the Protogenoi, who aren't just older than the Olympians, they are older than even the Titans! Also, Chaos is the mass on which all the other gods (and therefore the cosmos, with the gods being Personifications of universal laws) emerged. A lumpy, crude, unframed mass, creating the universe as we know it. He is only one of the Protogenoi
.The rest of the Protogenoi starts with the Phanes Protogonos Who is both male and female, He who was born from the Orphic Egg, which had the serpent Ophioneus wrapped around it. The protogenoi also includes Gaea (The Planet we live on) and and her husband Ouranous (The Sky). ◦ The rest of the Protogenoi starts with the hermaphrodite Phanes Protogonos*
.Tartarus(The Underworld), which came inhandy when Ouranous found that the first batch of children to come from the union of two Abominations were equally abominable. Before Neptune, Oceanus, Pontus, and all the other Greek Gods and Goddesses of the sea/ocean et al, there was Thalassa; sometimes she is Gaea's daughter, sometime her granddaughter by Aether (Light) and Hemara (Day), the counterparts of which, Erebus (Darkness) and Nyxare (Night) also a happy couple.
.The first children of Gaea and Ouranous were the Hecatoncheires (meaning The Hundred Handed Ones), who had one hundred arms, one hundred hands, and fifty heads with no further details of their appearance given. Now try and imagine what the Hecatoncheires looked like. You can't quite do it can you? Nope, the only name the greeks could even come up with for these things was basically to call them "those things with one-hundred hands", which was about all we humans could comprehend of them. This makes them odd to actually see.
.Typhon, the youngest and most powerful of Gaia's offspring. Lower half consisting of serpent coils, a human upper half that reaches the stars, arms that spanned the East and the West covered with live dragon heads, a body covered in mighty wings, and eyes that shot forth flames. He has a hundred "dragon" heads on his shoulders, which he can rip out to create a fully-grown monster; just one of those was enough to guard an imprisoned Zeus from the other Gods.
When it first appeared, all of the Greek gods except Zeus ran away to hide. even Zeus, the most powerful god of them all, wielding his mighty thunderbolts in battle, lost the first round against Typhon (by Typhon STEALING ZEUS'S SINEWS and HIDING THEM) and barely managed to seal it away under the whole island of Sicily - Typhon was standing in the sea before being hit. And as mentioned above, the blow didn't kill him but only trapped him underground - the flames, smoke, and lava of the volcano Etna come directly from his mouth. in round two.
Before it was sealed away, Typhon also fathered most of the monsters present in Greek Mythology, such as Cerberus, the Sphinx, Orthus, the Nemean Lion, the Hydra, Ladon, and the Chimera (their mother Echidna might also fit the bill). And how did Gaia give birth to this beast? By mating with Tartarus, a.k.a. the Greek Underworld of course.
However, Although the fact that Zeus was willing to fight it says how BRAVE the guy is. And his re-entry into the fight was wiciked awesome in its own right, too - he jumped off Olympus and started hurling thunderbolts before the inevitable end-battle finale of beating the thing over the head with an entire mountain, hitting him so hard that he sent him all the way down into Tartarus. Yes, that's right: Zeus clubbed Typhon into another world...with a mountain as his club and the other world being the Greek equivalent of Hell. There's a reason why he's King of the Gods......................HAIL TO THE KING BABY!!!
. His mate Eckidnai/Echidna is nothing to sneer at either, roughly equivalent to fellow Cosmic Abominations in her role as a Goddess Beast of the Primordial Sea, Mother of a Thousand Young, and bigger and badder than any of her children, with an appetite to match. Yeah watchout for that lady.
.The Earth produced another one when she mated with Poseidon, Charybdis was apparently once a beautiful naiad, but was transformed by Zeus into a horrible and utterly inhuman monster for rejecting his affections. she is Either a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers that belches out whirlpools or a giant whirlpool. When forced to choose between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus quickly chose Scylla for a VERY good reason.
