Description
Lovecraft described the Elder Sign only once in his writings, as given by the aged alcoholic Zadok Allen in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936): "In some places they was little stones strewed abaout — like charms — with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika nowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs." In this story, the sign is used as a defense against Deep Ones; apparently, the Deep Ones cannot harm someone protected by an Elder Sign. However, Lovecraft is known to have drawn it in at least one of his correspondences as a single line with five shorter lines branching off.
August Derleth, who wrote several Cthulhu Mythos stories, described it as a warped, five-pointed star with a flaming pillar (or eye) in the center. This latter description, which is featured in his novel The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), has become the most well-known and popular version of the Elder Sign. It is the version used in D&D, described in Deities and Demigods as an icon of green soapstone, and also appears in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game — as well as the later version published under the Open Gaming License — and in the video game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth as well as in the boardgame Arkham Horror, produced by Fantasy Flight Games.
A third version of the Elder Sign, incorporating both Derleth's description and Lovecraft's drawing, appears in Lin Carter's short story "The Horror in the Gallery" (1976). This version places Lovecraft's branching design as a cartouche in the center of an oval "star stone". According to the fictional Book of Iod, one of the numerous arcane tomes mentioned in the Cthulhu Mythos, the Elder Sign is a powerful weapon against the servants of Cthulhu and the Outer Gods, and can be used to drive them off.
Read more about this topic: Elder Sign
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It [Egypt] has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)