Queen in Red

The Queen in Red (AKA: "The Red Death", "Aka-Chan", "The Scarlet Whore of Babylon") originates in Malleus Monstrorum, adapted from Florentine iconography.

In the Mythos

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication....
— Revelations 17:4

The composer Franz Liszt was inspired in his work by a Florentine fresco depicting death as "a fearsome woman, with hair streaming wildly, with clawed hands. She is bat-winged, and her clothing is stiff with mire. She swings a scythe, eager to end the joy and delight of the world."
— The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural.

I hear the music, daylight disc; / Three Men in Black said, "Don't report this." / "Ascension," and that's all they said, / Sickness now, the hour's dread... / I'm in fairy rings and tower beds / "Don't report this," three men said. / Books by the blameless and by the dead, / King in Yellow, Queen in Red....
— Blue Oyster Cult, "E.T.I."

The Queen in Red usually appears as a very beautiful and powerful veiled woman, dressed in regal crimson and lavishly adorned with gems and jewelry. At times she may appear as a horrible bat-winged, clawed woman with vicious fangs, wearing a white skull mask splashed in red with filthy red robes, wielding a gleaming scythe crimson with blood. In the 21st Century, during an apocalyptic global pandemic nick-named for the Queen in Red, she was depicted in memes as a cute but delirious and overly-friendly cartoon maiden in a red gown, with fangs, wide toxic-green eyes, cheeks red with fever, and bat wings and fangs, joyfully spreading the feverish "love" and "gospel" of her plague and its social, political, and economic turmoil to an eagerly waiting world.

Heresies and Controversies

• Chaosium depicts the Queen in Red as an Avatar of Nyarlathotep. (Malleus Monstrorum)

Cult

There seems to be no widespread or long-lasting organized cult of the Queen in Red, who is apparently chaotic and all but oblivious to human interaction and perception, and has a tendency to turn on herown cults.

Short-lived "Courts" and "parties" dedicated to her have turned up from time to time throughout history, such as global internet-based communities calling themselves "The Court of the Red Queen", which appeared in the wake of the 21st Century Red Death global pandemic, in which groups of youths, pursuing social media "clout", organized flash-mobs and stunt "challenges" to deliberately try to catch or spread the "love and gospel" of "Aka-Chan" ("Little Red Cutie", an avatar or epithet of the Queen in Red.)

The entity's hand may also be perceived to be at work in the turbulent words, actions, and policies of pundits, politicians, scientists, demagogues, cultists, executives, and celebrities in the wake of the spread of the Red Death: seemingly disorganized and contradictory, but all weirdly working together toward the passing of the world from the hands of old, known gods, into the hands of a feverish "New Normal". Here, the cult of the Red Queen tends to become fashionable among the rich, famous, powerful, indolent and effete.

In either case, the cults of the Queen in Red tend to take the forms of decadent doomsday cults, celebrating widespread death and disease as a necessary step closer to a new utopian order in which a chosen few are permitted to survive the ravages of the disease, either by early exposure or by quarantine, and then inherit a "cleansed and purified" world remade into their own shallow and rigidly-ordered image of paradise.

The Red Death

The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
—Edgar Allan Poe, "Masque of the Red Death (fiction)"

The Red Death is a plague that has taken many forms and many names ("The Red Death", "Aka-Chan", "The Queen in Red", "Healter-Skelter" [sic]], "Captain Trips"), but always spreads in advance of the return of the Queen in Red to earth: it has generally been known as a fever with flu-like symptoms followed quickly by dizziness, bleeding at the pores, lurid red lesions about the increasingly pale and skull-like face, rapid decay, and death within a short period of time.

A sort of social or spiritual madness also seems to accompany the spread of the Red Death, bringing out the worst in mankind, and especially their rulers, the wealthy, powerful, and famous, as they try to reinvent the society around them, guiding it into a "New Normal" better suited for their debauchery; these giants among men, architects of the new world of the Red Death, also seem in the end to have been the ultimate self-destructive targets of the very doom they have opened the door to, to their own shock and horror. Historically, the Red Death has burned itself out almost as suddenly and unexpectedly as it started, taking the avatar of the Red Queen and its cultists to oblivion with it, but the Red Queen's cultists are known to subscribe to a prophecy that one day, the Red Queen will return to rule the earth forever, and perhaps that day is already here, and it is best to be on the Right Side of History when the Red Queen at last assumes her throne, and the Red Death rages across the land, subduing and ravishing the pitiful riffraff beyond the walls of the estates of the Red Queen's cults forever.

To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons — the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.
— H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep (fiction)"

Related Mythos Elements

• setting: Dreamlands, Dreamland of Carcosa (where the Queen in Red may rule or be worshiped in some of the Dream Cities neighboring or rivaling Carcosa, such as Alar or Yhtill)
• deity: King in Yellow (perhaps part of the same pantheon)
• deity: Nyarlathotep (the Queen in Red is sometimes reputed to be an Avatar of Nyarlathotep)
• tome: The King in Yellow (tome)
• cult: Men in Black (known to have become active at times when the Red Death spreads)
• cult: Human Cultists (generally disorganized, often taking the form of decadent doomsday cults, which may be especially fashionable among the rich and famous)
• race: Star Vampires

References

• sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum
• fiction (for inspiration):
  • H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep (fiction)"
  • Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (fiction)
  • Edgar Allan Poe, "Masque of the Red Death (fiction)"
    • film: The Masque of the Red Death (1964 film)