Threshold Church of R'lyeh Risen

08/30/2026

When you're not and someone notices.

08/23/2026

Pick up SRJs autoethnographic book 'When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R'lyehian Spirituality' wherever fine weird books are sold. https://www.amazon.com/When-Stars-Are-Right-Spirituality/dp/0987992880/

[ from 'When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R'lyehian Spirituality' by SRJ -- link in image, click to purchase ]

On Cthulhu, Dreams, and Dreaming

This is the premier communication medium between the R’lyehian and the Lord of R’lyeh. In dreams, we navigate strange angles, taste forbidden and monstrous emotions, participate in irrational rituals and experience altered sexualities and modes of being. This is so even in what could (with a straight face or not) be called normal dreaming. No dream is normal! We become used to dreaming, yes, and over time we take it to be a natural thing. Most become so bored with the contents of their nightly visions that they soon forget or ignore the fact that dreaming happens at all.

But it does. It does happen, and in more forms than we can know. Just as there are zones in the ocean, from the neritic through the cold seeps to the benthic, so, too, are there zones of Dream: states of awareness, of dreaming consciousness, and in order to survive there, the exo-personalities, soul-armours, and meta-tanks of psychic atmosphere that allow the dreamer to sink deep and return intact. In sleep, the mind drops like a stone into pressured, ebon depths.

The rationalists (of whatever stripe) among us will say that dreams are the mere residue of waking cognitive function. That those dreams which can be remembered are the sometimes chaotic, sometimes randomly meaningful froth of a brain untethered to bodily sensation, fizzing by itself in the dark, like some giddy captive of the Mi-Go. These rationalists (bleeding to a man from the constant self-inflicted strokes of Occam’s Razor against their ravaged flesh!) would go on to claim that in those nighted depths of dream that permit no recall, there is no life. In this, they are only half-right.

For Cthulhu is there. Dead, but dreaming.

The R’lyehian knows this, because the R’lyehian enters her dreams each night with one goal: to dive, as deeply as possible, beyond the individualistic ephemera of surface dreams, beyond even the twilight realms associated with the diffused common material of the human species. Past and through this detritus she dives, she sinks, into crushing abyssal nothingness, and she does not stop until she feels the stones of R’lyeh manifest beneath her quaking feet.

For the R’lyehian, dreaming is communion. To dream there, on the twisting steps of Cthulhu’s tomb, is to be Cthulhu, to be Madness. For the R’lyehian, to wander the warp and weft of the streets of that Eternal City is the purest, terrifying bliss. To linger by the shoggoth middens, to ponder hieroglyphs and graffiti alike, to navigate impossible angles and be swallowed by them, to be spat out changed from what he was before being swallowed, to prostrate himself before Things That Cannot Be, is enlightenment for him. Each contact with R’lyeh and its inhabitant, whether remembered consciously or not, allows the dreamer to bring a scrap of R’lyeh back with them, into the waking world. There is no way to properly cognize or speak about what this surfacing can look like: it is individual to each R’lyehian, utterly private and rarely expressible, and may manifest in the world and in their own consciousness any number of ways.

For myself, the signature mode of this surfacing in my own life is the incomprehensible channeled textual artifacts that are produced under trance. Even this, though, is only the most visible condensation of the R’lyehian aesthetic in the world of deeds and ideas. I have left hastily manufactured fetishes on public transport and in hidden places. I have spoken words (some few known to me, most not at all) at various places and certain times, not knowing why, unaware even, until the moment of speaking, that the word was there on my tongue. Signs have been unconsciously drawn in the air with one hand while the other was busy with another, more mundane task; my attention called to the action by those present. I have bled into the sea and gibbered beneath the stars. In these ways, and uncountable others, is R’lyeh raised.

To open oneself to being a conduit for R’lyehian energy, to become a line of circuitry in Cthulhu’s matrix of Dreaming Madness, is to find oneself living, with eyes open, in the trans-rational logic and shuddering pleasure of Dream itself.

