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48-455: Barzai the Wise, a high priest and prophet greatly learned in the lore of the "gods of earth", or Great Ones , attempts to scale the mountain of Hatheg-Kla in order to look upon their faces, accompanied by his young disciple Atal. Upon reaching the peak, Barzai at first seems overjoyed until he finds that the "gods of the earth" are not there alone, but rather are overseen by the "other gods, the gods of

96-524: A cobwebby collection of forgotten tomes, but rather in a certain convincing cosmic attitude. Price said Lovecraft's writings could at least be divided into categories and identified three distinct themes: the "Dunsanian" (written in a similar style as Lord Dunsany ), " Arkham " (occurring in Lovecraft's fictionalized New England setting), and "Cthulhu" (the cosmic tales) cycles. Writer Will Murray noted that while Lovecraft often used his fictional pantheon in

144-478: A gigantic entity worshipped by cultists, in the shape of a green octopus , dragon , and a caricature of human form. It is the namesake of the Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos . Invented by Lovecraft in 1928, the name Cthulhu was probably chosen to echo the word chthonic (Ancient Greek "of the earth"), as apparently suggested by Lovecraft himself at the end of his 1923 tale " The Rats in

192-682: A long beard. In "The Other Gods", Barzai the Wise is high-priest of the Gods of Earth (the Great Ones) in Ulthar and one-time teacher of Atal. According to the story, he often delved into the unknown, reading such works as the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan . He is the son of an aristocrat, which makes him skeptical of commoners' superstitions. He is said to have advised

240-556: A platform that included the legalization of human sacrifice, driving all Americans insane, and an end to peace. In 2016, the troll account known as "The Dark Lord Cthulhu" submitted an official application to be on the Massachusetts Presidential Ballot. The account also raised over $ 4000 from fans to fund the campaign through a gofundme.com page. Gofundme removed the campaign page and refunded contributions. Several organisms have been named after Cthulhu, including

288-600: A published credit to Chaosium, TSR refused and the material was removed from all subsequent editions. Cthulhu has appeared as a parody candidate in several elections, including the 2010 Polish presidential election and the 2012 and 2016 US presidential elections . The faux campaigns usually satirize voters who claim to vote for the " lesser evil ". "Cthulhu for America" ran during the 2016 American presidential election, drawing comparisons with other satirical presidential candidates such as Vermin Supreme . The organization had

336-429: A scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." A carving of Cthulhu is described thusly: "It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon , and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to

384-466: Is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe , originating in the works of Anglo-American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft . The term was coined by August Derleth , a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name " Cthulhu " derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story " The Call of Cthulhu ", first published in

432-568: Is about like that in 'full', and the first syllable is not unlike 'klul' in sound, hence the 'h' represents the guttural thickness" yielding something akin to /ˈq(χ)lʊlˌhluː/ . S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave different pronunciations on different occasions. According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language. Cthulhu has also been spelled in many other ways, including Tulu, Katulu, and Kutulu. Long after Lovecraft's death, Chaosium stated in

480-461: Is considered the start of the Mythos), the first story to really expand the pantheon of Great Old Ones and its themes is " The Call of Cthulhu ", which was published in 1928. Lovecraft broke with other pulp writers of the time by having his main characters' minds deteriorate when afforded a glimpse of what exists outside their perceived reality. He emphasized the point by stating in the opening sentence of

528-554: Is named after the Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft . It was introduced in his short story " The Call of Cthulhu ", published by the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. Considered a Great Old One within the pantheon of Lovecraftian cosmic entities, this creature has since been featured in numerous pop culture references. Lovecraft depicts it as

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576-453: The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game : "we say it kuh-THOOL-hu" ( / k ə ˈ θ uː l uː / ), even while noting that Lovecraft said it differently. Others use the pronunciation / k ə ˈ t uː l uː / . In " The Call of Cthulhu ", H. P. Lovecraft describes a statue of Cthulhu as: "A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers,

624-632: The Cthulhu Mythos . In 1937, Derleth wrote the short story "The Return of Hastur", and proposed 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

672-462: The cognitive dissonance caused by this revelation leads to insanity, in his view. There have been attempts at categorizing this fictional group of beings. Phillip A. Schreffler argues that by carefully scrutinizing Lovecraft's writings, a workable framework emerges that outlines the entire "pantheon"—from the unreachable "Outer Ones" (e.g., Azathoth , who occupies the centre of the universe) and "Great Old Ones" (e.g., Cthulhu, imprisoned on Earth in

