Cthulhu Mythos/Headscratchers


 * Okay, how in the flying hell do you pronounce "Cthulhu"? I've seen and heard at least five different ways. (Unless the point is that you'd have to be unbalanced to start with if you wanted/needed to use it on a daily basis...)
 * That's kinda right. Lovecraft said in his letters that there's no one correct way to say it, since it's just the closest approximation the human tongue can make of its true name. Most people say "cuh-thu-loo", I prefer "cuh-too-loo", but anything that gets the gist of it across is fine.
 * Here's what Lovecraft wrote:

"The actual sound - as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it - may be taken as something like Khlul'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly."

"The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different."


 * Did Lovecraft just make...a joke?
 * You know, the guy had quite a sense of humour, it's just that he didn't express it in its tales. In his letters though, he did.
 * Pickman's pals thought "Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow are buried in Mount Auburn" was hilarious enough...


 * You english speakers are struggling for nothing. Some languages, like portuguese, actually have the "lh" sound, and for us pronouncing "Cthulhu" would be resonaly easy.
 * That completely misses the point: "Cthulhu" isn't some absolute way to pronounce it, it's just the closest the writer can get to writing down a name that can't be spoken by human vocal apparatus. Being Brazilian doesn't give one the ability to voice alien words.
 * That mortal approximation he spoke of, you mean? And as for Lovecraft's humor, yes, it is one of his most overlooked literary traits, although it is all over the tale Ibid, though much more so if you know the story's origin. (He wrote it about a Latin-named faux historical figure as a big joke or prank when a student mistook that common abbreviation for what it sounds like, a Roman name.)
 * I just the other day read a story of his that had a funny line in it. Very subtle, but it really stood out. Most of his stories are written from such a serious/shattered point of view that humor would be inappropriate.
 * In Russian it is pronounced as "Ktoolhoo".


 * It isn't part of the mythos (though you could probably connect it via the Dreamlands cycle), but there's one bit in Lovecraft's story "The White Ship" that's bugged me, and made me laugh, for years as the longest Did I Just Say That Out Loud? moment ever. Allow me to quote, and keep in mind this is while the character's standing on the ship with his crewmates, lost in thought and just mumbling idly to himself...

"Cathuria," I would say to myself, "is the abode of gods and the land of unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees flutter gay birds sweet with song. On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of pink marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool fountains of silver, where purl with ravishing music the scented waters that come from the grotto-born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardens of these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds are of coral and amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the three-coloured shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And the houses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing the waters of the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendour of the cities as blissful gods view them from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some say to be a demigod and others a god. High is the palace of Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such carven figures of gods and heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze upon the living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria."


 * Wow... that is the character's idle mumbling?! I can only imagine the rest of the crew giving each other nervous glances and backing away slowly as the narrator rambles on and on to himself (remember, he's saying all this aloud!). Lovecraft's a great writer with brilliant ideas, but he does have a charming quirk about losing track of the context once he really gets into a Purple Prose bender.
 * Stephen King explains about Lovecraft's problem with writing natural-sounding dialogue very well in On Writing.
 * Thing is, Lovecraft wasn't a great writer. At all. He had some cracking ideas and his Mythos was an amazing concept just because of the framework that these unimaginably alien and powerful beings couldn't care less about humanity but his prose was, in many cases, absolutely dire. There's one story in particular (I want to say the Colour Out of Space but I'm not 100% on that) where a character is writing his journal when something bursts through his window. The final line of the story is something along the lines of 'oh no, htey're outside now, they're coming through the window, arrrgh.' Because obviously when being attacked by an alien monstrosity you'd be sure to make sure your death-scream was recorded.
 * That wasn't Lovecraft. That was Lin Carter's The Hounds of Tindalos, where the narrator continues to write his final words as he's being eaten alive by the titular creatures. Lovecraft's own prose doesn't have quite as egregious examples, and the few, like Dagon or The Haunter of the Dark, clearly have the narrator frantically scribbling their final notes, in hopes that they manage to get their last words down before the creature breaks in, and tend to cut off at a critical point. In The Colour from Space the narrator has no personal experience of the events at all, and the person he interviews survived after only glimpsing the Colour a couple of times.
 * The Hounds of Tindalos was by Frank Belknap Long, not Lin Carter.


