Not-So-Great Cthulhu

[Terrible Old Man]

Here's a topic which, though contentious, doesn't drag in any controversial real-world issues, so pure speculation is the order of the day.

I have never been particularly impressed by "Great" Cthulhu. Indeed, we are told - I forget exactly where, but probably in an excerpt from the Necronomicon - that Cthulhu is not a Great Old One. He is merely their "cousin" and can "spy them but dimly" - which sounds very much like the half-human Wilbur Whately's statement that he can catch a brief glimpse of his barely-human-at-all brother if he makes the Voorish Sign.

Indeed, if we take it that vast cosmic entities like Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth are the true Great Old Ones, how many of the others usually categorised as such really qualify? I think that humanity are in roughly the same position as a small tribe of natives on a tiny island who assume that the strange white man sent to govern them in ways and for reasons that utterly baffle them is a god exceeded in power only by the incomprehensibly omnipotent Queen Victoria, when in reality he's a very minor servant of the Foreign Office, who every night prays for promotion so that he can get off this miserable fly-speck before he catches something fatal.

Leaving aside vague and possibly apocryphal accounts of his early life, Cthulhu's entire career seems to have consisted of being brought down from some star or other by Greater Old Ones and plonked in a temple to be worshipped. And when that temple sank, he obediently stayed put, and went to sleep until such time as he'd be useful again.

Cthulhu seems to me to behave more like, at best, a faithful dog than a sentient being, let alone a god. Indeed, I see no real evidence that he's sentient at all. Since R'lyeh sounds less like a city designed for living in than a vast machine made of stone whose components happen to resemble buildings, Cthulhu may simply be an organic component of that machine, necessary to allow it to reach out to the brains of other organic beings.

Which would explain why he seems to be literally switched on and off by exposure to air and immersion underwater - why should either of these things affect him at all? I think the whole of R'lyeh, however vast it may be, is a massive and very durable machine deliberately designed to switch itself off when submerged, and reactivate millions of years later when it re-emerges, because its period of submersion coincides with that time when, for reasons beyond even their control, the Great Old Ones are powerless to make use of Earth.

Obviously it didn't sink by accident, or in an unpredictable way. Any civilisation smart enough to build R'lyeh in the first place must have known a fair bit about plate tectonics. The whole submersion thing is just a very long-term alarm-clock! Think about it. Apart from a massive asteroid strike which wrecks the whole planet (and maybe they've arranged for that not to happen), there's no environmental catastrophe, including all-out nuclear war, that will significantly alter the overall depth of the oceans, let alone affect the rise and fall of continents.

Consider this too. It may seem foolish of the Great Old Ones to have built their eternal city in a volcanically and seismically active area - after all, look what happens in the story! But here's a thing. We are expected to believe that geological activity caused a huge slab of land to rise out of the ocean with the buildings on it completely undamaged, and then slip underwater again just as easily.

This isn't very likely! We can safely assume that R'lyeh is quite deeply submerged, since a massive patch of very shallow ocean through which, on a sunny day, gigantic buildings can be glimpsed a few fathoms down, would have been noticed, no? So either the biggest earthquake ever caused the whole continent to rise a really significant amount and then sink again, somehow not swamping every coastal area on the planet with a mega-tsunami, or the most important bit of it neatly detatched itself and rose and fell all on its own without even damaging the buildings!

I suggest that the entire continent of R'lyeh is artificial, and build from truly gigantic slabs of stone which can move independently. This would conveniently render it earthquake-proof - indeed, earthquakes and/or volcanoes may be its power-source, otherwise why build it in that area? - as well as allowing its components to realign themselves on a large scale for whatever reason. In which case the brief emergence of Cthulhu and his temple was not a random error which conveniently corrected itself almost immediately (what are the chances of that?). It was probably a deliberate equipment test they do every million years or so.

As for Cthulhu, he reminds me a lot of the Haunter of the Dark. Here we have a sort of R'lyeh in miniature. A queerly- and perhaps impossible-angled stone telepathically transmits information to humans, while at the same time manipulating them for undisclosed reasons. It is intimately connected with a powerful but stupid creature with a weakness so basic that, should somebody who doesn't know what he's doing liberate the beast, it will have at best a very brief window of opportunity, and probably none at all, in which to run amok before being banished back into the Shining Trapezoid.

