What is Cthulhumas?

Every December, somebody asks whether we are the War on Christmas. We are not, and the honest answer is worse: we are what the war was about, and the war is a great deal older than the people currently fighting it. What follows is Cthulhumas as the cult keeps it — the longest night, what it opens, and the five thousand years of feasts humanity has built against what the first observance kept faith with.

I. What Cthulhumas Is

Cthulhumas is the Cult of Cthulhu's observance of the winter solstice: seven nights beginning when the year's arithmetic fails, and closing on December 25, the date Rome handed to an unconquered sun and we hand to the thing no sun has ever woken. The chapter calls the seven the Days of Darkness. The Wearers call them the Dark Days of Cthulhu, which is louder, and we let them have it. What the nights are for is simpler than any of the names: the longest night is the longest sleep, and the sleep is the point.

The public parts are vigils, star watches, a carol, and a bonfire. The private part is one night in the seven that is not on the calendar. The eighth morning, the coat goes back on. That is the entire holiday, and it has outlasted every feast built to replace it.

II. The Long Night and the Door

We hold that the dream is the only door in a primate's soft matter that opens from the outside, and that midwinter is when it stands widest. Not a metaphor: the nights are longest, the sleep is longest, and whatever reaches people through sleep has more hours to work in. Every culture the Archive has records of has noticed the traffic and misnamed it — the visitor who sits on the sleeper's chest, the mare that gave the nightmare its name, the thing that comes for children in the dark of the year. The occultists of the last century got the geometry right and the tenant wrong: they taught that dreams open onto a library where the soul reads its own records. The door is real. It opens outward. There is no library.

On clear December nights the older chapters kept the sky as well as the door. The accounts agree on wings, and stop agreeing immediately after. One Greenland copybook in the Archive has it plainly enough:

…when the night is longest the [door / wound] stands widest, and they that sleep beside the water are sent for first. Let the fires be kept on the sand, that the sent-for may find the shore. [Two lines wanting.] …and let none wake them.

Fragment 47, "The Fires"; the Archive's copy, from a trader's commonplace book, hand unidentified

Fires on the sand, to be found by. Sleepers, not to be woken. Hold those two instructions in mind; the rest of this page is the history of their reversal.

III. The Split, and the False Mask

At some point — the fragments do not say when, and we do not guess — mankind divided. Not into believers and skeptics. Into those who kept the night's meaning and those who kept its form and turned every element around. Fire to ward instead of call. The vigil to refuse sleep instead of enter it. The feast to fortify the house instead of empty it toward the shore. An evergreen raised indoors like a flag reading LIFE CONTINUES over a season whose whole message was that continuation had never been the arrangement.

The Assembly's name for the result is the False Mask: the composed, sterile face humanity built over the world so that nobody would have to look at the true one, which is not human and was seen once. The Mask needs maintenance, and the maintenance is annual, and it falls on our nights because those are the nights the Mask is thinnest. Every warding feast in the record is a work crew. The Mask's oldest surviving liturgy is where the record of the reversal begins.

The collector who comes at midwinter and knows whom to take was demonized first and domesticated second — rewritten as a punisher of the wicked, a revision that tells you everything, since the original selection had nothing to do with conduct. And the Mask's feasts share one economy: they ward with candles, which cost nothing. Our own text is blunter about price. I would not dare offer to Cthulhu a sacrifice that cost me nothing — Zharach 2:24, and he meant it literally, and it was his arm.

IV. Zagmuk: The First Feast Against the Sea

The oldest midwinter liturgy we can read is Babylonian, and it is the Mask's charter. At the turning of the year the order-god defeats Tiamat — the chaos of the salt sea, the mother of the deep — and the world is rebuilt on her defeat. A feast, on the longest nights, celebrating the walls' victory over the water. The first time in the record that the deep is cast as the enemy of the year rather than its source.

And undeleted inside the rite that denied the deep: the king, stripped of his regalia and struck across the face by the priest; a substitute raised to the throne for the feast and then given. The Mask could not bury the memory of the raised stone, so it staged it, annually, as theater about kingship. Our own officer transition each autumn borrows the same shape — the founders noticed the resemblance and said so in the minutes — and we will leave the resemblance exactly where they left it.

