by Donald Tyson
How could he have foreseen the cataclysm of the lower earth that drew R’lyeh beneath the waves? The waters of the deeps were the one barrier his great mind could not pierce, and it was for this reason that the Elder Ones had sought refuge beneath the waves so many ages before, to escape from his tyranny. The barrier that protected the Elder Ones while Cthulhu raged above has guarded humanity from his fury throughout the history of our race, for he has never ceased to hurl his commands forth from his mighty mind all the span of his durance beneath the surface.
The stars do not always remain poisonous, but for brief periods in their endless turnings they assume the angles of the same rays they shed down in the primordial dawn of the world. Then does R’lyeh rise upward so that the house of Cthulhu emerges into the air. The mind of the god waxes strong, and he uses its power to send forth to men who are susceptible to his influence the command that they release the seals that bind his tomb, for it is his single weakness that he cannot release himself from sleep but must rely upon hands of flesh to shatter the seals. As though in bitter jest, the stars never remain right for more than a handful of days, and always in the past, before the men enslaved by the god can reach distant R’lyeh, their fatal conflux of lights permits R’lyeh to sink once more, severing the bond between the will of Cthulhu and the flesh of those he has enthralled, leaving them to wail in confusion and despair upon the bosom of the vacant sea.
On the walls of lost cities and in the carvings of madmen who have glimpsed him in their dreams is the form of the god delineated. His height is as great as a mountain and he walks on taloned feet that resemble those of a hawk, so that the very stones of the earth are shattered by each step; yet from his back extend vast wings that have no feathers but are made of skin as are the wings of a bat, and with his wings he flies between the stars. His body has the shape of a man in that he has two arms and two legs, but his head cannot be described without horror, for it is akin to the formless mass of a deep dweller, having many ropes or soft branches that hang and writhe in place of a face, and his crown throbs and moves with watery softness for he has no skull. His eyes are small, and three in number on each side of his head. The color of his skin is green mingled with gray on his limbs and trunk, but paler gray on his wings, and these he is accustomed to keep folded so that they hang down to the ground behind his heels and tower above his pulsating crown.
Such is the unnatural body of this god, which has no kinship with the dust of our world; indeed, it is not flesh as we know flesh, but as crystal or glass, and soft so that during his dreaming death it often breaks apart, but when it breaks it at once reforms itself, held in its pattern by the will of the great one. This truth the Elder Race, who are indeed of solid albeit strange flesh, learned to their dismay, as their murals in the City of Heights on their own world attest, for no sooner did they shatter the body of Cthulhu with their arts of war then it reconstituted itself and in moments was whole. He is as their own shoggoths, about which men whisper but which no man has seen, able to take the shape of his desire and to hold it.
His spawn are like himself, but smaller in their dimensions; what they lack of their master in size, they compensate with their numbers, for they fly into battle as the locust swarm descends upon the ripening field of grain, so thick that they obscure the sun with their wings. At times past the meegoh have followed his commands and battled in his wars, for they dread the influence of Cthulhu upon the whim of their god of passage, Yog-Sothoth, and risk any danger rather than court his displeasure. All this was in the ancient times, and in the age of man Cthulhu lies dreaming in R’lyeh, his spawn has vanished, and the meegoh are returned to Yuggoth, all but a few that watch and wait.
The tale is whispered that at some future time the stars will move in their courses and align as they have in the past, but at last their pattern will endure and the world will become wholesome for the Old Ones. Cthulhu will rise and conquer, as is his right, for what force of gods or men can stand against his fury? Until that day, may it
soon be witnessed, those wise in necromancy who adore him wear the seal of the god burned upon their skin and chant a litany in his remembrance in the tongue of the Old Ones, that dreaming Cthulhu teaches his prophets in their sleep:
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Iä!
The prayer has this meaning in our tongue: At his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming; it is so! In the far places of the world, from the plateau of Leng to the western isle of Albion to the banks of the Nile and the frozen wastes of Hyperboria, his chosen chant these words, and they are the sign by which they know each other, and the bond that unites them even when they are of different races. The poet may sing a different song, for they chant what has been and what remains, but the poet intimates in verse what shall come to pass:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons death may die.
Of all the lords of the Old Ones, Cthulhu stands alone and apart, for his is not of the same blood with the others, though his blood mingles with theirs. They use him as a sword and think to distance themselves from his presence when the battle has been won, but he keeps his own counsel well guarded, and none can say what he intends for his kin. When all had fled the poison from the stars, he remained in his house at R’lyeh and dreamed his deep purposes in solitude. The ocean alone contains him, for the stars cannot shackle his mind.
