Tsathoggua (the Sleeper of N'kai, also known as Zhothaqquah) is a supernatural entity in the Cthulhu Mythos shared fictional universe. He is the creation of American writer Clark Ashton Smith and is part of his Hyperborean cycle.
Tsathoggua/Zhothaqquah is described as an Old One, a god-like being from the pantheon. He was introduced in Smith's short story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", written in 1929 and published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. His first appearance in print, however, was in Robert E. Howard's story "The Children of the Night", written in 1930 and published in the April-May 1931 issue of Weird Tales. His next appearance in print was in H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Whisperer in Darkness", written in 1930 and published in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales.
Description
The first description of Tsathoggua occurs in "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros", in which the protagonists encounter one of the entity's idols:
Later, in Smith's "The Seven Geases" (1933), Tsathoggua is described again:
Robert M. Price notes that "Lovecraft's Tsathoggua and Smith's differ at practically every point". Lovecraft, dropping Smith's bat and sloth comparisons, refers to the entity in "The Whisperer in Darkness" as the "amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton" (the priest's name was Lovecraft's nickname for Tsathoggua's creator, Clark Ashton Smith).
Later, in "The Horror in the Museum", a story ghost-written by Lovecraft, he writes,
He also mentions it in At the Mountains of Madness, in a paragraph mentioning several other gods.
Servitors
Formless spawn
The basin ... was filled with a sort of viscous and semi-liquescent substance, quite opaque and of a sooty color.... [T]he center swelled as if with the action of some powerful yeast [and] an uncouth amorphous head with dull and bulging eyes arose gradually on an ever-lengthening neck ... Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not ... a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and [it was now forming arms] that groped toward us with tentacle-like appendages in lieu of claws or hands! ... Then the whole mass of the dark fluid began to rise [and] poured over the rim of the basin like a torrent of black quicksilver, taking as it reached the floor an undulant ophidian form which immediately developed more than a dozen short legs. —Clark Ashton Smith, "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"
Tsathoggua's will is carried out by the formless spawn, polymorphic entities made of black ichor. They are extremely resilient and very difficult to dispatch. Formless spawn can take any shape and can attack their targets in nearly every conceivable way. They are surprisingly flexible and plastic, and can quickly flow into a room through the tiniest of cracks. They attack by trampling their targets, biting them, or crushing them with their grasp. The Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game's entry on Formless Spawn also claims that they are powerfully acidic in substance and can dissolve human flesh with even a slight touch.
Formless spawn often rest in basins in Tsathoggua's temples and keep the sanctuary from being defiled by nonbelievers.
In "The Mound" the people of the subterranean world of K'N-Yan had once worshipped Tsathoggua until a scientific expedition exploring N'Kai encountered the Formless Spawn. Those who escaped had all the images of Tsathoggua destroyed, and his temple re-dedicated to Shub-Niggurath.
In his story At the Mountains of Madness, H. P. Lovecraft states that "[a] few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself"
The formless spawn appear as adversaries in the video game Quake.
Voormis
A race of cave-dwelling humanoids who worship Tsathoggua. They are the primary focus of a "posthumous collaboration" short story by Lin Carter after Clark Ashton Smith's death, The Scroll of Morloc (First published in 1976, The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2, and again in 1980 in Lost Worlds). They are referred to as the Voormi (plural: Voormis) in H. P. Lovecraft's fictional manuscript The Pnakotic Fragments. The Voormis considered themselves the chosen minions of Tsathoggua and his direct descendants.