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H. P. Lovecraft invented the mythical cosmic creature Cthulhu. In his short tale “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, he first introduced it. This entity, which is considered a Great Old One in the Lovecraftian pantheon of cosmic creatures, has subsequently appeared in a slew of pop culture allusions. It is depicted by Lovecraft as a colossal being worshipped by cultists, resembling a green octopus, a dragon, and a caricature of human form. Its name was given to the Cthulhu Mythos, a Lovecraft-inspired reality where it coexists alongside other beings.

The term Cthulhu was invented by Lovecraft in 1928, and it was most likely selected to echo the word chthonic (Ancient Greek “of the earth”), as Lovecraft himself proposed at the end of his 1923 story “The Rats in the Walls.” The chthonic, or earth-dwelling, spirit appears in a variety of ancient and medieval myths, frequently protecting mines and valuable underground riches, most notably in the Germanic dwarfs and the Greek Chalybes, Telchines, or Dactyls.

Cthulhu was pronounced Khlûl′-hloo, as Lovecraft spelled it, and he added, “The first word is gutturally and heavily uttered. The sound of the ‘u’ is similar to that of ‘full,’ and the first syllable is similar to that of ‘klul,’ therefore the ‘h’ reflects the guttural thickness ” (see discussion linked below). S. T. Joshi, on the other hand, points out that Lovecraft used different pronunciations at different times. This, according to Lovecraft, is the closest the human vocal apparatus can go to recreating the syllables of an extraterrestrial language. Tulu, Katulu, and Kutulu are some of the different ways Cthulhu has been spelt. The epithets Great, Dead, or Dread are frequently used before the name.

Even though Lovecraft said it differently, Chaosium, the producers of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, inspired current pronunciation with the remark “we say it kuh-THOOL-hu.” Others pronounce the word Katulu or Kutulu as /ktulu/.

“A creature of roughly anthropoid shape, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking torso, enormous claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind,” writes H. P. Lovecraft in “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Cthulhu is supposed to have the appearance of a green octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, standing hundreds of meters tall with webbed, human-like limbs and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back. Its head resembles the complete body of a massive octopus, with an unknown number of tentacles around its alleged mouth.

Cthulhu was originally mentioned in 1928 in the short novel “The Call of Cthulhu,” which introduced the figure as a terrible creature sleeping within R’lyeh, an undersea metropolis in the South Pacific. Many human cults (including some in New Zealand, Greenland, Louisiana, and the Chinese mountains) and other Lovecraftian creatures worship the imprisoned Cthulhu, who is also the object of devotion for many human cults (including those in New Zealand, Greenland, Louisiana, and the Chinese mountains) (called Deep Ones and Mi-Go). Cthulhu, while temporarily bound, will ultimately return, according to the short narrative. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

Lovecraft devised a complex pedigree for Cthulhu (included in Selected Letters as “Letter 617”) and made the creature a prominent figure in his works. Cthulhu is mentioned in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930) suggests that one of his characters is aware of the creature’s origins (“I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth.”) Before the advent of man, the “star-spawn of Cthulhu” fought another species known as the Elder Things, according to the 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness.

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