About Campus Crusade for Cthulhu

Section I

The Founding

There is a photograph in the Archive of six people at a diner counter on French Hill, taken the third of March, 1974, and nobody in it looks like the founder of anything. Two of them are wearing the same borrowed parka. The coffee is in those brown institutional mugs the diner used until it closed. On the back, in ballpoint, somebody has written the six who stayed, which tells you there were more than six to begin with.

What follows is the Archive's account. It is not the only account, and we will come to the others.

The trip that started it was a field trip. In the autumn of 1973 the department ran its annual bus to the coast, north past Ipswich and Rowley to the ruined port at Innsmouth, which the government had raided in the winter of 1928 with troops and dynamite and a submarine. The official purpose was architecture: Georgian doorways, a decayed fishing economy, the customary lecture on the herring trade. Two sophomores, C. Kenneth Berkeley and Archie Thomas, spent the afternoon apart from the group down at the seawall and did not get back on the bus when it was called. They came home four hours later on a milk truck and neither ever said what they had been doing, though Thomas wrote in a letter years afterward that he had been listening to something that was not the water.

They spent the Saturnalia break of that year, as Thomas put it, reading everything the library would let them hold and one or two things it would not. In February he sent letters to eleven students whom he had reason to believe would be receptive. Six came to the diner. The other five never answered, and the Archive keeps their names in the same folder, unmarked.

The founding problem was not theology. It was the Dean of Students.

Section 2

Charter and Constitution

You must remember the campus in 1974. Arkham had a chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ operating out of the Union with a card table and a sign-up sheet, and they were doing well. There were three other religious organizations on the approved list. There was also a Dean's office that had spent four years being nervous about student groups, and a state legislature with opinions about what it was funding. A club that walked in and said it intended to preserve the memory of the old ways until the stars came right would have received a form to fill out and a very long wait.

So they did the sensible thing, which is the thing the cult has always done. They presented themselves as a satire of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

The Dean accepted it. The paperwork went through in eleven days. Berkeley wrote in the margin of his copy, and this is the sentence around which everything else on this website is built: he did not even ask what we would be doing at the meetings.

They ratified the Statement of Faith on Sunday, the fifth of May, 1974, and thirteen people signed it.

The date was not convenient and it was not arbitrary. The fifth of May in 1974 was the day the sun stood at fifteen degrees of the Bull, which is the true midpoint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice, and which almost nobody observes because almost everybody prefers the first of May, which is easier to remember and four days wrong. The witches of this county keep the calendar date. Thomas wrote in his working notes that the chapter would keep the sky, since the sky is what we are waiting on and the calendar is a thing people made up to know when to pay rent. He also noted, and the Archive has never decided whether he was joking, that ratifying on Walpurgis would have put them in the ravine on the same night as parties they had no wish to attend.

The constitution went to the Dean's office ten days later, on Wednesday the fifteenth, in a manila envelope, and the University recognized the Alif Chapter that week. The Statement is what the chapter believes. The constitution is what the University filed. It is worth knowing which of the two the founders wrote first.

Section 3

The First Years

Miskatonic organizations take Arabic letters — a convention that began with the houses and spread to everything on the approved list, so that the debate society and the film club and the outing club all carry one, and nobody at the University can tell you why the letters are Arabic. We are not a fraternity and never have been. We took a letter because that is what an organization at Miskatonic does, and because Thomas liked that Alif is the first letter and also a single vertical stroke, which he said was the shape of a person standing up. There was a mimeographed newsletter. There was an information table at the fall activities midway with a hand-lettered sign. There were bake sales, and the Archive would like the record to show that the bake sales were legitimate and the money went to the newsletter.

There was also, from the first autumn, a clubhouse. It stands on Elm Street, near the campus, and the chapter has met in it since 1974 at a rent that has not changed since 1974, on a lease of one hundred and twenty-seven years whose terms are kept in a sealed envelope bearing a wax seal. The landlord is a holding company buried under a number of shifting shell companies, one of which also owned the diner on French Hill, and somewhere in that chain a name recurs from a list of the University's trustees dated 1765. Nobody questioned the lease in 1974. Nobody has since. The lease runs out in 2101, and no one now living will see the end of it, and the Archive is in the building.

