Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories. Today we’re looking at “The Call of Cthulhu,” written in Summer 1926 and first published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. You can read the story here. Spoilers ahead.
Summary: This manuscript was found among the papers of Francis Wayland Thurston, deceased.
Thurston’s grand-uncle Angell leaves everything to him when he dies, apparently after being jostled by a “nautical-looking negro.” These possessions include a disturbing bas-relief and a series of notes and clippings.
In the first half of a manuscript labeled “Cthulhu Cult,” Angell describes a bas-relief brought to him by a young sculptor named Wilcox in March 1925. An earthquake has sparked dreams of a vast city of cyclopean architecture, and disembodied voices chanting the mysterious phrase: “Cthulhu fhtagn.”
The dreams nudge Angell’s memory and he questions the boy intensively. Wilcox continues visiting to share his artistic inspirations, but then is bed-ridden, delirious with fever. When the fever breaks, Wilcox’s dreams cease.
Angell also collected newspaper articles from around the world. In March 1925, artists and others shared Wilcox’s mad dreams. Reports of insanity, artistic inspiration, and unrest cover the same period.
The bas-relief includes unfamiliar hieroglyphs, and a monster that seems a mix of octopus, dragon, and caricatured human.
The second narrative is from Inspector Legrasse of Louisiana, who in 1908 brought a similar idol to the American Archaeological Society. It was captured during a raid on a “supposed Voodoo meeting” and he hopes the experts can explain it. (Why do Voudun rituals require police raids? Oh, right, this is during Prohibition.) The scientists are excited: the idol seems both ancient and unrelated to any familiar form. The stone it’s made of is likewise unfamiliar.
The description of Legrasse’s idol matches Wilcox’s bas-relief: “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.”
Legrasse describes the raid. Deep in a cypress swamp the police found cultists capering naked around a bonfire amid corpse-hung trees. One cultist told of their group’s ancient origins.
The cult worships the Great Old Ones, creatures not quite made of matter who came from the stars. They are asleep, or dead, in sunken R’lyeh beneath the ocean. When R’lyeh rises they communicate in dreams, so the living can learn how to awaken the great priest Cthulhu. When the stars are right, he’ll call, and the cult will answer. And he, in turn, can awaken the other Great Old Ones to kill and revel beyond laws and morals, and teach mankind to do the same.
The cultist’s chant, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” means: In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
And one anthropologist recalls hearing this same chant from a cult of “degenerate Esquimaux” in Greenland.
Thurston suspects Wilcox learned of the cult and fabricated his dreams to hoax Professor Angell. But when he travels to Providence to rebuke him, the young man seems a sincere, if eccentric genius. Still, perhaps he heard of it and forgot…
Visiting a museum, Thurston finds a Sydney Bulletin spread under a mineral specimen—with a picture of a Cthulhu idol. The article, dated at the same time as the dreams, describes a “mystery derelict” found at sea with one living man and one dead. Johansen was the last survivor of a crew that took over the Alert when it attacked their own ship. Six men were killed on a small island; another died delirious on the return voyage.
Unable to find explanations in Australia, Thurston travels to Oslo—where he finds Johansen’s widow and a manuscript the seaman conveniently left behind in English. He, too, died after being touched by nautical-seeming strangers.
Johansen’s manuscript describes the Alert’s attack. Their own ship sunk, his crew killed the attackers and took over their vessel. They explored the area that the Alert warned them away from, and found an uncharted island—covered in cyclopean architecture with off-kilter geometry. They opened a great door in the highest structure. The terrible, gargantuan figure from the idol lumbered forth. Two men died immediately of fright, while the Thing destroyed another three with a swipe of its claws. The remaining three men fled, but one fell and vanished into an angle of masonry.
Johansen and his remaining companion reached the boat and started the engine—only to see Cthulhu slide greasily into the water in pursuit. Johansen set the steam on full and reversed the wheel. You guys he rammed Cthulhu. The creature dispersed in a noxious green cloud, and was already starting to re-form as the ship steamed away.
The dates of R’lyeh’s rising and Johansen’s encounter exactly match the dreams and madnesses of March 1925.
Thurston has placed Johansen’s manuscript with Angell’s papers and artifacts, and this last manuscript which pieces together what should never be connected. The cult still lives, and will soon kill him as well, for he knows too much. Cthulhu lives too, once again beneath the waves. But a time will come—best not to think about it.
What’s Cyclopean: The word’s used no less than 7 times to describe R’lyeh’s architecture. And Cthulhu is “braver than the storied Cyclops” when he goes after the Alert.
The Degenerate Dutch: “Mongrel celebrants” at the swamp ritual are “of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type.” In general, most of the cultists appear to be anything but white Americans, and it’s repeatedly emphasized that a “negro sailor” probably killed Angell. When Cthulhu calls, white folk may go mad and/or make art, but brown folk react with “native unrest,” “voodoo orgies,” etc.
Mythos Making: Everything here is central Mythos text: the origin of the Great Old Ones, R’lyeh, the rising of things that aren’t dead, Cthulhu himself. (Described as male throughout, implying the existence of females. And offspring.)
Libronomicon: Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria by W. Scott-Elliot, Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europeare cited among Angell’s papers on the cult. Real books all. The Necronomicon drops hints about Cthulhu’s dead/not dead status.
