by Donald Tyson
This enigmatic being first appeared in Lovecraft's fiction in the brief story Nyarlathotep, written in 1920. It presents him very much as he had appeared in Lovecraft's repeating dream, as an Egyptian showman who claims or hints at an ancient past:
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilization came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
Again, we see how closely Lovecraft's fiction follows his dream vision, which may well have been a glimpse of some astral reality. The instruments of glass and metal suggest that Nyarlathotep is engaged in some alchemical or perhaps necromantic work that will have dire consequences for the human race. Lovecraft wrote in his story, "everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown."
In the story, while the audience is mesmerized by the strange images of his cinema show, Nyarlathotep works his static-electrical devices and causes shadow creatures to materialize above them and squat on their heads, stealing some essence of free will or humanity. They all become slaves to Nyarlathotep, and are in some inexplicable way transported into a bleak future, or perhaps into an alternative dimension of reality in which their familiar world has decayed. They march against their will into a gulf containing "ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities" in which the narrator, who we know from his dream is Lovecraft himself, catches a glimpse of the ultimate abyss where dance the blind gods of creation to the "maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes." Nyarlathotep is said to be the soul of these grotesque gargoyle gods.
Although this brief story has very little in the way of plot, it is important to an understanding of Nyarlathotep because it presents the Crawling Chaos in his purest form, as Lovecraft perceived him in his persistent repeating dream. We see foreshadowed at the end of the tale the blind Azathoth, who sits at the center of the universe and unrolls worlds with the shrill music he sends streaming forth from his cracked flute. In later work Nyarlathotep became not only the soul of the blind gods, but the messenger or agent of Azathoth. It is almost as though in his dream Lovecraft glimpsed an astral reality in a partial way, that in later years he was able to fill in more completely.
When he came to write The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath six years later, Lovecraft used almost an identical description of the central chaos of the universe that is the cauldron of creation, but he added more detail and included its name, Azathoth, a being who does not merely reside there, but is himself the chaotic maelstrom, just as Yog-Sothoth is not merely the gatekeeper but the gate itself. Lovecraft referred to Azathoth as "that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity-the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep."
As can be gathered from this description, Nyarlathotep is the active agent of the blind Other Gods who with their tortured dance spin the cosmos out of the raw fabric of chaos. Because he is so close to the chaotic source, there is madness and danger in his very nature. The orderly laws that govern our universe cannot contain him. The forms by which he is perceived by human beings cannot begin to express his true nature, but are vessels through which he works his various purposes. They are sometimes called his avatars. This is a Hindu term much used in Theosophy, and stands for a human being who is filled with divine essence-a god in human form, who has descended to our level of reality and put on human flesh for the purpose of teaching the human race. Nyarlathotep's avatars, such as the Egyptian showman, have some dark ultimate purpose that is never fully revealed.
In The Haunter of the Dark, Lovecraft indicated that the ageless Egyptian showman who steals the souls of his audience in the story Nyarlathotep was indeed an avatar of the messenger at the central chaos. A character in the later tale, Robert Harrison Blake, asks himself, "What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man?" "Khem" is an ancient name for Egypt. The implication is that the Egyptian showman of the earlier story is the same deathless avatar from Khem, who has descended to modern times.
Nyarlathotep's avatar is described as "swarthy, slender, and sinister," and is a manifestation of Lovecraft's lifelong phobia for foreign cultures. He regarded the familiar customs of New England as sane and correct, and those of the various immigrant types with which he came into contact as in some indefinable way distorted and unwholesome, a kind of cultural plague that was spreading across the world. Since this dream began at age ten, it may be assumed that his aversion to foreign culture was deeply rooted in his childhood, and was not something he developed when he later went to live in New York City, although it found its worst fears realized there, and so much tormented his mind that he almost committed suicide by poison.
One of the most important of Nyarlathotep's various avatars is the Black Man of European witches. This fascinating figure who straddles myth and reality was incorporated by Lovecraft into some of his stories, particularly The Dreams in the Witch House. In her profoundly influential but often disparaged 1921 book The Witch-Cult In Western Europe, Margaret A. Murray offered the opinion that the Black Man was not mythical but was a kind of theatrical role played by a real man who appeared at the witches' sabbat with his identity veiled and who enacted the part of the god of the witches. The demonologists of the Christian Church identified the Black Man with Satan himself, leading later historians to assume that he was mythical, but Murray was convinced that he was a leader of the witches, perhaps a nobleman, who impersonated an older pagan deity. Lovecraft was familiar with Murray's book, and undoubtedly drew upon it for his own interpretation of the Black Man as an avatar of Nyarlathotep.
