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In "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), H. P. Lovecraft described a global cult that worshiped the octopus-headed extra-terrestrial god Cthulhu, his minions, and the megalithic undersea city in the Pacific where they rested dead but dreaming until the day of Cthulhu's glorious resurrection. While Lovecraft's undersea monster drew on a number of mythic sources, surprisingly and unbeknownst to Lovecraft, there was a real religion in the Pacific that reproduced with uncanny accuracy the major details of the Cthulhu myth as given in the story. In Samoa the war god took the form of an octopus, lived in a great stone palace called the House of the Octopus, and was periodically reborn in a glorious resurrection. His followers prayed to him for blinding red rage. This book collects five essays on the octopus god of the Pacific and his cult, including the startling details of the real-life Cthulhu cult of the Pacific.… (more)
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Of particular note is the Samoan temple ruin referenced in the title of the volume. The "House of the Octopus" (O le Fale o le Fe'e) was evidently distinctive for its stone vertical supports, a design otherwise absent in the island environment where plenty of trees were to hand for building pillars. Although the cuttlefish god continued to be reverenced, this site was already in long disuse by the 19th century, and the writers represented here had the opportunity of discovering it as a "lost" site (with the aid of knowledgeable locals).
Colavito has provided a rather minimal editorial service here, pulling the five source essays together into a single, brief volume that he has issued through lulu.com. His foreword provides little more than a reassurance that the materials are in factual earnest. He seems sure that Lovecraft didn't know about the Samoan cuttlefish cult, but I have to wonder. See, for example, the reference to the Australian Buddai in "The Shadow Out of Time" for evidence of HPL's study in this sort of material.
At some point, optical character recognition (OCR) was used to gather these texts, and they have suffered for it. Insufficient care was taken to eliminate artifacts like "rougli" for "rough," and "cither" for "either" (both on p. 5, with many more to come). The cover design is attractive and appropriate, featuring a detail from an Enoch Arden engraving of 1869, and the book is a slim, convenient digest for the use of latter-day Miskatonic University students.