R’lyeh RevealedRE-LOCATED!

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.

One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.

I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:

Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.

So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.

UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:

Rlyeh2

BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

16 thoughts on “R’lyeh RevealedRE-LOCATED!”

  1. Well, that’s nice place to be hiding from the throngs of Cthulhu devotees…is warm there this time of the year (Austral Summer).

  3. Never read much Lovecraft. Tended to like A.E. van Vogt much more. Maybe I should check HP out. But Wilkie Collins is up next!

  5. I don’t know much about these things, but isn’t that on the wrong side of the international date line to be a west longitude?

  10. C’thu is located, GOOOOD !
    Let’s phone to N’yarlathotep and visit our fellow C’thulhu, Jimmy !

  15. That is near of Isla de Pascua, an island that belongs to Chile!!!
    (Sorry if my english is so terrible… I speak spanish)

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