#resurrection beast

[amiluc6]

alecto, varun and the other rbs are just planet humans

[spunchthegoblin]

"It was a humanoid creature with a beautiful face who held me under the water, and it spoke in a lovely voice but it only repeated die, die"

My attempt at drawing the fourth resurrection beast. I thought it would be the easiest because it's humanoid but it turn out its very difficult to visualize the embodiment of a celestial body! This is my best go at it but I'm still not super into it.

We don't know what planet it's supposed to be but I'm gonna assume it's Venus so I went with an orange color scheme color picked from this image:

When I thought of drowning my mind immediately went to Japanese folklore for some reason, lots of drowning in there from what I remember. I used this as a reference for the clothing and the face:

The background is a default forest template from csp lol. Tried to make it more psychedelic? Not sure what beast I want to do next they all seem really hard to draw

[piligrimmdi]

I feel terrible injustice that there still is no pictures of Resurrection Beast Heralds or those are so few I can't find them!

RBH will be my next art after promised feathered boobs. 👀

(just kinda reminder for myself)

[ghostsandyoumightdie]

Shoutout to literally THE best Resurrection Beast playlist on Spotify.

[someabsolutenonsense]

Okay I’m sure someone else has made a similar post but I have thoughts I’m attempting to think about these resurrection beasts

The Houses

As far as I can tell we only really know for sure that the First House is Earth and the Ninth House is Pluto. My proposed lineup for the houses is as above. Fucking up the numbering so that earth can be first is very human, and John would do it. And it makes sense since it is quite literally the first home of humanity. If we go with this lineup then there are few things I can read into…

Venus as The 3rd:

The third house have an association with beauty, like the goddess the planet is named for. The individuals from the third that we know are also kind of…horrible terrible people (affectionate). Venus, much like Ianthe’s personality, is inhospitable.

Mars as The 4nd:

“But wait,” you say, “shouldn’t the second house be Mars since they’re the ones associated with the cohort and all that?” MAYBE. The fourth also works for Mars though, they too are extremely associated with war, we learn from Isaac and Jeanmarrie that 4th kids go to war very young.

Pluto as The 9th:

Death god, skeleton nuns, we all know.

So that’s one interpretation, but honestly I think that

1) Venus is likely to be the 7th, since Cytherea was both a name for the goddess Venus and the name of everyone’s favorite identity stealing lyctor from the 7th house.

2) The 3rd might be Jupiter? King of the gods, and the third is always described in terms of royalty?

3) The 2nd could be Mars, as discussed above.

4) The 6th kind of needs to be Mercury. Mercury/Hermes as a god was associated with doctors and the element used to be used in thermometers.

So really that brings us back to this which is so upsetting but without further analysis that’s what I’ve got for sure.

Resurrection Beasts

Similar to the true nature of the houses, we know very little for sure when it comes to the RBs. Alecto is Earth. Varun seems to be Neptune. That’s what we know. Which is why it’s particularly confusing that in Harrow the Ninth Augustine describes a different creature as being The First.

As described by the lyctors…

Number Two: “…spewed quicksilver and remade itself into hundred foot spikes.”

@dmmeeble pointed out that this was probably mercury since quicksilver is another name for the element mercury

Number Six: “…kept sucking us into enormous sphincters and spraying us with worms.”

I’ve got next to nothing for the sphincter worms beast tbh. My only idea is that this could be Jupiter because that sounds like some Zeus (Jupiter) punishment nonsense on the level of Prometheus and the liver pecking eagle.

Number Four: “…a humanoid creature with a beautiful face who held me under the water, and it spoke in a lovely voice but it only repeated, die, die…”

I imagine that this one has to be Venus since Mercy makes a point to say they were beautiful and Venus was a goddess of beauty. Also, water is mentioned and Venus was born from water and is therefore associated with it.

Number One: “…a great and incoherent machine…when I saw it I thought it had a great tail, and a thousand broken pillars on its back, but Cassiopeia saw it as a mechanical monster with swords for wings, and great horns of myelin, tessellated over with graves.”

This is the weirdest one. We already know Number One was Alecto, so this has to be something different. Right? RIGHT?! Cause the thing is I could see this one being earth. Mechanical monster because of all the mechanical detritus of the human species left after John’s apocalypse, the thousand broken columns also speaking to ancient ruins, swords for wings because of the legacy of violence left by the people of earth, the graves all the many graves dug in the surface of the earth over the years. This is a fairly human centric interpretation but having experienced Nona and Alecto, the soul of the earth is clearly very affected by humanity. In an entirely different direction, this could totally be Pluto. The graves, the swords (especially with our knowledge of the ninth), the lifelessness of the mechanical creature. Parts of the description is even reminiscent of some kind of automaton version of a harpy or a fury, with the wings and the general horrors of appearance. And while the furies are chthonic beings…this still brings us back to Alecto…

Number Eight: “…a giant head.” “Finned like a fish…it’s ribs were bloody bandages, and it’s teeth protruded through its own skull, tangled about its face like a nest. It was red, and it had a single eye of green that moved all about the body…”

There are multiple ways to go here. Red implies Mars of course. All of the images of injuries and bloody bandaging could also speak to Mars as war imagery, but the single eye implies Jupiter. Then of course there is the “finned like a fish” and the one eye implying a Cyclops and Cyclopes being associated with Neptune/Poseidon-but we’ve set aside Neptune for Varun. HOWEVER Cyclopes are also connected to Uranus as Uranus and Gaia had some cyclops children in Hesiod’s Theogony. Have I taken this too far yet?

So as you can see, I’ve connected the dots??????

[someabsolutenonsense]

I don’t think we talk enough about the absolutely wild ways the resurrection beasts are described in Harrow the Ninth. Also which planets looked like which things and what does it all meeeaaan. I’m too tired for real thoughts right now but yeah I will read essays on this.

[addamii]

Some resurrection beast sketches I did while procrastinating working on my animatic

Uncolored under the cut :)

[kettacat]

What makes a planetary soul? The answer we're lead to believe is that they are the gestalt of all the life that ever existed on a planet. But that doesn't explain how the gas giant planets, which were never capable of sustaining life at all, have resurrection beasts. What is so fundamentally planetary that Alecto and Varun can be similar entities, despite the dramatic differences between Earth and Neptune?