Cthulhu's Reign

THE NEW PAULINE CORPUS Matt Cardin

Seated at a small wooden desk, a humble piece of cypress wood furniture elevated to veritably mythic status by a heaping of fabulously ornate decorative flourishes, he spreads out the papers on the smooth surface before him. A rushing murmur, like the sound of ten thousand voices melding into an oceanic hush, flows through the doorway that stands open and waiting on the far side of the equally ornate room.

The papers are crammed to capacity with a chaotic jumble of handwritten markings. Rows of text run from left to right and then, often, meet the edge of the page and instead of breaking to the next line simply continue on, rebounding from the barrier in curling coils and tracing the paper’s edge in circles that effectively form a written frame around the rest. Some lines appear in ink, others in pencil. Some words are minuscule to the point of near-indecipherability. Others shout hugely in hysterical looping letters.

None make sense. Not on their own, at least. Fragments. That is what he has in his possession. Pieces of a puzzle. Scraps of a portrait. Shards of a mirror, each reflecting and refracting the image of all the others to create a dazzling maze of meanings whose infinity encompasses enormous blank spaces.

The more I dwell on it, Francis, the more I am convinced that the single most fruitful result of the frightful transition which has overtaken us is the resurrection of our collective passion for story, for the specifically narrative understanding of our lives on this planet. I now view the trajectory of my former theological writings toward an almost exclusive emphasis on ontological matters as an egregious error. More than any other religious tradition in human history, our own Christian faith, along with its Jewish forebear, has always been centrally rooted in a cosmic- narrative understanding of human life and the cosmos itself. A reverence for story — as we have now been forcibly reminded — is not symptomatic of a regressive intellectual and theological naiveté but of an unblinking realism. It may simply be the case that the story in which we find ourselves existentially involved as living characters lacks any obvious correspondences with the charming drama we were told from childhood about the Eden- to-Fall-to-New Eden arc of our race. Or perhaps these elements are indeed discernable in our new tale, but in a jumbled order or — more likely — as inversions of themselves. I hope to say more about this in a future letter.

In any event, happily for me, since it means that I do not have to jettison the entirety of my former theological corpus, is the fact that theology-as-story does not preclude ontology but incorporates it. In fact, what has now been revealed to us in our dreadful recent disruptions is the express unity of these two categories of thought. That is, we are living the story of a war between levels of reality. Our metanarrative is the tale of how space-time, the cosmos, the created order, was usurped by a reality that is more fundamental, primary, and ancient.

This story, our story, is a tale of the deeply inner and primordial turning with hostility upon the objectively outer and evolved, and reshaping it according to a set of principles that are incomprehensible and, as we can see all around us in the fact of our wrecked cities with their new and growing populations of squamous, octopodan, and quasi-batrachian inhabitants, thoroughly revolting to the latter.

Under red-glowing smoke-filled skies I thread my way through a boulder field of shattered buildings. Fires blaze and smolder in places where no fuel ought to burn. Twisted chunks of steel and concrete burn like dry-rotten wood. Sparkling shards of shattered windows and doors and street lamps catch the flickering orange glow and ignite from the pressure of the images on their glassy surfaces. A sea of flaming rubble, fifty miles wide. This is what remains of my city and of all the others like it dot-ting the surface of the round earth like piles of autumn leaves raked together for burning.

Here is the heart of the matter, Francis, in a rush of analogies intended to distill the essence of the insights I lost when I shredded my manuscript on that terrible day.

ITS OMNIPRESENCE: my theological namesake quoted approvingly to his Greek audience a common bit of philosophical wisdom from their own cultural milieu when he spoke of God the Father as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Does not such a formulation recall Yog-Sothoth, who walks with the other Old Ones between the dimensions, and in whom past, present, and future are one? Does it not recall Azathoth, the primal chaos that resides not only at the center of infinity but at the center of each atom, each particle, perhaps serving as the unaccountable subatomic bond that has categorically escaped scientific explanation? But here I overstep the limits of my formal authority, so effectively does this demonic pantheon inspire a plethora of transgressive and exhilarating speculations.

