by Donald Tyson
Eventually, the Pacific island of R'lyeh, upon which the primary city of Cthulhu and his spawn resided, sank into the sea, and the Elder Race once again reigned supreme and unopposed over the entire world. It was during this period that they made the biological experiments that eventually resulted in the rise of the human species. They fought a second war, this time a war of rebellion, against their own creations the shoggoths, which over time evolved advanced brains capable of resisting the hypnotic psychic commands of the Elder Race. Through the use of atomic weapons the shoggoths were completely subjugated-or so the Elder Race believed.
During the Jurassic Age, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, a new alien threat descended from the skies, the race known as the Mi-Go, beings with the general shape of crustaceans whose bodies were half-fungous in nature. Lovecraft speculated through his narrator that they are the same creatures known in legend as the abominable snowman or yeti. The Mi-Go were fearsome warriors and drove the Elder Race from all the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere, but could not displace them from their undersea cities. In basic makeup the Mi-Go were similar to the spawn of Cthulhu-capa- ble of reshaping and reintegrating their physical forms in ways impossible to the purely material Elder Race, which for all its toughness was made of ordinary matter.
The Elder Race gradually lost much of its advanced science as its civilization decayed. The ability to fly through the aether of space on their wings was lost, although they could still propel themselves through the air or the waters of the oceans. The ability to subsist indefinitely and function in a normal manner without eating was also lost. The Elder Race preferred to consume meat, either that of the sea which they ate raw, or that of land animals which they cooked. They eventually retreated to their most sacred place, the original settlement, which at the time the Elder Race arrived on the barren Earth had been deep under the sea, but which eventually was thrust up into an Antarctic plateau some four miles high. It was here that they perfected their final and most magnificent city.
Their greatest foe, the one that ultimately doomed them as a race, was the coming of the glacial periods. The relentless ice sealed their great city and made it into a tomb where some of them lay dormant through the ages. Others retreated back into the open sea, but most made their way into a great underground ocean beneath Antarctica, which they may perhaps still inhabit. Lovecraft's narrator does not offer a firm opinion as to whether they survived or perished. Their shoggoths, however, did survive in caverns beneath the surface of the city, and still remember the age-old hatred of their former masters.
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Shadow Out of Time)
In Uganda are cyclopean ruins said by the local tribe to be older than mankind, and once an outpost of the "Fishers from Outside," as well as of the evil gods "Tsadogwa and Clulu." The first of these two names is probably a degeneration of the name "Tsathoggua," and the second is certainly a variant form of the name "Cthulhu." The Fishers from Outside would seem to be the Old Ones.
(Winged Death)
The gods of Earth, who have their habitation atop Kadath in the Cold Waste, in the dreamlands. They are watched over by the Other Gods.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
In The Shadow Out of Time, Lovecraft presented a race of time-spanning beings he called the Great Race. They dwelled upon the Earth from one billion until fifty million years ago, and had the curious ability to project their minds through time, both into the past and into the future, although it was much easier and also more useful for them to project into the future, where they could acquire future arts and sciences. When one of their explorers located a suitable host for its mind in the time period it had decided to visit, an exchange took place in which the mind of the host fell back into the past and took up resident in the body of the time-traveler, while the mind of the time-traveler entered and occupied the empty vessel of the host.
It was thus a kind of possession across time. The host organism remained outwardly unchanged, but its self-identity was that of the member of the Great Race that had entered it. Lovecraft asserted in his story that all of the great prophets in human history were the result of these time-spanning possessions by members of the Great Race. When a man suddenly became elevated by a higher genius, and gained remarkable abilities of which he had never before shown any sign, it was one of the Great Race inhabiting his vacant shell, while that man's mind resided in the body of the timetraveler not less than fifty million years in the past. Although Lovecraft did not dare to state such a thing, it would be reasonable to speculate that Jesus was a man possessed by the mind of a Yithian, which abandoned its host shortly before his crucifixion.
Sometimes the members of the Great Race who were on the point of death projected forward through time permanently, never meaning to return to their dying bodies. When they projected into a human being the result was outwardly a sudden and complete change in personality that remained for the duration of the human host's life. Usually, the possession was only temporary and was done as a way to explore the future. When the mind of one of the Great Race wished to return to the past and its own body, it used its host to build the machine it required to mentally travel across the ages. This was a mechanical device of rods, wheels, and mirrors, having one large convex and circular central mirror. The size of the device was not great-around two feet tall, by one foot wide, and one foot deep.
The members of the Great Race were described by Lovecraft as iridescent, rugose cones ten feet in height and ten feet across at the base, with four distensible limbs that contained the head and other organs spreading from the apex. They used the huge claws attached to the ends of two of these foot-thick limbs for communication, by clicking them and rubbing them. Another limb had on its end "four red, trumpet-like appendages" used to ingest a liquid nourishment, and on the final limb there was a yellowish round head some two feet in diameter, having three large, dark eyes spaced around its circumference. From the top of the head grew four thin, gray stalks with flower-like terminations, and from its bottom dangled eight greenish tentacles. It is these tentacles that were used to manipulate small objects such as a pen, not the claws, which were reserved for carrying heavier objects such as books. The beings moved after the manner of a snail, by means of a rubbery gray substance that fringed the base and provided locomotion by rhythmic expansion and contraction.
