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“To the astrologers, they have been neglected. To the astronomers, they are a mere curiosity. We can only turn to the writers of science fiction to find any real treatment of their worth. Perhaps they sense that the truth of our asteroid field lies beyond the boundaries of the present day. Their only mistake is to think it lies only in our future and not in the forgotten past.” -- “An Introduction to Xandra” THE STARS ARE WITH YOU! by Le Novar of Xandra

What follows is an attempt to comb the various resources of the Cthulhu Mythos with the intention of providing some facts towards a ‘history’ of the Asteroid Field that exists in our solar system. It is in no way meant to be an exhaustive treatment of either the sources or of the possible manner in which these sources could be used. It is simply an attempt to link together the lore of the Mythos with the facts given to us through other sources. It is assumed that most readers will have at least a general knowledge of the Mythos and that a full elaboration of various Mythos Lore will not be necessary.

The first real linking of a Mythos connection with the asteroids and the planet which once inhabited that orbit goes to the author Brian Lumley. In his "In The Vaults Beneath" (1971) where the information is supposedly contained within the G'HARNE FRAGMENTS. Contained within the Fragments was a series of dots which turn out to be a detailed star map of our solar system and those stars further out of importance. Along with the map is what appears to be fragmentary discussions on each of these celestial locations. It is at this point that we learn that there once existed a planet within the orbit of today's asteroid field that had been known as Thyoph. And that its destruction had been caused by "an evil, sentient creature, using that which could only have been an atomic weapon of some sort as there was mention of what appeared to be a certain frightful "Nuclear Chaos."

Naturally, the interpretation for the Mythos scholar is that this "Nuclear Chaos" is none other than the Sultan of the Fiery Eye, Azathoth. Indeed, it seems that Lumley makes much of the fact that Lovecraft described Azathoth as a "Nuclear Chaos." But such a rush to judgment is not necessary. We must preceded merely with the facts, bare-boned as they are. For we could take the quote to mean that while the "Nuclear Chaos" was responsible for the world's destruction, it was not the "evil sentient creature" spoken of in the Fragments. And that would seem to be the logical way to go since Azathoth can be called many things, but 'sentient' seems to be stretching it.

So what happened? What is the full story of Thyoph? Let's dig a little further.

Our next clue comes from Lumley's novel, ELYSIA, where we are told of the Azathi, the rare and fearsome children of Azathoth. As the character Ardatha Ell puts it, "While Azathoth was ... a true power without sentience, still he spawned others which had sentience: he was not only, in a sense, the Father of all 'life' as we know it, but also of certain thermal, rather thermo-nuclear beings."

Mercifully, we are told that all such beings are born with such madness and such self-destructive tendencies, that they rarely survive for more than a few moments after their births and are quickly reabsorbed into the chaos that is their parent.

Yet even so, there were those Azathi born and survived their own impulses towards self-annihilation. In ELYSIA, Lumley introduces three of these Azathi and implies that there could be more somewhere hidden within the silent corners of space. So as in all good-natured speculation and consistancy needs, we are going to pick up the ball and run with it. The Azathi provide us with an evil sentient creature (literally, for they are created by Azathoth) that is capable of using "Nuclear Chaos." And our next step is to discover if there is any supporting evidence, which thankfully there is.

Keith Herber's SPAWN OF AZATHOTH fits our needs perfectly. We are given an Azathi and a description of how the Azathi destroyed the planet Thyoph. It goes like this...

A few billion years ago, long before the concept of history and record keeping occurred to a thinking being upon Earth, Azathoth gave birth to an viable Azathi that has come to be known within the ancient occultic literature as He Who Passeth In Darkness and to the scientists of today as the hypothetical object Nemesis, the Star of Retribution. Ten times the mass of Jupiter, Nemesis encountered the gravitational pull of Sol, our sun, about a billion years ago. Allowing itself to become ensnared within an elongated orbit, Nemesis settled down and seethed in madness. Its furthest point being a full 2.4 light-years away from the sun and its nearest point being half a light-year away, Nemesis shouldn't have been nothing more than the cause of unusual gravitational effects upon the outer planets every twenty-six million years. Unfortunately for us, the solar system is surrounded by the Oort cloud, a spherical region of space that contains trillions of inactive comets. When Nemesis passes at its closest point to our sun and therefore our Earth, it jostles and sets into motion hundreds of comets and meteors that shower upon the planets with death-dealing blows. Yet this is not all, for if this was Nemesis' only contribution to the terrors of space, it could be anticipated and accounted for. What we must not forget is that Nemesis is alive and as such procreates. Occassionally, Nemesis releases a seed or egg into space that, if it finds fertile ground, will develop into a new Azathi. It is these seeds that represent the most danger since a comet or meteor may destroy millions of species, a seed will annihilate the entire existence of the planet. And as we are told within the text of SPAWN OF AZATHOTH, "Our solar system's original fifth world was so parasitized. Its remnants compose the asteroid belt."

