Gloon

Gloon, as described in Lovecraft's "The Temple"

First appears in "The Temple" as an ivory carving with no name attributed to it. Later detailed for the Call of Cthulhu RPG in Malleus Monstrorum.

The name "Gloon" seems to have appeared in a scenario in Cthulhu Now (G.W. Thomas's scenario "The City in the Sea"), and then in Malleus Monstrorum. (The word "gloon" seems to have first appeared in Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel Vril, or The Coming Race (fiction), allegedly a word from the language of the Vril-ya (underground civilization of the novel) and means "town".)

Description

A seaman's body was found on the deck, hands gripping the railing in curious fashion. The poor fellow was young, rather dark, and very handsome. . . . Our men searched him for souvenirs, and found in his coat pocket a very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth’s head crowned with laurel. My fellow officer believed that the thing was of great age and artistic value.
— H. P. Lovecraft, “The Temple”

Gloon, "Corrupter of Flesh" and "Guardian of the Atlantean Temple", may appear to worshipers as a tall, beautiful, naked young man wearing a laurel wreath, but its true form is that of a wrinkled, slimy, slug-like horror. Gloon is believed to be imprisoned in sunken Atlantis, where it guards a portal to another world. (Malleus Monstrorum)

Gloon Figurine

Possessing a figurine, statuette or idol of Gloon and touching it with bare hands will curse full-blooded humans with strange nightmare visions of sunken Atlantis and Gloon's ruined temple, carved from solid rock in a valley where a river once ran before the continent was submerged, the temple lit from within by some strange luminescence, with the ghastly dancing forms of Gloon's Deep One worshipers silhouetted against the windows and doorways. ("The Temple")

Cult

The cult of Gloon may typically consist of Deep Ones and possibly their human collaborators and hybrids, along with Servants of Gloon and worship of Gloon may appear side-by-side with worship of "Father" Dagon and "Mother" Hydra, and Cthulhu, with some details appearing in the Cthäat Aquadingen, The Pnakotic Fragments, and in other tomes associated with Atlantis and water demons and cults. No significant human cult of Gloon exists today, but the cult was active among humans in prehistory, especially in the Thurian Age and Hyperborean Age see (Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu).

Quotes

• "Our men searched him for souvenirs, and found in his coat pocket a very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth's head crowned with laurel.... I could not forget the youthful, beautiful head with its leafy crown, though I am not by nature an artist." - HPL "The Temple"

Associated Mythos Elements

• artifact: Gloon Figurine
• tome: Cthäat Aquadingen
• races:
  • Servant of Gloon
  • Deep One
  • Human Cultist
  • Star-Spawn of Cthulhu
• locations:
  • Atlantis
  • Lemuria
  • Mu
  • R'lyeh
• cult: (see above)
• deities - the Cult of Gloon may also incorporate the following entities into their cult as major figures:
  • Cthulhu
  • Dagon and Hydra
  • Chaat
  • Ythogtha
  • Zoth-Ommog

Rumors and Speculation

Gloon, in its female aspect

• Gloon may be a anthropomorphic, conventionalized representation of Dagon/Cthulhu carved by Atlantean artisans in a form less disconcerting to human worshipers of the Cthulhu cult, portraying Cthulhu and its Deep One priests as a beautiful male, human youth, to reassure those unfortunate human women chosen as "sea brides" for "Dagon", in much the same way that Gloon's female counterpart is conventionalized as a beautiful mermaid for the comfort of human men who are to marry sea-maidens of the Deep Ones.
• The Comte d'Erlette insisted in his infamous Cultes des Goules that Gloon was a "water elemental", and systematically traced relationships and conflicts between Gloon and other supposed "elemental spirits" in elaborate family trees that may contain at least as much fantasy as accurate historical information.

Appearances

• "The Temple" (as unnamed ivory carving)
• Cthulhu Now
• Malleus Monstrorum