The creature has to be there because an organic component is required for the telepathy to work, and for the same reason it has to be fairly powerful and just about sentient. But at the same time, it has to be pretty stupid and entirely unimportant to be bound to this incredibly tedious and trivial task (by the way, no, I don't think the ridiculously limited Haunter is actually the mighty Nyarlathotep himself in yet another bewildering disguise - possibly it's one of his pets). Presumably the creature is bright enough to resent its bondage, hence its foul mood on being briefly liberated - unless for some reason the only beast that will function in this capacity is the pan-dimensional equivalent of a wolverine.

This pattern is repeated constantly - "Great" Old Ones who impart knowledge in some osmotic fashion to their acolytes, but which mostly sit around doing nothing in one place, usually a purpose-built temple or crypt, with occasional outbursts of (literally) bloodthirsty violence. Most of these things - Tsathoggua for instance - sound more like exhibits from a space-zoo than its keepers. And if Rhan-Tegoth qualifies as a Great Old One, so does Audrey Junior from The Little Shop Of Horrors.

And Cthulhu? Well, what does he actually do? He awakens, apparently by accident. He starts broadcasting a detailed but repetitive and therefore possibly automatic signal, which is presumably not at full power, since it affects only a small minority of humans who are for one reason or another highly suggestible. This "call" attempts to persuade them to join an ancient religion, even though the infrastructure of that religion no longer exists, and has not been re-established, as with a full-scale emergence of R'lyeh it presumably would be. And when a few people more or less accidentally meet up with Cthulhu himself, which was apparently the object of the summons, he reacts by throwing a tantrum and swatting a few of them like flies just for being there. He then attempts to attack their boat - again, just because it's there - but fails because he isn't physically equipped to do it. And then it all stops and he goes to sleep again.

Cthulhu is obviously not very bright, and neither is he very powerful, except in the matter of sending out one very specific transmission - he's more like an electronic component than a god. And there's that odd moment when the sailor opens the door to his crypt. I have difficulty imagining this without getting a slapstick vision of the seaman gazing up at this vast stone door weighing millions of tons, shrugging helplessly, casually leaning on it, and then falling over when it swings open effortlessly! Why is it so easy to open? If his priests needed access to him, wouldn't it have been far easier to build a human-sized tradesman's entrance round the back? The door has to be that easy to open because Cthulhu, despite his size, isn't that much stronger than a human being!

We see later that he has no skeleton, no musculature, no internal organs - indeed, no complex physical structure that actually matters. His material body, feeble and tenuous as it is, exists primarily because, as the figurehead of a manufactured religion, it's useful for his followers to have something to make idols of. Why else would Cthulhu, a creature obviously derived in part from a genetically manipulated cephalopod, be even remotely humanoid?

The only truly powerful Great Old One who is both genuinely humanoid and obviously highly intelligent is Nyarlathotep (unless you count the King in Yellow, who isn't necessarily all that bright. and, if the ravings of Robert Blake are to be believed, may be yet another avatar of Nyarlathotep), and he isn't actually a proper Great Old One either - he is their "soul and messenger", but apparently not one of them.

I suggest that Nyarlathotep is active on Earth for the same reason that there are several robots, but as yet, no humans crawling about on Mars. He's a very advanced artificial being created to operate in environments that the Great Old Ones themselves find extremely hostile, probably to prepare the way for their eventual coming. It may well be the case that Nyarlathotep isn't a shape-changer at all - they just built a great many of him, with different characteristics depending on where they were sending him, and "Nyarlathotep" isn't really his name, merely a word meaning something like "space-probe". Remember that just about everything that we know about Nyarlathotep comes directly or indirectly from Nyarlathotep himself, and one of his favourite pastimes seems to winding people up! That and destroying their entire civilisation for a joke.

Anyway, this hypothesis would explain why there appear to be a very few Great Old Ones so powerful as to be utterly beyond human comprehension, a considerable number who skulk in cellars being worshipped by tiny mad cults and biting off the odd head (amongst whom Cthulhu stands out merely because he's by far the biggest), but, apart from good old Nyarlathotep, nothing in between.

 

[j d worthington]

Wheee-ew! This sort of thing reminds me of -- me! -- back in my heyday, before my life got swallowed up by the farcically-misnamed "real world"....

I may not agree with some of the things you say in your posts, but I'm definitely going to enjoy them! It's good to see a great deal of thought on these things, even the ones which are simply for enjoyment, as it provides a lot of stimulus for debate and reexamination of HPL's work... something I enjoy immensely.

