FORMLESS SPAWN

FORMLESS SPAWN
 "At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss with their great atom-power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed along stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of  Tsathoggua. But they were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes."
H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Mound

"Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not, as we had thought, a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and was now forming these damnable arms, that groped toward us with tentacle-like appendages in lieu of claws or hands!"
Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros

MANDRAKE

MANDRAKE

"It stood among osiers and alders on a low, mound-shaped elevation; and in front, toward the marshes, there was a loamy meadow-bottom where the short fat stems and tufted leaves of the mandrake grew in lush abundance, being more plentiful and of greater size than elsewhere through all that sorcery-ridden province. The fleshly, bifurcated roots of this plant, held by many to resemble the human body, were used by Gilles and Sabine in the brewing of love-philtres."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Mandrakes

"It looks as if the name 'mandrake' may have been applied to very strong plantroots shaped like little statuettes of the human figure. It was believed that small familiar demons took up their abode in these plants. Mandrakes revealed knowledge of the future by shaking their heads when questions were put to them."
Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy

"Mandrake. A poisonous perennial herb that grows in the Mediterranean region and that is reputed to have powerful magical properties. Mandrake, part of the nightshade family, has a strong and unpleasant odor. It is highly toxic, though it is used in theraputic remedies and as an aphrodisiac in love philtres. The magic attributed to mandrake is due to the shape of its thick root, which looks like a man or woman. According to lore, mandrake shrinks at the approach of a person. Touching it can be fatal. If uprooted, it shrieks and sweats blood, and whoever pulls it out dies in agony. 
Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia Of Witches and Witchcraft

HUNTER FROM BEYOND

HUNTER FROM BEYOND

"What I saw was a forward-slouching, vermin-gray figure, wholly devoid of hair or down or bristles, but marked with faint, etiolated rings like those of a serpent that has lived in darkness. It possessed the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semi-canine mouth and jaw, and arms ending in twisted hands whose black hyena talons nearly scraped the floor. The thing was infinitely bestial, and, at the same time, macabre; for its parchment skin was shriveled, corpselike, mummified, in a manner impossible to convey; and from eye sockets well-nigh deep as those of a skull, there glimmered evil slits of yellowish phosphorescence, like burning sulphur. Fangs that were stained as if with poison or gangrene, issued from the slavering, half-open mouth; and the whole attitude of the creature was that of some maleficent monster in readiness to spring."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Hunters From Beyond

MANDRAKE

MANDRAKE

"It stood among osiers and alders on a low, mound-shaped elevation; and in front, toward the marshes, there was a loamy meadow-bottom where the short fat stems and tufted leaves of the mandrake grew in lush abundance, being more plentiful and of greater size than elsewhere through all that sorcery-ridden province. The fleshly, bifurcated roots of this plant, held by many to resemble the human body, were used by Gilles and Sabine in the brewing of love-philtres."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Mandrakes

"It looks as if the name 'mandrake' may have been applied to very strong plantroots shaped like little statuettes of the human figure. It was believed that small familiar demons took up their abode in these plants. Mandrakes revealed knowledge of the future by shaking their heads when questions were put to them."
Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy

"Mandrake. A poisonous perennial herb that grows in the Mediterranean region and that is reputed to have powerful magical properties. Mandrake, part of the nightshade family, has a strong and unpleasant odor. It is highly toxic, though it is used in theraputic remedies and as an aphrodisiac in love philtres. The magic attributed to mandrake is due to the shape of its thick root, which looks like a man or woman. According to lore, mandrake shrinks at the approach of a person. Touching it can be fatal. If uprooted, it shrieks and sweats blood, and whoever pulls it out dies in agony. 
Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia Of Witches and Witchcraft

