Other evidence of Lovecraft's conception of Shub-Niggurath can be found in his letters. Shub-Niggurath is called "the Mother Goddess", and reference is made to "her sons", presumably Nug and Yeb. that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were ready to take sides with man" against the more malevolent Ghatanothoa. In the story, T'yog surprisingly maintains that "the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods, and . įinally, in " Out of the Aeons", a revision tale set in part on the lost continent of Mu, Lovecraft describes the character T'yog as the "High Priest of Shub-Niggurath and guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand Young". Price equates him with Yog-Sothoth-though he also suggests that Shub-Niggurath's mate is implicitly the snake god Yig. August Derleth identifies this mysterious entity with Hastur (though Hastur appears in the same Whisperer in Darkness list with the Magnum Innominandum), while Robert M. The Not-to-Be-Named-One, not being named, is difficult to identify a similar phrase, translated into Latin as the Magnum Innominandum, appears in a list in The Whisperer in Darkness and was included in a scrap of incantation that Lovecraft wrote for Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars". The reference to "Astarte", the consort of Baal in Semitic mythology, ties Shub-Niggurath to the related fertility goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater mentioned in Lovecraft's " The Rats in the Walls", and implies that the "great mother worshipped by the hereditary cult of Exham Priory" in that story "had to be none other than Shub-Niggurath". This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious." The revision story The Mound, which describes the discovery of an underground realm called K'n-yan by a Spanish conquistador, reports that a temple of Tsathoggua there "had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named-One. In "The Last Test" (1927), the first mention of Shub-Niggurath seems to connect her to Nug and Yeb: "I talked in Yemen with an old man who had come back from the Crimson Desert-he had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb-Iä! Shub-Niggurath!" While some of these revision stories just repeat the familiar exclamations, others provide new elements of lore. As Price points out, "For these clients he constructed a parallel myth-cycle to his own, a separate group of Great Old Ones", including Yig, Ghatanothoa, Rhan-Tegoth, "the evil twins Nug and Yeb"-and Shub-Niggurath. Lovecraft only provided specific information about Shub-Niggurath in his "revision tales", stories published under the names of clients for whom he ghost-wrote. Similarly unexplained exclamations occur in " The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932) and " The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933). Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! In The Whisperer in Darkness (1930), a recording of a ceremony involving human and nonhuman worshipers includes the following exchange:Įver Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. The next Lovecraft story to mention Shub-Niggurath is scarcely more informative. Her first mention under Lovecraft's byline was in " The Dunwich Horror" (1928), where a quote from the Necronomicon discussing the Old Ones breaks into an exclamation of "Iä! Shub-Niggurath!" The story provides no further information about this peculiar expression. Shub-Niggurath's appearances in Lovecraft's main body of fiction do not provide much detail about his conception of the entity. The CthulhuTech role-playing game, in turn, returns to Derleth's classification of Shub-Niggurath as a Great Old One. Īugust Derleth classified Shub-Niggurath as a Great Old One, but the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game classifies her as an Outer God. In Out of the Aeons, she is one of the deities siding with humanity against "hostile gods". He describes her as a kind of Astarte in the same story. Lovecraft explicitly defined Shub-Niggurath as a mother goddess in The Mound, where he calls her "Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother". Most of her development as a literary figure was carried out by other Mythos authors, including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Ramsey Campbell. Shub-Niggurath is first mentioned in Lovecraft's revision story "The Last Test" ( 1928) she is not described by Lovecraft, but is frequently mentioned or called upon in incantations. The only other name by which Lovecraft referred to her was "Lord of the Wood" in his story The Whisperer in Darkness. She is often associated with the phrase "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young". Artistic portrayal of Shub-Niggurath, along with her "Thousand Young"īlack Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young
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