Tsathoggua
fictional deity in the Cthulhu Mythos
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:
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.
Later, in Smith's "The Seven Geases" (1933), Tsathoggua is described again:
In that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth . . . abides from eldermost eons the god Tsathoggua.
The public source identifies “Tsathoggua” as fictional deity in the Cthulhu Mythos. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tsathoggua, fictional and deity.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q763980. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1931, 1930 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tsathoggua” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.