720-495: The pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. Richard L. Tierney , a writer who also wrote Mythos tales, later applied the term "Derleth Mythos" to distinguish Lovecraft's works from Derleth's later stories, which modify key tenets of the Mythos. Authors of Lovecraftian horror in particular frequently use elements of the Cthulhu Mythos. In his essay "H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos", Robert M. Price described two stages in

768-506: The "Lovecraft Circle". For example, Robert E. Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt reads Lovecraft's Necronomicon in the short story "The Children of the Night" (1931), and in turn Lovecraft mentions Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in the stories "Out of the Aeons" ( 1935 ) and "The Shadow Out of Time" ( 1936 ). Many of Howard's original unedited Conan stories also involve parts of

816-579: The California spider Pimoa cthulhu , the New Guinea moth Speiredonia cthulhui , and Sollasina cthulhu , a fossil echinoderm. Two microorganisms that assist in the digestion of wood by termites have been named after Cthulhu and Cthulhu's "daughter" Cthylla: Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque . In 2014, science and technology scholar Donna Haraway gave a talk entitled " Anthropocene , Capitalocene , Chthulucene: Staying with

864-407: The Cthulhu Mythos, the loosely connected series of horror stories written by Lovecraft and other writers inspired by his creations. These fictional cults have in some ways taken on a life of their own beyond the pages of Lovecraft's works. According to author John Engle, "The very real world of esoteric magical and occult practices has adopted Lovecraft and his works into its canon, which have informed

912-437: The Cthulhu Mythos. Price denotes the second stage's commencement with August Derleth, with the principal difference between Lovecraft and Derleth being Derleth's use of hope and development of the idea that the Cthulhu Mythos essentially represented a struggle between good and evil. Derleth is credited with creating the "Elder Gods". He stated: As Lovecraft conceived the deities or forces of his mythos, there were, initially,

960-483: The Cthulhu mythos (including character statistics) in the first printing of Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook Deities & Demigods (1980). TSR, however, were unaware that Arkham House , which asserted copyright on almost all Lovecraft literature, had already licensed the Cthulhu property to game company Chaosium . Although Chaosium stipulated that TSR could continue to use the material if each future edition featured

1008-627: The Elder Gods.... These Elder Gods were benign deities, representing the forces of good, and existed peacefully...very rarely stirring forth to intervene in the unceasing struggle between the powers of evil and the races of Earth. These powers of evil were variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones.... Price said the basis for Derleth's system is found in Lovecraft: "Was Derleth's use of

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1056-532: The Greek root, and her description of its meaning coincides with Lovecraft's idea of the apocalyptic, multitentacled threat of Cthulhu to collapse civilization into an endless dark horror: "Chthulucene does not close in on itself; it does not round off; its contact zones are ubiquitous and continuously spin out loopy tendrils." In 2015, an elongated, dark region along the equator of Pluto , initially referred to as "the Whale",

1104-422: The Mythos as opposed to it being a discrete plot device within Lovecraft's own stories. Derleth expanded the boundaries of the Mythos by including any passing reference to another author's story elements by Lovecraft as part of the genre. Just as Lovecraft made passing reference to Clark Ashton Smith's Book of Eibon , Derleth in turn added Smith's Ubbo-Sathla to the Mythos. Derleth also attempted to connect

1152-514: The Trouble", in which she proposed the term "Chthulucene" as an alternative for the concept of the Anthropocene era, due to the entangling interconnectedness of all supposedly individual beings. Haraway has denied any indebtedness to Lovecraft's Cthulhu, claiming that her "chthulu" is derived from Greek khthonios , "of the earth". However, the Lovecraft character is much closer to her coined term than

1200-566: The Walls ". The chthonic, or earth-dwelling, spirit has precedents in numerous ancient and medieval mythologies, often guarding mines and precious underground treasures, notably in the Germanic dwarfs and the Greek Chalybes , Telchines , or Dactyls . Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as Khlûl′-hloo , and said, "the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The 'u'

