There is an especially interesting essay from the Fantasy Commentator ("The
Call of Cthulhu" : an Analysis, by John McInnis; Fantasy Commentator, Vol.
VII, No.4, Fall, 1992, p. 268-281) that offers an intriguing psychological explanation
of how HP Lovecraft coined the name/word Cthulhu. It is a very powerful piece,
even if you do not agree with the author's thesis, though the historical and
medical facts are impressive.
There is also something more amazing - ASTOUNDING! - that was missed by Mr.
McInnis about the forming of the name/word Cthulhu. We present it here after
first paraphrasing Mr. McInnis' essay.
The interesting, even amazing part is the author's theory of HP Lovecraft's
unconscious derivation of Cthulhu from an archaic Saxon legal term cuth.
How HPL could have done this is supported in the essay by arguments which depend
on the theory that HPL was very deeply and traumatically affected his entire
life by having witnessed - as a child - his father's fatal dementia paralytica
or general paralysis of the insane, a terrible chronic degeneration of the nervous
system resulting in aphasia, personality deterioration, alternating phases of
mania and paralysis, and eventual death.
The idea in the essay is that HPL modeled the entire Call of Cthulhu
on his sick father, especially his appearance, who was committed to Butler Hospital
by the Lovecraft family's physician, Dr. George D. Wilcox. (Wilcox was the mental
patient in the story The Call of Cthulhu.The doctor is here turned into
the patient!)
The Louisiana cultists in the story represent the bouts of his sick father's
mania, which involved wild dancing.
The Cthulhu figurine is modeled on the paralytic posture such patients periodically
assume.
The icthyic appearance of Cthulhu's cultists is modeled on a naso-labial and
epidermal condition this disease causes in the afflicted. The "gibberish"
of R'lyehian is modeled on the aphasia this dementia produces, apparently affecting
Wernicke's area of the brain, or other speech centers; etc.
How the name Cthulhu got derived from cuth is an interesting, but necessarily
speculative yet amazing argument, involving how the unconscious minds of traumatized
people operate in their creative processes. It has a lot of credence however,
and the author could have made even stronger arguments than he did. He did not
do so because he is apparently unaware of a number of theories of the brain
and speech which are coming out today, which show that the unconscious mind
has a "ludic" or game-playing, sportive, toying function which enables
or even drives it to play word games in one's sleep, so to speak, and it does
so all the time, drawing upon words, memories, feelings, etc. which are psychologically
buried, i.e. drawing upon a much vaster storehouse of information than is usually
available to the "conscious" mind. In other words. while few people
notice or are interested in acrostics, the dreaming mind universally is aware
of such things and uses them, even "coding" repressed experiences
and memories in acrostic formulations.
In relating Cthulhu to the term cuth, the author seems unaware, however,
of an even more remarkable term from archaic Anglo-Saxon law which contains
a lot of the sounds, when pronounced, that HPL indicated (in his Selected Letters)
Cthulhu should have: a little known word from the Glossarium Archaiologicum,
couthutlaugh, which means "a person who willingly and knowingly
receives an outlaw, and cherishes or conceals him." (Couthutlaugh is a
real word. It's in Black's Law Dictionary. In common law, such a person undergoes
the same punishment as the outlaw, like aiding and abetting.)
How these archaic legal terms could possibly be tied in with HPL's monster
from R'lyeh will only make any sense if you read the essay, which is not apt
to be popular with certain admirers of HPL, like Prof. Dirk Mosig and S. T.
Joshi, who regard HPL as an exemplar of rationality. The essay makes HPL out
to be quite a pathological personality, a theory we cannot dismiss.
Also, consider that not only did HPL reverse the roll of Wilcox from "doctor
that committed his insane father" to "mental patient" in his
story, in his child's mind he may have considered the real Dr. Wilcox to have
been guilty of couthutlaugh! He may have seen his Dionysian father as an outlaw
- and Dr. Wilcox as hiding and protecting his father in the institution. People
back then, especially in Lovecraft's class/culture, kept such things secret.
Now, even more amazing. If you eliminate the 2nd and 3rd letters, the 7th letter,
the 9th letter, and the 11th letter, and reverse the 10th and 12th letters in
the word COUTHUTLAUGH - it spells Cthulhu. And if you look at the letters
left over you end up with o, u, t, a and g. Rearrange those letters: GAOTU (Grand
Architect of the Universe) - a Freemasonic title of the Deity. Strange!
HPL had a "thing" for the /ng/ phoneme, this could also have everything
to do with HPL's unresolved trauma over his father's shocking and even disgusting
death, that HPL's father's own name, Wingate, contains the "dread phoneme"
/ng/, depending on how it is pronounced. Also, the name Wingate contains the
word wing, related to flying, and the words indicating "winning" and
going in a gate, which is what much of what HPL's fiction is about.
Also, the "Terrible Old Man" has the notariqon (commonly called "acrostic")
form TOM, a name frequently used for a wayward type, such as Toms-of Bedlam,
Tom Thumb, Tom-Tit-Tot, Tom-Poker (a childhood bugbear or bogey-man), an "old
Tom cat," etc. - representing, once again, the important subconscious figuring
of HPL's father as a "Dionysian" symbol in his creative process. His
father was, indeed, a "Tom."