It is the responsibility, the glory, and the joy of each R’lyehian to dream in this fashion. To dream, to dive, to commune with Madness: this is a grasping of the celestial clockwork and wrenching it, cog by resistant cog, into a more favourable configuration. To dream, asleep and awake, is to make the stars right, within and without.

Raise R’lyeh, one stone at a time.

08/16/2026

Cthulhu Prayer breakfast homily -- Scott R Jones, spiritual director of the Threshold Church of R'lyeh Risen -- NecronomiCon Providence 2026, Sunday August 16

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

08/09/2026

Just completed recording the homily for the Prayer Breakfast at NecronomiCon Providence next Sunday. Hope all in attendance enjoy it. Will post it to the YouTube channel next Sunday as well. (No homily here today as a result; preparing and recording took a lot out of us.)

08/02/2026

[ part 5 of our homily series on the Cthulhusattva Vow, first published here in January of 2022 and here republished for the education and entertainment of new members ]

SUNDAY HOMILY
JANUARY 23, 2022
THE CTHULHUSATTVA VOW: Part 5

Good Sunday morning R’lyehians and seekers of the R’lyehian way, thanks for reading and sharing the homily for today. We’ll be examining the fourth and final verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow today and it is an interesting one, for in it we find the first mention of Cthulhu Itself and we get to talk about gods and what they are, before moving on to the Raising of R’lyeh in our hearts and in the world. So let’s dive right in. (For the introduction and previous verses, please see past homilies.)

Cthulhu waits there, dreaming
I vow to raise R’lyeh

As the founder of R’lyehian Spirituality, I get asked whether I “actually believe” in Cthulhu. To these questions I will often reply “Cthulhu is a fictional entity”. I have the coordinates to R’lyeh tattooed across the top of my chest; I do not believe that there is anything actually down there beneath the waves. I have attained the state of cthulhusattva, and yet the god I worship can not recognize or reward me for this attainment. So why worship at all? Why attempt to access the Black Gnosis? What is the point of raising your fhtagn to that of Cthulhu’s, when Cthulhu is a fictional entity?

One could counter all these questions with a simple statement, heartbreaking in its truth: we are all fictional entities. Consciousness of the world and consciousness of your own identity is little more than this: a kind of foam that arises on the surface of our reality by way of our own biology and linguistic activity. Our species has talked itself into being, pulling down ideas from some Platonic realm, mutating them in the process, and bringing them into the world warped and untrue, but IN THE WORLD NONETHELESS. When we are successful in this linguistic transubstantiation, we claim the results as great art, great fiction, great faiths. Gods are just some of the things we have pulled from the Unknown into the Known.

But what is a god? A collection of powers, traits, and personality quirks, in fact a being that is in many ways FAR LESS than what we are, by virtue of the limitations we place upon them. Does Cthulhu exist, waiting, dreaming? No. And yes. For Cthulhu (and indeed, all deities) are totemic place holders, stand-ins for concepts and modes of being that we can only just cognize in our limited scope and ability. Cthulhu is Madness. Cthulhu is Dream. Cthulhu is Patience and Sorcerous Consciousness. Cthulhu is Beyond our Understanding, which is what makes It interesting. Cthulhu is many things, literally UNTHINKABLE things, and it is in our effort to understand and incorporate those things into our own being that allows for the flow of Black Gnosis into our lives. Incorporate other gods and get other things, I suppose. Love, compassion, empathy and what not. In this way, gods DO exist and have an effect on humanity. For myself, I know and associate with Christians, pagans, Satanists, and sorcerers, and each one is clearly a changed person by way of their interaction with a god or gods. My atheist friends are equally changed by the vacant space for a deity in their lives and they are in no way lacking for this. At the end of the day all are choosing their values, the deities with which they feel an alignment.

So, to the Vow, and the final verse...does Cthulhu wait in R’lyeh, dreaming? When friends see my chest tattoo and ask, I often say I want to be buried at sea at these coordinates; do I expect my body to come to rest in Cthulhu’s throne room? Not at all. As mentioned earlier, there is nothing on the seafloor there other than rock and silt and the bones of dead whales.

