"The Thing in the Pit" first appeared in Lin Carter’s collection Lost Worlds (DAW Books. 1980).
The Thing in the Pit
by Lin Carter
THE mythological narrative which follows is taken from the disturbing and debatable translation made by Professor Copeland three years after his return from central Asia. His brochure, The Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation (1916), was published at his own expense after being rejected by the academic firms which had printed his earlier, more scholarly works. Widely condemned as unsubstantiated "ravings" by his scientific colleagues, the brochure was swiftly suppressed by the authorities. The present editors make no claims for the validity of Copeland's "translation." It must be remembered that the professor returned from Asia, his health, both mental and physical, broken by the terrible privations he endured in 1913, and that he died raving in an asylum only ten years after seeing his "translation" through press. His final manuscript, The Civilization of Mu: A Reconstruction in Light of Recent Discoveries, with a Synoptic Comparison of the R'lyeh Text and the Ponape Scripture (circa 1917 -1926), remains to this day unpublished—and unpublishable.
We have prefaced this extract from the Zanthu Tablets with a note from Copeland’s own introduction.
“Upon prolonged study I became firmly convinced that my initial impressions were thoroughly accurate, and that the Tablets were indeed inscribed in an elder hieratic variant of the primal Naacal language. It is regretful that, with the death of poor, much-maligned Churchward, the last man who could have possibly attempted a decent translation of so obscure a variant was lost to the scientific community. Hoping that a chance existed that the Colonel had left a key or some manner of Naacal glossary among his papers, I hastened to contact his estate and, with time and great cooperation which I am pleased to acknowledge here, a clue to the inscriptions was indeed unearthed in his files.
“What follows, however, is correctly termed a ‘conjectural’ translation, and to this qualification I should perhaps add 'fragmentary' as welclass="underline" for although the inscriptions are complete, my respect for the public sanity is such that I would not care to subject wholesome, healthy minds to the full depravity, the hideous blasphemies, set down by the hand of the long-dead, accursed wizard-priest of the Abomination Ythogtha, whose tomb I opened, perhaps unwisely, in 1913.
“I.et it be said now and in this place, once and for all, that the matter which I have named 'the Xothic legend-cycle'—which is to say, the mythsequence of the Xothic Triad (Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog)— has at its secret core a chaotic and cosmic blasphemy so appalling in its ultimate depravity and in the magnitude of its bearings upon human and prehuman evolution as to stun even the detached and dispassionate scholar."
THE innumerable iniquities of Yaa-Thobboth, hierophant of Ghatanothoa, the Monster on the Mount, I, Zanthu, wizard and last surviving priest of Ythogtha, the Abomination in the Abyss, have endured for long with uncomplaining and stoical fortitude. But this last, supreme, and ultimate affront I could not let pass in silence, nor could I forebear from the action I will describe.
For uncountable millennia, the fortunes of my cult had languished and waned, even as, during the same intervals of time, the rise to affluence and popularity of the rival cults which celebrate the vile Monstrosity that dwelleth ever atop the mysterious and untrodden heights of Yaddith-Gho had enjoyed an unbroken succession of triumphs. It was now many millennia since that legended Year of the Red Moon1, when the rash and impudent T’yog, high priest of the Old Ones, and votary of Shub-Niggurarh the Mighty Mother, sought with ultimate futility to whelm and break asunder for all time to come the power of Ghatanothoa, in which vain and perilous attempt the unfortunate T’yog came to so unthinkable and shuddersome an end that even that dread chronicle, the Ghorl Nigraal, did not dare whisper a single hint or slightest rumor of his fate.
It can easily be seen that the disastrous failure of the gallant, if incautious, T’yog was sufficient to overawe any other from making a similar attempt in all the ages since the Year of the Red Moon to my own epoch, for during the cycles which have lapsed from the era of T’yog to this day, none other has tried. And the rise to power and unquestioned authority of the cult of Ghatanothoa has been loathsomely smooth and rapid.
That this was, in very large part, the doing of Imash-Mo can easily be demonstrated. For upon the horrible demise of the unfortunate T'yog, gloatfully and hastily seizing upon the moment, the infamous Imash-Mo, who was high priest of Ghatanothoa in his day, proclaimed to all the Nine Kingdoms that his loathsome and noxious divinity was thus proven supreme over all the thousand gods of primordial and everlasting Mu. And, alas, Imash-Mo had long since gained ascendancy over the weak and easily swayed Thabou, king of the province of K’naa, wherein rose the demon-possessed mountain of Yaddith-Gho; and King Thabou hastened to ratify the supremacy of Ghatanothoa even over the might of Cthulhu, the Lord of R'lyeh, himself.
Lustrum by lustrum, cycle by cycle, the wealth, power, and following of the cult of Ythogtha declined thereafter, even as did all of the other of the thousand cults of primal Mu. In vain did my priestly predecessors warn that the vengeance of the affronted gods would someday smite the Nine Kingdoms of Mu, and mayhap trample all of the mighty continent beneath the green and seething waves of Ocean, as ancient prophecies reiterated was to be our eventual and transcendent Doom. But naught could avert or even retard the remorseless decline of the worship of Ythogtha.
WHEN I, in my turn, assumed the scarlet pontificals and the brazen rod of my office, in the Year of the Whispering Shadow2, I swore by the Gray Ritual of Khif, by the Vooric Sign, by the Weedy Monolith, and by the might and glory of potent and terrible Ythogtha, that my god should achieve His triumph and His revenge during my pontificate.
Alas, I had reckoned without the cunning and the ambition of Yaa-Thobboth! For no sooner had the brazen rod been set into my grasp and the Thirty-one Secret Rituals of Yhe been given over to my keeping, than the villainous high priest of Ghatanothoa let pass the ultimate and unforgivable affront against the dignity of my office and the splendor of my god.
For this Yaa-Thobboth had at length prevailed upon the palsied and enfeebled Shommog, monarch over K’naa. and a writ was proclaimed which set under ban and interdict any other form of worship of the Great Old Ones than that approved by the followers of Ghatanothoa. The copper gates of the temple of Shub-Niggurath were seated; the greenly lit adyta of Cthulhu were deserted; and, temple by temple, across the breadth of the Nine Kingdoms, the supreme power of Ghatanothoa the Monster on the Mount was proclaimed.
Now King Shommog was regnant over the province of K’naa while I and my few acolytes dwelt in the land of G’thuu to the north, beyond the River of Worms and the Carven Basalt Cliffs and the Catacombs of Thul. But great had the authority of K’naa grown in the eleven thousand years since the reign of King Thabou and the hierophancy of Imash-Mo, and in these moon-dim, latter days, the power of my land of G’thuu was shrunken and seldom did mine own monarch, the degenerate Nuggog-ying, dare oppose the will or whim of the King of K’naa. Thus it seemed inevitable that the last vestige of reverence for the Abomination in the Abyss should gutter and die. and in the very pontificate of one who had sworn by dread and terrible oaths to restore Him to the heights of His former and tremendous might.