 * Ok. Is Cthulhu merely a single entity, or is it a race of creatures?
 * "Cthulhu" is a proper noun for a single individual, but he represents a race of similar creatures, whose high priest and ruler he is.
 * I think they are just called the "Star Spawn of Cthulhu". They are basically Cthulhu, except much smaller, roughly 7 feet tall.
 * They're also sometimes called Cthulhi. Wikipedia tells us that, in a letter to James F. Morton, Lovecraft said that Cthulhu is himself the son of Nug, who is the child of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath.
 * Cthulhu is singular; the name of an individual, as mentioned above. As for the race, I want to call them Xothians (after the star or planet they came from, IIRC), but can't place the reference right now, so take that with an appropriate dose of salt. And incidentally, we don't -- strictly speaking -- know for certain that the entity who put in an appearance in The Call of Cthulhu actually was Great Cthulhu himself. It never bothered to introduce itself or wear a convenient name tag for a certain bunch of unlucky sailors to name it by, after all...and Cthulhu is hardly the only sleeper in R'lyeh.


 * Something seems inconsistent about the power of the great old ones (like cthulhu). In "Call of Cthulhu" Cthulhu is knocked out when someone rams a yacht into his head, and in Dark Corners of the Earth Hydra and Dagon are both killed by the player with conventional weaponry (well, Hydra was killed with a Yithian Engergy Gun), yet I've also heard that they are extremely powerful and could end humanity on a whim. So are they immortal badass gods or can they be killed?
 * Cthulhu isn't knocked out as such, just dispersed for a time and after that doesn't follow the yacht anymore; it's hard to tell how much the impact truly hurt him, if at all. As for the power to end humanity on a whim...remember that much of what we 'know' about the Great Old Ones is plain old cultist propaganda even where it isn't simply crazy babble. And even so, it's never said in the original story that Cthulhu & Co will one day wake up and decide to just wipe out mankind -- rather, the prophecy is that when the stars are right, humanity will already be pretty much like them, which is to say, not exactly very 'human' anymore as you and I might commonly understand the term. (Can't comment on Dagon and Hydra, though I seem to remember reading -- in the RPG, most likely --, that those two aren't so much GOOs as 'merely' very, very old and oversized Deep Ones.)
 * The boat seems to have punctured his head, and dispersed all the jelly. Johansen says that he looked back, and saw him reassembling.
 * Their power level is inconsistent, and varies Depending On the Writer. Lovecraft himself never cared about consistency between stories. Moreover, if a story's to have a truly Lovecraftian feel, then we should not know what the Great Old Ones are, and what powers they have. Are they gods or monsters, mortal or immortal? They're beings from another part of the universe, where the natural laws are different. Humans can't understand what they are; trying will drive you insane.
 * Even if the cultists are mistaken about them being gods, this troper has always been puzzled by which of these (faux) "gods" the ones in the stories always choose to worship. The legends of the Great Old Ones aren't exactly secretive about the fact they'd gotten their immortal asses kicked by the Elder Gods, which is how they got Sealed In A Can in the first place. So why the heck do all the fanatical nutjobs who believe in them insist on revering the losers of that ancient conflict, rather than the winners? Where are the Elders' faithful worshipers hiding?
 * It's true that Lovecraft wasn't big on continuity and many of his stories stand well enough alone without being shoehorned into one overarching 'Mythos universe' (though some are more connected than others). That said, towards the end of his work he seems to have leaned towards the point of view that the 'gods' of the Mythos were really just weird alien entities that early humanity mistook for gods or demons out of ignorance and by Clarke's Third Law. (As to whether Science Is Bad really is a necessary key element of 'Lovecraftian flavor'...I'd say it's debatable when the Aesop of his tales more often than not seems to be that while knowledge may be bad for your peace of mind, it's ignorance that gets you killed outright.)
 * Lovecraft's not the type of author that one would read to find an Aesop, the incredibly long earlier discussion notwithstanding. To the extent that any Aesops exist in his work, they're only valid in context, like "don't steal amulets from the graves of really wicked wizards" ("The Hound").
 * Most of them (such as Cthulhu) don't appear to be gods based on what little Lovecraft wrote about them so much as incredibly powerful aliens. As for the variations in power, part of that is inconsistency by Lovecraft and later writers and part of it is the more advanced technology we have now. Later writers had to find a way to make creatures like Cthulhu a threat when humans have access to weapons with far more kinetic power than a crashing ship.
 * In the case of Call of Cthulhu's climactic encounter, it is not in fact stated at any point that the abomination that emerges from Rl'yeh's gate is in fact Cthulhu himself, and not a Star-Spawn, Beloved or some other unknowable living atrocity. As part of the story ambiguous phrasing, it could be that the Alert destroyed the initial form of a much less potent threat than the big guy himself.


