"The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, the Womb in Darkness, Bestower of the Dark Gift, the Mother of Monstrosities.

Shub-Niggurath is an Outer God in the pantheon. She is a perverse fertility deity, said to appear as an enormous cloudy mass which extrudes black tentacles, slime-dripping mouths, and short, writhing goat legs. Small creatures are continually spat forth by the monstrosity, which are either reconsumed into the miasmatic form or escape to some monstrous life elsewhere.

Of all the mythos deities, Shub-Niggurath is probably the most extensively worshipped. Her worshippers include the Hyperboreans, the Muvians, and the people of Sarnath, as well as any number of druidic and barbaric cults. She is also worshipped by the non-human species of the mythos, such as the "Fungi from Yuggoth" (the Mi-Go) and the Nug-Soth of Yaddith. With the proper occult paraphernalia, Shub-Niggurath can be summoned to any woodlands at the time of the new moon. However, the place from whence she comes is not known. One possibility is that she dwells at the court of Azathoth at the center of the universe. She may also live beneath the planet Yaddith, where she is served by the Dholes. It is also possible that she lives in another dimension altogether.

Shub-Niggurath is believed to have mated with her grandson Hastur to produce the beings Ithaqua, Zhar, and J'Zahar. Hastur may also be the father of her "Thousand Young" or "Dark Young", though there is also a chance that they were spawned by fission. She may possibly have mated with Yog-Sothoth (Hastur's grandfather) to produce Nug and Yeb (though their father is more likely Hastur), and even Yig to produce Byatis (which is debatable since some believe her to be Yig's mother, though he may be the offspring of Mappo no Ryûjin.


The Dark Young

The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath are horrifying, pitch-black monstrosities, seemingly made of ropy tentacles. They stand as tall as a tree (perhaps between twelve and twenty feet tall) on a pair of stumpy, hoofed legs. A mass of tentacles protrudes from their trunks where a head would normally be, and puckered maws, dripping green goo, cover their flanks. The monsters roughly resemble trees in silhouette — the trunks being the short legs and the tops of the trees represented by the ropy, branching bodies. A congregation of these abominations smells like an open grave. They usually dwell in woodlands wherever Shub-Niggurath's cult is active.

The Dark Young are usually called upon to preside over cult ceremonies. One means for summoning them is found in the Book of Eibon and requires a blood offering. The ritual may only be performed in the deep of the woodlands at the darkest of a new moon, and the victim must be sacrificed over a stone altar. Dark young act as proxies for Shub-Niggurath in the accepting of sacrifices and the worship of cultists, in the devouring of non-cultists, and in the spreading of their mother's faith across the world.

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