Now... the quotation from the Necronomicon is from "The Dunwich Horror" (DH, p. 170), and you hit it almost exactly: "Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can He spy them only dimly." Which, on the face of it, would seem to argue that he something more than an automaton, even a biological one. Whether he is all that bright is another matter; but I think you're stretching things quite a bit there.

As for him not being one of the Great Old Ones, and not all that "great" in the sense indicated, Lovecraft himself indicated as much when writing Farnsworth Wright upon resubmitting "The Call of Cthulhu" to WT (at Wright's request):

If I were writing an "interplanetary" tale it would deal with beings organised very differently from mundane mammalia, and obeying motives wholly alien to anything we know upon Earth -- the exact degree of alienage depending, of course, on the scene of the tale; whether laid in the solar system, the visible galactic universe outside the solar system, or the utterly unplumbed gulfs still farther out -- the nameless vortices of never-dreamed-of strangeness, where form and symmetry, light and heat, even matter and energy themselves, may be unthinkably metamorphosed or totally wanting. I have merely got at the edge of this in Cthulhu, where I have been careful to avoid terrestrialism in the few linguistic and nomenclatural specimens from Outside which I present.

-- Selected Letters II, pp. 150-51​

So what we are seeing there is a very minor incursion of the great cosmic Outside onto the sphere of our awareness; only a hint of the truly alien nature of the universe.

As for the points about R'lyeh... it is true that there is no specific mention of it being in ruins (at least that I can recall), but there is the general impression from the terms used that this is the case. Not entirely in ruins; some structures obviously are still relatively intact... much as the ruins of the Great Race in the Australian desert in "The Shadow Out of Time" are; but in both cases various geological upheavals, it is indicated, have had their effect on the structural integrity of these "cities" as a whole. However, the idea of R'lyeh being an automated city designed to serve such a particular purpose (as was the case in a tale by Bradbury, as I recall), is an interesting one. I think there are grave problems with it, but it is nonetheless an interesting thing to think about. (On a side note, despite Derleth's generally egregious handling of Lovecraft's concepts in his own fiction, he did occasionally have an idea which captured my imagination; one of them being that the continent of R'lyeh actually extended from somewhere out in the South Pacific eastward to just off the eastern seaboard of North America -- Devil's Reef and Y'ha-nthlei being one of its extreme outposts. I've always found that a fascinating thought, as well.)

Nyarlathotep, though... I'd say he does belong somewhere between; he would appear to have many of the attributes of such a cosmic entity, yet his tendency to take human -- or any recognizably biological -- form, and his often malicious sense of humor (reminding me more of a very dark version of Puck than anything else), make him a complex symbol which I don't think HPL ever quite defined in his own mind. (And on the subject of Puck, there's this, from a late letter, about his impressions upon viewing the film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream: "As the animating spirit of the grove, that little elf who played Puck certrainly scored a triumph. In aspect and voice and demeanour he represented with utter perfection the bland, mischievous indifferentism of the traditional pagan deity, while that shrill, eery, alienly-motivated mirth of his was the msot convincing thing of its kind that I've ever seen"; Selected Letters V, pp. 435-36.)

The points about Cthulhu's being trapped, considered on a strictly literal basis, may (or may not) present problems; but metaphorically it works very well. And yes, it is accident which both causes R'lyeh to rise and sink; that seems pretty clear from the text itself, and is confirmed by Lovecraft's statements in letters. The intent there, of course, is that it is only fortuitous accidents such as this, and our isolation from the greater universe, which has allowed us our (relatively) comforting illusions and feeling of security and worth in the cosmos at large. Were humanity as a whole truly confronted, inescapably, with the evidence of our actual status -- simply another form of biological energy, no more nor less important than, say, the mosquito or ant or amoeba... or a virus -- it is extremely dubious that most people could handle that realization. Thus, there are these glimpses behind the apparent to the real, suffered by certain unfortunate individuals (as so many have pointed out, not because of any particular fault of their own, in most cases, but simply, again, the results of circumstances, of most of which they themselves would be totally unaware); but nothing as yet to erupt into the consciousness of the whole of humankind. Both Cthulhu and R'lyeh are symbols of this alienness (and, by association, our alienation), of course, in that each violates all our accepted perceptions of the basic principles of entity, whether that be physics (geometry, perspective) or biology. This is stressed many times in the story, where that very strangeness completely disrupts even the ability to tell whether the door is lying flat or is at an angle; or even whether the sea and sky are in their normal relationship.

I have more to say on your fascinating post, but must let it go at this for the moment, as I need to get ready for my second shift at work. But thank you for a very intriguing little bit of idea-weaving....

