Ponape

Ponape (AKA "Ponape Island", "Pohnpei Island" since the 1990s, and "Ascension Island" in the Gaslight era) is a Micronesian island, home of the cyclopean city ruin of Nan Madol (which sometimes lends the island its name, such as "Nan-Matal").

Description, Geography, History, Landmarks

Map of Nan Madol

Ponape Island is a real Micronesian island, coming to the attention of pulp writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and the other Mythos writers because of the discovery of cyclopean stone ruins of Nan Madol on the island, made from gigantic slabs of prismatic basalt stacked into buildings, artificial islands with canals between them, temples, and other features. Among the island's notable features is the fact that it has no beaches, per se, but instead a couple small shores of volcanic pebbles that quickly drop of into salt marshlands on the sea side, while rising up into massive basalt cliffs above the water; the basalt naturally fractures into massive, log-like prisms of stone which the natives have used to construct elaborate buildings with.

The island has been populated for thousands of years by Polynesian peoples today believed to have migrated to the island from nearby islands, migrating from island to island from East Asia, spreading onward to Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. In the 1920s, the fringe science and occultism that informed the "Jazz Era" classic Cthulhu Mythos setting would have held that the island is one of the remnants of the Lemurian or Muvian lost continents and their supposed prehistoric technologically advanced (or even alien) civilizations; the amphibious protohuman "Lemurians of Theosophy seem to have served as a template for Great Cthulhu and his Star-Spawn, with the basalt cyclopean architecture of Nan Madol suggesting an obvious template for Cthulhu's sunken city of R'lyeh. As such, Ponape is embraced by the Cthulhu Mythos as an outpost of Cthulhu's prehuman civilization which has thus far escaped being swallowed by the seas.

Cyclopean city of Nan Madol, Ponape Island

Ponape Island would have been known as Ascension Island in the gaslight era, and the name 'Ponape' - anglicized from a local name translated as "Upon a Stone Altar", would be changed in the mid 1990s to Pohnpei to more accurately reflect the native pronunciation.

A curiously Lovecraftian native legend holds that an ancestral hero named Sapkini, seeking the land at the end of the world, expecting that there he would find the paradise where the earth contacts the heavens; to that end, Sapkini loaded up a large canoe with those who would found his new tribe and set sail. After many days of travel with no land in sight, he saw a strange octopus spirit in his dreams, and asked for its name, and where it is from. The octopus, answering Sapkini, spoke its name in dream, and revealed to Sapkini a secret land to the southwest where the octopus lived - Pohnpei, the place on the stone altar. And so Sapkini, on awakening from the dream, traveled in the direction the octopus showed him, and found the land, and upon its shores the shoal upon which Sapkini's new city would be founded, using the mighty stones brought down from the cliff-sides.

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Xothic Cycle
• location: R'lyeh and Abyss of Yhe are said to be nearby
• location: Mu and Lemuria - Ponape is supposedly the last remnant of these lost continents
• race: Lemurians
• race: Xothan, Deep Ones, Shoggoths
• deity: Cthulhu, Ghatanothoa, and others

References

• fiction: A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool (fiction)", one of the earlier pulp references to the island (as "Nan-Matal")
• fiction: H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's "Out of the Aeons"
• fiction: Lin Carter's The Xothic Legend Cycle
• article: legend of Sapkini and the Octopus
• article: Wikipedia article on Pohnpei]
• article: Wikipedia article on Nan Madol]