The Ponape Scripture is a fictional document created by Lin Carter for his Cthulhu Mythos short stories, particularly those that make up the Xothic Legend Cycle.
Description[]
An immensely old artifact, the Ponape Scripture consists of several sheets of palm-leaf parchment inscribed with metallic ink of various colours, and bound between boards of wood that some experts identify as coming from an extinct species of prehistoric cycad or tree-fern. The text is written in the Naacal language, although some passages are in an earlier idiom identified only as "the Elder Tongue" by Yogash. Some of the signs bear resemblance to pictographs found on a black stone in Zimbabwe. (EXP: "The Dweller in the Tomb", "The Fishers from Outside")
History[]
The Ponape Scripture was discovered on Ponape by Arkham ship master Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag in 1734. Captain Hoag took the book with him to his house in Arkham, Massachusetts, where the text was translated to English by his Ponapean servant, Yogash, a human/Deep One hybrid. (EXP: "The Dweller in the Tomb", "The Fishers from Outside")
Yogash's translation circulated privately for many years among cultists and occultist in the USA, Europe, and Asia. (EXP: "Out of the Ages")
At some point before 1911, both the original and the translation found their way to the Kester Library in Salem, where they were kept "hidden away in the archives", only made available to scholars. (EXP: "The Dweller in the Tomb", "The Fishers from Outside")
The Wilmarth Foundation gathered most of its knowledge about Cthulhu's progeny from the Ponape Scripture and the Zanthu Tablets. (EXP: The Transition of Titus Crow)
Contents[]
The Ponape Scripture contains the writings of Imash-Mo and other priests of Ghatanothoa who lived in the prehistoric continent of Mu hundreds of millennia ago. It also has information about Zanthu, including the directions to find his tomb, thus suggesting that parts of the text were written after Zanthu's death, over 11,000 years after the time of Imash-Mo. The Scripture condemns Zanthu and blames him for a catastrophic blasphemy that caused the Elder Gods to descend to Earth and destroy the Muvian continent. (EXP: "The Dweller in the Tomb", "The Thing in the Pit")
The Scripture provides information about several Muvian deities, particularly the "Xothic Triad", which consists of Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog. According to the Scripture, these three are sons of Cthulhu and Idh-yaa, born in the vicinity of the double star Xoth (EXP: "The Thing in the Pit"). Other deities mentioned include Yig, Mnomquah, and Groth-Golka (EXP: "The Fishers from Outside").
Excerpts[]
| “ | As for Ghatanothoa, the Thing on the Mount, He and His Brethren, Ythogtha, the Abomination in the Abyss, and Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deep, are the Sons of the mighty Cthulhu, Lord of the Watery Abyss and the dread and awful Potentate of drowned R'lyeh; and, like unto Their Terrible Sire, Who yet shall come again in future time, They have Their Dominion over the great fish and the serpents of the Deeps, and They too be sealed away under the terrific spell of the Elder Sign for that They dared to challenge Them From Glyu-Vho for the domain of the Earth. Sons be They to great Cthulhu and His Spouse, Idh-yaa, with Whom He copulated awesomely in the nightmare darknesses between the Stars, and these Three, the Spawn of Cthulhu, came down from remote and ultra-telluric Xoth, the dim green double sun that glitters like a daemonic eye in the blacknesses beyond Abbith, to whelm and reign over the steaming fens and bubbling slime-pits of the mist-veiled dawn aeons of this Earth, and it was in primordial and shadowy Mu that They were great. | „ | |
| ~ EXP: "Out of the Ages", Lin Carter. |