They needed no sleep, being of a vegetable nature. Their blood was a thick green ichor, and they reproduced by means of spores that grew in clusters on the fringe around their bases and developed only under water. There were few youngsters of the species since their lifespan averaged four or five thousand years.
These are not the original bodies of this race, which perished aeons ago on the distant and dead planet of Yith. When the Great Race foresaw the death of their planet, they sent their minds searching through space and future time for the best replacement bodies, and found the species of conical creatures in what to them was Earth's future, but is to us 600 million years in the past. The conical species was ancient even then, having existed for 400 million years. A vast mental migration took place in which the minds of the Great Race seized permanent control of their new bodies, and the minds of the displaced conical creatures were trapped in the old vacated bodies on dying Yith. Lovecraft described the original bodies as a "horror of strange shapes," though whether the horror was inherent in the shapes, or was only produced by unfamiliarity, is not clear. The minds of the Great Race inhabited their new conical bodies continuously until fifty million years ago, when they escaped destruction again by departing in another great mental migration into our future, where they will take up residence in the bodies of what Lovecraft described as a "coleopterous species," a race of intelligent beetles that will become the ruling race of this planet immediately after the passing away of mankind.
When they came from Yith, they found this world and three other planets of our solar system ruled by an alien race of "half-polypous" creatures from
beyond our cosmos that were blind and only semi-material, so that at times they were not visible to the naked eye. Although wingless, they possessed the ability to fly through the air. It appears to be the same race known in the Necronomicon as the Old Ones. The Yithians found it impossible to reason with the Old Ones, or establish any common understanding due to their utterly alien natures and thought processes, so they used their knowledge of science to build weapons that drove the Old Ones from their windowless cities of black basalt and into caverns beneath the surface of the ground.
From their arrival on our planet until their departure from their conical bodies into the beetle race of our future, the Yithians kept constant watch over the gateways to the underworld where dwelled the remnants of the Old Ones. It was a subject they did not discuss with the captive minds that studied in their great library. Toward the end of their residence in the conical species, there was a sense among the Great Race that the Old Ones were growing more powerful and gathering their resources for some kind of retaliation. Lovecraft intimates that it was just such an attack from the Old Ones that was the disaster that drove the Yithians to see refuge in our future.
The Great Race traversed the ancient world in enormous air ships, or boat-like vehicles powered by atomic engines, which they drove along broad roads. Their libraries contained vast stores of knowledge culled from all ages. Indeed, they were said to contain the sum total of all knowledge of all the races that had ever existed both in the past and in the future. The mind of a host species that had undergone an exchange with the mind of a member of the Great Race, and found itself inhabiting one of these rugose cones, was permitted to study in the library at the capital city of Pnakotus once it understood its situation and grew reconciled to its fate, which was usually not permanent but temporary. This happened after the Great Race finished interrogating the displaced mind to learn all that could be readily gained from it that might be of any interest.
The study was a way for the entrapped alien mind to pass the time, while waiting for its return to its own body. It also served as a way for the Great Race to extract every possible bit of useful information from the alien mind, which was encouraged to write down its thoughts and memories in the library. For this purpose ink, paper, and pens were always provided. The books were printed on sheets of tough cellulose and bound in such a way that they opened from the top downward rather than from the side. Each book was kept in its own individual protective case of light, gray metal that was decorated with mathematical designs and marked with identifying hieroglyphics.
The library at Pnakotus was adapted to the bodies of the Great Race, having no chairs, but tall pedestals for the placement of the countless books that lined the walls in wooden shelves. The pedestals also held crystal lamps to facilitate reading and writing. The library was a vast stone building with high, vaulted ceilings of massive blocks and round glazed windows in its stone walls that were protected with heavy bars, to prevent escape attempts by the captive displaced minds from the future as they pursued their strange and unsought course of studies. Few tried to escape, since they recognized the futility of the attempt. They became reconciled to their situation. A human being who returned to his own body after the possessing mind of the Great Race had finished using it usually retained no detailed recollection of what he had learned in the library, but might remember vague impressions of the city of Pnakotus and the surrounding primordial jungle in later dreams.
The Necronomicon alludes to a secret cult of human beings that has a partial knowledge of the Great Race, and that sometimes gives aid to these time travelers in their explorations of their future, which is our present. The Great Race is also mentioned in parts of the text of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and Lovecraft asserted that ruins of its cities can still be found beneath the sea, in the form of vast blocks of stone that outline giant causeways or foundations of colossal buildings, but appear too large to be artificially cut. The ruins of Pnakotus itself lie beneath the Great Sandy Desert of Australia, where remnants of the library survive in our own time, even after the passage of fifty million years.
