Shub-Niggurath

Almost always invoked as "Ia! Shub-Niggurath," Yog-Sothoth's consort is the hellish cloud-like entity Shub-Niggurath, in whose honour nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young (sometimes Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young). She bore Yog-Sothoth two monstrous offspring, the evil twins Nug and Yeb. ("Ia" means 'The Truth'). It has been suggested by "Simon the Wise" the author of the Avon paperback called (wrongly) the Necronomicon that the name Shub-Niggurath was of Sumerian origin. He contends that "There is a seeming reference to SHUB NIGURATH in the Necronomicon [of Simon the Wise], in the name of a Sumerian deity, the "Answerer of Prayers", called ISHNIGARRAB. The word "Shub" is to be found in the Sumerian language in reference to the Rite of Excorcism, one of which is called 'Nam Shub' and means "the Throwing". It is, however, as yet unclear as to what the combination SHUB ISHNIGARRAB (SHUB NIGGURATH) might actually mean." Unfortunately, Simon mistakenly equates Shub-Niggurath with the god Pan and and Ishnigarrab who are male deities. Anton Szandor LaVey also makes this mistake in "The Satanic Rituals" though he does capture more of the essence of Lovecraft's conception of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred than Simon does in his Necronomicon paperback. In the (PR), Shub-Niggurath appears more often than in the main works of Lovecraft. Here she is the Mother Goddess, the Goat with a Thousand Young, mother of Nug and Yeb, wife of Yog-Sothoth, the "Not-to-be-Named One." Called the All-Mother, she is a kind of sophisticated Astarte. She had a copper temple in K'naa. Old Sophy incanted to this god upon the death of Marceline de Russy. Heaton invoked her name in regards to what he witnessed at the "Mound." Her squat, black temple in Tsath had once been dedicated to Tsathoggua. The villagers of Chorazin, New York, invoked her on Walpurgis Eve.

("The Thing on the Doorstep," "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Dreams in the Witch House")

([P.Rev.] "Out of the Aeons," "Medusa's Coil," "The Last Test," "The Mound," "The Man of Stone," "The Horror in the Museum," "The Diary of Alonzo Typer")