Azathoth

Literary invention
Nome in un taccuino del 1919 · frammento giugno 1922, edito 1938 · prima stampa in vita: agosto 1931

Azathoth — a blind, idiot entity at the centre of the universe, surrounded by flutes.

First appearance

In the corpus: «the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space».

What is told

A blind, idiot entity at the centre of the universe, surrounded by flutes. It is not a god who governs: it is the background noise of matter. It is the most radical formulation of Lovecraft's materialism, dressed up as a deity.

In the corpus

The textbook case for distinguishing conception, composition and publication. The first completed work in which it appears, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, was written in 1926-27 and published only in 1943.

Publication data

Private note of 1919 («AZATHOTH — hideous name»); narrative fragment of June 1922, published posthumously in 1938 in «Leaves»; first appearance in print in Lovecraft's lifetime in The Whisperer in Darkness, «Weird Tales», August 1931.

Caution

To say «Azathoth appears in 1922» or «in 1931» is inaccurate in both cases. The etymology proposed by Robert M. Price — a combination of the biblical Anathoth, Azazel and the alchemical term Azoth as read in Waite — is conjecture, not datum.

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