| Shub-Niggurath | |
|---|---|
 Image available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported | |
|
Other Name |
Lord of the Wood |
|
First Appearance |
The Last Test (1928) |
|
Original Publisher |
Weird Tales |
|
Created by |
H.P. Lovecraft |
Origin[]
Shub-Niggurath is a deity created by H. P. Lovecraft. She is often associated with the phrase "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young". The only other name by which Lovecraft referred to her was "Lord of the Wood" in his story The Whisperer in Darkness.
Shub-Niggurath is first mentioned in Lovecraft's revision story "The Last Test" (1928); she is not described by Lovecraft, but is frequently mentioned or called upon in incantations. She is connected to Nug and Yeb: "I talked in Yemen with an old man who had come back from the Crimson Desert—he had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!"
Her first mention under Lovecraft's byline was in "The Dunwich Horror" (1928), where a quote from the Necronomicon discussing the Old Ones breaks into an exclamation of "Iä! Shub-Niggurath!" The story provides no further information about this peculiar expression.
The next Lovecraft story to mention Shub-Niggurath is scarcely more informative. In The Whisperer in Darkness (1930), a recording of a ceremony involving human and nonhuman worshippers includes the following exchange:
"Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"
Similarly unexplained exclamations occur in "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932) and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933).
Lovecraft explicitly defined Shub-Niggurath as a mother goddess in The Mound, where he calls her "Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother". The story describes the discovery of an underground realm called K'n-yan by a Spanish conquistador, reports that a temple of Tsathoggua there "had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named-One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious."
Finally, in "Out of the Aeons", a revision tale set in part on the lost continent of Mu, Lovecraft describes the character T'yog as the "High Priest of Shub-Niggurath and guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand Young". In the story, T'yog surprisingly maintains that "the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods, and ... that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were ready to take sides with man" against the more malevolent Ghatanothoa. Shub-Niggurath is called "the Mother Goddess", and reference is made to "her sons", presumably Nug and Yeb.
Public Domain Appearances[]
All published appearances of Shub-Niggurath from before January 1, 1931 are public domain in the US.
Some notable appearances are listed below:
Public Domain Literary Appearances[]
- The Last Test (1928)
- The Dunwich Horror (1928)
- The Mound (1929-1930)
- The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)
- The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
- The Thing on the Doorstep (1937)
- Out of the Aeons (1935)
Notes[]
- Post 1930 appearances of Shub-Niggurath listed above are in the public domain because it was legally published within the United States before 1964, and copyright was not renewed.