This page contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, strong drug use, extremely traumatic themes, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page.
H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu is the titular character and a major antagonist in the Cthulhu Mythos by the late legendary weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. He's one of the Great Old Ones, an ancient race of deities that are comparable to cosmic beings and archdemons in other works of fantasy.
In H.P. Lovecraft's works, Cthulhu is a major antagonist in the Cthulhu Mythos, first introduced in the 1928 story 'The Call of Cthulhu'. As a member of the Great Old Ones, a race of powerful deities, Cthulhu embodies fear of the unknown and potential world-consuming destruction.
Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft. He 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, he is the namesake of the Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu has since been featured in numerous pop culture references.
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, the Cthulhu Mythos. 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 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.
Read also: Call of Cthulhu: A Must-Play for Horror Fans?
The character's influence also extended into gaming literature; games company TSR included an entire chapter on the Cthulhu mythos (including character statistics) in the first printing of Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook Deities & Demigods (1980).
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, fictional entity created by fantasy-horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and introduced in his story “The Call of Cthulhu,” first published in the magazine Weird Tales in 1928. The creature is described as “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.” It is said to be so terrible to behold that it destroys the sanity of those who see it.
Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as Khlûl′-hloo, and said, "the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The 'u' 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)lʊlˌɬuː/.
The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu are based on statues of the creature. Most known descriptions of him stem from statuettes found in the possession of cult members; they are usually around a foot high and depict Cthulhu in a crouching position. 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, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."
Read also: Descent into Madness
A carving of Cthulhu is described thus: "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 the spirit of the thing.
Johansen in The Call of Cthulhu states that "The Thing cannot be described-there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled." Cthulhu is described again shortly thereafter as a "mountainous monstrosity".
In fiction and popular media, Cthulhu's appearance can change from story to story, but he is most often portrayed as a monster of vaguely humanoid shape with a squid-like face and wings. Cthulhu, a grotesque entity from Lovecraft's lore, possesses a gigantic, humanoid form with octopus-like features, including a four-eyed head and tentacled beard. His mountainous size and horrifying appearance are known to drive humans to insanity.
Sketch of Cthulhu drawn by Lovecraft (11 May 1934)
And as a Great Old One, Cthulhu's true form also remains indescribable and indefinitely controversial. The Great Old Ones are cosmic entities that are too abstract to be accurately described by human perception. In canon, all of his most popular and remotely consistent appearances have been merely what little his witnesses have been able to comprehend before going insane at the sight of something beyond human comprehension.
Who can speak to the shape of an entity whose visage shatters the sanity of anyone who gazes upon it? Occasionally, his dreams have haunted the mind of an artist, and even as their psyche snapped like dried kindling under the immense strain, they attempted to realize the images onto their preferred medium. Some artists who have experienced this sculpted an approximation of his shape from stone or clay, while others put words to paper. Cthulhu is often depicted as an immense and grotesque being, his form an amalgamation of nightmarish features.
Read also: The Language of R'lyeh
Tentacles writhe around an elongated, rubbery visage that seems to mirror elements of the great cephalopods of the ocean deeps. Four baleful, crimson eyes stare from beneath fleshy brows. It is said that in the center of his head, a fifth orb remains tightly shut-his “dreaming eye,” the means by which he sees the world while he slumbers. His shoulders are dominated by a pair of huge wings, limp and tattered from millennia of disuse.
It is important to note that the creatures that Castro refers to as the "Great Old Ones" correspond only to the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu, not to any of the other entities referred to as Great Old Ones elsewhere in the Mythos. This is evidenced by Castro's claim that "They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh". Elsewhere in the story, Cthulhu is also identified as the "priest" of the Great Old Ones.
As the others tried to escape, a man named Parker "was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there", part of the mysterious alien geometry of R'lyeh. William Briden, who managed to reach the ship, lost his sanity as he saw the massive creature swimming after them in pursuit and "kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin".
In Lovecraft's works, the only description of Cthulhu himself, as opposed to his stone idols, comes from the narrative of Gustaf Johansen, the lone survivor of a group of sailors who stumbled upon a portion of sunken R'lyeh after it briefly emerged from the sea due to cataclysmic tremors in 1925. Johansen's testimony emphasizes the gargantuan size of the creature, which is compared to a walking mountain. The seaman describes Cthulhu as a "gelatinous green immensity", with "flabby claws" and a "squid-head with writhing feelers". Johansen's phrase "a mountain walked or stumbled" gives a sense of the monster's scale. This is corroborated by Wilcox's dreams, which "touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked or lumbered about".
After Johansen rammed the Alert into Cthulhu, the creature's body was ruptured like an "exploding bladder" and turned into a "blinding green cloud", which soon started to reform itself. Folklorist Albert Wilmarth believes that Cthulhu can exist as a gas and seep through solid rock.
In Derleth's fiction, Cthulhu is portrayed as a malleable shapeshifter. In the stories of August Derleth, Cthulhu's physical appearance is portrayed somewhat differently. Derleth's Cthulhu is far more protoplasmic than most other depictions, a shapeshifting mass with myriads of tentacles sprouting from its body, and a single eye on its face.