What we therefore have is a situation where a seed from an Azathi contaminated Thyoph by burrowing into its core and feeding off the material planet until it breaks through the crust and destroys it and any inhabitants upon it. And that brings us to our next goal, to force J.B.Lee's fiction kicking and screaming into the mold.

Let's look at the facts that Mr. Lee presents us through the mouthpiece of Le Novar, a.k.a. Nick Calvert.

(From "His Hour Upon the Stage") Thyoph is called Xandra. They take the symbol of the Tripple Crescent as their own. Xandriac magi-technology consisted of items such as the Clawed Crystal and presumably other artifacts connected with the manipulation of time and "spirit." There are examples of Xandriac souls being capable of inhabiting present day human beings. The society appears to be a meritocracy with a religious devotion to a form of Nyarlathotep.

(From "Genuine Article") The planet Xandra was destroyed by "warring forces from Yuggoth and Shaggai."

So what can we do with this? Obviously, there several different routes we could take with this information. We could simply dismiss the information provided up above as being the mad ravings of Nick Calvert, a Kalamazoo, Michigan native with too much time and energy on his hands. Or we could take them as being the authentic record of a race that once dwelled upon a fifth planet between Mars and Jupiter. I'm going to go with the second option for the time being with the expectation that Le Novar is not infallible, but merely reporting events as he sees and knows them.

We can easily clear up the Xandra vs.Tyoph problem by merely allowing Tyoph being the name given to the fifth planet by, presumably, the Elder Things. (This being due to the Elder Things having written the G'HARNE FRAGMENTS where the name Tyoph presumably originates from. Interestingly the origin of the name among human civilizations would have to be the PNAKOTIC MANUSCRIPTS and thus strengthening the argument that the Manuscripts, while attributed to the Great Race, is actually partially composed of works from the Elder Things.) While Xandra is the name given to the planet by either its inhabitants or one of the most advanced cultures upon the planet. (I'm guessing that the name Xandra is more of a "close fit" rather than the actual name since clues suggest that the Xandriac race isn't human and therefore unlikely to be using human language.) No doubt Le Novar spends a few paragraphs in his THE STARS ARE WITH YOU! book discussing this problem to the interested reader's satisfaction.

The biggest stumbling block is Le Novar's claim that the planet's destruction is caused by "warring forces from Yuggoth and Shaggai." Or is it a stumbling block? According to SPAWN OF AZATHOTH, the Mi-Go use the Azathi seeds as energy sources. Interestingly, the Shan (a.k.a. The Insects from Shaggai) use Azathoth himself as the source of power in their civilization and, most importantly, their conical star ships. Now imagine the following series of events. A Shan ship lands on Xandra. Either through natural causes or the intervention of the Xandriac adepts, the Shan discover that their ship's connection to Azathoth is lost. They are in need of power. At that moment, a seed from Nemesis is about to land upon the planet. The Mi-Go, having recently arrived in our solar system, conclude that the seed would be extremely useful for their species. Especially considering how the war's between species on Earth makes collection of essential minerals difficult and dangerous. When the seed lands on Xandra, three forces find themselves fighting over the seed. Xandriac, Mi-Go and Shan all attempt to recover the seed and either destroy it or use it for power. In the confusion, the seed is unhampered in its seeking of the planet's core and the Xandriac race suddenly finds itself faced with a dying world. They quickly use their magi-technology of time and "spirit" to substantialize their intelligence and spread throughout time to inhabit the bodies of humans and perhaps other species. Their goal to preserve their racial culture and perhaps even discover a means of restoring the Xandriac race to its original state of being.

Yet we are not quite finished with our asteroids yet. While we have identified the culprit and the possible circumstances for the crime but not how the destruction of Thyoph actually took place. For that information, we have to explore the human side of the asteroid equation.

On New Years Day, 1801, a Sicilian monk named Giuseppe Piazzi identified an object in the sky which was smaller than a planet but large enough to be seen on Earth. A year later, a German scientist named Heinrich Olbers discovered another and soon it became the hot trend among astronomers of the time to hunt down and name asteroids. One man, Johann Palisa, was able to locate a total of 120 individual asteroids. While there were astronomers looking towards the sky, others were busy trying to figure out how this asteroid belt came into being. Naturally, one of the first theories advanced was that they had originated from a planet which had once been in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. The problem was an absence of enough mass. If all the asteroids were put together, the resulting object would be smaller than our own moon. Various solutions were provided to account for the missing mass. One was to suggest that the planet had been small. Yet the distribution of the asteroids themselves seemed to suggest a massive destruction of a larger body. If the original planet had been small, a cataclysmic event of such magnitude would have eliminated any sign of the planet. Other theories suggested that much of the planet's mass had simply been knocked out of orbit during the impact of a large meteor. Still, this didn't seem to fit the facts either since such a powerful meteor would have left some mark on the inner planet and perhaps even have caused a flood of comet activity in a short and observable orbit. And it is at this point, amid the debates as to how one could reconcile the facts with theory that our next Mythos link occurs.

