Tsathoggua

The amorphous, toad-like god-creature from the black, lightless N'Kai, mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton. Actually, Tsathoggua was the creation of Clark Ashton Smith appearing in the short story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" (where Smith said the demon-god came from Cykranosh, or Saturn, and worshipped by the furry, prehuman Hyperboreans in such cities as Commoriom and Uzuldaroum). He is described at "very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like that of a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague suggestion of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; and the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth. In truth, he was not a comely or personable sort of god, and I did not wonder at the cessation of his worship, which could only have appealed to very brutal and aboriginal men at any time." A fuller description of this god and his origins may be found in Clark Ashton Smith's "The Door to Saturn" which appeared in the January 1932 issue of Weird Tales. In it, it is said that the worship of Tsathoggua is "incalculably older then man" and that he "had come down by wayt of other worlds from a foreign universe, in primeval times when the earth was still no more than a steaming morass." Because of the discrepency between Smith's origin of Tsathoggua and Lovecraft's, Smith set the record straight with a correction in the Summer, 1944 issue of "The Acolyte," a fanzine: "My account of Tsathoggua's terrene advent can readily be reconciled with the references in The Mound. Tsathoggua, traveling through another deimension than the familiar three, rist entered the Earth by means of the lightless inner Gulf of N'Kai; and he lingered there for cycles, during which his ultraterrestrial origin was not suspected. Later, he established himself in caverns nearer the surface, and his cult thrived; but after the coming of the ice he returned to N'Kai. Thereafter, much of his legend is forgotten or misunderstood by the dwellers in the red-litten Caverns of Yoth and the blue-litten Caverns of K'n-Yan." In the (PR), he is described as a Hyperborian god of 200,000 years ago. The black, formless god whose image can be found in George Rogers' Wax Museum. Stephen Jones imagined this black, toad-like gargoyle moulding itself to a long, sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet.

("At the Mountains of Madness," "The Shadow Out of Time," "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," "The Whisperer in Darkness") ([P.Rev.] "Out of the Aeons," "The Man of Stone," "The Horror in the Museum")