Where, then, does Cthulhu wait, dreaming? Within me. R’lyeh is a city and also a mode of thinking and being in the world. The city is fluid, mercurial, and not built for man but the heart is big enough to contain it. Raising R’lyeh in yourself, shaping your personal fhtagn to mimic the FHTAGN of the Risen R’lyeh, this is the path of the cthulhusattva. One could dissolve entirely into the FHTAGN of R’lyeh, uniting with Madness itself (recall that when all is Madness, there is no madness) but the cthulhusattva chooses to stay behind and help others along towards that state. Out of compassion? No. Solidarity? Hardly. The cthulhusattva recites the Vow, enters the innumerable Gates to R’lyeh, smashes delusions of Order and Sanity, so that all beings may be freed into R’lyeh to find their fullest expression of that hallucinatory self, the foam of consciousness that feels like identity to us, the dreaming self that is at one and the same time the entity of Cthulhu. We raise R’lyeh in our hearts so that the world may be brought into closer communion with Cthulhu, or rather, with the principles of Madness and Dream that Cthulhu is representative of. In Its House at R’lyeh, Cthulhu waits, dead but dreaming, as we know, but we ALSO know that when the stars come right, It will rise and bring about a new, more interesting mode of existence for our species. And we are the ones to do it, friends and R’lyehians, we are the ones that turn the stars to the right position and it must be done FIRST in our hearts. Once completed there, the transformation of the world outside ourselves (through language, through intent, through action) will be easy, in comparison. In the fullness of Eternity, R’lyeh has ALREADY risen, is in fact already there, at those coordinates, waiting for our hearts to align with it, waiting for us to turn the stars and raise the city, the First City, the Dreaming City, brick by non-Euclidean brick, within ourselves.

Thanks for reading, congregation. We here at Stonefish House and Threshold HQ hope your week is fraught with ease and accomplishment and we invite you to join us here next Sunday for another homily; we’ll be discussing the nature of Meaning by way of Nyarlathotep. If you’ve a copy of ‘When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality’, we encourage you to read up on the Nyarlathotep chapter in preparation. As ever, we invite spirited and respectful debate in the comments and remind you all to keep on .

07/26/2026

[ part 4 of our homily series on the Cthulhusattva Vow, first published here in January of 2022 and here republished for the education and entertainment of new members ]

SUNDAY HOMILY
JANUARY 23, 2022
THE CTHULHUSATTVA VOW: Part 4

Good Sunday morning to you and yours, R’lyehians and the R’lyehian-curious and welcome to the Sunday Homily here at the Threshold Church of R’lyeh Risen. Everyone here at Stonefish House and Threshold HQ hope your week was productive and pleasurable. Today we’ll be examining the third verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow and discussing GATES. (For the introduction and previous verses, please see past homilies.)

Gates to R’lyeh are without number
I vow to enter them all

When we think of gates, some will envision a literal gate or gateway, while others (and particularly in this context) will consider an occult gateway or portal, an energetic threshold beyond which new rules of physics and psychists apply. Although this conception is fine on the face of it and certainly an enjoyable conceit when encountered in fiction (the more swirly and portal-like the better!), we know that when discussing the Gates to R’lyeh found in the Vow we are conceptualizing something more like a STATE CHANGE from the human spiritual mode of perception to the transhuman, R’lyehian mode.

Thus, entering a Gate to R’lyeh can indeed happen at any point in the R’lyehian’s life and days and these moments are indeed without number, embedded within Time and Process as we are; Gates an infinite regression into smaller and smaller packets of time. We potentially enter R’lyeh through Gates each and every tumblered second. And once entered, where does the R’lyehian find themselves? Still here, embedded in Time and Process as ever, and yet also inhabiting that Space that is Outwith Time always and already, that of R’lyeh, the First City, the Dreaming City, the Capitol City of Madness, and where all is Madness, there is no madness! Who of us has not thrilled to the pristine, migraine clarity of that fractal vision, the great heaving districts and sloughing suburbs of R’lyeh, the twisted avenues and broadways teeming with alien cognition, impossible thoughtforms toppling over each other in an effort to inhabit the mind, mutate the mentation?

