Shub-Niggurath
1
Shub-Niggurath
Artistic portrayal of Shub-Niggurath, along with her "Thousand Young".
For the French zeuhl band named after it, see
Shub-Niggurath (band).
Shub-Niggurath, often associated with the phrase
The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young, is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P.
Lovecraft. The only other name by which H. P.
Lovecraft referred to her was "Lord of the Wood"
in his story "The Whisperer in Darkness".
Shub-Niggurath is first mentioned in Lovecraft's
revision story "The Last Test" (1928); she is never
actually described in Lovecraft's fiction, but is
frequently mentioned or called upon in
incantations. Most of her development as a literary
figure was carried out by other Mythos authors,
including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and
Ramsey Campbell.
August Derleth classified Shub-Niggurath as a
Great Old One, but the Call of Cthulhu role-playing
game classifies her as an Outer God. The
CthulhuTech role-playing game, in turn, has
returned to Derleth's classification of
Shub-Niggurath as a Great Old One.
Development
Shub-Niggurath's appearances in Lovecraft's main body of fiction do not provide much detail about his conception of
the entity. 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 "I! Shub-Niggurath!"
[1]
The story provides no
further information about this peculiar expression.
The next Lovecraft story to mention Shub-Niggurath is scarcely more informative. In "The Whisperer in Darkness"
(1930), a recording of a ceremony involving human and nonhuman worshipers includes the following exchange:
Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. I! Shub-Niggurath!
I! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
[2]
Similarly unexplained exclamations occur in "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932)
[3]
and "The Thing on the
Doorstep" (1933).
[4]
Shub-Niggurath
2
Revision tales
Lovecraft only provided specific information about Shub-Niggurath in his revision tales, stories published under
the names of clients for whom he ghost-wrote. 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.
While some of these revision stories just repeat the familiar exclamations,
[5]
others provide new elements of lore. 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 Deserthe had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and
had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and YebI! Shub-Niggurath!"
[6]
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. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her
worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious."
[7]
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."
[8]
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"
[9]
and was included in a scrap of
incantation that Lovecraft wrote for Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars".
[10]
August Derleth identifies this
mysterious entity with Hastur
[11]
(though Hastur appears in the same "Whisperer in Darkness" list with the Magnum
Innominandum), while Robert M. Price equates him with Yog-Sothoth--though he also suggests that
Shub-Niggurath's mate is implicitly the snake god Yig.
[12]
Finally, 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". In the story, T'yog surprisingly maintains that "the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against
the hostile gods, and...that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were ready to take sides
with man" against the more malevolent Ghanatothoa. Shub-Niggurath is called "the Mother Goddess", and reference
is made to "her sons", presumably Nug and Yeb.
[13]
Other references
Other evidence of Lovecraft's conception of Shub-Niggurath can be found in his letters. For example, in a letter to
Willis Conover, Lovecraft described her as an "evil cloud-like entity".
[14]
The Black Goat
Although Shub-Niggurath is often associated with the epithet "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young", it is possible that this Black Goat is a separate entity. Rodolfo Ferraresi, in his essay "The Question of
Shub-Niggurath", says that Lovecraft himself separated the two in his writings, such as in "Out of the Aeons" (1935)
in which a distinction is made between Shub-Niggurath and the Black Goatthe goat is the figurehead through
which Shub-Niggurath is worshipped. In apparent contrast to Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat is sometimes depicted
as a male, most notably in the rite performed in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931) in which the Black Goat is
called the "Lord of the Woods". However, Lovecraft clearly associates Shub-Niggurath with The Black Goat of the
Woods with a Thousand Young in two of his stories"The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Thing on the
Doorstep".
Shub-Niggurath
3
The Black Goat may be the personification of Pan, since Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen's The Great
God Pan (1890), a story that inspired Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). In this incarnation, the Black Goat
may represent Satan in the form of the satyr, a half-man, half-goat. In folklore, the satyr symbolized a man with
excessive sexual appetites. The Black Goat may otherwise be a male, earthly form of Shub-Niggurathan
incarnation she assumes to copulate with her worshipers.
[15]
Robert M. Price's interpretation
Robert M. Price points to a passage from "Idle Days on the Yann", by Lord Dunsany, one of Lovecraft's favorite
writers, as the source for the name Shub-Niggurath:
And I too felt that I would pray. Yet I liked not to pray to a jealous God there where the frail affectionate gods
whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, whom
the men of the jungle have long since deserted, who is now unworshipped and alone; and to him I prayed.
[16]
Notes Price: "The name already carried a whiff of sulfur: Sheol was the name for the Netherworld mentioned in the
Bible and the Gilgamesh Epic."
