Shub-Niggurath

## シュブニグラス (Shubunigurasu)

**Shub-Niggurath** is a fictional deity created by writer 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. Most of her development as a litMorary figure was carried out by other Mythos authors, including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Ramsey Campbell.

Lovecraft explicitly defined Shub-Niggurath as a mother goddess in *The Mound*, where he calls her "Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother". He describes her as a kind of Astarte in the same story. In *Out of the Aeons*, she is one of the deities siding with humanity against "hostile gods".

August Derleth classified Shub-Niggurath as a Great Old One, but the *Call of Cthulhu* role-playing game classifies her as an Outer God. The *CthulhuTech* role-playing game, in turn, returns to Derleth's classification of Shub-Niggurath as a Great Old One.

## Development

Shub-Niggurath's appearances in Lovecraft's main body of fiction do not provide much detail about his conception of the entity. 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.

Similarly unexplained exclamations occur in "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932) and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933).

## Revision tales

Lovecraft only provided specific information about Shub-Niggurath in his "revision tales", stories published under the names of clients for whom he ghost-wrote. As Price points out, "For these clients he constructed a parallel myth-cycle to his own, a separate group of Great Old Ones", including Yig, Ghatanothoa, Rhan-Tegoth, "the evil twins Nug and Yeb"—and Shub-Niggurath.

While some of these revision stories just repeat the familiar exclamations, others provide new elements of lore. In "The Last Test" (1927), the first mention of Shub-Niggurath seems to connect her 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!"

The revision story *The Mound*, which 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."

The reference to "Astarte", the consort of Baal in Semitic mythology, ties Shub-Niggurath to the related fertility goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater mentioned in Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls", and implies that the "great mother worshipped by the hereditary cult of Exham Priory" in that story "had to be none other than Shub-Niggurath".

The Not-to-Be-Named-One, not being named, is difficult to identify; a similar phrase, translated into Latin as the *Magnum Innominandum*, appears in a list in *The Whisperer in Darkness* and was included in a scrap of incantation that Lovecraft wrote for Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars". August Derleth identifies this mysterious entity with Hastur (though Hastur appears in the same *Whisperer in Darkness* list with the *Magnum Innominandum*), while Robert M. Price equates him with Yog-Sothoth—though he also suggests that Shub-Niggurath's mate is implicitly the snake god Yig.

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.

### Other references

Other evidence of Lovecraft's conception of Shub-Niggurath can be found in his letters. For example, in a letter to Willis Conover, Lovecraft described her as an "evil cloud-like entity". "Yog-Sothoth's wife is the hellish cloud-like entity Shub-Niggurath, in whose honor nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young. By her he has two monstrous offspring—the evil twins Nug and Yeb. He has also begotten hellish hybrids upon the females of various organic species throughout the universes of space-time."

## The Black Goat

Although Shub-Niggurath is often associated with the epithet "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young", it is possible that this Black Goat is a separate entity. Rodolfo Ferraresi, in his essay "The Question of Shub-Niggurath", says that Lovecraft himself separated the two in his writings, such as in "Out of the Aeons" (1935) in which a distinction is made between Shub-Niggurath and the Black Goat—the goat is the figurehead through which Shub-Niggurath is worshipped. In apparent contrast to Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat is sometimes depicted as a male, most notably in the rite performed in *The Whisperer in Darkness* (1931) in which the Black Goat is called the "Lord of the Woods". However, Lovecraft clearly associates Shub-Niggurath with The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young in two of his stories—"The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Thing on the Doorstep".

It is possible that The Black Goat is actually Ny-Rakath, Shub-Niggurath's brother. The Black Goat may also be the personification of Pan, since Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen's *The Great God Pan* (1890), a story that inspired Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). In this incarnation, the Black Goat may represent Satan in the form of the satyr, a half-man, half-goat. In folklore, the satyr symbolized a man with excessive sexual appetites. The Black Goat may otherwise be a male, earthly form of Shub-Niggurath—an incarnation she assumes to copulate with her worshipers.

## Robert M. Price's interpretation

Notes Price: "The name already carried a whiff of sulfur: Sheol was the name for the Netherworld mentioned in the Bible and the Gilgamesh Epic."

As for Shub-Niggurath's association with the symbol of the goat, Price writes,

> *We may believe that here Lovecraft was inspired by the traditional Christian depiction of the Baphomet Goat, an image of Satan harking back to the pre-Christian woodland deity Pan, he of the goatish horns and shanks. The Satanic goat is a device of much spectral fiction, as when in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out the Archfiend's epiphany takes goat-headed form.*— ***Robert M. Price***
>
>

## Fighting Style

Shub-Niggurath, due to her true form's size, did not have a fighting style before, though she was skilled in style-less combat.

### Sarcophagic Technique

**Biokinesis:** Shub-Niggurath, being the progenitor of all hellions, subsequently gained her Sarcophagic Technique, which allows her to control various properties and aspects of her body, from genMorally nothing or as an innate ability from being an offspring of Azathoth. Shub-Niggurath first displays this by protruding bladed bone-like dragon heads and appendages from her true form, which she uses to breathe fire and whip.

## Family

### Children

Shub-Niggurath's known children are, from *Howard Phillips Lovecraft*'s mythos and the *PHOBOS* series, Nug, Yeb, Enikle-Exoxilb, and her self-proclaimed "son", Mora. Even if Shub-Niggurath possesses children, however, she is genetically and biologically a virgin goddess, due to not having any female genitalia in her true form, rendering the possibility of having sexual intercourse impossible.

### Consorts

Shub-Niggurath's consort was Yog-Sothoth, who passed away during the Twilight Judgement Raid.

## Appearance

Shub-Niggurath takes the form of a gigantic, spheric-shaped, nightmarish being with dozens of giant tentacles, claws, heads, arms, legs and eyes protruding from her body. Often seen flying in the sky, Shub-Niggurath's outer skin appears a jet-black in color, with the many eyes protruding from her body having bright green irises within them.

After her true form's death after the Uesama Village Arc, Shub-Niggurath's appearance changes to a humanoid form. Like this, Shub-Niggurath possesses shoulder-length, grayish-green hair styled to become sharp and pointed at the ends, which is possibly a reference to *harionago yōkai*. She also has sharp eyes filled in with a wine-red iris with three blue slitted pupils crossing in each eye. When in her human form, Shub-Niggurath often wears a grayish-blue kimono filled with pink patterns and straight lines resembling slitted pupils, which is most definitely a direct reference to Mora as a Hellion, but can occasionally wear nothing due to not having to wear any clothing in her true form, which made it a habit for her not to wear anything at all. Shub-Niggurath's human form also possesses claws, alongside three curled horns that protrude from her head and sharp, angular teeth.

## Trivia

* After first appearing in her human form, Ran Luyus and Yozuina Kirikibishini's first reactions were to ask whether they could touch Shub's breasts or not.
* Her favorite animal is the goat.
* Her favorite color is brown.