Azathoth

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, and may also be seen as a symbol for primordial chaos, therefore being the most powerful entity in the entirety of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Azathoth is referred to as the "daemon-sultan" and "Lord of All Things", whose throne is at the center of "Ultimate Chaos". 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.

The name "Azathoth" was first mentioned in a note from 1919 by Lovecraft, and Azathoth was first formally introduced in the novella ''The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath'', which was finished in 1927, but not published until 1943, though the name was the title of an unfinished novel in 1922 by Lovecraft, which was not published until 1938.

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". 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".

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." In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft ties this plot germ to ''Vathek'', a supernatural novel by William Beckford about a wicked caliph. Lovecraft's attempts to work this idea into a novel floundered (a 500-word fragment survives, first published under the title "Azathoth" in the journal ''Leaves'' in 1938), 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.

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.

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, and in which no dreams reach, placing it beyond the Dreamlands:

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

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.

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". Fritz Leiber describes Azathoth as the only Lovecraftian entity that is unarguably a deity instead of a powerful alien. Leiber says he is the "perfect personification of the purposeless, mindless, cruelly indifferent cosmos of materialistic belief".

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". 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." 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". He later fears finding himself "in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth". Gilman notes that the realm itself "obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos".

The fictional poet Edward Pickman Derby, the protagonist of Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep", collects "nightmare lyrics" in a book called ''Azathoth and Other Horrors''.

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". His title of "blind idiot god" is not to be taken as being of lesser intelligence or ignorance, but rather that Azathoth is detached from human affairs and is incomprehensible to the human mind. David Punter says that Lovecraft chose words to describe Azathoth with little regard to their literal meaning and instead arranged them like an incantation. In Punter's view, Azathoth represents Lovecraft's fear that irrationality could destroy the natural order. Thus, Azathoth can not be sought or understood in any meaningful way.

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.

''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.

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Cthulhu Mythos deities
Evil deities
Fictional amorphous creatures
Fictional gods
Fictional monsters
Chaos gods
Literary characters introduced in 1943
Male literary villains
H. P. Lovecraft characters