Merry Cthulhumas!

The Highlander; Cthulhu Enigma

Inspired by my Scottish friend who plays the Bagpipes and my current reading of H.P.Lovecraft,
This film presents an unexpected twist in the Highlander story.
It could also be seen as portraying the loss that befalls those who seek gain at any cost, as the Highlander prophecy may still ring true that 'there shall be only One' but it might not be the One that was expected...
On a deeper level, the film provides an opportunity to consider the inherent violence of any cultural 'Grand Narrative', to think about Moral Dualism, Polytheism, Pantheism and the Eternally Unknowable Infinity.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

The Highlander;

Connor Macleod in The Highlander film is part of a powerful, extra-dimensional life-form that entered our physical realm to experience humanity, but because it was incompatible with Earth biology, the Entity divided into smaller units of energy which entered different locations throughout history in hosts known as 'Immortals' who live forever, some as Good, some Evil. The divided being lost its self-awareness and could not achieve its agenda, so to recombine itself the Entity compels its Immortals to duel each other to the death (via decapitation), the victor absorbing via the Quickening the experience and energy of the defeated. This battle through the ages is called 'The Game' and when only few remain at the 'Gathering' they shall battle to the last for the ultimate Prize of All Knowledge and Power. Despite Connor's evident good nature, not everyone thinks the Immortals a good thing. The Watchers are a secret society founded centuries ago who grew concerned about the winner of the Prize and his power over the Earth, and a small group among them called the Hunters decided the Immortals are unnatural, immoral and must be removed....

Connor MacLeod; The Highlander

Cthulhu;

H.P.Lovecraft's story 'The Call of Cthulhu' published in 1928, established the 'Great Priest Cthulhu' as a malevolent entity '...octopus, dragon, human caricature....with rudimentary wings' trapped in a Cyclopean underwater City in the South Pacific called R'lyeh. Central to Lovecraft's mythos, the Old Ones formed a Cult and Religion which worshiped the Aliens as Gods. In a universe ruled by the Outer Gods, the Great Old Ones, and the Other Gods, Cthulhu is the bridge between the Other Gods and the Earth Gods. Cthulhu came to earth aeons before mankind and waits in his submerged city for the day when he will rise to command the world, while His Esquimaux wizards, Louisiana swamp-priests and multifarious followers chant the legend; 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn' (In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming). Lovecraft used Sumerian, Egyptian and Greek mythology as a basis for his monstrous demigods, he said that his messenger-god Nyarlathotep was a member of the Egyptian pantheon and identified the Phoenician fish-god Dagon (formerly Oannes) with the Great Cthulhu himself, thus becoming the first person to link Alien astronauts to ancient Religions.

Cthulhu
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Oannes, Religious Origin of Cthulhu;

Oannes (also Ea/Enki) from 5000 BCE is the Babylonian Water God and leader of a group of beings such as Himself, with the upper body of a man and the lower of a fish. According to the Babylonian priest Berossus 3BCE , He taught mankind how to build cities, found temples, compile laws, survey lands, and grow food. He also taught them mathematics, the sciences, and every kind of art. The Assyrians referred to these amphibious 'dragon men' as Kulullu. The religious use of the fish symbol to denote Deity has continued through the millennia and is now affiliated with orthodox Christianity, in the fish symbol associated with Christ, which is called by the Greek word 'Icthys' meaning (like 'dag') 'fish'.
A Further Christian connection to Oannes has been identified in the John the Baptist story, which seems to echo this much older, pagan story of Oannes, the initiator god. Nightly Oannes would rise from the sea and teach arts, language and sciences. Whilst In the Christian story, it is Jesus who plays the 'communicator God' these two figures, Oannes and John the Baptist, share not only a name, but a job description...initiation by water. (Source, The Wild Hunt).
Clearly the link between the secret wisdom of the Ocean delivered by one who comes from beneath the waves is powerful and has survived across time and cultural boundaries. Despite the physiological and mythological similarities however, Lovecraft's cthonic Cthulhu differs significantly from its inspirational origins in that the latter is apparently benevolent while the former is attestedly malevolent. Although in a Lovecraftian view, the broader cosmological and psychological contexts of these perspectives could reveal unknown motives behind both, was Oannes 'goodness' to help us for ourselves or serve other ends, was Cthulhu's malevolence 'against us', or merely to keep us away from Alien geometries beyond our mortal comprehension...

