Cthulhu's Reign

supernatural impossibilities erupt all around.

The voice behind him remains silent, but its presence is palpable and its command unmistakable. With fixed stare and only slightly trembling hand, he resigns himself again to the task and begins reading from the first page, scanning not only for the meanings contained in the words themselves but for evidence of the interstitial semiotic glue that binds the whole insane edifice together. As always, his attention is soon swallowed whole by the dark and deranged philosophical cathedral it has entered.

Perhaps a recounting of how our new Great Awakening (a term whose traditional, historical use seems gallingly blinkered now) first made itself known to me will serve to purify and clarify our mutual apprehension of these matters.

As you know, I was hard at work on my third book of theology, a substantial and career- defining exercise in theological trailblazing to be titled The Fear of God, in which I took on the same theme treated by John Bunyan in his classic treatise with the same title, and agreed with him that “by this word fear we are to understand even God himself, who is the object of our fear.” I took for my orienting point Luther’s subversive declaration — which exerted a veritably talismanic power over me — that God “is more terrible and frightful than the Devil. For therefrom no man can refrain: if he thinketh on God aright, his heart and his body is struck with terror. Yea, as soon as he heareth God named, he is filled with trepidation and fear.”

One day — I distinctly remember the sun was shining sweetly through my living room window while a few birds twittered in the yard, so it must have been during the spring or summer, although my sense of time has lately become as confused and chaotic as the natural elements, which, as you know, have now taken on a schizophrenic kind of existence — one day I sat poring over a stack of pages that I had recently written, and was struck without warning by a thoroughly hideous vision. As I looked at my pages, I saw peering through the typewritten words, as if from behind the lines of text, a face more awful than any I had ever conceived. I need not describe it to you: the bloated octopoid visage with its obscenity of a fanged and tentacled maw, and with saurian and humanoid characteristics all mixed together in a surreal jumble. It conjured involuntary thoughts of the great Dragon of John’s Apocalypse, and of the watery waste of Genesis, and of the waters beyond the sky and below the earth, and of the chaos serpent Leviathan. But there was far more than that. Staring into the red-black effulgence of its awful eyes, I saw the skin of those biblical images peeled back to reveal great Mother Tiamat, the ancient archetype of all dragons and serpents and extra-cosmic chaos, wearing the more familiar imagery like a cheap rubber mask.

It was more than just a visual image, it was a veritable convulsion in my total being, and its ripples spread through the very air of the room. You well remember your own experience as you knelt praying before a statue of St. Jude and raised your eyes to his benevolent face, only to be greeted by the same sight I am describing. So you know, too, the violent illness that overtook me. I was gripped by a kind of mania even as my stomach and bowels twisted into searing knots, and I began turning frantically from page to page in an effort to escape the vision, but still the words of my magnum opus appeared as the bars of a cage holding back that impossible face, that locus of all nightmares, that source of all ancient, evil imaginings. I dimly remember ripping the book to shreds and even — I cannot remember why — eating portions of it, and then vomiting them back up; the half-digested paper had been transformed into tiny scrolls which I then ate again, and they tasted like honey, but then they turned so bitter in my mouth that I vomited yet again.

These events are all peculiar to me, but the rest I think you know. For my personal story is a microcosm of that greater story in which we are all now trapped. Each of us has his own story of how he personally experienced that terrible moment when our world was overturned by the eruption from beyond, and all of them bear a generic character that marks them as belonging to this new proclamation, this New Testament, which we are not reading but living.

“And did you truly experience such a vision with a statue of Saint Jude?” the voice asks, still located behind him. Its tone is overlaid with a scummy film, like the surface of a thick and slow-boiling stew, and he maintains his reverentially averted gaze. After pausing to regain his bearings in the relatively solid surroundings of the chamber, he softly shakes his head.

“I don’t think so. Or rather, I don’t remember. Reading the documents is like reading the transcript of a dream that I never knew I had experienced. Every line feels like a half-memory of something I had forgotten without ever knowing it at all.”

He considers the description of the demon-dragon, and imagines it transplanted onto the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. The apostle’s beard is a nest of writhing gray-green tentacles. Their tips caress the image of Christ hanging at the figure’s breast.

He asks, “And how did these papers come into the Church’s possession?” Maybe this time the answer will contain something new.

“By strange channels and unknown messengers,” the voice replies, as if chanting a litany, “the writings of the new apostle came to the Church to illuminate the shadows of these dark days.”

“But the timing is all wrong,” he says, unable to restrain himself. “The author must have written these things before the cataclysm began. Weren’t they delivered on the very day when the great face appeared in the sky and the cities erupted into madness?” The voice remains silent, of course, for these details have already been analyzed and discussed ad nauseam within the Roman episcopate. He considers for the hundredth time the ramifications of the fact that some unknown individual who shared the name of the last apostle had written of these things in the past tense, before they actually happened, and had addressed his dark visionary rantings directly to the Holy See in Rome. The Church’s frantically launched investigation had been hindered at every turn not only by the fantastic events unfolding around the globe but by false and disappearing leads that appeared positively supernatural in their abrupt and strategic occurrences. No publisher knew of a book offering a blasphemous reading of Isaiah. Only the vaguest of hints spoke of a renegade theologian writing a self-described magnum opus. The papers had been sent via a route that looked impossibly circuitous when staked on a map. The trail dead-ended simultaneously at indistinct locations in North America, Central America, Eastern Asia — and Rome itself.

The more he ponders it, the more it sounds and feels like a narrative being altered and overlaid by multiple redactions, each intended to accomplish a greater opening to an emotion compounded of equal parts bafflement and spiritual revulsion. In the latest revision, the letters are addressed directly to him, and their author is rendered fictional, to await complete obliteration in a version yet to come.

“Why me?” he asks, even though he is growing increasingly terrified at the thought that the specific identity of the New Paul may be supremely unimportant in one sense and all-important in another.

The voice responds to his unspoken fear: “In the beginning was the Logos, which speaks not only in the lines of Holy Scripture but in the lines of the real itself. Our new apostle’s writings and their accompanying signs and wonders declare a great rewording in which the notions of ‘me’ and ‘thee’ may be forgotten.”

A pen, formerly unnoticed, rests beside the pages on the desk. His hand begins to itch. The voice intones, “The Word is a living thing. Like a farmer sowing seeds, one sows the Word but knows not how it grows. If all were written down, the world itself could not contain the books.”

The multitude gathered outside in the piazza emits a sigh of anticipation and agreement.

He watches with shock and fascination as his hand picks up the pen and begins to add to the words of the final page, defiling its inviolable sanctity, writing in clean, crisp, orderly lines that cut across the jumbled chaos like the bars of a cage.

ITS IMMANENCE: Jerusalem and R’lyeh — might they always have been interlaced with each other? The physical Jerusalem and also the mythic vision of its bejeweled celestial fulfillment — both revealed as mere shades, devolutions, abstractions of the primary reality of those crazy-slanted, green-dripping towers and slabs emerging like the archetype of a chthonic city from the subterranean waters of the collective psyche, like bony black fingers rising up from Mother Ocean.

Christ and Cthulhu — might they both be hierophanies of the same awful transcendent reality? Christ as high priest in the order of Melchizidek, Cthulhu as high priest in the order of the Old Ones, both of them bridging the gap and healing the division between our free-fallen souls with their burden of autonomous, inward-turned selfhood and the greater, all-encompassing reality of God-by-whatever-name; both implanting their own deep selves within us, thus undercutting and overcoming our categorically contradictory attempts to heal the primordial rift through conscious effort. These psychic disturbances that have so terrified us of