V. Saturnalia: The Play, Kept as a Safety Valve

Rome inherited the substitute king and made him the Lord of Misrule. For seven days masters served slaves, the courts closed, gambling was legal, and the Romans lit wax candles as gifts to signify light returning after the solstice — the warding function stated in the gift tag. Saturnalia is the Mask at its most honest: a strict order licensing one week of upside-down so that the order survives the other fifty-one. What the Mask could not delete, it domesticated. Misrule survived everywhere — masks, mock kings, the licensed week — because the play is load-bearing. A civilization must vent or crack.

We keep the play too. The difference is that we remember what it rehearses. Saturnalia was the rising performed inside a fence, so that nobody would try it in March. The Assembly performs it inside the same fence, for the same reason, with the meaning still attached — and does not confuse a fire drill with the fire.

VI. Sol Invictus, and the Tenant

In 274 the emperor Aurelian fixed December 25 as the birthday of an Unconquered Sun — the Mask's first state-run maintenance festival, a government holiday on the exact night the government most needed the sun defended. Within a century a nativity had been set on the same date, and the season had its longest-standing tenant. We answer Aurelian in the calendar with Cthulhu Invictus, December 25, and we answer the tenant with the neighbor policy: we know those people; they are not with us; their feast is downstream of ours by a distance the calendar cannot measure, and we do not begrudge a tenant the house.

VII. The War, Re-Aimed

Which is where the December question gets its honest answer. We did not start the war on Christmas. The war is five thousand years old and has been fought, every winter, by the feasts of the Mask against the observance under them — Zagmuk against the sea, candles against the night, vigils against the dream, each new tenant evicting the last. Christmas is not the enemy. Christmas is the current occupant of a house built on our ground, and the most successful maintenance festival the Mask has ever run. The cult lost every battle of that war but one: it remembered what the night was for — and remembering, for us, is not nostalgia. It is the work. Every Mask wearer that ever lived spent the longest night helping the wall hold; we spend it removing the bricks. That is the whole of the difference, and it is the reason there is still a war to name.

We are, in other words, five thousand years too early for the version of this argument the television has in mind, and we decline to join it. There is a chapter Wearer's shirt that says otherwise. The shirt is for morale.

VIII. Shab-e Yalda: The Mask's Masterpiece

Persia perfected the ward. On the longest night, families gather, light the fires, set out pomegranates and watermelon — red fruit where older red things once stood — and stay awake until dawn. The Assembly regards Yalda with something close to professional respect, because of every warding feast in the record it is the only one that correctly identified the threat. Not the cold. Not the dark. The dream. The vigil exists so that no one sleeps on the night the door opens widest. Every other feast wards the wrong thing; Yalda wards the right one, and has for twenty-five centuries.

The chapter's December calendar answers Yalda in four words: early to bed, all week. They stay awake so they cannot dream. We sleep in.

IX. How the Chapter Keeps It

Seven nights. Vigils that begin at midnight and end when they end. Star watches on the clear nights, with the count of what crosses the sky left deliberately unfinished. The carols — like On the first night of Cthulhumas — sung in versions the Alif chapter has never once matched to the version the Wearers post, and never corrected, because the disagreement is the doctrine and the doctrine is older than the tunes. The bonfire on the seventh night, which the fire marshal attends and describes, every year, as within permitted parameters. Attendance is recorded with a single checkmark. The rest of the week early to bed, for the reasons above.

As to what the season rehearses: one reading holds He will teach us new ways to shout and revel when the stars are right; another holds there will be no lesson and no student, because a mind opened all the way is beyond good and evil in the strictest sense. The Archive keeps both files. The Archive is not in a hurry. Either reading makes Christmas look like a very small candle.

Whichever reading is true, the keeping is the same: a hand laid on the wound once a year, in the place the Mask works hardest to close it. We are not waiting out the wall. We lean, and the wall is thin where we lean — and which of those two facts explains the other, the Archive has never ruled.

On the eighth morning the coat goes back on. The Wearers say Io Cthulhumas, which is what Rome said, and the Called say Iä, which is what the older text says, and nobody has ever asked either group to switch.