Kathulos

[REH Skull (online text)]: A sorceror of ancient Atlantis. He advised kings and may have been one himself: he "reigned in the dim misty sea lands ages and ages before the sea rose and engulfed the land." Before the land sank, he and other dark wizards and kings drank a draft to preserve them through long eons beneath the waves. By the 1920s, a deep sea tide had broken his coffin free from the sunken halls where it lay, and it was found off Senegal by a passing ship, bobbing around on the ocean's surface. The mummy-case was "a strangely shaped affair carved with characters neither cuneiform nor hieroglyphic." The mummy was unique in having all its organs intact, though it had hardened to a wood-like consistency. On seeing it, the Moors and negroes aboard ship knelt and began chanting worshipfully. They identified him with a legendary figure known as the "ocean-man" or "The Son of the Ocean," who would some day lead the world's colored peoples in vanquishing the white race and establishing a new empire. Kathulos escaped from the ship in Lagos, and the continent of Africa shortly begain to seethe with unrest. His followers knew him as the Master, the Scorpion, or Skull-face. He was high priest of the mysterious Scorpion society of northern Africa. He sought the remains of Atlantean culture on distant shores where their cities had existed, but had not sunk, but found that their cities existed no more and had become deserts or the abodes of modern humans, whom he regarded as primitive and ignorant. He was also known as Kathulos the Egyptian, a name that might imply he had sought the remains of Atlantis first in Egypt. He also found such remains in the form of a vast network of lost, prehistoric tunnels under London.

Kathulos ran an opium den in London in the 1920s and use that drug and hashish to enslave many, including the wealthy and influential, and make them his servants. He had an elixir of his own creation that could cure anyone of opium addiction and give them vast strength and vitality, but the subject became more dependent on the elixir than on any drug. He had another elixir that could cure one's dependence on the first elixir, but which probably would kill the subject in the process. He also had mesmeric powers that enabled him to dominate others.

His face was gaunt like a skull, but yellow, with lean, yellow hands, with knobby joints and cruel curving talons, and a voice sounding rusty, as of one long dead. When talking to his servants, he sat hidden behind a screen in a room with artificial potted palms, dragon tapestries, and an idol with incense burning before it. When venturing forth, he disguised himself as a leper in rags.

Kathulos regarded the black, Middle Eastern, and Asian races only as tools to advance his ultimate goal. He planned to revive the ancient masters of Atlantis so that they might establish a new Atlantean empire over the world.

He may have been destroyed when a vast amount of explosives inexplicably detonated beneath a building that he owned in London, destroying fully a tenth of the city. His body was never found, but the revolutionary movement among the word's colored races seemed to die out shortly afterward.

The name Kathulos has a phonetic resemblance to Cthulhu, but it is not known whether the two are related. Their descriptions are quite different, although both spent eons in dormancy under the oceans. Also, they slept under different oceans: Kathulos under the Atlantic, and Cthulhu under the Pacific. It is conceivable that Kathulos was a devotee of Cthulhu, or that he was pretending to be an incarnation of Cthulhu so as to enlist the existing Cthulhu cult in his service.

REH Dig (online text) 75: John Grimlan hinted to John Conrad of Kathulos and the sunken cities.

Aka: the Master, ocean-man, the Scorpion, Skull-face, Son of the Ocean. Possibly aka: L'mur Kathulos.

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