I apologise for the poor quality right off the bat (never had a lesson asside from some high school art one semester) but It's my first real art "project" since before high school, when I used to lose myself in big, complicated scenes drawn in notebooks.

http://kifkeykrunchies.deviantart.com/#/d4n7uro

(I must say in advance: This is my own interpretation of the Mythos that acknowledges that Lovecraft had quite a few issues while treating Cosmic Horror as a fact rather than the goal).

It basically fits into one of the characters in yet another fic project I'm working on, this one the Lovecraftian Yog-Sothothery. My view is that most of the cults are driven by greed or nuttiness. The Cthulhu cult is especially loony, only used by it's sacred Deep-One leaders to act as a presence on the surface (The Big C is essentially a Cultural hero to the fishies, the leader of the Starspawn who "freed" them from enslavement under the Elder Things and who Dagon and Hydra, swore themselves to serve).

However, some groups ... well, essentially they keep their humanity while still worshiping the Outer Gods, or the primal forces of the universe. One example was a peculiar religious order among the southern Iroquois, who used captive warriors from the so-called "mourning wars" and the Beaver Wars as sacrifices to the Orendas of fertility and health (aka, Shub Niggurath).

Some of these practices were adopted by isolated communities of English Quakers in the early 1700's when harsh winters presented no other choice. While they banned Human sacrifice, the instituted sacrifice of livestock (pigs and chickens instead of dogs) and, by the 1920s, it was hard to distinguish the descendants of this group from very light-skinned, mostly assimilated Iroquois. Isolation had left them thin-faced and bony from the beginnings of systematic inbreeding while matrilineal descent and inheritance patterns only gave way as the Feds began snooping... or Miskatonic professors, one of which stole these items from a church reliquary.

The modern group has eased up on the inbreeding... but the fear of them being massacred by the authorities (egged on by academics screaming "degenerate!") has always held its quiet place among the community, regardless of official religious freedom. The whole Innsmouth thing didn't help much.

Getting massacred by more violent Shub-Niggurath cults or getting the Altar treatment from those self same cultists is the much bigger worry, it seems.