Madness Takes Its Toll: During the shared dreams, an architect goes mad and dies of a seizure. Only two of the prisoners taken in the swamp are sane enough to be hanged. Johansen’s surviving companion dies mad as they make their escape from R’lyeh.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
It’s hard to read Call as it should be read, to recapture the weirdness of words and images now so familiar. Cthulhu’s appearance, the unpronounceable chant, the non-Euclidian geometry, “…in strange eons even death may die,” are among Lovecraft’s most iconic creations. They’ve been used in stories both serious and satirical, turned into paintings and sculptures, sung to popular tunes, turned into stuffed animals. And yet they were also among Lovecraft’s most original and unusual creations—they succeed in being unlike anything in earlier art or anthropology. But that’s hard to remember when I’m being earwormed by Tom Smith singing “Cthulhu fhtagn” to the tune of “Hakuna Matata.”
“Call” breaks with much Lovecraft, and raises the creepiness factor, through immersion in real schools, books, and towns. No Miskatonic and Arkham here, and only one reference to the Necronomicon. It’s Princeton and Sidney and Golden Bough, and are you absolutely certain there isn’t a box somewhere full of clippings and disturbing figurines? If you find it, how confident will you be that it was created for a Call of Cthulhu LARP?
Like many of Lovecraft’s stories, this one isn’t exactly an advertisement for the advantages of knowledge. Rather the reverse. Here’s that familiar quote about the merciful inability of the human mind to correlate its contents. Learn too much and you’ll go mad, or run away gibbering. It’s like a detective story where the goal is to avoid putting together the clues—no wonder people like combining the Mythos with Sherlock Holmes. A scientist myself (one who studies the human mind’s imperfect attempts to correlate its contents), I find this a little strange and off-putting. But “Call” makes the case better than others—unlike, say, the existence of inhuman civilizations with awesome libraries, the rise of the Great Old Ones wouldn’t be much fun to know about.
So this is a successfully horrific story, one that stuck with me and apparently with everyone else who ever read it. One could wish, therefore, that it wasn’t so deeply entwined with Lovecraft’s racism. No mere mentions of crude slurs here—Cthulhu’s worshippers are almost entirely brown people. Or “mongrels” or “degenerates” or “mixed-bloods.” Indeed, it seems that rich white men have a very different reaction to C’s call than everyone else. White artists and poets get mad dreams and inspiration. But elsewhere we get “Native unrest” and “voodoo orgies.” Bothersome tribes in the Philippines! Hysterical Levantines in New York City! (Arabs or Jews, presumably, all scary.) The Paris Salon just gets blasphemous paintings.
Yeah, when white people get the call it’s mostly scary for them. When brown people get the call, it’s scary for the white people.
One suspects Lovecraft and I would disagree about just how close we are to the lawless, amoral state that will make apparent the rightness of the stars.
On a happier note, I’d forgotten about this tidbit: “Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched.” Irem shows up in Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts and sequels, where it is deeply awesome. Reading “Call” has much in common with reading Lord of the Rings and noticing all the things picked up by later writers, funny t-shirts, etc. It’s hard to read in isolation from everything it’s inspired, but worth it.
Anne’s Commentary
And here he is, the entity of entities! This story is superlative in all reread categories: most Mythos-making; most Cyclopeans per square inch; most far-flung cast of “degenerate Dutchmen”; folks going mad everywhere. Okay, it’s not the most tome-laden, but the Necronomicon appears, and there are those wonderful props, the idols made of no earthly stone by no earthly artists.
Narrator Thurston tells how his uncle’s papers instigated his own investigations. Following the mandatory warning about the repercussions of learning too much, he tells us too much. Like the Ancient Mariner who must collar some hapless listener and leave him a sadder but wiser man, he can’t help himself. He carefully records his baleful discoveries and does his best to correlate them—this, after he’s claimed the mind’s inability to correlate its contents is the most merciful thing in the world. We’ve seen confusion of motive before: What I have to relate’s unspeakable, but I’m going to speak it! At length! Or write it in a manuscript that is never destroyed or lost. Nope. Some scholarly sort will always inherit it, or dig it up, or stumble upon it in a dusty library.
One who worries too much about this sort of thing probably shouldn’t read SFF. We want our narrators to blurt out horrors we’d be better off not knowing. Otherwise we wouldn’t get to enjoy them.
The subsections are arranged not chronologically but in a more effective least-to-most-horrific order. Lovecraft opens with the 1925 “dream epidemic.” Then back to 1908, when Professor Angell learns of the Cthulhu cult and its vile rites. Then forward again to what caused that 1925 dream epidemic: the stirring and brief release of mighty Cthulhu! Only a second sinking of R’yleh saves the world—temporarily. For “decay spreads over the tottering cities of men,” while the dead yet deathless Old Ones abide, dreaming.
So far, so satisfying. But this reread I found myself pondering theological implications. Though Lovecraft calls Cthulhu a great priest rather than a god, it’s clear his human worshippers consider him a deity. Why wouldn’t they, given his powers? In “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the Deep Ones worship Dagon and Hydra, yet that Cthulhu fhtagn is part of their ritual, and they’ll supposedly rise again to give Cthulhu a tribute he craves. Huh. If the Deep Ones are his servants, why does Cthulhu need human cultists to free him? Surely Deep Ones could do it more efficiently.
Of course, though I think the Deep Ones are prefigured in “Dagon” (1917), they don’t actually “exist” in the Lovecraft universe before “Innsmouth” (1931)—hence they can’t do the deed. Damn. Gotta settle for humans, Big C.
