Ponape was the most likely site for Copeland’s opening research on the lost civilization; a mountainous, heavily jungled island, largest of the islands in the Carolines group, it has long been famous for its mysterious and unexplained ruined cities of curious blue stone. These twin megalithic cities, called Nan-Matal and Metalanim, first aroused the bewildered curiosity of European explorers in 1826. when they were discovered by a shipwrecked Irish sailor named O’Connell or O'Connor. It is now a hundred years since the first European glimpsed the cyclopean, basaltic ruined cities of blue stone, and we have as yet no reliable clue to the mystery of their origin.
On Ponape, Copeland heard whispers of certain curious rites that had lingered from time immemorial among the jungle natives; they worshiped a “Water-Being” they called "Lord of the Abyss", and it was rumored the secret rituals included human sacrifice. Copeland was intrigued by how closely these bloody rites paralleled the ancient Semitic worship of the Philistine fish-god Dagon, and he was even more intrigued when, questioning a native "ghost-doctor" about the secret cult, he discovered that the Ponape natives knew all about Dagon, whom they termed "leader of the Deep Ones." It was not Dagon they worshiped, the ghost-doctor confided to him, but one far greater and more terrible even than Dagon, indeed, the very son of Him whom Dagon and the Deep Ones served.
Copeland learned that the sea-god cult had existed in the jungled depths of Ponape for uncounted ages, but had only within recent months grown enormously. The factor had been the discovery of a jade idol, brought up by a native diver from the offshore waters early in that same year. The wizards of the sea-god cult recognized the idol as the very likeness of their god, whom they called Sothmogg. Now Copeland knew he was on the trail of something very interesting, for he had found traces of the sinister, secretive worship of a marine devil-god of similar name all over the Pacific. The Cook Islanders worshiped him as Zatamaga, the “fisherman’s god”; on New Caledonia they venerated him under the name of Hommogah; in the Marquesas, the natives knew him as Z’otomogo, or Zatamagwa; in New Zealand, the Maori shamans knew him as Sothamogha; natives in the Sepik River region of New Guinea called him Zhmog-yaa; and even in South Indo-China, degenerate native cults worshiped a being called Z'mog.
It was Copeland’s theory that this enigmatic sea god of Ponape was none other than Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deeps, one of the three sons of Cthulhu who had been mighty gods in elder Mu before the cataclysm destroyed that shadow-haunted and primal continent in prehistoric times ... Zoth-Ommog, whose name lingers yet in the sealed, forbidden pages of Certain inconceivably ancient books which are preserved under lock and key and armed guard in a handful of the world's great libraries.
Somehow or other, Copeland got possession of the jade statuette, to which his notes refer as "the Ponape Figurine." As he began to delve yet deeper into the enormous literature of this obscure mythology, he learned of strange and terrible things. At Cambridge, he dipped into the horrendous pages of the loathsome Necronomicon itself, the weird and half-mythic “bible" of this ancient mythology. He made another discovery as welclass="underline" that a mysterious manuscript or document had come to light on Ponape back in 1734, nearly a century before the ancient stone cities had been first discovered. This book, a handwritten codex of frightful antiquity, had been found by a Yankee sea trader, a Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag, who brought it back to his home port, Arkham, Massachusetts, where it was translated for him by a half-breed Polynesian-Asiatic servant. The codex, which was known as the “Ponape Scripture", is now in the Kester Library in Salem.
Copeland studied this Ponape Scripture in Salem, and delved into other hideously suggestive and rightfully suppressed books at Cambridge and at Miskatonic. In time he produced the book he had been researching on Ponape. It was entitled The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the Ponape Scripture (1911), and it was a death-blow to his scientific reputation. But by then he was deeply immersed in his studies of the age-old, worldwide mythos he had so oddly stumbled upon, and the Xothic file contained his working notes on that subject.
The basic premise of this mythology was that early men had worshiped a pantheon or family of divinities that had come down from the stars when the earth was young. These beings were essentially malign and had ruled man through fear, being more demons than gods; the most common term for them was “the Old Ones", and they were nor even remotely anthropomorphic. They had some innate correspondence to the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water: For example, the chief divinity, a winged, octopusheaded monstrosity named Cthulhu, was a sea elemental; his half-brother, Hastur, was an air elemental; another, Cthugha, was a fire elemental; and so on. These were known as "the Great Old Ones”, and subservient to them was a second group of minor entities which Copeland called “the Lesser Old Ones“; this Second group was composed of the beings who Served the Great Old Ones as leaders of their minions or servants. For example, the minions of Cthulhu were called the “Deep Ones", led by “Father Dagon and Mother Hydra", and the minions of Cthugha were the so-called "Flame-Creatures", whose leader, Fthaggua, dwelt on a world called Ktynga; the great air elemental, Hastur, was served by the "Outer Ones", under their leader. N'gha-Kthun. These beings were identified with the famous "Abominable Mi-Go" of Himalayan folklore and Nepalese hill legend, in a note in Dr. Blaine’s hand.
Reading further, I learned that these gods or demons rather resembled the fallen angels of Old Testament lore, having warred against and been defeated by a superior, rival pantheon called "the Elder Gods", who either banished them to distant stars (as Cthugha to Fomalhaut and Hastur to Aldebaran), or imprisoned them at various places upon the earth. Cthulhu himself they locked away in a sunken stone city called R’lyeh beneath the Pacific; his son Ghatanothoa they sealed within a mountain on Mu. His second son, Ythogtha, was imprisoned in a chasm in Yhe, a Muvian province, while Zoth-Ommog lay enchained beneath the ocean off the "Island of the Sacred Stone Cities", which Copeland had identified to his own satisfaction as being Ponape itself. An interlineation at this point stated that Cthulhu had fathered these three godlings on a female entity named Idh-yaa, who dwelt on or near the "dim green double star, Xoth" in the aeons before his descent to this planet. Hence, I assume, the term “Xothic legend cycle" when collating material bearing upon Cthulhu and his "spawn."
As for the twin leaders of this rebellion, Azathoth the "Demon-Sultan" and Ubbo-Sathla the “Unbegotten Source", they were reduced to idiocy by the Elder Gods, who thrust Azathoth beyond the physical universe into primal chaos from which he can never return, while Ubbo-Sathla they confined forever at a subterranean place referred to only as "gray-litten Y’qaa.”
Several factors concerning this account intrigued me at once. In the first place, this mythology bore not the slightest resemblance to any of the native Pacific religions; indeed, the more I came to think about it, these banished or imprisoned gods of evil far more closely correspond to common Indo-European mythologies than to the Pacific island religions, which was quite odd and curious. Reading of banished Hastur and imprisoned Cthulhu and his spawn reminded me at once of the fallen archangel, Lucifer, in the Old Testament, of the titan Prometheus in the Greek myths, and of Norse legends of the imprisoned Loki and his chained children, the wolf Fenris and the gigantic serpent, Iormungandar.