That being said, there are places on the planet itself where entering R’lyeh may be easier than others: wild spaces of a particular sort of chaotic Nature, rooms made conducive through accoutrement, statuary, and ceremony, parts of the city or town that open themselves through narrow apertures to a R’lyehian space, for as said above, R’lyeh is the First City, a kind of archetypal monument, a Mausoleum of the Real, and is therefore present in all cities of Earth. As a city-dweller, I find this mode of access best. Have you noticed that no city is like another? By all reasonable measures, they should be, as they all operate from the same starting point, the needs of the population. And yet Victoria is not Panang is not Paris is not Kathmandu or Melbourne or Toledo. Use the uniqueness of your city to identify the Gates to R’lyeh within it: where are the liminal spaces within your town? where do the angles not meet up in a traditionally Euclidean way? where does art proliferate like mould across the walls? where the alleyway that goes a little too deep, the collection of rooms with occasionally extra doors, the roof that looks out upon a different sea of roofs, a different sky? These places, once sought out, will be found to be everywhere and without number.

But of course all these infinite Gates are as one with the Gate in your heart, R’lyehians. Following general principles of Yog-Sothery, we are the gate, and the key, and the keeper of the key all at once. R’lyeh is a city, yes, but first and foremost it is a state of being, a particular mode of mind. The practitioner of R’lyehian Spirituality makes R’lyeh a reality through the careful raising of it, stone by dripping stone, in her own heart, raising the FHTAGN of their local space until it reflects as through a mirror R’lyeh itself. This is a process that will never end (“I vow to enter them all”) and though it requires dedication to do so, it is a level that for the faithful is relatively easy to attain, for with a little practice one begins to see, to intuit, Gates to R’lyeh everywhere.

As ever, we encourage civil, energetic discussion in the comments. Tell us of your Gates to R’lyeh, R’lyehian...be circumspect if necessary, as we value your privacy, but please share your experience with Gates in your city, home, woods, seaside! We look forward to seeing you all next week for the Homily where we will discuss the last verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow. Also, please like and follow the Threshold page here and find us on Twitter .

07/19/2026

[ part 3 of our series of homilies on the Cthulhusattva Vow, first published here in January of 2022 and republished today for the education and enjoyment of new members ]

SUNDAY HOMILY
JANUARY 9, 2022
THE CTHULHUSATTVA VOW: Part 3

Good Sunday morning to you and yours, R’lyehians and the R’lyehian-curious. Everyone here at Stonefish House and Threshold HQ hope your new year is progressing without mishap or mayhem and thank you for joining us here at the Threshold for this Sunday’s Homily, the third part of our breakdown of the four verses of the Cthulhusattva Vow. (For the introduction, and the first verse, please see past homilies.) Let’s dive right in.

Delusions of Order and Sanity are inexhaustible
I vow to break them all

I will be blunt: Where Are We, as a Species? I barely need to articulate the feeling, the sick gnosis of our current existential status, as it seemingly permeates our collective consciousness, a miasma of misperception and mania. We breathe in the sins of our organism every day, and that breathing is laced with pollution, paranoia, pain and pandemic.

The more important question, possibly: How Did We Get Here? Much of our present understanding of our history as a social organism on this planet tells us that things were not always thus. I’m not being nostalgic with this train of thought; by all understandings human existence in the prehistories was nasty, brutish, and short and in many ways we are well rid. We went from the trees to the savannah, from the savannah to civilization by way of agriculture and tech, war and writing, Reason and Order. We, the Chatty Ape, imposed these things on the world and the world has reacted, finally and possibly fatally, in these latter days of the human sphere.

I believe that the human world is over. Do you?

I believe that whatever is coming next will expand the scope of what we are and bring the next phase of life on this planet. We will no longer be able to call ourselves human, we will pass into the adulthood of our species, and what that will look like is beyond our imagination currently. And though Reason and Order have brought us to this climactic pass, if we are to survive into a post-human world then Reason and Order must be discarded. We must become fluid, malleable, R’lyehian, if we are to squeeze through the chokehold that rings Tomorrow with a million razor teeth.