Back to the tribute thing. The “Innsmouth” Deep Ones trade fish and gold for certain human concessions, that is, young sacrifices and consorts. “Call” makes me think Cthulhu won’t be interested in flounder or tiaras. Human sacrifices? That’s another story, if we believe the cultists. Here, old Castro gets the inside informant role Zadok Allen plays in “Innsmouth.” Like Zadok, Castro is “immensely aged.” Like Zadok the alcoholic, he’s not fully compos mentis—since only two cultists are found sane enough to hang, Castro must be one of the insane majority. I sense Lovecraft wants his narrators able to dismiss Zadok and Castro as unreliable, even while we readers accept their stories pretty much verbatim. Tricky.
Well, Castro tells interrogators that the cult means to resurrect the Old Ones so true believers can become like Them, “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy.” Reveling would doubtlessly include human sacrifices even more elaborate than those the cult already enjoys. But human sacrifices? Shouting and killing and generalized ravening? Are these really the pastimes of cosmic spawn who’ve filtered down from the STARS? Who can dream their way through the UNIVERSE? Who though dead are IMMORTAL? Strikes me as another example of men making gods in their own images, to cater to their own drives and desires.
I hope Cthulhu and his spawn dream of more than the pulp-cover-lissome sacrifices they’re going to slaver over when they come topside. I hope they’re not that tiresome sort of alien common to old Star Trek episodes, epicures of mayhem and misery who drive lesser creatures to supply them with same.
Come on, if you’re going to be a god (or close enough), be godly! At least open that damn door yourself, Big C. That “the spells” require outside assistance isn’t explanation enough. Okay, old Castro might not be able to explain it any better. I get that. He’s not one of those immortal humans living in the mountains of China. And, hey! Immortality! If that’s something the Old Ones can grant to followers, can we sign up for it minus the reveling?
Ahem.
Rant curtailed due to space considerations. Just time enough to note I’m intrigued by the black spirits of earth Castro mentions, all mouldy and shadowy. I guess these are the Black Winged Ones who supposedly kill the Louisiana victims. A species of night gaunt, Lovecraft’s favorite dream terror? And what about the mountainous white bulk in the heart of the haunted swamp? One of Legrasse’s party glimpses it, as Danforth glimpses what may be a protoshoggoth beyond the farthest Mountains of Madness.
These are peripheral horrors here. One might make a case for excluding them, but I’d find that a false economy. The sidelong glimpses, the apparent interweaving of milieus, Dreamlands into young Mythos, are additional spice for the fictive stew.
For the next month, we’ll celebrate the Halloween season with a special four-part reread of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Join us next week for Part I: “A Result and a Prologue,” and Part II: “An Antecedent and a Horror.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land.” Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. She lives with a large number of mammals.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” is published on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
Well, Castro tells interrogators that the cult means to resurrect the
Old Ones so true believers can become like Them, “free and wild and
beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy.” Reveling would doubtlessly include human sacrifices even more elaborate than those the cult already enjoys. But human sacrifices? Shouting and killing and generalized ravening? Are these really the pastimes of cosmic spawn who’ve filtered down from the STARS?
Plus it doesn’t quite mesh with the Lovecraftian idea of cosmic horror – that these creatures aren’t scary because they hate humans, but because they are crushingly indifferent.
I never believed the cultists were right, anyway. I thought the point was that they were driven nuts by the Cthulhu dreams just like everyone else – to the point where they actually want him to come back – but they’re cargo cultists. Cthulhu is coming back or not because of the stars, not because some loons in a swamp are chanting the right thing.
On a happier note, I’d forgotten about this tidbit: “Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched.” Irem shows up in Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts and sequels, where it is deeply awesome.
Irem of the Pillars also shows up in the Koran:
Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with ‘Aad – 7: [With] Iram – who had lofty pillars, 8: The likes of whom had never been created in the lands 9: And [with] Thamud, who carved out the rocks in the valley? 10: And [with] Pharaoh, owner of the stakes? – 11: [All of] whom oppressed within the lands 12: And increased therein the corruption. 13: So your Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment. 14: Indeed, your Lord is in observation.
And it’s possibly the same as Ubar, the ruins of which were discovered in Saudi back in the 90s.
For the temporally challenged: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amCxbVG8QUs
Lovecraft goes to unusual lengths here to put this very much in the real world. Not just those three real books that any of his readers could have gone down to the library and picked up. The earthquake which heralded the onset of the dreaming and so on really happened. The epicenter was near the St. Lawrence in Quebec and was felt all over the northeast, as far south as Virginia (the geology of northeastern North America is such that the whole thing rings like a bell when there’s a quake anywhere up there). A huge chunk of his readers must have said to themselves, “Hey, I remember that quake!”
Alas, I think HPL screwed up his coordinates. He places R’lyeh between New Zealand and Chile. He gets the latitude right, but the longitude is wrong for being on the opposite side of the Earth from the quake. As we have learned, math was not his strong suit.
I’m not sure just how brown those worshippers in the swamps are supposed to be. He specifically says that they are descended from Lafitte’s men (and we’re only talking about 100-110 years here). Pirates being what they were, there probably are more than a few mixed race folk down there in Barataria, but there are also a whole lot of Cajuns. Sure, the French may be a little iffy, but they’re indisputably white. Like last week’s Dutch, they’re simply degenerate, isolated by geography, and maybe a little inbred.