[17]
As for Shub-Niggurath's association with the symbol of the goat, Price writes,
we may believe that here Lovecraft was inspired by the traditional Christian depiction of the Baphomet Goat,
an image of Satan harking back to the pre-Christian woodland deity Pan, he of the goatish horns and shanks.
The Satanic goat is a device of much spectral fiction, as when in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out the
Archfiend's epiphany takes goat-headed form.
[18]
Other writers
Ramsey Campbell
In Ramsey Campbell's story "The Moon Lens", the English town of Goatswood is inhabited by once-human
worshippers of Shub-Niggurath. When the deity deems a worshiper to be most worthy, a special ceremony is held in
which the Black Goat of the Woods swallows the initiate and then regurgitates the cultist as a transformed satyr-like
being. A changed worshiper is also endowed with immortal life.
[19]
Stephen King
In the short story "Crouch End", a woman loses her husband to and then is chased by minions of "the Goat with a
Thousand Young" and then by the Goat itself.
[20]
Paul Stewart
In his Edge Chronicles novel The Curse of the Gloamglozer, one of the antagonists, the Rogue Glister, is obviously
modelled after Shub-Niggurath, with long, stretching tentacles and its main body being a pulsating mass of muscle
just like the Black Goat.
Paul Morris
The Scarifyers: The Devil of Denge Marsh, by Paul Morris, is a light-hearted radio play (on CD as a Cosmic Hobo
publication, 2007) whose heroes (played by Nicholas Courtney and Terry Molloy) are engaged in foiling the return
of this watery timeless horror and thwarting the intentions of its mysterious (and sometimes bizarre) human acolytes.
Shub-Niggurath
4
Gary Myers
Gary Myers's story, "What Rough Beast," casts Shub-Niggurath as the mother of all the gods, and her children as the
chapters of her ongoing revelation.
Jim Butcher
In Turn Coat, the eleventh book in The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, the narrator mentions that there are in his
universe "terrors that the Black-Goat-with-a-Thousand-Young wouldn't dare use for its kids' bedtime stories".
Edward M. Erdelac
In The Outlaw Gods, a novella from the The Mensch With No Name, second book in the Merkabah Rider weird
western series, Shub-Niggurath dwells beneath the ruins of Red House, a K'n-yan citadel in the mountains of
Arizona, surrounded by dark trees which tear apart trespassers.
Joseph Nanni
The Dark Young or Thousand Young appear in the short film Black Goat by writer/director Joseph Nanni. The Dark
Young first appear as root/tentacles assessing their prey. Later in the film a young trapper surrounds one of the
Young with fire only to find himself surrounded when the creature calls its siblings. However, the concept of the
Dark Young was first introduced by game designer Sandy Petersen for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.
Joe Hill
Shub-niggurath is mentioned in the Joe Hill graphic novel series Locke & Key. Consisting of black shapes and many
yellow eyes, this being exists in a place barred from our own by a black door in a deep cave. In Clockworks, volume
five of the series, one of the characters can be seen to scream "Ia! Ia Shub-Niggurath!" as he becomes violent. A goat
is also present, and screams the same words as it is sucked into the gate.
Christopher Brookmyre
In his book A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, Brookmyre includes various first-person shooter references (as the plot
involves an ex-videogame-salesman fighting terrorists single-handed). Among these references, the terrorists'
financier is named Shaloub "Shub" N'gurath, a reference to Shub-Niggurath as it appears as a boss in the first-person
shooter Quake.
Anders Fager
In "The Furies From Bors" Anders Fager includes references to Shub-Niggurath. The "Young of the Goat" is a cult
of teenage girls. They lure teenage boys into the woods and sacrifice them to a monstrous messenger.
[21]
[22]
[23]
Shub-Niggurath
5
Charles Stross
Shub-Niggurath is the primary antagonist in the 2013 novelette "Equoid" by Charles Stross.
[24]
A.J. Smith
Shub-Nillurath, or the "Black God of the Forest with a thousand Young", features in the "Long War" series of
fantasy novels.
[25]
Notes
[1] H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 170.
[2] H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 226.
[3] H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House", At the Mountains of Madness, p. 293.
[4] H. P. Lovecraft, "The Thing on the Doorstep", The Dunwich Horror and Others, pp. 287, 296.