What do I mean when I say “discard Reason”? “Abandon Order”? What does it mean to break these delusions as the verse instructs? Only that there is a limit, a necessary limit, to these ways of perceiving the world, of setting it up for ourselves in such a way that we benefit. Reason cracks wide the world and makes its slobbering way across the pieces; Order pursued to its end quantifies and commodifies the wastelands Reason leaves and kills that which is free and multiform in our R’lyehian souls. Reason an omni-directional arrow that leads to a single ever present location, that of Order’s Highest Manifestation, the BOX. And look how *well* we are doing in that Box, friends. The planet convulsing under our combined biological and psychic weight, our societies crumbling from within and bleeding everywhere, and make no mistake, the planet *will* buck us off, in our hundreds of millions over the next two, three, five decades at the outside, according to conservative algorithms.

Maybe we’ll hit a spot of cosmic good fortune as we’re tossed and that selfsame buckling will raise R’lyeh from the depths? Perhaps. It’s more important for now that we raise R’lyeh in our hearts, stone by stone, as a bulwark upon which we might rest as the human world dies. There is no Reason there, in the quantum avenues, the deep urban sinks, the suburbs of R’lyeh and what Order can be expressed is not as the Order we know. In R’lyeh, there is Dreaming, and Diving, there is Sorcerous Consciousness and multiple Forms in which to experience that Consciousness, there is Patience and there is Madness.

Friends and R’lyehians, it is my conviction that these things will save us, make us ready for the new worlds to come, condition us to the FHTAGN of the future, provide us with new skins and terrible armours with which to navigate the times ahead. There will be places for Reason and Order there in the future, but they will no longer dominate the world to the point of destruction, they will serve us, not subjugate us. When R’lyeh has risen, we shall learn new ways to Shout (express our personal fhtagn) and Kill (the ego, Reason’s dogsbody!) and Revel (celebrate the FHTAGN of the world itself) and it is the risen inhabitant of R’lyeh that will teach these lessons, once we have broken the chains that bind us.

Personally, I find the second verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow to be my favourite. There is action implied. Breaking delusions is a vital activity, something a cthulhusattva can DO within themselves. I try to break at least three delusions before breakfast each morning. It’s an exercise, a survival skill, and a little tidy up of my mental space all in one.

Next week, we’ll discuss the third verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow and consider the Gates to R’lyeh, what they are, where they may be found and how they may be entered. As ever, we encourage civil, energetic discussion in the comments and look forward to seeing you all next week for the Homily. Also, please like and follow the Threshold page here and find us on Twitter .

07/12/2026

( part 2 of our homily series, originally published here in December of 2021 and continues the series dealing with The Cthulhusattva Vow, verse by verse; we republish it here for the education of new followers )

SUNDAY HOMILY
DECEMBER 26, 2021
THE CTHULHUSATTVA VOW: Part 2

A good Boxing Day to all who live in Boxes, may your gloves be tightly laced and your opponents from the Other Boxes grow lax in their daily training, so that when the Summer Box Boxing Finals come, you and your Box style may prevail over theirs! Iä, Boxing Day! (Also please accept our multifaith wishes for pleasure and pleasantness during the season, and a Happy New Year!)

Thanks for joining us here at the Threshold for this Sunday’s Homily, the second part of our breakdown of the four verses of the Cthulhusattva Vow. Last week was the overview, today we dive in.

I want to begin by telling an experience I’ve just had today, an hour ago in fact, out on the back porch of Stonefish House. (Thanks, by the way, to all the viewers who tuned in for the live feed of our reading of The Festival over the weekend!) The snow we’d been promised for Christmas Day showed up last night instead, along with a nice arctic outflow dropping the temperature, and our hummingbird feeders froze up. I retrieved them earlier, brought them inside, thawed and emptied them, then refilled with freshly made sugar water. (In case you’re wondering, you’ll want four parts water to one sugar.) When I stepped outside to hang the first feeder, Gracie (the female of the pair in our holly tree) buzzed my ear and then hovered at the little red plastic flower of the feeder. Then she alighted there and began to drink, all while I held the feeder in my right hand. With my left I reached up and whaddaya know, the little thing was so cold and so desperate for fuel that it allowed me to pet it with my forefinger. This went on for maybe ten seconds that of course felt like a small eternity and in which I lost myself almost totally. Then it flew and it was like it had never been there.

