GLOGtober Challenge: Esoteric Orders & Creeds; Or: Cthulhu Cults of San Francisco

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Shadowfray: https://impulsivenecromancy.blogspot.com/

Cthulhu Cults of San Francisco

What drives a man to worship an undersea squid-dragon? Is it nihilism? Lust for seafood? An unfamiliarity with cosmic horror literature? Let's find out.

Here's six Cthulhu cults from a city already claimed by Lovecraftian madness - San Francisco:

1. Atlantean Aeonics:

At the dawn of the new millennium, one daring marine biologist made a miraculous discovery off the western continental shelf of North America - a biome isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. This biome produced biochemicals with properties that couldn't be found anywhere else, properties that promised cures for cancer, the common cold, even old age itself. Fearing traumatic exploitation of this biome, the marine biologist hid their discovery, patented the biochemicals, and has been slowly but surely working towards the benefit of all humanity through their company Atlantean Aeonics ever since.

This is all bullshit, of course, a nice little origin story for TED talks.

Atlantean Aeonics is in reality an obscure yet cutting-edge biotech company that caters to Silicon Valley cartel heads and survivalist billionaires. They offer immortality to their clients, by way of splicing Deep One genes into their DNA - no more must one have an ancestor that fucked a fish-man to enjoy the fruits of forever!

The company tells most clients that they've managed to separate the longevity-granting part of the Deep One genome from the turning-into-a-fish-man-and-communing-with-alien-gods-in-the-depths part, though they have not. In reality they've only managed to delay the least aesthetically-appealing parts of the process, and every lower-end client is an experiment in delaying it further. As of yet the company doesn't truly understand the technology, because it's not their technology. The isolated biome their legendary founder discovered was in fact a Deep One trench-city, almost totally depopulated by the clandestine extermination of their kind that the American government had been undertaking since the Innsmouth incident in the '30s. The founder promised them the moon - influence among terrestrial elites, full hybridization of the human population, protection of their religion and sanctuaries under federal law - and the Deep Ones were all too ready to believe them, providing access to the remnants of their biotechnology.

Atlantean Aeonics of course has no intention of following through on their end, at least not any more than they need to keep their undersea collaborators on the hook. Their future has no need for backwards faith or fish-people. Their future is human, capitalist, and eternal.

2. The Order of Meditations in Deep Waters

Whether a belief is true or not is irrelevant. What matters is: on a personal level, whether a belief is psychologically positive or negative, and on a eugenic level whether a belief is adaptive or maladaptive. So who cares if Cthulhu is really out there dreaming real dreams in R'lyeh (i.e. Real Yeah) - he is useful, on the level of the organism and the sub-species, as an archetype of and a metaphor for the power of the unconscious, the dragon of chaos, to be confronted and overcome by the worthy.

This is what the Order of Meditations in Deep Waters tells its members, in any case. It's a self-help group that grew in popularity among internet influencers and C-list celebrities about a decade back, combining Jungian and Thelemite teachings - particularly where they relate to the collective unconscious, mythic archetypes, and individual will.

They're waning now, never updated their message or their media to land with the youth. The non-consensual drug dosing and sexual abuse allegations didn't help either. They were hardly a cult in the Lovecraftian sense - definitely a cult in the regular sense - but with their spotlight dimming that's starting to change.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the "confronting the Cthulhu-archetype" stuff was just bullshit. That one time? Getting a psychically-sensitive person into the right headspace at the right time? That did let them brush the dreaming will of the High Priest of the Great Old Ones. Those who experienced such a thing were not unscathed - they could hardly be more scathed - and in the past they were swept under the rug, like the people that overdosed. Now the rug's being lifted - the inhuman and seemingly-indestructible coral-growth remnants are being retrieved from the sealed basements and storm drains they were stuck in.

Physically-petrified but psychically-active, these remnants became nodes for a network-broadcast nightmare, an isthmus of the Dreamlands. Those who've stuck with the Order are convinced they can use this nightmare network to fuse the waking world and the Dreamlands, and that their mental superiority will make them the ruling class of this mélange-realm after it destroys the false cathedral of modern, slavish authority.

3. "The Coastguards"

They're not the real coastguard of course - it's just an obscurant inside-joke name they came up with for themselves.

They're made up of high-ranking public and private partners in the military-industrial complex, meeting in conventions and clubs to discuss contracts and the issue of Cthulhu's awakening as it relates to profits and American policy.

They're kind of an ironic Cthulhu cult, they'll clink their glasses and say "Hail great Cthulhu!" and laugh but then walk it back and say "Haha, but really we're just being silly, we love America and we love God". They laugh about it but they also get little sigils put in missile guidance system circuitry because they believe ritual sacrifices will delay Cthulhu's awakening and preserve Freedom, Democracy, and the International Rules-Based Order a while longer. There's a split forming in the Coastguards over whether it's enough just to kill foreign people, or whether they should do false flag attacks and groom domestic terrorists to have an excuse to kill the Americans they find undesirable too. Oh yeah and they're really into the idea of starting a war over Taiwan.

