Sargon Earth - Fleshing Out

[Beatriz]

B_Munro wrote from the Alternate History travel guide about Sargon Earth, described below:

56.) Sargon Earth – the world is currently in the middle of a nuclear cold war between a vast Middle Eastern Empire descended from the ancient Akkadian Empire of Sargon the way Qing China was descended from the Shang Dynasty, and a vast American empire emerging from a blending of Meso-American and Carthaginian/Phoenician influences. A third great power is India, which maintains careful neutrality and follows a Polytheistic faith of positively Lovercraftian weirdness and self-mutilating ritual, much aided by modern medicine. (But at least they don’t indulge in mass human sacrifice in the Xizicoatl fashion).

There is no China: much of North China in this TL is taken up by backwards Caucasian kingdoms, while the Tibeto-Burman speaking people to the south have some largish states, but have a culture quite alien to the Chinese of OTL (the omnipresent masks are creepy, not to mention the use of elected castrated monarchs before the Three Heavens and Seven Hells revolutions of the 1920s brought Hevelic government to much of the area). Northern Europe is a war-torn land of barbarism. The Seven Rivers Empire (Egypt to the Indian border) is a fairly civilized place, its dual male-female God and the underlying Cosmic Spirit/Force a bit more understandable to outsiders, although some may be made uncomfortable by the stink of perfume (in a dry and overpopulated land, water is too scarce for frequent bathing

How do you plausibly get cultures that are frankly, alien to OTL sensibilities like what is described for the (Harappan?) Indians whose not-Hindu (POD before the IndoEuropean migrations) features Lovecraftian weirdness , ritual torture etc or the TibetoBurman mask cultures?

What does genuinely Lovecraftian polytheism look like? A pantheon of Malevolent deities to be placated?