What is a Cultist of Cthulhu?

I. Of the Word, and Whose It Is

"Cultist" is the report writer's word. The New Orleans police used it in 1907 for the forty-seven men they brought out of the swamp; the newspapers have used it since for anyone a coroner declines to classify; the game publishers print it on character sheets; and in election years the television awards it to whichever party is losing. We do not object. A name assigned by observers is a free account of what they can see, and what they can see is the point of everything we publish, including this page.

But a word coined outside a house cannot describe the rooms. Two of ours, since you will meet them below: the Assembly is the cult, and the Archive is what it keeps — the papers this chapter has held since 1974 and the older ones it inherited, most of them dull, a few of them not.

The Greenland material does not use the word at all. Where we would say "cultist," its closest rendering is the ones who hold, and the Archive has not settled the translation. We find no reason to improve on it.

II. Of the First Cultists

Inside, a cultist of Cthulhu is what the word has meant since before there were reports to write.

The oldest account the Archive owns has been translated in full exactly once. It is a fragment, which is to say the beginning and the end are missing and nobody knows what it was part of. The brackets are the translator's; where the original is damaged, we print the damage. Read it once for the story and once for what it does not say.

For forty and seven nights the Dream was upon them.

It burned within their [heads/hearts] like the fire beneath stone, and no man among them found sleep. Thus were they driven onward toward the Great Water, neither mountain nor marsh turning them aside.

Above them moved the Black Ones of the Air, keeping watch upon their passage. Those whose strength failed were taken up by them, and their names are not thereafter recorded.

And when the wanderers came at last to the place where Earth ends and the Great Water begins, those who dwelt beneath the waters came forth in multitude to receive them.

They led our ancestors to the Consecrated Place.

There stood the Great Carved One, the image of KLULLU [reading uncertain], before whom the people trembled. And there Man understood that the terror which had followed him from his first days had a face, and that his fear had not been without a master.

Then those few who did not turn away ascended the raised stone.

And they brought forward those who trembled, and gave them as the Gift.

When this had been accomplished, a great joy seized [all who remained]. They cried out; they struck the earth with their feet; they cast aside restraint. Men and women and those from the Great Water whirled before the Carved One in the sacred dance, and joined themselves one to another according to the ancient rite.

Thus fear became knowledge, and knowledge became rejoicing.

[The final three signs are damaged. A possible reading is: "And He dreamed beneath them."]

Fragment 19, "The First"

What followed, every tradition keeps: the Charge — hold the memory until the stars come round, and be the hands at the opening. A cultist is a person under it.

And the Charge has two verbs, which is the part outsiders miss: hold the memory and be the hands. The second is not a future assignment. It is what the first turns into on an ordinary week.

III. Of the Three Conditions

The version everyone arrives already knowing has been in the chapter's mimeographs since the seventies:

Cthulhu saves few of his believers for later, for his hunger is insatiable. But if you are saved, it is not because you are special. You're more like the popcorn that falls in between the couch cushions. And even that is eaten by something.

Hanju's Notes on the R'lyeh Apocrypha

That is the joke, and it is true as far as it goes. How far it goes is a matter of condition, and the public recension of the conditions is short.

These are conditions — spiritual states, not ranks. Nobody is promoted.

The Wearers buy the shirts, laugh at the right lines, and follow the accounts. They are owed nothing, told nothing, and protected from both. We thank them for their custom; they are doing our work and need never know it.

The Called were called first and arrived after: they attended a gathering under the right stars and took the Oath of Silence, which is the First Oath, and which does not expire. They know there is a Descent. Most are content to know it the way you know the ocean is deep.

The Returned went down and came back. They keep the rites, they are courteous, and they do not say what the doctrine looks like from the other side. Asking them is not forbidden. It is useless, which the Assembly finds more reliable.

Some do not return. The Archive records four possibilities and cannot say which is true. They are set out in our Statement of Faith, and the fact is repeated here without them, because it is the one thing about the conditions nobody should learn late.