 

[Terrible Old Man]

After a slight hiatus caused by the fact that life goes on, here I am again. I'm delighted to see that I have provided food for thought. For the record, may I state that, although I think I've read all of HPL's fiction, except possibly some very obscure stuff that is seldom anthologized because it isn't very good, I'm not familiar with most of the letters he never intended for publication, of which I gather there are a staggering number. So any comments I make are based purely on his stories. I also take it to be a game-rule that no human, including HPL, can be 100% accurate in guessing the motives of utterly alien creatures. Especially Nyarlathotep, who is at least capable of having a semi-rational conversation, but is almost certainly a terrible liar.

Oh, by the way, I think I should make something clear, just so that there are no misunderstandings. One of my paternal ancestors had a run-in with the Witchfinder General - he was in fact one of the people captured on the only occasion ever when witches were actually ever caught in the act (mainly because they were singularly rubbish witches). The ground on which I am typing this used to be a medieval leper colony. And my landline area code is 666. Seriously. So, whether I know it or not, there is a distinct possibility that I am Joseph Curwen.

Anyway! I tend to assume that, incomprehensible though the motives of the Great Old Ones may generally be, they ultimately just want to do what all living things want to do - carry on living. The trouble being that, in their case, they're so very, very old that they've actually outlived their own universe. This, I think, explains both their behaviour, and their limitations - unless you're actually God, adapting yourself to another universe where the physical laws are even the slightest bit different has got to be somewhere between impossible and incredibly difficult.

Now, I realize that HPL found mixed-race people peculiarly abominable (an attitude which I do not subscribe to at all, by the way). But putting that on one side, could a case not be made for assuming that the Great Old Ones are trying very hard to create some sort of hybrid that can exist in our world, and thus far their efforts to solve this almost impossible problem haven't been terribly successful? See either version of Quatermass And The Pit for further details. Somewhere else on this forum, though I can't find it right now, somebody comments that the death of Wilbur Whately is oddly bathetic - a superpowered giant being bitten to death by a dog? Yet if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Wilbur is within an inch or two of being exactly the same size as the tallest human ever know to have lived, and that guy could barely walk, because human beings aren't designed to be nine feet tall! Think about his death. It's true that his gun misfires, but he's still holding a gun, which is a pretty efficient club. Imagine that you're a reasonably but not freakishly large dog trying to kill a nine-foot-tall person because you just know that you have to. There is absolutely no way that you can rip this guy's throat out unless you first knock him to the floor. While he's hitting you in the face repeatedly as hard as he possibly can with a piece of metal. I don't think Wilbur Whately is all that strong - his subsequent disintegration proves that he has no skeleton whatsoever, and apparently almost no musculature. Why else would the biggest man in the world buy a gun for self-defense against normal-sized dogs?

It should be added that Wilbur's twin isn't all that strong either. He's at least the size of an elephant, but he only finds the strength to break out of a ramshackle wooden structure when he is literally starving to death. And although we are several times informed that he's physically indestructible, the only evidence we are actually given for this is that when a few terrified yokels blaze away in the general direction of an invisible opponent in the middle of the night, it somehow fails to die. I think it's fairly clear that physical manifestations of the Great Old Ones in this world are physically very frail indeed. The sole exception appears to be Nyarlathotep, who I have always assumed to be the only human being they ever managed to transfigure to that extent without driving him too insane to be useful.

So, without taking away too much of their mystique, I consider the Great Old Ones to have motives which are at least partially comprehensible - I haven't lived forever, but if I had, I dare say it would become a habit - and limitations which, without making them anything like a fair opponent for a bunch of barely-evolved apes, render them less than omnipotent, which is why they don't just automatically win.

So basically I have never subscribed to the theory that the Great Old Ones have limitless power which, for reasons incomprehensible to us, they choose not to exercise just yet. They have limitations. Just not the kind of limitations that make it remotely feasible for the likes of us to defy them - yes, I know that in movies like Avatar, throwing rocks at starships somehow works if you're the good guys. But hey, if that was a real situation, would it in any circumstances whatsoever be a good idea? Managing to exist in any form in the wrong universe is such a staggering achievement that we can barely comprehend it. But therein lies the true horror. These things will somehow live forever, no matter what the cost. And nothing else matters. Nothing at all.

Oh, by the way, I've been partially disagreed with already, but I don't mind that at all. How dull would this forum be if we all thought everybody else was right?

