Tsathoggua

Tsathoggua, also known as the Sleeper of N'kai, is a fictional 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.Robert M. Price, "About 'The Tale of Satampra Zeiros'", The Tsathoggua Cycle, p. 56. 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:
In a later story, Tsathoggua is described again:
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" (: 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. (: "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". (: "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 (: "The Door to Saturn"), possibly looking more like his paternal uncle Hziulquoigmnzhah, whose head dangles underneath his spheroid-like body.
==Dwelling==
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. (: "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===
===Other species===
Tsathoggua is the patron god of the Voormis, furry anthropoid creatures which inhabited the Eiglophian Mountains of ancient Hyperborea (: "The Seven Geases", "The Testament of Athammaus", : 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. (: "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". (: "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. (: The Mound)
Tsathoggua is one of the entities worshiped by the Mi-Go (: The Whisperer in Darkness), and might also be associated with the megalithic outposts of the Fishers from Outside in Uganda (: "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. (: "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 (: "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 (: "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.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). Indeed, he assigned outlandish familial relationships to his gods — for example, making the Saturnian being Hziulquoigmnzhah the "uncle" of TsathogguaWill Murray, "Introduction", The Book of Hyperborea. — and ascribed this bizarre family tree to the Parchments of Pnom, Hyperborea's leading "genealogist [and] noted prophet".Clark Ashton Smith, "The Family Tree of the Gods" in the The Acolyte (Summer 1934).
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 (: "Strange Manuscript Found in the Vermont Woods"), and another was Voorm, patriarch of the Voormis (: "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 (: "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. (: 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 the Demonbane series, Tsathoggua is the god that the two Deus Machina of Anticross members Vespasianus and Tiberius, Cykranosh and Belzebuth, were modeled after, with the former bearing the name of the said Great Old One's home planet. They both possessed abilities related to the aforementioned god, notably the Formless Spawn and the Star Vampires.
*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.
*The crossover comic Godzilla vs. Cthulhu: A Death May Die Story features Tsathoggua as an antagonist.
==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==
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Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Great Old Ones