Atlach Nacha

Great Old One which appears as a huge spider with an anthropoid head, and on rare occasion as a beautiful, multi-armed woman. Atlach-Nacha was said to have come to Earth from Saturn along with Tsathoggua; in other version of the myth, the spider god spun a web between the two planets that allowed Tsathoggua to arrive. The spider-god lives within a great chasm beneath Mount Voormithadreth in Hyperborea, though reports of the god have also come from Siberia and Peru. Atlach-Nacha spends all its time bridging a bottomless chasm between the waking world and the Dreamlands with its web, a task which will keep it occupied until the end of the world. Atlach-Nacha maybe summoned from its chasm to possess one of its statues, though it hates to leave its spinning. A few cults devoted to Atlach-Nacha have existed at various times. The Phoenicians held this Great Old One in reverence, and small groups of worshipers are known to have existed in India and the Andaman Islands. The Esoteric Order of Dagon speaks of Atlach-Nacha as a being who dwells on a "Tree of Death" and punishes those who do not breed with the deep ones and each other. Atlach-Nacha deals mostly with sorcerers, however, who contact it in exchange for arcane knowledge and visions of other dimensions. She has even acted as an emissary for Atlach-Nacha. Atlach-Nacha is said to control all spiders, and was at one time the lord of the Children of Atlach-Nacha, arachnid beings that lived during the early Mesozoic Era and which now exist only as curious fossils found at a few sites around the world. Atlach-Nacha's most devoted priests know arcane procedures that may return these remains to life. Some say that these Children are identical to the purple spiders of Leng. There has been one major attempt to find the dwelling place of AtlachNacha, the Barton-Doherty expedition. This brave band of explorers set out around 1985 for the Andes to attempt to locate the Great Old One, wearing fiberglass armor so that it would be too difficult for Atlach-Nacha to devour them. Unfortunately, nothing has been heard of them since. See Cykranosh; Gray Weavers; Tcho-tchos; Tsathoggua. ("The Andaman Islands", Herber; "Heterodox Churches in Innsmouth", Marsh; A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult, Pelton; S. Petersen's Field Guide to the Creatures of the Dreamlands, Petersen; "Rede of the Gray Weavers", Schwader;"The Seven Geases", Smith (O); "Web of Memory", Szymanski; "The Letter", Vance; The Complete Dreamlands, Williams and Petersen; The Philosopher's Stone, Wilson.)