Cultists seem to be a little unclear on what they get out of the deal. These seem to think they’ll get to go along with Cthulhu and his buddies. Others think they’ll just get eaten last, while still others think they’ll benefit by being eaten first. The Big C needs to be a little clearer on this for his recruitment effort.
The description we get from old Castro of the Great Old Ones (not to be confused with the star-headed, barrel-shaped Old Ones of “The Shadow Out of Time”) makes them sound like interstellar locusts. They flit between worlds, consume on their arrival, go into hibernation for eons, then wake up, consume and go on their way to the next star system.
Finally, the mention of the Black Winged Ones jumped out at me this time. They sound a lot nastier than nightgaunts, but I don’t think anyone has ever really picked up on them and done anything. Even the CoC RPG didn’t mention them (at least through the late 80s).
ETA:@1
Irem also appears in the 1001 Nights, which is probably where HPL encountered it.
I have indeed picked up on The Black Winged Ones, and will have a wee chapbook concerning publish’d next month. I am currently re-reading the story in THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT, and it impresses me more and more’ But wasn’t it queer of Lovecraft to place, in a tale that is otherwise set in solid reality, this mythic supernatural portion set in a haunted swampland, where murderous devils worship a formless white thing that dwells in a hidden lake?
Cthulhu is not a god, and need not thus “behave” like one. To be worshipped by mortal pygmies does not make one diety. Yet, I reject S. T.’s idea that Cthulhu is merely an alien from outer space. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and Outer Gods seem not only unearthly but like nothing else in any Universe. They are unique unto themselves. Yog-Sothoth is certainly not an alien from outer space but an unfathomable thing from unknown deminsion. Obviously, one cannot “conjure forth” an alien from outer space by reciting rare formula found in a nameless grimiore.
My one regret about Cthulhu is that the name is now more widely known than that of his creator. The name “Cthulhu” has now become such a market tool that Titan Books, when they began to reprint Joshi’s excellent BLACK WINGS series, insisted on changing the title to BLACK WINGS OF CTHULHU. Bah!
Demetrios X @@@@@ 3: Huh, I didn’t know about the earthquake! One on the east coast does stick in the memory, being so rare — I still remember the only two or three strong enough for me to feel.
Plus there’s nothing worse than nightgaunts — they will TICKLE YOU TO DEATH!!! Or at least hysterics.
a1ay @@@@@ 1 & DemetriosX @@@@@ 3: Thank you–I didn’t know of the earlier Irem references, which shows an unfortunate gap in my education. That whole series of Bear’s seems to draw on all those sources, but Irem itself is notably and delightfully Lovecraftian.
Hadn’t known about the earthquake either. I got back to the east coast just in time for the one in 2011, and it was definitely memorable! And not hard to believe that it presaged some darker event. (I gather they’re a little more alarming to those of us who’ve managed to avoid living in California–though I always liked how they were used in Buffy.)
W. H. Pugmire @@@@@ 4: Obviously, one cannot “conjure forth” an alien from outer space by reciting rare formula found in a nameless grimiore.
Depends how good their automatic search routines are. But yes, I think trying to stick the GOOs into human boxes like “god” and “alien” is a lost cause.
This is deservedly one of Lovecraft’s best-known stories. To the modern reader, it seems unusual that Cthulhu is something that has to be cautiously approached from multiple directions but I have no problem with that. Several of my favorite Lovecraft lines are also in here:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
and, of course
“A mountain walked or stumbled.”
In the dodgy mathematics file: “vigintillions”? Sounds far too long a time for me. It was nice to see shout-outs to Machen and CAS though.
In the good mathematics file: http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Rlyeh.pdf
Additionally, the 2005 film of this is probably the only genuinely good Lovecraft film out there.
Iram of the Pillars in literature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars#Literature
Weird Tales, February 1928: not much more to note; Robert E. Howard’s “The Dream Snake” is in there, the reprint is Theophile Gautier’s “Clarimonde” and the issue also included letters by Lovecraft and Derleth. “The Call of Cthulhu” also received a rare reprint in Lovecraft’s lifetime, appearing in the 1929 anthology Beware After Dark!.
@3: Do you think Lovecraft might have fudged the coordinates so that Rl’yeh could be close to the Pole of Inaccessibility?
I presume this is the place to grumble about having a comment eaten by the spam filter because it contains links…
SchuylerH @@@@@ 8: That your comment was eaten first is simply a reflection of your devotion to this reread series.
@8,9 – I just rescued it from our occasionally rather over-enthusiastic spam filter. Thanks for the heads-up.
I got the impression (or made it up in my head-canon) that it’s less that Big C wants any…well, anything from us. If he is to us as we are to ants (semi-intelligent ants, for this little exercise), and ants all of a sudden started picking up bits of human dreams and thought processes and motivations, there’s no real way they could process it all, and it would likely drive them to misread and misinterpret them and perform all kinds on insane things because of it.
Of course, maybe I’m just an Unreliable Narrator, m’self…
@7/8 SchuylerH
In addition to the Machen and Smith shoutouts, he also references two of his favorite artists as being the only ones who could properly depict the revel in the swamp. Sidney Sime is best known for illustrating Dunsany, which is probably how Lovecraft knew him. He also did some illos for WH Hodgson and Machen. But I can’t really see his work fitting the subject matter.
The other artist, supposedly one of his very favorite, is Anthony Angarola. His stuff doesn’t quite seem to fit either, at least what I can find on-line. Reading up on him, this line from Wikipedia really jumped out at in the HPL context:
Seems odd that his work would resonate with Lovecraft.