Born in 1846 in western England, James Moriarty showed prodigious ability at mathematical equations at an early age. The oldest of three boys, Moriarty quickly moved through the school system and at the young age of 21 published a treatise on the binomial theorem which was so impressive, it won him a university professorship. Eventually, in 1872, Moriarty took on the task of trying to work out the problem of asteroids. What caught Moriarty’s interest was what was known as the Titus-Bode rule. In 1766, Johann Daniel Titius published an interesting discovery concerning the correlation between a sequence of numbers and the distribution of planets. Take, Titius said, the sequence of 0,3,6,12,24 and so on where each number is obtained by doubling its predecessor. Now add 4 to each number and divide the results by 10. This produces the sequence 0.4,0.7,1,1.6,2.8 etc. If you take the Sun-Earth distance as 1, the distances between the inner planets and the Sun are exactly the same as in the sequence. What’s interesting, however, is that there was no planet at the distance of 2.8. This was where Johann Bode came into the discussion. For Bode, the lack of a planet at the 2.8 distance meant that astronomers should be looking for the missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. It was the discovery of Giuseppe Piazzi of the first asteroid that gave an object at the anticipated distance and showed some value in the Titus-Bode rule.

Moriarty was fascinated by the idea that if mathematics could predict the existence of a missing planet, then it should be capable of telling us something about that planet. The resulting work, THE DYNAMICS OF AN ASTEROID, attempted to mathematically describe what the current distribution of asteroids could tell us about the planet (which Moriarty simply called the "Asteroid" distinguishing it from its cousins by the mere unimaginative capitalization) and what would have been the cause of that planet's destruction. The book was so filled with rarefied mathematics that it is said no scientist on the Continent was capable of completely understanding it. Moriarty's conclusions stated that to account for the distribution and the lack of proper mass, we are forced to conclude that the Asteroid planet was destroyed from the inside, not from the exterior as the common meteor collision theory went. Thus working backwards from the asteroid orbits to the gravitational effects to the explosive forces, Moriarty proved that the Asteroid planet simply had to be bigger. And if it was, and the theory of a planet-origin of the asteroids was true, then something had to account for the missing mass. Moriarty's genius rested in the theory that the mass had been consumed through the "immanence of energy in the phenomenon of mass." In other words, Moriarty was on the verge of discovering fission and the instability of the atom. Moriarty theorized that it was the interior of the Asteroid planet that ate away at the mass and eventually caused the entire world to explode into pieces. And it is exactly at this spot that we encounter the Mythos.

In Chaosium's FIELD GUIDE TO CTHULHU MONSTERS, we are told that "One prominent line of scientific thought argues that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was formed when Azathoth shattered the planet previously in that orbit." And one of the sources given for that theory is Professor James Moriarty's THE DYNAMICS OF AN ASTEROID. So what does the book say about Azathoth? Not much really. If we recall that at the time of the book's writing and distribution (1872-1875) nuclear physics was not even conceivable, we can see that as Moriarty looked for some form of precedent for his theory, he'd be forced into using examples from mythology. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that he'd choose the most appropriate example of Azathoth. Obviously, at this time in his life, Moriarty wouldn't have taken the Mythos as being a true representation of reality. And he also wouldn't have had any inkling of the Azathi either. (Later in life, however, Moriarty hit upon the inter-relationships of spatial dimensions and, through a reading of Wormius' NECRONOMICON "borrowed" from the British Museum, eventually came to accept the Mythos as real. But that's another story. See "The Yorkshire Horrors" by William A. Barton.)

Moriarty's pamphlet was suppressed due to its controversial section on how the same explosion that occurred on the Asteroid planet could happen on Earth. (The section where Moriarty goes into detail about how it could be artificially brought about was seen by most academia at the time as being of bad taste. See, "The Ultimate Crime" by Isaac Asimov.)

So there we are. I've no doubt missed a few other references in the Mythos to the asteroids and the Asteroid planet. Little is known about the state of Thyoph within the Dreamlands where it has become known as The Ghost Planet. Where visits to his mist-filled surface is considered by travelers to be a very uncomfortable experience. The inhabitants all go about their business as if you are not there. They even walk through you if you block their path! Some have speculated that they are merely residue images with no corporeality. Creations of the planet's original inhabitant's emotional trauma from some experience that happened centuries ago. The souls of now-dead people who maintain and replay their last twenty-four hours. Others however think that the original inhabitants ARE these images. That, as a means of defending itself from attack, the inhabitants have merely changed themselves and their possessions into a incorporeal state. Whatever the answer is, the truth of the matter may be unsolvable. Especially those stories of people who have visited the planet only to disappear and be later seen as one of the ghosts who inhabit the planet! Perhaps we can take comfort in the thought that such stories have never been proven to be from trustworthy individuals.

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