Robert W. Chambers, an early 20th Century American artist and writer, wrote several loosely connected horror-fantasy stories about The King in Yellow – a play which has a profound psychological effect on everyone who reads it. The King in Yellow mythos was never as fully fleshed out as the later Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft and his circle (which is deemed to include Chambers and the King in Yellow by a kind of retroactive adoption – at any rate, some KiY elements were worked into some CthM stories).
One feature that pops up in several KiY stories is a mysterious glyph called the Yellow Sign. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Sign It is never described. In the course of netsurfing I have occasionally come across this version of it: http://www.miskatonic.net/pickman/mythos/ysig1.html That page says it is the “generally accepted Chaosium design.” But where did Chaosium come up with it? I can’t find anything about it on their website. http://www.chaosium.com/
You have shared the esoteric knowledge and are now marked for termination. Please grab your favorite beverage and sit down in your living room. You will be collected soon.
If HPL didn’t explicitly describe it, then the Chaosium people made it up. HPL rarely clearly described his stuff…that’s part of the point of his genre.
But from a pragmentic standpoint, if one is to produce games, visual media, movies, breakfast cereals, Halloween costumes, license plates, key chains and the like, then one must go where HPL never did: clear visual designs.
I don’t know about profound. The play contains the darkest most morbid humor I’ve ever encountered. It did make me sit stunned for awhile. But, I wouln’t call the effect profound. I thought I might benefit by reading the play a second time. Unfortunately, some odd chemical process had been going on, unnoticed, in the book. As I opened the cover to reread the play, the whole thing disintegrated into a pile of fine, wet dust and strange needles.
This, I can anser. The boundaries of the sign are three hands. They are wisened and diseased. The skin is tattered. Through the skin (I can’t quite explain this. Every layer of the hands was drawn and no layer was transparent. Yet, all the layers could be seen.) could be seen bones like vines, or pollyps. The interior of the sign is three spheres. One is an image of the globe as it was when the Old Ones ruled. One is a kind of map, showing your present location, and what half-human, or pre-human, or unknowable creatures stalk unseen near you. The final sphere shows you-your entire life, in unbelievably intricate detail, every thing you have ever done, or will do. It show your whole life, including your death. Tiny details in the style, make the depiction more and more mocking, until you realize that your existence is utterly meaningless.
I really wish I’d thought to scan the Yellow Sign. Ah well.
