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LovecraftArchive Website
I really agree
that Yog-Sothoth is a basically immature conception, &
unfitted for really serious literature.
H.P. Lovecraft
to Frank
Belknap Long, February 27, 1931
Azathoth
“...that last
amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and
bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless
daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and
who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond
time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the
thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable
pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the
gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous,
mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep.”
(“The Dream-Quest
of Unknown Kadath”)
“...I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear
chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully
cloaked under the name of Azathoth.”
(“The Whisperer
in Darkness”)
“Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a
monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous
piping of an unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he
had picked up that last conception from what he had read in
the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all
time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the
centre of Chaos.”
(“The Dreams in
the Witch House”)
Back
Chaugnar Faugn
“Some were the
figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops,
and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from
darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean
legend—black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu,
proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from
forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt.”
(“The Horror in
the Museum”)
Chaugnar Faugn is the
creation of Frank Belknap Long.
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Cthulhu
“If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures
of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head
surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings...
It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with
an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly,
rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet,
and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct
with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat
bloated corpulence...”
(“The Call of
Cthulhu”)
There are some who are
of the opinion that Lovecraft borrowed the name “Cthulhu” from
Sumerian mythology. This is a hoax perpetrated by the “Simon” hoax
edition of the Necronomicon which combines elements of Sumerian
mythology and the Lovecraft myths. The name “Cthulhu” was purely an
invention of Lovecraft’s. His sketch of Cthulhu may be seen at
Robert Arellano’s “The Lovecraft Web”.
Oddly, much debate surrounds the pronunciation of “Cthulhu.” The
pronunciation used by most is perpetuated by the “Call of Cthulhu”
roleplaying game by Chaosium, Inc., whose books have “Can you say
kuh-THOO-loo?” printed on their backs. Several Lovecraftian scholars
prefer to pronounce it “Cloo-loo” based on references in Lovecraft’s
revision tales. I choose to take a middle ground and aspirate both
hs, with a result similar to “kt’hoo-lhoo.”
Here are a couple of
excerpts from Lovecraft’s letters where he discusses the
pronunciation of this word:
The actual sound—as
nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record
it—may be taken as something like Khlûl’-hloo, with the first
syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about
like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in
sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second
syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being
unrepresented.
(to Duane Rimel,
23 July 1934)
The best approximation
one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly-formed
syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the
roof of the mouth. (to Willis Conover, 29 August 1936)
In “Lovecraft in Providence,” Donald Wandrei claims that Lovecraft
pronounced it “K-Lütl-Lütl,” yet in the above-mentioned letter to
Duane Rimel, Lovecraft claims that Wandrei’s comments on the
pronunciation of the term are “largely fictitious.” Robert H.
Barlow, in On Lovecraft and Life, claimed that Lovecraft pronounced
it “Koot-u-lew.” One can’t help but think that Lovecraft was toying
with his friends, since everyone’s pronunciations differ, including
his own. Ultimately, does it really matter?
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Dagon
“Vast, Polyphemus-like,
and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares
to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms,
the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain
measured sounds.... Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist,
and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient
Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving
that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my
inquiries.”
(“Dagon”)
“Poor Matt—Matt he allus was agin’ it—tried to line up the folks
on his side, an’ had long talks with the preachers—no use—they
run the Congregational parson aout o’ taown, an’ the Methodist
feller quit—never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson,
agin—Wrath o’ Jehovy—I was a mighty little critter, but I heerd
what I heerd an’ seen what I seen—Dagon an’ Ashtoreth—Belial an’
Beëlzebub—Golden Caff an’ the idols o’ Canaan an’ the
Philistines—Babylonish abominations—Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin...
All in the band of the faithful—Order o’ Dagon—an’ the children
shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon
what we all came from onct...”
(“The Shadow Over
Innsmouth”)
Dagon is mentioned in
the Bible on several occasions: Judges 16:23, I Samuel 5:2-7, and I
Chronicles 10:10.
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Deep Ones
“Them things told
the Kanakys that if they mixed bloods there’d be children as
us
look human at first, but later turn more’n more like the things,
till finally they’d take to the water an’ jine the main lot o’
things daown thar. An’ this is the important part, young
feller—them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water
wouldn’t never die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt
violent.”
(“The Shadow Over
Innsmouth”)
“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though
they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but
the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely
suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of
fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the
sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws
were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and
sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than
four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for
articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which
their staring faces lacked.”
(“The Shadow Over
Innsmouth”)
“We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive
down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned
Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell
amidst wonder and glory forever.”
(“The Shadow Over
Innsmouth”)
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Elder Things
“Important
discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9:45
with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly
unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of
unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral
salts. Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in
places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around sides. Six
feet end to end, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to 1 foot
at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of
staves.
Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator
in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious
growths. Combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans.
All greatly damaged but one, which gives almost seven-foot wing
spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal
myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon. These
wings seem to be membraneous, stretched on a framework of
glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at
wing tips. Ends of body shrivelled, giving no clue to interior
or to what has been broken off there.”
(At the Mountains
of Madness)
Slightly later in this
story, Lovecraft spends several pages describing the Elder Things.
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Ghouls
“These figures were
seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in
varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a
forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the
majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness.”