It was because Cthulhu is the greatest of warriors that the magi who are descended from the royal line of Babylon link him with the sphere of Mars, god of war, and none are wiser in the lore of the heavens than the priests of the Tigris. As Mars is the conqueror of all who oppose his will, so too is the dreaming god; as fire, the element loving to Mars, hates the water, so does Cthulhu hate the weight of the ocean above his head that frustrates his purpose. The magi give to him the number square of Mars, having five rows and five columns, each with a sum of sixty-five, and the sum of this square as a whole is 325. They teach that the seal of his name traced upon the square and incised into a plate of iron has power to give victory in battle and protects the warrior from injury by sword or arrow, and that its sight is pleasant to the things that dwell in darkness and are loyal to Cthulhu, who spare the lives of those who bear it. But this last is a lie.
here is a cause why the flute plays so prominent a role in the cults that worship the Old Ones in the dark places and hidden caves, away from the ears of common men. At the seething and fiery center of all, Azathoth sits upon his ebon throne within his halls of darkness that no man has seen and survived the vision. He is both blind and bereft of mind, but unceasingly he pipes upon his reed flute, and the pearling notes that rise and fall in measured patterns are the foundation of all the worlds. These notes are more than music, they are numbers. Azathoth ever calculates in sound the structure of space and time. Were his flute to suddenly fall silent, all the spheres would shatter into one another and the myriads of worlds would be unmade and as they were before the creation.
There is a mystery known to few, that his flute is cracked and can give no pure sound. It is explained by sages that when he blew the first great note that began the outpouring of worlds, the force of the sound was so vast that no instrument could endure it, not even the flute that made it; but this is the reasoning of children, and the truth is elsewhere, for the crack in the flute is a way of expressing the imperfection inherent in all created things. All that is made is imperfect, for perfection can have no form or texture in the mind; Azathoth himself is imperfect, being blind and blubbering as he pipes. Yet how can the creator who was never made be himself imperfect? Consider this riddle and be wise. Only the breath that bears the sound ever outward in widening circles, unseen and formless, is perfect, for the sound is but a pattern pressed upon the breath, but the breath pervades all; if it did not, how would the sound be carried to the farthest reaches of space? It is not the breath we know, but the subtle essence of breath that can neither be seen nor felt, and is forever unkn
owable.
The flute of Azathoth both makes and unmakes the worlds in ceaseless combinations that are like dancers spinning on the woven carpet of time. There can be no creation without destruction, and no destruction without creation; to unmake a thing is to make something else, and each time a thing is made, something is destroyed. The idiot god on his black throne does not choose what shall rise into being, or what should pass away, but only maintains a balance and constant order in the number and pitch of his notes. These piping sounds are numbers, for they interact in ratio and proportion; all things are made of numbers; men are formed in their flesh by the arithmetic of Azathoth, who gathers his sums and brings forth shapes.
No created being has seen Azathoth save only Nyarlathotep, who is called the Chaos That Creeps by writers who fear even to voice his name. In Azathoth is order, in Nyarlathotep is disorder; they are half brothers and can never be separated, for even when far apart in space, Azathoth forever creates the patterns and Nyarlathotep forever disperses them. It was the blind idiot god who piped forth the universe, but it is whispered that it shall be the Crawling Chaos who on the last day of time shall snatch the flute from his blubbering lips and break it, ending all forevermore. Nyarlathotep looks upon his half brother with contempt, yet knows full well that he is as dependent on the song of the flute as all other things; this enrages him so that he waits in eagerness for the last day.
Concerning the face of Azathoth no pen has written, unless the writer lied, for no living creature can look upon it and endure its terrible heat and black radiance that is like the reverberating unseen rays of heated iron that strike and prickle the skin, or crisp and sizzle it when too near. Only Nyarlathotep, who has no face of his own, has gazed into the countenance of the idiot god, and even he is dazzled by its fires and must turn away after an instant.
Azathoth receives no supplicants in his black halls of uncouth angles and strange doors, nor does he ever hear prayers or answer them. Endlessly he pipes, and endlessly he devours his own substance, for his hunger is insatiable. Nothing is taken into his body from beyond, and nothing is expelled, for he consumes his own wastes after the custom of idiots. Music alone issues outward from him, yet it has no substance or form; its semblance of form arises from the ever-present breath that pervades creation and bears it along; in itself the music is only number upon number, and so cannot be truly said to proceed from Azathoth, for how can a number possess motion through space?
Despite the indifference of their god, members of the cult of Azathoth emulate his music and dance accompaniment, spinning and revolving on the wind they create with their own turning motions, pipes pressed to their lips and their eyes rolled heavenward. The dance is their ecstasy, the music itself their prayer. In this way they seek unity with the center of all things. They wear as a pledge of their faith the seal of the idiot god over their hearts.
Men ask in the marketplace in idle talk why the world was created; there is no answer, for the world was made without thought by an idiot to whom good and evil are the same. He hungers and feeds yet is never satiated; he pipes and hears but does not see. Of sorrow he knows nothing; neither has he felt happiness. He pipes with patience, and the music of his flute rolls outward in trilling waves that rise and fall upon the breath of the cosmos, and the notes fulfill their patterns and move inexorably toward the last day, when the fury of his half brother shall be expressed and there will come silence.
The wise men of the Tigris, learned in the ways of the stars, placed Azathoth in the sphere of Sol, because both are at the center of things, the god at the center of creation and the sun at the center of the wandering bodies of the heavens. As the sun is hot and bright, so is the palace of Azathoth located in a place of great heat, and his face is blinding in its radiance that darkly shimmers. They gave to him the number square of the sun, having six rows and six columns, each making the sum of 111; and the sum of all is 666. This is the number of the Beast of the Christians, and wisely was it chosen, for the Beast shall usher in the last of days.