Cthulhu is often labeled as 'evil'. However, he is more accurately described as amoral, functioning beyond human comprehension of morality or sanity. In Lovecraft's original stories, Cthulhu's size is described as mountainous or even larger, creating an apocalyptic and terrifying presence. In the Cthulhu Mythos, Cthulhu is a near-omnipotent entity with the power of flight, telepathic communication, and vast intelligence. His appearance can drive humans to madness.
While not as powerful as many other Great Old Ones and being dwarfed in scale by the Outer Gods that he serves, Cthulhu is still a very powerful entity. Being near godlike to humans, Cthulhu is immortal and has great strength and can endure great amounts of damage and can only be killed by a near-omnipotent power. Using his wings, he is capable of true flight. Arguably, Cthulhu's most notable trait is the fact that he, alongside the rest of his kin, cannot be comprehended by humans; when a human so much as looks at Cthulhu, they will almost certainly be driven mad by his visage.
Cthulhu was born on the planet Vhoorl, located in the 23rd nebula. He traveled to the star Zoth where he spawned his offspring. Along with his children and the Star Spawn of Cthulhu, Cthulhu travelled to Saturn and then to Earth. They landed on a continent in the Pacific Ocean and built the city R'lyeh. Cthulhu received resistance from the Elder Things who also lived on the planet. They waged war for the planet Earth until a truce was made. Cthulhu then went into a deep hibernation within R'lyeh.
Humanity then evolved on Earth and Cthulhu communicated with several through dreams, resulting in the Cult of Cthulhu. Disaster then struck R'lyeh, sinking it into the ocean. R'lyeh has risen from the ocean for brief amounts of time. In most of the stories, Cthulhu lays dormant deep under the ocean within the sunken city of R'lyeh, but can still influence the world via many telepathic powers and, of course, his many cults and otherworldly minions. It is said that once Cthulhu is fully awakened, he shall rise from the depths and end the world; thankfully for humanity, Cthulhu has yet to do so.
The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh […] was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. R'lyeh (pronounced /ˈɹu.li.a/ or /ɹɪl.ˈai.ɛ/) is a nightmarish supernatural city featured in the Cthulhu Mythos by author H. P. Lovecraft, which makes its first appearance in the 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu". R'lyeh is also referred to in Lovecraft's "The Mound" as "Relex".
R'lyeh is a sunken city located deep under the Pacific Ocean and is where the godlike being Cthulhu of the immortal Great Old Ones is buried. When R'lyeh rises in Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu", the only portion of the city that emerges is a single “hideous monolith-crowned citadel” in which Cthulhu is entombed. The city is a panorama of “vast angles and stone surfaces […] too great to belong to anything right and proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and disturbing hieroglyphs”.
Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9'S 126°43'W in the southern Pacific Ocean. However, August Derleth placed R'lyeh at 49°51'S 128°34'W in his own writings. Both locations are close to the Pacific oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48°52.6'S 123°23.6'W), the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5,100 nautical miles (5,900 statute miles or 9,500 kilometers), or about 10 day's journey for a fast ship, from the real island of Pohnpei (Ponape).
R'lyeh, the sunken city of Cthulhu
They opened up one of the strange buildings, only for Cthulhu to exit it and attack them. The creature only halted its attack when the sailors used their ship to cut him in half. As they sailed away, they could see Cthulhu reforming into a whole being again. The world would have ended then but for the fact that R'lyeh suddenly sunk as the stars moved out of position.
The short story that first mentions Cthulhu, "The Call of Cthulhu", 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 the premise that, while currently trapped, Cthulhu will eventually return.
When a portion of R'lyeh, believed to be Cthulhu's citadel, rose briefly above the surface in 1925, Cthulhu's influence was felt globally by psychically sensitive individuals, with artists and asylum patients being particularly susceptible. All over the world there were "cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity", up to and including suicides. As with other Great Old Ones, statuettes of Cthulhu can serve as a "point of contact" that allow him to manifest himself physically and mentally through the idol. This is not limited to those idols made of extraterrestrial minerals brought to Earth by Cthulhu and his Star-Spawn, but has also been observed with wooden sculptures carved on Earth as well.
Cthulhu is said to have a worldwide doomsday cult centered in Arabia, with followers stretching everywhere in the entire world. There are leaders of the cult "in the mountains of China" who are said to be immortal. This cult is nihilistic in nature and seeks to awaken the Old Ones and bring about an apocalyptic age of darkness in which, according to some stories, men would be reduced to shouting and killing each other in fits of madness.
Cthulhu is characterized as the priest or leader of the Old Ones, a species that came to Earth from the stars before human life arose. The Old Ones went dormant, and their city slipped under Earth’s crust beneath the Pacific Ocean. They communicated with humans by telepathy, and, in hidden corners of the world, uncivilized people remembered and worshipped Cthulhu in rites described as loathsome. These groups had statues of Cthulhu that seemed to be made of materials not found on Earth and chanted the phrase “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”). When conditions are right, the city will rise, and, with the help of the eternal Cthulhu cult, Cthulhu will awaken and again rule the world.
