by Donald Tyson
Then a great catastrophe occurred. The rays of the stars in the heavens became poisonous to Cthulhu and his spawn. It seems likely that it also became poisonous to a number of other cosmic beings of a similar nature, forcing them to withdraw from the Earth. The alien substance that composed their bodies could not tolerate the shifting alignment of the constellations, or perhaps it was the arrangement of the planets-the histories that tell of the event are not clear on exactly how the stars or planets (which in ancient times were known as wandering stars) went wrong, only that a transformation in the pattern of the night sky forced Cthulhu to place his spawn into a state of suspended animation from which only he had the power to awaken them.
He retired inside the protective walls of his great house and placed himself in a similar hibernation that was indistinguishable from death, except that he remained aware and dreamed strange dreams, sending his thoughts across the surface of the world to command his worshippers as before. The death-like sleep protected him. Even as the rays of the malign stars destroyed his substance, his dreaming mind rebuilt it and renewed it, so that his body was perpetually reborn. Cthulhu became dependent on his worshippers to open the door of his house from the outside and liberate him, once the stars again came right in their turnings.
Cthulhu could not foresee that a geological event would occur that would sink the island of R'lyeh to the bottom of the Pacific. The miles of seawater between him and his worshippers acted as a barrier to his projected telepathic commands, severing the control he held over them. He could no longer summon them at will to R'lyeh to open the door of his great house, which in any case was unreachable beneath the crushing weight of the ocean. He remained aware of what transpired on the Earth, but was trapped and helpless. It is perhaps to this condition that the enigmatic couplet in the Necronomicon, written by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, alludes:
A sentence written in the ancient language of the Great Old Ones describes Cthulhu's frustrating suspension between being and nonbeing: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. It may be translated, "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." These words were chanted by the members of the Cthulhu cult in their rituals, for his cult survived even though his mental control over its members was cut off by the miles of intervening ocean water. A shorter form of chant used by the cult was Cthulhu fhtagn, which was not translated by Lovecraft, but which may mean "Cthulhu waits dreaming."
The members of the Cthulhu cult assert that they worship the Great Old ones who came from the sky before there were human beings. They do not know if Cthulhu resembles these Old Ones, because no man has ever seen them. All of this race has vanished, either beneath the ground or beneath the waves, but in the first dawn of humanity their dead bodies revealed their secrets in dreams to their human worshippers.
In The Call of Cthulhu, the sleeping alien is described by his cult as a "great priest," but whether he is considered to be the great priest of the cultists, or of the dreaming Old Ones, or of the Cthulhu spawn, is not completely clear. The obvious assumption is that Cthulhu is the priest of the Cthulhu spawn that lie dreaming in their stone houses around his mountain on sunken R'lyeh. Perhaps a better description of his role to the spawn would be magician or even scientist. He cast the suspended animation over his spawn that protects them from the malign stars, and only he has the power to lift it. Whether it was done by prayers, magic, or alien science, who can say? These are human distinctions and do not apply to the Old Ones.
The Cthulhu spawn are probably not the same as the Old Ones, because the spawn are described in At the Mountains of Madness as octopi, but the Cthulhu cult asserts in The Call of Cthulhu that no man has ever seen the Old Ones, or can say what they may look like. It is possible that the cult remained unaware that the spawn were octopoidal, and that the spawn are indeed the same as the Old Ones they worship, but I believe the Old Ones are not the same as the spawn. Lovecraft does not make clear whether the spawn are octopoidal only in the general shape of their heads, as is Cthulhu himself, or if their entire bodies resemble octopi. It may be that they are smaller versions of Cthulhu who have in some manner budded off him or been generated asexually by him.