 

[j d worthington]

Glad to see a new post from you. I was beginning to fear you had moved on, and am quite pleased to see such is not the case.

I also take it to be a game-rule that no human, including HPL, can be 100% accurate in guessing the motives of utterly alien creatures. Especially Nyarlathotep, who is at least capable of having a semi-rational conversation, but is almost certainly a terrible liar.

"'The demon is a liar. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us.'" I believe that's the correct quote from Father Merrin, though my copy of The Exorcist is not at hand. At any rate, that (your comment above) has got to be one of the best one-liners dealing with this particular entity I've ever encountered. Very nice.

The personal information there is... interesting, to say the least. Oh, and speaking of Curwen... you may or may not know, but that novel (along with Kadath, and several other pieces) as something HPL never intended for publication, either. He never even went back and revised or polished it nor, for that matter, put it in any sort of sane order; the manuscript, from what I understand, is a nightmare in itself. He was so discouraged with the novel that he simply shelved it and considered it an abortive experiment....

Anyway! I tend to assume that, incomprehensible though the motives of the Great Old Ones may generally be, they ultimately just want to do what all living things want to do - carry on living.

The question becomes whether they are, in any sense we understand it, living. A being (Yog-Sothoth) which is coeval with all time and conterminous with all space might stretch the furthest definition of that word past the limit; while Azathoth may not be a conscious entity at all, considering the hints of his nature we are given. At the very least, if he is a corporeal being (or anything remotely resembling it), he is not sane in the least; that much HPL has made quite clear in both prose and verse. So even such a basic concept may not apply to them... which to me is a part of their very alienness. (The lesser beings, such as the Mi-go, the Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness, the Great Race, etc., are another matter. They are obviously living beings, however bizarre and far removed from us they may be; so such motives would certainly fit with them... as, indeed, would such petty things as clumsy attempts at deception, such as the Fungi from Yuggoth attempt to practice on Wilmarth....)

On the idea of the Old Ones trying to breed such a hybrid, and setting aside HPL's ideas on the matter... frankly, I've grown to feel that this is one of the driving forces of his fiction, so it isn't necessary to set any such thing aside; unpleasant as it may be to realize, his loathing of such miscegenation is a fair amount of what gives his work its power, for it conveys in a dramatic form his own views of such mixing; this is one of the horrors he evokes so well. The fact that they may (or may not) be ineffective would also seem, to me, to be a manifestation of one of the basic precepts of his fiction: that it is sheer chance which allows us to survive. Not that we are necessarily worthy of that much attention from such forces; but that any mistakes, fumblings, or sheer blind experimentation on their part has been, so far, our salvation. When such ceases to be the case, we're for the ash-heap, whether such is their intention or not.

Wilbur, to me, would have the musculature; it is just that, like Cthulhu and so many other of HPL's entities, his physical being is made up of matter which is quite different from any such as we have encountered; it may appear similar to a fair degree, but is actually very foreign to anything from our portion of the cosmos. So I don't see Wilbur as weak, particularly. He took up carrying the gun to fend off dogs when he was quite young, and much more vulnerable to their attack and, being at least slightly human in some respects, is likely to not have relished any pain they might inflict, even if he was no longer likely to be as vulnerable as all that. Even a strong entity may be overcome if caught off-guard and off-balance.

His twin, too, I would say (based on the text) wasn't too weak to break free before that point; it was simply that he had the restraint of the other family members (Wizard Whateley and Wilbur) keeping him under control. Once their influence was removed, he set forth with a vengeance. Not, again, because he was starving... as I recall (though I'd have to look at the story again to be certain on this point) this is a thing which it would be unlikely to be possible to starve; but lack of food would slow down its growth and, possibly, modify its powers (whatever they might have been).

So basically I have never subscribed to the theory that the Great Old Ones have limitless power which, for reasons incomprehensible to us, they choose not to exercise just yet. They have limitations. Just not the kind of limitations that make it remotely feasible for the likes of us to defy them

On this, I would tend to agree. They do have their limitations, due simply to the laws of physical reality. But this does not alter the fact that their motivations, on the other hand, may be completely beyond our comprehension. I think this is at its clearest with "The Colour Out of Space" -- which entity, it has been posited before (though I don't recall off-hand who did the positing) may be yet another avatar of Nyarlathotep....

 

[willwallace]

This thread is quite the impressive read so far. Both of you are well-versed in the HPL lore, far greater than I myself. However, although I don't feel I could contribute to this conversation, I enjoyed reading it immensely and hope both posters continue their efforts.