ITS ANNIHILATING HOLINESS: in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the desert, under the merciless sun, the Israelites witness repeated outbreaks of Yahweh, Who “is a consuming fire,” an untamable force, a burning pestilence, a plague of serpents. And so is He revealed not just as the Holy Other but as Wholly Other, possessed of a cosmically singular sui generis nature that cannot and will not abide contradiction. In the words of Luther himself, if you sin “then He will devour thee up, for God is a fire that consumeth, devoureth, rageth; verily He is your undoing, as fire consumeth a house and maketh it dust and ashes.” As Otto wrote with such frightening clarity of apprehension, there is something baffling in the way His wrath is kindled and manifested, for it is “like a hidden force of nature, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near. It is incalculable and arbitrary.” To see His luminance shining from the face of Moses is a horror. To see His face is to die.

This incomprehensible, inconceivable, incalculable, arbitrary horror serves as the font, finish, and focal point of our entire tradition. I trust my attempts at commentary would only weaken the blow of the brute fact itself.

“My son.” The voice speaks behind him, and he looks sideways in acknowledgment of its presence without actually turning to face it. “Have you read them again?” The voice is thin as a reed, like a sick child, and also thick and murky, like a chorus chanting together in imperfect unison. But even now, with the world having passed beyond its own farthest extremity, the voice exudes a supernal calmness and control that still, astonishingly, serve to comfort and soothe.

“Some of them, yes,” he replies. “But something is eluding me. They seem to contain two different strands or stories. One of them is like a dream narrative that follows an alternative plot and — perhaps — posits a world in which the efforts of the other narrative have failed or were never made. But I’m not at all certain of any of this. I need to read the pages once more.”

“Then read,” the voice says. “But remember that we are waited upon.” As if in confirmation, the ocean roar of voices swells momentarily to a peak, washing up from below the balcony outside and telling of a tensely waiting throng before settling back into an undulating trough.

He nods and returns to the pages.

ITS TRANSCENDENCE. In the Book of Isaiah we encounter a Yahweh who protects the cosmic order from destructive incursions by the ancient chaos serpents but also launches His own cosmos-shaking assaults against that order, all leading up to a concluding note of horror in the book’s worm-infested final verse that has resounded down through the ages and brought no end of trouble for biblical exegetes, since its literary and theological effect is to stamp the book with the impossible message that Yahweh is the ultimate chaos monster who only saves His creation from the others so that He can destroy it Himself. (Surely you remember this subversive reading of the Isaian text from my last book, which sold relatively well but drew such scathing condemnation from my fellow theologians.)

Is it possible, can we conclude, that these and a thousand other aspects of our tradition were always both more and less than they seemed — that they were, in a word, other than they seemed; that instead of pointing directly toward spiritual and metaphysical truths, the great concepts, words, and icons of our tradition were in fact mere signals, hints, clues, that gestured awkwardly toward a reality whose true character was and is far different from and perhaps even opposite to the surface meanings?

Consider: humanity’s dual nature — conscious and unconscious, deliberate and autonomic, free and determined, physical and spiritual, cerebral and reptilian — has always singled us out as the earth’s only true amphibians. We have always acted from two centers and stood with feet planted in two separate worlds. Now we have seen this duality ripped apart or brought to fruition — how to regard it is unclear — as those elements of reality represented by our reptilian brainbase, and by the darkest archetypes of our collective unconscious, and by the corresponding monstrous elements in our mythological traditions, have fulfilled a nexus of ancient race-level fears.

Does this perhaps indicate something of our role in what is transpiring? Do we perhaps serve a necessary function as bridges between the realms, simply by the fact of our fundamental duality?

I turn my eyes skyward and see the gargoylish figures still commanding the open air between the coiling columns of smoke. Rubbery black demonoid shapes with smooth blank faces and leathery wings swoop and careen like flakes of ash on a hot wind.

