Yog-Sothoth: the Real War!

[Xenophon]

Sure, everyone spells it as above. BUT, Von Junzt's Unaussprechliche Kulten in the exceeding rare Leipzig edition of 1841 spells it with the Euro "J" as "Jog-Sothoth." He notes that the "weak and womanly Y of the English quite deprives the word of all its ondh and vril." Likewise, in a recently unearthed Grade 4 essay, Lovecraft himself originally spelled the name as "Uog-Sothoth" stressing that the "U" referred to the reader's Higher Self. A paper found in Crowley's hip pocket at the time of his death suggested that the name is "properly spelt Iog-Sothoth," hinting as a link with the sacred syllable "Io." And, as an aside, Kenneth Grant (in The Fallen Arch and Behind the Mauve Zone) insists that the name be rendered "Yogsothoth," the "arbitrary hyphen introducing a species of divine apnea." As authority, he presents a previously unpublished masher note from Michael Bertiaux to the entity Lam.

All in all, this controversy---cosmic in irs implications---bids fair to knock the Cabalistic C-Q-K quibble into a bowl of lukewarm alphabet soup. So, have at 'er gang.

 

[DiLoco_DelEted]

I had always thought it was an invention solely by Lovecraft, though I recall something about that name in the Necromomicon.
Interesting. Following this.

 

[KjEno186]

"It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign..."​

​

The English Qaballa (aka the Qaballa of Liber AL) calculates Yog-Sothoth as 108. Key verses from Liber AL that are also 108:

vii. "a mask of sorrow" - per Wikipedia, "to see it or learn too much about it is to court disaster."​

xlii. "I am above" - see description above​

xlvi. "is the lord" - see description above​

lxxii. "resinous" - a reference to the globes of the tree of "malignant globes" as described by Kenneth Grant​

lxxvii. "soul to me" - eternal servitude​

lxxviii. "souls to awful" - perhaps a reference to human sacrifice​

xc. "traitors"​

xci. "trance or"​

xcii. "unto me"​

xciii. "veiling"​

xciv. "visible"​

xcv. "whom I send"​

xcvi. "work to toy" - "Traitors! In trance or pathworking thou come unto me veiling thine motives! I am above thee! What I make visible to thee is a mask of sorrow. Whom I send to thee will work to toy with your sanity."​

Whereas, Jog-Sothoth is calculated as 109. Key verses from Liber AL include:

​

ii. "a veiling"​

iii. "all the sorrows"​

iv. "am a god of war"​

v. "am eight" - tentacles?​

xvi. "black upon" - color correspondences​

xv. "blue am i"​

xlix. "know that i"​

l. "lord hadit now" - see

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li. "love and love"​

lii. "make cakes" - acceptable offering?​

liii. "me burn" - preferably overcooked​

liv. "me i have"​

lv. "meaning"​

lvi. "no wrong if"​

lvii. "not behold" - again, a deity which prefers not to be seen by human eyes.​

​

Resources: Jake Stratton-Kent's The Serpent Tongue Liber 187 and

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[Tryp]

It's remarkable to find a quote from such rare edition, but Von Junzt was clearly a proto-völkisch, edgy chauvinist and we should not consider his spellings unless the whole point is clearing our throats of truly elder phlegm. And did Grant ever bother to check any references older than Lovecraft?

Thankfully we do have some notes from the Kitab Al-Azif. Quoting from "Notes on a fragment of the Necronomicon", by Phileus P. Sadowski, in Chaosium catalogue n.2301, p94:

The meter of the poem is as follows: -/---/---/---/- for both lines (the accent falling on the '/'). A transliteration of the Arabic characters would be as follows:

la mayyitan ma qadirun yatabaqa sarmadi
fa itha yaji ash-shuthath al-mautu qad yantahi

A literal translation of the Arabic goes something like this:

That thing is not dead which has the capacity to continue to exist eternally,
And if the abnormal (bizarre, strange) ones (things, times?) come, then death may cease to be.

Given that the couplet as Lovecraft rendered it in English is a translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation, which can account for the slight variations in meaning, we obviously have here the original version. This alone was a discovery of some importance. But one of the phrases in Arabic gives a clue to perhaps an even deeper mystery.

The phrase in question contains the words "yaji ash-shuthath". "Ash-shuthath" is plural, and literally means 'the abnormal,' referring either to people or things depending on context. "Yaji" means simply "comes" or "are coming". Now in colloquial Arabic the soft 'j' sound is often transformed into the hard 'j' sound, and many times the vowel endings are left off and the words slurred together as we do in English. Therefore, a possible rendering of this phrase in colloquial Arabic would be "yag-shuthath", which is easily recognizable, with a slight change in the quality of the vowels, as the Lovecraftian "Yog-Sothoth".

Post automatically merged: Oct 25, 2023

Thus I'd consider referring to "The Abnormal is Coming" an acceptable vernacular English invocation, which also solves the problem.

