#yog sothoth

Lovecraft was particularly fond of his fictional entity Yog-Sothoth. “Yog” appears in various forms in a variety of Lovecraft’s stories. “He” is called The All in One, One in All, is the male spouse of Shub-Niggurath, is the guardian of the gates - cosmic gates apparently - is featured in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” novel and perhaps is most clearly defined in the Price/Lovecraft “collaboration” THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY. Lovecraft made some amusing references to Yog-Sothoth’s nature in letters to Willis Conover when the latter was a teenage fan. Though these quips should probably be taken with a grain of salt, Lovecraft does remark to Conover, when the youth questions Yog-Sothoth’s date of birth: “ He has always been.” Interestingly as Lovecraft mused on Yog-Sothoth’s nature he stated that “Yog could ‘manifest’ in a variety of shapes and forms.

Lovecraft suggests in several instances, both in his fiction and in letters to friends, that Yog-Sothoth, whom he a few times calls The One in All, All in One, and Shub-Niggurath, AKA The Black GOAT of the Woods with a Thousand Young, AKA “The All Mother”, are somehow “husband and wife” on some strange and possibly symbolic, level. In Through the Gates of the Silver Key, HPL explains that Yog-Sothoth is a sort of overarching cosmic mind in which all great thinkers and artists are cells or facets. Shub -Niggurath is never actually shown in any original Lovecraft tale or even in any of his “revisions”, but people and aliens shout her name as an oath. Both “Shub” and “Yog” evolved as Lovecraft revisited them in subsequent stories. Now, supposedly these two, one possibly a ‘father of the universal mind’ and the other possibly representing the ‘mother of all material flesh’ apparently have two sons. These entities - for lack of a better term - are called Nug and Yeb. Critics have commented that the names were not particularly creative on Lovecraft’s part. We don’t really see Nug or Yeb in action in Lovecraft’s fiction, so any conclusions we might make as to their aspects are almost completely hypothetical. Hypothetical, at least for now. There may be some tidbit hidden in a letter from HPL to one of his writer pals that will one day explain things more definitely. Or not? Anyway, for the sake of projection, let’s wonder if Nug and Yeb might be symbolic as Negative and Positive, or as Yin and Yang? Or as Nug - Neg, and Yeb -Yang? Well , maybe. Pure speculation, but such has been a long tradition in the field of Lovecraftian criticism.