A moment later I stumble on a fragment of granite, and the involuntary ducking of my head proves perfectly timed for avoiding a surely fatal encounter with a squid-like shape twenty feet long that bloats and shimmers through the air in a rhythmic pulsating pattern like a sea creature propelling itself through deep water. I stare at its underside, sick with terror, as it slides past and over me, but then note with relief that the fat torpedo-shaped body is turned so that its great blank eye looks laterally instead of downward. Had the thing been looking down, it would have done what these sentinels always do when they detect their prey: it would have paused directly over me and regarded me through that alien eye with an equally alien intelligence. Then it would have bunched itself into a knotted mass of claw-tipped tentacles ringed around a dilating sphincter-mouth set with concentric rows of needled teeth, and dropped upon me with inconceivable speed and ferocity. I have already seen those serpentine tentacles enmesh many a man in their deadly loops. I have heard the human flesh sizzle and scorch on contact with that corrosive extra-dimensional matter. I have watched shrieking people disappear into that churning meat grinder of a mouth.

As incongruous as it may sound, I now express thanks, not just passive resignation but a positive gratitude, for the waking nightmare that has overtaken us. For those things that otherwise seem so horrific in their surface appearances can actually serve to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers and lead us to a more vital and viable faith, a faith that is unshakeable, unassailable, impervious to doubt: a true theological exemplar of Luther’s Ein Feste Burg, although this mighty fortress, if rendered in literal brick and stone, would embody a warped architectural schema of a pointedly nonhuman and non-rational nature.

It would be so easy to rearrange some of these fragments, to clarify their individual and collective meanings by connecting some of their philosophical edges where they obviously cohere. But despite his pleading for permission to do so, the rule is firm: the pages and their contents must remain in their received order, and must be met and dealt with in that order and no other. Any interpretation must emerge from and pointedly account for that canonically unalterable jumble in its precise given form. A new Revelation, so many members of the hierarchy have said to him and to each other on so many different occasions since the papers first came into their possession at a time when the global nightmare was just beginning to invade from the shadows. A new scripture. A third testament. They have said such things in tones of awe, and exultation, and confusion, and horror, and, increasingly, with a dogmatic air of fanatical certitude.

We were both weaned, Francis, you in your Roman tradition and I in my Protestant one, on the winsome belief that “All things work together for good for those who love the LORD, those who are called according to his purpose.” I am writing to you now simply to say this: our global eruption of nightmares, which would otherwise seem to disprove this canonical statement from my theological namesake, actually serves to confirm it — not directly but by demolishing the presumptuous prison of axioms in which it lay incarcerated for two millennia. “All things work together for good for those who love the LORD” — ah, but what good? And which LORD? “Those who are called according to his purpose” — ah, butwhat call, and which purpose?

The quotations and their implied questions point to our pressing need. What confronts us as an awful necessity, if we and our faith intend to survive, is a reconciliation of what we have always believed with what now presents itself as a contrary but incontrovertible truth. The classic theological antitheses — Jerusalem and Athens, the City of God and the City of Man, Christ and Belial — no longer apply. The only one that still retains any potency is that which refers to the enmity between the “seed of the woman” and the “seed of the serpent.” But it requires a substantive modification.

Our antithesis, our dilemma in the form of a sacred riddle, is simply this: what has Christ to do with Cthulhu?

It comes with a corollary: what has Jerusalem to do with R’lyeh?

In these letters I intend to present you with the rudiments of a viable theological recalibration that will explore the avenues opened up by these shocking juxtapositions, and that, in doing so, will safeguard the possibility of our salvation, albeit in a much modified and, as I fear we shall be unable to keep from feeling it, far less agreeable form.

