Shub-Niggurath
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" ; she is not described by Lovecraft, but is frequently mentioned or called upon in incantations. Most of her development as a literary figure was carried out by other Mythos authors, including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Ramsey Campbell.
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", 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. In The Whisperer in Darkness, a recording of a ceremony involving human and nonhuman worshipers includes the following exchange:
Similarly unexplained exclamations occur in "The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Thing on the Doorstep".
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", 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 , 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" 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 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".The Black Goat may be the personification of Pan, since Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, a story that inspired Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror". 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
points to a passage from "Idle Days on the Yann", by Lord Dunsany, one of Lovecraft's favorite writers, as the source for the name Shub-Niggurath: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,
Other writers
Ramsey Campbell
In Ramsey Campbell's story "The Moon Lens", the English town of Goatswood is inhabited by once-human worshippers of Shub-Niggurath. When the deity deems a worshiper to be most worthy, a special ceremony is held in which the "Black Goat of the Woods" swallows the initiate, and then regurgitates the cultist as a transformed satyr-like being. A changed worshiper is also endowed with immortal life.Stephen King
In the short story "Crouch End", a woman loses her husband to, and then is chased by minions of "the Goat with a Thousand Young" and then by the Goat itself. In the novel Revival a maddening entity known as "Great Mother" is introduced and shares many similarities with Shub-Niggurath, though the latter is never mentioned.Paul Stewart
In his Edge Chronicles novel The Curse of the Gloamglozer, one of the antagonists, the Rogue Glister, is obviously modelled after Shub-Niggurath, with long, stretching tentacles and its main body being a pulsating mass of muscle just like the Black Goat.Paul Morris
The Scarifyers: The Devil of Denge Marsh, by Paul Morris, is a light-hearted radio play in The Scarifyers series whose heroes are engaged in foiling the return of this watery timeless horror and thwarting the intentions of its mysterious human acolytes.Gary Myers
's story, "What Rough Beast", casts Shub-Niggurath as the mother of all the gods, and her children as the chapters of her ongoing revelation.Jim Butcher
In Turn Coat, the eleventh book in The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, the narrator mentions that there are in his universe "terrors that the Black-Goat-with-a-Thousand-Young wouldn't dare use for its kids' bedtime stories".Edward M. Erdelac
In The Outlaw Gods, a novella from The Mensch With No Name, second book in the Merkabah Rider weird western series, Shub-Niggurath dwells beneath the ruins of Red House, a K'n-yan citadel in the mountains of Arizona, surrounded by dark trees which tear apart trespassers.Joseph Nanni
The Dark Young or Thousand Young appear in the short film Black Goat by writer/director Joseph Nanni. The Dark Young first appear as root/tentacles assessing their prey. Later in the film a young trapper surrounds one of the Young with fire only to find himself surrounded when the creature calls its siblings.The concept of the Dark Young was first introduced by game designer Sandy Petersen for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.