by Terry McCombs
Terry McCombs maintained the "God/dess of the Month Club" on soc.religion.paganism for several years, producing monthly profiles of deities from across the world's traditions. His approach was consistently comparative and earnest — he gave each figure the same structure, the same research, the same sincere attention, whether they were ancient Sumerian household gods or Welsh moon goddesses from the Mabinogion.
His June 2007 entry applied that same structure to Yog-Sothoth, the Outer God invented by H.P. Lovecraft in 1929. He catalogued its avatars from Chambers to Derleth to Kenneth Grant (noting that Grant "seems to take all this a lot more seriously than is good for him"). He listed its synodeities — Cthulhu, Kali, Gozer. He asked, with full seriousness, how real a god needs to be to count as a god.
The answer, McCombs concluded, might be found in the question itself. Yog-Sothoth survived its creator's death in 1937, survived the pulps, survived the century — while far more celebrated works from the same era were forgotten. Something in the Cthulhu Mythos responded to something real. Yog-Sothoth knows.
Name: Yog-Sothoth. The Key and Guardian of the Gate. The All in One, the Beyond One. Also: Iog-Sotot, Ramasekva.
Avatars: The King in Yellow (Chambers) / Aforgomon (Clark Aston Smith — appearing only to those who anger him, manifesting as a blinding light) / The Lurker at the Threshold (August Derleth & Lovecraft — primal slime in nuclear chaos) / Tawil at'Umr, Umr at'Tawil (Price & Lovecraft) / Gog Magog? In that it sounds somewhat like Yog-Sothoth, and there is an Islamic tale of how Alexander the Great walled two groups of evil men — the Gog & Magog — behind a wall of iron and brass. Each day they try to break through, failing, saying "tomorrow we will break through" — but because they do not add "Allah willing," the wall is rebuilt the next day. One day they will break through and destroy all mankind, which sounds very Yog-Sothothian. / Dick Cheney? In that he is said to be neither part of the Executive Branch nor the Legislative Branch, yet also part of both; he dwells in darkness, has an uncanny buzz instead of a heartbeat, and is evil. And there is the question of where Yog-Sothoth went after he escaped from the pentagram at the center of the Pentagon, at least according to Shea and Wilson in Illuminatus!
Symbols: A Y-shaped rune. Veil, Silver Fire. Iridescent spheres. A single staring eye.
Usual Image: A giant mass of iridescent globes, like soap bubbles — or a barely visible mass of feelers, legs, eyes, stalked organs, and tentacles phasing in and out of reality. Or a huge man seated on a throne in fine yellow robes, his face covered by a yellow veil, with only his clawed hands showing. Or a single free-flying globe like a UFO. Kenneth Grant, occultist who seems to take all this a lot more seriously than is good for him, describes his color as a gangrenous shade of green, with no upper skull at all — only a bloated mess of a maggot-festering naked brain, a madly gazing giant's eye beringed by octopoidal palpi and shark teeth above a warty tyrannosaurus-like body covered in muck. And how do you feel about yourself, Mr. Grant?
Holy Books: the Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, Azathoth and Others, the Seven Cryptic Books of Hsan, Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft. Liber Al. H.P. Lovecraft and the Hidden God by Kenneth Grant.
Holy Days: As Yog-Sothoth is said to touch all times and all spaces while at the same time being confined to a single place outside our dimension, this is a moot point.
Place of Worship: Your basic windswept moor, or craggy rock outcropping overlooking the sea. Seems to like at least one lone spire of rock.
Major Taboos: Getting in its way, I guess.
Form of Worship: Contemplating "Him" without going nuts or being eaten. Mating with some form of it. Feeding things to it.
Synodeities: Cthulhu, Hastur the Unspeakable, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Aywass, Kali, Yig, Nodens, Tsathoggua, Cthugha, Azathoth, Gozer.
How real does a god have to be to qualify as a real god?
Yog-Sothoth first saw the light of imaginary day in "The Dunwich Horror," and would also appear in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," both by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" in collaboration with another writer, E. Hoffman Price. Gradually many other writers would make reference to Yog-Sothoth.
Not really that impressive a presence in a pop culture era that was seeing the birth of such other ideas as the Land of Oz mythos, the cultures and peoples of Barsoom (Mars), and early "scientifiction."
Yet something about Yog and the other otherworldly minions that were part of what Lovecraft jokingly called Yog-Sothothism — and others called the Cthulhu Mythos — struck a chord with a small minority within another minority that at the time didn't even know it was on its way to becoming a subculture.
At first just a few friends of Lovecraft took part, then others who only read the stories after he died in 1937, till as it stands today there are hundreds who have "invoked" this mythos, so that while not common, the idea of Yog-Sothoth is still alive and well.
The time when Yog-Sothoth was created was an era of change. More people in the whole of human history were literate; the globe was shrinking because of new forms of faster transportation; the beginning of real progress in medicine had started; and radio and films were bringing sounds and sights never experienced by the masses. Add to that the daunting shocks to the public's system given by two world wars and a great depression.
If it's true that the human mind needs to be shocked before it can change, then there was ample catalyst for change in the first half of the century.
As such it's no surprise that within just fifty years the ratio of left-handed students (and therefore right-brain-dominant, with all the attendant effects on personality) in the American public school system went from less than 2% in 1920 to 15% by 1970.
The point McCombs was getting across is that the Change Winds were blowing. All across the world, huge ideas such as Global Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Organized Labor, Worldwide Economics, Democracy, and Science were thrashing about on the world stage at such a scale that at times they seemed almost out of the hands of the human minds that had conceived them, and had taken on a will of their own. In other words, behaving much like the vast Outer and Elder Gods of Yog-Sothothism that go about their inscrutable ways indifferent to human concerns.
Might that in part be what caused this small slice of an at-best-ignored, at-worst-maligned media known as the Pulps to survive and thrive more than seventy years after its creator died — while other, far more popular ideas from the same era and media are forgotten?
How real does a god have to be to qualify as a real god?
How much do people have to believe in that god for it to have power?
Is there a grading system for beliefs, the way there is for the hardness of rocks or the hotness of peppers?
How sincere do the worshippers of a god have to be for it to count as real worship?
Are we really sure what is and isn't worship in the first place?
Yog-Sothoth knows.
Colophon
Written and posted by Terry McCombs to soc.religion.paganism on June 30, 2007, as part of his "God/dess of the Month Club" series. The post appeared in the archive as two identical entries (indices 4540–4541); the complete text is drawn from both. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
🌲