 

[Terrible Old Man]

Firstly, I'll just say that, should I disappear for a while as I already have, I'm just trying not to over-expose myself here. HPL is a fascinating author, but there's a limit to how much anybody not called Joshi can say about him, and there are other people already here who know far more about him than I do. I think I've read all of his fiction, and it's fair to say that I know it pretty well, but the truly vast amount of private correspondence he wrote is almost entirely unknown to me. For which reason I may very well get certain things wrong - as noted elsewhere, I have never read his uncensored views about black people, and I don't think I want to.

But, leaving all that aside, let's return to this particular topic. I am taking it as a basic assumption that nobody - myself, J. D. Worthinghton, Abdul Al-Hazred, or even a certain Mr. Lovecraft - is in full possession of the facts about these utterly alien beings. Indeed, HPL himself was willing to allow the likes of Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Robert E. Howard to write anything they pleased, which he would then read, and basically say: "Oh, is that part of my mythos? Well, there's a surprise!" (willwallace, take note! - you can join in this dialogue without necessarily knowing all the obscure stuff!)

So, Mr. Worthington, I put it to you that we are both guessing, as indeed is everybody else! Which, if true, means that neither of us can be either completely right nor completely wrong. Which opens up a rather large playing-field. Though I will say that, with all due respect, you are wrong about the Whately twins. Wilbur is very clearly established to have bought a gun because, despite being nine feet tall, he is not a physical match for a fairly large dog. He's like Cthulhu - he's big, but he's not all that solid, and any serious physical trauma throws him for a loop. Unfortunately, being a lesser entity than Cthulhu, he can't bounce back again. By the way, I've actually seen a German Shepherd attack an unarmed six-foot-tall human being, and he defended himself a lot more effectively than Wilbur did.

And his twin? We are repeatedly told throughout the story that both lads feed on mammalian blood. And what, exactly, is the point of nailing him inside the house if this is purely a symbolic precaution, and he stays there because his relatives told him to? I think it's very strongly established in the story that the reason this creature breaks out of his prison is that he is starving. Is hunger not a completely useless sensation for any creature not capable of starving to death?

Apart from the extremely devious death-of-Christ subtext at the end, the more-monstrous twin comes across throughout as rather pathetic - a bewildered, hungry freak who dies crying for the help of a father who ignores him. And how much of a threat were the Whateleys anyway? Wilbur is the ultimate alienated teenager - of course he has delusions of grandeur! His father is raving mad and dies of old age halfway through. His mother is a half-wit who apparently gets eaten by his brother, who is a muddled thing that has to be locked up to stop it inconveniently eating people. And here's a thing - their entire master-plan is based on pages of the Necronomicon which they've never actually read because their copy is incomplete! Couldn't Yog-Sothoth just tell them the crucial incantation? It's his key to world domination. And he is their dad after all!

The Whateleys are fooling themselves. They're lab-rats. Here we have the Great Old Ones casually messing with anybody who will fall for their lies, and watching with detached interest as their pitifully unsuccessful experiments die miserably. This is a classic example of the limitations I mentioned - of which more later. "I canna change the laws of physics, captain!" But they're trying. Which is my basic point. No matter how incomprehensibly alien these creatures are, the one thing they cannot possibly get around is that in order to function at all, they have to be alive. And I think this is the true horror of the Great Old Ones. They are so ancient that their own universe has died around them, therefore they need ours to live in, because they flatly refuse to give up and die. Yet they're so old that they've deteriorated to the point that they have absolutely nothing left except the raw will to live forever for no reason at all. And I seriously doubt that I can think of anything more bleakly horrendous than that!

So that, I think, probably explains the simultaneous omnipotence and imbecility of he idiot god Azathoth. He's the oldest, biggest, and most utterly worn-out of them, but like all the rest, he will survive forever at absolutely any cost because it's all he can remember how to do.

Well, that's my view. Which could of course be completely wrong, because I'm not a Great Old One. Though I promise you that the aforementioned unlikely personal information is perfectly true. Given the non-existence of Joseph Curwen, I'm about as close as you'll ever get - I trust you appreciate me. Though, alas, I have to admit that I am not secretly Vincent Price back from the grave. Though I'll tell you this. The land on which I'm typing this is, thanks to spectacularly confused medieval geography, technically part of the legendary sunken kingdom of Lyonesse. And there's a well round the corner that cures scabies by magic, but utterly failed to sort out Robert the Bruce's leprosy.