(“Pickman’s
Model”)
“It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes,
and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing
at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position
was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any
moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel.
But damn it all, it wasn’t even the fiendish subject that made
it such an immortal fountain-head of all panic—not that, nor the
dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and
drooling lips. It wasn’t the scaly claws nor the mould-caked
body nor the half-hooved feet—none of these, though any one of
them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.”
(“Pickman’s
Model”)
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Great Race
“They seemed to be
enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet
wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic
matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical
members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that
of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted
almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to
about ten feet.
Terminating two of them were enormous claws or
nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like
appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish
globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes
ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head
were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages,
whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or
tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a
rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through
expansion and contraction.”
(“The Shadow Out
of Time”)
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Hastur
“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....
There is a whole secret cult
of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me
when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the
purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of the
monstrous powers from other dimensions.”
(“The Whisperer
in Darkness”)
These are the only
places in Lovecraft’s fiction where he mentions Hastur. Lovecraft
borrowed the term “Hastur” from Robert W. Chambers, who had, in
turn, borrowed it from Ambrose Bierce. In Bierce’s “Haïta the
Shepherd,” Hastur is “the god of shepherds.” Chambers borrowed the
term and used it as the home city of Cassilda and Camilla, but also
used it as the name for a groundskeeper in “The Demoiselle d’ Ys.”
Back
Mi-Go, the
Fungi from Yuggoth
“They were pinkish
things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing
vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets
of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid,
covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head
would ordinarily be.... As it was, nearly all the rumours had
several points in common; averring that the creatures were a
sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with
two great bat-like wings in the middle of their back.
They
sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the
hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of
indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in
considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a
shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently
disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching
itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and
vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been
silhouetted an instant against the full moon.”
(“The Whisperer
in Darkness”)
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Night-gaunts
“Shocking and
uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces,
unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings
whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed
tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of
all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they
had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive
blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch
and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.”
(The Dream-Quest
of Unknown Kadath)
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Nyarlathotep
“And it was then
that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could
tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a
Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say
why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of
twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from
places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilization came
Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying
strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into
instruments yet stranger.
He spoke much of the sciences—of
electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which
sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame
to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where
Nyarlathotep went, rest
vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a
nightmare.”
(“Nyarlathotep”)
“What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he
was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of
infinity’s Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.”
(“The Dream-Quest
of Unknown Kadath”)
“There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of
hidden and terrible powers—the ‘Black Man’ of the witch cult,
and the ‘Nyarlathotep’ of the Necronomicon.”
(“The Dreams in
the Witch House”)
“There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing
into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the
black gulfs from which it was called. The being is spoken of as
holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices.”
(“The Haunter of
the Dark”)
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Shoggoths
“Over the jagged
peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.”
(Sonnet
XX, “Night Gaunts” in Fungi from Yuggoth, 1929-30)
“We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of
foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its
fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it
a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was
a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a
shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly
self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and
unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the
tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the
frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that
it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”
(At the Mountains
of Madness, 1931)
“This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first
time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming.”
(“The Shadow Over
Innsmouth,” 1931)
“I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . .”
(“The Thing on
the Doorstep,” 1933)
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Shub-Niggurath
“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”
(“The Last Test,”
“The Dunwich Horror,” “The Mound,” “Medusa’s Coil,” “The Horror
in the Museum,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Diary of
Alonzo Typer”)
“One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it
had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother
and wife of the the Not-to-Be-Named-One. This deity was a kind
of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious
Catholic as supremely obnoxious.”
(“The Mound”)
“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young!”
(“The Whisperer
in Darkness,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Man of
Stone”)
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Tsathoggua
“This was a squat,
plain temple of basalt blocks without a single carving, and
containing only a vacant onyx pedestal.... It has been built in
imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to
house a very terrible black toad-idol found in the red-litten
world and called Tsathoggua in the Yothic manuscripts. It had
been a potent and widely worshipped god, and after its adoption
by the people of K’n-yan had lent its name to the city which was
later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legend said that
it had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the red-litten
world—a black realm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no light
at all, but which had had great civilizations and mighty gods
before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had come into
being.”
(“The Mound”)
“They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which
human beings know nothing of—some of them are in these very
Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten
K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from
N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came—you know, the amorphous,
toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and
the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the
Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.”
(“The Whisperer
in Darkness”)
“Black Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a
sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet...”
(“The Horror in
the Museum”)
Tsathoggua is the
creation of Clark Ashton Smith.
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Yog-Sothoth
“I last Night
strucke on ye Words that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for
ye firste Time that fface spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye ———.”
(The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward)
“Rais’d Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver’d.”
(The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward)
“He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and
grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with
references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the
hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of
Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book
open in his arms before him.”
(“The Dunwich
Horror”)
“Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate.
Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present,
future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones
broke through of old, and where They shall break through again.
He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They
still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.”
(“The Dunwich
Horror”)
“Imagination called up the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth—only
a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign
suggestiveness.”
(“The Horror in
the Museum”)
“It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and
self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied
to the ultimate animating essence of existence’s whole unbounded
sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which
outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that
which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as
YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that
which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and
which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an
untranslatable Sign...”
(“Through the
Gates of the Silver Key”)
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