Tsathoggua | |
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Cthulhu Mythos character | |
![]() Khannea Suntzu's impression of Tsathoggua | |
First appearance | "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931) |
Created by | Clark Ashton Smith |
In-universe information | |
Alias | Zhothaqquah |
Tsathoggua (the Sleeper of N'kai, also known as Zhothaqquah) is a supernatural entity in the Cthulhu Mythos shared fictional universe. He is the creation of American writer Clark Ashton Smith and is part of his Hyperborean cycle. [1]
Tsathoggua/Zhothaqquah is described as an Old One, a god-like being from the pantheon. He was introduced in Smith's short story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", written in 1929 and published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales . [2] His first appearance in print, however, was in Robert E. Howard's story "The Children of the Night", written in 1930 and published in the April-May 1931 issue of Weird Tales. His next appearance in print was in H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Whisperer in Darkness", written in 1930 and published in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales.
The first description of Tsathoggua occurs in "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", in which the protagonists encounter one of the entity's idols:
He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; and the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth. [3]
Later, in Smith's "The Seven Geases" (1933), Tsathoggua is described again:
In that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth . . . abides from eldermost eons the god Tsathoggua. You shall know Tsathoggua by his great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad which he has eternally. He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice.
Robert M. Price notes that "Lovecraft's Tsathoggua and Smith's differ at practically every point". Lovecraft, dropping Smith's bat and sloth comparisons, refers to the entity in "The Whisperer in Darkness" as the "amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton" [4] (the priest's name was Lovecraft's nickname for Tsathoggua's creator, Clark Ashton Smith).
Later, in "The Horror in the Museum", a story ghost-written by Lovecraft, he writes,
Black Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet.
He also mentions it in At the Mountains of Madness , in a paragraph mentioning several other gods.
The basin ... was filled with a sort of viscous and semi-liquescent substance, quite opaque and of a sooty color.... [T]he center swelled as if with the action of some powerful yeast [and] an uncouth amorphous head with dull and bulging eyes arose gradually on an ever-lengthening neck ... Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not ... a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and [it was now forming arms] that groped toward us with tentacle-like appendages in lieu of claws or hands! ... Then the whole mass of the dark fluid began to rise [and] poured over the rim of the basin like a torrent of black quicksilver, taking as it reached the floor an undulant ophidian form which immediately developed more than a dozen short legs.
- —Clark Ashton Smith, "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"
Tsathoggua's will is carried out by the formless spawn, polymorphic entities made of black ichor. They are extremely resilient and very difficult to dispatch. Formless spawn can take any shape and can attack their targets in nearly every conceivable way. They are surprisingly flexible and plastic, and can quickly flow into a room through the tiniest of cracks. They attack by trampling their targets, biting them, or crushing them with their grasp. The Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game's entry on Formless Spawn also claims that they are powerfully acidic in substance and can dissolve human flesh with even a slight touch.
Formless spawn often rest in basins in Tsathoggua's temples and keep the sanctuary from being defiled by nonbelievers.
In "The Mound" the people of the subterranean world of K'N-Yan had once worshipped Tsathoggua until a scientific expedition exploring N'Kai encountered the Formless Spawn. Those who escaped had all the images of Tsathoggua destroyed, and his temple re-dedicated to Shub-Niggurath.
In his story At the Mountains of Madness , H. P. Lovecraft states that "[a] few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself"
The formless spawn appear as adversaries in the video game Quake . [5]
A race of cave-dwelling humanoids who worship Tsathoggua. They are the primary focus of a "posthumous collaboration" [6] short story by Lin Carter after Clark Ashton Smith's death, The Scroll of Morloc (First published in 1976, The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2 , and again in 1980 in Lost Worlds ). [7] They are referred to as the Voormi (plural: Voormis) in H. P. Lovecraft's fictional manuscript The Pnakotic Fragments. The Voormis considered themselves the chosen minions of Tsathoggua and his direct descendants.
The Voormis are described as three-toed, umber-colored, fur-covered humanoids [8] though they are carefully differentiated from their traditional enemies (the shaggier-haired but superficially similar Gnophkehs who worshiped the Great Old One Rhan-Tegoth). Both of them are further differentiated from true humans. The Voormis communicate by dog-like howls.
They reside in a continent in Hyperborea which will be known in the future as Mhu Thulan: specifically in cave systems under the four-coned extinct volcano named after them—Mount Voormithadreth, the tallest peak in the Eiglophian mountains. Their ancestors (as described by Carter's narrative) were originally thralls of the Serpent-people who escaped after the continent of the latter sank to the sea. They are shamanistic and apparently began dwelling underground in an effort to imitate their deity, Tsathoggua, under the leadership of the eponymous Voorm.