 * OK, forgive me if I didn't research this enough, but what exactly are the Deep Ones? Aliens? Demons? Some prehistoric animal that survived in the depths of the ocean? Precursors?
 * They're immortal (type II) fish-people who've lived in the oceans for at least millennia, if not much longer, and interact with humans only rarely, in secret, and on their own terms. They're also capable of interbreeding with humans, resulting in hybrid offspring that start out looking human enough but will usually over the years 'mature' into fully accepted Deep Ones themselves. I don't think their precise ultimate origin is ever spelled out, but The Shadow over Innsmouth at least vaguely hints that they're simply another race native to Earth, what with all life having originally come from the sea and all that...
 * "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" elaborates on their origin.
 * Most people interpret the creatures from "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" as entirely different. For one thing, they're driven to extinction at the start of the story.
 * IIRC, there's some suggestion that they're spawn of Dagon, one of the...I get these mixed up, whatever gods are on the same level as Cthulhu. Great Old Ones?
 * Dagon isn't a Great Old One (which is a fairly imprecise term) and definitely not on the same level as Cthulhu. He appears to be a very powerful Star Spawn of Cthulhu.
 * At least one critic has proposed that Dagon is Cthulhu -- Lovecraft generally didn't use clear, pre-existing, earthly names like the Biblical name Dagon for his alien creatures. Thus, it's possible that Dagon is just a more familiar name for Cthulhu being used by the people of Innsmouth as cover.
 * "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a little obscure on the issue, but I believe it states that the Deep Ones are a separate evolutional offshoot of mankind, which is why they can successfully interbreed with humans.


 * So, the Great Old Ones and their kin aren't malevolent, but simply do not register that we're here, or that we're sentient...does that mean you can defeat Cthulhu by initiating a pleasant and intelligent conversation?
 * In theory maybe. Generally the stories depict Cthulhu as being a very powerful creature whose resurrection would mean bad times for humanity. Of course the original story has Cthulhu getting knocked over by a ship crashing into it but we can probably chalk that one up to technology marching on.
 * And the other Great Old Ones? It's mentioned above that none of them are aware we're sentient. Striking a conversation with one of them would concievably change that.
 * With the contradictory nature of the Cthulhu Mythos that isn't quite certain and it's sometimes suggested that they're so alien they couldn't understand us and vice versa.
 * And yet, ordinary humans can summon these creatures we're incapable of ever understanding and vice versa?
 * Not all of them and the people who summon them tend to either be hybrids or mostly insane (or both), however simply summoning something does not equal comprehension. Also the stories are hardly consistent.
 * In any case, in The Call of Cthulhu we see that when the titular Old One awakens, the sheer psychic shock is enough to send sensitive minds around the world into insanity or even suicide. Humans and Old Ones can't coexist simply because being within few astronomical units from one in their full strength would destroy human consciousness. Even their dreams would be dangerous, if not for the ocean water that somehow insulates the psychic influence.
 * Considering how several of the Great Old Ones seem to be bitter rivals, it's unlikely that getting them to acknowledge humans are sentient would make us safe. They're not friendly to each other, why should they be that way to anyone else?