Oannes, Ea/Enki

Oannes and the Theosophists View;

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. The Theosophist Madame Blavatsky explained Oannes amphibian nature and nocturnal return to the Sea as implying that He '...belonged to two planes: the spiritual and the physical. For the Greek word 'amphibios' means simply ‘life on two planes’... and was often applied in antiquity to those who had made themselves almost divine through knowledge'.'(The Vessel of God) This perspective complements Lovecraft's Great Cthulhu who is from beyond the Earth and wields hidden powers for unknown purposes. That we may equate 'spiritual' with an elevated meaning often immutably and anthropologically concerned with our human well-being may not necessarily apply however, as many mythologies of ancient times also attest of spirits and Gods that were less than humanocentric. Such acknowledgement of the deities life and purposes other than a preoccupation with humanity may reveal them to exist in a wider natural cosmos and also sets them closer to Lovecraft's disinterested deities of the beyond.

Madame Blavatasky, Theosophist

Scientifically Speculating, Carl Sagan Says;

Especially striking about the Oannes legend is that the stories are so consistent over thousands of years. Carl Sagan has commented '...the Oannes legend, and representations especially of the earliest civilizations on Earth, deserve much more critical studies...with the possibility of direct contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as one of many possible alternative explanations.' (Source)
Such a view clearly supports the potential for an Alien/Deity hypothesis and would nodoubt have been welcomed by H.P.Lovecraft.

Scientific Origins and Influence of Cthulhu;

During the late 19th century the remarkable advances in technology which accompanied the industrial revolution opened up new vistas for the imagination to explore.The dizzying speed of progress of this time was compounded by an expansion of the unknown. Each new development, instead of reducing the number of questions as had been expected by pre-modern philosophers, instead compounded them exponentially, each new discovery only increased humanity's knowledge of its own ignorance. Thanks to Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Scientific Materialism became the unofficial religion of the intelligentsia, the first fictional accounts of extraterrestrials emerged in works like H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds and by the early 1920s, aliens entered the mainstream culture through the new media of film in Jules Verne's 'From the Earth to the Moon' which featured extraterrestrials. Many naive viewers at this time believed the were aliens real because they could not grasp the concepts behind such a radical change in entertainment as the movie. Soon after, Einstein's theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, timetravel, alien geometry, and radically altered peoples' notion of space-time itself. By the late 1920s Lovecraft wrote that Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones came from dark stars and had an outpost on a planet he called Yuggoth, the ninth planet in our solar system, mere months before Pluto was discovered. In this fertile environment, the fictional world of H.P. Lovecraft has given rise to many diverse theories about alternative archaeologies, ancient astronauts and new religions.

Ernst Haeckel

Cthulhu and Von Daineken's Chariots Of The Gods;

Lovecraft's idea that extraterrestrials were humanity's earliest deities came to popular attention with Erich von Daniken's 1968 best-seller Chariots of the Gods in which he postulated that the ancient works of man, from the pyramids of Egypt to the Nazca lines, were the work of extraterrestrials who came to earth and gave civilization to mankind. In fact, only one of Von Daniken's major claims is missing from the Cthulhu story, that the ancient gods created mankind in their own image and Lovecraft answers that in his 1931 story 'At the Mountains of Madness' where explorers find an incomparably old city in Antarctica with sculptures that tell a horrifying story of how the Old Ones created Earth’s lifeforms: 'under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes...'. To explain the Von Daniken link, Lovecraft's work had inspired the editors of Planète to write a book, Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) and Von Daniken is known to have exploited this book as his major source. From Egyptology to human cloning, Cthulhu still stalks the vistas of the human mind though he has vanished from direct sight and cloaked himself in the guise of science, what began as fiction has become in the minds of many incontrovertible fact with consequences far beyond the make-believe of Lovecraft's fantastic fiction.

