The Occult Source for Shoggoths

Back in 1994, Ryan Parker developed his short essay “Creating a Shoggoth” which soon became very popular and it was readily welcomed by most modern authorities on the Necronomicon Gnosis and the Cthulhu Cultus. In it, Ryan gives a brief overview of the procedure to create a thought-form or egregore, an oft-abused concept in, and beyond, Chaos Magick. Now, I must stress that I admire Ryan’s work on the Necronomicon Tradition, and consider him one of the foremost groundbreakers in rooting the Necronomicon Gnosis in solid occult lore. Yet it is no secret that there is no single “canon” or set of guidelines and we have ample room for agreeing in some respects, and disagreeing in others. In this particular instance, it so happens that I differ, which I am sure Ryan will have no problem with. In fact, my disagreement lies in the focus; I will attempt not to substitute, but to expand upon it.  

As H.P. Lovecraft describes in At theMountains of Madness, the Shoggoths are an artificial life form that was fashioned by the Elder Things from Antarctica in Earth’s prehistory, to use them as servants or slaves, and as machines after a fashion. Shoggoths were used to build their vast stone cities of legend, such as the one found by the Miskatonic Expedition. However, the Shoggoths became more intelligent and unruly, and it is suggested that they rose up against their former masters. 

“These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the ‘shoggoths’ in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.” –H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness. 

A Shoggoth, as depicted by Borja Pindado.

Now, even if an egregore can certainly be described as an artificial life form, it is beyond far-fetched to imagine an army of servant thought-forms cutting and carrying stone blocks and building cities. Therefore the unspeakable horror of Lovecraft’s, and Alhazred’s Shoggoths is reduced to a standard handy tool used by Chaotes! Still, what would a thought-form produced by the alien, unfathomable minds of the Elder Things? From what we know of them, they would no doubt be able to create far more powerful egregores than ours, and perhaps even to materialize them for some periods. I hereby suggest that this is at least a part of the Elder Things’ procedure to create Shoggoths, which they no doubt combined with genetic manipulation. Imagine to create an artificial organism by biochemical means and to impress upon it an egregore developed in a parallel way, ensouling it with a life of its own! 

Now, it turns out that –according to various occult sources- such a creature has been recorded –at the very least, as myth, legend and unverified testimonies- throughout history, and when considering the possibility of existence of an actual Shoggoth, I can only hope this is merely an obscure and fanciful piece of folklore That I have stumbled upon, and that Alhazred was right in claiming it a mere vision of obfuscated minds. 

Like various other elements in the Cthulhu Mythos, the Shoggoth may have been inspired in actual occult lore; while we know with a fair amount of certainty that such a piece of lore was not found in any of the scarce occult treatises ever read by Lovecraft, we know also that he was acquainted with a few occultists and witches, and skeptic though he was, he was often willing to listen to them in the hopes of drawing intriguing tidbits to be used in his fiction.

Now, have you heard of the Ommith?

I’ll save you the effort of googling it: doing so brings up one single source: the list of correspondences between the Cthulhu Mythos and actual occult lore developed by Tani Jantsang, a woman who is hands-on knowledgeable in both fields. In it, Tani equates Shoggoth with Ommith, with no further explanation.

As it happens, Tani wan’t the first to identify the Ommith as Lovecraft’s possible source. Credit of the unearthing of the lore concerning the Ommith, and its identification with the Shoggoth, goes to Edward E. Costain. A writer and university lecturer, who also dedicated great effort to “the field of detecting and measuring paranormal force fields through electronic instrumentation”, Costain had already, back in 1973, thirty years of experience in occult research and was at the moment in charge of answering readers’ questions in the “Who? What? Where? Why?” section of Occult magazine, which counted among its collaborators such noteworthy people as Brad Steiger, Leo Martello, Martin Ebon, Sybil Leek and Virgil Finlay. I should note that Costain was clearly well-read in Lovecraft as well, since he more than once mentioned him in his column (and he clearly enjoyed the time he had to answer the obligatory question concerning the reality of the Necronomicon!) 

Vol. 4 number 4, January 1973,
issue of Occult magazine

Now, in Vol. 4 number 4 of Occult, dated January 1973, an intriguing question came up, and Costain’s answer must have been as much a shock for his readers back then as it is for us half a century later –at least for those who found it, hidden in the last few pages of the magazine, among hokey advertisements! I now reproduce both the question and Edward E. Costain’s fascinating reply, for the sake of Lovecraft and Necronomicon scholars:

What is an Ommith; is it true that they have been photographed? –B.J.B., Washington, D.C.

