Cthulhu

[lord of the 4 realms]

What does Cthulhu Mythos have to do with sorcery?  

[Nuadu]

Outside of some chaos magicians who choose to play with such, pretty much nothing.

Good stories though.  

[lord of the 4 realms]

i get hints it has somthing todo  

[Rustig]

Like Nuadu said, it's a recurring theme practised by a few hardcore chaos magickians; summoning fictional tentacled beings and such. All very interesting. |D  

[Nuadu]

Yes indeed. You have to remember that the Cthulhu thing is made up, i.e. works of fiction (and thus I would not refer to it as a mythos, which does not, or at least should not, imply fiction). Yes, there is all sorts of hype out of there that Lovecraft was actually talking about something real and that he possibly even learned it from Aleister Crowley. The fact of the matter is that Lovecraft was a raging anti-Semite who had nothing but contempt for the Kabbalah and anything associated with it (i.e. most of the magic he would had access to during his time).

So, beyond chaos magic, not a thing to do with magic, and even with chaos magic its because the chaos magicians choose to do something with the Lovecraftian stuff, not the other way around.  

[Baltazaar]

well, lovecraft deliberately constructed his storys out of some religious material from round the world. not surprising that after his death, where he allowed autors to continue the mythos, the quality of the storys dropped so much that the new autors had to search for new possibilities to sell. So, they started to construct the hype from today....
from my general opinion, he picked up some very general sympthoms of religion in that manner, and actually was one of the first that tried desperatly to patch all the religions together. a few years later, guys that look like the children of cthulu are the reduced version of an evil being in pirates of the carribean, and they even are the good guys in wow.... Lovecraft was just too general not to have picked up some hints...
case rested.  

[Nuadu]

Quote:

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. - H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was not one of the first people to try to patch religions together, assuming he tried to do so at all; attempts at this sort of universalism go back to at least the Renaissance and can be found throughout European intellectual history until the present (c.f. the early Hermetic Movement (i.e., Finico, Bruno, Mirandola, Agrippa, etc.) Freemasonry, "Grand Lodge" Druidry, E.B. Tylor, the Golden Dawn (and all of its descendants), Sir James Frazer (published the Golden Bough the year Lovecraft was born), C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, etc. etc.). We could probably go back further, as this tendency shows itself in Platonic and Neoplatonic thought and is equally noticeable in the Corpus Hermeticum in the second or third century CE as it is in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius in the fifth or sixth century CE.

All that aside, I would highly recommend Joshi's The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft and More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, which discuss, through footnotes throughout numerous Lovecraft stories, Lovecraft's interests and influences and what went into his writing.  

[Chieftain Twilight]

my research of the Necronomicon lead me to some very disturbing realities.... i'd rather leave it alone, but it seems the paranoia will never go away now.... and i worry that the haunting may already be continuing.... but, i take Simon very seriously.... and quite frankly, i'm glad most of you fellows don't.  

[Oborosen]

Cthulhu (K'thu'lhuh) was transcribed into lovecrafts works as an abridging piece.

Originally named as Kathaelu, he was the step bother of Nergal. His mother after revealing her betrayal to Nergals father, tried to flee. After a being injured by Enlil, she made her way down to the oceans of man. Which is where she spoke her last breath, naming him as her life passed and his began.

His name is a play on a very old samarian canid which translates into, (from life to life).