After-Cthulhumas Conversations About Cthulhu

The Feast of Cthulhu Invictus is behind us, the eighth day has dawned, and the coat is back on. Classes resume. Offices reopen. Sunday belongs once more to the ordinary world. And you, faithful cultist, have a problem the rest of the holiday-shopping public does not: people remember what you did.

Your roommate saw you leave at midnight carrying a wrapped object. Your mother wants to know why the card says Cthulhu Invictus. Your coworker heard the album. Somebody at the party photographed the seal, and the photograph also contains robes, twelve pounds of calamari, and something tall in the back that nobody remembers inviting. And so the two questions arrive, as they arrive every year:

"How was your Cthulhumas?" — and, from anyone who saw the pictures — "Who was the tall one?"

Nobody. Next question.

This is the season of conversations. CCC International would like to help you have them. We would also like to be honest, in the loud way we prefer, about what these conversations can and cannot do — because our theology has an inconvenient position on that, and we have spent fifty years running an evangelism department in cheerful defiance of it.

Keeping the Conversation Alive

Post-Cthulhumas curiosity is a gift, and we do not mean the kind from the Deep. People ask about the holiday because the holiday is conspicuous — that is what it is for. The fire, the carol, the week of saying the quiet part at volume: all of it is a door propped open, and for about ten days in January the door stays cracked while people ask you what was on the other side.

So answer them. With enthusiasm! When your cousin asks how your Cthulhumas was, do not mumble "fine." Say "Fhtagn!" and tell her about the bonfire and the marshal who called it "within permitted parameters" and the carol your chapter sings differently from every other chapter on earth and refuses to correct. Talk about the album. Talk about the shirts. Talk about the twelve pounds of calamari. Be exactly as loud as the season was.

Just know, going in, what the talking is for. Which brings us to the doctrine, and the department's small embarrassment.

You Can't Give Someone the Call

Every campus ministry's January newsletter — which is where we stole the idea — told you to share the gift, to bring souls into the fold, to invite people in until they accepted the Call. Here is the trouble: the Call is not ours to give.

You can talk. You can answer any question honestly asked. You can hand someone a tract. You can lend them the wrong book, if the Custodian is not looking. You can invite them to the fire. You cannot make them hear what they do not hear. Nobody has ever been argued into the dreams. The memory reaches whom it reaches, and it has never once consulted our recruitment numbers. Evangelism does not create the Call. At its very best, it discovers where the Call has already arrived — and mostly it doesn't even do that. Mostly it results in a very pleasant conversation about calamari.

The Apocrypha's own evangelistic text knows this, once you read it properly instead of the way the typescript did. The letter to the Kadathians — written to a congregation that expected the whole thing to be over sooner — puts it this way in the modern edition:

*Tell what you saw, and tell it plainly; but do not tell what another will hear, for that is not given you to know.*¹ This is the true thing — not that you are devoted, but that you were present, and can say so. Some will laugh. Let them laugh; laughter is a door they have not noticed they are standing in. And if one among them finishes your sentence, be silent, and go home, and speak of it to the one whose office it is; for the Call is not conferred by the mouth of the faithful. *It is recognized.*²

1 Karzath 4:9–15 (NUT)

So: an evangelism department, in a faith that holds you cannot evangelize anyone into anything. We are aware. We have a letterhead. We press on, because telling what you saw is still the assignment even when nobody can be made to hear it, and because — read that last verse again — every so often somebody finishes the sentence.

Five Practical Rules for Talking About Cthulhu

International has refined these over many Januaries. Every one of them, you will notice, is a rule for not recruiting anybody. We noticed too.