The Cthulhu faith is not monotheistic. Being a devotee of Cthulhu does not preclude one from worshiping other (cosmic) deities. Abdul Alhazred, for example, was known to worship both Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth.
Cthulhu cultists believe that, by the time Cthulhu and his Star-Spawn return, humanity will have become like them: an anarchic society free from all laws and morals, whose members dedicate themselves to "shouting and killing and reveling in joy". They also believe that the Great Old Ones will "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".
The cult has been known to abduct victims and sacrifice them to their deity, although those who have been imprisoned insisted that their allies, the Black Winged Ones, did the actual killing. About the nature of the Black Winged Ones and their relationship with Cthulhu nothing is known, except that they are not the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu.
In the past, Cthulhu was one of the gods worshiped by the earliest humans in the prehistoric continent of Mu. Michael Hayward's manuscript describes him as "mountain-tall Cthulhu of the Watery Abyss". Some sources suggest that Cthulhu was the inspiration for the biblical Leviathan, and that he and his Star-Spawn are the origin (or at least one of the origins) of worldwide legends about winged dragons and sea serpents, with the common motif of dragons and serpents with multiple heads originating as a misinterpretation of the creatures' facial tentacles.
Cthulhu is also worshiped by the nonhuman creatures known as the Deep Ones. Like the human cultists, the Deep Ones are also known to sacrifice victims as a "tribute" to Cthulhu. It is not known what kind of relationship Cthulhu has with Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, which are also worshiped by the Deep Ones.
The K'n-yanians are a humanoid species who worship Cthulhu (a.k.a. Tulu), alongside Yig. The K'n-yanians claim that it was Cthulhu who brought them from the stars to Earth long ago. They also worship the Tulu-metal, an unidentified extraterrestrial element or alloy which does not occur naturally on Earth, having been brought from the stars by Cthulhu.
"Great Cthulhu" is one of the gods that the Mi-Go and their human allies gave praise to in a ritual recorded by Henry Wentworth Akeley.
In common with Cthulhu, B'Moth is also identified as a giant prehistoric entity that lurks at the bottom of the ocean, and can communicate telepathically with its cultists throughout the globe.
Although the details vary widely, most sources generally agree that Cthulhu and his Star-Spawn are currently in a death-like state of dormancy, possibly akin to suspended animation, aestivation, or hibernation, from which they cannot emerge without outside assistance from their cultists. The ritual to release them might involve the opening of dimensional gateways, as suggested in The Trail of Cthulhu series. It is unknown how large the throng of those who worship the dreaded Cthulhu is, but his cult has many cells around the globe.
Professor Shrewsbury has dedicated many years of his life to try to locate and close down any "openings" in various parts of the world that might serve as avenues of escape for Cthulhu.
At some point in time, Cthulhu might have dwelt on the planet Saturn. According to correspondence between Lovecraft and fellow author James F. Morton, Cthulhu's parent is the deity Nug, itself the offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath. Meanwhile, Nug's twin sibling Yeb is the parent of Tsathoggua. Lovecraft labels Cthulhu and Tsathoggua as the "first of their respective lines to inhabit this planet", and includes a fanciful family tree in which he himself descends from Cthulhu via Shaurash-ho, Yogash the Ghoul, K'baa the Serpent, and Ghoth the Burrower.
However, other authors have expressed different ideas about the familial relations of Cthulhu and the other gods of the Mythos. Clark Ashton Smith, in his letters to R. H. Barlow, suggests that Cthulhu is the offspring of the androgynous Cxaxukluth (itself an offspring of Azathoth), and the brother of Hziulquoigmnzhah and Ghizguth, the latter being the father of Tsathoggua.
In the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy episode "Prank Call of Cthulhu", Cthulhu is literally called on a telephone by Billy, and uses him to start sending prank calls to people that turn them into squid monsters.
In the video game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Cthulhu is the name of a minor enemy with a strong fire breath attack and he is seen at the bottom of the Marble Gallery and again in various parts of the Inverted Castle. However, due to localization misplacing, this enemy is originally "Devil" in the Japanese release of the game while the enemy "Malachi" is the representation of the actual Cthulhu.
One of the heavy metal band Metallica's popular songs in their album Ride the Lightning was a song called "The Call of Ktulu", obviously referencing the beast.
A creature resemblant of Cthulhu appears in the Rick and Morty opening credits when Rick, Morty, and Summer fly away from it holding a baby Cthulhu.
When Bart Simpson rides his skateboard across Springfield, Cthulhu picks him up on its tentacles in the opening scene for the episode Treehouse of Horror XXIV. It then makes a background cameo at Krustyland in Halloween of Horror. It is also the main antagonist from the story Cthulhu? Gesundheit! which is featured in a comic book The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror #19.
In Magicka DLC called The Stars Are Left, Cthulhu appears as the final boss. Though his portrayal in the game depicted him to be smaller than his original counterpart whom depicted begin larger, otherwise having equal size with mountains but remain larger than the protagonists (this Cthulhu portrayed with height around 10 meters tall).