by Donald Tyson
Tales of plentiful gold sometimes lure men to the mounds in the plains that mark the entrances to blue-litten K'n-yan, but those who find their way down the passages to the great cavern are never permitted to return to their own world. The insubstantial figures of the race of K'n-yan are sometimes seen walking on these mounds at twilight, either projected there as images during dreams by the powerful telepathic minds of the cavern-dwellers, or stationed there as guardians of the portals to the lower world. Those foolish enough to investigate these spectral sightings vanish without a trace.
(The Mound)
Mi-Go, a word probably derived from the Nepalese Sherpa word metoh meaning "filthy or disgusting," is the name Lovecraft adopted for the abominable snowman or yeti of the Himalayan mountain range. Metoh is a partial and incorrect translation of the term actually used by the Sherpas in the 1920s, meteh kangmi, which means "wild man of the snow." At present the Sherpas favor the name meh-the for the yeti. Lovecraft in his fiction applied the name "Mi-Go" to an alien race, the occasional sightings of which in the Himalayas had given rise to the legends of the abominable snowman. He also associated these aliens with the hills of Vermont. Most of what Lovecraft has recorded concerning this race is contained in his short story The Whisperer in Darkness, but scattered hints appear elsewhere in his fiction.
The Vermont Mi-Go are described as around five feet tall, pinkish in color, their bodies resembling those of crustaceans such as the lobster. They have a pair of large membranous wings on their backs that they fold out of the way, and several sets of limbs. Their heads are "a sort of convoluted ellipsoid" that is covered with short antennae. The intended meaning seems to be that the head does not project much from the body and is without a neck. Lovecraft characterized them as "a sort of huge, lightred crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings." Elsewhere in The Whisperer in Darkness they are said to be "a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with feelers where a man's head would be."
In At the Mountains of Madness Lovecraft referred to the Mi-Go as "half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures." The interior of their bodies is composed of a kind of fungoidal matter; their blood is a thick green juice. They give off a foul odor. Several hours after death, they evaporate into the air and disappear, in a way similar to the bodies of the hybrid Old Ones. So alien is the matter that composes their bodies that they cannot be photographed, because they make no impression on ordinary photographic film. They are more vegetable than animal, but completely unlike anything that grows on this world. Even their atomic structure is said to have a rate of vibration different from common earthly matter.
Lovecraft intimates that there are several species of Mi-Go on Earth. The winged variety that lives in the wooded hills of Vermont is not as intelligent as those wingless Mi-Go that inhabit the remote mountains of Europe and Asia. Even so, the Mi-Go are the most intelligent living things on this planet, and the mental abilities of even the Vermont species is vastly greater than human intelligence. They speak in a strange buzzing voice that can imitate any human language, after they undergo a minor surgery that allows them to produce human speech at all, but among themselves converse silently by changing the colors of their heads, and also employ telepathy.
The Mi-Go first descended from space during the Jurassic Age, while R'lyeh was still above the waves. They fought a great war with the Elder Things and drove them from the northern hemisphere of our planet. They came to Earth seeking metals they could not mine on Yuggoth, the planetoid we know as Pluto, which they now inhabit. The race is not native to Pluto, but traveled across the gulfs of space, some species flying on their wings and others conveyed by machines, to make Pluto the latest planetary colony in their vast empire that extends beyond the bounds of our universe. These membranous wings also serve at times to carry them across the sky, but they are not skillful fliers in the air and prefer to use their legs, either walking upright on two hind legs when they have need of their other limbs to carry burdens, or employing all pairs of their legs to crawl along the ground.
Although the majority of those Mi-Go who colonized the Earth in its past have left it, a few still remain in remote places, such as the wooded hills of Vermont, and the mountains of the Himalayas, where they live in secret in deep mines disguised to look like caves, which they seal behind them with great stones. They continue to mine the metals their race needs but cannot obtain on Yuggoth. They could easily return to the Earth in great numbers and conquer it, but would rather avoid the effort if they can obtain their metals in secret.
