"The Call of Cthulhu" (1926) is certainly the fountainhead story of the Cthulhu Mythos, both in Lovecraft's fiction and in subsequent works. And though it is easy to see how other writers, e.g., Derleth and Lumley, have developed Cthulhu in new directions, it should not go unnoticed that HPL himself did not let the dreaming titan rest undisturbed in R'lyeh. For he brought him out of retirement for several (often admittedly minor) appearances in later stories. We want to survey these references, tracing the frequent reversals and permutations in Lovecraft's depiction of Great Cthulhu.

Horrifying Visage

First, what of Cthulhu's appearance? In "The Call of Cthulhu", we find this famous description: "A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings. . . ." The figure is at once like "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature" (The Dunwich Horror, p. 132). Further, he is represented as crouching atop a pedestal. He is similarly depicted in statuary in "The Mound" (1929-1930), where he appears as a "squatting octopus-headed thing" (The Horror in the Museum, p. 323). Once he is called simply "the octopus Tulu" (Ibid., p. 371). We see him "leering with fishy, sea-green eyes" (Ibid., p. 337). Three years later, in "The Horror in the Museum" (1933), Lovecraft makes fleeting reference to "many tentacled Cthulhu" (Ibid., p. 104) and notes that his wax statue starts to give eerie signs of life: "The long, facial tentacles of great Cthulhu" began to wave in the air. In fact, the story implies that the "sculptor" Rogers had actually tracked down and captured Cthulhu as he lay sleeping, and that he is henceforth trapped in wax in a London gallery!

Cthulhu is profiled again, and perhaps given a new locale as well, in Lovecraft's much-underrated story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" (1935). Trapped in a haunted house and awaiting his doom, the occultist Typer stumbles upon a colored drawing of a "monstrous creature resembling nothing so much as a squid, beaked and tentacled, with great yellow eyes, and with certain abominable approximations to the human form in its contours. . . . On the paws, feet, and head tentacles were curious claws --- while the entity as a whole sat upon a great throne-like pedestal inscribed with unknown hieroglyphs of a vaguely Chinese cast" (Ibid., p. 166). Obviously Cthulhu is in view here. The description matches the one given in "The Call of Cthulhu", save for a few interesting variations emphasized in our quote.

It is even implied here that Cthulhu himself may lurk in a vault beneath the house! For the claws of the image remind Typer of the squamous phantom claws that had been harassing him, and certain other signs hint that behind the cellar vault lies an enormous "serpent or sea-beast dragging its monstrous folds over a paved floor" (Ibid., p. 163). Though in these stories he seems to get around, it is said or implied in most of the other tales ("Medusa's Coil", "The Whisperer in Darkness", At the Mountains of Madness, "The Shadow over Innsmouth", "Through the Gates of the Silver Key") that Cthulhu "still lay prisoned and dreaming in the watery vaults of the half-cosmic city Relex [= R'lyeh]" ("The Mound", The Horror in the Museum, p. 340).

The Old Ones

In post-Lovecraft Mythos fiction, Cthulhu is universally regarded as one of the Great Old Ones, but how did Lovecraft see Cthulhu's relationship to this group? In "The Call of Cthulhu", Cthulhu is said to be the great high priest of the Old Ones, implying that he is one of them, perhaps the greatest. But two years later in "The Dunwich Horror" (1928) Lovecraft reverses things. "Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly" (The Dunwich Horror, p. 175). This quote from the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred makes it clear thrice over that Cthulhu is to be differentiated from the Old Ones. He is related to them, to be sure, but only their "cousin". He cannot even perceive them clearly. And finally, (it is implied) he has earned their retribution since "the sunken isles of [the] Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven" and one of these isles presumably is R'lyeh. The situation in "The Call of Cthulhu", then, has been completely reversed in "The Dunwich Horror".

But things have changed again in "The Mound" (1929-1930), since now Cthulhu is worshipped by the Old Ones, though the identity of this group has changed, referring now to the "primal proto-humans brought down from the stars by Great Cthulhu" (Selected Letters III, p. 95). In fact these Old Ones, the inhabitants of K'n-yan, theologize "Tulu" as "a spirit of universal harmony" (The Horror in the Museum, p. 345), a far cry from Alonzo Typer's estimation: "Rather must that monstrous shape be a focus for all the evil in unbounded space, throughout the eons past and to come. . . ." (Ibid., p. 166).

