User:Vortexgods/sandbox

Cthulhu

Cthulhu is a creation of author H. P. Lovecraft, an atheist. H. P. Lovecraft believed in a lot of strange and evil things, but God or gods wasn't one of them. Lovecraft believed that humanity as a whole was a meaningless blip in the cosmos at large, and chose to metaphorically express this believe by creating a mythology that was passive-agressively hostile to humanity as a whole. (In that, while it was true that they would destroy humanity given the chance, they required the intervention of their victims in most cases to allow them access.)

This mythology had a pantheon of gods, which can be roughly divided into two groups. The first group are essentially incredibly powerful aliens. Immortal supergeniuses with nearly unlimited power, and often gargantuan in size, this group is known as the Great Old Ones, and Cthulhu is the best known representative of this group.

The second group are more like what we would think of as true gods, although my own read of Lovecraft is that nothing exists outside the natural world, but that these "gods" prove that mankinds understanding of the natural world is pitiful and inadequate. The Blind Idiot God, Azathoth and the Lurker at the Threshold, Yog-Sothoth, vie for the big chair in this group, known as the Outer Gods.

There are many reasons why the Lovecraft pantheon, or Cthulhu Mythos, has become popular. The first is that despite holding many unsavory beliefs and being a strange and lonely figure, Lovecraft was a force in amateur and semi-professional science fiction, fantasy and horror fiction. He reached out to his fellow writers, and invited them to use his ideas in their writings or expand on his ideas. Many writers have done this with his Mythos, and many continue to do this. While the Lovecraft copyrights are jealously held by those who profess to own them, I suspect in modern times Lovecraft (having been resurrected from his essential salts) might have put them under some sort of creative commons license (well, possibly the mythos itself only and not his individual stories, a man has to eat after all).

Lovecraft is popular in many parts of the world including England and Japan. I often fancied that his work is popular in Japan because the Shinto religions supernatural elements are just as uncaring toward human goals, desires and safety as Lovecraft's gods are. However, this is probably due to my understanding of Shinto coming from things like Inu Yasha, Paranoia Agent and xxxHolic rather than any true understanding of the religion.