Azathoth

This article is about a deity in fiction. For the short story named after it, see Azathoth (short story).
Not to be confused with Anathoth, Astaroth, Ashtoreth, Ataroth, or Azeroth.
Azathoth
Cthulhu Mythos character
Artist's depiction of Azathoth
First appearance"Azathoth"
Created byH. P. Lovecraft
In-universe information
SpeciesOuter God
TitleNuclear Chaos
Daemon Sultan
Blind Idiot God
Lord of All Things
Lord of Nighted Chaos
ChildrenNyarlathotep (son)
Nameless Mist (offspring)
Darkness (offspring)
RelativesYog-Sothoth (grandson)
Shub-Niggurath (granddaughter)
Nug (great-grandchild)
Yeb (great-grandchild)
Wilbur Whateley (great-grandson)
Cthulhu (great-great-grandson)
Tsathoggua (great-great-grandson)

Azathoth is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos and Dream Cycle stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft and other authors. He is the supreme deity of the Cthulhu Mythos and the ruler of the Outer Gods,[1] and may also be seen as a symbol for primordial chaos,[2] therefore being the most powerful entity in the entirety of the Cthulhu Mythos.[3][4][5][6]

Azathoth is referred to as the "daemon-sultan" and "Lord of All Things", whose throne is at the center of "Ultimate Chaos".[5] In his genealogy chart from 1933 of his mythos, Lovecraft places Azathoth as the single being at the very top from which everything else descends.

H. P. Lovecraft

Inspiration

The first recorded mention of the name Azathoth was in a note Lovecraft wrote to himself in 1919 that read simply, "AZATHOTH—hideous name". Mythos editor Robert M. Price argues that Lovecraft could have combined the biblical names Anathoth (Jeremiah's home town) and Azazel—mentioned by Lovecraft in "The Dunwich Horror".[7] Price also points to the alchemical term "Azoth", which was used in the title of a book by Arthur Edward Waite, the model for the wizard Ephraim Waite in Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep".[8]

Another note Lovecraft made to himself later in 1919 refers to an idea for a story: "A terrible pilgrimage to seek the nighted throne of the far daemon-sultan Azathoth."[9] In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft ties this plot germ to Vathek, a supernatural novel by William Beckford about a wicked caliph.[10] Lovecraft's attempts to work this idea into a novel floundered (a 500-word fragment survives, first published under the title "Azathoth"[11] in the journal Leaves in 1938),[12] although Lovecraftian scholar Will Murray suggests that Lovecraft recycled the idea into his Dream Cycle novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written in 1926.[13]

Price sees another inspiration for Azathoth in Lord Dunsany's Mana-Yood-Sushai, from The Gods of Pegana, a creator deity "who made the gods and thereafter rested." In Dunsany's conception, MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI sleeps eternally, lulled by the music of a lesser deity who must drum forever, "for if he cease for an instant then MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI will start awake, and there will be worlds nor gods no more." This oblivious creator god accompanied by supernatural musicians is a clear prototype for Azathoth, Price argues.[14]

Fiction

Other than the fragmentary draft described above, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was the first fiction by Lovecraft to mention Azathoth, and describes his realm as being beyond any and everything:[15]

There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

Verse 22 of Lovecraft's 1929 poetry cycle Fungi from Yuggoth is entitled "Azathoth", and consists of the following:

Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master’s head.[16]

The realm in Fungi from Yuggoth is described as the chaos that is beyond dimensioned space, time, matter, form, and place. The "daemon" that claims to be Azathoth's messenger is identified by later authors as Nyarlathotep, another of Lovecraft's deities.[17]

In a 1930 letter, Lovecraft describes Azathoth as "the mindless Lord of Nighted Chaos who is the father of all other horrors & is coeval with the Ultimate Abyss itself",[18] in which the Ultimate Abyss is later stated to be where the archetypes reside, the true and unimaginable forms of the Outer Gods, and who are "formless, ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the low-dimensioned worlds", though as facets of the Supreme Archetype, and which lies beyond the Ultimate Gate. Also noted is that "the entities outside the Gates command all angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary, change-involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance with their will".[19]

Lovecraft referred to Azathoth again in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), where the narrator relates that he "started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth".[20][21] Here "nuclear" most likely refers to Azathoth's central location at the nucleus of the cosmos and not to nuclear energy, which did not truly come of age until after Lovecraft's death.

