The Monstrefact: Monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses a few monsters of the Cthulhu mythos...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, this is Robert Lamb. We tend to avoid
politics on the show. Most of you, like us, are
probably looking for a break from all of that when
it comes to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But for
our us listeners, I feel like I'd be remiss if
I didn't urge y'all to head out there and vote.
Vote with your hearts and vote with your minds. Early

(00:20):
voting is up and running in various places, So get
out there and make your voice heard if you can. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
Since this week is Halloween, I decided to draw inspiration
from a particular elder tome of other world evil. Nope,

(01:01):
it's not the Necronomicon, not the Book of Ebon, and
not even the Denton Affair. I'm talking about the two
thousand and six Malius Monstrorum from the role playing game
Call of Cthulhu. Now I realize there's a far more
recent edition of this book. Essentially, it's a monster manual

(01:24):
for the sixth edition of the Call of Cthulhu game
from Chaosum, Inc. But the two thousand and six book
this is the one that I really love. It features
scrapbook style illustrations, so a mix of repurposed and altered
images from various times and places that creates a haunting
sense of horror. It implies that all of these things

(01:44):
are lurking just beyond the limits of our senses, the
limits of our sanity, just waiting to burst through. And
we have all of these various illustrations, woodcuts, suspicious photographs,
and so forth that hint at their forms. Dark gods
and creatures in the books stem from many different sources,
obviously from the works of HP Lovecraft, but also from

(02:07):
many of his contemporaries such as Clark Ashton Smith and
also later admires like Stephen King and Michael Shay. So
in this special Halloween episode of The Monster Fact, I
thought we'd dip into the Malleus Monstororum and discuss a
few different unspeakable horrors from this dreaded volume of yore.

(02:28):
First up, the dreaded gugs, black furred ogre like creatures
with bifurcated four limbs branching into separate limbs. Their heads, however,
are the most distinctive feature on these creatures. As Lovecraft
described them in the dream Quest of Unknown Kadath quote,
the eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by

(02:49):
bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was
chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great
yellow fangs that ran from the top to the bottom
of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally. Now, there
are many wonderful depictions of the Gug by talented human artists,
including the legendary Wayne Barlow, one of the absolute bests.

(03:12):
But I find the illustration in the two thousand and
six Mallius Monstororum quite amusing, as it depicts what he's
said to be a nineteen hundreds children's cutout doll of
a gug as found in a Swiss museum. It makes
me chuckle, and somehow it makes the unseen reality of
the gug even stranger to contemplate. Again, the illustrations are

(03:33):
tremendous in this edition, so if you get a chance
to pick one up used, I highly recommend it. I
bought one years ago, and then I somehow lost it
and I had to purchase it again. So I definitely
have one on the shelf now. But what can we
say about the vertical mouth of a gug and therefore
strictly horizontal chewing action for these eaters of human dreams. Well,

(03:58):
certainly we see something like this in the mandibles of arthropods,
with the mandibles possibly evolutionarily derived from legs. There's nothing
quite like a gug in the history of the natural world.
But his face does vaguely look like a taco lined
with teeth, which leads me to a comparison to a
very peculiar taco shaped creature from the Middle Cambrian period

(04:22):
known as an Odoria. Its body enclosing shell does vaguely
look like a taco, and it likely swam upside down,
which enhances its comparison. According to Margarita Bassi in a
twenty twenty four Smithsonian Magazine post, recent studies indicate that
the creature also had a mandible lined toothed mouth, and

(04:43):
that this makes it one of the earliest mandibulates or
arthropods with mandibles, which is a course of an adaptation
that we've given it tremendous chewing advantage over other organisms.
It also had a trident shaped tongue. You can look
up images of the odoriah and I guarantee you'll glimpse
something as weird and wild as anything from Call of Cthula.

(05:07):
Now for my taste some of the deeper cut myth
those creatures are among the most interesting. Consider the vaguely
elephant like reptilian elder god Chognon Foggen, whose long trunk
terminates in a leechlike disc. This is a creation of
Horror author Frank Belknep Long in The Horror from the Hills.