As for the Pole of Inaccessibility, I suppose it’s possible. That’s an area that’s also pretty far off the shipping lanes, especially in a time where ships either still relied on sail or needed frequent coaling stops.
This story could also be re-titled: “White men x Brown cultists and a octopus-dragon god”. Lascar seamen, mestizoes, mongrels, Chinamen and, my favorite H P Lovecraft racial slur, a “nautical looking negro” (I can’t help but laugh when I read that. If RPG had been invented in H P Lovecraft’s time, he’d have written a Monsters Manual with a creature called “nautical negro” in it). All those guys appear. I think very few ethnicities aren’t represented here, like Australian aboriginals (who appear in Shadow out of time, Lovecraft calls them blackfellows).
On a more serious note, I agree with Ruthanna. This is Lovecraft’s “lord of the rings”. It’s not my favorite story from Lovecraft, but it’s very influential and has a lot of bits that influenced the world, from books to Role Playing Games to heavy metal music.
And I had forgotten that Johansen rammed Cthulhu! Makes the TVTropes entry “did you just punch Cthulhu” take a whole other meaning, because in his first appearance he kind of gets punched … by a boat. Also, I’d like to see a Call of Cthulhu movie starring Scarlett Johanson as gender-flipped Johansen, ramming her boat against Cthulhu. For the time, I’ll have to satisfy myself with the silent movie (which is awesome, by the way. Could totally have been done in H P Lovecraft’s time).
I love the movie version that was made. I bought it on DVD, and while it’s a very short (silent) film, it was a fantastic adaptation. As is the audio drama version that was done by the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast.
@12: There’s a suggestion that Lovecraft encountered Angarola’s work in The Kingdom of Evil, a book by an author who attracted a good deal of controversy, some of it self-generated: http://johncoulthart/feuilleton/2007/01/31/fantazius-mallare-and-the-kingdom-of-evil/
All of which cements my belief that we need a Tor.com article entitled “Picturing the Indescribable”.
Lovecraft excelled at the art of the glimpse, methinks. His stories are like flowers bearing sparse drops of pure nectar which other writer bees have gathered, mixed, and masticated into thick, sweet, sometimes-cloying honey of mythos. Or the seeds of new and lavish gardens. This flower is especially spiny and rank with racism, but from it we’ve extracted copious nectar and the seeds of what is now a vast jungle. To use another metaphor, this especially big and stinky oyster bears an incomparable pearl.
Part-cephalopod deity (or priest or whatever)? I’d answer that call, no question, and would be even more interested if fish-people were involved. I considered octopuses to be the most magical and otherworldly of creatures long before discovering Lovecraft, and I’m not alone. It amuses me greatly that a man who supposedly hated marine life was the one to give our love of it a focal point for a real-life fandom.
@13: After Her, Under The Skin, and Lucy, I’m more than ready for Scarlett Johannson in the title role.
This has always been an interesting one to me not just because it’s so central to the canon, but because it’s really not much of a story in the traditional sense — there’s no direct narrative through-line; it’s a series of self-reinforcing vignettes; basically, exactly what you’d construct from the scraps Thurston left behind in an old shoebox. (And it’s extremely convenient that Thurston just happened to see the “Swedish sailor encounters cosmic horrors!” article in a scrap of newspaper he just happened to come across. But I’m willing to let that slide.)
DemetriosX @3:
I found this map of Lovecraftian locations on Google maps:
https://maps.google.com/maps/u/0/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=203685024434556563890.0004a0052ba5a6af6b98d&dg=feature
SchuylerH @7:
In Hugh Cook’s “The Wizards and the Warriors”, there are mountains that actually walk, which provided a heaped helping of sensawunda.
I’m getting more than a little suspicious of how tolerant Godzilla is of Cthulhu living in his ocean. You don’t suppose they’re in cahoots?
Godzilla vs Cthulhu, speaking of movies. What could be more…CYCLOPEAN than that?
…well, besides either of them vs. Cyclops, I guess.
The mysterious white thing in the middle of the swamp always reminded me of a similar beastie lurking in the middle of Maple White Land, in Doyle’s “The Lost World”. When Kliban came out with a cartoon collection called “Luminous Animals”, the cover reminded me amusingly of both.
And wasn’t there something about moving mountains near the climax of “Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”?
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in
the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
When, in my naive youth, I first read this celebrated passage, it seemed
wildly overwrought. Now, I think Lovecraft was prescient. We can be relieved that the advance of cosmological science has not shown the solar system to be overrun with malign spacefaring Cthulhoid aliens; but in every other way, the sheer enormity and strangeness of the cosmos has only become more bewildering and intimidating. Billions of stars within our galaxy; billions of galaxies; titanic supernova blasts; black holes; neutron stars spinning faster than an electric motor; unexplained “dark matter” and “dark energy”; chaos theory; hidden dimensions; quantum paradoxes; inflation spawning vast numbers of life-hostile universes “whar things ain’t as they is here”: all of these and more are known or seriously proposed. I suspect that if I could truly grasp all of these matters clearly, terror and madness would indeed be the likely outcome. And among the world’s peoples, the continuing strength of regressive religions and growing obsession with bizarre distractions looks very like flight into the reality-denying “peace and safety of a new dark age.”
