Yuggoth

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Yuggoth
Cthulhu Mythos location
Created by H. P. Lovecraft
Genre Science fiction horror
Information
TypePlanet
Race(s) Mi-go
Characters Tsathoggua, Cxaxukluth

Yuggoth (or Iukkoth) is a fictional planet in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. It is deemed to be located at the very edge of the Solar System.

Contents

In the Cthulhu Mythos

Lovecraft referenced Yuggoth in the 1929–1930 poetry cycle Fungi From Yuggoth . Yuggoth is described in "Recognition", the fourth sonnet in the series:

I saw the body spread on that dank stone,
And knew those things which feasted were not men;
I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,
But Yuggoth, past the starry voids—and then
The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,
And all too late I knew that it was I!

The novella The Whisperer in Darkness , written in 1930 and published in 1931, Lovecraft develops the Yuggoth concept in greater detail, as the origin of strange beings (the Mi-Go) who secretly inhabit isolated mountains in Vermont.

Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggothgreat tiers of terraced towers built of black stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridgesthings built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voidsought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...

Yuggoth is the planet where the extraterrestrial Mi-Go have established a colony. The Mi-Go's city sits at the edge of a pit wherein dwells an ancient and horrifying entity feared by the Mi-Go. They periodically abandon the city on those occasions when it rises from the pit and can be seen directly.

The being Cxaxukluth, along with Tsathoggua and his parents, migrated to Yuggoth from Xoth. A dysfunctional family in their own right, Cxaxukluth's progeny abandoned their patriarch and sought refuge deep in the bowels of Yuggoth, owing to Cxaxukluth's cannibalistic tendencies. Soon thereafter they fled Yuggoth, though Cxaxukluth still dwells there to this day. [ citation needed ]

It (Rhan-Tegoth) came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm, deep sea.
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Horror in the Museum"

Yuggoth is also given as the source of the Shining Trapezohedron in The Haunter of the Dark.

Tok'l-metal

On Yuggoth, the Mi-Go mine a strange metal known as tok'l. Tok'l-metal is used in the manufacture of the Mi-Go's notorious "brain cylinders", but it has other ritual uses as well. [ citation needed ]

In other fiction

Yuggoth itself hung directly overhead, obscenely bloated and oblate, its surface filling the heavens... and all the time pulsing, pulsing, pulsing like an atrocious heart, throbbing, throbbing.
Richard A. Lupoff, "The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone—March 15, 2337"

In Richard A. Lupoff's 1977 short story "The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone—March 15, 2337", Yuggoth is the hypothetical Planet X or Planet Nine—then predicted by perturbations to Neptune and Pluto's orbits, and now, in 2017, by the orbit of several trans-Neptunian objects. [1] Lupoff's Yuggoth is a colossal planet, double the size of Jupiter and as big as 600 Earths. The planet pulses, throbs, and glows with a "low crimson radiance" from pulsating lava tectonics, "like an atrocious heart." Its rotational velocity is 80,000 kilometers per hour, and thus Yuggoth is oblate and flattened at the poles. The planet has numerous moons like the other giant bodies of our outer solar system, to include the single moons Nithon and Zaman, and the twin-moons Thog and Thok—all names intertextually chosen by the Lovecraft enthusiast on board the planet's visiting ship Khons, a character named "Sri Gomati," from Lovecraft's long sonnet sequence, "Fungi from Yuggoth" (1929–30).

Other references

Moons

Nithon

Nithon is a cloud-laden moon of Yuggoth. It is covered by fungi and has luminescent clouds that block all sunlight. [3]

Thog and Thok

Thog and Thok are twin moons of Yuggoth. Very little is known about these moons, though Thog is said to be a pitch-black world. On the surface of Thok is the fabled Ghooric Zonea green-litten cavern containing a putrid lake where "puffed shoggoths splash". [4]

When Pluto was discovered in 1930, Lovecraft himself very casually suggested, in a letter to his friend James F. Morton, dated on 15 March 1930 that Yuggoth might "probably" be the same as Pluto. Other writers have since claimed that Yuggoth is actually an enormous trans-Neptunian world that orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic of the solar system. The Italian astronomer Albino Carbognani has suggested that any planet discovered beyond Pluto might be named Yuggoth. [5]

Related Research Articles

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Mi-Go Fictional race in H. P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos

Mi-Go are a fictional race of extraterrestrials created by H. P. Lovecraft and used by others in the Cthulhu Mythos setting. The word Mi-Go comes from "Migou", a Tibetan word for yeti. The aliens are fungus-based lifeforms which are extremely varied due to their prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill. The variants witnessed by Akeley in "The Whisperer in Darkness" look like winged human-sized crabs.

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<i>Fungi from Yuggoth</i> Sonnets by H. P. Lovecraft

Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets by cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the sonnets were written between 27 December 1929 – 4 January 1930; thereafter individual sonnets appeared in Weird Tales and other genre magazines. The sequence was published complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Ballantine Books’ mass paperback edition, Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems included other poetic works.

The Haunter of the Dark Horror short story by H. P. Lovecraft

"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".

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The following tables and lists feature elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, that are often shared between works within that fictional setting.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness was a three-part comic book mini-series published in the USA by Millennium Publications. It followed a group of investigators, the Miskatonic Project, as they confronted the Mi-go, the cunning Fungi from Yuggoth.

<i>The Whisperer in Darkness</i> Novella by H. P. Lovecraft

The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. The story also introduces the Mi-Go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.

Pluto in fiction

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Dwarf planet Planetary-mass object

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<i>Cthulhus Dark Cults</i>

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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, though 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.

<i>The Whisperer in Darkness</i> (film) 2011 American film

The Whisperer in Darkness is a 2011 independent film directed and produced by Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, and David Robertson and distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Based on the H. P. Lovecraft short story of the same name, it was shot using Mythoscope, a blend of vintage and modern filming techniques intended to produce the look of a 1930s-era film. According to the film's website, the filmmakers intended to capture the look of "classic horror films of the 1930s like Dracula, Frankenstein and King Kong".

Cthulhu Macula Dark surface feature of Pluto

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This is a list of fictional creatures from the Cthulhu mythos of American writer H. P. Lovecraft and his collaborators.

References

Notes

  1. Sheppard, Scott S. "Beyond the Edge of the Solar System: The Inner Oort Cloud Population". Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science. Retrieved 5 June 2017.
  2. "The Tomb of the Phoenix"
  3. Fantina, Michael (1974). Night Terrors. Plainfield.
  4. Lupoff, Richard A (2001). Claremont tales . Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon Press. ISBN   9781930846005.
  5. Albino Carbognani, "Pluto and the astronomy of H.P. Lovecraft", Urania, 30 June 2012

Bibliography

Further reading