Threshold Church of R'lyeh Risen

https://www.amazon.com/When-Stars-Are-Right-Spirituality/dp/0987992880/

Okely Fhatgnly!

This is what the AI overlords think of R'lyehian Spirituality 😂

Our anti-guru SRJ on an older podcast talking about R'lyehian Spirituality, Gnosticism, Lovecraft and for your Sunday Service as it were, congregation. Enjoy and let us know what you think in the comments! Link to purchase WTSAR in the first comment!

Gnostic Themes in the Cthulhu Mythos One of the most enduring horror narratives is the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft’s tales have evolved beyond genre into a deep fascination by popular culture and ...

The Eye through which I see Cthulhu is the same Eye through which Cthulhu sees me. This is part of the Art of Dreaming.

[ thoughts on Shub-Niggurath for this Mother's Day 2025, from WTSAR by SRJ, link in picture and first comment ]

Time is often characterized as a consuming fire in which all things burn. Time the Thief. Time, and its grim, chalky cheerleader Death: two heads of the tag-teaming Conqueror Worm. Shub-Niggurath, the Conqueror Womb, shows us that the opposite is true: we, that is to say Life, is that which consumes Time. We are the hungry ghosts, moving from body to body, and beyond bodies into epigenetic technologies and airy Platonic idea-forms, and we pass the seconds and minutes and eons through the needle-narrow throats of our endless iterations. We are not the victims of Time. Time is our food, we take from it what we need, and once we have consumed it, it becomes fixed in the past, immovable and essentially dead.

Another view, one relating to the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: the Future is always dark, which is to say formless and unknown. To consume Time, to feed the Future through the choke-point of consciousness and being, of manifestation, is to expose it to the illumination of the Present, a brightness which calcifies and stiffens it. The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, then, are the forms of Life yet to be manifested, permanent residents of that threshold state just beyond the Now. Recall the description, given by the sometime Mythos-author Robert Bloch in his classic story Notebook Found in a Deserted House...

“
Something black in the road, something that wasn’t a tree. Something big and black and ropy, just squatting there, waiting, with ropy arms squirming and reaching ... it was the black thing of my dreams - that black, ropy, slime jelly tree-thing out of the woods. It crawled up and it flowed up on its hoofs and mouths and snaky arms.
”

What is this image of a single Dark Young, if it is not a composite form of the shifting, viscous flesh of genetic possibility? Of some future chimeric proto-manifestation of a life force not yet locked down into a single form? Mouths and ropes and snakes and hoofs and trees, a being (or myriad beings!) vibrating with quantum uncertainty at every point of intersection with the moment that is to come, the one just after this one! The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: agents of the ultimate insurgency.

But why is such an insurgency necessary? Why must Time be consumed, processed, shat out? All things move toward their end: Time, though the thing through which all things move, is itself no exception to this cosmic law, and so we see the goal of the Great Old Ones brought closer to fruition by the activities of Life at the behest of the Mother, the Conqueror Womb...

“
That is not dead, which can eternal lie
and with strange aeons, even Death may die
”

Yog-Sothoth knows the Gates and is the Key to them; Shub-Niggurath is the pressing of the flesh against those Gates, and when the Great Old Ones awaken and return to their full consciousness and might, that which bursts through will be her spawn. Shub-Niggurath devours Time to hasten the moment of their return, or, to be rather more crude about it, Shub-Niggurath f***s Time to death.

The R’lyehian, knowing this, and knowing the method whereby this devouring is accomplished, has her answer to the nihilist and the anti-natalist. The latter claims that, given the cruelty and suffering inherent to incarnating in this world, the worst cruelty a sentient being can commit is being party to the creation of yet another sentient being.

This view supposes that survival-in-the-flesh somehow means survival-of-the-individual. The R’lyehian knows there is no such thing. The R’lyehian knows that “the individual” is a momentary condensation of consciousness (itself an extrusion of Yog-Sothoth) on the shifting surface of flesh and form, and any pain or joy “the individual” experiences is likewise momentary.