You’ll be sorry you asked. The Ommith is some kind of – well, entity that physical researchers don’t like to think about. Its existence violates a lot of chemical, physical, spiritual, and religious concepts. It is as if it were something that had been only partly created and allowed to linger on in a half-solid, half-slime state with the intelligence of a vicious idiot. It is of no spiritual order that can be classified, although it manifests in many of the qualities of a spirit – interpenetration of matter and so on. Yet it can be destroyed by corrosive chemicals and X-ray radiation. It nourishes itself by absorbing its victims; part of them, anyway, leaving a residue that makes discoverers retch. In form, it is like a cloud of closely packed bubbles, an iridescent milky-gray. It moves by flowing, though it can extend pseudopods and progress in a manner something like walking. Cases of transvection have been reported: the entity forms into a tube and progresses through the air, only a slight distance above the ground, with an inchworm kind of movement. It has no definite size. Two or more can form into one or one can break down into a number of individuals and then reform. 

In ancient Persia they were known as Ahmizda. One of the kings, Shatrah the Good (ca. 217 AD) is said to have kept one to execute prisoners for the amusement of his court. In the Meadows of Gold, a 10^th-century Arabian work, it is revealed that “in Egypt and other countries they have seen white serpents in the air, moving from place to place as fast as lightning; that they lit sometimes on an animal and killed it; and they are sometimes heard flying by night when, in their locomotion in the air they are accompanied by a noise like that of new cloth being unfolded.”

Gervase of Tilbury (ca. 1140 AD) tells of a “Hommat” of immense size that alighted on the tower of St. Martin’s Church in “Southefolke” (Suffolk, probably) and flowed down its interior, dividing into parts, and decimating the congregation – at noontime!

Isolated accounts occur down through the ages. In 1911, my mother and Radclyffe Hall, the poetess (both members of the SPR) were shown a cinematograph of an Ommith by Baron von Schrenk-Notzing at Graz, Austria. It had turned up in a subcellar of Schloss Liechtenhof in the Austrian Alps. Schrenk-Notzing had rendered it torpid by pitching a cylinder of hydrocyanic acid at it. After he got his film by magnesium flares, the Ommith was destroyed with lime chloride. All my mother ever said of the film was, “What a naughty, smutty thing to show to two young ladies!” She said it made both her and Miss Hall sick. It is likely that the Ommith was the inspiration for the Shuggoths of Lovecraft’s tales.

Thus ends Costain’s account, and reading it no doubt brings so many things to mind. But the first and foremost is, why is such an entity so obscure? Why have so few of us heard of it? The answer is, we have; merely not identified either by the apparently Arabic name of Ommith or as a Lovecraftian Shoggoth.

However, before continuing, I must point out that, if Edward E. Costain, Tani Jantsang and I are right, then Abdul Alhazred’s despairing insistence that no Shoggoths had ever existed upon this Earth –was wrong. May the Gods help us if it is so. 

You have probably heard about the house at 50 Berkeley Square, London –best known by the monicker “England’s Most Haunted House.”

The various stories surrounding this four-storied brick house are lengthy and fascinating. The only other such lore-loaded house I know of is my hometown’s “Casa de los Perros”, about which I may post someday.

Back in 1789 we find the earliest reports of a ghostly girl who hangs from a windowsill in the top floor and then falls screaming, then disappears in thin air; she was believed to be a young lady called Adeline who killed herself. A newspaper reported back in the day that "since then more than 50 respectable people have reported seeing Adeline clinging to the windowsill, about to drop to her doom."

Pay heed now: In 1872, politician Lord George Lyttelton wagered that he would spend a night in the house. He was ready to sleep in the attic, with a shotgun at hand. That night, a misty, brownish, mass with tendrils appeared before him, and Lyttelton fired his shotgun to no avail. Lyttelton found no trace of the thing, and later stated that the higher stories of the house were “supernaturally fatal to body and mind.”

The house was then occupied by a recluse, Mr. Myers, said to have lost his mind with pain after his being abandoned for someone else by his fiancée; he died in 1878. Late in 1879, the Bentleys occupied the house. Their daughter was engaged to an army officer called Kenfield, and they were about to marry. There was a party at the house to celebrate the upcoming wedding of the daughter to an army officer. In the early evening, loud screams came from the attic room, where a maidservant had been sent to ready it as a guest room. The Bentleys and the young couple found the maid in a corner of the bedroom, terrified and pleading again and again: “Do not let it touch me”. She died in the hospital the following day, rambling about having seen "something horrible".

