T'yog is a fictional character from H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's story "Out of the Aeons", an ancient priest turned into a mummy by the sight of a Great Old One. T'yog first appeared in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales.
High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath[]
T'yog's history is recounted in the story as information the narrator gleans from reading Von Junzt's Nameless Cults--a book invented by Lovecraft's friend Robert E. Howard in the short story "The Children of the Night". In "Out of the Aeons", the book recounts a myth from the lost continent of Mu, which flourished in what is now the Pacific Ocean some 200,000 years ago. In Mu there was said to be a land called K'naa, dominated by the priesthood of Ghatanothoa, an alien entity living beneath the sacred mountain Yaddith-Gho, and kept quiescent by annual human sacrifice.
T'yog, Von Junzt relates, was the High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath, the "guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand Young"; the cleric, a "heretic" noted for his "skill and zeal", had "thought long on the powers of the various gods, and had had strange dreams and revelations touching the life of this and earlier worlds." He resented the power of the cult of Ghatanothoa, and believed that with his own god, along with the twin gods Nug and Yeb, and the Serpent-god Yig, were "ready to take sides with man against the tyranny and presumption of Ghatanothoa."
T'yog prepared to confront Ghatanothoa in his "alien-angled citadel of Cyclopean stone" by creating a scroll, written in "hieratic Naacal" on pthagon membrane (the inner skin of a yakith-lizard) and encased in "a carven cylinder of lagh metal" brought from Yuggoth, that would neutralize the power of the Daemon-God. On the Day of the Sky-Flames in the Year of the Red Moon--estimated to be 173,148 B.C. by Von Junzt--the High-Priest set forth , with the blessings of K'naa's King Thabon and the hopes of the people, to "confront the shocking devil-entity in its lair".
Unbeknownst to T'yog, however, the High-Priest of Ghatanothoa, Imash-Ko, had switched his scroll with an ineffectual facsimile, rendering him powerless against the Devil-God. Rather than breaking the power of Ghatanothoa, he was instead petrified by the sight of the horrific entity, transformed into a living mummy. In that immobile form, T'yog survived through the aeons as Mu sank beneath the waves of the Pacific.
The Eridanus Mummy[]
T'yog's mummy was found on May 11, 1878, when the freighter Eridanus, en route from New Zealand to Chile, encountered a "new island unmarked on any chart", "suddenly upheaved from the Pacific’s floor." In a "massive stone crypt" on the island, formed of "prehistoric Cyclopean masonry", Capt. Charles Weatherbee found the "ghastly, inexplicable mummy", which he brought back to Valparaiso. There it was acquired by Boston's Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which put it on display in November 1879.
The mummy is described as
| “ | a medium-sized man of unknown race...cast in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright.... The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony.... In places bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to the object. | „ |
The mummy had been on display for half a century, the Cabot Museum's "chief attraction and most impenetrable mystery", when a sensational article in the Boston Pillar, dated April 5, 1931, brought it to first local and then global attention. Under the attention of throngs of visitors--including latter-day worshippers of Ghatanothoa, one of whom, Nagob, carries the true scroll of T'yog--the mummy is seen to undergo changes, as "the half-stony, half-leathery fibres seemed to be gradually relaxing, causing distinct variations in the angles of the limbs and in certain details of the fear-twisted facial expression." Most notably, the mummy's eyes slightly open, with "a thin crescent of cornea being visible in either eye". (One visitor makes explicit the connection between the mummy and the legendary figure from Von Junzt's book: " “It tried to open its eyes!—T’yog tried to open his eyes and stare at me!” shrieks a "Peruvian of Indian blood" who "suffered a strange hysterical or epileptic seizure in front of the mummy.")
A series of disturbances at the museum climax on December 1, 1931, with the murder of a nightwatchman and the deaths of two intruders in front of the mummy, one of whom carries the true scroll. The mummy had "made radical shifts of posture. It had sagged and slumped with a curious loss of rigidity; its bony claws had sunk until they no longer even partly covered its leathery, fear-crazed face." Most disturbingly, "its hellish bulging eyes had popped wide open." Noting "the theory that scenes and objects become photographed on the retina of the eye in cases of death or coma," the narrator--curator Richard H. Johnson--sees the preserved image of Ghatanothoa in T'yog's eyes. Though it sends him into a faint, the image had already faded; he surmises it must have appeared with greater clarity when the eyes first opened, with power enough to kill one cultist from fright, and to petrify the one not protected by the scroll.
On December 8, in light of the deterioration of the mummy, the eminent Dr. William Minot conducts a dissection. He is amazed to find "various organs in astonishing degrees of non-petrified preservation"--and inside its skull, "a pulsing, living brain."