(05:31):
Long's description of Chognar Fogin alone makes it one of
the most interesting cosmic entities in this book, but consider
also its strange servants, the merry Negris. These are naked,
vaguely man shaped dwarfs that are not actual humans. They
are fashioned from the flesh of toads that crawl around

(05:52):
on the body of their dark god. Long rites that
they quote were incapable of speech, and their thoughts were
the thoughts of Chognar. Now the Malleus Monstrorum summarizes these
creatures gather victims for their dark god and then drags
them up to the hills. And this is so that

(06:12):
the elephant like lizard deity can then suck their blood
with its strange trunk. Now we might loosely compare Chognar's
trunk to the mouth parts of a mosquito, and we
might also compare them to the oral suckers of leeches
and various analid worms. Again, remember that this dark being
is supposed to have like a disc shaped feeding apparatus

(06:35):
on the end of its trunk. And I'll also add
here that the suction disks of leeches in particular has
been singled out by scientists as a potential feature that
could be adapted for use in medical technology. This is
of course interesting as well, given that leeches were of
course historically used in medicine and still occasionally have have
usages today. Now, as for the creation of minions out

(06:59):
of fraud flesh, well we might well bring up the
human practice of zenograft here, by which the flesh of
a non human animal is used in human skin grafts
to repair skin damaged by fire, necrosis, or disease. Believe
it or not, nineteenth century doctors did employ frog flesh
in some of their procedures. As David Casey Cooper describes

(07:23):
in twenty twelve's A Brief History of Cross Species organ Transplantation.
Various mammal skins were also experimented with, but frog skin
was considered ideal given its hairlessness, and apparently freshness was
also prized, as the frog could be skinned alive and
then immediately have its skin used during a transplant. However,

(07:46):
Cooper stresses that these transplants likely didn't work, and any
reported successes might have been due to the idea that
the frog skin covered a skin ulcer and allowed that
skin ulcer to heal beneath the attempted graft. Still, xenotransplantation
remains a promising field in which genetically altered mammals such

(08:07):
as pigs, produce organs and tissues for use in potential
human transplants. The idea of creating a humanoid wholesale from
the flesh of another creature remains the domain of science
fiction and of course strange cosmic hor but the idea
of patching up a humanoid with parts from another creature
is just a promising part of scientific reality. All right,

(08:29):
we should cover one more monster, don't you think make
it an even three. Well, I've always found the Mego
from Lovecrafts The Whisperer in Darkness to be one of
the more fascinating of these creations, especially since we have
a strong sci Fi twist everything here. They're described as fungal,
intelligent interstellar aliens quote pinkish things about five feet long,

(08:53):
with crustaceous bodies, bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or
membranous wings and several sets of our ticket limbs, and
with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid covered with multitudes of
very short antenna where a head would ordinarily be. The
creatures have described as a curious mix of biological and

(09:13):
technological advancement. On one hand, we're told they travel through
space without the aid of spacecraft, using their weird wings
to flap or swim through the interstellared ether. This is
mostly a reference to the classical and medieval idea that
the universe beyond Earth was filled with a translucent fifth
element known as ether, and in the early modern period

(09:35):
there were ether theories that discussed space in terms of waves, fields,
and even mediums. In either case, the migo were said
to fly or swim or what have you through this
strange imagined interplanetary soup. As impressive as such biology would seem,
the Migo are also interested in Earth's rare minerals and
use technology for things like mining and communication equipment, as

(09:59):
well as special cylinders that can sustain surgically removed human
brains for long distance space travel. We see this horror
concept that of a brain in a jar throughout horror
and sci fi, with ties going back to the seventeenth
century writings of Reneedi Carts, for example, who considered, well,
not a brain in a vat, but an existence in
which a manipulative demon controlled all of our senses but

(10:22):
the brain in a vat scenario. The basic idea is,
if we're just a brain, what have we depended on
something else for our senses, some sort of technology, alien
technology in this case. A whole string of philosophical demons
extend from this basic concept, including direct brain in a
vat variations dating back to the early nineteen seventies. However,

(10:44):
we should note that the use of such brains in
fiction actually predates Lovecraft's nineteen thirty story, and of course
subsequently has come to factor and do everything from the
writings of philosopher Daniel Dinnett to the movie RoboCop two.
The Migo deliver a number of tariff concepts in Lovecraft's
story concerning both outer and inner space. What if the

(11:06):
wider universe is not what we thought it was. What
if my own human experience is not what I've long held?
What happens when all preconceived meanings collapse and the waxen
mask of sanity is lifted from the stranger's face. Such
moments are cosmic horror at its finest. Happy Halloween Everywhere.

(11:28):
Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact,
or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.