Tsathoggua, also known as the Sleeper of N'kai, is an entity in the Cthulhu Mythos. The character was originally created by Clark Ashton Smith for his Hyperborean Cycle.
Tsathoggua (or Zhothaqquah) is described as an Old One, a godlike being from the pantheon. He first appeared in Smith's short story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," written in 1929 and published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.[1] His first appearance in print, however, was in H. P. Lovecraft's story The Whisperer in Darkness, written in 1930 and published in the August 1931 Weird Tales.
Lovecraft mentioned Tsathoggua in nine stories, not counting the unfinished fragment that would later become The Lurker at the Threshold. This makes it one of the most oft-mentioned Mythos deities in Lovecraft's fiction, tied with Yog-Sothoth and losing only to Nyarlathotep (ten stories), Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath (eleven stories each). Of these, Tsathoggua is the only one not created by Lovecraft himself.
Like Shub-Niggurath, however, Tsathoggua never appears physically in Lovecraft's stories, except for a possible appearance disguised as a wax sculpture in "The Horror in the Museum".
Other authors also mentioned Tsathoggua in their Mythos fiction, including Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch.
Description[]
The first description of Tsathoggua in the Mythos occurs when 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; the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth. | „ | |
~ Satampra Zeiros (CIRCLE: "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros") |
In a later story, Tsathoggua is described again:
“ | You must win to that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth, beyond the dens, wherein 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. | „ | |
~ Ezdagor (CIRCLE: "The Seven Geases") |
Tsathoggua is often found asleep. He is incredibly lazy and refuses to leave his chambers unless mortally threatened. If disturbed, he will eat whoever awakened him, unless the awakener has a sacrifice to offer; in which case, Tsathoggua will eat the sacrifice instead and then fall back into hibernation. However, there are exceptions. When the wizard Ezdagor sent the Hyperborean Lord Ralibar Vooz as a sacrifice in Smith's "The Seven Geases", Tsathoggua refused him and bound Ralibar Vooz to a geas, sending him to be eaten by another denizen of Mount Voormithadreth (the next five likewise did the same).
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" (HPL: The Whisperer in Darkness) --the priest's name a tip of the hat to Tsathoggua's creator.
However, both Lovecraft and Smith portray Tsathoggua as capable of shapeshifting. 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."
Tsathoggua is capable of communicating with humans, including its cultists, and occasionally rewards them for their services by offering occult knowledge or gifts, such as presenting Eibon with a device that could open a gate to another world, where Eibon could hide from the inquisitors. (CIRCLE: "The Door to Saturn")
Whether Tsathoggua communicates by speech or telepathy is unknown. When it spoke to Ralibar Vooz, the latter "seemed to hear a deep, rumbling sound; but he knew not whether it reverberated in the dusky air or in his own mind. And the sound shaped itself, albeit uncouthly, into syllables and words". (CIRCLE: "The Seven Geases")
Other forms[]
As a god, Tsathoggua can alter his shape, the better to adapt to whatever environment he is in. When he dwelt on Cykranosh (a planet we know today as Saturn), he had a much different form (CIRCLE: "The Door to Saturn"), possibly looking more like his paternal uncle Hziulquoigmnzhah, whose head dangles underneath his spheroid-like body.
