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.
✍️ This article collected from this book 📚
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shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity…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 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 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 outr𐀠mental
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