Berkeley wrote to the chapter in the spring of 1976, at the end of his term, and that letter is the most quoted document we have. He asked the members to remember three things: that the chapter existed to keep something, not to grow something; that a man who explains himself to a Dean twice has already lost the second conversation; and that they should trust in the keeping power of our Dread Lord. He signed it and left for the West Coast, and there is a card from him in 1981, and then there is not.

Thomas stayed. He was elected to the office the founders called Chief Carnifex, a title he chose himself out of a Latin dictionary because he thought it sounded better than President, and he ran the chapter for four years in a manner that people who were there described, in later interviews, as somewhere between a seminar and a Dionysian revel. He wrote an invitation in October of 1978, addressed to no one and mimeographed in some quantity, that survives in the Archive and that we have reprinted elsewhere on this site. It is loud. It promises things. It sets a date, which is not something we do now.

That is the last document in the Archive in Chief Carnifex Thomas's hand.

Section 4

The Missing Winter

The chapter went quiet the following year. The constitution was resubmitted to the Dean's office in the fall of 1979 with two of the thirteen signatures removed, and there is no note explaining which two or why, and the members who were present have been asked and have not answered. The newsletter did not resume. The bake sales did. Whatever happened at the clubhouse on Elm Street in the winter of 1978 is not written down, and this is the first thing a new member learns about how we keep records: some things are left out on purpose, and the space where they are missing is itself the entry.

We have run continuously since, more quietly in some decades than others, at three hundred and twenty-three schools by our own count. A 1979 audit put the number at three thousand and twenty-three. The auditor is not available to explain the discrepancy.

Section 5

The Other Accounts

Now, the other accounts. There are two, and the Archive holds both, and rules on neither.

The older is our own. Before there was a Crusade there was the Nocturnal Philosophical Society, chartered at Miskatonic in 1811 — philosophical society being the ordinary form of the period, and nocturnal the oddity that made it memorable. Its public purpose was astronomy: meteor observations, and late discussion. Its actual purpose, so far as its minute-book allows us to say, was dreams, vigils, certain threshold rites, and meetings held at hours when fewer sensible people are awake. The minute-book stops in the middle of a sentence in 1841. The Archive has never learned what the sentence was going to say, and holds that a club which has been refounded twice was probably not in need of founding the first time.

The other is not ours, and the chapters that held it did not agree with us on any particular. In that telling the Crusade was founded at Miskatonic early in the last century, not in 1974; it reached Yale and New York University and Binghamton within two years; it claimed six hundred and sixty-six schools; and it maintained offices in ten American cities and a post box in Arkham. We have the mimeographs. We have not reconciled them with our own, and we are not going to. There is more than one Cult of Cthulhu, the way there is more than one way to worship anything worth the trouble, and the chapters have never much cared whether the story matched from town to town so long as the rites were kept. A cult that agrees with itself in every particular is a cult that has been organized by somebody, and we would want to know who.

For the same reason we maintain no national office in any sense you would recognize. There is a body that calls itself International and sends press releases. There was a chapter at the Institute down the river in Cambridge that ran a barbecue sacrifice and a crafting circle and Sunday office hours between about 2007 and 2011, and whose records are incomplete. There is a Society in New England that will tell you we are doing it wrong. All of them are the Crusade in some sense, and none of them speaks for the Alif Chapter.

One more entry, and it is our favorite.

In December of 2007 somebody wrote an encyclopedia article about us. In March of 2009 it was deleted, on the finding that we appeared to be more of a joke than an actual organisation, and were therefore not notable enough to record.

We have that determination framed in the clubhouse. Fifty-two years of continuous operation, thirteen signatures, one missing winter, an older society whose minutes stop mid-sentence, and the encyclopedia of record has established that we are not here.

We are not going to correct them.

Questions