To put this in perspective Charybdis is a giant whirl of water that sucks three times a day enormous amounts of water, devouring entire fleets in the process, and spits it out with a loud roar. Skylla is a monster with numerous heads which also destroys ships by eating the crews...The trick behind passing those two monsters is to ship exactly between them. Unfortunately, Odysseus gets too close to Skylla the first time, since he wants to avoid Charybdis, and loses many comrades to Skylla. Later on, his fleet is utterly destroyed by a storm and Odysseus, who's holding onto a part of a ship for his life, gets pushed back to Skylla and Charybdis and only survives to Charybdis since he manages to catch the branch of a tree on the rock hanging over Charybdis and wait for Charybdis to spit out its water to get something to float on.
Viking.Ymir, a frost giant and the first living being. He was so big that the earth was made out of his corpse (the soil from his flesh, the stones from his teeth, the grass from his stubble, You get the picture right?). This means that he was at least as big as the planet.
. Jormungandr the Midgard (Viking for earth) Serpent might qualify as well. One of the monstrous offspring of Loki and a giantess, he started out big and grew so large that he encircles the world. He sleeps at the bottom of the ocean depths and waits for Ragnarok (The end of the world) where he will storm Asgard (in the company of his brother, Fenrir, and father, Loki), slay Thor, die in the battle with Thor, and help to bring about the end of the world.
. His brother Fenrir is another borderline example. On the one hand, he's a wolf, which makes him fairly recogniseable and not too frightning. On the other hand, when it comes to being stupidly huge, he has few rivals. When he opens his jaws, his lower jaw rests on the ground while his upper jaw scrapes the dome of the sky. His howl is so loud that it can shatter the vault of heaven. At Ragnarok, he leads the charge against Asgard and slays Odin, King of the Gods.
. Nidhogg the dragon is the most dangerous and powerful. It chews the roots of Yggdrasil (the world tree and then entire Omniverse) and has the souls of human sinners as snacks. It is said to even be able to survive Ragnarok. Oh, and to put its size in perspective, Jörmungandr may sit in an ocean, surrounding all of midguard in its coils, but that ocean still just sits on the end of one branch of the World Tree, while Níðhögg's massive form encompasses the entire rootsystem of the World Tree (Omniverse) itself.
. There is also an eagle called Hresvelgr at the top of the World Tree, and is the enemy of Nidhoggr (implying that they are of about equal size and power), and he has a hawk named Veðrfölnir sitting on his head to guide him.
. Ratatöskr is the being that carries messages between Nidhoggr and the Eagle. Commonly taken as a squirrel, albeit a squirrel large enough to climb up and down the World Tree with ease.
. Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór are Harts or Stags, also said to live among the branches of Yggdrasill.
Asia.Amenominakanushi, who is considered a sort of Supreme Being in some forms of Shinto in Japan and considered the center of all creation; all other gods, called kami, are considered a part of him. Kami themselves could be considered Cosmic Abominations as well, due to just how vague the definition of "kami" is, with descriptions ranging from anthropomorphic to amorphous. Shinto is an animistic religion, so everything in the universe has a kami, including humans. The kami also symbolize the forces of nature, the cosmos, the laws of physics, etc. When you put that all together, that means that the supreme deity of Shinto did not create the universe; it is the universe itself! He is an Cosmic Abomination consisting entirely of millions upon zillions of lesser Cosmic Abominations, including us.
Interestingly, he is only ever mentioned in the Japanese creation myth.
He's a great guy like God though
.the relatively obscure Japanese star-god Amatsu-Mikaboshi, also called Ame-no-Kagaseo, given the two rather...curious passages in the Nihon Shoki that mention it, both of which constantly refer to it as "the evil kami" and seem to suggest that at least three major deities - one of whom was the symbolic founder of martial arts - were required in subduing it. And that's not even getting into the more dubious sources, some of which seem to imply that it is less a spirit per se than a malevolent force that predates creation.
. Hundun, is a monster formed from the remnants of the proto-world that was not shaped into the ordered universe in Chinese Mythology. Interpretations of what he is vary: he is sometimes an internal organ-less celestial dog, a faceless giant, a sentient force of nature, or even just a huge lump of flesh. All are Lovecraftian, but he is very nice. In one story, two Emperors named Shu and Hu, thought that since they had holes in their bodies (eyes, mouth, nostrils, etc), Hundun should have them as well. They thus drilled those holes in Hundun, killing Hundun in the process. In other words, Hundun was a nice Cosmic Abomination that was destroyed by overzealous public servants.
