Word: cthulu
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...with unspeakable frenzy. What was most unusual for a dream was that my nose was active, wrinkling in disgust at the fetor of rotten grass and the ichor of freshly overturned earth. This time the enshrouded figure spoke to me in hollow tones: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." I woke up screaming...
...Azagoth. University specialists in strange languages could not place-much less decipher-the grim words I had heard so distinctly. I had no recourse, therefore, but to revert to Lovecraft's own works, where I discovered that the sentence means, "In his house at R' lyeh dread Cthulu waits dreaming." It seems Lovecraft created a whole mythology, complete with guttural Asiatic incantations, to support his twelve best stories. The basic notion was that countless eons ago, Earth had been taken over by an extraterrestrial race which, in the practice of black magic, had lost its hegemony...
Obviously, Lovecraft here was exploring those tenebrific estuaries of the occult that had barely been mapped by Jung, Fraser and Arthur Machen. He even equipped the ancient demons with names - mindless Azagoth, Soggoth, Ib, Nyarlathotep and, above all, the great dread Cthulu who, in his sole appear ance, seems to be a "gelatinous green immensity" that slobbers. To recall these alien creatures from their hideous hiding places (the arctic wastes, unfathomable submarine chasms, New Eng land), the intrepid have but to practice rituals recorded in dusty, blasphemous old tomes like the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred...
...true that some of Lovecraft's stories on the Cthulu Mythos - The Call of Cthulu, At the Mountains of Madness - rank high among the horror sto nes of the English language. But Great Cthulu only knows why perfectly good, independent writers from the late Au gust Derleth to Colin Wilson have seized and elaborated on the Mythos in their work...
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