by Donald Tyson
This god is described by Lovecraft as "black, formless" in one place in The Horror in the Museum and as "black amorphous Tsathoggua" in Out of the Aeons. In Through the Gates of the Silver Key it is called "black, plastic Tsathoggua." Lovecraft used these vague descriptions because the servants or spawn of the god who inhabit dark N'kai are without form, their bodies a shapeless black liquid similar to black oil or ooze that can take on any form it chooses. Lovecraft associated this amorphous spawn with the god's own primal nature, and regarded Tsathoggua's statues, which have the shape of a seated humanoid figure with the head of a toad, as only a kind of symbolic representation.
In The Mound, Lovecraft characterized the image of Tsathoggua as a "very terrible black toad-idol" but he was describing the idol, not the god itself, and it is evident from how he described the god in other stories that he believed it to be in its essence formless, as are its ebon flowing servants, who sometimes occupy bowls or basins in its temples, ever ready to take on shape to do the god's bidding. In a later place in The Horror In the Museum, Tsathoggua is observed to have "molded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a long, sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet," indicating that Lovecraft believed the toad-god form to be merely one of its many shapes.
By contrast, Clark Ashton Smith was much more material in his concept of this god. He described Tsathoggua as squat and corpulent, with a toad-like head, sleepy globular eyes, a fat mouth from which the tip of an oddly shaped tongue projects, and a body covered in short hair that resembles bat fur. In his story The Whisperer in Darkness, Lovecraft split the difference, so to speak, and described the god as both "amorphous" and "toad-like" in the same sentence.
Tsathoggua was the ruling deity of lightless N'kai, an unilluminated cavern-world beneath the red-litten cavern-world of Yoth, which in its turn lies beneath the blue-litten cavern-world of K'n-yan. For a period of time the alien but humanoid inhabitants of K'n-yan worshipped the stone idols of Tsathoggua and erected temples to the god. The temples were built from black basalt blocks following an architectural plan that existed in the archives of the Vaults of Zin. They are squat structures unadorned by a single carving, and contain only an onyx pedestal for the idol of the god.
The people of K'n-yan got these idols of Tsathoggua from red-listen Yoth. When they descended to the cavern of Yoth to explore it, they found its civilization destroyed, and took the numerous idols of Tsathoggua up to their own realm to worship. They even renamed what was to later become their capital city Tsath, in honor of this god. By studying the histories of Yoth, they discovered that the god was named Tsathoggua in the Yothian language, and that the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had not created the images of the god themselves, but had looted the idols from an unlighted realm below their own, which they named in their language N'kai. This lower realm had supported a great civilization with mighty gods long before the race of Yothians had even come into existence, but at the time the Yothians entered it they found it deserted.
The explorers of K'n-yan finally got around to making an entrance passage from Yoth down to N'kai and descended to these stygian depths with powerful radioactive light emitters that turned the darkness to day. What they discovered horrified them. The historical records of Yoth had reported that N'kai was deserted and lifeless. The men of K'nyan found a form of life that Lovecraft characterized as "amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes." These black-slime beings flowed along stone channels that served them as pathways-channels that had existed when the Yothians first entered N'kai, but for which the Yothians had not been able to conceive any purpose. The slime beings worshipped the remaining onyx and basalt idols of Tsathoggua.
The terrible suspicion began to dawn on the men of K'n-yan that some chance geological upheaval had released these strange beings of black ooze from whatever crypts or tunnels had for long ages imprisoned them, and that their release coincided with the destruction of the civilization of Yoth. The amorphous beings attacked and tried to kill the members of the exploratory expedition. In fear and revulsion, the men of K'nyan withdrew from N'kai, sealed up the passage between the dark world and red-litten Yoth, and, upon returning to their own blue-litten world, persuaded their leaders to have all the statues of Tsathoggua destroyed. They did not want the fate that had arisen into Yoth to also ascend to K'n-yan. The existing temples of the toad-god were given over to the worship of other gods such as Shub-Niggurath, or were abandoned.