Dwelling[]
“ | This was a squat, plain temple of basalt blocks without a single carving, and containing only a vacant onyx pedestal. The remarkable thing about it was its story, for it was a link with a fabled elder world compared to which even cryptic Yoth was a thing of yesterday. It had been built in imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terrible black toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in the Yothic manuscripts. It had been a potent and widely worshipped god, and after its adoption by the people of K'n-yan had lent its name to the city which was later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legend said that it had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the red-litten world — a black realm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no light at all, but which had had great civilisations and mighty gods before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had come into being. | „ | |
~ H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop , The Mound |
“ | They’ve been inside the earth, too — there are openings which human beings know nothing of — some of them are in these very Vermont hills — and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N'kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came — you know, 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. | „ | |
~ An alien creature masquerading as Henry Wentworth Akeley (HPL: The Whisperer in Darkness) |
In ancient eras, Tsathoggua lived for a long time on Yuggoth along with its parents, Ghizguth and Zstylzhemgni, dwelling in deep underground caves to avoid the attention of its cannibalistic grandparent Cxaxukluth. Eventually, Tsathoggua moved to Cykranosh (Saturn), and later to Earth. Traveling from one world to the next by moving between dimensions, as opposed to crossing the gulfs of space, it first emerged deep beneath the surface of the Earth, in the lightless underground land of N'kai. From there, Tsathoggua eventually moved closer to the surface and dwelt inside Mount Voormithadreth in Hyperborea, but returned to N'kai after the continent iced over. (CIRCLE: "The Family Tree of the Gods", "The Door to Saturn")
In The Old One by John Glasby, Tsathoggua is said to reside in the ruined underwater city of Yuth near the Bahamas.
Servitors[]
Formless Spawn[]
- Main article: Formless Spawn
“ | When we approached and peered over the brim, we saw that the bowl was filled with a sort of viscous and semi-liquescent substance, quite opaque and of a sooty color. [...] the center swelled as if with the action of some powerful yeast, and we watched in utter horror, while an uncouth amorphous head with dull and bulging eyes arose gradually on an ever-lengthening neck, and stared us in the face with primordial malignity. Then two arms — if one could call them arms — likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not, as we had thought, a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and was now forming these damnable 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 far more quickly than the suvana-juice runs from my pen, it 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. | „ | |
~ Satampra Zeiros (CIRCLE: "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros") |
Tsathoggua's will is carried out by the formless spawn, polymorphic entities made of black goo. 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. Formless spawn often rests in basins in Tsathoggua's temples and keep the sanctuary from being defiled by nonbelievers.
At least some Formless Spawn were born on Earth as the offspring of Knygathin Zhaum, himself a descendant of the "Protean spawn" of Tsathoggua, which came to Earth with it. This "Protean spawn" mentioned by Athammaus likely includes Sfatlicllp, who is Tsathoggua's granddaughter and mother of Knygathin Zhaum, according to the genealogy of Pnom. However, it's not known if the "Protean spawn" represent an earlier generation of Formless Spawn, or whether all Formless Spawn are descended from Knygathin Zhaum.
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". This might refer to the Formless Spawn, as protagonist Prof. Dyer later mentions Tsathoggua's "worse than formless star-spawn". Alternatively, it might refer to an unknown alien species from the double planet Kythanil, which once revolved around Arcturus. In "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", Lovecraft reveals that these creatures from Kythanil flew down to Earth to settle in Hyperborea and worshiped Tsathoggua. Since the natives of Kythanil are described as "doubtfully shaped", they might in fact be Formless Spawn as well.
In The Mound, Lovecraft has the Formless Spawn inhabiting the subterranean world of N'kai.
The Formless Spawn appear as adversaries in the video game Quake.
Other species[]
Tsathoggua is the patron god of the Voormis, furry anthropoid creatures which inhabited the Eiglophian Mountains of ancient Hyperborea (CIRCLE: "The Seven Geases", "The Testament of Athammaus", HPL: The Shadow Out of Time).
Humans in Hyperborea have also been known to worship Tsathoggua, although the influence of the cult has fluctuated over time. At one point, it was replaced with the worship of Yhoundeh, and the few remaining cultists were persecuted, although the Tsathoggua faith did experience a resurgence following the "miraculous" disappearance of Eibon and his persecutor, Morghi. (CIRCLE: "The Door to Saturn")
By the time of Satampra Zeiros, Tsathoggua was no longer worshiped by humans. However, its abandoned temples were still frequented by animals such as apes, giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers, leading the people of Hyperborea to believe that these beasts still worshiped Tsathoggua. According to Zeiros, these animals "have sometimes been seen to make obeisance and have been heard to howl or whine their inarticulate prayers". (CIRCLE: "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros")
Thousands of years ago, Tsathoggua was worshiped by the K'n-yanians, who named their capital city Tsath after the deity. The cult of Tsathoggua was brought to K'n-yan after several images of the god were found in the ruins of the underground realm of Yoth, where Tsathoggua was venerated by an extinct species of sapient, quadrupedal reptiles. These in turn brought the idols from the even deeper world of lightless N'kai. However, when the K'n-yanians found that N'kai's inhabitants and Tsathoggua's original worshipers were the ravenous Formless Spawn, they abandoned the cult and destroyed all the idols. (HPL: The Mound)
Tsathoggua is one of the entities worshiped by the Mi-Go (HPL: The Whisperer in Darkness), and might also be associated with the megalithic outposts of the Fishers from Outside in Uganda (HPL: "Winged Death").