In line with this, reviewers of Lovecraft often say that the deepest
horror of his “mythos” stories is that mankind is insignificant, beneath the
notice of superior alien beings. However, in “The Call of Cthulhu,” the Old
Ones seem interested enough in humans to play with them sadistically: when
Cthulhu’s rule returns, “…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.”
I imagine that HPL’s alienist, upon reading that, might have asked
“Howard, are you ever afraid of losing control?”
If the brown people become bloodthirsty cultists when they worship a white monster, it is obvious that white people are the real bad guys. Or do the brown people need a white leader because they couldn’t come up with a cult on their own? That still would make the real bad guys white.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, to find racism and prejudice in a Lovecraft piece.
Interestingly, it’s the very first appearance of Cthulhu that also features the very first literal instance of the “Did you just punch out Cthulhu?” trope. And with a boat no less. So, HPL at the same time one-upped the “Car Fu” trope before that even became a thing.
@19: A good map, seemingly made by one of the three people who liked “The Mound”.
@20: In another universe, this is a real film:
@24: “Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?” has been around for a long time. Derleth’s The Trail of Cthulhu features the US Army nuking Rl’yeh, not that this is likely to make much difference in the long run.
Question: Since this discussion is about “The Call of Cthulhu”, I was reminded of Joshi’s three annotated Penguin Modern Classics, which had ~50 stories, almost all solo. My two Gollancz volumes add many of the collaborations to that number, bringing it up to ~70 stories altogether but there are several still missing, including all the Zealia Bishop stories. Most allegedly complete editions, including those from Barnes & Noble, contain less than that. So, has anyone ever put together a real complete Lovecraft?
a “nautical looking negro” (I can’t help but laugh when I read that
Yeah, it’s an interesting sort of casting call. I’m thinking Idris Elba in a sailor hat.
<i>Most allegedly complete editions, including those from Barnes &
Noble, contain less than that. So, has anyone ever put together a real
complete Lovecraft?</i>
Many unwary men have tried. I think the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the average publishing house to correlate all its contents.
@26: I think I like this explanation better than whatever the real one turns out to be.
Modern publishing isn’t really ready for the sort of books that Lovecraft refers to. I am imagining Tor.com running a “Necronomicon Re-Read”. Poor old Leigh Butler slogging through the writings of the deranged Abdul Alhazred, one chapter a week, and gradually descending into unhinged madness.
Chapter 23: On the Mysteries of the Pre-Atlantean Cults
Dear God! Even as I blog I hear them clawing at my door! The hideous formless things! No human mind can tolerate such sights! Also, this chapter is kinda sexist.
@28: Nonetheless, after the completion of the re-read, there would immediately be a re-read of the re-read, just in case anyone hadn’t gone mad the first time.
As an aside, I haven’t been able to find a decent prop Necronomicon: the Simon edition contains far too much Crowley and Mesopotamian Myth for my liking and anyway, the cheap paperback edition rather kills the effect.
@28 a1ay
re: Leigh’s decent into madness
To that I say: “Get in line, HPL!”
The combined onslaught of RJ’s Aes Sedai
shenaniganspolitics, GRRM’s…well…everything and the comments’…er…even more everything has long since taken care of that. By the time she gets to doing a Necronomicon read there won’t be any descending left to do…Out now from Tor, The Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred the Mad!
We have five copies of the hardback edition to give away! Just gibber insanely in the comments to enter! Sweepstakes open to legally sane, white pureblooded Anglo-Saxon residents of the 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. Void outside the United States and Canada. Really, literally void. A black, formless, shrieking void into which the unwary will be dragged to spend an eternity in agony. Sweepstakes end at 1200 ET on November 4. World ends at 1600 ET on November 5. No purchase necessary.
@31 a1ay
As usual the Old World is excluded from a giveaway and/or merciful insanity. That’s so unfair! May you be jostled by a nautical-looking negro!
@@@@@ everything since 28
*snork*
@@@@@19
Good map find. And it clearly shows that R’lyeh is not opposite the epicenter of the earthquake. As further evidence that he screwed up his coordinates, he notes that one date corresponds to an event the day before in New England because of the International Date Line, but R’lyeh is clearly on the same side of the IDL as the US.
Also, we’ve all ignored the fact that HPL lived on Angell Street for much of his life. OK, that will get more play as we read Charles Dexter Ward and he uses his actual house, but it is the genesis of a character name.
DemetriosX@33:Good points on the map. If the narrator was right on the opposite part and just concealing the actual coordinates, then (going from Boston) we would find an antipode of 42.3581° S, 109.0636° E. This puts us deep in the Indian ocean. Interestingly, in the general area of the search for Malaysian Flight 370. Cue ominous music Dun, dun, Dah!
As further evidence that he screwed up his coordinates, he notes that
one date corresponds to an event the day before in New England because
of the International Date Line, but R’lyeh is clearly on the same side
of the IDL as the US.
More likely, surely, that Johansen made a navigational error. Which, fair enough, dude had a lot on his mind.
@25 — I think the four Arkham House collections — Dunwich Horror & Others, At the Mountains of Madness, Dagon & Other Macabre Tales, and Horror in the Museum & Other Revisions are pretty comprehensive — Horror contains the collaborations and the other three volumes have all of Lovecraft’s solo fiction.
Hippocampus Press is in the process of an apparently even more authoritative version than the Arkham editions — again, it’ll be three volumes of solo fiction (reordered chronologically, I believe) and a fourth volume of collaborations.