IV. Of What a Cultist Is Not

Three errors follow the word around, and we correct them in order of what they cost.

A cultist is not licensed. The promise of the faith is freedom — law and morality set down like a coat at the door of a warm house — and the promise is not yet. Until the stars are right the coat stays on, and we keep it on very carefully. The member who reaches for that freedom early has not become interesting. He has deserted the Watch, and the Watch is the only thing we ask of anyone.

A cultist is not commanded. Cthulhu does not issue orders; He is not that kind of priest, and this is not that kind of house. The charge was laid down once, on the first men, before writing, and has not been repeated. A standing order does not need to be.

A cultist is not fodder. The word appears nowhere in our records and once in someone else's: the Rev. Ward Phillips, a Puritan divine who attended nothing, reports in his Thaumaturgical Prodigies that the coast's wretches "doe feast upon the Drown'd Man's leavings, and are madde." His volume is kept, read aloud once a year at the Reading Against, and enjoyed. The Creed has already answered him: He does not love us. That is not the offer. One does not fatten what one does not require. What the Assembly attends to is memory — ours, kept whether or not it is received. Feed that.

V. Of the Rule of the Door

Membership is open to all races, classes, and genders, and was before those were the words. This is a rule, not a courtesy, and it is kept for the plainest reason in the records: in fifty years of its own looking, and in every older paper it inherited, the Assembly has never found a distinction Cthulhu makes among us. We have looked.

Other faiths on this campus arrive at the same welcome from kinder premises. We do not quarrel with their arithmetic. We only note that ours has never needed revising.

VI. Of the Ordinary Cultist

The popular picture is robes and long knives. The Archive's picture is a roster.

Members graduate, marry, move away, and become accountants, and this is not a fall from grace, because grace is not on offer. They remain under the Oath, which has never needed enforcing, and they are not visited, because there is nothing to visit. Every few Septembers one of them comes back, and is not asked where he has been.

The testimony the Archive trusts most has always come from the least remarkable people: the clerk who is steady, bored, and certain of what he saw. The extraordinary witness is a burden; the ordinary witness is a finding. If you are dull, dependable, and sleep well, you are not disqualified. You are the preferred stock.

VII. Of the Day to Day

The visible life of the chapter is folding chairs, a coffee urn, and minutes. Every September the club signs the Commonwealth's anti-hazing acknowledgment — first item, on the record, in front of the adviser, every member — and the older members treat it as the most important document the chapter produces, and do not explain why. There is study, which is slow, because the fragments disagree and are meant to.

And there is the rest of it, which the minutes record as line items. The chapter buys things — a field season on a coast, a crate at an estate sale, the contents of a dead collector's shelf — and what it is buying is the part of the world that existed before the paint went on. It keeps nights that do not work the way nights work, in the places where that is easiest, and it does not explain the mechanism, because explaining it is not what it is for. It declines, in small and consistent ways, to go along: the agreements everyone else makes without noticing they are making them. And it is unembarrassed about wanting people back the way people were before the coat, the wall, and the herd's arrangements. None of that is filed with the Dean's office. The folding chairs are.

There are public gatherings, which are announced and optional, and the other kind, which are announced by mouth, one day before, and are not.

Most of it is dull. The dullness is not a failure of the program. Consider what it is for.

VIII. Of the Man Who Wrote It Down

We are asked, often enough to answer it here, whether H. P. Lovecraft founded the Cult of Cthulhu.

No. He recorded it. In 1926 a Providence antiquarian set down the most accurate outside account of the cult ever written, while claiming to believe none of it, and the cult conferred on him — or he assumed; the Archive does not say — the title of Honorary High Priest. Why he was permitted to publish, and what it cost him, are questions we keep on a list of questions. He died in 1937. His file in the Archive uses no verb.

The cult regards him the way a coastline regards a cartographer: useful, and not the point.