The Voormis established a thriving culture in the surface Hyperborea before the coming of humans. [9] Their civilization eventually fell into demise. [10] With constant warfare with their archenemies, the Gnophkeh, they grew smaller and smaller in number until the remnants retreated to the highest slopes of the Eiglophian mountains. They were hunted for sport by later human settlers.
Smith literally wed Lovecraft's creations to his own gods, which seem to be molded more like the Greek pantheon than the cosmic group of Lovecraft's fiction. [11] He assigned familial relationships to his gods—for example, making the Saturnian being Hziulquoigmnzhah the "uncle" of Tsathoggua [12] —and ascribed this family tree to the Parchments of Pnom, Hyperborea's leading "genealogist [and] noted prophet". [13]
According to Smith's "Parchments of Pnom", Tsathoggua is the spawn of Ghisguth and Zystulzhemgni, as well as being the mate of Shathak and the parent of Zvilpogghua. Lovecraft, however, states that Tsathoggua is the offspring of the deity Yeb, whose twin Nug spawned Cthulhu. [14]
Cxaxukluth (or Ksaksa-Kluth) is an Outer God, spawn of Azathoth by spontaneous fission. His progeny are Hziulquoigmnzhah and Ghisguth. He is the grandfather of Tsathoggua.
Cxaxukluth dwells on Yuggoth. His immediate family lived with him for a while, but soon left because of his cannibalistic appetites.
Ghisguth (or Ghizghuth or Ghisghuth) is the son of Cxaxukluth and the brother of Hziulquoigmnzhah. He is the mate of Zstylzhemghi and the father of Tsathoggua.
Hziulquoigmnzhah (also Ziulquaz-Manzah) is the son of Cxaxukluth. He is also the brother to Ghisguth and the uncle of Tsathoggua.
His appearance is much like his nephew, but he has an elongated neck, very long forelimbs, and very short, multiple legs. He has had many homes including Xoth (possibly Sirius B), Yaksh (Neptune), and Cykranosh (Saturn), where he resides to this day.
In Kevin L. O'Brien's "October Surprise" (2006) Hziulquoigmnzhah's mate is Zstylzhemghi's sister Klosmiebhyx who bore him two entities likely matching with the Welsh giant Ysbaddaden and the Scottish war-goddess Scáthach, [15] since both named after these two demigods.
Klosmiebhyx is mentioned in Kevin L. O'Brien's "October Surprise" (2006) as sister of Zstylzhemghi. [16] Her appearance is not described, but likely similar to her sibling.
Knygathin Zhaum is the child of Sfatlicllp and a Voormi.
He repopulated Hyperborea after humans deserted the cities of Uzuldaroum and Commoriom. [ citation needed ] Athammaus tried to execute him by beheading, but because of his preternatural heritage, such attempts proved unsuccessful and only served to aggravate him. As a descendant of Cxaxukluth, Knygathin Zhaum reproduced by fission and thus created an Azathothian strain among the Hyperborean Voormi.
Sfatlicllp is the daughter of Zvilpogghua. She is the wife of a Voormi and their offspring is Knygathin Zhaum.
Sfatlicllp was likely born on Kythanil and may have procreated the formless spawn once on Earth. She probably dwells in N'kai with Tsathoggua.
Shathak is the wife of Tsathoggua and the mother of Zvilpogghua.
Ycnágnnisssz is the being from the dark star Xoth who spawned Zstylzhemghi by fission.
Zstylzhemghi (Matriarch of the Swarm) is the offspring of Ycnagnnisssz along with Klosmiebhyx, [17] mate of Ghisguth and the mother of Tsathoggua.
Zvilpogghua (the Feaster from the Stars) is the son of Tsathoggua and Shathak, and is the father of Sfatlicllp. Zvilpogghua was conceived on the planet Yaksh (Neptune).
Zvilpogghua is known to the American Indians as Ossadagowah. He usually takes the form of an armless, winged, bipedal toad with a long, rubbery neck and a face completely covered in tentacles. He currently dwells on Yrautrom, a planet that orbits the star Algol.
In 1971, Tsathoggua's idol, which came to life and attacked Conan the Barbarian, made a cameo in Conan the Buccaneer , book 6 of the Conan series, this novel written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter based on the Conan character created by Robert E. Howard.
In 1975, Tsathoggua made a cameo in The Golden Apple, book two of The Illuminatus! Trilogy , by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, where he was also referred to as Saint Toad.
In 2008, the short story "Tsathoggua" by Michael Shea was first published in The Autopsy and Other Tales.
In 2013, Tsathoggua played a pivotal role in Gray Magic: An Episode of Eibon, a novel by Gary Myers based on the Eibon character and Hyperborean cycle created by Clark Ashton Smith.