Before the destruction of the cult of Tsathoggua in K'n-yan, it made its way to the surface of our world and found its devotees among human beings. One small black image of the toad-god was worshipped in a shrine at Olathoe, in the prehistoric kingdom of Lomar near the North Pole. The cult survived the destruction of Lomar by the hairy Gnophkehs and the great ice sheet that covered the land. So it was rumored in K'n-yan, at any rate. In the ancient land of Hyperborea, this god was adored by a race of furry prehuman creatures that Lovecraft did not name. Tsathoggua was also worshipped in Leng by its horned and semi-human inhabitants, and in The Whisperer in Darkness, the name of the god is included in the litany of the Vermont cult of the Mi-Go in connection with the almost-men of Leng. Tsathoggua is mentioned in the Necronomicon, in the Pnakotic Fragments, and also in the Commoriom Myth-cycle of Atlantis.
(The Horror in the Museum; Out of the Aeons; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; The Mound; The Whisperer in Darkness)
Most of the lore concerning this snake god comes from The Curse of Yig. He appears either as half-human and half-serpent, or wholly serpentine. The killing of snakes angers him and calls down his vengeance. He was associated explicitly with the gods Kukul- can and Quetzalcoatl by Lovecraft, who called Yig an "older and darker prototype" of Quetzalcoatl, and may be regarded as representative of all great primal serpent deities. Yig, the Father of Serpents, is a god of the Plains Indians, and his cult is particularly strong in Oklahoma, beneath which lies the great cavern of blue-litten K'n-yan, where Yig is the primary deity along with Cthulhu.
Lovecraft wrote that Yig is not wholly evil in his nature, and shows no hostility toward those who respect serpents, but in the autumn of the year he becomes ravenous and wild, and must be driven away with Indian rites that involve the ceaseless sounding of drums, rattles, and whistles throughout the months of August, September, and October. Yig never forgets injuries done to his children. The Indians so fear his wrath that they hesitate to even defend themselves from the bites of rattlesnakes. It is the usual punishment of Yig to turn those humans who offend him into spotted snakes. To placate Yig, the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo Indians make sacrifices of corn to him, and dance to the sound of his ritual music. They also call upon the aid of the god Tirawa, whom the Indians believe to be the father of men.
In The Curse of Yig, a white woman named Audrey Davis who came from Arkansas to settle in Oklahoma with her husband, walker, in the spring of 1889, angers the serpent god by killing a nest of baby rattlesnakes. She is later driven mad, loses her hair, and her skin becomes scaly and white. She can no longer speak, but only hisses. Worst of all, the god impregnates her in a dream, and nine months later she gives birth to four hybrid babies, half-snake and half-human, only one of which survives to adulthood. It is kept locked in the basement room of an insane asylum in the town of Guthrie. It is almost human in size, with a scaly back speckled and brown near the shoulders, a flat head, and small beady black eyes. It wriggles naked on the straw strewn over the floor of its cell, and does not speak but only hisses.
In this story we have the familiar theme of the human-alien hybrid that so obsessed Lovecraft. There is an element of reality in his description of the mad Audrey Davis, who writhed on the ground on her belly and hissed wordlessly, and the similar behavior of Audrey's half-serpent offspring. When the great serpent god of Voodoo, Dambala, possesses or "mounts" his worshippers, they fall to their bellies on the ground and cease to speak. They communicate only by means of hissing sounds. Dambala is the only loa (god) of Voodoo who deprives worshipper
s of speech when they are possessed. All other loa talk through the human hosts they mount, but Dambala only hisses.
In the story The Mound, the alien but humanoid race that inhabits the cavern of bluelitten K'n-yan regard Yig as the principle of life, represented for them by the symbol of the serpent, which was widely regarded in human cultures around the world as deathless and capable of renewing itself with the periodic shedding of its skin. The temples of Yig are common in K'n-yan, almost as common as those of Cthulhu. The passage of time is marked in sunless K'n-yan by the tail-beats of Yig, corresponding roughly with the cycle of day and night, and waking and sleeping, each a span of around twenty-four hours. The time of Yig's shedding marks a period similar in function to a year, although it is around eighteen months in length.
