Official Cult of Cthulhu

But as functional as Cthulianism is, it has had a long, and thorny road to get to where it is today. I could start at the beginning, with all the speculations that Lovecraft was perhaps one of a few authors in the early part of the 1900s that seemed to have been inspired or contacted by something outside of themselves. Or I could talk about all the side personalities that would later have an influence over the sprawling literature. However, I think it would be better if not simpler to stick to the facts. And the fact is that very little of that matters.

 

It should be made very clear from the start, that any book you read on the subject of Cthulianism as a religion, is based squarely upon the initial concepts and foundations established by Anton Szandor LaVey. Stop there. Hold the press. 

Hey buddy stop waving that cheese doodle like a sword or we are going to have words. Yes I said it was created by none other by Anton LaVey, the same guy that founded the Church of Satan. No he did not write any full or complete outline of the religion, instead he incorporated it into his own version of Satanism. Which is why it works so well with LaVey’s teachings.

 

Anton LaVey spent a number of years formulating his original organization called “The Magic Circle.” For anyone familiar with this original proto Satanic Organization, They will remember that it used a Trapezoid with a demonic bat as its sigil. This would be hiding its true sigil though of what would eventually become the sigil of the Order of the Trapezoid. The eventual evolution of LaVey’s Magic Circle. But we must understand LaVey’s mindset and his favored reading literature.

 

LaVey grew up voraciously consuming the seedy pulp fiction magazines that polluted news paper stands in the 1930s and 40s. Several authors became at that time cult favorites of the young man and would influence him into his adult hood. Tales of Robert E. Howards’ Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror became mixed with Lovecraft’s stories of strange and cosmic things. these along with taboo subjects like witchcraft and occultism, inspired young Anton to explore his world with a twisted sense of humor and a healthy taste for adventure.

 

LaVey was noted for being a huge fan of “The Haunter in the Dark,” and had one point became fixated upon the concept of the Church of Starry Wisdom, and their Shining Trapezohedron, so much so that he had irritated his wife into fits about the subject. This would become the inspiration for his initial Magic Circle, and later for the Order of the Trapezoid. But more than that these concepts and notions would shape several elements in Satanism, such as LaVey’s Law of the Trapezoid, and the inclusion of a few rituals in his second book, The Satanic Rituals.

 

It would be these seldom used and explored rituals that would catch the eyes of many a readers, and would later inspire two other organizations.

 

The first organization inspired by one of these Lovecraftian rituals, would be the hugely controversial, and inevitable quasi terrorist group, Order of the Nine Angles, or ONA/o9a, for short, in the mid-1980s.

 

The second wouldn’t come until the mid-2000s, by a mysterious Satanist known only as Venger Satanis. And it was with Venger, that Cthulianism was first born onto a fully formulated and realized concept, and it was all initially based on LaVey’s original theories.

 

Now one thing that should be noted as a side note to Venger’s creation of Cthulianism, was the secretive experiments going on inside the Temple of Set, another Laveyan based religious organization. A recent refugee from the Church of Satan, now fully under the tyrannical control of Peter H. Gilmore, was Magister Diabolus Rex Church. Who had famously resigned from the CoS after his participation in the 6-6-06 High Mass with a letter, citing that he actually did believe in a very real Satan.

 

Diabolus Rex, began employing his own experimentations with Lovecraftian theories, along with the notions of Vril. These experimentations apparently held significant effect, as the Temple of Set found them valuable enough to include them into the Ruby Tablet of Set. An artifact kept secret until very recently. Naturally STS is one of the few organizations that actually has a physical copy of this tome on file outside of the ToS.

 

It is here that we must finally address the next chapter in the short and turbulent growth of this religion. For this we must return to Venger. In the early days of his Cult, I was a member. But as time went on, like so often is the wont of many Left Hand Path Practitioners, I moved away from his, and other paths that didn’t fit my mold. I am a Satanist. More specifically I am a pure Classical Laveyan. Which does incorporate many elements from various traditions, but is more of unique eclectic path.

 

One thing to know is for most, occultism is transitory. Especially that of the Left Hand Path. Like many others, Venger too left occultism to pursue other ventures. This left a power vacuum in his Cult and it wasn’t long before someone began seeking to fill the void. That person, was Wyntre Whateley.

 

Wyntre seemed to emerge from the either out of no where for people like myself, who had moved on with our studies outside the Cult. He came fully formed and ready, with an amazing text known now as The Bible of Cthulhu. It was a ground breaking and seminal work. Which outlined the religion of Cthulianism beautifully. It was also a complete rip-off and scam built upon the foundations of Venger.

 

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against improving or building upon other people’s work and efforts. Simply put that is exactly what I did when I wrote my own books. But unlike Wyntre, I cited my sources and did not attempt to take credit for other peoples work or creations. Wyntre Whateley did exactly that, and it would eventually come to bite him square in the ass.

