You won't find "St. Toad" listed in The Lives of the Saints, nor is there a "Gospel according to St. Toad". But of course there is a "St. Toad's Church" mentioned in Lovecraft's sonnet-cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth. "

St. Toad's

"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" I heard him scream
As I plunged into those mad lanes that wind
In labyrinths obscure and undefined
South of the river where old centuries dream.
He was a furtive figure, bent and ragged,
And in a flash had staggered out of sight,
So still I burrowed onward in the night
Toward where more roof-lines rose, malign and jagged.

No guide-book told of what was lurking here ---
But now I heard another old man shriek:
"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" And growing weak,
I paused, when a third greybeard croaked in fear;
"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" Aghast, I fled ---
Till suddenly that black spire loomed ahead.

St. Toad's church is thus one of many enigmatic and evocative hints sprinkled throughout "Fungi from Yuggoth". No doubt it would be best simply to leave it at that and just savor the atmosphere of the poem.

But who can resist the temptation to speculate? Are there any hints elsewhere in Lovecraft's fiction that shed any light on the beatified batrachian? We are reminded of certain elements of "The Shadow over Innsmouth", with its "fish-frog" inhabitants (recall the "croaking" man in the poem). The amphibian ambiance of such a town would nicely accommodate our blessed saint. In fact, directly across from Innsmouth's Dagon Hall we find a church answering to the description of the one in the sonnet. The narrator is startled

by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street. . . . The sound came from a squat-towered stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was.

Notice the similarity to the sonnet: the "cracked chimes" and the "cracked bell". The old men of the poem are reminiscent of old Zadok Alien in "The Shadow over Innsmouth", who likewise warns the protagonist of the amphibian horrors to come. Note, by the way, that the church in Innsmouth is a more recent construction than the surrounding buildings; presumably it is a church built since the domination of the town by the Deep Ones. Thus it would have been designed and christened to reflect their own beliefs. Can it have been dubbed "St. Toad's"? To conclude this line of argument, it is perhaps worth noting that elsewhere in the sonnet-cycle Innsmouth is actually mentioned in connection with "chimes" and an "ancient spire".

Another possible Lovecraftian association would be that of Tsathoggua, a deity borrowed from Clark Ashton Smith. Both Smith and Lovecraft describe Tsathoggua as "toad-like". Smith makes him the object of worship in primordial Hyperborea, while Lovecraft places his cultus in "lightless N'kai" far below the surface of Oklahoma. It is not hard to imagine this pagan toad-god becoming camouflaged as a Christian saint.

Then again it is also possible that Lovecraft read Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and was charmed by the Bilbo Baggins-like character "Toad" who lived on an estate called "Toad Hall". "St. Toad's" might then be Lovecraft's eerie tribute to Grahame.

Lastly, we might call to mind Aleister Crowley. Some have tried to link Crowley and Lovecraft, unsuccessfully, we think. But there are occasional similarities between Crowley's metaphysics and Lovecraft's fiction, and one of them concerns St. Toad. One is hard pressed not to think of the St. Toad imagery when reading of the offensive and blasphemous rite whereby Crowley once baptized a toad with the name of Jesus of Nazareth and crucified it in order to exorcise from himself the last lingering bit of his oppressive fundamentalist upbringing. Crowley, ever the posturing megalomaniac, commemorated the event with a poem:

He had crucified a toad
In the basilick abode.
Muttering the Runes averse
Mad with many a mocking curse.

So when all has been said (and we have surely said more than the scant facts allow), the mystery of St. Toad still stands inviolate . . . "beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!"