Not Yeti Friday - Mi-Go

It goes without saying that there are yetis in everything. So it came as a surprise that there were no yetis in H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror-verse.

But actually there are! ... Of a sort.

The monster called Mi-Go from Lovecraft's 1930 story "The Whisperer in Darkness" isn't a yeti. It is a fungus.

A large, pinkish, fungoid, bat-winged crustacean-like alien man-thing, to be exact. With an antennaed "convoluted ellipsoid" for a head.


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Not much like a yeti, I know. But Lovecraft actually intended Mi-Go to be yeti.

Say wha?

I'll let the Mi-Go wikipedia entry expound upon the subject :

"It is possible that Lovecraft encountered the word migou in his readings. Migou is the Tibetan equivalent of the yeti, an ape-like cryptid said to inhabit the high mountain ranges of that region. While the Mi-go of Lovecraft's mythos is completely unlike the migou of Tibetan stories, Lovecraft seems to equate the two, as can be seen in the following excerpt from "The Whisperer in Darkness":

It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzarai of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times—or even to the present.

— H. P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)

Also, the Mi-Go leave mysterious footprints. Sound familiar?

Here's some artistic depictions. Remember, knowing H.P. Lovecraft, to look upon the true form of these creatures would invoke madness. Be grateful you are just seeing some vague, scribbled approximations of the actual fungoid man-things.

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Designs for a stop-motion style Mi-Go for a movie version of The Whisperer in Darkness (view the trailer here|buy the dvd here)

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More Mi-Go Representations here!

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I'll leave you with one more quote from the Mi-Go wikipedia entry:

"They do not register on ordinary photographic film."

Hmm, now that sounds like the yeti I know!