. Ananta Shesha, lord of all nagas from Hindu Mythology in India, is a gigantic serpent/cobra with a thousand heads so huge that it can hold all the planets on the hoods. Not only can it spew venom, but it can also breathe fire. It's also one of few beings that will remain after the destruction of universe, true to its name, Ananta - ''Infinity''. It's good thing that Shesha prefers to sing and praise the glories of Vishnu, who sleeps on its back, rather than destroy everything.
. Also in Hindu Mythology in India we find Krishna, in the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, gets a description befitting any great old one: an infinite number of mouths, an uncountable number of arms holding an infinite variety of weapons, fiery breath that destroys the entire cosmos, and so on. This is the main hero in several versions of Hinduism.
Most physical depictions of Hindu gods are very odd have a look:
It gets even weirder the whole pantheon of Hinduism consists of very miscroscopic aspects of the supreme god Brahman, which is what happens if you took the Biblical God above and turn the "all-in-one-and-one-in-all" aspect up to even more inconceivable levels and their own respective aspects, and it all gets so weird that you'll need some kind of a chart to sort it all out. In fact all I can say is the universe will last as long as Brahman lives however a day in Brahman's life is equal to 4.32 billion years or an aeon.
. The Buddha, or at least the Mahayana (Buddhism merged with Far Eastern mysticism) version. in Journey to the West he is bigger than the entire universe and an entire soular system can fit in his palm and is powerful to the point even the gods worship him.
Middle Eastern.Babylonian mythology gives us some frightful critters, but the mother of all of them is Tiamat. A creature that gives birth to millions of offspring made to symbolize the primordial sea, her exact appearance is unknown. Later depictions portray her as a dragon or serpent-type creature, but the most ancient portrayals described her form as including a tail, thighs, "lower parts" (which shake together), a belly, an udder, ribs, a neck, a head (skull, eyes, nostrils, mouth, and lips), and insides (possibly "entrails," i.e. a heart, arteries, blood, stomach, womb...and other organs) also. She was big enough for innumerable gods and monsters to live inside her.
To give an idea of how monsterous Tiamat was, the battle between her and Marduk, an invader of her domain and king of the gods. By the end of it, Marduk slays Tiamat, making her "upper half" (her skull) into the earth and her "lower half" (her tail) the sky.
.Apep, or Apophis, from Egyptian Mythology was a gigantic serpent-demon that embodied chaos and darkness. Every night it tried to eat Ra as he passed through the underworld, and every night Ra killed it - but it always came back to life. Sometimes it was strong enough during the day to temporarily consume Ra before his attendants cut him free again (this was the Egyptian explanation for solar eclipses). Prior to the demonization of Set, Apep was the canonical ultimate evil of Egyptian Mythology, and there's no solid evidence that it was ever worshipped as a positive force. There were temples in Egypt dedicated to the worship of Apep, but it was more along the lines of praying "Please, please, please, please do not let this monstrosity ever win." It was sort of worship AGAINST Apep
.Nut/Nuit/Newet/Neuth, primordial Egyptian goddess of the sky and EVERYTHING in it. She separates the heavens from the earth and eats the sun and the moon allowing them to visit the underworld
.Geb, primordial Egyptian god of the earth. His laughter creates earthquakes. With Nut, he fathered many of the more famous Egyptian Gods.
.Shu is the father of Nut and Geb and god of the air. Often have him physically seperating Nut and Geb.
.Nu was the Primordial Egyptian deity of the watery abyss and was gender ambigious, no one knows what it looks like.
the supreme god Nyname of the Ashanti people of africa is pretty weird in form, the sun is merely one of his eyes. the creator god Ngula, who gave birth to him, was created by him before she did so. She is somehow both his mother and daughter. He is a very nice guy so it is hard to call him an abomination. His response to being struck repeatedly by an old woman was to not come back to Earth rather than strike back.