"Medusa's Coil," written the same year (1930), seems to echo this alliance of "Cthulhu and the Elder Ones" (Ibid., p. 290), though the reference is brief. But the very next year Lovecraft switched things yet again in At the Mountains of Madness (1931), where the Old Ones (now star-headed extra-terrestrials!) are at war with the spawn of Cthulhu, and thus by implication with Cthulhu himself. The same state of affairs is implicit in "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (also 1931), where the Deep Ones are worshippers of Cthulhu but enemies of the Old Ones.

Spawn of Cthulhu

What relation does Cthulhu bear to the human race? At first (in "The Call of Cthulhu"), Cthulhu and the Old Ones have already disappeared when humans first evolve. "When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by molding their dreams" (The Dunwich Horror, p. 145). The Old Ones "had, indeed, come themselves from the stars. . . ." (Ibid,, p. 144), but humanity was the product of nature on earth. But in "The Mound", written three years later, we are told that "we're all descended from them in the beginning --- children of Tulu. . . ." (The Horror in the Museum, p. 309). Darwin, it seems, was wrong, since the first "primal proto-humans [were] brought down from the stars by Great Cthulhu" (a reference to this tale in Selected Letters III, p. 95). But come to think about it, maybe not, since in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930), the "Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles" of myth are described as "antedating the coming of man to the earth" (The Dunwich Horror, p. 223), implying that man was a post-Cthulhu development. At the Mountains of Madness (1931) implies this, too, since the war of the Old Ones and the Cthulhu-spawn is over and R'lyeh has already sunk by the Permian Age, much too early for man.

If humans are out of the picture after "The Mound", who are the spawn of Cthulhu? In "The Whisperer in Darkness" the Outer Ones, or Mi-Go, from Yuggoth are shown as worshippers of Cthulhu, and may share a common origin with him since we are told that "they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R'lyeh when it was above the waters" (The Dunwich Horror, p. 260). There is also the interesting hint contained in Wilmarth's words, "I learned whence Cthulhu first came. . . ." (Ibid., p. 262), i.e., perhaps from Yuggoth or the extra-dimensional homeland of the Mi-Go. He may be pictured, then, as bringing the Mi-Go down from the stars, as with the Old Ones of K'n-yan in "The Mound".

But if this is a possible reading of "The Whisperer in Darkness", it doesn't work in At the Mountains of Madness, where the Mi-Go from Yuggoth could not possibly remember the epoch of Cthulhu since they first arrived on earth after the sinking of R'lyeh. Instead, Cthulhu is supplied with a new set of proteges, "cosmic octopi" who are clearly said to be "pre-human".  Like the Old Ones of "The Mound", they "begin filtering down from cosmic infinity."

In "The Shadow over Innsmouth", written the following year, the ichthyic Deep Ones are said to be sometime worshippers of Cthulhu, but do not seem to be identical to the earlier "cosmic octopi". In his collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1932-1933), Lovecraft mentions some unspecified "spawn of Cthulhu" who brought the R'lyehian language to earth "countless ages ago".

One last chronological difficulty arises in a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith, where Lovecraft waxes eloquent about a fragment of dinosaur bone sent him by Smith. It may, he says, have belonged to "a beast on whose broad back Great Cthulhu himself may have ridden from his palace in blasphemous R'lyeh" (Selected Letters III, p. 119). But according to At the Mountains of Madness, written the next year, Cthulhu was long gone when the age of dinosaurs arrived.

Whenever human beings entered the Cthulhuvian picture, it is plain that eventually some of them came to worship the R'lyehian. In "The Call of Cthulhu", his secret religion is said to extend from Greenland, to the Louisiana bayous, to China, to Arabia. Some of the later stories extend this list. "The Electric Executioner" (1929) includes Cthulhu among the frightful Aztec divinities ("Tonatiuh-Metztli! Cthulhu!"), while "Medusa's Coil" links Cthulhu to the megalithic ruins of Zimbabwe. Likewise, "Winged Death" (1933) associates Cthulhu with similar cyclopean remains in Uganda.

Lovecraft was not done with Cthulhu when he wrote "The Call of Cthulhu". Elsewhere in his writings, he expels Cthulhu from the Old Ones' ranks, and then reinstates him, and expels him again. (And through it all, the identity of these "Old Ones" is constantly changing. ) He gives him vacations from R'lyeh and returns him there. He has him shepherd the fledgling human race to earth and then withdraws this honor. Now the Mi-Go see him, now they don't. Yet through the ever-shifting panorama, the basic outlines of the Cthulhu character remain the same. And it's not called "the Cthulhu Mythos" for nothing.