I will now make a huge effort to render myself sufficiently real to type this on a keyboard not made from peeled elves.

 

[dask]

Talk talk talk. When we gonna cut some throats?

 

[J Riff]

The raw will to live forever for no reason at all.
One would assume that the Great Old Ones could adapt, if they really wanted to, to a fresh new Universe. Probably as easily as a change of clothes. No problemo.(snaps fingers)* Done.
Hence, they must be tired, that's all just bushed, tuckered and rundown.
Like feeble ghosts wandering an accursed abandoned nursing home in a deserted corner of a nameless city on some continent also without a name, they barely manage to make it to the corner for cat fud, let alon, .too ..>. zZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.*

 

[j d worthington]

But, leaving all that aside, let's return to this particular topic. I am taking it as a basic assumption that nobody - myself, J. D. Worthinghton, Abdul Al-Hazred, or even a certain Mr. Lovecraft - is in full possession of the facts about these utterly alien beings. Indeed, HPL himself was willing to allow the likes of Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Robert E. Howard to write anything they pleased, which he would then read, and basically say: "Oh, is that part of my mythos? Well, there's a surprise!" (willwallace, take note! - you can join in this dialogue without necessarily knowing all the obscure stuff!)

First, I would encourage anyone interested in the topic to join in -- even those who are freshly coming to HPL are likely to have something to say; and if it seems someone like myself (for example) is dismissing you, that isn't likely to be the case. If we see what seem to be errors, we may take them up and argue, but we are likely to nonetheless be interested in your views, especially if there is some thought behind them.

Second: Yes, HPL encouraged others to use these mythic materials in their own way, but that is a rather complex thing, too. He wanted to give it the feel of genuine mythology, which contains variants. However, when it comes to any sort of authoritative voice, his would have to be that voice, as the entire structure was his creation (or synthesis combined with creation). When he adapted things from others, it gives them a certain added legitimacy, but ultimately it is Lovecraft's writings which have to supply the basis for any assumptions about those creations.

So, Mr. Worthington, I put it to you that we are both guessing, as indeed is everybody else! Which, if true, means that neither of us can be either completely right nor completely wrong. Which opens up a rather large playing-field. Though I will say that, with all due respect, you are wrong about the Whately twins. Wilbur is very clearly established to have bought a gun because, despite being nine feet tall, he is not a physical match for a fairly large dog. He's like Cthulhu - he's big, but he's not all that solid, and any serious physical trauma throws him for a loop. Unfortunately, being a lesser entity than Cthulhu, he can't bounce back again. By the way, I've actually seen a German Shepherd attack an unarmed six-foot-tall human being, and he defended himself a lot more effectively than Wilbur did.

I would disagree with the term "guessing"; drawing differing conclusions based on the available evidence, yes; but "guessing', to me, discounts the degree of thought put into those conclusions. The closer the conclusions are to the information given in Lovecraft, the more likely they are to be correct.

Which brings me to the point about the gun (emphasis added):

Almost the first long passage [from Wilbur's notebooks] that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was writen, he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.

"Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth," it ran, "which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins' collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't.[...]

So obviously he had the gun since he was quite a young tyke, long before he reached the point of his confrontation with the guard dog at Miskatonic U.

And his twin? We are repeatedly told throughout the story that both lads feed on mammalian blood. And what, exactly, is the point of nailing him inside the house if this is purely a symbolic precaution, and he stays there because his relatives told him to? I think it's very strongly established in the story that the reason this creature breaks out of his prison is that he is starving. Is hunger not a completely useless sensation for any creature not capable of starving to death?

I never said that the nailing him in was "a symbolic precaution"; what I said was that he was kept there by the family's influence. The nailing seems, incidentally, at least as I read it, more to keep others out than keep Wilbur's brother in. The influence to which I refer would include the "spells" and other safeguards they use to keep it under control... not out of any affection (necessarily), but because if it gets out too early, or under the wrong conditions, the purpose for which it was created would be unfulfilled, and it would at best be -- as it turns out to be in the end -- a minor, local danger. If kept safely from the outside world until all the conditions are right, it would serve as a gateway for the incursion of the Old Ones into our world, and thus the destruction not only of humanity but, apparently, of all life on this planet.

The twin does burst out, but while it does devour animals and human beings alike, it isn't "established" that hunger is the reason (though it may be), and there may well be others, including simple mindlessness or idiocy by our standards (recall that "it is not like to have much earth brain"). Indeed the story would seem to indicate that controlling its ingestion of whatever food it seeks is the way to control its growth:

"Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gets aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use.[...]"