In Vermont folktales they are commonly known as "those ones" or "the old ones," the latter being the general term used in Lovecraft's fiction for any ancient, alien race. The Puritan settlers of New England thought them familiars of the Devil, and the Irish and Scottish immigrants believed them to be malignant fairies, but the local Pennacook Indians asserted that they were not natives of our world, but had come long ago from the constellation of the Great Bear to dig the earth for a rock they could not find on their own world.
The Indians said that the Winged Ones, as they called this race, could not eat human food, but were forced to bring their own food down from the stars, as they carried away to their home world on their great wings the oar they dug from the ground. Their presence on Earth was of the nature of mining outposts. Animals shunned and loathed them. They did not harm human beings unless they were spied upon, and then they killed for their own protection. Although they knew the languages of all races, they had no need for language themselves, but communicated by the constantly changing colors on their heads. So claimed the legend of the Pennacooks.
In order to remain informed about the activities of humanity, and to protect their secrecy, the Mi-Go employ those who dwell alone in remote places as their agents, and these reclusive individuals have formed themselves into a cult of worshippers of the Outer Ones, as they call the Mi-Go. The human spies gather information of interest to the Mi-Go, and warn them when there is any danger that their existence may become known. This practice caused the local people of rural Vermont to regard any hermit with suspicion, due to the speculation that the man might be working for "those ones." The passage of the Mi-Go is sometimes betrayed by the distinctive claw-prints they leave in the ground over which they walk, and it is these trails of prints leading to blocked up cave mouths in the Vermont hills that are in large part responsible for the local folktales about these beings.
Perhaps one reason the Mi-Go have managed to remain concealed for so long is their power of mind control. They are able to hypnotize human beings and cloud their thoughts, taking away the force of their will and rendering them ineffectual to oppose the purposes of the Mi-Go, even when humans learn of the existence of this alien race. It is not the greater mass of humanity that the Mi-Go most fear, but a secret cult of human beings that worships Hastur and the Yellow Sign, and is in league with "powers from other dimensions" who seek to track down the Mi-Go. Just as the Mi-Go have enlisted individuals as their agents, so have these mysterious powers employed humans as their instruments in their efforts to persecute the Mi-Go. To elude this questing cult of Hastur, the Mi-Go conceal themselves.
It is the curious practice of the Mi-Go to extract the brains of other intelligent species and encase them in metal cylinders, for the purpose of carrying them through space to the alien worlds of their empire. Some of these worlds lie beyond the bounds of our universe. At these far destinations, the brains are given mechanical bodies in which to function. The Mi-Go do this, not as a torture or punishment, but as a kind of cultural exchange with alien races.
Lovecraft intimated that the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Thombaugh in 1930 was no accident, but was the result of telepathic instructions projected by the Mi-Go from Yuggoth. The Mi-Go believe that it will soon be necessary to reveal their existence to human beings, since the increasingly sophisticated technology of our race will make it impossible for them to remain concealed beneath the ground in thei
r mining colonies. For this reason they have begun selective contact with certain human beings, with the purpose of forming bonds with men in positions of power and authority over whom they can exert their influence.
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Whisperer in Darkness)
"The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be." So wrote H. P. Lovecraft in his short story The Dunwich Horror. It is part of a longer quotation from the Necronomicon, one of only a handful of direct quotes Lovecraft made from the dreaded book that he had seen during his dreams. From this quotation of Alhazred's text we learn that the Old Ones are invisible beings who walk between the spaces of men, or as we might say today, between dimensions. They are large and powerful beings, because they are described as having the ability to "bend the forest and crush the city."
It is not to be supposed that the Old Ones have left the Earth. They are still here, but slightly out of phase with our reality. They share this quality with the fairy race, which is supposed to live in the same places habited by human beings, but in another dimension that renders their bodies and their dwellings invisible and intangible, except under special conditions. According to Alhazred, the Old Ones walk the meadows and stand at the thresholds of our houses without us ever being aware of them, save sometimes by a foul odor that they carry with them.
