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Revision as of 14:48, 21 October 2009

For other uses, see Cthulhu (disambiguation).
An interpretation of Cthulhu in the sunken city of R'lyeh

Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity created by horror author H. P. Lovecraft in 1926, first appearing in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu" when it was published in Weird Tales in 1928.

Cthulhu is one of the central Great Old Ones of the Lovecraft Mythos. It is often cited for the extreme descriptions given of its hideous appearance, its gargantuan size, and the abject terror that it evokes. Cthulhu is often referred to in science fiction and fantasy circles as a tongue-in-cheek shorthand for extreme horror or evil. [1]

After its first appearance in "The Call of Cthulhu", Cthulhu makes a few minor appearances in other Lovecraft works.[2] August Derleth, a correspondent of Lovecraft's, used the creature's name to identify the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors, the Cthulhu Mythos.

Spelling and pronunciation

Cthulhu has also been spelled as Tulu, Clulu, Clooloo, Cthulu, Cighulu, Cathulu, Kathulu, Kutulu, Q’thulu, Ktulu, Kthulhut, Kulhu, Kutunluu, Cuitiliú, Thu Thu,[3] and in many other ways. It is often preceded by the epithet Great, Dead, or Dread.

Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as "Khlûl'-hloo" (IPA: /ˈkɬʊl.ɬuː/ ?).[4] S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave several differing pronunciations on different occasions.[5] According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.[6] Long after Lovecraft's death, the pronunciation kə-THOO-loo (IPA: /kəˈθuːluː/) became common, and the game Call of Cthulhu endorsed it.

Physicality and origins

While the birthplace of Cthulhu is not definitively established, it is suggested that his birthplace is that of the planet Vhoorl; with his advent somehow connected with supernovae: "I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth."[7] It is also suggested in both “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” that Cthulhu is made up of some unknown and foreign matter.

The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu appear in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu", and are based on the statues of the creature. One, constructed by an artist after a series of baleful dreams, is said to have "yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings."[8] Another, recovered by police from a raid on a murderous cult, "represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."[9]

When the creature finally appears, the story says that the "thing cannot be described", but it is called "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", with "flabby claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers." The phrase "a mountain walked or stumbled" gives a sense of the creature's scale.[10]

Cult of Cthulhu

Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide doomsday cult centered in Arabia, with followers in regions as far-flung as Greenland and Louisiana.[11] There are leaders of the cult "in the mountains of China" who are said to be immortal. Cthulhu is described by some of these cultists as the "great priest" of "the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky."[12]

Look up ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The cult is noted for chanting its horrid phrase or ritual: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," which translates as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."[13] This is often shortened to "Cthulhu fhtagn," which might possibly mean "Cthulhu waits," "Cthulhu dreams,"[14] or "Cthulhu waits dreaming." [15]

One cultist, known as Old Castro, provides the most elaborate information given in Lovecraft's fiction about Cthulhu. The Great Old Ones, according to Castro, had come from the stars to rule the world in ages past.

They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape...but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.

— [16]

Castro points to the "much-discussed couplet" from Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon:

That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.

— [17]

Castro explains the role of the Cthulhu Cult: When the stars have come right for the Great Old Ones, "some force from outside must serve to liberate their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented them from making an initial move."[16] At the proper time,

the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth....Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

— [18]

Castro reports that the Great Old Ones are telepathic and "knew all that was occurring in the universe." They were able to communicate with the first humans by "moulding their dreams," thus establishing the Cthulhu Cult, but after R'lyeh had sunk beneath the waves, "the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse."[19]

Additionally, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" establishes that Cthulhu is also worshipped by the nonhuman creatures known as Deep Ones.[20] While “The Whisperer in Darkness” establishes that Cthulhu is one of many deities worshiped by the Mi-Go.

Star-spawn of Cthulhu

The star-spawn of Cthulhu (or Cthulhi), although not extensively described in Lovecraft's works, are depicted as sharing physical characteristics similar to that of Cthulhu himself; although their overall size is far smaller. The narrator of At the Mountains of Madness notes that "the Cthulhu spawn...seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we know than was the substance of the Antarctic Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space.... " suggest that they too, like Cthulhu, have bodies made of materials foreign to Earth.

