Draft:Cyäegha

Cyäegha (German pronunciation: /tsʏˈɛːɡa/ or sigh-AE-guh) is one of the fictional deities in the Cthulhu Mythos, also known as “The Destroying Eye” and “The Waiting Dark.” It is commonly classified among the Great Old Ones, a group of monstrous deities and cosmic beings associated with Lovecraftian horror. The entity was created by Belgian writer Eddy C. Bertin for his short story, “Darkness, My Name Is”. The story introduced Cyäegha as part of Bertin’s expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos, first appearing in the anthology, The Disciples of Cthulhu, edited by Edward P. Berglund, and published by DAW Books in 1976. Cyäegha is depicted as a gigantic dark mass of writhing tentacles surrounding a single enormous eye.

Description

Cyäegha first appeared in “Darkness, My Name Is”, described as a deity who manifests as a dark, shadowy mass with a single giant green-glowing eye encircled by numerous dark, slimy tentacles. The epitome of absolute nihilism, Cyäegha possesses profound contempt for everything.

Cyäegha is pronounced as sigh-AE-guh according to the core rulebook of the role-playing game, The Call of Cthulhu. However, Chaosium noted that this is unofficial because Bertin never explicitly stated the exact pronunciation of the monster’s name similar to Lovecraft to emphasize its alien nature.

Inspiration

Eddy C. Bertin was a Belgian writer of science fiction, horror, fantasy, and children's literature. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dutch-language science fiction publishing remained limited. Popular genres such as Westerns, war fiction, and detective fiction had a stronger market demand during this period. Bertin recalled that relatively little horror and science fiction was commercially available in Dutch, compared with the wider variety of British and American English-language publications. He taught himself English using a dictionary so that he could read these imported horror books. Lovecraft’s short stories “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” were Bertin’s first encounter with this author. Later he became interested in the former’s writing style and ideas, leading Bertin to seek out more of his works and discover Lovecrafts’s collaborations with other writers and authors who expanded and reinterpreted the Cthulhu Mythos.

In the interview "Dissecting Eddy C. Bertin in Nine Questions", 2014, with Jaap Boekestein, Bertin stated that:

“I was very ill at the start of 1963, and for three weeks I suffered from a high fever and horrible nightmares. I had just discovered the work of H. P. Lovecraft, and in those nightmares I was constantly involved in a very surrealistic battle between immense inhuman forces, who took the form of geometrical patterns, which were fighting a war in a world outside of our space and time. It was around this time that I wrote “De poort in het duister”.”

Bertin wrote the novelette De Poort in het duister (“The Way into Darkness”) between January and April 1963. Although he had privately published in the fanzine Nachtmerrie in May that year, in an edition of six carbon-typed copies, an early Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos still listed the work as in progress.

“Darkness, my name is” first introduced Bertin’s entity, Cyäegha, it also incorporated elements from the other existing Cthulhu Mythos, Cultes des Goules, which is Robert Bloch’s fictional grimoire, and even gives the fictional author, the Comte d’Erlette who appearing in Bloch’s 1935 story “The Suicide in the Study.”, the name François-Honoré Balfour. Cultes des Goules grimoire and the author Comte d'Erlette were even reused by Lovecraft in “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Haunter of the Dark.”