Why is Cthulhu on this 300-year-old gravestone?

[The Straight Story]

Why is Cthulhu on this 300-year-old gravestone?

The Reverend Ichabod Wiswall (1637-1700) is a historical footnote. When he's remembered, it's for giving the first funeral sermon in America, in Duxbury, Massachusetts. So why is there a Lovecraftian cephalopod on his gravestone?

Wiswall was responsible, with the Reverend Increase Mather, for persuading Queen Mary to create the 1692 charter which united the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay into the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which became the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Wiswall served the town of Duxbury as a minister for 24 years and is buried in Duxbury in the Myles Standish Burial Ground, supposedly the oldest continually maintained cemetery in the United States.

The winged skull atop the gravestone is not unusual for pre-1750 gravestones, which had a range of meaning-laden symbols on them, from arrows (symbolic of martyrdom) to scallops (symbolic of resurrection). But the cephalopod, which might be anything from a cuttlefish to a squid, is seemingly unique-a search of the literature turned up no record of a pre-1750 gravestone with any version of a cephalopod on it.

It's fitting that Wiswall's gravestone has a touch of weirdness. According to the record books of Plymouth Colony, there were two Ichabod Wiswalls alive in 1667, the second Ichabod marrying Remember Wiswall that year-but the second Ichabod Wiswall disappears from the historical record after that, an oddity for the record-obsessed Puritans. The Myles Standish Burial Ground was abandoned in 1789 under mysterious circumstances-1789 of course being the year of George Washington's first inauguration as well as the year that the French Revolution began-and was "reclaimed" only in 1887. Standish himself, the military advisor to the Plymouth Colony and a man of particular brutality, seems to have rested unquietly in the Burial Ground: the initial location of his burial site was unknown, and it took three separate exhumations to conclusively discover where he lay. The center of the Burial Ground was occupied by two pyramids, although pyramids as grave markers only became common in the 19th century.





http://io9.com/5699875/why-is-cthulhu-on-this-300+year+old-gravestone

[xchrom]

1. Very interesting. Nt

[geckosfeet]

2. Map of the area - as supplied by google maps

Duxbury MA

Looks to be just north of Plymouth, which of course is home to Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower re-enactment.

Also see 'Ipswich - Stories From the Rivers Mouth' for some lovely tales of New England frontier life. Shipwrecks, the revolutionary war, witch and native american abuse and more.

[HopeHoops]

3. That's Flying Spaghetti Monster

[notadmblnd]

4. The guy liked calamari?

:shrug:

[onehandle]

5. There's two of them and they are identical. Generally, a deity would be singular, and if repeated...

...the depictions would be different.

I think it's an upside down flower (maybe a symbol of death, like the skull above) or simple scrollwork.

[BrklynLiberal]

6. Chariots of the Gods....

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=57636


This is a Zoom on ancient egyptian writings..Yeap, i guess you see what i see: A plane, a clearly defined helicopter, those other ones are thought to be either a blimp, a hovercraft, a submarine, or the modern UFO.





, the Nazca lines. These drawings in the Nazca Desert include a hummingbird, monkey, spider and lizard, to name only a few. Drawn by the Nazca culture between 200 BC and 600 AD. The most accepted theory and supported by the locals is that the Nazca drawings are an astronomical calendar used by the Nazca culture predict when the water would flow from the Andes to irrigate crops.

[Motown_Johnny]

7. the stone mason was high

assuming it is a cephalopod .


I can't begin to guess what someone in 1700 was trying to represent there. It may be a squid or a cuttlefish, it may be something else that I would never recognize.

[Posteritatis]

10. It looks like a fairly well-depicted squid to me

I'm trying to figure out what to make of people thinking "squid" and "cthulhu" are synonymous.

[Countdown_3_2_1]

8. Probably means nothing, BUT...

its a lot more fun to make up conspiracy theories.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. I think it's meant to be flowing curtains on the side of the stone

Just not very well rendered.

[pschoeb]

11. It's stylized squash and leaves

This was a fairly typical stylized vegetation that appears on the sides of graves from this period.

heres a grave where the two squash can't be mistaken for a cephalapod head



The "tentacles" below are just one type of stylized leaves from that period as seen here:

[struggle4progress]

13. +

thanks

[Codeine]

15. Today's history lesson.

:hi: That was a good catch!

[Historic NY]

12. I think its a little dodad.

[Baclava]

14. I, for one, welcome the return of the Great Old Ones

Having tentacles is a trait not only of Cthulhu...

"With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began.... Another race—a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu—soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea.... Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands.... he antarctic remained the centre of the Old Ones' civilization, and all the discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were once again supreme on the planet" - - 'At the Mountains of Madness'

"I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections — Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum — and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way...." - - 'The Whisperer in Darkness'




That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

—Abdul Alhazred, The Necronomicon

[the redcoat]

16. Looks more like Jesus to me. nt

[Vickers]

17. I see bewbies. n/t

:P

[kickysnana]

18. Supposedly, some from Massachussets relocated to Virginia ahead of the law about that time.

I have one gg...randmother thought to be one of the transplants.

[Baclava]

19. Strange goins' on, back then thaya

I still say it was Cthulu, or the work of it's spawn - remember Roanoke?


The so-called "Lost Colony" of 90 men, 17 women and 9 children, founded in 1587 and discovered to be missing in 1590, but for the word "Croatan" carved on a post. Although both the English and the Spanish searched for clues to the colony's disappearance for many years, the mystery has never been solved.

[AnnieBW]

20. How close is it to Dunwich?

As in "The Dunwich Horror".