While the particulars of their relationship with Cthulhu are unknown, it is clear that they arrived on Earth with him, where they constructed the city of R'lyeh. Although it is said that they continue to dwell in the sunken city of R'lyeh, it has also been rumored that a few them escaped this city's fate, and can be found in hidden places on Earth.

In "At the Mountains of Madness" the "Spawn of Cthulhu" wage a great war against the Elder Things after arriving on Earth. (See below).

Elsewhere in Lovecraft's fiction

Cthulhu is mentioned elsewhere in Lovecraft's fiction, sometimes described in ways that appear to contradict information given in "The Call of Cthulhu". For example, rather than including Cthulhu among the Great Old Ones, a quotation from the Necronomicon in "The Dunwich Horror" says of the Old Ones, "Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly."[21] But different Lovecraft stories and characters use the term "Old Ones" in widely different ways.

For example, in his 1931 novella “At the Mountains of Madness”, the “Old Ones” refers to a species of extraterrestrials also known as the Elder Things. In this piece, a group of human explorers discover a lost city of the Elder Things deep in the Antarctic mountains. Within this ancient city, a series of hieroglyphic murals depict a great conflict between the Elder Things and the star-spawn of Cthulhu:

With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began.... Another race--a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu--soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea.... Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands.... [T]he antarctic remained the centre of the Old Ones' civilization, and all the discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were once again supreme on the planet....

— [22]

As the narrator of “At the Mountains of Madness” notes, "the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats."[23] This “cosmic framework” serves as an important element of other stories written by Lovecraft. In "The Whisperer in Darkness", for example, one character refers to "the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth--the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles--which are hinted at in the Necronomicon."

According to correspondence between Lovecraft and fellow author James F. Morton, Cthulhu's parent is the deity Nug, itself the offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath. Lovecraft includes a fanciful family tree in which he himself descends from Cthulhu via Shaurash-ho, Yogash the Ghoul, K'baa the Serpent, and Ghoth the Burrower.

August Derleth & the Cthulhu mythos

August Derleth, a literary protégé and founder of the publishing house that first printed Lovecraft's works, wrote several stories in the Cthulhu Mythos (a term he coined) that dealt with Cthulhu, both before and after Lovecraft's death. In "The Return of Hastur", written in 1937, Derleth proposes two groups of opposed cosmic entities,

the Old or Ancient Ones, the Elder Gods, of cosmic good, and those of cosmic evil, bearing many names, and themselves of different groups, as if associated with the elements and yet transcending them: for there are the Water Beings, hidden in the depths; those of Air that are the primal lurkers beyond time; those of Earth, horrible animate survivors of distant eons.

— [24]

According to Derleth's scheme, "Great Cthulhu is one of the Water Beings". Derleth indicated that "the Water Beings oppose those of Air"--a departure from traditional elemental theory, in which water and fire were opposed—and depicted Cthulhu as engaged in an age-old arch-rivalry with a designated Air elemental, Hastur the Unspeakable, whom he describes as Cthulhu's "half-brother".[25]

Based on this framework, Derleth wrote a series of stories, collected as The Trail of Cthulhu, about the struggle of Dr. Laban Shrewsbury and his associates against Cthulhu and his minions, culminating, in "The Black Island" (1952), with the atomic bombing of R'lyeh, which Derleth has moved to the vicinity of Ponape. Derleth describes Cthulhu in that story as

a thing which was little more than a protoplasmic mass, from the body of which a thousand tentacles of every length and thickness flailed forth, from the head of which, constantly altering shape from an amorphous bulge to a simulacrum of a man's head, a single malevolent eye appeared.

— [26]

Derleth's interpretations are not universally accepted by enthusiasts of Lovecraft's work, and indeed are criticized by many for injecting a stereotypical conflict between equal forces of objective good and evil into Lovecraft's strictly amoral continuity. [27]

Artistic imagery

Cthulhu has been depicted in a parody of the Ichthys bumper ornament.

