The Fall of Cthulhu

H. P. Lovecraft never stuck to any serious continuity with his Mythos. It has always been simply accepted that the return of Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods was an inevitability. So a while back I was rereading Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time” and came across the following passage…. “I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.” Now this can easily be interpreted as stating that Cthulhu and the Others do not return during Humanity’s time on Earth! Why don’t they return? What happens that stops them?

Country of Publication

United Kingdom