Azathoth

Azathoth is a deity in the Cthulhu Mythos and Dream Cycle stories of H. P. Lovecraft and other authors. He is the ruler of the Outer Gods.

H. P. Lovecraft

Inspiration

The first recorded mention of Azathoth was in a note Lovecraft wrote to himself in 1919 that read simply, "AZATHOTH—hideous name". Mythos editor Robert M. Price argues that Lovecraft could have combined the biblical names Anathoth (Jeremiah's home town) and Azazel (a desert demon to whom the scapegoat was sacrificed—mentioned by Lovecraft in "The Dunwich Horror"). Price also points to the alchemical term "Azoth", which was used in the title of a book by Arthur Edward Waite, the model for the wizard Ephraim Waite in Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep".

Another note Lovecraft made to himself later in 1919 refers to an idea for a story: "A terrible pilgrimage to seek the nighted throne of the far daemon-sultan Azathoth." In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft ties this plot germ to Vathek, a novel by William Beckford about a supernatural caliph. Lovecraft's attempts to work this idea into a novel floundered (a 500-word fragment survives, first published under the title "Azathoth" in the journal Leaves in 1938), although Lovecraftian scholar Will Murray suggests that Lovecraft recycled the idea into his Dream Cycle novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written in 1926.

Azathoth (disambiguation)

Azathoth may refer to:

Great retrosnub icosidodecahedron

In geometry, the great retrosnub icosidodecahedron or great inverted retrosnub icosidodecahedron is a nonconvex uniform polyhedron, indexed as U₇₄. It is given a Schläfli symbol s{3/2,5/3}.

Cartesian coordinates

Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a great retrosnub icosidodecahedron are all the even permutations of

with an even number of plus signs, where

and

where τ = (1+√5)/2 is the golden mean and ξ is the smaller positive real root of ξ³−2ξ=−1/τ, namely

or approximately 0.3264046. Taking the odd permutations of the above coordinates with an odd number of plus signs gives another form, the enantiomorph of the other one.

See also

External links