Alhazred mentions several matters concerning these invisible beings. They can be called by seasonal rites and words of power in lonely places. Traditionally in magic, demonic spirits prefer deserts and wastelands where no human being lives. The reason for this is not evident, but wildernesses have always been reputed to be the haunts of evil spirits, particularly in Arabian mythology, but also in the myths and legends of Greece, Rome, and Judea. The link between evil spirits and wastelands goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia.
When the Old Ones are ritually called, the wind howls and the earth shakes. They are summoned through a dimensional gate that falls under the authority of a being known as Yog-Sothoth. It is through this gate of Yog-Sothoth that the Old Ones travel from their world to our world, and back again. The gate has the appearance of multiple intersecting spheres.
Alhazred wrote that Yog-Sothoth knows where the Olds Ones "broke through, and where they shall break through again." This implies either that there was some attempt to bar the entry of the Old Ones into our earthly reality, or that our world is naturally resistant to their intrusion and must be forcibly entered by them. Yog-Sothoth is described as the "key and the guardian of the gate" by the mad Arab, so it is possible that he must be bargained with before he will allow the gate to open.
The usual assumption is that Yog-Sothoth is one of the Old ones, but this is not stated explicitly by Lovecraft, and Yog-Sothoth does not appear to be the same as these powerful, invisible beings. Perhaps he is a kind of lord or god of the gateway who is set over the Old Ones, somewhat akin to the Roman god Janus, god of comings and goings. It may be that the face he shows when he appears to men is only a symbolic representation of his function, and that no one has seen his true appearance, which is akin to the other invisible Old Ones.
Alhazred mentions that when these Old Ones come into our reality, they sometimes interbreed with human beings. This is in keeping with the medieval lore of demons, which in the legends of the Catholic Church were supposed to copulate with mortal women and engender unnatural children or monsters in their wombs. Angels were also supposed to have the ability to breed children from mortal women, but in this case the offspring were more beautiful and more intelligent than normal human beings. The hybrid children of the Old Ones varied widely in their nature from those who were, in childhood at least, almost indistinguishable from ordinary men to those who were almost identical to the Old Ones themselves.
Lovecraft's story involves the two extremes of such an unholy union, twin brothers bred upon Lavinia Whateley by Yog-Sothoth, ritually evoked for that purpose within a stone circle on Sentinel Hill by her father, the old Wizard Whateley. They were brothers under the skin, but not identical twins. They merely shared the same womb. One brother, Wilbur, was of normal appearance in early childhood but as he aged became less and less human. He grew and matured with abnormal rapidity. When he was killed by a dog at age fifteen, he was over eight feet tall and furry below the waist, with alien growths on his hips and abdomen, and a kind of tail that terminated in a mouth. The other unnamed brother was never remotely like a human being. He was kept imprisoned in the gutted Whateley farmhouse and sustained himself on blood sucked from live cows. Like his father, Yog-Sothoth, he was invisible.
The ultimate purpose of the Old Ones is sobering food for thought. They wish to strip the surface of our world of all corporeal life, both animal and vegetable, and then take the entire planet to another dimension, from whence it fall into our universe countless aeons ago. This transition would involve a sliding or shifting across the dimensional planes, so that the entire Earth became as the bodies of the Old Ones, imperceptible to normal senses, or as Alhazred puts it, "without shape or substance." Lovecraft implied that the Earth would also be taken from its orbit around the Sun, so it may be that a transition through space is also involved. The gate that would allow the Old Ones to initiate this purpose was to be opened by Wilbur Whateley with the voicing of the "long chant," which, as old Wizard Whateley informed his grandson, is to be found on page 751 of the complete English edition of the Necronomicon, the rare John Dee translation.
