Cthulhu of the Caribbean?

Has anyone else noticed that Cthulhu and Davy Jones (as played by Bill Nighy in Walt Disney’s production Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) is a dead ringer for Cthulhu or one of his spawn? Even Davy’s hat looks like Cthulhu’s wings.
Davy Jones lives at the bottom of the sea in Davy Jones’ Locker and is a nickname of the devil of the seas (Devil Jonah) since he kidnaps sailors and drowns them as they join him in his watery abode. Tobias Smollet‘s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) comments, “This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep....”. As an ardent Anglophile and avid reader (at his death he had over 1500 books in his library), it is quite possible that Lovecraft was familiar with Smollett’s works.

Cthulhu lives – “dead but dreaming” – in R’lyeh, a sunken city deep under the Pacific Ocean in the middle of one of the biggest empty regions of water on the planet. Lovecraft describes Cthulhu as having an “awful squid-head with writhing feelers” (a very apt description of Davy Jones in the movie).

According to Wikipedia, “…Lovecraft said that R’lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R’lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth’s coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the “Ponape Scripture“, a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W“. The sound was given the name “Bloop“.

Have you an avatar?

An avatar is:

The physical embodiment of an idea or concept; a personification;
(Computing) A digital representation of a person or being;
(Hinduism) The earthly incarnation of a deity, particularly Vishnu.

Many of the Lovecraft Cosmos gods are embodiments of concepts, particularly Azathoth who is the personification of the nucleus of the cosmos “at the centre of all infinity” yet “beyond time and space”.

Lovecraft was extremely interested in dreams and the nature of reality and many of his stories explore these subjects so, if one considers the role of avatars in role-playing games – many of which feature the Cthulhu Mythos – then there is a fascinating link between his creations and digital representations.

In ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ Lovecraft said,

“…Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”


In the Lovecraft Cosmos, Nyarlathotep is the avatar and soul of the Outer Gods, serving as an intermediary between the pantheonn.2’s deities and their cults. As such he is very similar to the Greek god Hermes who was messenger for the other gods of the Greek pantheon; the god of crossroads, boundaries and travellers; a psychopomp who led or guided souls to the afterlife; a god of luck, and, of scheming and trickery.

The virtual reality world of the ‘role-playing games’ Second Life (and Second Teen Life for those under eighteen) and World of Warcraft feature avatars in different metaverse environments not unlike, in principle, the virtual reality of the Matrix Trilogy that features a fictional universe where the man-machine interface is integrated. The virtual reality world in the Canadian director David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ may be compared and contrasted with the theories of the Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan who wrote a number of analytical and predictive books, particularly Understanding Media.

In our interaction with fiction, movies, television and, especially, cyberspace we all exist as avatars, not as ourselves but as digital representations of ourselves – as do the creations of our minds. Lovecraft would have loved it!