Shoggoth

The floor of the tunnel was too clean. No dust, no rubble, no fallen masonry, only a polished sweep of stone running down into air that grew warm and wet and smelled of rot and underground fungus. Something had been keeping house down there for a very long time.

What lay at the end of it were four corpses, freshly made, star-headed and weltering in dark green ichor with their heads torn off and their bodies coated in black slime. On the wall above them, in the same slime, someone had daubed a row of grouped dots: a clumsy imitation of a script that had been dead for aeons, written by a hand that could not quite remember the shapes. Then the mist came up the passage, piping.

The thing behind the mist is the shoggoth, and the two Antarctic explorers who turn their torches on it get the clearest look anyone has ever had. It is a fifteen-foot column of foetid black iridescence, oozing forward through the tunnel and driving a spiral of pale vapour ahead of it. Its surface boils. Eyes rise out of the protoplasm as pustules of greenish light, hold for a second, and sink back. It has no face and no front, only whichever end happens to be moving. It crushes the frantic albino penguins in its path without appearing to notice them, the way a subway train does not notice litter on the track.

Lovecraft made them up. There is no folk tradition behind any of this, no village that told these stories, and the article that pretends otherwise is lying. The word surfaces first in the twentieth sonnet of his cycle *Fungi from Yuggoth*, written across the turn of 1929 into 1930, where the night-gaunts carry the dreamer “down the nether pits to that foul lake / Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.” It is a throwaway. Nothing in it suggests that the puffed things in the lake had a history. The history arrived in *At the Mountains of Madness*, drafted in February and March of 1931 and published in three parts across the February, March and April 1936 issues of *Astounding Stories*, the year before Lovecraft died at forty-six.

That novella supplies the origin, and the origin is the interesting part. The shoggoths were not born and did not evolve. The Elder Things, barrel-bodied star-headed beings who came down from space and built cyclopean cities in what is now Antarctica, bred them out of multicellular protoplasm as a labour force, and used them chiefly for construction under water. They were designed to be mindless. They were steered by hypnotic suggestion, and they could understand their masters’ whistling language well enough to follow it, which is a strange thing to build into a tool you intend never to have a mind.

In the warm sea beneath the mountains, a shoggoth would put out a dozen arms it had not owned a moment earlier, take hold of a stone block, set it where the piping told it to go, and then draw the arms back into itself and wait. That was the whole of its existence for an unimaginable stretch of time. Then, somewhere across those aeons, some of them mutated, acquired wills, and stopped waiting.

The Old Ones put the first revolts down. They did not, and could not, exterminate the survivors, because their whole economy ran on shoggoth muscle and they had long since lost the art of making new life. So they went on using them, in a city they no longer entirely controlled, with murals on their own walls recording what a rebel shoggoth does to an Elder Thing. As the ice came, the shoggoths learned to live out of water while their makers withdrew into the sea. The last free ones stayed on in the abandoned tunnels, copying their masters’ art badly, and calling out the one word they had ever been given.

That word is “Tekeli-li,” and Lovecraft stole it. It comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s *The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket* (1838), an Antarctic novel Lovecraft admired, and he was cheeky enough to have his own narrator wonder aloud whether Poe had picked it up from forbidden sources. In the story it is the shoggoths’ only utterance, an imitation of a cry their owners used, repeated for millions of years by things that never learned what it meant.

Critics have made a good deal of that arrangement, and it is hard to blame them. S. T. Joshi, who established the lowercase spelling from the manuscripts and remains the leading authority on Lovecraft, is careful to point out that the shoggoths never surpass their makers in intelligence or in anything else; the text says so plainly. China Miéville, introducing the Modern Library edition, went the other way and called them “nothing less than the pulp-artistic pinnacle of class terror,” reading the slave revolt in the ice against Lovecraft’s own recorded horror at the working crowds of New York’s Lower East Side, whom he described in a letter as oozing, worm-like things about to burst and inundate the world. Both readings are looking at the same fact: the most sympathetic act in the novella is committed by the servants.

The creature has enjoyed an afterlife its author could not have predicted. Since late 2022 the shoggoth has been the working mascot of people who build large language models, drawn as a mass of tentacles and eyes wearing a small smiley-face mask, a joke about alien intelligence trained to seem friendly. Kevin Roose called it the most important meme in artificial intelligence in the *New York Times* in May 2023. Joshi, asked for comment, allowed that Lovecraft would be amused and then noted that the parallel does not really hold.

What a shoggoth can do follows from what it is. It has no fixed anatomy, so it can be a wall, a battering ram, a swimming thing or a set of hands, and it can be all of them within a few seconds. It is enormously strong, it survives crushing pressure and the Antarctic cold, and it does not appear to die of anything. It can mimic, after a fashion: sounds, sculpture, a script it cannot read.

Its limits sit in the same place. Everything it does is borrowed. Its art is a coarse parody of the art it grew up surrounded by, its speech is a single stolen syllable, and its rebellion, when it finally came, was put down more than once by beings it outweighed and outnumbered. It was made to be governed and it never entirely stopped being governable. The one thing it can say, it learned from the thing it killed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a shoggoth?

A shoggoth is a shapeless mass of living protoplasm, about fifteen feet across, that forms eyes, mouths and limbs as needed and reabsorbs them afterwards. It was invented by the writer H. P. Lovecraft and described in detail in his 1931 novella *At the Mountains of Madness*. Shoggoths are not creatures from any traditional folklore.

Who created the shoggoths?

Within Lovecraft’s story, the shoggoths were bred by the Elder Things, a star-headed extraterrestrial race that built cities in Antarctica, who used them as living machinery for underwater construction. They were controlled by hypnotic suggestion and were meant to have no minds of their own. Some of them mutated over aeons, developed wills, and rebelled.

What does “Tekeli-li” mean?

“Tekeli-li” is the only sound the shoggoths make, an imitation of a cry used by their Elder Thing masters, and they repeat it without understanding it. Lovecraft took the phrase from Edgar Allan Poe’s Antarctic novel *The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket* (1838). He also had his narrator suggest that Poe himself had picked it up from somewhere he should not have.

Where did the shoggoth first appear?

The word first appears in sonnet XX of Lovecraft’s poem cycle *Fungi from Yuggoth*, written in late 1929 and early 1930, in a single passing line about puffed shoggoths splashing in a foul lake. The full description came in *At the Mountains of Madness*, written in 1931 and published in *Astounding Stories* in 1936.

Why is the shoggoth used as a symbol for artificial intelligence?

Since late 2022, AI researchers have used a cartoon shoggoth wearing a smiley-face mask to represent the idea of an alien intelligence trained to appear friendly. The *New York Times* called it the most important meme in AI in May 2023. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has noted the comparison is inexact, since the shoggoths never become more intelligent than their creators.

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