1248-727: The Winter 1942 issue of the magazine. Impressed by the glossary, Derleth asked Laney to rewrite it for publication in the Arkham House collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943). Laney's essay ("The Cthulhu Mythos") was later republished in Crypt of Cthulhu #32 (1985). In applying the elemental theory to beings that function on a cosmic scale (e.g., Yog-Sothoth ) some authors created a fifth element that they termed aethyr . A number of fictional cults dedicated to "malevolent supernatural entities" appear in

1296-498: The World, Against Life (2005) decries Derleth for attempting to reshape Lovecraft's strictly amoral continuity into a stereotypical conflict between forces of objective good and evil. In John Glasby 's "A Shadow from the Aeons", Cthulhu is seen by the narrator roaming the riverbank near Dominic Waldron's castle, and roaring. The character's influence also extended into gaming literature; games company TSR included an entire chapter on

1344-519: The baleful attention of the Other Gods, they "did what was expected". According to the story, Sansu is "written of with fright" in the Pnakotic Manuscripts , having once scaled the mountain of Hatheg-Kla "in the youth of the world" and found "naught but wordless ice and rock". He is the last person to have climbed the mountain before Barzai. Though some readers assume that "The Other Gods" is set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands , critic S. T. Joshi points out

1392-407: The burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their ban on cat-slaying. He vanishes shortly after climbing to the top of Hatheg-Kla to see the gods reveling on its peak. In "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", Nyarlathotep himself speaks to Randolph Carter in a brief and sardonic fashion of the ill-fated expeditions of other impertinent god-seekers, and therein relates that when Barzai's hubris brought him to

1440-578: The connections to the story " Polaris ", which seems to be set in Earth's distant past, in arguing that "the clear implication is that this tale too takes place in a prehistoric civilization." In addition to Dream-Quest , the mysterious mountain is mentioned in several other Lovecraft stories, including " The Strange High House in the Mist ", " The Dunwich Horror ", and At the Mountains of Madness . The story resembles

1488-515: The creature's origins ("I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth.") The 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness refers to the "star-spawn of Cthulhu", who warred with another race called the Elder Things before the dawn of man. 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,

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1536-441: The deities of the Mythos to the four elements (air, earth, fire, and water), creating new beings representative of certain elements in order to legitimize his system of classification. He created "Cthugha" as a sort of fire elemental when a fan, Francis Towner Laney, complained that he had neglected to include the element in his schema. Laney, the editor of The Acolyte , had categorized the Mythos in an essay that first appeared in

1584-429: The development of the Cthulhu Mythos. Price called the first stage the "Cthulhu Mythos proper". This stage was formulated during Lovecraft's lifetime and was subject to his guidance. The second stage was guided by August Derleth who, in addition to publishing Lovecraft's stories after his death, attempted to categorize and expand the Mythos. An ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete irrelevance of mankind in

1632-404: The face of the cosmic horrors that apparently exist in the universe. Lovecraft made frequent references to the " Great Old Ones ", a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and have since fallen into a deathlike sleep. While these monstrous deities were present in almost all of Lovecraft's published work (his second short story " Dagon ", published in 1919,

1680-595: The many tales of hubris written by Lord Dunsany , like "The Revolt of the Home Gods" from The Gods of Pegana (1905). The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan (misprinted as "...of Earth" in the story's original publication) appear for the first time in "The Other Gods". The Pnakotic Manuscripts make their second appearance in "The Other Gods", having been introduced in "Polaris", along with Lomar . Both later reappear in Dream-Quest . Great Ones The Cthulhu Mythos

1728-465: The outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!" Atal flees, and Barzai is never seen again. Atal first appears in Lovecraft's " The Cats of Ulthar " (1920) as the young son of an innkeeper in Ulthar who witnesses the weird rites of the cats on the night that the old cotter and his wife are killed. In "The Other Gods", he becomes the apprentice of Barzai the Wise and accompanies him on his doomed climb to

1776-635: The premise that, while currently trapped, Cthulhu will eventually return. His worshippers chant " Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn " ("In his house at R'lyeh , dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"). Lovecraft conceived a detailed genealogy for Cthulhu (published as "Letter 617" in Selected Letters ) and made the character a central reference in his works. The short story " The Dunwich Horror " (1928) refers to Cthulhu, while " The Whisperer in Darkness " (1930) hints that one of his characters knows

