11/8/2023 0 Comments Dark young shub niggurath quake![]() The Black Goat may otherwise be a male, earthly form of Shub-Niggurath-an incarnation she assumes to copulate with her worshipers. In folklore, the satyr symbolized a man with excessive sexual appetites. In this incarnation, the Black Goat may represent Satan in the form of the satyr, a half-man, half-goat. 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). 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". 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". 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 Goat-the goat is the figurehead through which Shub-Niggurath is worshipped. The Black GoatĪlthough 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. For example, in a letter to Willis Conover, Lovecraft described her as an "evil cloud-like entity". 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. 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 Ghatanothoa. Price equates him with Yog-Sothoth-though he also suggests that Shub-Niggurath's mate is implicitly the snake god Yig.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". 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. ![]()
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