Ithaqua
The Wind-Walker
A towering god of the Arctic wastes who walks on blizzards and carries victims into the sky, central to Algernon Blackwood's influence and August Derleth's expansion of the mythos.
Overview
Ithaqua is the mythos made visible in winter: a titan who strides across polar horizons and leaves no footprints except the missing. Lovecraft nodded to him; Derleth and others built a cult mythology of kidnapped villagers and bloodless snowfields.
The archive lists Ithaqua as active because Arctic expeditions continue to report impossible silhouettes aligned with wind patterns that do not match meteorology.
Description
Witnesses who survive describe a gigantic humanoid face in the storm, eyes like aurora, arms that lift people as kites are lifted. Cultists in later fiction worship him as lord of air and cold.
He overlaps tonally with Blackwood's Wendigo country but is explicitly cosmic - not a spirit of hunger alone but an alien power using hunger.
Historical Record
Lovecraft's mention in The Thing on the Doorstep ties Ithaqua to body-theft lore; Derleth's stories supply the bulk of incidents. Cross-reference Antarctic and Arctic files for expedition safety briefings.
Treat whiteout conditions with anomalous humanoid radar returns as evacuation triggers.
Archive Notes
Personnel must not camp alone above 70°N without aerial rescue on standby. Ignore Inuit warnings about the walker at your peril - they are field data.
Citation: Miskatonic Expedition Archive. Record GOD-006. Access subject to institutional review.