As I navigate the burning wasteland, another environment flickers intermittently into view around me: a crazy-tilted maze of stone columns and temples vying with the reality of the blasted city and attempting to supplant it all at once in a cinematic superimposition. The ocean, hundreds of miles from here, laps momentarily at my feet, while a monolithic mass of ancient stone towers glimmers darkly offshore. I blink, shake my head and refuse to accept the vision. After a furtive hesitation, the inland wasteland regains its foothold.

ITS AWFULNESS. Especially in Mark’s gospel, but also throughout the New Testament and also the Hebrew scriptures, manifestations of divine reality are portrayed consistently as occasions for sheer terror. Jesus calms the storm; his disciples are filled not with sweet sentiments of divine love and comfort but with terror and awe. The women find his tomb empty; they do not exit the garden singing hosannas but stumble away in soul-blasted fright, unable to speak. When angels appear in bursts of light and song, shepherds and Roman soldiers alike faint, tremble, avert their eyes, raise their hands to ward off the sight of those awful messengers of a reality from beyond this world — a reality that is inherently awful because it is from beyond this world.

He pulls his attention out of the pages like a swimmer hauling himself naked and shivering out of icy black waters. He makes to inhale deeply, to suck in cleansing air, but finds that his breath remains frozen at mid-breast, just as it has been for months now, ever since reality first went mad with the collapsing of the distinction between divine and demonic, leaving him internally paralyzed, gripped as if by a fist in his diaphragm while grotesque supernatural impossibilities erupt all around.

The voice behind him remains silent, but its presence is palpable and its command unmistakable. With fixed stare and only slightly trembling hand, he resigns himself again to the task and begins reading from the first page, scanning not only for the meanings contained in the words themselves but for evidence of the interstitial semiotic glue that binds the whole insane edifice together. As always, his attention is soon swallowed whole by the dark and deranged philosophical cathedral it has entered.

Perhaps a recounting of how our new Great Awakening (a term whose traditional, historical use seems gallingly blinkered now) first made itself known to me will serve to purify and clarify our mutual apprehension of these matters.

As you know, I was hard at work on my third book of theology, a substantial and career- defining exercise in theological trailblazing to be titled The Fear of God, in which I took on the same theme treated by John Bunyan in his classic treatise with the same title, and agreed with him that “by this word fear we are to understand even God himself, who is the object of our fear.” I took for my orienting point Luther’s subversive declaration — which exerted a veritably talismanic power over me — that God “is more terrible and frightful than the Devil. For therefrom no man can refrain: if he thinketh on God aright, his heart and his body is struck with terror. Yea, as soon as he heareth God named, he is filled with trepidation and fear.”

One day — I distinctly remember the sun was shining sweetly through my living room window while a few birds twittered in the yard, so it must have been during the spring or summer, although my sense of time has lately become as confused and chaotic as the natural elements, which, as you know, have now taken on a schizophrenic kind of existence — one day I sat poring over a stack of pages that I had recently written, and was struck without warning by a thoroughly hideous vision. As I looked at my pages, I saw peering through the typewritten words, as if from behind the lines of text, a face more awful than any I had ever conceived. I need not describe it to you: the bloated octopoid visage with its obscenity of a fanged and tentacled maw, and with saurian and humanoid characteristics all mixed together in a surreal jumble. It conjured involuntary thoughts of the great Dragon of John’s Apocalypse, and of the watery waste of Genesis, and of the waters beyond the sky and below the earth, and of the chaos serpent Leviathan. But there was far more than that. Staring into the red-black effulgence of its awful eyes, I saw the skin of those biblical images peeled back to reveal great Mother Tiamat, the ancient archetype of all dragons and serpents and extra-cosmic chaos, wearing the more familiar imagery like a cheap rubber mask.