Interestingly, this is one of the points Derleth picked up on when he wrote that generally awful story, "The Shuttered Room", where we had such a hybrid creature kept in a room and starved down to a manageable size. It couldn't die from inanition, but continued lack of such would cause it to reduce in size, whereas added food would cause it to grow exponentially. In "The Dunwich Horror", whether or not the creature is actually hungry, it bursts out once the family is dead and their precautions no longer in effect (though this does not happen immediately, you'll note), and once out it does eat, and eat heartily... and apparently grows from something which could fit into the space of the Whateley farmhouse upstairs to something much larger than an elephant by the time of the scene atop Sentinel Hill.

As for hunger being "a completely useless sensation"... etc.; well, no. It is an indication of a need for added fuel for growth, whether or not the deprivation of that food would cause a reduction or cessation of the life process. So it would at least serve that purpose. There is also the precedent in literature of vampiric entities, who cannot necessarily starve to death, but nonetheless feel intense hunger for blood (or breath, depending on which tradition you're going with). Wilbur's twin is certainly "not of this earth" in most senses, having in fact very little of earthly matter in its constitution; so it is impossible to say whether or not it could be starved to death. The question remains an open one but, as I say, I don't see where it is established as a fact anywhere in the text.

Apart from the extremely devious death-of-Christ subtext at the end, the more-monstrous twin comes across throughout as rather pathetic - a bewildered, hungry freak who dies crying for the help of a father who ignores him.

This, by the way, has been used as the basis for a story or two elsewhere. I'll try to look up the information on them if you're interested. But yes, I would tend to agree that there is a certain pitiable quality about this monstrous child and its necessary, but nonetheless cruel, fate.

His mother is a half-wit who apparently gets eaten by his brother, who is a muddled thing that has to be locked up to stop it inconveniently eating people.

Actually, Lavinia disappears after Wilbur has made a trip to the hills for one of the rites, and there is a strong intimation that it is he who has brought about his mother's death, as she had become a nuisance to him in his machinations. Whether he called something else either out of the sky or the hills, or whether he arranged for his brother to take care of her, is left an open question, but it is unlikely, given her evident fear of both of them, that she'd go anywhere near the thing of her own accord; and I would say it is much more likely Wilbur caused her evanishment in another fashion. Of course, if anyone here is to be truly pitied, it is poor Lavinia, who is damned and doomed from the beginning of her life.

And here's a thing - their entire master-plan is based on pages of the Necronomicon which they've never actually read because their copy is incomplete! Couldn't Yog-Sothoth just tell them the crucial incantation? It's his key to world domination. And he is their dad after all!

Well... that first isn't so unbelievable, really. Even an imperfect copy of a book can contain most of the information on such a plan, yet lack certain vital details to bring it to fruition. Hence Wizard Whateley's insistence Wilbur seek out those missing pieces, so that the plan can succeed without any "hitches". It is also apparent Yog-Sothoth is not able to communicate with those here in a regular (as in consistent) fashion; so no, he couldn't. (Besides, this also seems a touch further of Lovecraft's satire of religion and gods, who frequently failed to take such seemingly simple and logical steps to attain their ends or protect their own. Mythology and religions are full of 'em.) And "world domination"? In this case, we may be assuming that this is an important goal to them, whereas the thrust of most of HPL's work is that such is not the case; that it may be of interest, but minor, not major, interest. And the selection from the Necronomicon makes it fairly evident that their success is inevitable and, being without death, they have time.... ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth" reinforces this view that such a goal is actually rather trivial. "they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother"; "For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved"; emphasis added).

The Whateleys are fooling themselves. They're lab-rats. Here we have the Great Old Ones casually messing with anybody who will fall for their lies, and watching with detached interest as their pitifully unsuccessful experiments die miserably. This is a classic example of the limitations I mentioned - of which more later. "I canna change the laws of physics, captain!" But they're trying. Which is my basic point. No matter how incomprehensibly alien these creatures are, the one thing they cannot possibly get around is that in order to function at all, they have to be alive. And I think this is the true horror of the Great Old Ones. They are so ancient that their own universe has died around them, therefore they need ours to live in, because they flatly refuse to give up and die. Yet they're so old that they've deteriorated to the point that they have absolutely nothing left except the raw will to live forever for no reason at all. And I seriously doubt that I can think of anything more bleakly horrendous than that!

Sounds very much like you're describing Moorcock's version of the Fhoi Moire....