Just as we are all Yog-Sothoth, so, too, are we the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath: we are mind and consciousness, and the base matter that houses consciousness for brief moments, birthing and dieing in our unguessable numbers, and all of it surging towards the point when Time (exhausted, devoured, and unable to hold its shape against the onslaught of the First Hunger) finally shatters, ending the cycle. At that point, the stars will come right.

As the Buddhists affirm, only in Time is suffering possible. Is not its destruction the awesome work of gods? Is it not the ultimate Great Work, performed by Ones no less Great?

To Shub-Niggurath, then, Primal Kali, Annihilating Dark Mother, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, the R’lyehian offers praise and, so far as they are able, abundance(*).

SRJ wrote worldbuilding and descriptions, and monsters, natch, for RAILGODS of HYSTERRA, a new base-building aRPG with strong Lovecraftian content. It's now in early access on various platforms. Enjoy!

RailGods of Hysterra - Official Gameplay Trailer Check out the gameplay trailer for RailGods of Hysterra, a post-apocalyptic Lovecraftian co-op survival game developed by Troglobytes Games. Players will com...

[ from WTSAR by SRJ -- link in image and first comment ]

A Certain Sort of Men: Dagon & the Deep One Aesthetic

The R’lyehian is a transitional creature, a thing of the shoreline and the spaces between states of Being. She is human in body and to a lesser extent in mind, but she holds within herself so much void, so many honeycombed surfaces that define the hollow spaces, surfaces which the Black Gnosis may adhere itself to, that to speak of her as a hybrid thing is more than correct.

The R’lyehian lives and creates in multiple worlds simultaneously, and does so with relative ease. He transitions between them as well, constantly. For this reason, an examination of the esoteric aspects of the Deep Ones, who are in many ways a kind of evolutionary precursor to the R’lyehian, will be beneficial, and of course there can be no discussion of the Deep Ones, those archaic leapers-between-the-worlds, without a discussion of their lord and King of the Voltiguers, Father Dagon.

Dagon’s place in our pantheon here is a unique one, for unlike his fellows, his first appearance as a god on this planet predates his inclusion in Lovecraft’s Mythos: Dagon was, originally(*), a god of the Phoenicians, a being who rose from the depths of the sea to bring technology, the arts, agriculture and writing to the early Aegean and Mesopotamia. In this guise, and often under the name Oannes, he is depicted as a protean humanoid figure with prominent fishy accoutrements, which may be construed as either ceremonial garb or, in the more perplexing (to non-R’lyehian minds) representations, parts of his actual body.

Even in this early form, the lineaments of the Great Old One we know now are present, though blurred by primitive human understanding. Dagon here is amphibious, a being of many worlds, imparting knowledge and advanced technologies on ignorant surface-dwellers in return for worship and, one can only assume, something in the nature of sacrifice, though this is never explicitly stated.

Naturally, the mind jumps to the obvious sacrificial choices: blood and lives, the virginity of maidens, and so on. Though such offerings never really go out of style, as R’lyehians we must entertain the notion that Father Dagon (at least in this ancient incarnation) had something else in mind. Why gift air-breathing apes, barely out of their caves in the hills, with culture, arts, progress, thinking? There is nothing in this life that is not, somehow, contractual, and dealings with gods are certainly not exempt from this rule. What does the deity gain? is the question that must be asked.

Dagon is the King of the Voltigeurs, the Prime Leaper Between the Worlds. All things batrachian are under his gaze; his totem is the frog, who in one moment rests in utter stillness on lily pad or stone and in the next is gone from sight, leaving only ripples and after-images, so swift is its spring. What would such a being, itself progenitor to an entire race of like-yet-lesser beings, the Deep Ones, need of endowing humans with power and agency?

Clearly, Dagon is a god who, Prometheus-like, wants to get us up to speed. But to what end? The goal of such an action is always to bring to the younger species some form of parity with the gods. And parity with the gods can only be achieved through the shattering of the barriers between the mundane and the spiritual...

We'd move the Threshold HQ there immediately

Let's all assume it is in good condition and you will have the funds for upkeep. BUT the will states that you must leave the exterior as is: gothic and foreboding. AND it is in a place you have never lived before.

Keeping It R'lyeh? Or not. Your thoughts in the comments, cong.