Nyarlathotep

Nyarlathotep, also known as the Crawling Chaos, is a fictional character. He is one of the cosmic Outer Gods in the fictional Cthulhu Mythos based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth and others.

Nyarlathotep differs from the other beings in a number of ways. Most of them are exiled to stars, like Yog-Sothoth and Hastur, or sleeping and dreaming like Cthulhu; Nyarlathotep, on the other hand, is active and constantly walking the Earth in the guise of a human being, usually a tall, slim, joyous man. Most of them have their own cults serving them, while Nyarlathotep seems to serve them and take care of their affairs in their absence. Most of them use strange alien languages, while Nyarlathotep uses human languages and can be mistaken for a human being. Finally most of them are all powerful yet purposeless, while Nyarlathotep seems to be using deception, manipulation and even propaganda to achieve his goals. At that he is probably the most human-like among them.

Nyarlathotep enacts the will of the Outer Gods, and is their messenger, heart and soul; he is also a servant of Azathoth, whose wishes he immediately fulfills. Unlike the other Outer Gods, causing madness is more important and enjoyable than death and destruction to Nyarlathotep.

Nyarlathotep has many different forms (some literature refers to these forms as Masks, and says that he has a thousand of them), and is thus known by many different avatars:

• Ahtu: a huge mound of viscous material with several golden tentacles; this form is peculiar to the Congo.
• The Beast
• The Black Demon: a black-furred, winged and snouted monster. The creature is destroyed by light.
• The Black Lion, Destroyer of Egypt
• The Black Man: in legends about witchcraft, the Black Man was the being that sealed pacts between the Devil and witches; in the Cthulhu Mythos, it is Nyarlathotep who fills this role. (Note this is the colour black, not racially black.)
• The Black Wind
• The Bloated Woman: a hugely obese woman with five mouths and many tentacles; this form is peculiar to China.
• The Crawling Chaos
• The Dark Demon: a larger, more cunning version of the Black Demon.
• The Dark Pharaoh: a hairless man with dead black skin and hooves for feet; this form is peculiar to Egypt. This form and the previous two appear to be slight variations on the same Mask.
• The Effigy of Hate
• The Faceless Sphinx
• The Father of Knives
• The Father of Locusts (Bringer of Pests): a horde of huge, spitting supernatural locusts.
• The Floating Horror
• The God of the Bloody Tongue: A creature the size of a building, of vaguely humanoid stature but having three legs and immense, clawed arms. Its head is an immense blood-soaked tentacle in which a vast, gaping maw looms when the thing howls at the moon.
• The Green Man
• The Haunter of the Dark: A bloated, batlike creature with a single, burning, three-lobed eye that appears able to kill by fear alone. Like the Black Demon, it is destroyed by light.
• The Horned Man
• L'rog'g, Bat God of L'Gy'Hx (debatable)
• The Messenger of the Old Ones (It is not known if this refers to a true form of Nyarlathotep or is merely a title)
• The Royal Pant
• Mr. Skin: Indistinguishable imitation of a Black American pimp
• Narla: A Woman in the Red Dress-like virtual reality entity
• Nyarlatophis, the Sorceror
• The Pool of Shadow
• Set
• Shugoran: a black humanoid figure playing some sort of horn, this form is worshiped by the Tcho-tcho people of Malaysia.
• The Small Crawler: a small human figure with four arms and three tentacles for legs.
• Stephen Alzis
• Tezcatlipoca
• The Thing in Yellow Rags
• Thoth (strange, since Thoth was an enemy of Set)
• The Wailing Writher: a column of writhing black tentacles and screaming mouths.
• The White Man
• Xipe Totec (also called the Skinless One): a flayed, skinless corpse worshiped as a god by the Aztecs.

Quotes

"And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences - of electricity and psychology - and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare."
—H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

"What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep."
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

"There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers - the 'Black Man' of the witch cult, and the 'Nyarlathotep' of the Necronomicon."
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House

"There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices."
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark

Appearances

Outside the Lovecraft mythos, Nyarlathotep appears in the Persona series of PlayStation games as a god symbolic of the destructive potential of Carl Jung's collective unconsciousness, humanity's collective soul. He is the ally/enemy/doppelganger (it's complicated) of the Philemon character, and appears in various forms.

He also appears (as Nylonathatep, the crawling terror) in the Discworld game Discworld Noir. Stephen King's character Randall Flagg was also known as Nyarlathotep. Magic spells in Conan the Barbarian comic books feature invocations to Nyarla Thotep.

See also: References to the Cthulhu Mythos.ko:니알랏호텝