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About the Cthulhu Deities
VOGTPATR
It is indeed curious that Lovecraft's mythos has not yet been classed with Sa-
tanism, serial killers and all that shit by psychologists & fearful Christians.
Not that it deserves to be; no one could be more unlike the typical "Satanist"
than H.P.L. But it does manifest a set of beliefs that are deeply unchristian
and subversive of ideas about the privileged place of Man in the universe. It
is thus mocking of the claims of progress and secular humanism upon which our
present age is based as well. And like Satanism, it parodies for purposes of
satire certain key notions of science and religion.
Thus the members of an "Unholy Trinity": Azathoth or "God the Father" is the
blind, idiot god at the centre of the universe. He is its motor force, dynamo.
He is the most powerful but also the least intelligent: uncontrollable energy.
He is the Big Bang, and like it occupies his own place in space & time (or ra-
ther outside of them), which he cannot leave nor others reach without the help
of --
Yog-Sothoth. He is the "Holy Spirit" and like Him is hardest to concep-
tualize, the most abstract and philosophical of the deities, yet more than a
mere idea: He really exists! He is relativity and the time-space continuum
whose laws only he can transcend. Thus he can move and move others from any
time or place to any other. Even Azathoth needs him, the telephone & teleporta-
tion system of the universe, to do this. His intelligence comprises all known &
unknown physics, and the latter rescinds the laws of the former. He knows the
answers to the most intractable problems of unified field theories and astrono-
my. The greatest scientists alive or dead have not been able to learn them be-
cause they do not understand his "language". The insane on the contrary can
understand snatches of it, and it is to them that he imparts his "knowledge".
Nyarlathotep is "God the Son", the Word made flesh. He is sent however
not to save man but to damn him. For man is good for nothing but to feed the
fires of Azathoth with. His limited intelligence and unlimited arrogance allow
him to create brief, little suns on his own earth and to see the biggest and
the smallest of visible things. He makes extinct countless other species and
overpopulates his own; then he slaughters millions of his own kind in wars. His
mind is advanced enough to glimpse the Great Old Ones, their traces. Yet is he
primitive enough to participate, an active ingredient, in their (un)natural cy-
cles. This makes of him a good catalyst, accelerating certain processes greater
than himself to faster than what nature alone might do.
Just as the dust ejected by a supernova eventually forms planets and
life, that asteroids will strike, red giants engulf and black holes consume; so
man and his civilizations are destined to glut the appetite of Azathoth. If he
would see an emblem of his fate, let him view under his microscope an amoeba in
the act of devouring its prey.
Nyarlathotep is the god who understands us and is willing to speak to
us in a language we understand. He does so that he may the better lure us to
our doom. His treachery, greed and violence resemble that of the pre-eminent,
prepotent among us. He has left examples of pharaonic magnificence for us to
imitate. Were we created in his image or did he take on our form to converse
with? For certainly that tempter is most convincing who sympathizes with his
victim. And Nyarlathotep is the devil, and mocks the same vain dreams that he
flatters: Climb Mt. K2 and fall. Go to the South Pole and freeze. Jockey for a
kingdom and see your own burn. Travel to exotic locales and eat fast-food. Buy
the consumerist dream and die in a car accident. Smoke cigarettes and get can-
cer. ... It is obvious the devil has been among us for a long time, and the
Great Old Ones' names have a demonological ring to them: Abhoth, Yog-Sothoth,
Father Dagon...
Nyarlathotep also mocks his masters, though. The most anthropomorphic,
he is also the most intelligent. Azathoth has the mind of an amoeba whereas he
is a genius. The irony of this fact is not lost on him. For he can never be his
own man, but must always be the creature of Azathoth. His plans, personality
and accomplishments serve only to express the instinctual urges of a Being that
pays him no thanks, doesn't recognize his existence. He thus welcomes chances
to blaspheme, fool and deride that entity he would like to be rid of but can't.
He also mocks Yog-Sothoth. For despite his vast knowledge of the cosmos
this powerful being, whose idiom is almost incomprehensible to us, has no dip-
lomatic, social or specificly human skills or affections. And Nyarlathotep
(whom he brought to earth) looks on him contemptuously, much as we look at
nerds, geeks -- scientific, socially inept people.
In the old days, Nyarlathotep liked to appear as a conqueror or was ta-
ken for the devil. Today it is important that we recognize him for what he is:
the principle of evolution. He is "good breeding" and the improvement of the
race by natural selection, as well as Social Darwinism and ruthless competitive
individualism. He inspires our arts, professions and institutions. Whenever a
terrible new weapon was invented, his touch was felt. He is the (polluted)
"river that runs uphill": He suspends entropy in biological systems in order to
create a species -- humanity; then he delivers this choice morsel together with
the sauce of man's achievements into the ravening maw of Azathoth, which is the
ultimate Entropy. (In the selfsame fashion did Mephisto sell Dr. Faustus youth,
riches and talent, then drag his soul to hell. We may interpret Christopher
Marlowe's play as an attempt of simple and superstitious people to detect the
presence of Nyarlathotep in their society.)
These three beings compose the demonic trinity that rules our material-
istic age. But they differ from the Christian trinity in another theologically
important sense. The three Persons of that Trinity are really One: different
manifestations of the one true God. The three beings I have described today are
separate and semi-competitive entities, in power unequal, in character unalike.
Their activities combine to produce the effect of a loose collaboration. They
are more like the members of a triumvirat than of a trinity.
They are not the only gods in the pantheon of the Old Ones. A few more
are known to exist -- Shub-Niggurath is one of them. Would it not be fitter
to compare them to the polytheistic gods of Greece and Rome? Perhaps. But re-
member that a current of paganism continued to survive in Christianity all the
way up to our century. Not only in the cults of witchcraft and Satanism, that
Christianity did not succeed in stamping out, but within the church itself too:
St. Valentines Day, Christmas, Hallowe'en were once pagan feast days.
Like them, Shub-Niggurath is a pagan deity that has survived to play a
part in the domains staked out by the three supreme Elder Gods. She is a fer-
tility and vegetation goddess -- "the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young". She is responsible for the teeming fecundity of weeds and putrefaction.
She is Disease and brings forth plagues to decimate mankind. Ebola may be the
newest of these. She also represents the fickleness of the weather and the har-
vest. One year plenty, another famine. One year drought, another flood or hurr-
icane. She prefers to be in the tropics with its millions of (undiscovered) in-
sects & fungi. She splits dominion of the temperate zone with Ithaqua the Wind-
walker, owner of the frigid zone. She is the Population Explosion and gives us
sex so that our numbers will exceed our means. Wherever anything rank and lux-
uriant, like cancer, overruns reasonable bounds, she is found. She is Ecology,
and constantly gives birth to new mutant species that she inserts in her food-
chain. (Nyarlathotep as patron of Agriculture sometimes begets them on her.) A
few hang on, most disappear. These aborted imagos are eaten by some newer abom-
ination, a winner in the fittests' ceaseless struggle to survive. Cthulhu might
be one of these, when conditions are "ripe for his germination", i.e. for his
triumphant exit from R'lyeh.
This ends my disquisition on the role of Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and Nyarlatho-
tep in the Cthulhoid cosmos. No impiety was intended by my comparison of them
to the Christian trinity, which is plainly better for mankind than they are!
While they are plainly what we deserve.
"Ia! Shub-Niggurath!"
-- Warren Vogt
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Exorcizo igitur te creatura!
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Something I Found..., about the deities of the necronomicon
Aug 22 2006, 07:55 PM