The cult has a very good idea of what Cthulhu himself looks like, because they possess his image in the form of statues, or plaques carved in bas-relief. The image on one such bas-relief was said to resemble at once "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." A statue taken from a Cthulhu cult in the swamps of Louisiana was around eight inches tall, done in a type of stone completely unknown to geologists. Lovecraft described this stone as a "soapy, greenish-black stone" with "golden or iridescent flecks and striations." The artistic style of the carving resembled no human artistic style, inviting speculation that the small statue predated the human race. It may even have originated from another planet. One of the leaders of the Cthulhu cult at New Orleans, a man named Old Castro, asserted that when the Great Old Ones came down from the stars, they brought their images with them.
These statues or carvings allowed a very precise description of Cthulhu, even before he emerged briefly from the waves during the temporary rising of R'lyeh from the ocean. Lovecraft described his body as scaly, rubbery-looking, and "vaguely anthropoid" in outline. This does not mean a human body, and depictions of Cthulhu with a human-like body are probably incorrect. His body is vaguely ape-like in its overall outline, that is all. It has two arms and two legs. His head is said to be "octopus-like" and again, this is not the same as asserting that it looks like an octopus. His face is a "mass of feelers." Feelers are not the same as tentacles. On the ends of his arms and legs are prodigious claws that may be somewhat similar to those of a bird of prey. It was these claws that caused his image to be characterized as dragon-like, along with a set of narrow leathery wings on his back.
Cthulhu is depicted squatting on a rectangular block. The curved tips of his folded wings touch the edge of the block in the back. In front, the claws of his feet curl over the edge of the block and extend down a quarter of its height. His clawed hands clasp his elevated knees, and the feelers hanging from his face brush the backs of his hands. It seems obvious that Lovecraft based this description on stone images of gargoyles. Or, if we were inclined to be more fanciful in our speculations, that the images of medieval gargoyles reflect in their posture the dim racial memory of the stone idols of Cthulhu.
The pedestal of greenish stone taken from the New Orleans cult is carved on its sides with unreadable symbols that resemble writing. The posture of Cthulhu is threatening and malignant in some way that is difficult to define. Lovecraft described his body as a "bloated corpulence." This indicates a heavy torso and thick limbs. Nothing is mentioned concerning Cthulhu's eyes, but in one of his letters Lovecraft drew a small image of the squatting Cthulhu, on the head of which he placed a triangular cluster of three eyes. It is not clear in the crude sketch whether Lovecraft intended Cthulhu to have three eyes in total, or three on each side of his head. My own interpretation of the sketch is that there are three eyes on each side of the head, or a total of six eyes. Cthulhu is often depicted in popular art with two eyes, and this is definitely incorrect.
The cult of Cthulhu in the swamps near New Orleans did not worship alone, but were aided by inhuman creatures-a race of black-winged flying devils that came out of caverns under the earth, and "a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes" that rose from the depths of a deep lake. The identity of these beings can only be speculated about, but the winged devils resemble night-gaunts, and the formless white thing may have been a shoggoth. Lovecraft gave no definite information that would confirm their natures. The black-winged creatures were the ones who carried out the ten human sacrifices of the ritual described, not the human members of the cult, and it appears that a kind of esoteric symbiosis existed between the human worshippers of Cthulhu and these winged things, which the cultists called the Black Winged Ones. Arguing against the identification of these creatures with the night-gaunts is the explicit sta
tement in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath that the night-gaunts owe their allegiance only to the god Nodens, not to the Old Ones.
In The Call of Cthulhu, an upheaval on the floor of the Pacific Ocean thrusts up the sunken island of R'lyeh so that the monolith and the citadel of Cthulhu that crown the central mountain project above the surface of the waves. This is enough to allow dreaming Cthulhu to send his thoughts outward over the surface of the world to summon his worshippers to release him. His powerful telepathic messages affect not only the minds of his committed followers, but the mind of anyone with a sufficient degree of psychic perception, giving them disturbing and frightening dreams in which they perceive the city with its monolith, and even the form of Cthulhu himself.
