Winnie the pooh, and Cthulhu too!
Posted by:
Simon (---.lancing.org.uk)
Date: July 15, 2003 06:50PM
(Formatting note: Imagine that each of the two words in the following article that is separately enclosed between "[o]" and "[/o]" symbols has, although it is still present, a line drawn through it...)
Winnie the Pooh, and Cthulhu too!
A.A. Milne's famous series of books about "Winnie the Pooh" & his associates are not included in most people's lists of texts about the "Elder Gods", as far as I know, but in my opinion they do indeed contain numerous references to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos which _ although they're both masked in metaphor and trying to show those deities in a much more favourable light than do most other sources _ should be quite obvious to an educated reader...
Consider POOH himself, who is covered with hair and _ as he freely admits _ "of little brain": Surely he must have been one of those furry pre-humans who worshipped various of the "Elder Gods", often in lands that have since been swallowed up by icecaps or oceans, in the primaeval eras before true Humanity evolved (or was created?). This would presumably have been the case for his friend PIGLET too, although given the extent to which POOH takes the lead in their shared adventures I would suggest that he was a priest of their local diety (or deities) whereas PIGLET was just a more ordinary member of the tribe to which they both belonged.
"PIGLET" would be considered a very unusual name for a person in most Human cultures, and I fear that it indicates an unpleasant fact about the society in which that person lived. That there's a similarity between porcine meat & human flesh has not only been discovered by various better-documented cultures but led to the term "Long Pig" being used (in at least one Pidgin English dialect from New Guinea or Melanesia) to describe human flesh when this was being used as a foodstuff: Doesn't it seem all too likely that the furry pre-humans of these stories also practised cannibalism, either as a part of their religious rites (as various other societies in which one or more of the Elder Gods were revered are known to have done) or simply due to a shortage of alternative sources of meat in their homeland, and that the person in question had consequently been given this "animal" (nick)name because he had already been selected as a potential centrepiece for one of their feasts?
If that was why PIGLET bore such an unuusual name then the scene in which he was allowed to take over PPOH's former home, in the story about a great storm & its aftermath, might _ and in my opinion probably does _ have been a temporary increase in status & privileges such as certain historical cultures gave to their prospective sacrifices, he would have been killed soon afterwards (quite probably in an attempt at propitiating whichever deity was considered responsible for sending that destructive storm (maybe Hastur, or Ithaqua?), and the character named as PIGLET in the later stories would have been not the same person but his successor in the role of "designated victim".
Several of the other beings who were identified by name during their appearances in those stories clearly represnt not just more of the furry pre-humans but various of the "Elder gods" themselves,and can easily be identified with specific members of that pantheon. This is the case both for some of the beings that had apparently been already in contact with the local populace for a while before the stories began, such as Shub-NiggurRABBIT (alias "The Black [o]Goat[/o] Bunny Of The Woods, With A Thousand [o]Young[/o] Friends & Relatives") and the informative but frequently misleading NyarWOLthotep, and also for at least one of those who arrived there mysteriously from afar during the period chronicled i.e. the fur-covered but demented-seeming TsaothaTIGGER... The pair of strangely-shaped newcomers to the woods where POOH dwelt who are named only as "KANGA" & "ROO" were probably another two of the Elder Gods, come from some alien world or outer dimension, although admittedly I haven't yet worked out which (if any) of the 'Mythos' beings that are already known-of by Earth's contemporary scholars they might have been...
EYEORE, living alone and depressed (& depressingly to other locals) in a boggy patch as he did, might be a metaphorical representation of one of the Elder Gods whom their ancient foes had somehow "imprisoned" in varius regions: If the boggy patch is supposed to indicate an aquatic connection then he might perhaps be an avatar of Bokrug, "the abominable green water-lizard", with his gloominess due to the extinction of his worshippers in the land of 'Mnar'... I don't think that he is supposed to be dread Cthulhu himself, however, despite the latter's suboceanic captivity, as I have an alternative and (at least in my opinion) more convincing theory about which character in those stories stands for that deity. Another possibility is that EYEORE, sunken in despair about the prospect of things ever getting better, actually represents some or all of the ordinary lay-people from POOH's native society...
Accepting this view of Milne's writings about POOH's adventures forces us to re-interpret many of the incidents that were described in those books, as I've already done for the one about the storm & its aftermath, too... The game of "Poohsticks" clearly represents the offering of sacrifices by throwing them into sacred rivers or other bodies of water, as has also been practised by various better-reported cultures from Humanity's history, probably with some degree of increased prestige going to whoever had their gifts to the gods accepted (& taken below the water) first. The expedition that went off in search of the North Pole would obviously have been an attempt at contacting cold Ithaqua "the Wind-walker", who was bound to the Arctic regions, whilst the declaration that the pole which POOH found was the North Pole despite it being so much closer to POOH's home than that would really have been shows how the influence of the Elder Gods warped the ("Euclidean") geometry of normal time & space. The "honey" that POOH craved so much, which was so sweet to his sense of taste but so bad for him, is clearly a metaphor for knowledge about the Elder Gods with its infamously baneful effect on scholars' sanity: The time when he got stuck in the exit from RABBIT's home ater eating a meal that consisted solely of honey and "condensed milk" (presumably the occult substance that is known as "The Milk of Shub-NiggurRABBIT"...) but no "bread" would thus be a bowdlerised account of an incident when he became too deeply involved with supernatural learning & rituals for gaining power at the expense of his connection with reality (the "bread" that he shunned) and suffered a temporary bout of madness although some of his associates eventually managed to restore him (by prolonged conversation alone, or _ perhaps more probably _ by using treatments of a physical nature as well?) to a more "normal" condition again.
The incident with the HEFFALUMPS & WOOZLES is harder to explain. I initially suspected that their apparent invisibility might indicate an aireous nature (probably making them servants of either Hastur or Ithaqua, or maybe members of the group known collectively as the Lloigor), but I now think it likely that as it was after going around in circles for a while that POOH announced their absence from the scene _ despite his earlier fears _ that he had in fact been worrying about a possible incursion into 'Pooh Corner' by the Hounds of Tindalos (who are always a potential menace at "corners", after all... :-) instead.
And where was Mighty CTHULHU himself during all of those events? Well, consider which of the characters described by Milne (a) was the most different in nature from all of the others; (b) promised to make an imminent return when he had to go away for a while (as I surely don't have to remind you about the carven inscription above the entrance to the dread one's tomb/prison at R'lyeh, do I?); and (c) was _ even in the dsiguised form described here _ given a name that began with the same letter 'C' as his true identity...
Isn't it obvious?
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN = CTHULHU!!!
(So when he went to see them "Changing the guard at Buckingham Palace", just what were the unfortunate people concerned actually being changed?)