Cthulhu and Scientology;

In a more modern context, Cthulhic influence may also be apparent in
L. Ron.Hubbard's Scientology religion, founded in 1952 on the premise that Aliens entered a cosmic battle a million years ago and the losers fell to earth where they genetically modified Homo erectus to carry on their genes. Whilst there is no direct evidence that Hubbard read Lovecraft, since both men wrote sci-fi for pulp magazines in the 1930s, it is unlikely that Hubbard was unfamiliar with his rivals work.(Source Jason ColaVito.)
These authors and many more following the Cthulhic trail have produced many unforeseen consequences affecting life today...

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Cthulhu and Moral Dualism;

Dualism is any theory that recognizes only two mutually irreducible principles, often considered to be mind (conscious experience) and matter (occupying space and being in motion). Ethical or Ethico-religious dualism asserts that there are two mutually hostile forces or beings, one being the source of all Good, the other the source of all Evil and that the universe is just a battleground for these opposing beings. This orientation can easily be seen throughout history and more recently in a number of mono-cultures which employ various forces to destroy or perhaps merely enslave and exploit their cultural or religious opponents. August Derleth's book 'The Return Of Hastur'(1939) which referenced Lovecraft's Cthulhic mythos, echoed this view by proposing two groups of opposed cosmic entities: The Old Ones, Elder Gods of cosmic Good, and those of cosmic Evil. Dereleth's interpretations have however been criticised for attempting to reshape Lovecraft's amoral continuity into a stereotypical conflict between the forces of objective Good and Evil.


To move beyond such moral dualisms is important for a greater appreciation of the Cthulhic mythos and Lovecraft's literary creation affords us an opportunity to apply this unfettered view to the wider world. That 'there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them'. This perspective could inform our lives, freeing both individuals and societies from a prosaic materialist spiritualism, 'as this less material life is our truer life, and that our presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary phenomenon'. Whilst as children of the Earth we may always be afraid of the unknown and unknowable, to explore the dream-narratives as Bruno Bettleheim suggests in his Uses Of Enchantment, to reconcile myth and dark fairy-tales of witches, abandonment and even to look beyond death, may afford those so moonstruck a glimpse of of unthinkable galaxies & unplumbed dimensions. In such a view, Lovecraft's Eldritchian ambivalence could serve to turn us away from preoccupation with man's relations to man, to gaze instead united in awe upon the vast inexorable mysteries that lay beyond.....

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Conclusion;

Connor Macleod embodies the balance of good, although he is ultimately unknowable as he will become a part of the recombined Entity with Ultimate Power over the Earth and all its peoples,
like a Monotheistic God.
Cthulhu does not conform to any anthropomorphic outlook but represents the indescribable ambivalence of unknowable universal forces, which as Lovecraft was deeply suspicious of modern technology and the poorly-understood powers it vested in mankind, possibly presents a caution for scientific exploration that charges ahead where angels may fear to tread, currently for example into the genetic or sub atomic realms. However as Quantum theories on the nature of existence claim that our act of observation influences the outcome of any given situation, by extrapolation it is easy to understand that if we are entrenched in specific perspectives, we may falsely assess any situation to conform with our own views and thereby be closed to the infinite alternatives that could have existed otherwise. Particularly relevant here is that the tenebrous Cthulhu hails from an effulgent pantheon of Old Other Gods and as such for me represents their pluralist Polytheist Pantheism.

In this context, my film catharticaly presents through the symbolic sacrifice of Connor (the good) and the unexpected victory of Cthulhu (the malevolent), the existential Gift of Uncertainty (rather than a possibly 'incorrect' and potentially limiting certainty) and an opportunity to look beyond the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth but ignores the vast Universal background, from the comfort of our own homes.
'To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are the springs of delight and beauty'.

And we may hope that the real Cthulhu whoever he may be, might sleep awhile longer....

Ia Ia Cthulhu Fhtagn!

H.P.Lovecraft 1890–1937

Merry Cthulhumas to All,

And to All a Tentacly Good Night!