We might speculate as to why the Old Ones wish to return this planet to the higher dimension from which it fell, and how it came to fall to our lower reality. Is our Earth unique among the planets of our solar system, or perhaps even unique of all the planets in our great galaxy? Does the fall of the Earth from its higher place mirror the myth of the fall from grace of the rebel angels, who were cast down into a dark abyss for their disobedience? Is the fall of the Earth a punishment that the Old Ones seek to nullify? Or do they wish to correct an error? We may speculate about these weighty questions, but Lovecraft provided no information that would allow us to draw any firm conclusions.
The One Ones "cannot take body without human blood," so wrote Wilbur Whateley in his diary. This may be interpreted to mean that the Old Ones cannot become material without intermingling their seed with that of human beings, a rite that requires a sacrifice. The purpose for creating hybrids between humans and Old Ones is to use the hybrids as warriors in the army that will destroy all life on the Earth. However, until a great ritual had been enacted with the Long Chant from the Necronomicon, Wilbur's invisible brother could not be cloned. As Wizard Whateley told his grandson, only the Old ones from beyond could make his brother multiply and do their work. Wilbur died before he was able to conduct the ritual, so the plan of the Old ones for the destruction of all earthly life came to nothing, at least on this occasion.
Wilbur Whateley was able to glimpse the appearance of the Old Ones in the stone circle on top of Sentinel Hill during the rites of May-Eve, and he recorded in his diary that they looked very much like his invisible brother, who he could see in a dim way by using an occult gesture known as the Voorish sign, or by blowing over his brother's misshapen bulk the powder of Ibn Ghazi. No details are provided as to the nature of either of these devices of revealing.
When Wilbur's brother was made momentarily visible by Henry Armitage, he was described as larger than a barn, with a body made of squirming ropes of a jelly-like substance that are compressed together into an egg-shape, and dozens of legs as large as hogs-heads that extend and retract after the manner of pseudopods. The bulk of the thing was covered with numerous bulging eyes and ten or twenty mouths on stalks that ceaselessly open and shut. Its color was gray, with blue or purple rings. This may be taken to be the true appearance of the Old Ones, since Wilbur Whateley testified in his diary that his brother was very like those he saw on Sentinel Hill.
In The Call of Cthulhu, the members of a degenerate Cthulhu cult that held their rites in a wooded swamp south of New Orleans asserted wh
en interrogated by the police that no man has ever seen the Old Ones. Strictly speaking Wilbur Whateley was not a man, so his glimpse of them does not violate this statement. According to the cult, the Old Ones came down from the sky when the world was young. They have lain dead beneath the earth and the sea since before the arising of the human race, but their dead bodies spoke to the first man in his dreams and told him secrets, giving rise to the cult. Cthulhu is described by them as a great priest, but they did not assert that the Old Ones resemble his carven images-they did not know if this was true or not.
One of the cultists, Old Castro, said that the Old Ones had ruled the world and inhabited great cities for aeons before the rise of mankind. They were all dead now, but the remains of their cities could still be seen on certain South Sea islands. There were practices known to the cult that could revive the Old Ones once the stars came around to the right positions in their celestial cycles. He said that the Old Ones had originally come from the stars, carrying their images with them. They were not beings of flesh and blood. They had shape but were not made of matter. When the stars were right they could travel from one world to another through the sky, but when the stars were wrong, they could not live.
Even though the Old Ones were not alive, Old Castro maintained that neither were they dead. They lay in their stone houses in the great undersea city of R'lyeh, protected by the powerful spells of Cthulhu, and would rise again once the stars came right. However, they could not break the spells that held them alone, but must have help from "some force from outside." Meanwhile, they lay in their stone tombs, awake and aware but unable to move. They knew what happened elsewhere in the universe by the power of their telepathy. When mankind evolved, they talked to those few of the first humans who were psychically sensitive in their dreams, and this is the only way they can communicate with human consciousness.