(The Curse of Yig; The Mound)
There seems little question that Yog-Sothoth is one of the Old ones referred to in The Dunwich Horror. He is their leader, and he controls the gates by which they move between dimensions of reality and across space. Although they can fly through the air by a kind of levitation, they rely on these gates for more significant journeys. The name of this great being was given to one of the two historical cycles hinted at in the Necronomicon during which the Old Ones dominated the Earth. It was called the Yog-Sothoth Cycle. It was ended by the coming to our planet of the time-traveling Great Race of Yith, which with its vast knowledge was easily able to defeat the old Ones. The Great Race found it impossible to reason or coexist with the Old Ones, so they drove the Old Ones into tunnels and caverns deep beneath the surface of the ground, and built their cities on the ruins of the cities of the Old Ones.
It is noteworthy that Yog-Sothoth is a being who can be invoked by human beings using ritual methods. In The Dunwich Horror, Wizard Whateley invoked him on the festival of May-Eve in 1912, when Yog-Sothoth impregnated his daughter Lavinia with hybrid twins, one of whom was Wilbur Whateley, and the other the nameless invisible thing that was fed on fresh blood and kept locked away while it matured. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where Yog-Sothoth receives his first mention by Lovecraft, Joseph Curwen noted in his diary "Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd."
It is not usual for gods to come at the beck and call of humans, so it must be speculated that Yog-Sothoth has his own good reasons for doing so. In the matter of the Whateley family it was to bring about the return of the Old Ones to the surface of the Earth, so that they could wipe it clean of all life and wrest it from its orbit, passing the sterilized planet through a dimensional gateway that would return it to the higher space from which it fell untold aeons ago. This plan failed due to Wilbur Whateley's inability to learn for the ritual the necessary long chant that appears on page 751 of the complete John Dee translation of the Necronomicon. In the matter of Joseph Curwen and his necromantic experiments with the essential salts of human corpses, it is not at all clear why Yog-Sothoth should have involved himself, unless by his very nature, he is compelled and constrained in limited ways by the symbols and words of power used in necromantic rituals.
The invocation of the name "Yog-Sothoth" is part of a chant that raises the dead up from their essential salts, or returns them once again to dust. It occurs in a pair of occult formulae linked with the astrological symbols of the Head of the Dragon (Caput Draconis) and Tail of the Dragon (Cauda Draconis):
The first formula is similar to the second, but reversed, except for the name of YogSothoth, which has the same form in both, and the final exclamations.
The Head of the Dragon is an appropriate symbol for raising the dead, because it represents the point in the heavens at which the Moon, as viewed from the surface of the Earth, crosses the apparent path of the Sun, known as the ecliptic, in a rising direction, moving from below to above the Sun's path. The Sun is the symbol of life, since it is the source of all vitality and warmth. What lies below the ecliptic may in this sense be regarded as the zone of death. The Tail of the Dragon represents the point in the heavens at which the Moon appears to cross the path of the Sun in a downward direction, moving from above the Sun's path to below it. For this reason, it is a good symbol to represent the return to death of what was raised up by necromancy from its essential salts.
It is easy to understand why this activity falls under the power of Yog-Sothoth. He is the keeper of all the gates, including the gateway between life and death. As I have indicated, it is more mysterious why Yog-Sothoth should trouble himself for the benefit of human necromancers, who are working for their own selfish, personal purposes. It may be that Yog-Sothoth cannot always control the use of his gates-that when they are called upon in the correct ritual manner, he has no choice but to open them, being himself governed by higher laws. On this perplexing matter Lovecraft had nothing to write.
In one of the passages from the Necronomicon, which is quoted by Lovecraft in the story The Dunwich Horror, is written: "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 had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread." It is their mastery of time that earned the Great Race its title. It seems that Yog-Sothoth has a portion of their ability to span time, at least with his awareness.