It was more than just a visual image, it was a veritable convulsion in my total being, and its ripples spread through the very air of the room. You well remember your own experience as you knelt praying before a statue of St. Jude and raised your eyes to his benevolent face, only to be greeted by the same sight I am describing. So you know, too, the violent illness that overtook me. I was gripped by a kind of mania even as my stomach and bowels twisted into searing knots, and I began turning frantically from page to page in an effort to escape the vision, but still the words of my magnum opus appeared as the bars of a cage holding back that impossible face, that locus of all nightmares, that source of all ancient, evil imaginings. I dimly remember ripping the book to shreds and even — I cannot remember why — eating portions of it, and then vomiting them back up; the half-digested paper had been transformed into tiny scrolls which I then ate again, and they tasted like honey, but then they turned so bitter in my mouth that I vomited yet again.

These events are all peculiar to me, but the rest I think you know. For my personal story is a microcosm of that greater story in which we are all now trapped. Each of us has his own story of how he personally experienced that terrible moment when our world was overturned by the eruption from beyond, and all of them bear a generic character that marks them as belonging to this new proclamation, this New Testament, which we are not reading but living.

“And did you truly experience such a vision with a statue of Saint Jude?” the voice asks, still located behind him. Its tone is overlaid with a scummy film, like the surface of a thick and slow-boiling stew, and he maintains his reverentially averted gaze. After pausing to regain his bearings in the relatively solid surroundings of the chamber, he softly shakes his head.

“I don’t think so. Or rather, I don’t remember. Reading the documents is like reading the transcript of a dream that I never knew I had experienced. Every line feels like a half-memory of something I had forgotten without ever knowing it at all.”

He considers the description of the demon-dragon, and imagines it transplanted onto the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. The apostle’s beard is a nest of writhing gray-green tentacles. Their tips caress the image of Christ hanging at the figure’s breast.

He asks, “And how did these papers come into the Church’s possession?” Maybe this time the answer will contain something new.

“By strange channels and unknown messengers,” the voice replies, as if chanting a litany, “the writings of the new apostle came to the Church to illuminate the shadows of these dark days.”

“But the timing is all wrong,” he says, unable to restrain himself. “The author must have written these things before the cataclysm began. Weren’t they delivered on the very day when the great face appeared in the sky and the cities erupted into madness?” The voice remains silent, of course, for these details have already been analyzed and discussed ad nauseam within the Roman episcopate. He considers for the hundredth time the ramifications of the fact that some unknown individual who shared the name of the last apostle had written of these things in the past tense, before they actually happened, and had addressed his dark visionary rantings directly to the Holy See in Rome. The Church’s frantically launched investigation had been hindered at every turn not only by the fantastic events unfolding around the globe but by false and disappearing leads that appeared positively supernatural in their abrupt and strategic occurrences. No publisher knew of a book offering a blasphemous reading of Isaiah. Only the vaguest of hints spoke of a renegade theologian writing a self-described magnum opus. The papers had been sent via a route that looked impossibly circuitous when staked on a map. The trail dead-ended simultaneously at indistinct locations in North America, Central America, Eastern Asia — and Rome itself.

The more he ponders it, the more it sounds and feels like a narrative being altered and overlaid by multiple redactions, each intended to accomplish a greater opening to an emotion compounded of equal parts bafflement and spiritual revulsion. In the latest revision, the letters are addressed directly to him, and their author is rendered fictional, to await complete obliteration in a version yet to come.

“Why me?” he asks, even though he is growing increasingly terrified at the thought that the specific identity of the New Paul may be supremely unimportant in one sense and all-important in another.

The voice responds to his unspoken fear: “In the beginning was the Logos, which speaks not only in the lines of Holy Scripture but in the lines of the real itself. Our new apostle’s writings and their accompanying signs and wonders declare a great rewording in which the notions of ‘me’ and ‘thee’ may be forgotten.”

A pen, formerly unnoticed, rests beside the pages on the desk. His hand begins to itch. The voice intones, “The Word is a living thing. Like a farmer sowing seeds, one sows the Word but knows not how it grows. If all were written down, the world itself could not contain the books.”

The multitude gathered outside in the piazza emits a sigh of anticipation and agreement.

He watches with shock and fascination as his hand picks up the pen and begins to add to the words of the final page, defiling its inviolable sanctity, writing in clean, crisp, orderly lines that cut across the jumbled chaos like the bars of a cage.