In "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), the protagonist Walter Gilman dreams that he is told by the witch Keziah Mason that "He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos.... He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name.... What kept him from going with her...to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name 'Azathoth' in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal horror too horrible for description."[22] Gilman wakes from another dream remembering "the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute", and decides that "he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos".[23] He later fears finding himself "in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth".[24] Gilman notes that the realm itself "obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos".[25]

The poet Edward Pickman Derby, the protagonist of Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep", is a poet whose collection of "nightmare lyrics" is called Azathoth and Other Horrors.[26]

The last major reference in Lovecraft's fiction to Azathoth was in 1935's "The Haunter of the Dark", which tells of "the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws".[27] His title of "blind idiot god" is not to be taken as being of lesser intelligence or ignorance, but rather that Azathoth is detatched from human affairs and is incomprehensible to the human mind.[5]

Genealogy of Cthulhu mythos (1933)

In a letter to a James F. Morton in April of 1933, Lovecraft details a family tree containing his mythos, with Azathoth at the top of the tree, in which all beings below descend from it, with Lovecraft himself posited at the bottom of the tree. With Azathoth the ancestor, his creation goes through his children such as Nyarlathotep, "The Nameless Mist," and "Darkness," of Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nug and Yeb, Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, and several deities and monsters that are unmentioned outside the letter, and some of Lovecraft's and Clark Ashton Smith's fancifully-posited human forebears.[28]

The Azathoth Cycle

In 1995, Chaosium published The Azathoth Cycle, a Cthulhu Mythos anthology focusing on works referring to or inspired by the entity Azathoth. Edited by Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price, the book includes an introduction by Price tracing the roots and development of the Blind Idiot God.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ Agnew, Jeremy (2018). The Age of Dimes and Pulps: A History of Sensationalist Literature, 1830-1960. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. p. 198. ISBN 978-1-4766-6948-9.
  2. ^ Bilstad, T. Allan (2009). The Lovecraft Necronomicon Primer: A Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos. Llewellyn Publications. pp. 53–55. ISBN 978-0738713793. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
  3. ^ Leiber Jr., Fritz (1980). Joshi, S. T. (ed.). H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Ohio University Press. p. 54. ISBN 0-8214-0577-2.
  4. ^ Datlow, Ellen, ed. (2014). Lovecraft's Monsters. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications. p. 363. ISBN 978-1-61696-121-3.
  5. ^ a b c Enright, Lyle; Bennett, Nick (2022). "When God Goes Mad: Lovecraft, Von Balthasar, and the Split between Transcendence and Goodness". In Freeman, Austin M. (ed.). Theology and H.P. Lovecraft. Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. pp. 132–133. ISBN 9781978711709.
  6. ^ Taylor, Reece (2022-12-11). "Why Lovecraft's Most Powerful God Can't Be Adapted to Film". CBR. Retrieved 2024-04-29.
  7. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 158.
  8. ^ Robert M. Price, The Azathoth Cycle, pp. v-vi.
  9. ^ cited in Price, The Azathoth Cycle, p. vi.
  10. ^ Letter to Frank Belknap Long, June 9, 1922; cited in Price, The Azathoth Cycle, p. vi.
  11. ^ "H. P. Lovecraft's original fragment, 'Azathoth'" Archived 2007-08-14 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ^ "Data Page for "Azathoth"". www.hplovecraft.com. Retrieved 2024-05-13.
  13. ^ Price, The Azathoth Cycle, p. vii.
  14. ^ Price, The Azathoth Cycle, pp. viii-ix.
  15. ^ ""The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" by H. P. Lovecraft". www.hplovecraft.com. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  16. ^ ""Fungi from Yuggoth" by H. P. Lovecraft". The H.P. Lovecraft Archive.
  17. ^ Tyson, Donald (2012). The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon: A Workbook of Magic. Llewellyn Worldwide. p. 112. ISBN 9780738726298.
  18. ^ Schultz, David E.; Joshi, S. T., eds. (2020). Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith: 1922-1931. Vol. 1. Hippocampus Press. ISBN 9781614981756.
  19. ^ ""Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price". www.hplovecraft.com. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  20. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 256.
  21. ^ Harman, Graham (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Zero Books. p. 235. ISBN 978-1780992525. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
  22. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House", At the Mountains of Madness, pp. 272–273.
  23. ^ Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House", p. 282.
  24. ^ Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House", p. 293.
  25. ^ ""The Dreams in the Witch House" by H. P. Lovecraft". www.hplovecraft.com. Retrieved 2024-12-12.
  26. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Thing on the Doorstep", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 277.
  27. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 110.
  28. ^ Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft (1976). Derleth, August; Turner, James (eds.). Selected Letters IV (1932–1934). p. 183. ISBN 978-0-87054-035-6.

Sources