There are other influences in the piece. I wanted to give a nod towards Arthur Machen’s Pan, and to the mysterious Baphomet of the Templars via Elphas Levi, but she is for the most part a sophisticated form of Astarte.
It was Lord Dunsany rather than H.P. Lovecraft that planted the seed of this sculpture in my mind. I was reading a short story entitled, Idle Days on the Yann, in which Lord Dunsany mentions Sheol Nugganoth, one of the ” frail affectionate gods” once loved by the heathen. The name sounded strangely familiar, for obvious reasons, and the few lines which mentioned the deity evoked something compelling yet nebulous.
I remembered Sheol Nugganoth when I was re-reading the Whisperer in Darkness, it added a little something to the text for me, and made me want to see what other traces of this enigmatic deity I could uncover.
Lovecraft does little to clarify the nature of Shub–Niggurath. She, or possibly he, remains ambiguous, and undescribed even as indescribable. I’m sure Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan, and Lord Dunsany’s Sheol Nugganoth, were lurking in at the back of H.P’s mind when he mentioned the Black Goat of the Woods, but I found one particular reference that crystallised for me the essence of Shubby and her thousand young.
There is a story called The Mound, which was at least partially ghost-written by H.P. Lovecraft, and which contains a reference to Shub-Niggurath.
“One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious. What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarring sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.”
So Shubby was a sophisticated form of Astarte. The mythology of the Ancient Near East is an obsession of mine, and I’m very fond of Astarte, by various names and in various forms. What came to mind was an image of that particular goddess in the form of a tree feeding her goat children. Suddenly everything clicked into place and I knew what I was going to sculpt.
There are other influences in the piece. I wanted to give a nod towards Arthur Machen’s Pan, and to the mysterious Baphomet of the Templars via Elphas Levi, but she is for the most part a sophisticated form of Astarte.
She sits on the black cube, a symbol of the All-Mother that first surfaced in neolithic Anatolia, and she has an eye for each of the seven “planets” of the ancient world. I wanted her to be linked to the stars and also the earth, as I believe she was for Mr Lovecraft. She had to be grounded, and anatomically credible, despite being utterly alien. She also had to embody abundance and fertility, which in part meant making her as sexy as possible. Making a goat sexy was probably the biggest challenge.