The Star Vampires might also be associated with Tsathoggua, given that the incantation to summon them mentions "bufoniformis Sadoquae", i.e. toad-like Tsathoggua. (CIRCLE: "The Shambler from the Stars")
At least one source identifies Tsathoggua as one of the many Great Old Ones who rebelled against the Elder Gods, leading the earth elementals alongside Yog-Sothoth (AWD: "The Sandwin Compact"). The Book of Eibon suggests that some sort of rivalry exists between the elemental beings of earth and air, explaining the enmity between the Voormis, who worship Tsathoggua, and the Gnophkehs, who worship Rhan-Tegoth (EXP: "The Scroll of Morloc").
Family[]
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.[2] Indeed, he assigned outlandish familial relationships to his gods — for example, making the Saturnian being Hziulquoigmnzhah the "uncle" of Tsathoggua[3] — and ascribed this bizarre family tree to the Parchments of Pnom, Hyperborea's leading "genealogist [and] noted prophet".[4]
Both Smith and Lovecraft agree that Tsathoggua is one of the descendants of Azathoth, but the specifics of its lineage diverge in the family trees drawn by the two authors.
Kzadool-Ra was a son of Tsathoggua, who destroyed him in a fit of jealousy.
Tsathoggua had at least two children with his wife Shathak. The first was Ossadagowah, also known as Zvilpogghua (EXP: "Strange Manuscript Found in the Vermont Woods"), and another was Voorm, patriarch of the Voormis (EXP: "The Scroll of Morloc"). Zvilpogghua's daughter, Sfatlicllp, was present on Earth at some point, where she mated with a Voormi and gave birth to Knygathin Zhaum, whose descendants regained the Azathothian ability to reproduce asexually and became the Formless Spawn (CIRCLE: "The Testament of Athammaus", "The Family Tree of the Gods").
Another child of Tsathoggua (or possibly another name for one of the previously mentioned ones) is the mysterious Yabou, whose descendants include Nush the Eternal, Gilles Grenier, Hippolyte Le Sorcier and Clark Ashton Smith. (HPL: Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft)
In Other Media[]
- Tsathoggua appears in book two of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, under the name Saint Toad.
- Tsathoggua is one of the components for the BLT sandwich in the anime Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, along with Byakhee and Lloigor.
- In Transformers Animated: The AllSpark Almanac II, one of the many planets that was colonized by the Cybertronian race in the Hadeen System is named after Tsathoggua.
Gallery[]
- Main article: Tsathoggua/Gallery
Behind the Mythos[]
George Olshevsky named the nonconvex snub polyhedra after some other Great Old Ones, with the Great snub icosidodecahedron as "Tsathoggua".
Although Smith sometimes used the term "elder gods" to describe the Hyperborean pantheon, Tsathoggua included, it's not considered one of the Elder Gods in the Derlethian sense.
References[]
- ↑ Robert M. Price, "About 'The Tale of Satampra Zeiros'", The Tsathoggua Cycle, p. 56.
- ↑ Robert M. Price, recognizing that Smith's gods dwell beneath Mount Voormithadreth, remarked that is fitting that Smith's "Hyperboean Olympians should be under a mountain rather than atop one!" (Price, "About 'The Seven Geases'", The Tsathoggua Cycle, p. 8).
- ↑ Will Murray, "Introduction", The Book of Hyperborea.
- ↑ Clark Ashton Smith, "The Family Tree of the Gods" in the The Acolyte (Summer 1934).