Influence of Lovecraft's Cthulhu

Writing has always been a powerful tool for people who wanted to influence large groups of people with their thoughts and arouse a spark in them. This act can be done on purpose to transfer one’s ideas to readers by using certain literary means such as academic writings, yet, it is possible to see that it may happen more in

artistic works, mostly in fictional writings. Despite being aware of the fact that characters and events are all fictional, readers tend to empathize with characters and relate fiction to their daily lives and this creates a two-sided situation. While knowing the characters, their choices, and events arouse from those choices are fictional, most readers match fiction with reality. Indeed, this dilemma happens because of the author’s touch on life in his/her work. This is the matter with Cthulhu that actually surprised me.

H.P. Lovecraft once stated that the most powerful fear is the fear of the unknown and focused on creating something unknown to humanity, something that would push the limits of the human mind. At first, he thought of the space-related end of mankind such as comets colliding Bozkırlı 2 with the Earth but that kind of fear was not powerful enough, so Lovecraft enhanced his area of fear to the cosmos. He created cosmic horror lore, which was a hold for celestial divinities who can erase all the creatures from existence with a blink of an eye and would not even notice anything about it. The idea of powerful cosmic deities worked dramatically on many people. Cthulhu is one of these fictitious cosmic entities, created by H.P. Lovecraft in 1928 and first appeared in his short story The Call of Cthulhu, which was published in a magazine.

Lovecraft, with all these powerful godly characters, managed to create a well-thought horror theme. He pushed the limits of human perception to the cosmos and succeeded in effectively influencing readers. The success of this "Lovecraftian" theme appealed to many authors of horror. Seeing the power of the unknown, horror writers progressively started to work on the "unknown" theme. Also, Lovecraft left his works open for other writers to contribute. Lovecraft influenced many popular authors such as Stephen King and Clive Barker.

Besides his successful influence on the literary world, Lovecraft changed many people’s lives too. This change occurred in both good and bad ways, though. Lovecraft’s “simple weird fiction” is loved by many, but some people, along with loving it, made wrong interpretations. Lovecraft himself was a rationalist man and created his work totally in a fictional frame. However, his works became the subject of underground occultists, and the last thing Lovecraft wanted as a rational man was to watch his work absorbed by those “Lovecraftian occultists”. He basically called his work a “weird fiction” but it was actually a perfect fit for occultist beliefs. On the other hand, when we consider Lovecraft’s mythological and cosmic characters, this kind of unwanted outcome was inevitable.

Some group of Lovecraftian occultists focuses on a wider aspect compared to other groups. This group uses all of the universes Lovecraft created. They don’t even mix his work with theirs, they use the sole work and put it in the center of their practice. Leading occult in this group especially uses the name “Esoteric Order of Dagon” from the occult in Lovecraft’s work The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Esoteric Order of Dagon sees Lovecraft as a prophet, who is not aware of the genuine potential of his work. They see Lovecraft as somebody presented with great wondrous but refused it due to lack of might. For EOD, Lovecraft’s “visions” are undeniable or have formed in reality.

In addition to these influences, Lovecraft influenced the music industry too. Metallica's The Call of Ktulu, Black Sabbath's Behind The Wall of Sleep, and Electric Wizard's Dunwich are songs that can be shown as examples of such songs.