Cthulhu

We're back! And with maybe one of my most requested and epic monsters, we're looking at Cthulhu from Lovecraftian mythology! How does this epic fictional monster link to modern spider species? How can you wake him up from his deep, godly slumber? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:
Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

We’re back and ready to tackle the world of monsters for 2025! Thank you all for your patience and I appreciate you sticking with me during this big hiatus - I’m finally feeling much more like myself and ready to invest time in the podcast again after so many things happening last year. 

For those who want to know, I lost my grandmother in December 2023 and was her estate executor, so selling her house was really hard and alongside that, I’m also in the process of donating a kidney to my dad - so it was a lot of health things, alongside general stresses like my day job and surviving in the world we live in today as a neurodiverse person - but I’m on the flipside of most of that stress now, so I’m thrilled to have the time and mental space to be back into the podcast.

Again, big thank you for bearing with me and for all your lovely messages that I got, it really meant a lot to me to have the support of you, my lovely listeners and I’m going to give it my all to pay it back to you in super interesting episodes this year and including almost every recommended monster I’ve had in the running order!

DESCRIPTION:

And what a way to come back then with maybe one of the greatest monsters to ever walk into fictional history - the great one, Cthulhu from Lovecraftian mythology or Cthulhu mythos, named after our headline monster this week.

Cthulhu is actually quite hard to describe, although I am sure we’re all thinking of the same entity in our heads. He typically drives anyone who gazes upon him mad, so technically, all of the descriptions of him are different and not such a reliable source. However, I’ll tell you what we all believe he is meant to look like. 

Cthulhu is generally described as a giant, mountain-sized entity, with a vaguely humanoid body, but with a squid-like face, with long tentacles which are fully moveable and slimy and gross. He’s usually described as being either a dark green, blue or purple colour and has bat-like wings that I think are a little bit too small for his body, and I highly doubt he’d be able to fly with them and I reckon they’re just for show. 

His hands and feet are replaced with claws, much like a lobster and he uses them to pick up prey but they were described as flabby in one account which I can’t get out of my head. However, he is sometimes described differently and does change throughout the stories of him, for instance, he’s sometimes described as a shapeshifting mass of tentacles with a single cycloptic eye in the middle or even a gas cloud.

He is generally referred to as a he, but he’s actually what the Lovecraft universe considers a Great Old One. He’s also kind of a big deal amongst the other Old Ones, kind of the big boss - so the others in the universe respect his goals and ambitions for the planet. Within this mythos, the Great Old Ones are previous Gods of Earth and I have a good little quote to explain them;

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.

Cthulhu is apparently millennia old and the Old God’s creations were linked to the stars, making it possible that he is as old as the universe itself. He was said to come down to Earth as a great priest when the stars were right, defeat the existing beings and then take their place, but went to sleep in this palace he’d made in the Pacific Ocean and slept for so long that the ocean formed around it and trapped him in there. What a dummy. 

I also forgot to mention that he can speak any language, however, he communicates in a language called R'lyehian or Cthuvian. I have one phrase that is in this language and I’m not even going to bother attempting to say it, it’s all over the shop.

Now in regards to powers, he’s got a lot because of his god status. He’s known to be a shapeshifter, but he’s also completely unkillable, and only regenerates or reforms upon death, although often not in the same form he had before. Once they are defeated, they return to a slumber-like hibernation and can only be awoken with the assistance of their cultists, and some believe this opens some kind of dimensional gateway to summon them. A good quote about them coming back is; 

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

and with strange aeons even death may die.

He had the power to drive all that spoke to him or saw him insane, and was sometimes known as the Dreamspeaker, as he could reach out psychically to his cult members and others alike to communicate in his prison and could also reach out through any idols of his too. 

The Great Gods also were linked to the elements, and Cthulhu was associated with water amongst these. He was considered amphibious and able to swim, unlike his brethren and he could manifest himself as fog, rain or water and not manifest anywhere near fire or heat. It most likely explains why his palace is at the bottom of the ocean too, and he’s very linked to being a sea monster of sorts.

Due to his massive mass, of course, he could also just crush you like a bug or pull you apart with the massive pincers too - and he will give chase if you’re spotted by him. Although I said he’s unkillable, he’s not invulnerable and you can damage him through usual means. The best way to completely destroy his form though is to nuke him, which is extreme, but at least he’s out far into the water I suppose.

It’s noted that his first escape from his prison was in 1925, where he chased down a sailor’s boat and drove the entire crew to kill themselves - so he’s a pretty scary beast to come across. 

There’s no mention of eating or reproducing for Cthulhu in any of the books surrounding him I’m afraid, but it is theorised that he lives off of souls from humans that he terrorises whilst they sleep. His ultimate goal is to return the world to anarchy which existed before civilisations formed, and there is that cult that loves him that is passionate to do the same thing.

