The moment you’ve all been waiting for! I now present the second installment of…
Meet a Magical Horned Creature!
This Week: Cthulhu! (a.k.a. Tulu, Clulu, Cighulu, Kulhu, etc.)
An artist's pitiful attempt at evoking the paralyzing terror of Cthulhu.
Meet the Great Cthulhu and be glad he doesn’t speak any human language, because he would otherwise be quite offended at your inability to pronounce his alien name. If you’re trying to communicate with other hominids, however, the commonly accepted pronunciation nowadays is “ka-THOO-loo”.
Describing Cthulhu is a bit like an atheist trying to describe God, because it’s nearly impossible to figure out where to begin. And in all honesty, their origins are pretty similar. Cthulhu, like God, first appeared in some hallucinogen-inspired writing some years ago and has since inspired a cult-like following. More specifically, he (or maybe she? or it?) debuted in horror and science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, as a mythic cosmic entity who crash-landed on Earth eons ago and subsequently coaxed the development of all sentient life. But unlike God (or so I hope), Cthulhu is really, really ugly.
Being a cosmic entity does have its drawbacks. Once the stars began to drift out of alignment, Cthulhu “died”, though not in the usual sense of the word. He cast a spell to protect himself and his spawn, so instead of dying he went into some sort of magical suspended animation and is now waiting for the stars to realign to make his comeback. Without a physical body, he communicates with people through their dreams, where he chants something along the lines of “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagi fhtagn” (sic). Thankfully, he and the similarly un-pronounceable city he lived in, R’lyeh, both sank to the bottom of the ocean, so at least for now we don’t have to stare at his terrifyingly ugly corpse all the time.
And just how ugly is Cthulhu? He’s described as a slimy, green combination of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”, with a “pulpy, tentacled head” and a “grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”. He’s also as big as a mountain. To get an idea of what he might look like, just imagine a gargantuan Davy Jones + a gargantuan pterodactyl + a gargantuan amount of Nickelodeon slime, and then make it ten times uglier and bigger just for good measure.
Possible relations to Cthulhu: Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Davy Jones, Jedi Master Kit Fisto, and a man with an octopus on his head.
If you think the story of Cthulhu is all imaginative folly, a series of ultra-low-frequency, deep oceanic sounds recorded in 1997 nicknamed the “Bloop” indicates otherwise. Scientists are pretty sure that the sounds were biological in origin, but the bloops were also so loud that only an animal several times the size of a blue whale could’ve made them. Clearly, no other explanation exists, other than the fact that Cthulhu is real.
One of the several recorded "bloops", sped up 16x and probably around 1,000,000 times quieter. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
Magical Horned Creature Rating: 8.5*
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)
*I was considering giving Cthulhu a 9, but he seems a tad too undesirable to be rated that close to a lovely unicorn.
Meet a Magical Horned Creature!
This Week: Cthulhu! (a.k.a. Tulu, Clulu, Cighulu, Kulhu, etc.)
An artist's pitiful attempt at evoking the paralyzing terror of Cthulhu.
Meet the Great Cthulhu and be glad he doesn’t speak any human language, because he would otherwise be quite offended at your inability to pronounce his alien name. If you’re trying to communicate with other hominids, however, the commonly accepted pronunciation nowadays is “ka-THOO-loo”.
Describing Cthulhu is a bit like an atheist trying to describe God, because it’s nearly impossible to figure out where to begin. And in all honesty, their origins are pretty similar. Cthulhu, like God, first appeared in some hallucinogen-inspired writing some years ago and has since inspired a cult-like following. More specifically, he (or maybe she? or it?) debuted in horror and science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, as a mythic cosmic entity who crash-landed on Earth eons ago and subsequently coaxed the development of all sentient life. But unlike God (or so I hope), Cthulhu is really, really ugly.
Being a cosmic entity does have its drawbacks. Once the stars began to drift out of alignment, Cthulhu “died”, though not in the usual sense of the word. He cast a spell to protect himself and his spawn, so instead of dying he went into some sort of magical suspended animation and is now waiting for the stars to realign to make his comeback. Without a physical body, he communicates with people through their dreams, where he chants something along the lines of “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagi fhtagn” (sic). Thankfully, he and the similarly un-pronounceable city he lived in, R’lyeh, both sank to the bottom of the ocean, so at least for now we don’t have to stare at his terrifyingly ugly corpse all the time.
And just how ugly is Cthulhu? He’s described as a slimy, green combination of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”, with a “pulpy, tentacled head” and a “grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”. He’s also as big as a mountain. To get an idea of what he might look like, just imagine a gargantuan Davy Jones + a gargantuan pterodactyl + a gargantuan amount of Nickelodeon slime, and then make it ten times uglier and bigger just for good measure.
Possible relations to Cthulhu: Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Davy Jones, Jedi Master Kit Fisto, and a man with an octopus on his head.
If you think the story of Cthulhu is all imaginative folly, a series of ultra-low-frequency, deep oceanic sounds recorded in 1997 nicknamed the “Bloop” indicates otherwise. Scientists are pretty sure that the sounds were biological in origin, but the bloops were also so loud that only an animal several times the size of a blue whale could’ve made them. Clearly, no other explanation exists, other than the fact that Cthulhu is real.
One of the several recorded "bloops", sped up 16x and probably around 1,000,000 times quieter. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
Magical Horned Creature Rating: 8.5*
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)
*I was considering giving Cthulhu a 9, but he seems a tad too undesirable to be rated that close to a lovely unicorn.
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