Cthulhu has served as direct inspiration for many modern artists and sculptors. Prominent artists that produced renderings of this creature include Paul Carrick, Stephen Hickman, Kevin Evans, Dave Carson, Francois Launet and Ursula Vernon. Multiple sculptural depictions of Cthulhu exist, one of the most noteworthy being Stephen Hickman's Cthulhu Statue which has been featured in the Spectrum annual,[28] and is exhibited in display cabinets in the John Hay Library of Brown University of Providence. This statue of Cthulhu often serves as a separate object of inspiration for many works, most recent of which are the Cthulhu Worshiper Amulets manufactured by a Russian jeweler. For some time, replicas of Hickman's Cthulhu Statuette were produced by Bowen Designs.

Call of Cthulhu fiction

The character of Cthulhu and the mythos that surrounds him has come to inspire a great number of works, some of which are listed below.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ http://danharms.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/humor-and-cthulhu/ Daniel Harm's blog entry on humor and the Cthulhu mythos
  2. ^ "Cthulhu Elsewhere in Lovecraft", Crypt of Cthulhu #9.
  3. ^ Harms, "Cthulhu", "PanChulhu", The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, p. 64.
  4. ^ Lovecraft said that "the first syllable [of Khlûl'-hloo is] pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness." H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters V, pp. 10 – 11.
  5. ^ S. T. Joshi, note 9 to "The Call of Cthulhu", The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
  6. ^ "Cthul-Who?: How Do You Pronounce 'Cthulhu'?", Crypt of Cthulhu #9
  7. ^ "Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"". Mythostomes.com. 2007-04-09. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  8. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 127.
  9. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", p. 134.
  10. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", pp. 152-153.
  11. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", pp. 133-141, 146.
  12. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", p. 139.
  13. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu," p. 136.
  14. ^ Will Murray, "Prehuman Language in Lovecraft", in Black Forbidden Things, Robert M. Price, ed., p. 42.
  15. ^ Marsh, Philip "R'lyehian as a Toy Language — on psycholinguistics"
  16. ^ a b Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu," p. 140.
  17. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", p. 141. The couplet appeared earlier in Lovecraft's story "The Nameless City", in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, p. 99.
  18. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu," p. 141.
  19. ^ Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", pp. 140-141.
  20. ^ Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", pp. 337, 367.
  21. ^ Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", The Dunwich Horror and Others, p. 170.
  22. ^ Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, in At the Mountains of Madness, p. 66.
  23. ^ Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 68.
  24. ^ August Derleth, "The Return of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, Robert M. Price, ed., p. 256.
  25. ^ Derleth, "The Return of Hastur", pp. 256, 266.
  26. ^ August Derleth, "The Black Island", The Cthulhu Cycle, Robert M. Price, ed., p. 83.
  27. ^ Bloch, Robert, "Heritage of Horror", The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre
  28. ^ Burnett, Cathy "Spectrum No. 3:The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art"

References

  • Bloch, Robert (1982). "Heritage of Horror". The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (1st ed.). Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-35080-4.
  • Burleson, Donald R. (1983). H. P. Lovecraft, A Critical Study. Westport, CT / London, England: Greenwood Press. ISBN.
  • Burnett, Cathy (1996). Spectrum No. 3:The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art. Nevada City, CA, 95959 USA: Underwood Books. ISBN 1-887424-10-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  • Harms, Daniel (1998). "Cthulhu". The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana ((2nd ed.) ed.). Oakland, CA: Chaosium. pp. 64–7. ISBN.
 — "Idh-yaa", p. 148. Ibid.
 — "Star-spawn of Cthulhu", pp. 283 – 4. Ibid.
  • Joshi, S. T. (2001). An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.) (ed.). The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. London, UK; New York, NY: Penguin Books. ISBN. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help); External link in |chapter= (help)
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. (1968). Selected Letters II. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN.
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. (1976). Selected Letters V. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN-X.
  • Marsh, Philip. R'lyehian as a Toy Language — on psycholinguistics. Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085 USA: Philip Marsh.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  • Mosig, Yozan Dirk W. (1997). Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at H. P. Lovecraft (1st printing ed.). West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press. ISBN.
  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon ((1st ed.) ed.). Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Pub. ISBN.
  • "Other Lovecraftian Products", The H.P. Lovecraft Archive
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