Lovecraft, H P - The Call Of Cthulhu

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The Call of Cthulhu

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Summer 1926

Published February 1928 in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78, 287.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a

survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested,

perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of

advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have

caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings

of all sorts and kinds...

- Algernon Blackwood

I. The Horror In Clay

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 sciences, each

straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing

together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of

our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from

the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our

world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in

terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from

them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think

of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth,

flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case an old

newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish

this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a

chain. I think that the professor, too intented to keep silent regarding the part he knew,

and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my great-

uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown

University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an

authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of

prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by

many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The

professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly; as

witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from

The Call of Cthulhu

one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the

waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any

visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the

heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible

for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am

inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.

As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to

go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of

files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be

later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I

found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes. It

had been locked and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal

ring which the professor carried in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it,

but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked

barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed

jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years become

credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric

sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches

in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in

atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many

and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric

writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be;

though my memory, despite much the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any

way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its

impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of

monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could

conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous

pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the

spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with

rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most

shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestions of a Cyclopean

architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in

Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed

to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly

printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was

divided into two sections, the first of which was headed "1925 - Dream and Dream Work

of H.A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.", and the second, "Narrative of Inspector

John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg. - Notes on

Same, & Prof. Webb's Acct." The other manuscript papers were brief notes, some of

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them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from

theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot's Atlantis and the Lost

Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with

references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer's

Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely

alluded to outré mental illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of

1925.

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular tale. It appears that on

March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon

Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp

and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had

recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who

had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living

alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of

known genius but great eccentricity, and had from chidhood excited attention through the

strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself

"psychically hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed

him as merely "queer." Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually

from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from other

towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found

him quite hopeless.

On the ocassion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked

for the benefit of his host's archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of

the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated

sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous

freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's

rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim,

was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and

which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new, indeed, for I

made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre,

or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping

memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake

tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and

Wilcox's imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an

unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths,

all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered

the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that

was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but

which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu

fhtagn."

The Call of Cthulhu

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor

Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with frantic

intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad

only in his night clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle

blamed his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for his slowness in recognizing both

hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to

his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or

societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he

was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or

paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was

indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with

demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview

the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling

fragments of nocturnal imaginery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean

vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting

monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two

sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."

On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his

quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the

home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several

other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of

unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that

time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr.

Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was

dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them.

They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly

on a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about.

He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr.

Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he

had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added,

was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His temperature,

oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such

as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly ceased. He sat

upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had

happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22. Pronounced well by his

physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no

further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my

uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant

accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes

gave me much material for thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism

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then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes

in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same

period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,

had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the

friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their

dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his

request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses

than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original

correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant

digest. Average people in society and business - New England's traditional "salt of the

earth" - gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but

formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23 and and

April 2 - the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected,

though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes,

and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic

would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their

original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of

having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see.

That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the old data which my

uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from

esthetes told disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them had

dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger

during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported

anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described;

and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible

toward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The

subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went

violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later

after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle

referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted

some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down

only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all

the the objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well

that no explanation shall ever reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity

during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the

number of extracts was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here

was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after

a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America,

where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from

California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some

"glorious fulfiment" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of

serious native unrest toward the end of March 22-23.

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摘要：

TheCallofCthulhuTheCallofCthulhubyH.P.LovecraftWrittenSummer1926PublishedFebruary1928inWeirdTales,Vol.11,No.2,p.159-78,287.Ofsuchgreatpowersorbeingstheremaybeconceivablyasurvival...asurvivalofahugelyremoteperiodwhen...consciousnesswasmanifested,perhaps,inshapesandformslongsincewithdrawnbeforethetide...

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Lovecraft, H P - The Call Of Cthulhu

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