"For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zhothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life … And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla."
—The Book of Eibon
Ubbo-Sathla, also known as the Unbegotten Source and the Demiurge, is one of the ancient beings known collectively as the Outer Gods.
It is described as a huge protoplasmic mass resting in a grotto deep beneath the frozen earth. The being is of a monstrous fecundity, spontaneously generating primordial single-celled organisms that pour unceasingly from its shapeless form. It guards a set of stone tablets believed to contain the knowledge of the Elder Gods. Ubbo-Sathla is said to have spawned the prototypes of all forms of life on Earth; though whatever its pseudopods touch is forever devoid of life. Ubbo-Sathla is destined to someday reabsorb all living things on Earth. Ubbo-Sathla possibly dwells in Y'qaa.
The being may also dwell in Mount Voormithadreth and may have spawned another of its residents, the being Abhoth, whose form and nature is very similar. This similarity has led some writers to speculate that Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth are the same entity viewed at different epochs under different names. The tablets that Ubbo-Sathla guards have been oft sought by sorcerers, though no sorcerer has yet succeeded in acquiring them.
Description
A colossal mass of protoplasmic goo, Ubbo-Sathla is a creature which has dwelt on Earth since its formation. Constantly spewing forth a plethora of primitive organisms, some believe that this creature was the source of all life on the planet, and that one day it will emerge to re-absorb all of its biomass. Interestingly, despite its prolific generation of new life, anything this horrific monstrosity actually touches will thereafter remain bereft of life for all eternity.
Based on the existing information to date, it is hypothesized that the Elder Things utilized both the strange ultra-stellar stone tablets and some of Ubbo-Sathla to create life on Earth. Depending on when the Elder Things arrived on early Earth they may have created all life on Earth or bio-engineered eukaryotic cells from simple prokaryotic cells (bacteria) that may have been directly produced by Ubbo-Sathla. The stone tablets may have provided the recipe, while Ubbo-Sathla may have been the raw material. It is said that Ubbo-Sathla was deposited onto the Earth by unknown gods, which may have been from a previous or parallel universe. Thus, the fact that over millennia the Elder Things “forgot” how to create life may have been due to them simply misplacing the stone tablets and/or not having enough of Ubbo-Sathla to create additional life. Further it was hypothesized that the proto-shoggoth may be the last remaining fragment or part of Ubbo-Sathla; a feral, uncontrollable force from the universe’s distant past that even the Elder Things could not control and therefore feared.
Even though we humans have not read the ultra-stellar stone tablets, we may not be that far away from creating life. The Miller-Urey experiments in the 1950’s, demonstrated that simulating the Precambrian atmosphere and ocean in laboratory glassware, essentially combining water, nitrogen and carbon monoxide with electrical sparks to mimic lightning, results in the production of a brownish sludge that contains sugars, amino acids (building blocks of proteins) and nucleotides (building blocks of nucleic acids) (The History of Life, A Very Short Introduction, by M.J. Benton, 2008). The stuff of life made in a bottle. Is this stuff essentially what Ubbo-Sathla was made of? A semi-sentient form of bio-matter that was deposited onto ancient Earth by unknown beings?
Ubbo-Sathla may have been a collection of a more advance version of protocells, utilized, manipulated and experimented upon by the Elder Things.
Ubbo-Sathla ("The Unbegotten Source", "The Demiurge") is described as a huge protoplasmic mass resting in a grotto deep beneath the frozen earth. The being is of a monstrous fecundity, spontaneously generating primordial single-celled organisms that pour unceasingly from its shapeless form. It guards a set of stone tablets believed to contain the knowledge of the Elder Gods.
Ubbo-Sathla is said to have spawned the prototypes of all forms of life on Earth, though whatever its pseudopods touch is forever devoid of life. Ubbo-Sathla is destined to someday reabsorb all living things on Earth.
Ubbo-Sathla possibly dwells in gray-litten Y'qaa underneath Mount Voormithadreth, and may have spawned another of its residents, the being Abhoth, whose form and nature is very similar. This similarity has led some writers to speculate that Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth are the same entity viewed at different epochs under different names.[4][5] The tablets that Ubbo-Sathla guards have been oft sought by sorcerers, though no sorcerer has yet succeeded in acquiring them.[6]
Ubbo-Sathla is said to be the guardian of a set of tablets carved from star stone which contain the combined celestial knowledge of the Elder Gods.
History
Nothing is known of the origins of Ubbo-Sathla, but it is currently imprisoned somewhere beneath the Earth’s crust, waiting for its release so that it may consume every living thing on the planet.
"This wizard, who was mighty among sorcerers, had found a cloudy stone, orb-like and somewhat flattened at the ends, in which he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth's beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime … But of that which he beheld, Zon Mezzamalech left little record; and people say that he vanished presently, in a way that is not known; and after him the cloudy crystal was lost."
He had acquired the stone in dubitable ways, from a more than sinister source. It was unique and without fellow in any land or time. In its depths, all former years, all things that have ever been, were supposedly mirrored, and would reveal themselves to the patient visionary. And through the crystal, Zon Mezzamalech had dreamt to recover the wisdom of the gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultra-stellar stone; and the tablets were guarded in the primal mire by the formless, idiotic demiurge, Ubbo-Sathla. Only by means of the crystal could he hope to find and read the tablets.
There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.
And there, to the goal of a forgotten search, was drawn the thing that had been—or would sometime be—Paul Tregardis and Zon Mezzamalech. Becoming a shapeless eft of the prime, it crawled sluggishly and obliviously across the fallen tablets of the gods, and fought and ravened blindly with the other spawn of Ubbo-Sathla.