Editing Shub-Niggurath (section)

== Revision tales ==
[[File:H. P. Lovecraft Portrait, June 1934.png|thumb|alt=H. P. Lovecraft in June 1934, facing left|H. P. Lovecraft, Shub-Niggurath's creator]]
Lovecraft only provided specific information about Shub-Niggurath in his "revision tales", stories published under the names of clients for whom he ghost-wrote. As Price points out, "For these clients he constructed a parallel myth-cycle to his own, a separate group of Great Old Ones", including [[Yig]], [[Ghatanothoa]], [[Rhan-Tegoth]], "the evil twins [[Nug and Yeb]]"—and Shub-Niggurath.

While some of these revision stories just repeat the familiar exclamations,<ref>H. P. Lovecraft writing as Zealia Bishop, "Medusa's Coil", ''The Horror in the Museum'', pp. 189–190; H. P. Lovecraft writing as Hazel Heald, "The Man of Stone", ''The Horror in the Museum'', pp. 225, 232; H. P. Lovecraft writing as Hazel Heald, "The Horror in the Museum", ''The Horror in the Museum'', pp. 225, 232; H. P. Lovecraft writing as William Lumley, "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", ''The Horror in the Museum'', p. 321.</ref> others provide new elements of lore. In "The Last Test" (1927), the first mention of Shub-Niggurath seems to connect her to Nug and Yeb: "I talked in [[Yemen]] with an old man who had come back from the Crimson Desert—he had seen [[Iram of the Pillars|Irem]], the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!"<ref>H. P. Lovecraft writing as Adolphe de Castro, "The Last Test", ''The Horror in the Museum'', p. 47.</ref>

The revision story ''[[The Mound (novella)|The Mound]]'', which describes the discovery of an underground realm called [[K'n-yan]] by a Spanish [[conquistador]], reports that a temple of [[Tsathoggua]] there "had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named-One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated [[Astarte]], and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious."<ref name="auto"/>

The reference to "Astarte", the consort of Baal in [[Semitic mythology]], ties Shub-Niggurath to the related fertility goddess [[Cybele]], the Magna Mater mentioned in Lovecraft's "[[The Rats in the Walls]]", and implies that the "great mother worshipped by the hereditary cult of Exham Priory" in that story "had to be none other than Shub-Niggurath".<ref>Price, ''Shub-Niggurath Cycle'', p. xiv.</ref>

The Not-to-Be-Named-One, not being named, is difficult to identify; a similar phrase, translated into Latin as the ''Magnum Innominandum'', appears in a list in ''The Whisperer in Darkness''<ref>Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness", p. 223.</ref> and was included in a scrap of incantation that Lovecraft wrote for [[Robert Bloch]]'s "The Shambler from the Stars".<ref>Robert Bloch, "The Shambler from the Stars", ''Mysteries of the Worm'', p. 31.</ref> [[August Derleth]] identifies this mysterious entity with [[Hastur]]<ref>August Derleth, "The Return of Hastur", ''The Hastur Cycle'', pp. 255–256.</ref> (though Hastur appears in the same ''Whisperer in Darkness'' list with the ''Magnum Innominandum''), while Robert M. Price equates him with [[Yog-Sothoth]]—though he also suggests that Shub-Niggurath's mate is implicitly the snake god Yig.<ref>Price, p. xiii.</ref>

Finally, in "[[Out of the Aeons]]", a revision tale set in part on the lost continent of [[Mu (lost continent)|Mu]], Lovecraft describes the character T'yog as the "High Priest of Shub-Niggurath and guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand Young". In the story, T'yog surprisingly maintains that "the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods, and&nbsp;... that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were ready to take sides with man" against the more malevolent Ghatanothoa. Shub-Niggurath is called "the Mother Goddess", and reference is made to "her sons", presumably Nug and Yeb.<ref name="auto1"/>

=== Other references ===
Other evidence of Lovecraft's conception of Shub-Niggurath can be found in his letters. For example, in a letter to Willis Conover, Lovecraft described her as an "evil cloud-like entity".<ref>Cited in Price, p. xv.</ref> "Yog-Sothoth's wife is the hellish cloud-like entity Shub-Niggurath, in whose honor nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young. By her he has two monstrous offspring—the evil twins Nug and Yeb. He has also begotten hellish hybrids upon the females of various organic species throughout the universes of space-time."