ORIGIN:

So important note, before we get onto anything origin-wise. This is a creature from a fictional story, what we know is what was created by a person, but importantly, Cthulhu is mentioned in about 100 pieces of text and is now in the public domain. It’s really hard now to differentiate between what’s canon and not, so everything I’ve told you here - I’ve researched, but I can’t 100% guarantee that it’s from Lovecraft himself because quite frankly, I’m not reading all of his work to figure that out and the joy of fictional monsters is that they are just that, and can be interpreted and added to by others, and if enough people believe it, it kind of becomes canon anyway.

Moving on, let’s talk about etymology. Cthulhu comes from the word chthonic, which if you listen to my show often, you’ll know is a Greek word meaning ‘of the earth’. The Greek underworld and all the gods and creatures who live within it are considered chthonic, and in theory as Cthulhu is a god living in the deep parts of the Earth, he is no different.

He does have a couple more nicknames, such as the One who cannot be described, Him who is to come, Him who will rise again and Him who lies dreaming - but all of those are pretty self explanatory.

But let’s talk about something more interesting, and that’s where this monster and the inspiration behind him came about. 

Cthulhu and the universe that he lives in was a creation of the American author, H.P Lovecraft - which is why I’m referring to Lovecraftian mythology or just Lovecraft, as he’s such a prolific writer that he has his own genre of books and storytelling. 

Lovecraft wrote a short story back in 1926, yep - it’s that old, called the Call of Cthulhu which was published in a magazine called Weird Tales. It’s written in an almost documentary style and opens with one of the most epic lines in literature history;

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The story is realistically a manuscript, and talks about the findings of a professor told through notes from people he had spoken to about the beast known as Cthulhu and the cult that worshipped him. There are only three chapters, the first explaining the dreams of a student who had carved a statue of the monster, the second of an inspector who raided a cult headquarters in New Orleans and found the bodies of 100 men used in a sacrifice to Cthulhu. He ends up interrogating the cultists and finding out more about the monster and the rituals. 

The last chapter is about a sea voyage and describes how the boat’s crew found an island, the hidden city of R’lyeh, and saw Cthulhu before stabbing his head with the boat and technically saving humanity for now. 

Cthulhu was then the main attraction for Lovecraft, but funnily enough was only the subject of one story, but with him being mentioned in other pieces of his work till his death in 1937. The Call of Cthulhu is the first piece within what is known as the Cthulhu mythos, which is the collection of work around Cthulhu but written by authors other than Lovecraft himself and is still going today with over 100 pieces featuring him as a character. 

It’s believed that the inspiration for Cthulhu was the legendary Kraken from Scandinavian mythology, which I’ve covered in another episode. This is due to the poem named the Kraken by Alfred Lord Tennyson from 1830, which depicts a giant octopus or squid sleeping beneath an abyssal sea, his ancient, dreamless uninvaded sleep. But other Lovecraftian scholars cite the work of Lord Dunsany to be his main inspiration, as he loved his work, which often talks about Gods sleeping and if they’re awoken, it means the end of the world. 

Lovecraft is often cited as the creator of cosmic horror for this piece, but his work wasn’t celebrated until after his death and his popularity rose over the 20th century, where now he is celebrated as one of the most influential horror writers ever. 

I’m afraid to say though that he was a horrendous racist, verging on white supremacist, and often wrote about what he thought of people of colour in his works, which I certainly won’t repeat here and don’t recommend anyone look up. He was also a sexist, and believed that women were naturally to be discriminated against, and there were very few women in his pieces, and next to no romance or sex, and if there was, it was negatively portrayed. So it’s up to you what you want to do with this information, he’s long dead either way.

Cthulhu and the Call of are now within the public domain, so the character is often used in modern media and within other stories, so as I said at the beginning of this segment, his lore has really been built by others more than Lovecraft himself - which I think could only be a positive and it’s become more of a community monster than his through the 20th century.

We do have to talk about the cultural impact of eldritch horror and cosmic horror on the modern media space though, as Cthulhu is the inspiration behind a lot of monsters we know and love today. For instance, mind flayers, in D&D or wherever you’ve seen them in movies or TV shows, are all inspired by this monster, and you can see why physically, but they are usually also psychic powered like him. 

Cthulhu has also been used in politics to demonstrate voting for a greater evil during the US 2016 campaign and the Polish 2010 campaign. He’s also had multiple scientific names for new animals using his name, such as the spider Pimoa Cthulhu or the moth, Speieredonia Cthulhui for instance. He’s also used as a character directly in plenty of shows and movies, but let’s get onto that now. 