Alhazred went on to write in the Necronomicon that Yog-Sothoth is "the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet." This enigmatic statement may have given rise to the common description of the face of Yog-Sothoth as a conjunction of spheres or circles. Lovecraft himself in the story The Horror in the Museum described Yog-Sothoth as "a congeries of iridescent globes." This may be only his higher-dimensional appearance. Since he is one of the Old Ones, he probably resembles them in a general way. His body would be gigantic, invisible to human eyes, capable of levitation through the air, and characterized by a tight mass of writhing tentacles. He would be blind, like the rest of the Old Ones, but possessed of higher senses that transcend ordinary vision.
The Mi-Go of Yuggoth worship Yog-Sothoth under the title "the Beyond-One." A race of intelligent gases in the spiral nebulae know this Old one only as an untranslatable symbol, the shape of which Lovecraft did not reveal. In the story Through the Gates of the Silver Key, Randolph Carter called him the `All-in-One and One-in-All," and came to the realization that Yog-Sothoth is not limited to only one time-space continuum, but is associated with the "ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep." It is this transcendence that allows Yog-Sothoth to know both past and future, as well as the present.
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Dunwich Horror; The Horror in the Museum; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
Greek god, son of Zeus and Persephone, who took the form of a youth. The Titans tore him to pieces, but Apollo rescued his heart and enabled his regeneration.
(The Electric Executioner)
One of the three chief, bearded gods of the doomed city of Sarnath, the other two being Lobon and Tamash.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
The Key to the Third Gate
Sun passes through Aquarius: February 17-March 12
Constellation is represented by a water-carrier who empties water from his inverted clay pot.
Right Pillar: Sadalmelik (Arabic: at sad at malik-The Lucky One of the King). Astronomical designation: Alpha Aquarii. Astrological nature: Saturn-Mercury. Influence: success in ventures concerning the sea. Magnitude: 3. Color: pale yellow. Sun crosses: February 18. Location: right shoulder of the Water-Bearer. Comments: A strongly favorable star.
Left Pillar: Skat (Arabic: at shi'at-A Wish). Astronomical designation: Delta Aquarii. Astrological nature: Saturn-Jupiter. Influence: luck in achieving desired purposes. Magnitude: 3.2. Color: blue. Sun crosses: March 3. Location: the right shin of the Water-Bearer. Comments: As it true of all stars in this constellation, it has watery associations.
The astral
gate of Aquarius lies between the star of its right pillar, which is located on the right shoulder of the figure of the Water-Bearer, and the star of its left pillar, which is found on the right shin of the figure, just below the knee. The Sun enters the gate around February 18 when it crosses the longitude of Sadalmelik, the star of the right pillar, and leaves the gate around March 3, when it crossed the star of the left pillar, Skat. The transition of the gate takes around thirteen days.
The key to the Third Gate opens the constellation Aquarius, allowing entry into the section of the walled city of the Necronomicon that contains gods and devils. Use it for divining information, receiving dreams about, or communicating with, deities both good and evil mentioned in the Necronomicon mythos.
Seal of the Third Key on the Third Gate
Face the direction of the compass ruled by the Third Gate, which is east by south-that is, slightly to the right of due east. Visualize the closed gate of the walled city before you just as though it were a real gate in an ancient walled city, and make sure that it is large enough for you to walk through. Take the time to create it on the astral level in precise detail.
With the image of the gate clear in your mind and projected upon the astral level to the direction east by south, speak the following invocation to Yog-Sothoth, taking care to insert those references that are specific to the Third Gate:
Guardian of the Gate! Defender of the Door! Watcher of the Way! Who art the stout Lock, the slender Key, and the turning Hinge! Lord of All Transition, without whom there is no coming in or going out, I call thee! Keeper of the Threshold, whose dwelling place is between worlds, I summon thee! Yog-Sothoth, wise and great lord of the Old Ones, I invoke thee!