Capt. Kenfield, the daughter’s fiancée, decided to spend the night in the room. He promised to ring a bell if anything happened, and had his pistol at hand. Early  in the morning the bell rang desperately, and a gunshot shook them all. Kenfield was found lying on the floor, gibbering and shaking in horror, gun in hand, his gaze fixed on a corner of the room, where a bullet hole stood out. Kenfield recovered but was changed, and could never speak of what he saw (legends touch up this story claiming he was found dead).

Then came what may be the most terrible of episodes, when two sailors, EdwardBlunden and Robert Martin, arrived in London in Christmas eve, penniless and seeking shelter –and wandered into the haunted, shunned house at 50 Berkeley Square.

Daniel Cohen gives a quick, although incomplete, rundown in his Encyclopedia of Monsters (1992) (italics are mine) where he tells of not two but “three sailors who broke into the empty house one night looking for a place to sleep. During the night they were awakened by strange and horrible noises. One of the sailors was so frightened that he rushed out of the house without ever seeing what was making the noise. The other two stayed behind to confront ‘the horror.’

“The sailor who got out located a policeman and persuaded him to come back to the house. When they returned they found the other two sailors were already dead. No exact cause of death was ever determined, but both died with a look of utter terror frozen on their faces.”

One of these men had actually leaped out the window to escape “the horror,” and died from the fall. Other accounts add gory details such as one man being found dismembered in the basement and the one who jumped out having been impaled in the spikes of the fence.

“There are many theories and tales regarding the origin and nature of ‘the horror,’” adds Cohen, briefly mentioning a story of a madman who had been kept in the “top room” and of the aforementioned recluse. “These are fairly traditional ghost stories. There are, however, other accounts which assert that ‘the horror’ is not a ghost at all, but a shapeless and slimy thing, too grotesque to describe accurately, that had crawled up out of the sewers and was hiding somewhere in the house. It was said that the noises that so terrified people were the gruesome slopping noises the thing made as it slithered up and down the stairs.” I ask you now –are these descriptions not disturbingly similar to an Ommith – or a Shoggoth? 

The house is occupied, since 1937, by Maggs Bros – Antiquarian Book Dealers. The staff has sometimes heard strange noises in the upper floors, but they never venture there, since they are forbidden to do so – an old police sign states that said upper floors must never be occupied or used in any way.

Now, in the past couple of decades, the number of apparently-organic shapes reported by ufologists has increased, which is probably due to the improvement of cameras; UFOs remain ridiculously blurry, but enough clarity is sometimes achieved to make it clear that at least some of them are clearly not of a technological nature. A great number of elongated and snaking objects –much as the medieval description of Ommiths quoted by Costain- have even become a particular variety of either cryptid or UFO. Here is my favorite one, seen on November 3, 1973 at Cocoyoc, north of Mexico City (and it was seen again years later, elsewhere! But I don’t have the information at hand): 

The strange UFO seen at Cocoyoc, Mexico, in 1973.

There are also organic-looking objects seen in high altitude and even snapped on occasion by space probes outside Earth’s atmosphere! The unlikely-named Russian astrophysicist Dr. V.I. Goldanskii apparently even coined a term for them: Zeroids, due to their hypothetical habitat with zero temperature and zero atmospheric pressure. While such names and theories are somewhat ludicrous, the observed phenomena that inspired them are there all the same. Could they be instances of the very same phenomenon being observed throughout the centuries? 

Zeroids - the Ommiths of old? 

We might have reason to look into unresolved disappearances occurring around the times and locations of the sightings. I dread to think what we might find.

So, is the Ommith a source that H.P. Lovecraft drew on when writing about the Shoggoths? We of course have no conclusive proof. And it must be acknowledged that the Ommith presents some differences, such as its floating abilities. But we are speaking of inspiration, not of accurate representation. And, of course, even if we are right, the Ommith were obviously not created by the pre-human science of the Elder Race…

Or were they? Because there is at least a single, but impressive, hint that the Elder Things that inhabited Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness and fashioned the Shoggoths as well as earthly life, were also based on some elder model by Lovecraft! I am not claiming that their prehistoric cities have been found (not that unusual findings have not been taking place in Anatctica of late); but watch this blog in the following days; you just may be surprised.