RLIM SHAIKORTH

RLIM SHAIKORTH

"Something he had of the semblance of a fat white worm; but his bulk was beyond that of the sea-elephant. His half-coiled tail was thick as the middle folds of his body; and his front reared upward from the dais in the form of a white round disk, and upon it were imprinted vaguely the lineaments of a visage belonging neither to beast of the earth nor 

ocean-creature. And amid the visage a mouth curved uncleanly from side to side of the disk, opening and shutting incessantly on a pale and tongueless and toothless maw. The eye-sockets of Rlim Shaikorth were close together between his shallow nostrils; and the sockets were eyeless, but in them appeared from moment to moment globules of a 

blood-coloured matter having the form of eyeballs; and ever the globules broke and dripped down before the dais. And from the ice-floor of the dome there ascended two masses like stalagmites, purple and dark as frozen gore, which had been made by 

the ceaseless dripping of the globules."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Coming Of the White Worm

 

LICH

 LICH

"I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing On the Doorstep

"It was a lich's face-desiccated flesh tight over its skull. Filthy strands of hair were matted over its scalp, tattered lips were drawn away from broken yellowed teeth, and, sunken in their sockets, eyes that should be dead were bright with hideous life."

Karl Edward Wagner, Sticks 

"After a while, in the gray waste, they found the remnant of another horse and rider, which the jackals had spared and the sun had dried to the leanness of old mummies. These also they raised up from death; and Mmatmuor bestrode the withered charger; and the two magicians rode on in state, like errant emperors, with a lich and a skeleton to attend them. Other bones and charnel remnants of men and beasts, to which they came anon, were duly resurrected in like fashion; so that they gathered to themselves an everswelling train in their progress through Cincor."
Clark Ashton Smith, The Empire Of the Necromancers

 

FABULOUS CREATURE

FABULOUS CREATURE

"Especially was it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city—fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism;"

H.P. Lovecraft, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

"westward from these [the Troglodytoi of the Red Sea coast of Africa] there are some people without necks, having eyes in their shoulders."

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia

"These beings, though they were bipeds, and were not quite so unheard-of in their anatomic structure as the entity which Eibon had met by the lake, were nevertheless sufficiently unusual; for their head and bodies were apparently combined in one, and their ears, eyes, nostrils, mouths, and certain other organs of doubtful use were all arranged in a somewhat unconventional grouping on their chests and abdomens. They were wholly naked, and were rather dark in color, with no trace of hair on any part of their bodies."

"His knowledge of the customs, manners, ideas, and beliefs of the Bhlemphroims soon became extensive; but he found it a source of disillusionment as well as of illumination."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Door To Saturn 

 

KNYGATHIN ZHAUM

KNYGATHIN ZHAUM
"He had seized a respectable seller of djongua-beans, and had proceeded instantly to devour his victim alive, without heeding the blows, bricks, arrows, javelins, cobblestones and curses that were rained upon him by the gathering throng and by the police. It was only when he had satisfied his atrocious appetite, that he suffered the police to lead him away, leaving little more than the bones and raiment of the djongua-seller to mark the spot of this outrageous happening."

"When the criminal re-appeared, it was obvious not only to me but to everyone that his physical personality, in achieving this new recrudescence, had undergone a most salient change. His mottling had developed more than a suggestion of some startling and repulsive pattern; and his human characteristics had yielded to the inroads of an unearthly distortion. The head was joined to the shoulders almost without the intermediation of a neck; the eyes were set diagonally in a face with oblique bulgings and flattenings; the nose and mouth were showing a tendency to displace each other; and there were still further alterations which I shall not specify, since they involved an abhorrent degradation of man's noblest and most distinctive corporeal members. I shall, however, mention the strange, pendulous formations, like annulated dew-laps or wattles, into which his knee-caps had evolved. Nathless, it was Knygathin Zhaum himself who stood (if one could dignify the fashion of his carriage by that word) before the block of justice."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Testament Of Athammaus

Be sure to check out the second half of my guest appearance on the excellent Clark Ashton Smith themed podcast The Double Shadow!

TSATHOGGUA

TSATHOGGUA

"Black Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a long, sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet, and a lean, rubbery night-gaunt spread its wings as if to advance and smother the watcher."