The magi make the seal of the god that is formed on this square into a charm upon a plate of gold and wear it to attract money and substance, and to insure health of the body, on the reasoning that all things come into being from the music of Azathoth, therefore his square must bring forth substantial virtues such as vitality of the flesh and the increase of wealth. Their reasoning is flawed, for as the god creates, so he destroys.
f the fecundity of the earth there is no end; her womb breeds monsters unglimpsed by those who dwell under the sun, and her twisting entrails crawl with things white and blind. These are the children of Shub-Niggurath, who is called the Goat With One Thousand Young by those who dare not speak her name. She is of the gender of a woman, for what except the womb brings forth fleshy life upon the ground, or beneath it? Those who worship her with images most often depict her with the head of a goat; this is not her true visage, which is bestial but unlike any beast known to men, yet it may be that the image of the goat was chosen as appropriate due to the ruttiness of this animal, which is proverbial.
Her statues are black and made of stone, and are often of human size, though some are smaller for the convenience of carrying in those lands where her worship is severely punished. They show the goddess standing upright, four horns bristling from her hairy head, her mouth snarling with savage teeth like those of a wolf. Her arms and hands are those of a woman, but her legs and feet those of a goat. She is ever naked, her torso covered with innumerable round breasts to suckle her countless progeny, but that which is most shocking to those who strive to suppress her cult is the gaping and exposed state of her genitals; by this her worshippers express that Shub-Niggurath is the womb of the night from which all creatures of nightmare issue.
In the ancient time, great Cthulhu lay with her and bred upon her the armies that overthrew the Elder Things, for the manner of her bringing forth is not one after the way of women, nor even a score after the way of mice, but myriads of myriads of children issue from her womb, which never closes. It has been ages since last she lay with her cousin, and most of his children are dead or have sought their dwellings deep beneath the sea and under the surface of the ground, for they hate the light of the sun and, being of the same substance as the Old Ones, cannot easily endure the noxious rays of the stars that presently keep Cthulhu imprisoned at R’lyeh. When the stars are right, and darkness covers the earth, they will issue forth from their deep pits and lakes, and from the ocean, and fulfill the will of the Old Ones as they did in the beginning of things.
Her rites are wild ecstasies of debauch during which brother lies with sister, mother with son, father with daughter, and infants conceived in this unlawful way are sacrificed to the prolific goat, and their blood consumed in wine to produce intoxication and visions; so also are the bodies boiled in great pots, and their flesh consumed by the revelers, who recognize no restraint of law and practice any outrage against religion. They are accustomed to meet in caverns during the night hours, both for greater security against detection and also because the deep places are the wombs of the world, sacred to Shub-Niggurath.
With red and blue and yellow pigments they paint their faces and bodies, for they worship naked after the way of the goddess; upon their backs they paint her seal; the men dance with their virile members inflamed and erect, and the woman dance obscenely, opening and closing their bent knees to expose their genitals, and shaking their heads and their breasts while screaming invocation of the goddess to the beat of drums and the drone of flutes; around blazing fires they dance, the flames rising higher than their elevated hands, and the men gash their arms with blades and spatter the blood on the thighs of the women to make them more fertile.
The women scream these words in the tongue of the Old Ones, Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Iä! Their voices that echo in the caverns resemble the yelping of dogs, for there is nothing human in the sound. When the worshippers begin to couple, it is the women who mount on top of the men, in honor of the supremac
y of the goddess as the womb of creation. The theological books of the Hebrews make veiled allusion to this practice in their fables concerning Lilith, who was the wife of Adam before Eve, and who had union with him on top rather than beneath; and the Babylonians had similar stories of a demoness of lust that bore strange children from the seed she stole away from sleeping men in the dark of night. In truth, Lilith is no other than Shub-Niggurath, even though the scribes of the Hebrews dared not write her name.
She visits the men who seek union with her in their dreams, but only if their lust is great. When she comes to the bed, she presses upon the chest of her lover and takes her pleasure on top of his sleeping body, and from his ecstasy she gives birth to monsters of a lesser kind, those that inhabit the desert places of the world and lie in wait to murder travelers beneath the moon. From the seed of the Old Ones her womb gives rise to great abominations, but from the seed of men it yields lesser evils. In dreams she cloaks her form so that men do not withdraw from her, but when she visits her worshippers she comes as she truly appears, and they welcome gladly her bestial kisses, for she makes their virility unending.
The worship of Shub-Niggurath is greatest in the lands of Lebanon and around the salt inland sea, but she is also adored with orgy and sacrifice along the upper tributaries of the Nile, on the western shore of the Red Sea, and between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Yet these are only the chief centers of her cult, for her worship spans this world in lands both known and uncharted, carried far and wide by her roving cult as it moves from place to place in its caravans. It has been the cause of much misery and countless mysterious deaths, since her worshippers must have human flesh for their sacrifices during her highest rites, and where infants cannot be procured they use the flesh of travelers, for the disappearance of a traveler causes less inquiry than the vanishing of a local dweller.