Cthulhu

This article is about H. P. Lovecraft's fictional character. For the 2000 and the unreleased 2006 films, see Cthulhu (film).

Cthulhu and R'lyeh

Cthulhu (other spellings: Kutulu, Ktulu, Cthulu, Kthulhut, Thu Thu, Tulu, and many others) is a fictional entity created by horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu is often preceded by the epithet Great, Dead, or Dread.

Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as "Khlûl'hloo" or "Kathooloo" S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave several differing pronunciations on different occasions. According to Lovecraft, however, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.

Cthulhu debuted in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928) — though he makes minor appearances in a few other of Lovecraft's works. August Derleth used the creature's name to describe the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors, the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Call of Cthulhu

Main article: The Call of Cthulhu

The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu in "The Call of Cthulhu" are based on 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 and scaly body with rudimentary wings." 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."

When the creature finally appears in the story, it's said 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.

Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide cult centered in Arabia, with followers in regions as far-flung as Greenland, Louisiana, and New Zealand. 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."

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." This is often shortened to "Cthulhu fhtagn", which appears to mean "Cthulhu waits" or "Cthulhu dreams".

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.

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.

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." 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.

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."

Elsewhere in Lovecraft's fiction

Cthulhu makes several cameo appearances 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." But different Lovecraft stories and characters use the term "Old Ones" in widely different ways.

In At the Mountains of Madness, for example, the Old Ones are a species of extraterrestrials, also known as Elder Things, who were at war with Cthulhu and his relatives or allies. Human explorers in Antarctica discover an ancient city of the Elder Things and puzzle out a history from sculptural records:

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' civilisation, 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....

This all seems to occur before the Permian period (about 300 million years ago), and certainly before the Jurassic period (200 million years ago), in apparent contrast to "The Call of Cthulhu", where R'lyeh sinks after the rise of humanity.

The narrator of At the Mountains of Madness also 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.... The first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath." He notes, however, that "the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats." Other stories have the Elder Things' enemies repeat this cosmic framework.

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." That story suggests that Cthulhu is one of the entities worshipped by the alien Mi-Go race, and repeats the Elder Things' claim that the Mi-Go share his unknown material compostion. The story mentions in passing that some humans call the Mi-Go "the old ones".

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" establishes that Cthulhu is also worshipped by the nonhuman creatures known as Deep Ones.

According to correspondence between Lovecraft and fellow author Clark Ashton Smith, Cthulhu's parent is the androgynous deity Nagoob. Nagoob mated with the Outer God Yog-Sothoth to bear Cthulhu on the planet Vhoorl.

August Derleth

August Derleth, a literary protegé, 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.

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".

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.

Other writers

• Lin Carter, in his Xothic legend cycle, depicts Cthulhu of having mated with the quasi-female entity Idh-yaa on a planet near the double star Xoth. This spawned four offspring: Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, Zoth-Ommog, and Cthylla.
• The English horror writer Brian Lumley introduced an equally powerful, but questionably benevolent, "brother" to Cthulhu called Kthanid.
• Stephen King has suggested that Cthulhu represents "a gigantic, tentacle-equipped, killer vagina from beyond space and time."

See also

• Cthulhu in popular culture

References

• Akeley, Henry (Hallowmas 1982). "Cthul--Who?: How Do You Pronounce 'Cthulhu'?". Crypt of Cthulhu #9: A Pulp Thriller and Theological Journal. Vol. 2 No. 1. Retrieved February 19. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help) Robert M. Price (ed.), Bloomfield, NJ: Miskatonic University Press.
• Angell, George Gammell (Hallowmas 1982). "Cthulhu Elsewhere in Lovecraft". Crypt of Cthulhu #9: A Pulp Thriller and Theological Journal. Vol. 2 No. 1. Retrieved February 19. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help) Robert M. Price (ed.), Bloomfield, NJ: Miskatonic University Press.
• Burleson, Donald R. (1983). H.P. Lovecraft, A Critical Study. Westport, CT / London, England: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23255-5.
• Harms, Daniel (1998). "Cthulhu". The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana ((2nd ed.) ed.). Oakland, CA: Chaosium. pp. pp.64–7. ISBN 1-56882-119-0. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

— "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 0-313-31578-7. {{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 0-14-118234-2. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
• Lovecraft, Howard P. (1968). Selected Letters II. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-029-7.
• Lovecraft, Howard P. (1976). Selected Letters V. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-036-X.
• Mosig, Yozan Dirk W. (1997). Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at H. P. Lovecraft (1st printing ed.). West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press. ISBN 0-940884-90-9.
• Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon ((1st ed.) ed.). Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Pub. ISBN 1-56184-129-3.

Notes

The Call of Ktulu is a song on Metallica's Ride The Lightning Album

External links

• The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft
• Free Audio Book of The Call of Cthulhu
• www.cthulhu.org The Home Page for Evil
• "Calls For Cthulhu", A talk show with a puppet Cthulhu as host
• "The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu"
• Cthulhu Nation A Browsergame dealing with the Cthulhu Mythos
• "I CTHULHU", a short story by Neil Gaiman about Cthulhu's personal anxieties