The mind parasites are called the Tsathogguans in Colin Wilson's Cthulhu Mythos–based novel The Mind Parasites (1967).
Tsathoggua is also a summonable unit in the 2016 Japanese mobile game Tokyo Afterschool Summoners , where he's depicted as a proud shut-in NEET dwelling in the VIP room of an underground casino in Roppongi, Tokyo.
In 2005, Chaosium published a Cthulhu Mythos anthology edited by Robert M. Price called The Tsathoggua Cycle, which comprised the original Clark Ashton Smith stories featuring Tsathoggua, along with tales by other authors in which the entity has a starring role. The short story collection includes:
The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term was coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name "Cthulhu" derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures".
Averoigne is a fictional counterpart of a historical province in France, detailed in a series of short stories by the American writer Clark Ashton Smith. Smith may have based Averoigne on the actual province of Auvergne, but its name was probably influenced by the French department of Aveyron, immediately south of Auvergne, due to the similarity in pronunciation. Sixteen of Smith's stories take place in Averoigne. In Smith's fiction, the Southern French province is considered "the most witch-ridden in the entire country." The most well-known citizen is Gaspard du Nord of Vyones, a wizard who translated The Book of Eibon into Norman French.
The Hyperborean cycle is a series of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith that take place in the fictional prehistoric setting of Hyperborea. Smith's cycle takes cues from his friends, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and their works.
"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5–9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales. It was the last written of the author's known works, and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".
Unaussprechliche Kulte is a fictional book of arcane literature in the Cthulhu Mythos. The book first appeared in Robert E. Howard's 1931 short stories "The Children of the Night" and "The Black Stone" as Nameless Cults. Like the Necronomicon, it was later mentioned in several stories by H. P. Lovecraft.
The Emperor of Dreams is a collection of American fantasy author and poet Clark Ashton Smith's short tales arranged in chronological order. It was published by Gollancz in 2002 as the 26th volume of their Fantasy Masterworks series. The collection contains stories from Smith's major story cycles of Averoigne, Hyperborea, Poseidonis, and Zothique. Most of the stories originally appeared in the magazines The Fantasy Fan, Weird Tales, Overland Monthly, Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, The Magic Carpet/Oriental Stories, The Auburn Journal, Stirring Science Stories, The Arkham Sampler, Saturn and Fantastic Universe.
Zhar is a fictional deity in the Cthulhu Mythos. The being first appeared in the short story "The Lair of the Star-Spawn" (1932) by August Derleth and Mark Schorer. Zhar and its companion Lloigor are together known as the Twin Obscenities.
The Xothic legend cycle is a series of short stories by American writer Lin Carter that are based on the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, primarily on Lovecraft's stories "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Out of the Aeons".
A Cthulhu Mythos anthology is a type of short story collection that contains stories written in, or related to, the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction launched by H. P. Lovecraft. Such anthologies have helped to define and popularize the genre.
"The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" is a short story written in 1929 by American author Clark Ashton Smith as part of his Hyperborean cycle, and first published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. It is the story in which Smith created the Cthulhu Mythos entity Tsathoggua.
"The Testament of Athammaus" is a short story by American writer Clark Ashton Smith, part of his Hyperborean cycle. It was published in the October 1932 issue of Weird Tales.
The Spawn of Cthulhu is an anthology of fantasy short stories, edited by American writer Lin Carter. It was first published in paperback by Ballantine Books in October 1971 as the thirty-sixth volume of its Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It was the fifth anthology assembled by Carter for the series.
Hyperborea is a collection of fantasy short stories by Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Lin Carter. It was first published in paperback by Ballantine Books as the twenty-ninth volume of its Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in April 1971. It was the second themed collection of Smith's works assembled by Carter for the series. The stories were originally published in various fantasy magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s, notably Weird Tales.
Serpent Men are a fictional race created by Robert E. Howard for his King Kull tales. They first appeared in "The Shadow Kingdom", published in Weird Tales in August 1929.
American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) created a number of fictional deities throughout the course of his literary career. These entities are usually depicted as immensely powerful and utterly indifferent to humans, who can barely begin to comprehend them; however, some entities are worshipped by humans. These deities include the "Great Old Ones" and extraterrestrials, such as the "Elder Things", with sporadic references to other miscellaneous deities. The "Elder Gods" are a later creation of other prolific writers who expanded on Lovecraft's concepts, such as August Derleth, who was credited with formalizing the Cthulhu Mythos. Most of these deities were Lovecraft's original creations, but he also adapted words or concepts from earlier writers such as Ambrose Bierce, and later writers in turn used Lovecraft's concepts and expanded his fictional universe.
Bibliography of science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction writer Lin Carter:
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