 

I recall being blindly wonder bound by Wyntre. I did a quick review of his then young Cult of Cthulhu, and was rewarded with a gift of a free copy of the Bible of Cthulhu. I did a review of it in several parts on my YouTube Channel and was welcomed into the group for my glowing words. So enamored with the cult was I that I eventually bought a special limited edition Satanic Red Cover edition.

 

All was good for the cult for a few short years, that saw massive growth for the cult. But as has been proven time and again, the Old Ones are fickle beings, and all good things must eventually come to an end.

 

Like the famous 1975 schism between LaVey and Aquino, Wyntre suddenly found himself at odds with his own clergy due to his greed and personal. An admirable quality at times in a Satanist, but one that should be kept in check with a level head instead of an ego. It was this shake up that saw STS return to the fold of Cthulianism to try to lend support to the now fleeing Cultists, and help smooth over the formulation of a new temple.

 

It was here that the beginnings of The Viridian Order began to take shape, when my old friend and colleague Thaumaturge began reaching out to me for advice on matters. Sadly it wasn’t long before another dust up in the newly founded Temple of the Old Ones saw him finally choose to depart that project and come to the fold of the STS. With him he brought the document you now hold in your hands.

 

The Temple Nyth had begun work on the document you now hold as a group project, but as my friend would eventually tell me, there soon showed the problem of too many roosters in the hen house, and feathers began getting more than ruffled, the would have started to fly. The temple though still standing had rapidly proven to be a failure and a new avenue had to be taken. Which is where I and the STS fully come into this story.

 

It is always necessary that when something needs to grow anew, it will need guidance and support. A singular neutral ruling figure that can mitigate the difficulties that come with new growth. But at the same time there can’t be too many constraints. This was the problematic grounds found in previous attempts to bring this strange a new religion to complete stable fruition. Either the leader was an egomaniac who refused to take the advice of his council, or it was the suffocating nature or a council of overly independent ruling bodies with no singular direction. Honestly this sounds like an erotic fantasy dream of the idiot god Azathoth.

 

Thus, it was that fully fed up with all the BS Thaumaturge came to me and asked to return to the original fold of his faiths origins, Laveyan Satanism. And so here we are now.

 

The Viridian Path is one with a very turbulent and chaotic history. But it is probably one of the most potent forms of modern sorcery, I have ever come across in all my years. Why is that I wonder? I will tell you in one word.

 

THULE.

 

The word is probably one of the most mysterious and important words in human history. It is a term that strikes blind fear into the uneducated, and wonderment into those with knowledge of the past.

 

It is also a word that goes back to the writings of pulp authors like Howard Phillip Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. It is a word that goes back to a place and time before modern recorded history. To a world where giants actually walked the earth. A forgotten time as Robert E. Howard would describe it.

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"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars.”

Conan the Barbarian, The Pheonix and the Sword.

 

It is a strange thing that many of the famous pulp authors of the 1920s, all suffered strange visions and dreams around the same time, of an age or era and a place or places removed from human memory. Lovecraft’s stories were writing mostly from his own nightmares. He actually described his dreams in many of his writings, and even noted the curious nature of the fact that multiple people of a sensitive mind experienced similar disturbances at the same time in his famous novella, The Call of Cthulhu.

               

Robert E. Howard was famously visited by the spirit of a mighty warrior wielding a broad axe named Conan. This spirit tormented his nights supposedly and forced him to write out stories of his life of adventures in a forgotten age of humanities past. He was said to bar the door to his home and fortify it every night and sit waiting quietly until the Cimmerian showed himself to tell another story of the Hyborian Age

               

There was others too that wrote of strange occurrences right around the same time in the 1920s, that compelled them to create works of what we now call fiction. But what if they were not works of fiction?

               

The story of Conan visiting Robert E. Howard, is now largely discredited. Yet recent archeological studies have begun showing that perhaps there really was a forgotten age to human history. Sunken ruins in our oceans, underground cities, ruins that track specific stars over a long period of centuries. Repeating symbols and stories figures across the globe that makes no sense independently, yet seem to be connected to a much larger global history.

               

This was the topic of a recent Netflix docuseries, called Ancient Apocalypse. But what is more is the recent abounding new stories and evidences of the existence of real giants in the world. The finding of artifacts whose complexity in craftsmanship is not seen until a vastly later period of human history, yet is proven to be from a time predating the earliest known records of human civilization.

               

So was the dreams of Kadath just that? Or did Lovecraft actually receive messages from a very real Cthulhu? Recent evidence seems to point to the latter as being more and more possible. I don’t have those answers, but perhaps it is now time for you to discover them.