 * Why is Nodens described in the character sheet as The Hunter when is attitude and actions are more like a Egomaniac Hunter that hunts for sport? where is the fragment that says otherwise?


 * Why do the cosmic beings in the Mythos take so many weird forms,like Y'golonac:Takes the form of a obese male with no head and mouths on his hands.
 * The majority of the cosmic beings in the Cthulhu Mythos are beyond human. Way beyond. They do not share our ideas of what 'good looks' are, they hardly share our ideas of what 'up' is. You cannot grasp the true form, starfish aliens and alien geometries are in full effect here, as well as the occasional brown note.


 * Why do the various Cosmic Horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos take multiple avatars?
 * In Nyarly's case at least, I'm inclined to suspect the answer of being 'for fun' with a side of it making messing with the squishy mortals easier.
 * This is largely a trait of the most potently deistic creatures in Lovecraft's pantheon (Shub-Niggurath, Nylarthotep, Yog-Sothoth, but not Cthulhu, Yig, et al) because he's borrowing from old religious archetypes. Near all religions that refer to deities refer to them by multiple monikers and tell tales of them assuming manifold forms due to their mythologies being created by many individuals over long periods of time with countless cultural influences informing each. The Christian god is at once Yahweh, The Triumvirate Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Our Father Who Art In Heaven, The Whirlwind in the Burning Thorn Tree and many others. Not so different from say Nylarthotep, The Crawling Chaos, The Dark Man of the East, and of course Nyarko the Silver-Haired anime girl who fights aliens (Sorry).


 * What the hell was it that got summoned by accident in The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward? I mean, it's one of the few genuinely helpful supernatural entities in Lovecraft's works and there's absolutely no indication of who or what it was. I know that Nothing Is Scarier was his thing but sometimes a hint would be nice.
 * If you mean the figure that apparently reconstituted itself from the ashes in front of Dr. Willett on his underground foray, there are hints. It apparently had a beard if his words on waking up are anything to go by, the letter it left with him was written in Latin using "the pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A.D.", and if the way it seems to have brought him home and erase all evidence is any indication it must have possessed a fair degree of power, "magical" or otherwise. All that might point towards one particular Public Domain Character...


 * Can a cosmic deity be killed?
 * The Mythos universe doesn't really play favorites. So in principle, if any way for the entity in question to die at all exists in the first place, somebody (or something) may one day find and implement it. Of course, if it really is a 'cosmic deity' we're talking about rather than 'merely' a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, then it's probably also connected to the cosmos in ways that might make its demise bad news for the rest of us anyway...


 * What does the only word we know of in the language of the Elder Things, "tekeli-li", mean?
 * Given that it is screamed by an Elder Thing moments before it is crushed by a Shoggoth in "In The Mountains of Madness", it's possible it means something similar to "Run For Your Lives". The Shoggoths repeat it endlessly either in a primitive attempt at imitating their former masters, or as a kind of cruel mocking threat.
 * Alternatively, given that the Elder Things are described as whistling a lot, it might be that most of their language would sound like "tekeli-li" to English speakers. Alternately alternately, it's an onomatopoeia for a bird call.


 * Why can Nodens compare to the power of Nyarlathotep? How is it possible that one of the Outer Gods to NOT vanquish this annoying pest? Does he have something in particular that makes him a nessesary evil?
 * Because Nodens is that awesome.