Walter Gilman, the protagonist of the story, who was a student both of mathematics and the occult, takes a room in an ancient house in the "legend-haunted city of Arkham." The house is known as the Witch House because it had once been the residence of the notorious witch Keziah Mason. Indeed, the room he rents is the very eastern attic room in which Keziah had practiced her spells more than two centuries earlier. Once within its oddly distorted walls, Gilman begins to suffer from horrible nightmares. In the dreams, he sees repeatedly an old woman who tells him that he must meet with the Black Man and travel with them to the throne of Azathoth at the center of ultimate chaos. Once there, Gilman must sign the book of Azathoth in his blood and take a new secret name to symbolize his initiation into the witch cult.
These details are more or less correct, insofar as the records of the witch trails are concerned. Witches were reputed to gather for great celebrations known as sabbats that took place, not at the center of chaos, but on top of high places far from cities or towns. Here a new witch met with the Black Man who presided over the sabbat, was marked by him, and took a secret witch name. The new witch pledged allegiance to the Black Man and signed his or her name in blood in a book to seal the oath. These were the beliefs of
the Christian demonologists of the Renaissance period, who wrote about the doings at the witches' sabbat.
Why a deathless being as potent as Nyarlathotep would participate in such human theatricals can only be conjectured. Nyarlathotep seems to enjoy interacting with human beings, or why else would he walk among them in human form? Perhaps the worship of our race for the Old Ones provides some kind of occult energy that can be used for their higher purposes. Or perhaps Nyarlathotep merely enjoys being worshipped, and inspiring fear and awe in humans.
One of the avatars of Nyarlathotep is a youthful-looking Egyptian pharaoh with an erect posture and a regal bearing, who is dressed in "prismatic robes" and crowned with a golden pshent. He has the manner of a fallen archangel. Capricious humor sparkles in his eyes. His voice is melodic. This outwardly attractive being is there to meet Randolph Carter when he reaches the end of his dream-quest for Kadath. He orders Carter to return the gods of Earth to Kadath where they belong-the gods were so attracted to Carter's dream city of Boston that they left their mountain fortress and went to live and play in Carter's dream city. Nyarlathotep gives Carter the final warning at their parting, "Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms." Nyarlathotep, even in this smiling and attractive human form, is not to be trusted, since he attempts to trick Carter into the chaos of Azathoth. It is only with great difficulty that Carter eludes the trap and manages to awaken in his bed.
Nyarlathotep is also worshipped by the Mi-Go. In The Whisperer in Darkness, they invoke his name and praise him during their joint rituals with their human cultists. They are instructed by the litany of the ritual to go among men in the outer world and learn all that they can learn, in order that Nyarlathotep may inform Azathoth, who is called "He in the Gulf." For this purpose of acquiring knowledge, the Mi-Go put on wax masks and the clothing of human beings, so that they can pass unnoticed by human observers. Nyarlathotep is called in the ritual "the Great Messenger," "bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void" and is also characterized as Father of the Million Favored Ones-presumably the favored ones of Yuggoth.
(Nyarlathotep; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Haunter of the Dark; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Whisperer in Darkness)
Quetzalcoatl is a word in the Nahuatl language that literally means "bird-serpent" but is more usually rendered "feathered serpent." In the religion of the Aztec of Mexico he was linked with the planet Venus. The protagonist of Lovecraft's story The Curse of Yig, co-written with Zealia Bishop, refers to Quetzalcoatl as the great, benign snake-god of the Mexicans, by which he means the natives of Mexico, the Aztec. He hints darkly that this god "had an older and darker prototype." That prototype is the serpent god Yig, worshipped by the Central Plains tribes of the United States. Lovecraft seems to equate Quetzalcoatl with Kukulcan, the feathered serpent god worshipped by the Maya.
(The Curse of Yig)
This mummified god was discovered seated on a carved ivory throne in the northern part of Alaska by George Rogers, the proprietor of a private wax museum in London. It is a ten-foot tall amphibious being from the warm seas of Yuggoth that came to Earth three million years ago. The six sinuous limbs on its globular torso terminate in crablike claws. Its head is globular as well, with three staring, lidless eyes arranged in a triangular pattern and a foot-long proboscis. Its entire body is covered with slender tentacles that are almost hair-like, each terminating in a sucking mouth. Those on its head and below the proboscis are larger and resemble the serpent-hair of Medusa. The god was revived with sacrifices of blood, coupled with the long ritual on the eighth Pnakotic Fragment, and sustained in a deep tank of water in the basement of the museum. Rogers, who had made himself the priest of this ancient god, asserted that if Rhan-Tegoth died, the Old Ones could never come back to the Earth, but what he meant by this cryptic remark remains unclear.
