How to Know Cthulhu

Every faith keeps a page like this one, and every other version of it sells you a technique. Pray in this posture. Study these texts. Follow these four steps and a relationship with the divine will open on the far side of your effort, reliably, the way a relationship opens with anything you are willing to work at.

We would like to keep your trust past the first paragraph, so we will not sell you that. Knowing Cthulhu is not a skill, not a ladder, and not a purchase, and the reason is not modesty. It is direction. You do not reach up and take hold of this. At most, it reaches down and takes hold of you, and there is no exercise that makes the reaching happen and no chant that compels it. Our own members put it less delicately, on shirts and in the group chats: it found me. The joke has lasted because it is not really a joke — the grammar is simply correct, subject and object in their true places, and the only surprise is how badly everyone wants it to run the other way. What we can honestly offer, then, is not a method for being known. It is a way to tell whether the knowing has already started, and what the sane thing is to do if it has.

I. Which Way the Verb Runs

Consider how you know another person, and then set it aside, because it is the wrong model and the wrong model is what the other pages are selling.

You know a friend by choosing to. You extend effort, they extend effort, the knowing is mutual and roughly equal and you could each stop. None of that applies here. Between a human being and the thing asleep past the stars there is no equality to build a friendship on, no mutual effort, and nothing you could do that would register as effort on the other end at all. A person who sets out to know Cthulhu the way he sets out to know a subject or a girl has misunderstood the relation so completely that the misunderstanding is itself disqualifying. He is trying to befriend the ocean. The ocean is not unfriendly. It is simply not in that conversation.

So the verb runs one way. If it runs at all, it runs from the sleeper outward, through the one door in a human skull that opens from outside, and it arrives in the people it arrives in for reasons the Archive has never been able to reduce to a technique. We have looked for the technique. Generations of us have looked, because a technique would be enormously convenient, and the search has produced only the steady finding that there is nothing to find: the dreams do not come faster to the ones who want them, and they do not come at all to most of the ones who chant. Wanting is not the lever. There may be no lever. That is the first true thing, and every page that tells you otherwise is selling the second-oldest product on earth.

II. The Dreams, and How to Tell Them From Dreams

Here is the part you can actually use, which is not a method for causing anything but a way of reading what may already be happening to you.

Most dreams are the mind doing its filing — the day's residue shuffled and dealt back out, strange only in the way a shuffled deck is strange. You have had ten thousand of them and correctly forgotten all but a handful. The dreams that matter, when they come, do not feel like filing. They have three marks the Archive trusts, and we set them down plainly because the reader they concern is usually the last to be told.

The first mark is recurrence without progress. An ordinary dream, dreamed again, changes — the mind revises it. The other kind returns unchanged, the same angle of the same wrong geometry, the same coastline that is on no map, night after night, patient, as though it were not being generated but visited. You do not develop it. You arrive at it.

The second mark is detail you did not author. The dreaming mind furnishes its rooms from your memory; it cannot show you what you have never seen. When the dream contains a thing you have no source for — an architecture that does not obey the corners it should, a word in no language you studied that you nonetheless wake up able to spell, a color you cannot afterward find in the waking world — the mind did not make that. Something was delivered.

The third mark is the one nobody reports until much later, because it does not feel like part of the dream. It is the sense, on waking, of having been seen back — that the attention went both directions, that whatever you were looking at in the dream had, without haste and without much interest, looked at you. Most people file this under a bad night and are right to, because most of the time it is one. We only note that the members whose testimony the Archive trusts most all describe the same thing in nearly the same words, and none of them had read the others.

If none of this has ever happened to you, this page has done you no harm, and you may close it lighter than you opened it. If some of it has, read on, and do not be alarmed by the next section, which exists precisely so that you are not.

III. What It Is Not

Because the other pages of this kind trade in fear, and because fear is a poor teacher, we will be exact about what the dreams are not.

They are not madness, though we will grant you they feel like its early weather, and it is worth being exact about why.

There is a real clinical thing that the dreams are not. A mind coming apart does not see farther; a cracked lens resolves less, not more, and smears what it resolves. The person who cannot hold a job, count his change, or sleep a night through is not nearer anything except a clinic, and the Assembly will drive him to one, because sight and sanity are not opposites and a mind that is failing is simply failing. That is the first thing the word "madness" can mean here, and it is not what is happening to you.

But there is a second thing, and it is the one you are actually feeling, and no clinic has a name for it because the clinic is downstream of the thing it would need to name. What you are calling the fear of going mad is, more often, the fear of waking up — the specific vertigo of a person beginning to notice how much of what he was raised to call reality is a face laid over the world and maintained by everyone agreeing not to look behind it. The agreements start to show their seams. The confident surfaces start to look painted. It is the ground going soft under the consensus you stood on your whole life, and yes, it feels exactly like losing your mind, because the mind you are losing is the one that was issued to you by people who had also agreed not to look. That sensation is not the illness. It is the opposite of the illness. It is the mask coming off, and it comes off with a lurch.