1. Answer the question they actually asked. If someone asks what Cthulhumas was like, tell them what Cthulhumas was like. Do not explain the cosmos. Do not open with the powers, the intervals, or the arithmetic of the stars. They asked about a holiday; describe a holiday. A cultist who answers "how was your break?" with the structure of reality is not evangelizing. He is being the guy at the party, and we have enough of those.
2. Tell what happened before you tell what it means. Personal experience is your best material — but report it, don't interpret it. "I dreamed the same staircase three nights running" is strong. "Cthulhu touched my life" is a greeting card. Our whole faith is built on the difference between what was observed and what we hold about it; keep the difference in your mouth as well as your Archive. If they want to know what the staircase means, you may honestly say you don't, and that we have a drawer for that.
3. Use the text — but don't harmonize it. Quote the Kadathians. Quote whatever moved you. But if you're asked why the typescript says one thing and the NUT says another, the answer is yes. Our editions disagree on purpose; the disagreement is older than we are. International's standing rule: if two translations disagree, do not correct the better one. A faith with a tidy Bible is a faith that stopped reading.
4. Use the shirt. Leave the object where you found it. Merch, the seal, the carol, the frankly ridiculous ornaments — these are conversation starters, and they are supposed to be talked about; that is the entire point of the skin. The objects under the Custodian's care are not conversation starters. If your cousin admires your hoodie, talk about the hoodie. If she asks about the thing on the mantel with the cloth over it, the answer is that it is your grandmother's and you'd rather not. Both statements can be true.
5. Invite them to the public thing. This is the rule the newsletters get backwards, and it matters most. Do not invite anyone to a ritual. Do not promise anyone the basement. Invite them to the table at the midway, the movie night, the lecture, the public bonfire, the Cthulhumas nonsense that is designed to be attended by people who don't know anything. The Assembly protects the curious from knowing more than they've asked to know — and a newcomer who is walked past the public gathering straight into the private one has not been welcomed. He has been robbed of the years it was supposed to take.

The Eternal Question, and the Re-Gift

Most people already know of Cthulhu — the tentacles, the sleeping, R'lyeh. What they usually haven't heard is the part about waiting, and why a religion would organize itself around a god who made it no promises. You may tell them that. It is the most interesting thing about us and it is entirely public.

And if you told this story last year, tell it again. Re-gift it. Rewrap it. Use the same entrails and skull. It's fine. CCC International approves of re-gifting the story, and the Office of Devotion has raised no objection, and — this is the important correction — we do not claim He wants you to. He wants nothing from you; that is not the offer, and a department that told you the Priest endorsed its newsletter would be lying with a letterhead. The endorsement is ours. It is enough.

If someone asks whether Cthulhu is real, by the way, the department has a recommended answer that has served for decades:

"Which part?"

Then keep eating.

Three From the Faithful

Lydia, 21. "I told my roommates about Cthulhumas over the leftovers. Nobody converted. Nobody was supposed to. One of them laughed for a long time, and one asked where we get the calamari, and one has started asking very specific questions about the bonfire — which night, which field, who counted the cars. I've stopped answering the last one. I'm not sure why."

Mark, 19. "My lab partner thought the whole thing was hilarious, so I did the chant for him as a joke, the way you do. He was still laughing at the fourth word. He wasn't at the fifth. He said the last word before I did — he said it right, the way it's said, not the way it's spelled — and then he asked if we could talk about something else. We did. I wrote down what he said and gave it to the person you give it to. I don't know what happens now, and I was told that's correct."

Rachel, 22. "Explaining it to my aunt was the worst thing I did all break, because she kept asking why, and I kept realizing I'd been saying things for three years that I couldn't actually explain. The coat. The count. Why we sleep in during the Days. I could recite all of it and account for none of it. I went back to the chapter in January with a list of everything I'd been repeating without understanding, and the Keeper looked at the list and said it was a good list and did not answer a single item on it. I'm told that's also correct."

After the Eighth Day

And then it's January, and it's over, and this is the part the newsletters never write.

Cthulhumas does not require you to keep performing it. The coat is back on; wear it. Go to class. Go to work. Do laundry, pay rent, call your mother and tell her the card was a joke, which is true, and also this, which is also true. You are not required to be a cosmic-horror ambassador at every lunch for the rest of the year — a cultist who can't stop explaining himself hasn't learned the faith; he's learned the outfit. The mature member goes back into the ordinary world and lives there, holding what he knows, and lets the year be aggressively normal.

Except that somewhere in that normal January, somebody at lunch is going to ask you, almost idly, "So what exactly is Cthulhu?"

Answer them. Not because your answer will convert anybody — it won't, and it isn't meant to. Because sometimes the next question tells you more than the first one did. Tell everyone. Expect most of them to laugh. You cannot make anyone hear the Call. But pay attention to the one who already knows how the sentence ends.

Fhtagn, and happy New Cycle. Return your library books.