If you want eBook, cthulhuchick.com put together a collection of all of his solo work; I’m not aware of eBook versions of the collaborations.
@36: Thankyou. All of Lovecraft’s solo stories and collaborations (pre-mortem, anyway) are on hplovecraft.com, I was just curious. The Hippocampus edition would be the first variorum, wouldn’t it?
SchuylerH @@@@@ 25: In this case, “nuke it from orbit” does not seem like a good way to be sure.
a1ay @@@@@ 28 & 31: Here, have an internet. Have two internets. They’re slightly squamous, I’m afraid.
I’m thinking Idris Elba in a sailor hat. Does this go with Ryamano’s suggestion of Scarlett Johanson? *fans self*
DemetriosX @@@@@ 33: Ah, but you’re using that pesky Euclidean geometry.
I didn’t know about it before, but apparently H P Lovecraft did a sketch of the Cthulhu idol. We can see it here, along with a sculpture someone made based on it.
Ctulhu has 6 eyes. I never pictured him with so many eyes. This is kind like giving wings to the Balrog.
And no Cthulhu discussion is done without a link to Call of Cthulhu memes, I especially like the one with the cellphone.
http://www.memecenter.com/fun/521638/the-call-of-cthulhu
@34 stevenhalter
Actually, it should be opposite Kamouraska, Quebec (although I don’t know how well the epicenter was known at the time), which would put the position of R’lyeh around 47°34? N 69°52? E. Which is not too far from the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. The opposite point for Lovecraft’s coordinates is somewhere in eastern China.
@36 Ruthanna
Actually, since we’re talking about the surface of a sphere, this is most definitely non-Euclidean geometry.
@37: Yes, the HipCamp edition is the Variorum and I think it’s the first time he’s gotten this treatment, at least for his entire collected works.
And thanks for hplovecraft.com! I didn’t know about that site …
@39: Cthulhu idols could be a topic of discussion in themselves. I’m quite partial to the more abstract film design myself: http://cthulhulives.org/store/storeDetailPages/legrasseidol.html
@39 Ryamano
We must also not forget the work of DrFaustusAu, who has converted this tale into a sort of Dr. Suess story (which Chaosium apparently plans to publish!). He’s done a few other tales as well, including Dagon and The Tomb.
@40: Have you used this: http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/antipodemap/#.VEe3paZ0zVQ
@43: It seems like a perfect bedtime story for mentally scarring impressionable children, especially if you then present them with this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/e92a/
I may have to buy one of those “my first Cthulhu” toys for my godson.
After all, nobody specified which god…
And let’s not forget Lil Cthulhu!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOHJUrcVdJk
@38: Call (or rather, Trail) of Cthulhu players know that explosives sometimes work. See the inspirational story of Old Man Henderson: http://s4.zetaboards.com/Battlehammer/topic/9884566/1/
“Johansen and his remaining companion reached the boat and started the engine—only to see Cthulhu slide greasily into the water in pursuit. Johansen set the steam on full and reversed the wheel. You guys he rammed Cthulhu.”
When I read this story I wondered if that scene inspired the ending of The Little Mermaid.
KatherineW @@@@@ 49 The truth comes out: The Sea Witch is really Cthulhu, and Ariel wants to mate with a human because Deep One!
You know what, HPL was right. Ignorance is the only bliss possible in a cosmos where I suddenly realize that Elsa is Ithaqua! That Mike Wazowski is Nyarlathotep minus two of the eye-lobes! If even Disney isn’t safe from Mythos infiltration, I must run mad….
I did say that Cthulhu being male implied the existence of females.
…if these are *your* slash goggles, can you please take them back?
I wonder what Lovecraft would think of the pop culture phenomenon his ‘maddeningly horrific’ creatures became.
Oh, I think he’d probably be bemused by it (and happier if he was getting a cut of the profits). He & his cohorts had fun with it back in the day — for example, the way he & Robert Bloch took turns killing each other off in their stories.
@52 & @53
I remember reading a few of HPL’s letters. In one, he complained about how a certain Outer God was “being a very bad Yog” and disintegrating passers-by with his formless pseudopodia.
So yeah, he had a sense of humor about his own works.
SchuylerH @@@@@ 42: I’m now at home and able to follow links. I do not need an Innsmouth Swim Team t-shirt. My wife assures me of this.
The monograph on Innsmouth Sea Shanty variations, however, fills us both with a mixture of elation and dread. Does anyone own this intriguing artifact, and if so can they report on the suck-to-awesome ratio?
@42, 55: Drownit, now I want any or all of the Innsmouth/EOD stuff on that site. Especially the sea shanties. Also the tentacle glass. And a chance to model the EOD jacket while wearing a seaweed crown.
I may or may not be the proud owner of a Cthulhu tiki glass.
@49 KatherineW
Wait, I don’t remember the Little Mermaid getting steamboated between the eyes. They must have skipped that part in the Disney adaptation…
Nitpick: National prohibition did not start until 1920 and, to my knowledge, Louisiana never enacted any anti-liquor laws (at least on the state level) before then.
I suspect the corpse festooned trees may have been what attracted law enforcement’s attnetion.
Sorry to be so anal, but I am a history buff and it bothers me how ignorant so many educated people are. In my Spycraft campaign set in 1964, I had to tell them who was president. And I had to explain Freedom Summer.
Randalator @@@@@ 58 In Disney, Ursula the octopoid (hence Cthulhu-like) sea witch gets skewered by a bowsprit, bye bye.