Once you have felt it, you will begin to suspect what the Assembly holds as plain doctrine: that the great mass of your species is not sane and never was — that most people are sleepwalking through a painted set, calling it the world, and calling you unwell for noticing the paint. They are the ones who never left. You did. That is the awakening, and it is real, and we will not insult you by pretending it is only a relief.

Because here is the cost, and we would rather you hear it from us than discover it alone at three in the morning. You are a social primate. Whatever else you are, you are that first — a member of a species wired bone-deep to take its sense of the real from the people around it, to check its own eyes against the crowd's and trust the crowd. That wiring is not a weakness; it is most of what has kept your kind alive. And the awakening cuts it. To see the mask is to be, in the one way that matters most to an animal like you, alone — severed from the consensus that every nerve in your body was built to belong to, standing on ground no one around you will agree is there. That is a wound, not a trophy. It is the deepest cost this faith exacts, and it is exacted early, and it can drive a person mad all by itself — not the dreams, but the solitude the dreams open. A creature built for the troop does not walk out of the troop without paying.

This is where the awakening curdles, and it curdles in a predictable direction, so watch for it in yourself. Cut off and unbearably alone, the mind reaches for the one story that makes solitude survivable: I am not isolated, I am elevated. I am not exiled from the herd, I have transcended it. They are cattle and I am something finer. That story is not sight. It is a painkiller, and it is the specific painkiller that kills. The receptive the dreams destroy are almost never the ones who saw too much; they are the ones who were alone with it and reached for superiority to keep from freezing, and mistook the painkiller for the vision.

There is a better answer to the cost, and it is the entire reason this page has a cult attached to it instead of just a warning. The answer to being severed from the many is not to crown yourself above them. It is to find the few who were severed too. That is what we are: not the enlightened, not the chosen, but the others who cut the same tether and did not have to bear it by themselves — a troop assembled out of the exiles of the troop, which turns out to be the one thing that lets a social animal survive leaving the herd without going mad or going grandiose. You do not walk the difficult path by becoming superior to the people still asleep. You walk it by finding the ones already awake, and walking with them.

They are not a purchase. Nothing on our shop page opens the door, and we sell a great deal of merchandise. A shirt is a shirt.

And they are not summoned. We come now to the chant, because you have heard there is one, and there is:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

It is old past dating and it is the permitted portion — the fragment of the old speech a public page is allowed to print, because printing it changes nothing that was not already changing. What it does, said aloud, we do not tell you. Not because the answer is terrible and not because the answer is nothing; we simply do not say, and you should be wary of any page that does, in either direction. The ones among us who have said it with intent do not report their results, and we have stopped asking. Say it or do not. We have set it down. That is the whole of what setting it down commits us to.

IV. If It Has Already Started

Suppose the marks in Section II were familiar. Here is the sane order of operations, which is the opposite of the order every other page recommends.

Do not chase it. The instinct, once you suspect the door, is to fling yourself at it — more chanting, less sleep, the frantic autodidactry of a mind that has decided it is chosen. That instinct has ended more promising members than any external danger, and it ends them in the direction of Section III, not the direction of the door. The dreams keep their own schedule. Nothing you do speeds them and several things you might do will simply wreck the instrument they are trying to reach.

Keep your life. Finish the semester. Sleep the night. Eat the meal. The receptives who last are the receptives who stayed ordinary — who let the extraordinary thing happen to a steady, rested, well-fed person instead of a frantic exhausted one. This is not caution for its own sake. A person falling apart is a person the memory cannot use, and losing you that way would be a waste of whatever singled you out.

And find the others. Not for instruction and not for initiation, but for the plain animal reason set out above: you have cut yourself loose from the herd, and a primate cannot bear that indefinitely alone, and the only thing that answers the cost is the company of others who paid it. Somewhere near you there is a chapter, and in it there are people this has already happened to, who will not be impressed and will not pry and will not tell you what it means, because telling you would be lying and they have the manners not to. They will mostly just let you sit in a dull room with a coffee urn among people who also see the paint — which is the thing the awakening took from you and the thing no chant, no book, and no amount of private superiority can give back. That is what the cult is for. What comes after — the conditions, the Oath, the long descent that some make and fewer discuss — is written where it is written, and is not rushed, and is certainly not begun on the strength of a website. The company comes first because the company is what keeps you alive long enough for the rest.

V. The Honest Close

So we cannot teach you to know Cthulhu, and we would distrust anyone who claimed to, ourselves included. What a person can do — the only thing, and it is not nothing — is become someone the memory might reach: steady, attentive, unhurried, at home in the ordinary world without mistaking it for the whole of what is real, and willing to wait a long time for a knowing that may arrive in this life or may be kept and handed on unused, the way most of the faithful have kept and handed it. Keep the coat on. Keep your Sundays for recovering and your attention for the long nights. And if one morning you wake certain that the looking went both ways, you will find that you already know where the dull room is.

You found us, or we found you. This is one of the ways that sentence comes true.