Cthulhu Mythos

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Cthulhu Mythos begins with a single sentence. In his short story "The Call of Cthulhu", H. P. Lovecraft wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." That line, published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, set the tone for an entire shared universe of horror that would outlast its creator and spread across more than a century of literature, occult practice, and popular culture.

  What exactly is the Cthulhu Mythos? It is a mythopoeia - a constructed mythology - and a shared fictional world, originating in the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term itself was not coined by Lovecraft. It came from August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent and protege of Lovecraft, who named the sprawling web of settings, creatures, and lore that Lovecraft and his successors built together.

  The name "Cthulhu" at the center of that label comes from the creature in "The Call of Cthulhu", that 1928 Weird Tales story. But the roots of the Mythos stretch back further, to Lovecraft's second short story, "Dagon", published in 1919. How did a set of ideas one writer called "Yog Sothothery" become something scholars have called "the official fictional religion of fantasy, science fiction, and horror"? The answer runs through cosmic philosophy, a circle of writer friends, a disputed expansion by Derleth, and eventually into the real world of occult practice.

• 2. Cosmic Indifferentism

  ›

  Writer Dirk W. Mosig identified Lovecraft as a "mechanistic materialist" who embraced a philosophy known as cosmic indifferentism. At its core, this view holds that the universe is purposeless, mechanical, and utterly uncaring toward human beings. Lovecraft did not treat this as a source of nihilistic despair in his fiction. He treated it as the most terrifying fact imaginable.

  In Lovecraft's stories, the "Great Old Ones" are a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth. They have since fallen into a deathlike sleep. Cthulhu himself lies imprisoned in the sunken city of R'lyeh. Higher still sit what Phillip A. Schreffler calls the "Outer Ones" - beings such as Azathoth, who occupies the centre of the universe. Below the Great Old Ones are lesser castes, including the slave shoggoths and the Mi-Go.

  Lovecraft broke with the pulp writers of his era by having his main characters' minds deteriorate when they glimpsed what lay outside their perceived reality. Madness was not a plot device for him. It was a logical outcome of the philosophy. Human faculties, in his view, can never fully comprehend the true nature of the universe, and the cognitive dissonance that results from trying leads inevitably to insanity.

  David E. Schultz later argued that Lovecraft never intended to build a canonical Mythos at all. His imaginary pantheon was meant to serve as a background element, not a rigid system. S. T. Joshi put it plainly: 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." The essence of the Mythos, Joshi said, lay not in any pantheon or collection of forgotten tomes, "but rather in a certain convincing cosmic attitude."

• 3. The Lovecraft Circle

  ›

  Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Henry S. Whitehead, and Fritz Leiber were among the writers who corresponded with Lovecraft, met him in person, and traded story elements. This group became known as the "Lovecraft Circle". The exchange between them was informal - there was no formal agreement, no acknowledged shared project - but the borrowings were concrete and traceable.

  Robert E. Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt reads Lovecraft's Necronomicon in the 1931 short story "The Children of the Night". Lovecraft returned the favor by mentioning Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in two of his own stories: "Out of the Aeons" in 1935 and "The Shadow Out of Time" in 1936. Many of Howard's original, unedited Conan stories also wove in elements of the Mythos.

  Writer Will Murray observed a distinction in how Lovecraft managed this exchange. While Lovecraft freely used his fictional pantheon in stories he ghostwrote for other authors, he reserved his fictionalized New England setting - Arkham and its environs - exclusively for tales he wrote under his own name. Robert M. Price identified this as part of three distinct cycles in Lovecraft's output: the "Dunsanian" (written in a style similar to Lord Dunsany), the "Arkham", and the "Cthulhu" cosmic tales.

  At times, Lovecraft had to remind readers that his Mythos creations were entirely fictional. He referred to the whole enterprise with self-deprecating humor, calling it "Yog Sothothery". Dirk W. Mosig independently proposed renaming it the "Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth". Neither name stuck.

• 4. Derleth's Transformation

  ›

  August Derleth did more than publish Lovecraft's stories after his death. He attempted to categorize and expand the Mythos in ways that altered its fundamental character. Robert M. Price identified this as the second stage of the Mythos, and the central difference was stark: where Lovecraft's universe was indifferent, Derleth's was morally structured.

  Derleth developed the idea that the Cthulhu Mythos represented a struggle between good and evil. He created a category of beings called the "Elder Gods" to stand in opposition to the Great Old Ones. Price noted that Derleth traced the basis for this in Lovecraft's own text, pointing to "At the Mountains of Madness" and hints from "The Shadow over Innsmouth" as sources for the conflict between interstellar races. Whether that reading is faithful to Lovecraft remains deeply debated.

  Derleth also attempted to connect the Mythos deities to the classical elements - earth, air, fire, and water. The origin of the fire elemental Cthugha illustrates how collaborative this process was. A fan named Francis Towner Laney, editor of The Acolyte, complained that fire was absent from Derleth's elemental schema. Laney had already categorized the Mythos in an essay that first appeared in the Winter 1942 issue of The Acolyte. Derleth, impressed by Laney's glossary, asked him to rewrite it for the Arkham House collection "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", published in 1943. Laney's essay, titled "The Cthulhu Mythos", was later republished in Crypt of Cthulhu number 32 in 1985.

  When some authors applied the elemental theory to beings that operate on a cosmic scale, such as Yog-Sothoth, they found the four classical elements insufficient and introduced a fifth: aethyr. Writer Richard L. Tierney later coined the term "Derleth Mythos" specifically to distinguish Lovecraft's original works from these later stories that modified key tenets of the Mythos.

• 5. Beyond Fiction

  ›

  The fictional cults of the Cthulhu Mythos were designed to serve horror stories. They are described in the source material as groups dedicated to "malevolent supernatural entities", scattered through the loosely connected series of tales written by Lovecraft and his successors. What was not designed is what happened to them next.

  Author John Engle observed that "the very real world of esoteric magical and occult practices has adopted Lovecraft and his works into its canon, which have informed the ritual practices, or even formed the bedrock, of certain cabals and magical circles." A mythology invented by a writer who insisted it was entirely fictional became, for some practitioners, a basis for genuine esoteric work.

  The reach of the Mythos extended into the natural sciences as well. Sollasina cthulhu, an extinct ophiocistioid echinoderm, was named after the Cthulhu Mythos. Yogsothoth is a genus of centrohelid protists. Taxonomists, working in fields Lovecraft could not have imagined, found in his invented cosmos a vocabulary for naming the genuinely alien creatures of deep time and deep ocean.