return to commentary The great Old Ones "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws andmorals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."The Call of Cthulhu," H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft was a fiction
writer, and, in spite of his personal denials and contempt for those who would
have it otherwise, a creator of a pantheon.
The Old Ones, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep and the rest did not exist before
him. After he was through they lived in
the same way that Jupiter and Odin and wrathful, stupid, old Jehovah live,
created by the imaginations of those who chose to believe in their existence.
So thus the Old Ones live
again and walk unseen among us. And
dead Cthulhu, no longer dead, dreams anew and makes dreams come true, dreams of
chaos and madness and destruction. They
live in the hearts of those who have grown sick of order and dream of the time
when the human spirit will break free again and once more ravage the earth.
And the human soul has
changed. The undead are not myths of
terror. They are romantic visions of a
life to be desired, eternal, sensual, untrammeled by the weaknesses of ethics
and morality. The vision of the dark
Old Ones no longer causes dread to those who encounter it. They are embraced as brothers and as friends
by those who call out, “Come Great Nyarlathotep! Bring your divine Chaos and crawl no more!”
Safety is an illusion. Let the illusion be now dispelled.
Security is an
illusion. Let the only security be that
of the grave.
Come Great Cthulhu! Rise from your slumbers in the deep and free
humanity from its self-imposed bondage of order.