This article is about the Cthulhu Mythos deity. Yog-Sothoth is also a French, free-form Jazz band; similar to what one might expect from the character Erich Zann (from the Lovecraft short story The Music of Erich Zann).

Yog-Sothoth (nickname: The Key and the Gate) is a fictional character, an Outer God from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Yog-Sothoth is coterminus with all of space and time, yet is supposedly locked outside of the space and time that we inhabit. Like nearly all of the Cthulhu Mythos entities, to see it or learn too much about it is to court insanity.

Yog-Sothoth has several different avatars:

• Aforgomon
• The Dweller on the Threshold
• Tawil-at-U'mr

Quotes

"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread." -- H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

"Imagination called up the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth – only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign suggestiveness." -- H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror in the Museum

"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..." -- H.P. Lovecraft, Through the Gates of the Silver Key

References to Yog-Sothoth

• Mark E. Smith, songwriter and lyricist of The Fall, namechecks Yog-Sothoth in the supernaturally based song Spectre vs. Rector (1979)
• The graffiti in Stephen King's Needful Things (1991) proclaims, "Yog-Sothoth Rules."
• In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Moving Pictures, an "outerdimensional being" named "Yob Soddoth" is mentioned during a pre-exam drill being administered to Ponder Stibbons by his roommate Victor Tugelbend.

External Links

• The Ultimate Cthulhu Mythos Book List - Listing of all mythos novels, anthologies, collections, comic books, and more.