 

[KjEno186]

edgy chauvinist and we should not consider his spellings unless the whole point is clearing our throats of truly elder phlegm.

"The Abnormal is Coming"

= 248 in

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Matches from Liber AL =

xxix. "in the Khu not the Khu"​

which leads us to the commentary:

We are not to regard ourselves as base beings, without whose sphere is Light or "God". Our minds and bodies are veils of the Light within. [...] This 'star' or 'Inmost Light' is the original, individual, eternal essence. The Khu is the magical garment which it weaves for itself, a 'form' for its Being Beyond Form, by use of which it can gain experience through self-consciousness [...] -

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​

But it could also have reference to Young Frankenstein...

 

[Xenophon]

I had always thought it was an invention solely by Lovecraft, though I recall something about that name in the Necromomicon.
Interesting. Following this.

Post automatically merged: Oct 28, 2023

Diluculo, follow not. This way lieth madness.

Actually I'm just jerking folks around. Parodying what I take as a show of too-fine tuning in another thread in this forum

Post automatically merged: Oct 28, 2023

It's remarkable to find a quote from such rare edition, but Von Junzt was clearly a proto-völkisch, edgy chauvinist and we should not consider his spellings unless the whole point is clearing our throats of truly elder phlegm. And did Grant ever bother to check any references older than Lovecraft?

Thankfully we do have some notes from the Kitab Al-Azif. Quoting from "Notes on a fragment of the Necronomicon", by Phileus P. Sadowski, in Chaosium catalogue n.2301, p94:

Post automatically merged: Oct 25, 2023

Thus I'd consider referring to "The Abnormal is Coming" an acceptable vernacular English invocation, which also solves the problem.

Nothing remarkable at all if you make up the quote. Von Junzt WAS fiction, after all. That aside, unless I mistake, you say "proto-völkisch" as if it were a bad thing. This transgresses the rules of this thread. Above all we must have the Order, no?

 

[KjEno186]

Above all we must have the Order, no?

Modern man sometimes forgets that the Universe has a sense of humor. People who try to make too much sense of magic rather miss the point. If you're not playing and having fun, you're doing it wrong-ish.

Text does not always communicate our intentions perfectly, but I gathered there was more than a bit of humor in your original post.

 

[Xenophon]

Modern man sometimes forgets that the Universe has a sense of humor. People who try to make too much sense of magic rather miss the point. If you're not playing and having fun, you're doing it wrong-ish.

Text does not always communicate our intentions perfectly, but I gathered there was more than a bit of humor in your original post.

There's the old tale about Professor Kalloskaigathos setting his aesthetics class to talking saying, "This morning I read a beautiful phrase, 'Walk with light.' Isn't that a wonder: walk with light." The class spent 3 hours exploring the topic till, at length, one student asked toward seminar's close, "Who said that? Plotinus? Meister Eckhart? Baudelaire?" Replied the Professor, "I suppose the maxim is anonymous. It's posted over the traffic light at crosswalk on the corner of Larmar and University Avenues.

 

[Tryp]

Post automatically merged: Oct 28, 2023

Diluculo, follow not. This way lieth madness.

Actually I'm just jerking folks around. Parodying what I take as a show of too-fine tuning in another thread in this forum

Post automatically merged: Oct 28, 2023

Nothing remarkable at all if you make up the quote. Von Junzt WAS fiction, after all. That aside, unless I mistake, you say "proto-völkisch" as if it were a bad thing. This transgresses the rules of this thread. Above all we must have the Order, no?

I know you made up the quote. I was just playing along, and spent some time to find a quote I remember from a Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game book. But I guess in some ways I pissed out of place... Too bad.

 

[Xenophon]

I know you made up the quote. I was just playing along, and spent some time to find a quote I remember from a Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game book. But I guess in some ways I pissed out of place... Too bad.

You didn't pee on nothing of mine. Or if you did, I never noticed. What with the foetid miasma of my eldritch dwelling, I'd never notice.

Post automatically merged: Oct 29, 2023

I know you made up the quote. I was just playing along, and spent some time to find a quote I remember from a Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game book. But I guess in some ways I pissed out of place... Too bad.

Anyway, sorry to miss your point. Like KjEno said, keyboards convey feelings worster than violins.

 

[Tryp]

Anyway, sorry to miss your point. Like KjEno said, keyboards convey feelings worster than violins.

All good, I'm prone to doubling down on other people's good jokes and also to deadpan deliveries. These can be misunderstood even face to face, and still I try to make them work in online discussions.

 

[Xenophon]

All good, I'm prone to doubling down on other people's good jokes and also to deadpan deliveries. These can be misunderstood even face to face, and still I try to make them work in online discussions.

You gots to be careful as a millipede in a minefield in these times. If you're too successful a deadpanner, they'll diagnose you as "on the spectrum" and experimentally medicate you into zombiedom.