(The Horror in the Museum)
This female deity is first mentioned in The Last Test, where she is named but not described. To human beings Shub-Niggurath is a Mother Goddess. One of her titles is "the Goat With a Thousand Young." Her worship is ecstatic, similar in this regard to the ancient Greek worship of Bacchus. Her rites are punctuated by the cries "Ia! ShubNiggurath!" In The Mound she is described as the All-Mother and the wife of the NotTo-Be-Named One. Lovecraft compared her to "a kind of sophisticated Astarte." In The Whisperer in Darkness she is called "the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young." Mentioned in the same incantation is a deity called "the Lord of the Woods," who may be a masculinized form of this goddess-or it is possible that the Lord of the Woods is a separate deity, perhaps even the Not-To-Be-Named One.
Esoterically, Shub-Niggurath is similar to the Kabbalistic concept of Binah, the bitter salt-sea of creation from which all life arose. Binah is anthropomorphized into a mother goddess, and is the creative womb from which arises all manifest forms. These forms are engendered within her by the divine sparks of the father god, Chokmah, who is a seminal expression of the primal swirlings of creation in Kether. In the system of Jewish mysticism known as the Kabbalah, these are the three highest emanations of the ten-fold process by which the universe came into being out of nothingness. Collectively they are known as the Supernals.
Kether is the first and highest of all the ten emanations, so exalted that it can scarcely be said to exist, having no form or quality of its own. In Lovecraft's mythos, it corresponds with the mindless, blind Azathoth. Chokmah is the second emanation, the masculine spark that engenders creation, the divine seed that impregnated the womb of Binah. Chokmah is described as the mirror reflection of Kether, alike to it in all respects, save only that it is one stage lower on the process of emanation, and therefore slightly more manifest than Kether. It corresponds with Nyarlathotep, god of a thousand faces, who is the messenger of the Blind God and carries out his will. Azathoth is too exalted to act directly, so he must act through the intermediary Nyarlathotep. Binah is the third emanation, the feminine womb in which all forms and qualities are shaped. These forms of things cannot grow of themselves but must be engendered by the sparks from Chokmah.
Nyarlathotep, the god of a thousand faces, acting as the messenger of Azathoth, who is Shub-Niggurath's true husband, impregnates the mother goddess and engenders her thousand young-a thousand is a number which in ancient times signified too many to count. Shub-Niggurath is the mother of a multitude of monsters. Her fertile womb is a chaotic ground from which may arise any abomination. She is the dark side, or dark reflection, of Binah. The things that grow in her womb flourish like cancers, ungoverned and unchecked, and take the forms of nightmares.
Nowhere in his stories did Lovecraft describe Shub-Niggurath. Her association with the proverbially prolific goat links her with the Greek god Pan, and also with the Christian Devil, who is supposed to have the legs and feet of a goat. The form of Baphomet, oracular god of the Knights Templars, that was drawn by the French occultist Eliphas Levi, depicts him as a torso with prominent female breasts, the horned head and hairy hind legs of a goat, but the arms of a man. Lovecraft was familiar with some of Levi's writings. He may have had Levi's version of Baphomet in mind when he created Shub Niggurath. However, in one of his private letters to Willis Conover, he described ShubNiggurath as an evil cloud-like entity. This is about as vague as a description can get.
It may be fair to assume that Shub-Niggurath acquired different forms during different periods of her worship. As is the case with Nyarlathotep, a multiplicity of forms would have had the effect of making her formless, since no single form could be said to be the goddess. At the very least, she must have had a higher and a lower form, represented respectively by the evil cloud and the black goat. The evil cloud would correspond with the shadow side of Binah, the third emanation, the endlessly fecund womb from which all monsters arose. The black goat would correspond with the lower aspect of this goddess, a fertility deity presiding over the growth of crops, the health of domestic cat
tle, and the birth of babies.
(The Last Test; The Mound; The Whisperer in Darkness)
One of the three chief bearded gods of the doomed city of Sarnath, the other two being Zo-Kalar and Lobon.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
A title for the goddess of witches, Hecate. An alternative translation is "moon of a thousand forms." Lovecraft applied this title to the demoness Lilith in an incantation that is chanted by a cult of Yazidi devil worshippers at Red Hook in New York: "Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!"
(The Horror at Red Hook)
The creator god of the Pawnee Indians, credited by them with teaching their ancestors religious rites and sacrifices, language, hunting, farming, and the making of fire. In The Mound, this deity is mentioned by Chief Gray Eagle of the Wichita Indians of Oklahoma, who were a neighboring people to the Pawnee, in connection with the moundcovered entrance to blue-litten K'n-yan. Gray Eagle describes Tirawa as the father of men. He is described along with Yig, the father of snakes.
(The Mound)
This dark god of unilluminated N'kai was not invented by Lovecraft, but by his close friend, the writer Clark Ashton Smith. His nature differs somewhat between Lovecraft and Smith, but it is primarily Lovecraft's conception of the god that we will examine. Tsathoggua is a part of Lovecraft's mythos because Lovecraft chose to incorporate the god into it. It is perhaps the most sinister and evil of all the Old Ones or their related alien races who came to this planet in the dim beginnings of its formation.
