The Cthulhu Mythos As Religion?

[Paul Baack]

http://www.fredvanlente.com/cthulhutract/pages/

http://www.rubbersuitstudios.com/ptcct.htm

Those are fantastic!  Thanks for sharing...

[catamount]

Yep, "God is a blind retard." All hail the Crawling Chaos!

[Chris Lackey]

Very clever. I think Andrew Leman gave me a printed version he had of those.

[old book]

Cults of Cthulhu exist. One famous or infamous practioner is a real live voodoo master from Haiti who did some ceremony to call forth a monster from a lake in Wisconsin.

Many have noted similarities between HPL's creatures and themes and the Lost Kingdoms of Edom/Quippoth (sp?) of Kabbala. Lovecraft's "system" is incomplete in that regard.

The funny thing is that a child can stumble upon multiple Necronomiconi now without knowing a jot about Lovecraft, and some take it for a real system of magic. "Chaos" magickers say it doesn't matter if the Mythos is incomplete, they can work with it anyway.

The Simon Necronomicon comes from a New York/New Jersey-based occultist millieu, see Satanic Reds website and the full story from a former patron of the Magickal Childe bookstore, both still on the web, somewhere.

Esoteric Order of Dagon and Church of Starry Wisdom are the two cults HPL formulated in his fiction. EOD has some interesting connections, see the Fijian colony in Massachusetts in HPL's Miscenllaneous Writings. If you happen to read James Gaffarel's Unheard of Curiosities Concerning the Talismanical Sculpture of the Persians, the Horoscope of the Patriarchs, & the Reading of the Stars, 1650, specifically the passage about Dagon and his etymology, you might make the connection with the American myth of Thanksgiving, the stuff about Indians teaching pilgrims to place fish in the earth to fertilize the maize crop. Virginia Dare frolics and desports with the Deep Ones off Kingsport.

[Parallaxicality]

I knew a guy in college; the kind of guy everyone knows at least one of. He would spend the week getting wired on Red Bull and herbal ecstasy in goth nightclubs, then, the day before his papers were due, write them in a single, ephidrine-fueled rush, then get an A. Anyway, we were discussing religion at one point and he told me that he worshipped Chthulu. I pointed out, perhaps a bit too snidely, that Chthulu was a fictional character, and he responded that Lovecraft had in fact been channelling the wisdom of the Old Ones as they spoke through him.

OK.

[Bassik]

When people confront me with the fact that my gods are fictional, I usually respond that theirs are as well.

[old book]

When people confront me with the fact that my gods are fictional, I usually respond that theirs are as well.

Excellent point.

I like this religion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Dai

[Bassik]

Reminds me of this poll in Great Brittain, where people had to fill in their religion, among other things. A lot of Brits didn´t like it, so they wrote down Jedi.

[vardøgr]

I've always regarded the Cthulhu cults in Lovecraft's stories as a pisstake of this kind of thing, people with the knowledge of the Elder Gods blindly worshiping them simply as they're superior, even though they could wipe humans out if they were bothered enough about them. Another note of how we're such lowly, transient primates.

Reminds me of this poll in Great Brittain, where people had to fill in their religion, among other things. A lot of Brits didn´t like it, so they wrote down Jedi.

It was the census, actually.  

Yeah, foreigners are often surprised by how secular Britain is these days. Faith schools are still quite common though.

[old book]

http://www.fredvanlente.com/cthulhutract/pages/

http://www.rubbersuitstudios.com/ptcct.htm

Those are fantastic!  Thanks for sharing...

Real genuine bible tract image:

[Bassik]

Yeah, foreigners are often surprised by how secular Britain is these days. Faith schools are still quite common though.

Odd, that a country with a state religion is secular, but it's sister country (The US of A) that was founded on secular grounds, is one prayer short of a theocracy.

What gives, anglo-saxons, what gives?

[Genus Unknown]

Richard Dawkins thinks the two may be connected. In the USA (so his reasoning goes), with its separation of church and state, religion is subject to something comparable to market forces, with churches competing with one another for patronage (or "customers," if you want to be cynical about it). This leads to ramped-up rhetoric, political involvement, and so on.

England, on the other hand, has an officially-designated favorite church, and things just sort of settle there. Religion becomes something you do on Sundays, if at all, and people just go about their regular, secular lives.

[Genus Unknown]

I was thinking about the subject of the religious symbolism in Lovecraft, and what the cults of the Old Ones could possibly signify. If the Old Ones (and Company) signify cosmic chaos and the insignificance of mankind, then the Cthulhu/Yog-Sothoth/Starry Wisdom cults are essentially worshipers of the dark, unknowable cosmos.

And when I think of a worshiper of the dark, unknowable cosmos, I immediately think of Carl Sagan.

If you've ever watched, read, or heard of anything related to Carl Sagan, you know the man was passionate about science, passionate about discovery, and passionate about the vast worlds of wonder that astronomy reveals.

Carl Sagan would have been all over Starry Wisdom.

[Dionysius8421]

I'm not a "cultist," but merely a "believer." I don't follow the Old Ones, although I know that they, one day, shall reclaim Earth and its gods for their domain. The Bloop pretty much cemented that for me.

I actually worship the Magyar gods (plains Vikings) like Wotan, Frigga, etc.

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Real genuine bible tract image:

Actually, Dagon is a real thing in the Hebrew scriptures, which is what I assume the tract is drawing from. Philistines & all that, capturing the ark of the covenant, bringing it into the temple, & the Dagon idol falling down in front of it ....or at least that's how they tell it. In fact, the guy in "Dagon" goes to see a scholar to find out if he's got any info that might be helpful.

Now, *puts down minor in religion and puts on amuseable brain*....it's kind of hilarious to see that in a tract now that I've read Lovecraft.

Also, I'm very very disappointed that no classes at my college covered Lovecraftian religions. I was a lit major, too, surely the Lit and Religion departments could've put something together. Belated idea for a senior paper, I guess.