H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, The Horror In the Museum

"He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth. His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; and the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros

"In that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth . . . abides from eldermost eons the god Tsathoggua. You shall know Tsathoggua by his great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad which he has eternally. He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Seven Geases

GARGOYLE II

GARGOYLE II

"77-Unspeakable dance of the gargoyles—in morning several gargoyles on old cathedral found transposed."

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

"Its companion was a horned satyr, with the vans of some great bat such as might roam the nether caverns, with sharp, clenching talons, and a look of Satanically brooding lust, as if it were gloating above the helpless object of its unclean desire."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Maker Of Gargoyles

GARGOYLE I

GARGOYLE I

"76-Ancient cathedral—hideous gargoyle—man seeks to rob—found dead—gargoyle’s jaw bloody."

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

"One was a snarling, murderous, cat-headed monster, with retracted lips revealing formidable fangs, and eyes that glared intolerable hatred from beneath ferine brows. This creature had the claws and wings of a griffin, and seemed as if it were poised in readiness to swoop down on the city of Vyones, like a harpy on its prey."

Clark Ashton Smith, The Maker Of Gargoyles

VOORMIS

VOORMIS

"There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time

"Also, much was said regarding the genesis of the Voormis, who were popularly believed to be the offspring of women and certain atrocious creatures that had come forth in primal days from a tenebrous cavern-world in the bowels of Voormithadreth. Somewhere beneath that four-coned mountain, the sluggish and baleful god Tsathoggua, who had come down from Saturn in years immediately foIlowing the Earth's creation, was fabled to reside; and during the rite of worship at his black altars, the devotees were always careful to orient themselves toward Voormithadreth."

"They stood only half erect, and their shaggy heads were about his thighs and hips, snarling and snapping like dogs; and they clawed him with hook-shaped nails that caught and held in the links of his armor."
Clark Ashton Smith, The Seven Geases

"The shaman Yhemog, dejected by the obdurate refusal of his fellow Voormis to elect him their high-priest, contemplated his imminent withdrawal from the tribal burrows of his furry primitive kind to sulk in proud and lonely solitude among the icy crags of the north, whose bourns were unvisited by his timorous, earth-dwelling brethren."

"By their obese, stertorously-breathing forms, sprawled recumbent on the pave before the spangled curtain which concealed the innermost adytum from the chance of profanation of impious eyes, he crept on furtive, three-toed, naked feet."

"With paws that shook with the intensity of his loathing and wrath, Yhemog unfolded the antique papyrus and, straining his weak, small eyes, sought to persue the writings it contained."
Lin Carter, The Scroll Of Morloc

UBBO-SATHLA

UBBO-SATHLA

"Ubbo-Sathla is that unforgotten source whence came those daring to oppose the Elder Gods who ruled from Betelgueze, the Great Old Ones who fought against the Elder Gods; and these Old Ones were instructed by Azathoth, who is the blind, idiot god, and by Yog-Sothoth, who is the All-in-One and One-in-All, and upon whom are no strictures of time or space, and whose aspects on earth ar 'Umr At-Tawil and the Ancient Ones."
H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, The Lurker At the Threshold

"There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods."
Clark Ashton Smith, Ubbo-Sathla

ATLACH-NACHA

ATLACH-NACHA

"The dark form ran toward him with incredible swiftness. When it came near he saw that there was a kind of face on the squat ebon body, low down amid the several-jointed legs. The face peered up with a weird expression of doubt and inquiry; and terror crawled through the veins of the bold huntsman as he met the small, crafty eyes that were circled about with hair."
Clark Ashton Smith, The Seven Geases

"I found names and familiar ones, awful descriptions and mere hints of terror unimaginable in accounts of Yig, the terrible snake-god, of Atlach-Nacha of the spider-shape, of Gnoph-Hek, the "hairy thing" otherwise known as Rhan-Tegoth, of Chaugnar Faugn, the vampiric "feeder", of the hell-hounds of Tindalos, which prowl the the angles of time, and again and again of the monstrou Yog-Sothoth, the "All-in-One and One-in-All", whose deceptive disguise is as a congeries of iridescent globes concealing the primal horror beneath."
H.P. Lovecraft & August Derleth, The Lurker At the Threshold