Elder Sign

The Elder Sign is an icon in the Cthulhu Mythos, whose stories describe it as a form of protection against evil forces. Although not described in Lovecraft's work, he illustrated it in correspondence as a line with five branches. Mythos writer August Derleth described the Sign as a warped, five-pointed star with a flaming pillar (or eye) in its center, and it is this interpretation which has become the most popular in subsequent Mythos literature.

The Elder Sign is first mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, although it is not described ("the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar").

Lovecraft described the Elder Sign only once in his writings, as given by the aged alcoholic Zadok Allen in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936): "In some places they was little stones strewed abaout—like charms—with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika nowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs." In this story, the sign is used as a defense against Deep Ones, the story suggesting that the Deep Ones cannot harm someone protected by an Elder Sign. Although it did not appear in his books, Lovecraft drew the Elder Sign in at least one of his correspondences as a single line with five shorter lines branching off.

August Derleth, who wrote several Cthulhu Mythos stories, described the Sign as being "the rough shape of a star, in the center of which there appeared to be a caricature of a single giant eye; but it was not an eye, rather a broken lozenge in shape with certain lines suggestive of flames of perhaps a solitary pillar of flame". This latter description, which is featured in his novel The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), has become the most well-known and popular version of the Elder Sign. It is the version used in Dungeons & Dragons, described in Deities and Demigods as an icon of green soapstone, and also appears in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game—as well as the later version published under the Open Gaming License—and in the video game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth as well as in the boardgame Arkham Horror, produced by Fantasy Flight Games.

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