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Now onto modern media, Cthulhu is a monster that is frequently mentioned in passing within modern media and has his own cult following, so there’s going to be a lot for this one and I won’t be able to include everything!

For art, you can actually see the original inspiration sketch by Lovecraft online of a Cthulhu idol if you Google it. But generally, because it’s a fictional monster, most of the art is fan work and I’d recommend just having a scroll through deviantart and such to find some really cool independent pieces around this monster.

In movies, we have; Cthulhu, Underwater, The Deep Dark, Cast A Deadly Spell, The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu, Glorious, In the Mouth of Madness, The Voyage of the Dreamtreader, Godzilla, Necronomicon, The Testimony of Randolph Carter, Witch Hunt, Forever Evil, The Deep Ones, The Haunted Palace, Innsmouth, The Resurrected, The Whisperer In Darkness, The Call of Cthulhu, Die Monster, Die!, The Dunwich Horror, Howard Lovecraft series, AM1200, The Evil Dead, Re-Animator, Hellboy, The Black Goat, Mad God, In Search of Lovecraft & Colour Out of Space.

For TV, we have; Doctor Who, Housing Complex C, Agents of Shield, Demonbane, Ghostbusters, Ultraman, Superman: The Animated Series, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Stranger Things, South Park, The Simpsons, Final Space, Inhumanoids, Scooby Doo, Love, Death and Robots, Rick and Morty, Spongebob Squarepants, Robot Chicken, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Gravity Falls, Ben-10, Dark Shadows & Supernatural.

In video games, we have ones such as; Call of Cthulhu (2003 & 2019), Shin Megami Tensei, Prisoner of Ice, Pray For Death, Castlevania, Fate series, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Robert D Anderson and the Legacy of Cthulhu, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, Scribblenauts, Baldur’s Gate, Cthulhu Saves the World, Hamilton’s Great Adventure, The Secret World, SMITE, Tentacult, World of Warcraft, Warcraft, Cards of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Saves Christmas, The Sinking City, Call of the Sea, Eldritch, Sunless Sea, Lovecraft’s Untold Stories, Magrunner: Dark Pulse, Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure, Worshippers of Cthulhu & Sucker For Love.

My book recommendation this week is tricky if you don’t want to read Lovecraft himself, although I can recommend Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos which is a collection of the Mythos written by others but are within the Cthulhu mythos itself and considered canon. A funner suggestion is What to Do When You Meet Cthulhu: A Guide to Surviving the Cthulhu Mythos by Rachel Gray for something different or The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction by Paula Guran for a good summary of everything in the mythos.

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed?

Haha, no. I mean that much is obvious, right?! Cthulhu, as much as he is considered one of the great monsters, is really considered a great fictional monster with absolutely no link to any monster in mythology or within real life. He’s a made up creature with epic powers and one that is prevalent within modern media - but that doesn’t make him any more real than anything in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but at least these are kind of based off of something in reality or ancient culture.

The concept that he is this great sleeping God who is awakened is really cool, but I think if you honestly believe that Cthulhu exists and is a god you need to appease, then you should really get yourself checked out - and I’m completely serious. I don’t like to talk about religion on a personal basis, but that one is a really big fantasy boy.

Will I one day regret these words as I’m consumed by the thing that cannot be described? Maybe, but only at that point will I admit I was incorrect about him existing. 

However, what I will say is the modern media pull with Cthulhu is massive. He’s an epic monster, and seeing him on the big screen with his Old God pals and the idea of this other universe sleeping underneath us is super cool. And whilst Lovecraft was a genuinely awful human being, his writing did capture the imagination and did bring this monster to life - so there’s that I guess. 

I will say, you may have also guessed this as I’ve done a very wide lens approach to Cthulhu in this, that I’ve never read anything Lovecraftian, I was gifted the Necronomicon when I was 17 and it’s always looked too intimidating to read - so I hope I’ve done the monster justice just based on my research outside of the stories themselves for my Cthulhu fans.

But what do you think? Did Cthulhu terrorise the Earth? Let me know on social media, I’d love to know what you think.

OUTRO: 

A great monster to come back to and I hope all the people who requested a Lovecraftian monster now feel satiated. I honestly don’t know much about that universe, maybe I should have a closer look to get a grasp on more of his epic monsters.

Next week, we’re heading over to Deutschland and looking at a little beast that has graced the walls of log cabins all over the Alpine forests - the Wolpertinger! Make sure to bring your taxidermy gear next Thursday for this rodent menace!

For now, thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’m on every social media platform for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok, Youtube and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, and twitter is mythmonsterspod and I’m now also on BlueSky under mythmonsters. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk and you can also find us on Goodpods, Buymeacoffee and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast too.

Come join the fun though and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.