Yuggoth


Yuggoth is a fictional planet in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. It is deemed to be located at the very edge of the Solar System.

In the Cthulhu Mythos

Lovecraft referenced Yuggoth in the 1929-1930 poetry cycle Fungi From Yuggoth. Yuggoth is described in "Recognition", the ninth sonnet in the series:
The novella The Whisperer in Darkness, written in 1930 and published in 1931, Lovecraft develops the Yuggoth concept in greater detail, as the origin of strange beings who secretly inhabit isolated mountains in Vermont.

Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...

Yuggoth is the planet where the extraterrestrial Mi-go have established a colony. The Mi-go's city sits at the edge of a pit wherein dwells an ancient and horrifying entity feared by the Mi-Go. They periodically abandon the city on those occasions when it rises from the pit and can be seen directly.
The being Cxaxukluth, along with Tsathoggua and his parents, migrated to Yuggoth from Xoth. A dysfunctional family in their own right, Cxaxukluth's progeny abandoned their patriarch and sought refuge deep in the bowels of Yuggoth, owing to Cxaxukluth's cannibalistic tendencies. Soon thereafter they fled Yuggoth, though Cxaxukluth still dwells there to this day.

It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm, deep sea.
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Horror in the Museum"

Yuggoth is also given as the source of the Shining Trapezohedron in The Haunter of the Dark.

Tok'l-metal

On Yuggoth, the Mi-go mine a strange metal known as tok'l. Tok'l-metal is used in the manufacture of the Mi-go's notorious "brain cylinders", but it has other ritual uses as well.

In other fiction


Yuggoth itself hung directly overhead, obscenely bloated and oblate, its surface filling the heavens... and all the time pulsing, pulsing, pulsing like an atrocious heart, throbbing, throbbing.

—Richard A. Lupoff, "The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone—March 15, 2337"

In Richard A. Lupoff's 1977 short story "The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone—March 15, 2337", Yuggoth is the hypothetical Planet X or Planet Nine—then predicted by perturbations to Neptune and Pluto's orbits, and now, in 2017, by the orbit of several trans-Neptunian objects. Lupoff's Yuggoth is a colossal planet, double the size of Jupiter and as big as 600 Earths. The planet pulses, throbs, and glows with a "low crimson radiance" from pulsating lava tectonics, "like an atrocious heart." Its rotational velocity is 80,000 kilometers per hour, and thus Yuggoth is oblate and flattened at the poles. The planet has numerous moons like the other giant bodies of our outer solar system, to include the single moons Nithon and Zaman, and the twin-moons Thog and Thok—all names intertextually chosen by the Lovecraft enthusiast on board the planet's visiting ship Khons, a character named "Sri Gomati," from Lovecraft's long sonnet sequence, "Fungi from Yuggoth".

Other references

Nithon

Nithon is a cloud-laden moon of Yuggoth. It is covered by fungi and has luminescent clouds that block all sunlight.

Thog and Thok

Thog and Thok are twin moons of Yuggoth. Very little is known about these moons, though Thog is said to be a pitch-black world. On the surface of Thok is the fabled Ghooric Zone—a green-litten cavern containing a putrid lake where "puffed shoggoths splash".

Links with Pluto

When Pluto was discovered in 1930, Lovecraft himself very casually suggested, in a letter to his friend James F. Morton, dated on 15 March 1930 that Yuggoth might "probably" be the same as Pluto. Other writers have since claimed that Yuggoth is actually an enormous trans-Neptunian world that orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic of the solar system. The Italian astronomer Albino Carbognani has suggested that any planet discovered beyond Pluto might be named Yuggoth.