Zero magic, but lots of money and connections and they've got the number of a couple ex-special forces guys who think life is a movie and are ready to do Guantanamo shit to anyone they're told is an enemy of America.

4. Tentatoocoolforschool

Ok so take some hippies, original hippies, who went yuppie and made their money and are now retired and feeling nostalgic for the old days of the constipated great consciousness shift and the Summer of Love, and some guys who were teenage shitposters making Trump memes in 2016, big believers in "meme magic", but now it's 8 years down the line and they've become disillusioned with Zion Don, he's old, he's tired, he's the establishment now, he's no good.

These guys collide discussing perennial mysticism and testosterone-enhancing natural diets and culture jamming and whatnot and enough of them say, hey, why don't we start a commune, not like a gay anarchist commune, but like a cool, Grecian agora where wise old men can mentor twenty-something boys. And so they did exactly that, and between tomes of fell lore downloaded off the dark web and one of the no-longer-former hippies being a legit Lovecraftian occultist, turned to Cthulhu as their tool for wiping the slate of America clean and ushering in a new age, for real this time.

Some of these guys are more into the "free and wild" part of that new age, some are more into the "beyond good and evil" stuff. Some are into the morals being thrown aside and all men shouting and killing, other into the laws being thrown aside and all men revelling in joy stuff. It's a mixed bag but they all get along on a day-to-day, interpersonal level. They've summoned some tentacled lumbering thing they keep in a shed and it's their girlfriend, for all of them it's their girlfriend. It gives birth to living information, ideas that possess you and memetic viruses, and they try to sneak these things into the media - mostly zines and posts and posters and suchlike right now, but they're pretty sure if they can get them into a popular cartoon that'll be the tipping point.

They' tried to muscle in on L.A. but the King in Yellow guys are pretty entrenched there.

5. The True Rl'yehan Witches Movement

Y'all, white people are NOT the indigenous people of the land. Any land. Neither are any other people. 99% of human beings are descendants of ORGANIC SLIME exuded as a BY-PRODUCT of shoggoth bio-machinery 200 million years ago, and leaked into EARTH'S ORIGINAL PURE ENVIRONMENT by the Elder Thing scientist Y'QUU'B!!!

The REAL people, the true 1%, are DEEP ONES. Deep as in DEEP MEANING. We are the DEEP TRUE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH and it has been STOLEN from us and POLLUTED by the 99% SLIME. We were once worshiped as GODS by the 99% SLIME - Dagon and the Nommos are the MYTHIC MEMORY of this - but they got GREEDY and DISLOYAL and used trickery to take over and LIE to us about our true origin. We are NOT MONKEYS - they are SLIME and we are FISH.

ORIENTAL WISDOM recognizes that FISH will become DRAGONS - this we MUST DO.

Rise up my brothers and sisters, rise up and HONOUR YOUR HERITAGE. We will BECOME DRAGONS, we HAVE REAL MAGIC, we will SWEEP OVER THE LAND as a TIDAL WAVE. The 99% SLIME have bred OUT OF CONTROL, they are CONSUMING OUR RESOURCES. There will come a day when our PAIN and our RITUALS awaken GREAT CTHULHU who is our RACIAL ESSENCE and he will lead us to ETERNAL GLORY AND VICTORY.

Sign up to my substack for more.

6. The Many Cthulhus of San Francisco

Too many cultists running around - shouting "Cthulhu fhtagn" and "Ia Shub-Niggurath" (especially that last one - people are gonna mishear it!) - bad for a city's image. So the government rounded up a bunch of cultists and brought on the state of California's best therapists to deprogram them.

It worked, and it didn't. The cultists were convinced they shouldn't worship Cthulhu, but that's because they were now convinced that they were Cthulhu. Individually and collectively. A bunch of Cthulhus.

This made them even less capable of functioning in society. Imagine paying taxes when you're convinced you could end the world on a whim. The Many Cthulhus were swiftly unhoused. Their transition from potential January 6th-level political disruptors to mentally unhinged hobos was seen as close enough to a success, as now they could be cared for, and make some people a lot of money by providing care.

The Many Cthulhus were moved into an Urban Alchemy camp, worked their way up to becoming guards of that Urban Alchemy camp, and before anyone who could do anything about it cottoned on to what was happening they were isolating their fellow camp inhabitants and indoctrinating them into believing that they, too, were Cthulhu. They also managed to snag case workers and NGO bureaucrats, infiltrating third sector noopolitiks.

Their aims are simple: Rent's too damn high. Racism? Bad. Solve both problems by flooding the world and turning people into fish-people.