I almost immediately experienced a moment of Black Gnosis, tinted by the ultraviolet radiations of my recent excursions into thoughtrealms regarding camouflage and higher order entities. For instance, what have I been so desperate for in my own life, so hungry for, that I have let myself ignore the touch of entities that I can barely conceive of let alone understand? And what have I MISSED because of that hunger? How many times have I allowed Reason to block out my understanding of this world, or any others? The first verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow...

A Universe of Beings imprisoned by Reason
I vow to liberate them all

There is no doubt that Reason is a great tool for interacting with reality. As a species it has been one of our great gifts, so much so that in this day and age we worship Cause and Effect, we praise the most rational among us and vault them up to celebrity status (Hitchens, Peterson, et al.), and we decry alternate world views that cannot (by their very nature! and the categories they rule over!) stand up to the dressing down that Reason gives to all things not allied with it.

But I am here to tell you, friends and R’lyehians, that Reason ain’t the only player in the network. And as a player, Reason is heavy handed. Unsubtle. A hammer in place of a lockpick. Reason piles on Reason and before long there is a logjam of it, a great dam holding back the free flow of whatever-it-is that we, humans, are. We are backed up with Reason and as a result our cities and reality-warping political and economic systems feed and grow large on the energy collected by this reductive process. There are so many subjective realities being held by so many individual minds today that we can hardly be said to even reside on the same planet, and that goes for most of us. For myself, certainly. My world is about as different from yours as yours is from the cold hummingbird. That does not mean, however, that we cannot communicate, after a fashion. I write this Homily and you read it. I reach out to the hummingbird and offer...what? A bit of warmth, some small moment of cross-species solidarity? Fuel in the form of sugar water? Something less speakable, perhaps?

And it is that something less speakable, or rather, unspeakable, that concerns us with the first verse of the Cthulhusattva Vow. Reason imprisons us and we see the world as it is between the bars of Reason, which is to say we never see the world complete. There is always our Reason blocking our vision, hampering our sense of the Totality of the World. We could call this Totality the FHTAGN of the World, if you like. The FHTAGN is that ineffable essence of Cthulhu’s Dream that permeates our reality. It is unreason and outside rational cognition. A heavy hand will crush it between too eager fingers but if one is gentle, circumspect, and unminded, losing oneself in the process of reaching out and allowing the touch of the unknown to unseat our minds for a moment, we may see our way beyond our limits, the limits we have set for ourselves as a species, the limits we set for ourselves as individuals. The ways for our collective organism to exist are as many and multiform as the quantum suburbs and fractal districts of R’lyeh. How many sides does spaghetti have? That is what we could be, what I believe we *should* be. The cthulhusattva has taken the vow to remain in Reason and the painful, dammed and damning world it generates in order to point the way beyond Reason into a fuller expression of the human life wave, one of freedom and boundless imagination. As the poet Bryan Thao Worra wrote: “When the sage points at R’lyeh, the fool sees only the tentacle.” There is a way into the future for our species, but we will need to let go and allow the FHTAGN of existence to permeate our selves and consciousness if we are to survive.

In a way, Gracie the Hummingbird allowed herself contact with the FHTAGN of her world earlier today, she let go of her Reason (instinct to flee a larger creature) in order to feed herself, so intent was she that a very unreasonable thing happened; I reached out and stroked the feathers of her back, felt the thrum of her tiny dynamo heart. For many, this story shows only Reason prevailing over fear, instinct, habit, what have you. For me, though, I saw an avian cthulhusattva, approaching the boundary of her world and worldview in order to survive new and terrifying conditions. My hope is for all folx to arrive at some similar place, soon, and each to their own, so as to allow themselves a taste of the FHTAGN of the world outside their Reason. We are all already liberated from Reason; we cling to the bars still because at least it “makes sense”. Let go and watch the world open up into the Black Gnosis. Then help others let go. This is part of the Cthulhusattva Vow.