Miscellaneous.in Nautical Folklore The ocean. Be respectful to it and it will feed you and make you rich. Disrespect it and it will drown your homes. Or just makes sure that you will never be heard of again. Tought to deal with.
.Tau from the myths of the Guarani people of South America. Personification of evil itself. Tau was created along with his opposite, Angatupyry, by the supreme god of the Guaraní creation myth, Tupã, and was left with humanity on Earth.
Tau found himself enamored by a woman named Kerana, the daughter of Marangatu, who lived among the Guaraní tribe. Tau disguised himself as a handsome young man and wooed her for seven days before deciding to kidnap her, but his plot was foiled by Angatupyry, the spirit of goodness. Tau and Angatupry fought each other for seven days and seven nights in a fairly stereotypical "Good vs Evil" fight until he was at last defeated. Following his defeat, he was exiled from the land by Pytajovái, the god of war and valour.
Tau would not be so easily defeated. In spite of his expulsion he was able to return and kidnap the beautiful Kerana. He mated with her the product of Tau and Kerana was seven children who were cursed by the goddess Arasy and born as Cosmic Abominations. Each of the seven were revered or feared, each possessing different abilities and traits, central to Guaraní lore.
They are:
1.Teju Jagua: a half-lizard, half-dog creature considered lord of caverns
2.Mbói Tu'ĩ: a giant snake with the head of a parrot
3.Moñái: a giant horned snake said to be the lord and protector of the fields
4.Jasy Jatere: lord of the siesta
5. Kurupi: god of reproduction
6. Ao Ao: appeared as perhaps a monstrous sheep or peccary
7. Luison: a dog-like human, lord of death
. Silla of Inuit cosmology and most of its variations recognized by related cultures. Basically it is the air every thing breathes and the main ingredient of everything's soul. It is not exactly benevolent either as it wants those parts of itself that makes up all that lives back and its not above such acts as convincing kids to wander out into the tundra where they will get hypothermia to get it.
. In Aztec mythology the purpose of ritual scarifice was used to keep the Aztec gods (especially the sun/war deity Huitzilopochtli) strong enough to defend our world against the depredations of the horrific Tzitzimime a skeletal, spider-like star demonesses with flint blades for tongues and rattlesnakes for tails.
They kind of look like this:
.Even putting their bloodthirstiness aside, the Aztec pantheon is exceptionally strange and alien, even by mythological standards. Most of the gods had many, many different names, forms, appearances, roles, and general alter egos, to the point where it's often unclear whether two gods were considered separate entities or not, even archenemies are not immune to this. It gets weirder when they'd actually destroyed and remade the world four times before this one (WORLD RECORD), going through four different suns in the process, and many of them took forms of the "hide under the bed" variety, often involving skeletons, Biological Missmatches, things being substituted for body parts that really weren't meant to be (having an obsidian block for a foot), and lots of feathers and obsidian blades. Plus, their names all look completly unpronounceable if you're not familiar with them.
While most people (including neighboring cultures to the Aztecs, many of whom shared the same base mythology) would consider Tezcatlipoca to be evil and Quetzalcoatl to be good, like with any proper Cosmic Abominations, it's nothing like that simple. One of the jobs of Tezcatlipoca is to ensure that Quetzalcoatl does not return to full power... because if he did, the resulting cataclysm would destroy the world and destroy every living thing.
. the biggest and baddest thing to come out of Aztec Mythology is undoubtedly Cipactli, the gargantuan monster that inhabited the ocean before the creation of the first world. It's described as part crocodile (which is what its name means), part fish, and part toad, and as having an extra mouth at every joint. The gods couldn't get to creating with this... thing running around, so Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca actually put aside their eternal rivalry to kill it, and even then it managed to take off Tezcatlipoca's foot (to put this in perspective, Tezcatlipoca was the King of the Gods at the time and believed to be nigh-omnipotent) before finally going down. Then the two gods made the world out of its corpse, because it was just
that big. The struggle of the gods against some primordial, horrifyingly incomprehensible
thing before they can start doing creation
Fri Jul 20, 2012 6:46 pm