[5] H. P. Lovecraft writing as Zealia Bisop, "Medusa's Coil", The Horror in the Museum, pp. 189190; H. P. Lovecraft writing as Hazel Heald,
"The Man of Stone", The Horror in the Museum, pp. 225, 232; H. P. Lovecraft writing as Hazel Heald, "The Horror in the Museum", The
Horror in the Museum, pp. 225, 232; H. P. Lovecraft writing as William Lumley, "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", The Horror in the Museum, p.
321.
[6] H. P. Lovecraft writing as Adolphe de Castro, "The Last Test", The Horror in the Museum, p. 47.
[7] H. P. Lovecraft writing as Zealia Bishop, "The Mound", The Horror in the Museum, pp. 144145.
[8] Price, Shub-Niggurath Cycle, p. xiv.
[9] [9] Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness", p. 223.
[10] Robert Bloch, "The Shambler from the Stars", Mysteries of the Worm, p. 31.
[11] August Derleth, "The Return of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, pp. 255-256.
[12] [12] Price, p. xiii.
[13] H. P. Lovecraft writing as Hazel Heald, "Out of the Aeons," The Horror in the Museum, pp. 273274; Price, p. xiii.
[14] [14] Cited in Price, p. xv.
[15] Ferraresi, "The Question of Shub-Niggurath", Crypt of Cthulhu #35, pp. 178, 22.
[16] Lord Dunsany, "Idle Days on the Yann" (http:/ / www. litrix. com/ dtales/ dtale006. htm), A Dreamer's Tales.
[17] Robert M. Price, Shub-Niggurath Cycle, p. xii.
[18] [18] Price, p. x.
[19] Campbell, "The Moon-Lens", Shub-Niggurath Cycle.
[20] Stephen King, "Crouch End", New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
[21] http:/ / www.adlibris. com/ se/ bok/ samlade-svenska-kulter-skrackberattelser-9789146220961
[22] http:/ / bokhora.se/ 2010/ mandagsmote-anders-fager/
[23] Martinsson, "At One With Nature", An Ecocritical Study of the Nature Motif in Three Swedish Horror Writers https:/ / gupea. ub. gu. se/
bitstream/ 2077/ 34207/ 1/ gupea_2077_34207_1. pdf
[24] Charles Stross, "Equoid" (http:/ / www. tor. com/ stories/ 2013/ 09/ equoid), The Laundry Files
[25] http:/ / sffworld. blogspot.co.uk/ 2013/ 08/ the-black-guard-by-aj-smith-review-by. html
References
Campbell, Ramsey (1987) [1964]. "The Moon-Lens". Cold Print (1st ed.). New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
ISBN0-8125-1660-5.
Harms, Daniel (1998). "Byatis". The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (2nd ed.). Oakland, CA: Chaosium. pp.423.
ISBN1-56882-119-0. [Suggests Byatis is the son of Yig]
"Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath", pp. 75, ibid.
"gof'nn hupadgh Shub-Niggurath", pp. 124, ibid.
"Shub-Niggurath", pp. 2757, ibid.
Ferraresi, Rodolfo A. (Hallowmas 1985). "The Question of Shub-Niggurath". Crypt of Cthulhu #35: A Pulp
Thriller and Theological Journal 5 (1). Robert M. Price (ed.), Mount Olive, NC: Cryptic Publications.
Lovecraft, Howard P. (1985) [1933]. "The Dreams in the Witch House". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). At the Mountains of
Madness, and Other Novels (7th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN0-87054-038-6.
Definitive version.
Shub-Niggurath
6
Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984) [1931]. "The Whisperer in Darkness". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and
Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
Lovecraft, Howard P.; Zealia Bishop (1989) [1940]. "The Mound". In S.T. Joshi (ed.). The Horror in the Museum
and Other Revisions. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN0-87054-040-8.
and Adolphe de Castro (1928). "The Last Test", ibid.
and Hazel Heald (1932). "The Man of Stone", ibid.
Myers, Gary (2007). Dark Wisdom. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books. ISBN0-9789911-3-3.
Pratchett, Terry (2002) [1990]. Moving Pictures. New York, NY: HarperTorch. ISBN0-06-102063-X.
External links
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
The Whisperer in Darkness
"The Dreams in the Witch House" by H.P. Lovecraft (http:/ / www. dagonbytes. com/ thelibrary/ lovecraft/
dreamswitchhouse. htm)
"The Man of Stone" by H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (http:/ / www. psy-q. ch/ lovecraft/ html/ stone. htm)
"The Mound" by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop (http:/ / www. sockpuppet. org/ ~tyme/ lovecraft/ works/ rev/
mound. htm)Wikipedia:Link rot
"The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft (http:/ / www. dagonbytes. com/ thelibrary/ lovecraft/
thewhispererindarkness. htm)
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