Musings on Shub-Niggurath

Ia! Shub-Niggurath? No, it's actually a Baobab tree from Madagascar I snagged from the BBC News website's science page. This squat, tendriled tree is not unlike many of the common depictions of Shub-Niggurath in the Cthulhu mythos. The entity is usually rendered along these lines:

is one of the creatures most sketched in and defined by While on the subject, it's only natural to informally consider the interesting facets of this deity setting it apart from other eldritch beings in Lovecraft's universe. For instance, Shub-Niggurathmythos writers following Lovecraft's death. Indeed, the Old Gent scarcely elaborated on it, despite its place in his revision tales as well as old standbys like "The Dunwich Horror," "Dreams in the Witch House," "The Thing on the Doorstep," and "The Whisperer in Darkness." Still, the Black Goat with a Thousand Young heralded several interesting features from the very start, particularly its imagery. The Black Goat association almost immediately conjures up Satanic connotations for anyone with a little occult knowledge. This also enjoys the probable influence of Arthur Machen may well have altered a great deal from this image, if it was actually Lovecraft's original conception, it also makes her one of the more easily imaginable things in on Lovecraft here, from such tales as "The Great God Pan," which would endow the Black Goat with satyr-like aspects of Pan common in Machen's tale. While the place and appearance of Shub-NiggurathHPL's universe. Lovecraft tended to veer away from Satanism and commonplace entities of previous horror tales, unless they construed as symbols of something far more alien and hideous. While that may well still be the case with the Black Goat in Lovecraft's imagining, his use of recycled Satanic imagery and the easily imaginable goat is notable. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price has backed the Satanic influence, as traced from Lovecraft's reading of Lord Dunsany's "Idle Days on the Yann."

Most surprising, however, is Shub-Niggurath's gender identity. Sure, it's reasonable to assume the Old Ones are beyond simple earthly gender, but the tying of Shub-Niggurath to feminine pronouns by HPL and subsequent writers is rather unique. Aside from post-Lovecraft entities made by later mythos writers, it marks Shub-Niggurath as one of the few genuinely feminine creations in all of Lovecraft's work. Mother Hydra and a few other near-human female monstrosities like Asenath come to mind, but otherwise, any blatant allusion to the fairer sex in Lovecraft is rare (a major point in the psychoanalytical sex studies of Lovecraft and his work around for awhile now). And obviously, the association of the Thousand Young with this creature plays a large role into its gender identity. If the Thousand Young are really the spawn of Shub-Niggurath, then she might fulfill a similar function on a cosmic scale to Mother Hydra in the seas.

Yet, much confusion and controversy also surrounds Shub-Niggurath, which is a large impulse in its development by others, along with its initial uncertainty left by HPL. Some speculate the Black Goat is a separate entity altogether, or even a temporal conduit of lesser power and importance to facilitate worship of Shub-Niggurath. Also, the conflicting imagery continues to provide fertile ground for variant depictions: the goat-like features alongside the typically Lovecraftian (tentacled, amorphous, inky, etc) continue to swirl, clashing and complementing at the preference of mythos writers. As a result, artists of all types will keep stretching curious tendrils into either the Goat or more alien features of Shub-Niggurath, less frequently even combining the two depictions together in innovative ways. Thus, the uncommon blasphemy will remain a beacon for both the eerier and sillier products of Lovecraftian horror.

-Grim Blogger