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| “ | It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God! | „ | |
| ~ The King in Yellow (ADJ: "In the Court of the Dragon") |
The King in Yellow is a character created by Robert W. Chambers for his horror fantasy story cycle The King in Yellow.
In Chambers' stories, the King is the titular personage of the fictional cursed stage play of the same name. He is a powerful being, bearer of madness and damnation for those who have read the play, and associated with the equally mysterious Yellow Sign.
While the mythology of The King in Yellow has been incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by H. P. Lovecraft and others, the King remains an enigmatic figure. The most favoured interpretation, popularised by the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, presents him as an avatar of Hastur, and one of the best known forms of the deity.
Contents
- 1 Quotations
- 2 Introduction
- 3 References to the King
- 4 Other interpretations
- 4.1 Nyarlathotep
- 4.2 The Colour Out of Space
- 5 In other works
- 6 External links
Quotations[]
| “ | He is a king whom emperors have served. | „ | |
| ~ Mr. Wilde (ADJ: "The Repairer of Reputations") |
| “ | I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, "Not upon us, oh King, not upon us!" Feverishly I struggled to put it from me, but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and flapped as they passed like the scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow. | „ | |
| ~ Alec (ADJ: "The Mask") |
| “ | The KING can now be seen, although only faintly. He stands in state upon the balcony. He has no face, and is twice as tall as a man. He wears pointed shoes under his tattered, fantastically colored robes, and a streamer of silk appears to fall from the pointed tip of his hood. Behind his back he holds inverted a torch with a turned and jeweled shaft, which emits smoke, but no light. At times he appears to be winged; at others, haloed. These details are for the costumer; at no time should The KING be sufficiently visible to make them all out. | „ | |
| ~ Description in at least one version of the play. (CIRCLE: "More Light") |
Introduction[]
Judging from the original stories, the cursed play The King in Yellow is somehow linked to this being in a nebulous and horrible way, a tattered-clad god who bears some connection to an entity or city called Yhtill. The King is in turn linked in some way with "Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali." His nature, the king's motives, and his modus operandi are unclear; but he appears from time to time on Earth, by reanimation of corpses or possessing those already slaves to him, and reclaiming those who have eluded him. Reading the play exposes one's mind to the King, and causes readers to fall under his influence, driving them insane.
The King does not strictly appear in the original stories, at least not in a way that allows for a good description. Whilst the narrators of "The Yellow Sign" and "In the Court of the Dragon" seem to see and hear the King briefly at the end, they are not able to convey everything they see.
References to the King[]
There are few direct references to the King in Yellow in the book that bears his name by Robert William Chambers. There are implications that he (or she) is a kind of horrible being, perhaps all powerful, and insidiously pervasive, though there is little mention of what substance it is or the origin or the true form it takes; his machinations, however, stem from an unlimited desire for domination. As Mister Wilde has pointed out in "The Repairer of Reputations": "The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts... He is a king whom emperors have served."
The snippets given from the play's script, as mentioned in the stories, suggest that the king is connected to the Pallid Mask, which is possibly a projection or avatar of the king himself or at least his servant or emissary. The king, however, seems to be present both in the "reality" inhabited by the protagonists of Chambers' tales and within the fictional world of the play. Part of the horror of the stories is the way the king's malice flows from one layer of reality to another. For the characters, allowing their minds to open up to the forbidden play and its world is to give the entity the means to reach them.
The king's ability to possess the bodies (not necessarily alive) of those who have fallen into his control is evidenced by the fate of the narrator, Mr. Scott, in "The Yellow Sign": "The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless... I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now."
Other interpretations[]
Nyarlathotep[]
The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana acknowledges the King in Yellow as "an avatar of Hastur, or possibly Nyarlathotep".
The association with Nyarlathotep might be derived from the High Priest Not to Be Described, which Lovecraft portrays as "a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face", heavily implied to be either Nyarlathotep himself or one of his Moon-beast allies (HPL: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).
In "The Strange Doom of Enos Harker", Robert M. Price portrays the High Priest as a body chosen by Nyarlathotep to be his vessel. The host, upon being selected, is presented with the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask, and the Silken Mantle.
In The Whisperer in Darkness, which was the first Mythos story to incorporate elements from The King in Yellow, the Mi-Go claim that Nyarlathotep "shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock". This passage anticipates how one of the Mi-Go themselves would likewise use a waxen mask to impersonate Henry Wentworth Akeley.
The Colour Out of Space[]
In Neil Gaiman's tongue-in-cheek short story "I, Cthulhu", the King in Yellow is a separate character from Hastur. Although he looks human, the King is actually an extradimensional being worshiped as a god on alien planets, and claims that he first appeared in our dimension as "a mere colour out of space".
In other works[]
- The King in Yellow appears in the Pathfinder RPG as an immensely powerful demigod served by aberrant beings of all kinds, with Xhamen-Dor as his most powerful Carcosa-growing asset. The Yithians have fought their servants since time immemorial. The Great Race of Yith battled against them on Golarion, destroying many and sealing others under the earth.
- In the trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh! there are two cards possibly based on this avatar of Hastur, named "Tour of Doom" and "Old Entity Hastorr".
- In the HBO series True Detective, the plot revolves around the King in Yellow. A series of references are also made to Carcosa, the place where certain crimes will be committed that will lead to the development of the plot.
- In the book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and the BBC series inspired by said book, Hastur appears as a demon within a Christian-type cosmology. In humanoid form, he sports blond hair, a ragged appearance with rotting boils on his face, and an unhinged attitude. In the TV series, he also displays the ability to adopt the form of a swarm of flesh-devouring maggots large enough to fill a large room, which did not occur in the book. This iteration of Hastur is a Duke of Hell, rather than a King.
External links[]
- The King in Yellow at the Yellow Sign wiki