(The Shadow Out of Time; The Challenge from Beyond)
The Earth of Lovecraft's weird fiction is not solid, but hollow, at least in part. In the story The Mound, co-written with Zealia Bishop, Lovecraft described three vast voids beneath the plains of Oklahoma, one above the other. The highest of the three, which is far below the surface of the ground, is blue-litten K'n-yan, a great cavern illuminated by a natural blue radiance that is so large the roof cannot be seen from the floor through the auroral glow. It is inhabited by a race of beings that somewhat resemble the Plains Indians, having copper-colored skin and high cheekbones, but their heads are elongated, whereas those of the Indians are round. Indeed, the human race may be genetically related to them. They were carried across the stars to our planet in the distant past by Cthulhu, who they continue to worship as a god along with the Father of All Serpents, Yig.
K'n-yan is connected to the surface by a number of narrow passages that exit the earth through ancient stone doorways. At one period in the distant past, the men of K'n-yan colonized the surface, creating the civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, but a great flood drove them back beneath the ground to their blue-litten home. They still occasionally appear near mounds that were erected at their doorways, to the bewilderment and terror of human beings, who regard them as ghosts. This error is promulgated by the ability of the men of K'n-yan to project their images to the surface during their dreams, and to make their physical bodies insubstantial or ghost-like for the purpose of walking through walls or other solid barriers. But those most often glimpsed are the ones placed as sentries at the doorways to warn off curious human beings, or capture those who will not heed the warning.
The local Wichita Indians who saw these apparitions called them "those people" or the old people" or "they who dwell below." Chief Gray Eagle of the Wichitas specifically referred to them as "the old ones." Here we encounter again the generic use of the term Old Ones in Lovecraft's fiction to designate an ancient alien race.
The race of K'n-yan are intellectually advanced. They use telepathy for communication, although they have not forgotten how to speak with their voices. At one time their science was perfected to a high degree, but it was allowed to decay, so that in our own period they no longer use machines for transportation but ride on the backs of genetically modified beasts known as gyaa-yothn, which are carnivorous quadrupeds with hairy backs, humanoid faces, and a single horn in their foreheads. These disturbing creatures were bred from a genetic hybrid of the reptilian race of red-litten Yoth, combined with degenerate human beings captively bred by the race of K'n-yan for slave labor and as a food source.
The inhabitants of K'n-yan have ceased to be intellectuals and have become sensualists who seek only physical and emotional stimulation to relieve the tedium of their endless lives, for they have defeated death and can live forever unless they grow so weary of it that they end their own existence. One of their amusements is the torture of their human slaves, which they do before large crowds in enormous circular amphitheaters similar to those of ancient Rome. When the slaves die from this mistreatment, they are transformed by the ancient sciences of the race into animated corpses and used for purposes of field labor.
Two primary gods are worshipped by the copper-skinned men of K'n-yan, the octopus-headed Cthulhu who carried their race across the stars to Earth, and Yig, the Father of Serpents. However, there are temples in K'n-yan erected to Yig, Tulu, Nug, Yeb, and the Not-to-Be-Named One. "Tulu" is the local name for Cthulhu. At one time Tsathoggua the toad-god was worshipped in the form of black idols discovered in redlitten Yoth, the cavern world that lies immediately below K'n-yan. The men of K'n-yan, exploring the land of Yoth, discovered the cult of Tsathoggua preserved in the Vaults of Zin, chambers that lie beneath the largest ruined and nameless city of Yoth. They carried the black stone idols and written scrolls of the cult to their own world, where it waxed so greatly in po
pularity that their capital city came to be called "Tsath," in honor of Tsathoggua.
They learned that the idols of Tsathoggua were not native to the lost reptilian race of Yoth, but had been looted from the land of N'kai, which is called black N'kai because it has no natural illumination. Just as the race of K'n-yan had carried the idols up from Yoth, the race of Yoth had carried them up from N'kai, a cavern world below Yoth. When the men of K'n-yan began to explore N'kai with their enormously powerful atomic searchlights, what they found caused them to seal up all the entrances to N'kai, and to destroy every trace of the Tsathoggua cult in their own land. They discovered that N'kai was not deserted, but was inhabited by viscose beings of black ooze that moved by flowing along stone channels, and the terrible realization came to them that it was the looting of the idols of Tsathoggua that had brought about the destruction of the reptilian race of red-litten Yoth.
The primary building metal used in K'n-yan is gold, which they possess in great abundance. For this reason they value it scarcely at all, but cherish a metal carried with them down from the stars that is magnetic to itself, dark, mottled, and lustrous. This was transported by mighty Cthulhu across space in the form of various idols and cultic items, but at one point in the history of K'n-yan some of the metal was minted into coins and used as the basis for the monetary system of the land. These coins were around two inches in diameter, stamped with an image of the octopus head of Cthulhu on one side, and the serpentine body of Yig on the other. Gray Eagle possessed one as a talisman.