Before a faction of the cult of Cthulhu made up of "Kanakas and half-castes" can reach the newly risen island in their pirated steam yacht the Alert to liberate their great priest from his tomb, their ship is captured and taken over by the crew of the schooner Emma. In the battle, the Emma is sunk, requiring the eight surviving members of her crew to transfer to the Alert, where they kill all of the cultists. They steam on to encounter R'lyeh and explore it, inadvertently opening the door to Cthulhu's house and setting him free. Evidently the stars are right at this moment, for Cthulhu is able to venture forth into the open air. It may be speculated that it was the temporary coming right of the stars in their turnings that caused R'lyeh to rise from the ocean depths.
The door to Cthulhu's house is like a great barn door in size, but whether set flat in the ground beside the base of the monolith like a trap door, or angled like a cellar door, the alien geometries of the city make it impossible to determine. It is carved with an image described as a "squid-dragon bas-relief" that the crew of the sunken Emma also observe elsewhere in the citadel, and its frame is intricate and ornate. When one of the crew climbs onto the stone slab of the door, it begins to open inward from the top under the pressure of his scant weight, indicating that it is delicately balanced. A tangible black smoke issues forth, followed by Cthulhu himself.
The small statues and carvings of the god can reveal everything about his appearance except the nature of the substance of which his body is composed, and his size. The sole surviving member of the crew of the captured yacht, Second Mate Gustaf Johansen, later reported that the body of Cthulhu was green and gelatinous. The term "sticky" was also used. This indicates that his body is transparent or translucent. Cthulhu's size was never given precisely. He was compared to a walking mountain. One of those who received his telepathic communications when R'lyeh first arose from the waves asserted that he was a mile high, but this appears to have been an exaggeration.
When Cthulhu enters the water to pursue the fleeing steam yacht, his head comes "nearly up to the bowsprit." This indicates that almost all of his body is below the water. We have no way to know how deep the water just off R'lyeh may have been, but since Cthulhu's house was on the top of a mountain, the ground of the island probably sloped away steeply. Cthulhu's size may be roughly estimated from the size of the doorway to his house, which was compared to a barn door. But it is possible that his gelatinous body was able to squeeze itself through a small opening, relative to its dimensions, so the size of the door is no certain measure of the size of Cthulhu. It may be guessed that he stands at least a hundred feet tall, and his height may well be double that estimate.
Second Mate Johansen has the presence of mind and the courage to send the steam yacht racing toward Cthulhu rather than away from him. It strikes his great rounded head, described in the story as "like the stern of a daemon galleon." The gelatinous head explodes like a burst bladder into a noxious and acrid green cloud of gas, but almost immediately after the ship has passed, it begins to draw together and reform itself. The ship is able to escape before Cthulhu has time to repair his body. Since the island of R'lyeh soon after the encounter sank beneath the ocean, and since the thought emanations of Cthulhu ceased, it was presumed by the narrator of Lovecraft's story that Cthulhu had returned into his house, and was within it when R'lyeh once more plummeted to the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
Whether the stars are presently right, and the rule of Cthulhu over the Earth awaits only another rising of R'lyeh, or whether it was the brief coming right of the stars that caused R'lyeh to rise, and their going wrong again that made it descend, Lovecraft did not speculate. He only asserted that Cthulhu lives, and observed, "What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise."
In the story The Mound, Cthulhu figures prominently as one of the primary gods worshipped by the people of blue-litten K'n-yan, who dwell in an enormous self-illuminated cavern somewhere deep beneath the plains of Oklahoma. The twin ruling gods of the copper-skinned people of K'n-yan, who somewhat resemble American Plains Indians, are Cthulhu and the serpent-god Yig. The reason for the reverence paid to Cthulhu, who in K'n-yan is known as Tulu, is the teaching that it was Cthulhu who, long ages ago, carried the race of the cavern-dwellers across the gulf of space to the Earth, along with ritual objects made of a dark and lustrous metal, magnetic to itself, that is not to be found on this planet.
