The Father of Serpents

The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. — The Whisperer in Darkness Another month, another Lovecraftian portrait. Yig was the last of the Photoshop melanges from 1999 that I felt a need to replace for the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark, which means that the whole of the Great Old Ones section of the book is now complete. Back in 1999 I wasn’t really sure what to do with Yig. The snake god described as “the Father of Serpents” was partly an invention of Zealia Bishop who paid HP Lovecraft to flesh out a trio of outlines which were subsequently sold as stories to Weird Tales. Illustration by Hugh Rankin, 1929. The first of these, The Curse of Yig, was published in November 1929, and credited to Zealia Brown Reed as Bishop was then known. The piece is essentially a revenge scenario in which…