| “ | It was his monstrous pleasure to hunt the soul, as a hound will course and run down a frightened rabbit | „ | |
| ~ CIRCLE: "The Hunt" |
Iod is a Great Old One [1] created by the late American author Henry Kuttner for his short story "The Secret of Kralitz".
In Kuttner's Fiction[]
The first mention of Iod comes in Kuttner's "The Secret of Kravitz," when Franz Kralitz is learning eldritch lore from his ancestors: "I learned, too, of the unbelievable manner in which Iod, the Source, is worshiped beyond the outer galaxies."
In "The Invaders" (1939), Hayward's experiment teach him that "the first human race dwelt in primal Mu, worshiping strange, forgotten gods"—including "Iod the Shining Hunter."
The most extensive discussion of Iod comes in Kuttner's "The Hunt" (1939), in which the wizard Will Benson "call[s] up an entity which mankind worshiped eons ago as—Iod. Iod, the Hunter":
Man had worshiped Iod in older days, under other names. He was one of the oldest gods, and he had come to Earth, the tale went, in pre-human eons when the old gods soared between the stars, and earth was a stopping place for incredible voyagers. The Greeks knew him as Torphonios; the Etruscans made nameless sacrifices diurnally to Vediovis, the Dweller beyond Phlegethon, the River of Flame.
This ancient god did not dwell on Earth, and a certain apt phrase the Egyptians had coined for him meant, rendered into English, the Dimension Prowler. The evilly famous De Vermis Mysteriis spoke of Iod as the Shining Pursuer, who hunted souls through the Secret Worlds—which, Prinn hinted, meant other dimensions of space.
...It was the human soul, the Flemish magician wrote, which the ancient god hunted. It was his monstrous pleasure to hunt the soul, as a hound will course and run down a frightened rabbit; but if an adept took the necessary precautions, he could safely summon Iod, and the god would serve him in certain curious but desirable ways....
Iod's appearance is said to be indescribable--and unsurvivable:
No man could say, moreover, what shape Iod would assume; it was whispered that he did not always retain the same form.... And for a human being to see the shape of Iod in all its frightful completeness, unprotected by the necessary precautions, meant swift and certain doom.
When Iod does appear, he manifests as a "blazing cosmic horror":
It was not a homogeneous entity, this unholy specter, but it partook hideously of incongruous elements. Strange mineral and crystal formations sent their fierce glow through squamous, semitransparent flesh, and the whole was bathed in a viscid, crawling light that pulsed monstrously about the horror.
Description[]
Iod is a conglomeration of plant, mineral, and animal which appears first as a veil or great black shadow in the air, followed by a blinding night after which it emerges. Its body consists of pulsing luminous crystals and mineral formations inside an envelop of squamous, translucent flesh, with a large faceted eye and vine-like tentacles. After paralyzing its victims, Iod drains away their life force with its tendrils until only the victim's brain remains conscious. This consciousness lives on within the corpse, trapped for all eternity.
Background[]
Iod was worshipped on the planet Bel Yarnak and beyond the farthest galaxies (where it is referred to as "The Source"), and is known in Atlantis and Mu (as "The Shining Hunter") where the inhabitants worshipped it as a "god of earth" along with Vorvadoss and Cthulhu. It is a strange crystalline fungus entity, remembered dimly as "the Shining Pursuer, who hunted souls through the Secret Worlds". Most of what mankind knows of it is contained in the occult text the Book of Iod.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ Malleus Monstrorum, pp116-117, Scott David Aniolowski (Chaosium, 2020)