The writer August Derleth, when attempting to classify Lovecraft's elder gods into four elemental categories, placed Cthulhu under the heading of water, because of his resting place on sunken R'lyeh. This is clearly an error. Lovecraft states in At the Mountains of Madness that the Cthulhu spawn are a land-dwelling race. An additional consideration is that the waters of the ocean block the projection of Cthulhu's telepathic commands. If he were watery in his nature, it seems unlikely that he would be frustrated by water.
The division by Derleth of the elder gods into four elemental categories was a mistake in general, because they do not lend themselves to a fourfold elemental division. In my version of the Necronomicon I have placed the chiefs among the Old Ones under the seven planets of traditional astrology, and this seems to serve much better than an elemental division. The Old Ones are sky gods, having come from the stars, so they do not belong to the elements, but to the heavenly spheres. I have set Cthulhu under Mars because he is the most war-like of the lords of the Old Ones. It may be disputed whether Cthulhu can even be classed among the Old Ones, but he is clearly related to them. The Necronomicon states that Cthulhu is their cousin, an attempt by Alhazred to indicate some close blood connection.
(The Call of Cthulhu; At the Mountains of Madness; The Mound)
The fish-god made his first appearance in the Lovecraft mythos story Dagon, written in 1919. As is true of so much of Lovecraft's seminal work, this story was little more than a description of one of Lovecraft's dreams. An escaped American officer of the merchant marine during the First World War, fleeing the German navy across the Pacific Ocean in a small boat, finds himself beached on a vast island that rises up beneath his boat. He explores the new landmass under moonlight and discovers a deep chasm with a band of water that resembles a river flowing along its bottom. He descends into the chasm and looks across the watery fissure, which not long before had lain submerged under miles of ocean. On the opposite side of the water is an enormous block of white stone, covered with pictographs, and also with images of amphibious creatures that seem disproportionately large, almost the size of whales. From the water arises one of these creatures. It clasps the monolith in its great arms and began to make "certain measured sounds" that are not specified.
Lovecraft is vague in his description of the monster, but we can assume that the images carved on the monolith depict its form. The images show a man-like being with webbed feet and hands, scaly skin, and a hideous head with wide, flabby lips and glassy, bulging eyes. Upon seeing the monster, the escaped American officer immediately goes mad, flees back to his boat, is vaguely aware of a great storm, and recovers his senses in a hospital in San Francisco. The experience continues to prey upon his mind, and he becomes a drug addict, then decides that the only way to escape its memory and the fears it evokes is to end his own life.
The images on the monolith are obviously prototyp
es for the Deep Ones who appear later in Lovecraft's fiction. They closely resemble the Deep Ones apart from their size. In the story Dagon, the American officer associated them with the Philistine fishgod Dagon, and in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the people of Innsmouth under the leadership of Obed Marsh instituted the Esoteric Order of Dagon as their new religion. The monolith that the monster embraces, with its pictoglyphs, foreshadows the monolith that in a later story surmounts the house of Cthulhu on the submerged Pacific island of R'lyeh, which also rises from the sea floor during some great but temporary geological upheaval.
The story Dagon raises more questions than it answers. Is the amphibious monster that clings to the monolith only one of many such gigantic creatures in the ocean depths, or is it the last of its kind? Does it hug the carved stone block in worship, or in fear, or in sorrow? Are the noises it makes prayers, the sounds of weeping, or is it calling others of its kind up from the depths? Why are the Deep Ones of the later tale The Shadow Over Innsmouth so much smaller than this great being?
The clue to this mystery may lie in the nature of some living creatures to continue to grow larger throughout their entire lifespan. Their growth is only ended by their deaths. If Dagon is ancient beyond reckoning, it may be that all the others of his race, apart from his mate, are much smaller, those of Dagon's own age having been killed in the past. We know he has a mate because mention is made in The Shadow Over Innsmouth of "Father Dagon and Mother Hydra." Assuming that this mated pair of aliens decided to breed, their offspring would be relatively diminutive in size, having not had the vast span of ages to reach the dimensions of their progenitor.
