#daoloth

Daoloth hum📏📐

I commissioned this from Dreamalgia/@vomitcrisis a while back, and I thought I’d post it here!

I play a Call of Cthulhu game, and a frequent character is the outer god, Daoloth! He’s been changed from the source, and he doesn’t really have much of a personality or motivation his original books, but he’s become one of my favorite characters because of how unique he is as a god.

Having read Exploring Egregores...

Daoloth is one of the Mythos deities invented by Ramsey Campbell, and hasn't had much press to its name. Its classic description goes as follows:

"[It] was not shapeless, but so complex that the eye could recognize no describable shape. There were hemispheres and shining metal, coupled by long plastic rods. The rods were of a flat grey colour, so that he could not make out which were nearer; they merged into a flat mass from which protruded individual cylinders. As he looked at it, he had a curious feeling that eyes gleamed from between these rods; but wherever he glanced at the construction, he saw only the spaces between them."

Daoloth is inexhaustible, infinite, overly complex. A set of simple, interconnecting parts, laid out for long enough, can calculate the answer to any question at maximal efficiency. The familiar shores of everyday numbers slowly give way to unending ocean - the supermajority of integers couldn't be written down if you used the whole universe as a chalkboard. Primes, groups and cyclotomic polynomials are the symbols (and simples) we use to make the world properly digestible.

More than this, Daoloth is the aspect of reality that provides unexpected bounties, rivers of experience you never expected to find. It's what you encounter during original seeing. It's why John Cage claims that "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." This is the slash in the veil - sit being bored for long enough and you start poking permanent holes.

But this is a Great Old One, and not to be trifled with; Daoloth's abundances can fatten, choke and drown. You look something up on TVTropes and hours later you're somewhere completely different, hours lost to the Pavlovian buffer of new knowledge. You paint to express your adoration of the beauty of light and slowly lose it to the maelstrom of other things you can express, only to wind up painting about painting. We're attracted to new information in the same way that our eyes are attracted to motion, but for the same reason the things that we find meaning in are few and far between. Whatever you want, most of existence isn't it.

Interdisciplinarians brush against Daoloth, dimly viewing the "spaces between". Every subject seems to elevate its own importance - open an intro text for a field and see it list all of the pies it has fingers in. Two people talk on a streetcorner - an expression of facts in biochemistry, neurology, psychology (the people), physics, acoustics, linguistics, sociology (the talking), geography, architecture, politics, history (the streetcorner). Every sentence a dozen concepts apply - conflict, war, love, desire, scripting, authenticity, the past and future.

Daoloth is a titan whose joints are reality, and we peer between them feeling watched. It's the sum total of that we don't yet see, even in front of us. It is the hidden object of all contemplation. Summoned directly without containment, it could envelope the world in its form and extinguish all life - but on distant Yuggoth its priests, who can sustain the brain in machinery long after the body decays, call on it to divine the past and future, and to see things as they truly are, to their extensions in "the last dimension."

Daoloth is a mass of extradimensional machinery located between worlds, and acts as a sort of interdimensional gatekeeper and portal operator.