ITS IMMANENCE: Jerusalem and R’lyeh — might they always have been interlaced with each other? The physical Jerusalem and also the mythic vision of its bejeweled celestial fulfillment — both revealed as mere shades, devolutions, abstractions of the primary reality of those crazy-slanted, green-dripping towers and slabs emerging like the archetype of a chthonic city from the subterranean waters of the collective psyche, like bony black fingers rising up from Mother Ocean.

Christ and Cthulhu — might they both be hierophanies of the same awful transcendent reality? Christ as high priest in the order of Melchizidek, Cthulhu as high priest in the order of the Old Ones, both of them bridging the gap and healing the division between our free-fallen souls with their burden of autonomous, inward-turned selfhood and the greater, all-encompassing reality of God-by-whatever-name; both implanting their own deep selves within us, thus undercutting and overcoming our categorically contradictory attempts to heal the primordial rift through conscious effort. These psychic disturbances that have so terrified us of late, all of the collapsing distinctions between thought, imagination, and physical reality, so that a stray wish or undisciplined notion may cause finned, clawed, and tentacled atrocities to appear, or may even alter one’s own physical body in awful ways that some of us have been unable to undo afterward, as in a nightmare from which one cannot wake because one has awakened inside the nightmare itself — may these not be the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to send the paraclete to “guide us into all truth” and “convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment,” and of his promise that his followers would perform even greater miracles than he himself had performed, and of the apostle Paul’s teaching that the divine spirit living within us will show us directly those primal mysteries which “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived”? Surely these last words, quoted by Paul from the prophet Isaiah, aptly characterize the marvels and monstrosities we have recently witnessed.

Still writing, still horror-struck, he sees in his peripheral vision the Voice moving away from him in a swirl of smoky shapes. The new scriptural corpus is complete. The Church can now achieve alignment with that which truly is. What might be a wholesome human form dressed in liturgical vestments and wearing the papal mitre might also be a mutated manshape sprouting dragon’s wings and surmounted by a head like a cuttlefish, and this dual superimposition of high priest might be walking on the floorstones or gliding above them.

The crowd assembled in the piazza might be a wild-eyed multitude of ragged and terrified survivors or a stalk-eyed horde of flopping fish and toads.

The vast visage painted across the dome of the twilit sky might be a white-bearded transposition from the nearby chapel ceiling or the imprint of an extra-cosmic monstrosity now burned eternally onto the face of heaven.

The granite obelisk planted in the piazza’s center might be a skeletal black finger rising from Mother Ocean. The curved walls enclosing the crowd might be alien stone hewn into an architectural impossibility.

The incarnate voice emerges onto the balcony. The crowd roars, raising hands or fins or webbed claws and screaming in desperation or delight, singing a hymn of horror to the face in the sky.

The voice begins to speak, delivering its opening blessing: “Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!”

Inside the ornate room he continues to write, binding the pages with a meaning that can only be known, not spoken.

The answer, Francis, must surely be found in the implicit order that lies buried in all of this chaos. Embracing it is our salvation. God’s ways are not man’s. To Him a thousand days are as one, and one as a thousand. He is terrible to behold. Our religion, all the world’s religions, may once have kept Him out, all unknowing of their true role, but now they, we, have become His conduit, again ignorant of our purpose until it is upon us to fulfill.

Gaunt faceless gargoyles hover on black leathern wings above the assembled multitude, showering whitefeather plumage as they beam benevolence from gold-glowing countenances.

The Lord God sits on His throne above the throng, towering above the basilica in a redblack inferno. His crown burns black. His beard coils green.

In these letters I intend to present you with the rudiments of a viable theological recalibration that will explore the avenues opened up by these shocking juxtapositions, and that, in doing so, will safeguard the possibility of our salvation, albeit in a much modified and, as I fear we shall be unable to keep from feeling it, far less agreeable form.