Who Is Cthulhu?

Cthulhu is a Great Old One: a titanic, winged, tentacle-headed entity held in the drowned city of R'lyeh, in the South Pacific, alive but dormant. The dossier files him under the further titles of the Great Dreamer and Priest of the Great Old Ones, rates his threat as civilization-ending, and records the single most unusual thing about him, which is how little he has done. One chronicle on file puts him in the open, and it does so briefly, in the spring of 1925.

What the record shows

The account is The Call of Cthulhu, and it was put together by Francis Wayland Thurston from three sets of papers left by his late great-uncle, a professor of Semitic languages at Brown University. The first is a small clay bas-relief made by a Providence sculptor, Henry Wilcox, from a dream. The second is an inspector's report on a police raid on a cult in the Louisiana swamps in 1907, in which the same image was found as an idol and the same name was chanted. The third is the log of a Norwegian sailor, Gustaf Johansen, who landed on an island that had risen from the sea and met what lived there.

The three do not meet until the last of them is read. Johansen's party opened a door in the stonework, and what came through it was too large to describe, and the log does not try to describe it. Johansen drove the yacht's bow into the thing, it was cut open, and it drew itself together again. He got away, and the island sank.

What he does from where he lies

He speaks in dreams. The dossier records that the dreams grow stronger as the geometry of R'lyeh comes into alignment, which is why Wilcox, an unconnected young man in Providence, dreamed the city in the same weeks that the sea floor was being heaved up. The cults that worship him, in Louisiana and on the Greenland coast, are waiting for the city to rise and keep their rites in the meantime.

Why he appears so seldom

Cthulhu is named in several other chronicles but is present in only this one. For the longer note, see the Dispatch on why he appears so rarely, and for the difference between the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods see the Dispatch on the two tiers.

On the screen

The Call of Cthulhu was filmed in 2005 as a silent picture in the studio manner of 1926. The Archive also holds Underwater (2020), which adapts nothing on file but ends on a creature its director has said, outside the film, is meant to be Cthulhu.