1824-638: 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 Elementals" and was engaged in an age-old arch-rivalry with a designated air elemental, Hastur the Unspeakable , described as Cthulhu's "half-brother." Based on this framework, Derleth wrote a series of short stories published in Weird Tales (1944–1952) and collected as The Trail of Cthulhu , depicting

1872-476: The ritual practices, or even formed the bedrock, of certain cabals and magical circles". The Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft is considered to have been highly influential for the speculative fiction genre. It has been called "the official fictional religion of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, a grab bag for writers in need of unthinkably vast, and unthinkably indifferent, eldritch entities". Sollasina cthulhu , an extinct ophiocistioid echinoderm ,

1920-616: The rubric 'Elder Gods' so alien to Lovecraft's in At the Mountains of Madness ? Perhaps not. In fact, this very story, along with some hints from "The Shadow over Innsmouth", provides the key to the origin of the 'Derleth Mythos'. For in At the Mountains of Madness is shown the history of a conflict between interstellar races, first among them the Elder Ones and the Cthulhu-spawn." Derleth said Lovecraft wished for other authors to actively write about

1968-518: The spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings ." Cthulhu is said to resemble a green octopus, dragon, and a human caricature, hundreds of meters tall, with webbed, human-looking arms and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back. Its head is depicted as similar to the entirety of a gigantic octopus , with an unknown number of tentacles surrounding its supposed mouth. The short story that first mentions Cthulhu, "The Call of Cthulhu",

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2016-479: The stories he ghostwrote for other authors, he reserved Arkham and its environs exclusively for those tales he wrote under his own name. Although the Mythos was not formalized or acknowledged between them, Lovecraft did correspond, meet in person, and share story elements with other contemporary writers including Clark Ashton Smith , Robert E. Howard , Robert Bloch , Frank Belknap Long , Henry Kuttner , Henry S. Whitehead , and Fritz Leiber —a group referred to as

2064-419: The story that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Writer Dirk W. Mosig noted that Lovecraft was a "mechanistic materialist" who embraced the philosophy of cosmic indifferentism and believed in a purposeless, mechanical, and uncaring universe. Human beings, with their limited faculties, can never fully understand this universe, and

2112-709: The struggle of a Dr. Laban Shrewsbury and his associates against Cthulhu and his minions. In addition, Cthulhu is referenced in Derleth's 1945 novel The Lurker at the Threshold published by Arkham House . The novel can also be found in The Watchers Out of Time and Others , a collection of stories from Derleth's interpretations of Lovecraftian Mythos published by Arkham House in 1974. Derleth's interpretations have been criticized by Lovecraft enthusiast Michel Houellebecq , among others. Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against

2160-620: The sunken city of R'lyeh ) to the lesser castes (the lowly slave shoggoths and the Mi-Go ). David E. Schultz said Lovecraft never meant to create a canonical Mythos but rather intended his imaginary pantheon to serve merely as a background element. Lovecraft himself humorously referred to his Mythos as "Yog Sothothery" (Dirk W. Mosig coincidentally suggested the term Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth be substituted for Cthulhu Mythos ). At times, Lovecraft even had to remind his readers that his Mythos creations were entirely fictional. The view that there

2208-519: The top of Mount Hatheg-Kla to see the gods. When Randolph Carter visits Atal in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), he is the patriarch of the Temple of the Elder Ones and is now well over 300 years old, "but still very keen of mind and memory". After many draughts of moon-wine, he reveals an important piece of information that helps Carter in his quest. As befits his age and station, Atal sports

2256-419: Was no rigid structure is expounded upon by S. T. Joshi , who said Lovecraft's imaginary cosmogony was never a static system but rather a sort of aesthetic construct that remained ever adaptable to its creator's developing personality and altering interests.... There was never a rigid system that might be posthumously appropriated..... The essence of the mythos lies not in a pantheon of imaginary deities nor in

2304-722: Was published in Weird Tales in 1928, and established the character as a malevolent entity, hibernating within R'lyeh , an underwater city in the South Pacific . The imprisoned Cthulhu is apparently the source of constant subconscious anxiety for all mankind, and is also the object of worship, both by many human cults (including some within New Zealand , Greenland , Louisiana , and the Chinese mountains ) and by other Lovecraftian monsters (called Deep Ones and Mi-Go ). The short story asserts

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