In Hans Christian Anderson, the little mermaid sacrifices herself (now in human form) by leaping into the ocean and turning into sea foam. However, she gets to rise as an air spirit and eventually go to heaven.
Disney was so not down with THAT foolishness. All princesses must get their princes, even if they ARE really Deep Ones.
JAWolf @@@@@ 59 – Quite true. The reason the cops slogged into the swamps was not to search for booze but because locals had reported missing people. There was also this little matter of “harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants, and dancing devil-flames” coming from that direction.
Not that bad bootleg might not bring ON all those things, but still, missing peeps.
Really, that EOD hoodie could be useful if I ever unknowingly encounter a fellow Lovecraft fan in person. Thanks?
*later* Oh, what’s the use. Innsmouth isn’t real, Y’ha’nthlei isn’t real. Deep Ones aren’t real. Damn you Lovecraft, for inventing things to torture me (personally) with what I can’t have. Wearing the shirt won’t make them real or turn me into a Deep One. That last bit is important, because the frustratingness of living in Innsmouth and not being a Deep One would make me as alcoholic and unhinged as Zadok. *slinks off, depressed*
JAWolf @@@@@ 59: Busted! I didn’t check my dates closely enough there–mostly those of the raid. Lovecraft is very specific with his dates, but it’s rare that I actually sit down to map out their timeline properly myself. Somewhere on the interwebs, I suspect, I could find the whole thing pre-mapped.
But by the narrative, the corpse-hung trees and screams were a surprise to the raiding party. So apparently they just assumed: missing people, Voudun rituals, must be connected. My initial interpretation was insufficiently cynical. (Nowadays people still call 911 on soul-chilling chants, and the police mostly find the local Neopagan coven arguing over why everyone brought hummus again. Truly we live in degenerate times.)
AeronaGreenjoy @@@@@ 63: I sympathize. You can still be a member of the Esoteric Order, though–I’m sure you’d look stunning in a seaweed crown. I looked up seaweed crowns on Google Image Search–some of them are a bit twee, but some are pretty spiffy.
I habitually wore seaweed crowns when living on the Maine coast. Now I live far inland and will need to substitute ribbons for it in my Halloween costume.
@55: If I buy meself the sea shanty/monograph set for Fishmas, after they’re fully finished editing it, I’ll tell you what I think of it. In the meantime, I’m buying meself the EOD hoodie and hoping it’s good because I can’t access the company’s policies. *scowl*
I think Lumley was right to suppose that what emerged from R’lyeh back in 1925 was just a cthulhoid being, not Great Cthulhu himself. Disturbed by the earthquake and the arrival of the Emma, he swam out, saw that the stars were wrong and the environment hostile, and went back in to sleep the sleep of the, er, dead.
“Rather the reverse. Here’s that familiar quote about the merciful inability of the human mind to correlate its contents. Learn too much and you’ll go mad, or run away gibbering.”
Despite the opening of Supernatural Horror in Literature, which states that the strongest fear is fear of the unknown, when Lovecraft’s protagonists do lose it, it tends to be because they *can* put what they’re seeing into a greater context. Though I’ve long thought the inclusion of revelations about the nature of the universe driving you mad is the other way round from how I’ve usually seen it interpreted – not Lovecraft being afraid of what science was showing about the world, but him being afraid of insanity and so giving the phenomena in his stories the power to cause it.
Something else I find interesting about the story is that Cthulhu is as helpless before the universe as humans are. An earthquake brings up R’lyeh, and another sends it back down. The old ones live when the stars are right, and are dead when the stars are wrong. But those things seem to be outside their power.
“Yeah, when white people get the call it’s mostly scary for them. When brown people get the call, it’s scary for the white people.”
Well put.
Aah! While I’m at it and before I forget!
This book! Ezilis Mirrors!
https://www.amazon.com/Ezilis-Mirrors-Imagining-Black-Genders/dp/0822370387
I lost my copy when I lost my library, so I can’t even quote at y’all (“mercifully”). But apparently there really were voudon rituals broken up by the police in New Orleans. They were in the 1840’s (?) not the 1900’s.
They were all female rituals- of all races living in New Orleans at the time.
Led by free black women.
They were apparently in honor of the voodoo goddess- ah shit- ¿just Ezili?- I was more familiar with her under the name Oshun because I was studying a different branch of the religion. She was- is- it’s a living religion- the goddess of water and female sexuality.
The author felt the energy/awoken interest of the people in Ezili around this time (in a materialistic scheme possibly through the increased edginess of the southern slaveholders= jumping into secession) was related to the ‘flood’ of war the swept the land shortly thereafter- and the emancipation that followed.
She’s a very close match for Istar/Ashtarte.
I didn’t get to finish the book, so, no word on if she was reputed to have a water/semen untouched priestess like Ishtar did when she stole the Me tablets.
Not it.
:)
I just found a whole batch of unnoticed comment notifications from last year–Tegan, such a cool find! And exactly the sort of thing that would freak Lovecraft out, decades later…
SunlessNick @@@@@ 71: As I think about it now, there’s a distinction between fear of the unknown and fear of not knowing, isn’t there? Lovecraft’s fear is that the things we don’t know yet are really awful; the unknown is terrifying because of the potential transition into the paradigm-breaking known. Whereas others who “fear the unknown” might in fact be terrified of ignorance itself. Lots to unpack in the one cliche phrase, not all of it compatible!