It is this sense, of teasing out a hidden truth from the seemingly mundane pages of, e.g., artistic trends, archaeology, anthropology, shipping news, and criminology (to select only the fields investigated by Francis Thurston in “The Call of Cthulhu”) that makes Cthulhu especially attractive to a certain kind of artist. Creators who find themselves drawn to Cthulhu are those likewise (like Thurston) drawn to teasing out hidden, subversive, even terrifying meanings from the bland corpus of modern life. Not always “counter-cultural” creators, they are nonetheless “cult-cultural” ones: creating art for self-selected outsider audiences (like the weird pulp fans of the 1920s or the Goths of the 1980s), for those predisposed to reject the bourgeois, mass-market concerns of the culture at large in favor of the hidden, the outré, the Weird.
Hence, Cthulhu’s great popularity with heavy metal musicians (never the mainstream face of popular music), comics artists (never the acceptable image of great art), and roleplaying gamers (never the cool kids in high school). Cthulhu appeals to those constructing anti-narratives against the received and accepted truth, from French literary critics (Gilles Deleuze and Michel Houellebecq are Lovecraft devotees) to Swiss surrealists (H.R. Giger called three of his collections Necronomicon) to ritual magicians. Lovecraft is quoted and alluded to respectfully in Pauwels and Bergier’s vastly influential 1960 counter-culture text Morning of the Magicians (a seminal document for everything from UFOs to ancient astronauts to New Age spirituality), in Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, and in numerous magickal textbooks by Aleister Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant. Comics writer and magician Alan Moore has designed a Cthulhoid Kabbalah; a New York occultist calling himself “Simon” attempted to merge Crowley and Lovecraft in a paperback Necronomicon in 1980; Phil Hine’s text of “chaos magick” is called the Pseudonomicon, after Lovecraft’s pseudo-gospel; a quick Googling points to any number of Cthulhu cults defying all Lovecraftian logic in the attempt to contact the Great Old Ones.
But the act of digging up the “real truth about the world” is not just a creative act, but almost always a fundamentally reactionary one. The “real truth” is, by definition, deeper, older, truer. (If postmodernism says “there is no real truth,” then that must surely apply to postmodernism itself. And in this context, note that Lovecraft got there before Derrida.) As contradictory as it may seem, I think that Cthulhu must draw some large part of his polymorphous power from his connection to this single realization: that the modern consensus world is wrong. Michel Houellebecq calls Lovecraft’s great tales works of “rage against the world.” One can keep more of Lovecraft’s cool, rational demeanor in mind and still notice that Cthulhu does not merely refute the modern world, his existence demolishes it in fire and flood and chaos. He is simultaneously all that is wrong with modernity and all that will destroy it.
Lovecraft created Cthulhu as a new kind of monster, one for an age in which the sciences “each so far striving in their own direction” had demonstrated that mankind was irrelevant and meaningless: Einstein’s physics, Hubble and Shapley’s astronomy, Rutherford’s geology, and Haeckel’s biology all showed that mankind was a brief, accidental flyspeck in an unfeeling, insensate cosmos. By discovering that our creation is meaningless, we reveal that the end is likewise unimportant. Lovecraft realized, or discovered, or revealed, that horror no longer comes from mankind or his parochial myths; it comes from off Earth, from the universe at large, from Outside. (Fritz Leiber famously called this Lovecraft’s “Copernican Revolution of horror.”) And the Outside doesn’t care. It doesn’t even care enough to hate us; it will destroy us at the moment of impact. Cthulhu is that nihilistic realization given form, the inevitable modern science that will destroy the modern world. Cthulhu drowns us in that realization; he embodies our rage at our own inability to matter. The Cthulhu Mythos is, in John Clute’s words, pre-apocalyptic fiction.
Lovecraft embodied Cthulhu with any number of his own apocalyptic fears and hatreds: not only the vast implications of 20th-century science, but the “yellow peril” that would destroy the white race (Cthulhu’s Pacific cult is run by “deathless Chinamen”), the blasphemous vandalism of modern architecture (R’lyeh’s “Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths” are explicitly described as “Futurist”), the collapse of Anglo-Saxon mores and culture (Cthulhu’s coming will be heralded with “laws and morals thrown aside”), and even his own distaste for seafood. Other critics have intimated that Cthulhu represents Lovecraft’s fear of his own creative powers, or Lovecraft’s hatred of women, or any number of other personal apocalypses.
Other authors have attached Cthulhu to their own hatreds of the modern world, from Robert Bloch echoing Lovecraft’s concern with social decay in Strange Eons to William Browning Spencer’s Resumé With Monsters casting the Cthulhu Mythos as representative of the anti-human office culture of the corporate world. In Move Under Ground Nick Mamatas opposes square Cthulhu to the doomed, liberatory Beats; in “The Deep Ones” James Wade indicts the counter-culture as Cthulhu-spawn; in “Recrudescence” Leonard Carpenter points up the eerie similarities between Cthulhu and petroleum. Thomas Ligotti ingeniously makes Cthulhu (under the transparent disguise of “Nethescurial”) represent the insidious collapse of originality in cosmic horror, while lesser lights from Michael Slade to Joseph Pulver have paralleled Lovecraftian fandom and serial murder in murky attempts to personalize and ironically examine the Cthulhoid apocalypse. In short, there has been surprisingly little push-back against Cthulhu’s main symbolic meaning of the horrific Modern. But then, it’s only been a lifetime.
A few of Lovecraft’s successors have teased out another thread in Lovecraft’s work: Cthulhu as “strange attractor,” as the Faustian rapture of knowing what man was not meant to know. The discoveries of the modern will, it is true, unmake and devastate our humanity — but is that such a bad thing if human concerns are purely parochial? Lovecraft, in this light, prefigures “posthuman” science fiction and ideology. Thomas Olney in “The Strange High House in the Mist,” Robert Olmstead in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Randolph Carter in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and Henry Akeley in “The Whisperer in Darkness” all give in to the Mythos, to the seductive power of the Outside. Robert Blake seemingly joins with Nyarlathotep in “The Haunter of the Dark,” and there is some ecstasy blended with horror in his final apotheosis. Certainly the seductive allure of Cthulhu runs under his popularity as well, from Giger’s artistic lustmord to Japanese hentai to the paeans to the uncanny in Willum Hopfrog Pugmire’s Sesqua Valley story sequence.