6) Bushy-maned and bearded wooden mask, Ambrym origin, New Hebrides, date unk. Note suggestion of tentacles, not hair: "Medusa” motif observed in Carolines, New Guinea (Sepik R. area), also Marquesas.
7) Stone tiki, Marquesas, about 1904, but motif common in prev. generations, says Tillinghast. Note snaky hair, pyramidal body. Native name: "Z'otomogo" or "Zatamagwa.”
8) Carven lintel, New Zealand, very old Maori (bef, 1800?). Cone or pyramid body, surmounted by wavy-maned head. Note “Medusa" motif, as in #6. Old shaman called it “Sothamogha.”
9) Basalt image, Easter Island, undatable. No similarity to giant aku aku heads found on outer slopes of Rano-raraku; natives call it "god of ocean deeps” (Cthulhu? Zoth-Ommog?)
10) Frag, lavastone bas-relief, S. Indo-China, perhaps Khmer? Used as idol for degenerate native cult in Singapore, circa 1900-1905. Cult-name “Z’mog” attached to central fig.; note serpentine hair motif.
11) Devil-mask. Sepik Riv. area, N. Guinea. Non-human, octopoid head, pyramid or cone body, tentacular arms. Missionaries in area report fighting native cult for 30 years; Rev. H. Wallace says native god named "Zhmog-yaa."
As for the artifacts on this list, described in the notes, they were for the most part excellent examples of South or Central Pacific native workmanship. Design motifs, however, were quite unusual and suggested sources in Pacific myth and legend unfamiliar to me. There was nothing about the stone images and carvings, the wooden masks or woven cloth samples, that seemed particularly bizarre or frightening ... except that, taken together in this proximity, they suggested a surprising and even disconcerting similarity of theme and design, which became all the more enigmatic when you consider the enormous distances involved.
That is to say, there is nothing really uncanny about a lavastone bas-relief fragment such as #10, which, if the Professor is correct in assigning Khmer origin, must come from the jungles of Cambodia; nor is there anything frightful or unnatural about the stone tiki, #7 on the Professor’s list, which is clearly of Marquesan craftsmanship.
What is a trifle disturbing, however, is to examine them in the light of distance ... for there are more than eight thousand miles of ocean between the Marquesas and Cambodia ... and it seemed perplexing, it not virtually inconceivable, that two so widely separated cultures could have carved images of a snaky-maned divinity with names so amazingly similar as Z’otomogo and Z'ntog.
AS for the twelfth item on the inventory that was much more surprising than all the rest put together. The Professor's notation read as follows:
12) Jade image, workmanship unidentified; disc. by native diver off Ponape, 1909. Note inscription on base (not Naacal—Tsath-yo or R’lyehian?). Definitely represents Zoth-Ommog!
This particular artifact arrested my attention almost immediately, indeed, among the jumble of carved and painted wood and crudely cut stonework, it stood out dramatically. As the "Ponape figurine" has never been photographed or displayed, I shall describe it in some detail, for it is most remarkable.
In the first place, it is an extraordinary rarity co find worked jade articles of such size among native Pacific artworks—unless they be mere trade craft exports from China, such being commonly found. This particular image or idol was certainly not of Chinese workmanship ... indeed, both from style and technique, to say nothing of craftsmanship, it is completely unique.
Briefly, the figurine, including base, stands about nineteen inches tall and is of worked and polished jade of an unfamiliar type. I am no authority on Chinese jade carvings, but I have never seen this sort of jade before anywhere. It is greasy gray-white, flecked or mottled with irregular spots of deep dark green, and both extremely dense and heavy. The image itself is not only non-humanoid, but virtually non-objective—hauntingly suggestive of some of the weird carved figures of the little-known amateur sculptor Clark Ashton Smith—and in detail and finish, to say nothing of conception and sophistication, weirdly reminiscent of the brilliant if degenerate work produced by the famed San Francisco sculptor Cyprian Sincaul.
It represents a peculiar creature with a body shaped like a broad-based, truncated cone. A flat, blunt, wedge-shaped, vaguely reptilian head surmounts this conical torso, and the head is almost entirely hidden behind swirling tresses. This hair, or beard and mane, consists of thickly carved and coiling ropes, like serpents or worms, and the workmanship is so uncannily naturalistic that you could almost swear the slithering tendrils are in motion. Through this repulsive Medusa-mane of ropy tendrils, two fierce, serpentlike eyes glare in a horrible mingling of both cold, inhuman mockery ... and what I can only describe as gloating menace.
The technique of the unknown sculptor is one of astonishing sophistication: There is not the slightest hint of the primitive about this puzzling and vaguely repellent figurine. It must have taken exceptional talent, virtual genius, to catch that expression of leering, icy, alien menace in the stubborn medium of slick, heavy jade. But caught it the artist has ... to an almost disquieting degree.
The base upon which this truncated, conical body rests is carved from the same unfamiliar speckled jade, and it is oddly angled, as if the sculptors culture possessed a completely non-Euclidean geometry. Deeply and cleanly cut in one side of this odd-angled base are two exceedingly complex hieroglyphs in no language known to me, symbols which bear no similarity to Chinese ideographs, Egyptian glyphs, Arabic characters, Sanskrit, or even common forms of Mesopotamian cuneiform, and certainly no slightest resemblance to any southern or central Pacific native writing known to me.
Rising from overlapping folds at the base of the image's neck, four bluntly tapering limbs or appendages rise from the torso. They are flat and resemble the arms of the common echinoderm of the class asteroidea—the familiar starfish of our California beaches—with the rather peculiar exception that the underside of these broad, flat, narrowing limbs bear row upon row of disc-like suckers. Remarkable how the unknown artist has combined suggestions of starfish and squid or octopi in his central conception ... and extraordinary, the cold sensation of unease amounting to a sort of psychic warning of actual physical danger I receive from the briefest contemplation of this idol! The combination of that fixed, gloating stare from those soulless, snake-like eyes half-veiled behind the coiling, worm-like tangle of its hair ... and those weird, bending arms or tentacles, half-raised and half-extended as ... as if to clutch their prey! ... well, it is quite unsettling.
PUTTING aside the jade figurine, I next turned to a cursory perusal of the miscellaneous manuscripts. I first leafed through the manila folder which had been inserted in the packing case which had contained the artifact collection, and whose first page consisted of the annotated listing of the collection.
Leafing rapidly through the bulky folder, I discovered its contents to be heterogeneous indeed, consisting of some personal letters from Professor Copeland to various institutions such as the Curator of Rare Books at the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, universities and libraries here in the United States; there were also bundles of newspaper clippings from a vast range of papers (generally having nothing in common, outside of the fact that they concerned missing or sunken ships in the Pacific, or news accounts of the temporary emergence of sunken islands of volcanic nature), and several pages of notes clipped together and bearing the heading Notes on the Xothic Legend Cycle, with References to the R’lyeh Text and Other Books.