Let me ask you a question...
Have you ever felt...Hopeless?
Let me ask you another question... Why are you lying?
Someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of realities and of our frightful
position therein that we shall either go mad  from the relation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new
dark age...
Humans cannot comprehend the incomprehensible.
Sounds obvious, right?
But what if they summoned beings that lay since the dawn of time? GODS!
Ones that is still utter despair upon humans in a way that is impossible.
One of those beings is known as Cthulhu
The time has come for the call of Cthulhu!
Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft
I am essentially a static, contemplative and objective person
almost a hermit in daily life and
always preferring to observe rather than participate.
Man's relation to man does not captivate my fancy,
It is man's relation to the cosmos
To the unknown which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft born August 20th
1890 on Rhode Island USA,
Was an American novelist of philosophically intense horror stories based on the cosmicism
philosophy, but we'll get to that later...
His writings are the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos
Which has inspired a large body of games music and other media
But I think this history lesson is over. Let's experience the horrors of Cthulhu
firsthand...
An end must have a beginning.
They live since the dawn of time.
All is silent.
Chapter 1: The horror in clay
Francis Wayland Thurston, our story's narrator
relates his discovery of the notes left by his grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, who died mysteriously.
amid the notes lay a small stone sculpture of a
disturbing scaly creature. After thoroughly reading the notes,
Thurston finds out that the man behind the ominous sculpture is
Henry Anthony Wilcox, an art student from Rhode Island
He supposedly made the statue while having delirious dreams of mysterious giant cities...
The papers showed that Gammell had written frequent reports of Wilcox's dreams, as he gradually began getting feverish
referencing a divine being known as Cthulhu that mumble incomprehensible words to him.
The fear in Gammell worsens, as reports on incidents of mass hysteria
occurring around the globe increase.
Artists become delirious, as they give life to the horrid dreams that haunt them...
The tracks are set in motion.
Soon, salvation will await us all.
It is approaching.
Chapter 2: The tale of Inspector Legrasse
The second chapter begins with Thurston looking further into the notes, reading about a meeting back in
1908
the meeting of an archaeological society
where New Orleans police officer John Raymond Legrasse shows those attending a
statuette of a greenish black stone with a dramatic resemblance to Wilcox's sculpture
Legrasse reveals that the previous year, he and a group of officers raided a voodoo ritual by a cult,
seizing the statue.
However, one named William Channing Webb,
attests to having encountered the idol among Inuit rituals in West Greenland.
Webb's phonetic transcriptions of these rituals, compared alongside Legrasse's,
reveal the phrase:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh
Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Which translates to: In the house of R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Legrasse reveals to Angell that he was tasked with responding to reports of kidnapping and murder in the Louisiana swamp.
Locals directed the policeman into an area of the swamp widely considered to be dangerous and cursed,
Where they heard the sounds of chanting and Tom-Toms
The men find the mass voodoo ritual with dozens of men dancing among burning human remains,
arranged around an 80-foot effigy of the creature for Wilcox's bas-relief.
Out of the many cultists that are apprehended,
Legrasse finds the testimony of a lucid elder named Old Castro most compelling
Old Castro talks about Old Ones of interstellar
origins, that once resided in great
cyclopean cities , and which now slumber beneath the oceans,
waiting to be activated by a chance confluence of astrological and human affairs...
After reading the document, Thurston finds Wilcox in the present day, finding him a successful
decadent sculptor who still remembers the world Cthulhu from his dreams.
In Louisiana, Thurston interviews
the remaining prisoners from Legrasse's raid and becomes convinced that this far flung,
secretive belief system is of genuine
anthropological note.
He also openly wonders whether knowing too much about it has precipitated his grand-uncle's death and
whether it will occasion his own...
A new world is about to be unearthed, alongside its ruler
The final chapter awaits.
The end is nigh.
Chapter 3: The madness from the sea.
Digging further into the notes, Thurston discovers a
1925 article by an Australian newspaper
discussing the discovery of wrecked ship, the EMMA.
The only survivor is the second mate, Gustaf Johansen
Johansen reports that his ship was attacked by the Alert, a heavily armed aggressive yacht.
Although the crewman of the EMMA killed those aboard the Alert, their own ship was heavily damaged in the battle.
They were able to commandeer the rival ship before their ship sank,
guiding it to an uncharted island in the South Pacific
Thurston finally pieces together that the same earthquake that triggered
Wilcox's dreams, also set the Alert  cruising towards some unholy destination
He then travels to Norway to interview Johansen directly and finds out directly from his widow that he's dead,
possibly murdered...
Thurston reads Johansen's notes, learning that him and his men actually
encountered an otherworldly monolith while riding the Alert... The corpse city of
R'lyeh... It was a place unlike any other.
Giant green stone monoliths with impossible geometry
lay looming over, as a foul stench reeked in the air.
At the foot of the monolith, the men find a massive carved door, bearing the outline of Cthulhu.
After searching the edges for a lever or a handle,
The men watch as the door retracts, unleashing  the Supreme Being...
CTHULHU!!!
Two men died instantly of fright, three were swept up in
Cthulhu's claws and one slipped while running. Only
Johansen and one other named Bryden reached the boat.
Cthulhu enters the water and gives chase to
Johansen who frantically pilots the Alert away from the monolith at full speed,
as Bryden is driven fatally insane by witnessing the beast.
Knowing the creature will eventually outpace the ship,
Johansen reverses courses and strikes Cthulhu with the prow of the ship, sending a
slushy nastiness, and an acrid and blinding
green cloud, cascading over the deck of the Alert.
He managed to barely escape from Cthulhu's grip,
maniacally laughing like a madmanas the Alert fades into distance...
Thurston places Johansen's diary, alongside
Angell's papers and Wilcox's clay bass relief, to which he adds his own account and
regrets ever having a piece together knowledge about the Cthulhu cult.
He acknowledges that he will likely die soon, and urges his executors not to let anyone read his
manuscript. At some point, as the title of the story indicates,
Thurston dies...
Cthulhu still lays in the sunken city of R'lyeh,
waiting for eons to rise again...
And when that cursed day shall arrive,
Inconceivable chaos shall ensue...
The End.
So, that was a lot to unpack, but that was only the surface level.
let's delve deeper into
Lovecraft's work, and try to figure out what the hell it all means...
Analysis
The irony of the fatal power of writing and reporting in the story
is that its characters mostly fail to successfully describe the things they are seeking...
We see this with the various experts failure to decrypt the aliens written language, and
Old Castro's use of non descriptive oral language like "things" and "ones".
Johansen cannot even begin to describe witnessing Cthulhu in his diary:
"Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out..."
"The thing cannot be described..."
Nevertheless, reading Johansen's log
and placing it next to Angell's papers in his own estate has
convinced Thurston that he has encountered "All the universe has to hold of horror..."
The final irony of Lovecraft's tale
consists of the fact that Thurston begs his executor not to let his document meet any other eye.
The reader is left to contemplate whether having read Thurston's tale of forbidden knowledge,
he or she is now plagued with the curse of the Cthulhu cult.
THEMES
The main overarching theme of Lovecraft's works, is that of cosmicism.
Cosmicism is rooted in the absence of God and,
ultimately, any sort of morality and meaning tethered to such a presence
Lovecraft described his worldview this way:
"The universe is only a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. The human race will
disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn, the sky will become icy and void,
pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars, which will also disappear...
Everything will disappear... And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free
motion of elementary particles.
Good? evil? morality? feelings? Pure Victorian fictions.
Only egotism exists."
And that is the true beauty of Lovecraft's
world. At the end of the day, you are just another brick in an infinite wall...
Call of Cthulhu