Thank you again, friends and R’lyehians, for staying with the Homily this week. As always, if you like what you’re reading here, please like the page, follow and subscribe or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Next week, part three of this series on the Cthulhusattva Vow; I hope you’ll join us again in the New Year for the first Homily of 2022! Dagon’s Teeth, it really is the Future, isn’t it? In the meantime, keep on .

07/12/2026

It often be like that, though, when you're on the path of the .

07/10/2026

ON CTHULHU'S PATIENCE [ from WTSAR by SRJ -- link to purchase in first comment and graphic ]

Much is made of Cthulhu’s form, Cthulhu’s might, Cthulhu’s potency and potential for destruction and chaos, for rending a world upon its waking from the dream of Death. Though the R’lyehian looks forward, obviously, towards such a transformation of all that lives and exists, for the remaking of the world in fire and ice and deep, cold waters, she also is aware of the cycles of deep Time in which the Great Old Ones are embedded, and of the supreme quality of patience that is one of the genuine hallmarks of their High Priest, Cthulhu.

It is said that when the stars are not right, they cannot live, which is a fine thing to say on the surface of it. A small morsel of hope, perhaps? The musings of the ignorant, most likely. It is said that they are held, dead or dormant, or whatever passes for these states with such beings, imprisoned in the deep places of the Earth, bound Outside our various dimensions and planes and spheres, barred from passing through gates. But are we really to believe that the trans-temporal nature and plenipotent scope of what the Great Old Ones and Cthulhu are is limited by something as simple as binding runes? Ancient signs? Please. What does it mean to imprison a thing using sigilized meaning, which is all a rune is? A drawing of a line in the sands of Time, an illusory demarcation in a thing that is already an illusion, as the mystics tell us and affirm. To speak of binding a thing is to speak of contracts, and contracts, by their very nature, are agreements between parties.

Knowing this, the R’lyehian understands the patience of Cthulhu. Cthulhu waits. Cthulhu dreams. Cthulhu could, in fact, rise at any time; the so-called bindings that we are told keeps it in this state are as nothing. Contracts are made to be broken, re-negotiated, tossed aside, at least as much as they are to be held; the contract is a mere arrangement between parties, parties which we can barely conceive of, for reasons that cannot be fathomed by us, not in a thousand strange aeons.

And so the R’lyehian recognizes Cthulhu’s patience and seeks to mirror it in their own life and practice. He recognizes his own place, miniscule and as near to meaningless as it is, in the slow, grinding movement of the aforementioned cosmic gear-works. In service to the Lord of Dreams, if the R’lyehian, through a supreme effort of will and sorcery and directed dreaming, manages to shift a glowing cog a millimeter further along the track that leads to the return of the Great Old Ones, and no further, then that? Even that is enough for him.

Not for him are the fevered posturings and unthinking propitiations of the lesser minded, for whom the raising of R’lyeh must happen now, right this minute, just as soon as this working is complete, this sacrifice made, these barbarous syllables chanted badly into the night. For these lesser ones, Cthulhu is something to be summoned, something outside of themselves which (they feel, erroneously) can be made manifest in their tiny circles of intent. The Platonic ideal of Madness somehow little more than a bogeyman to be whistled for and directed at the enemies of the small-minded. Minds such as these, stultified and walled-in (however colourful and creative the graffiti on those walls) could never contain the enormity of Cthulhu. These minds are not R’lyehian, they are merely human and of the most standard type. For all their protestations to the contrary, they have no understanding of what R’lyeh is, believing it to be a location, whereas it is no such thing...

R’lyeh is a state of being. And Cthulhu the supreme expression of that state. The R’lyehian seeks to raise R’lyeh, always, unceasingly, but at the same time she recognizes that Cthulhu? Cthulhu will awaken when it is ready and not a moment before.

And in the meantime, we wait. We wait, and teach waiting, and pass that quality of infinitesimal patience on down the centuries and the seconds.