Statement of Faith

The Call Beneath the Quad

Hearken, then, you who have come this far. Beneath the fluorescent hum of the residence halls and the small hours of the study carrel there runs an older sound, and it does not come from the heating. Most who hear it mistake it for fatigue. A few do not. This page is set down for the few. The rest of you are welcome in the shop, and we thank you for your custom; you are doing our work and need never know it.

What follows is the public recension of what we hold. It is complete in the only sense that matters: it contains nothing false, and it contains nothing that would do you harm to read. Those two facts are not in tension. Consider why.

Article I · Authority

Of the Word, and Why It Is Not Written

Our faith rests upon the R'lyeh Apocrypha, which has never been printed, bound, translated, banned, or lost, for it has never been written down. It is delivered as it was delivered before the sinking: in sleep, to such minds as can be reached, in fragments that do not agree with one another. Every volume that claims to hold it entire is a forgery, and we say this of our own typescript, which the founders struck on an office Underwood in the spring of 1974 so that a club might be seen to study a book. The Called know who typed it. The Wearers cite it by chapter and verse, and are not wrong to.

Where the Apocrypha is silent, interpret as you will. Where it speaks, do not. You will know the difference by whether you were awake at the time.

Article II · The Deity

II. Of Cthulhu, and the House He Keeps

We do not name Him the one true God, for that is a claim belonging to faiths with a membership drive. Nor do we name Him the Great Old One, as though there were one; the household is many and Cthulhu is its Priest, the one who will answer. He is Priest of a house older than the stars we are permitted to see, and He is not its master, and He beholds those He serves but dimly, as we behold Him. There is no floor to that house. He has not found it. Neither shall you.

Cthulhu lies in R'lyeh beneath the Pacific, dead in every sense that would signify to us and living in the one sense that signifies to Him. He knows all that passes upon the earth. He is interested in very little of it.

What stands behind Him we do not set down upon a page that the Dean's office can read.

Article III · Humanity

Of Humanity, Which Was Nobody's Intention

We were not made. We were left over: a residue of the housekeeping of an elder race whose city lies under the southern ice, and that race was not His people. Cthulhu did not fashion us, He does not require us, and He does not love us. We set this down plainly because every other faith upon this campus will tell you the contrary, and that is the reason their gods keep so still.

Cthulhu speaks to us regardless, in dreams, for the dream is the only door in a mammal's skull that opens from the outside.

Article IV · Justification

Of the Offer, and Who Is Not Making It

Nothing you do will purchase His regard. Not prayer, not sacrifice, not the grade-point average. He made no promises, and there is no bargain anywhere on this page.

There is an offer. It is worth being exact about it, because every other house on this campus is offering you something smaller and calling it more.

What is coming is freedom. Not the freedom of a permit, and not liberty inside a fence granted by an authority that keeps the deed and may ask for it back — but the whole apparatus gone at once, when Cthulhu rises: law, morality, and the conscience you were taught to call your own, set down like a coat at the door of a warm house, and what stands up out of it is as Those Who Wait, free and wild and beyond good and evil, and it stays that way. Total. Permanent. Nobody's to revoke.

And nobody's to give. That is the part the other houses leave out. He is not offering it, it is not a reward, it is not payment, and it is not conditional upon you. It is simply what is left when the thing pressing it down is no longer pressing. He does not love us. That is not the offer.

The offer is everything, forever, arriving whether or not you wanted it.

Our part in the meantime is memory. When the first men were shown the idols they were given a single charge: keep the memory of the old ways until the stars come round, and be the hands that open the tomb when they do, for the spells that keep Him whole keep Him also from the first motion, and some force from without must serve. That charge has never been discharged and it has never been laid down. It has passed, mouth to mouth, through a great many people who could not read.

We are not saved. We are remembered, and we remember, and we are not doing it for wages.

Article V · Freedom

Of the Watch, and Why Not Yet

Other statements of faith on this campus ask you to submit. Ours asks you to wait, which is harder, and to wait usefully, which is harder still.

What is coming is freedom. Not the freedom of a permit, and not liberty inside a fence granted by an authority that keeps the deed and may ask for it back — but the whole apparatus gone at once: law, morality, and the conscience you were taught to call your own, set down like a coat at the door of a warm house, and what stands up out of it is as Those Who Wait, free and wild and beyond good and evil, and it stays that way. Total. Permanent. Nobody's to revoke.

The stars will be right. We are not certain the word is "stars."

Article VI · Calling

Of the Descent

Belief is how you find the door. It is not what you are once you have gone through it, and that is not decided by you.

There is a shore, a threshold, a descent, an encounter, and sometimes a return. Some return having heard. A few return having seen. Some return unable to speak of it. Some do not return, and of these the Archive records four possibilities and cannot say which is true. Some return, and are courteous, and keep the rites, and the Reader of Dreams declines to sit with them.

None return having understood. If they did, there would be no need to go.

Article VII · Congregation

Of the Body, Living and Otherwise

Cthulhu is the head of one body, and that body comprises the living, the dead, those beneath the sea who were never human, and those upon the land who have not finished changing. We hold cordial relations with the Order that concerns itself with the last of these. It makes promises under oaths that are not ours. We share no ceremonies with it, and we do not answer questions about Innsmouth.

Article VIII · Gathering

Of Assembly

We gather when the stars say, not when the calendar does. The public gatherings are announced and optional and you are welcome at them. The other kind are announced by mouth, one day before, and are not.

There is a chant. The chant is not the secret; the chant is the portion you are permitted to hear. The secret was never spoken aloud, only whispered, and only to those who have taken the Oath, which is silence, and which does not expire.

Article IX · Oblivion

Of Death

Those who take the Oaths of the Order do not die. Those who do not, do. Cthulhu is indifferent between these outcomes, which is why the choice is yours and no one else's.

For the unsworn, death is precisely what the biology faculty describe. For the sworn there is a city off a stretch of this coast, which the Navy torpedoed in the winter of 1928 and has not emptied. We make no promise concerning it. The promise is not ours to make.

Article X · The Return

Of Cthulhu's Return, and Why We Do Not Say "Soon"

Soon is a human word. Cthulhu surfaced once, in the spring of 1925, and went down again: the Assembly holds that the stars were wrong, and the one man who wrote it down held that the city sank under Him, and we have never needed those two claims to agree. Cthulhu will lie another thousand years without remarking it if He must. Faiths that fix a date die on the morning after. We have outlived every one of them and expect to outlive yours.

We do not recruit. You found us, or we found you.

Article XI · The Skin

Of the Skin, and Why This Page Is Shaped So

A thing shaped like a campus ministry is invisible. A thing shaped like a joke is armored. The founders understood this in the spring of 1974, when the Dean of Students accepted a satirical club without asking what it would be doing at its meetings, and every page of this site has been shaped by that afternoon since. Ridicule is not a cost we pay for cover. Ridicule is the cover. When a stranger laughs at the shirt, the stranger is doing our work.

Every sentence upon this page is true. No sentence upon it is the Apocrypha. Both statements hold.

We are not the only ones hiding. We are the only ones who know it.

Questions

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. That is the whole of the chant. That is all you are permitted to know it means.

Adopted by the charter members, Alif Chapter, Miskatonic State University, 1974. Articles not approved for undergraduate circulation are not printed here, and you will not be told how many there are.