Great Race of Yith
The
Great Race of Yith are fictional
aliens in the
Cthulhu Mythos of
H. P. Lovecraft. They first appeared in Lovecraft's
short story "
The Shadow out of Time" (
1936). They are called the
Great Race because they are the only beings to have conquered time.
[T]he Great Race ... waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come – for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. . . The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them – the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago.
—H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"
The Great Race are beings of enormous intellectual and
psychic powers that once dwelt on the dying world of Yith. They escaped the destruction of their home planet by
transferring their minds to the bodies of a species native to the Earth in the far distant past. They lived on this planet for 200 million years or so, in fierce competition with the
flying polyps, until this enemy finally destroyed their civilization near the close of the
Cretaceous era (about 50 million years ago).
In the bodies they inhabited on the Earth, they were tall and cone-shaped, rising to a point with four strange appendages – two terminating in claws, a third in a "trumpet", and the fourth, a yellow globe which functioned as a sensory organ. The unique ability of this scientifically advanced
race was to travel through time by swapping minds with creatures of another era. This allowed them to satisfy their interest in human culture, science, and occult beliefs. Occupied beings, their minds transferred to Yithian bodies against their will, learned as much as possible about the societies in which they dwelt; meanwhile, the "captive minds" were simultaneously queried by skilled inquisitors.
Although captive minds were prisoners, they were nonetheless granted some freedoms in exchange for their cooperation. Those captive minds who cooperated with the Great Race were allowed to wander the Yithian cities at will and to browse the Yithian's gigantic library, which contained metallic tubes with scrolls that recorded the histories of uncounted alien races, including humanity. Creatures inside a Yithian body could also communicate with other captive minds from across the universe (and beyond). Once the Great Race had learned all they could from a captive mind, the occupied being's intellect was swapped back, with the additional precaution of erasing all knowledge of the Great Race.
Because the Great Race travelled to the future as well as the past, they foresaw their own destruction by the flying polyps. Before the fateful day, the Great Race transferred their best minds forward through time into the bodies of the "beetle folk" (the
Coleopterous race), Earth's dominant species after humankind. One of the factors involved may have been the fact that the flying polyps are completely gone by this point in time
[Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. -The Shadow Out of Time.].
The Lost City of
Pnakotus (also called the
Library City) is located in
Australia's
Great Sandy Desert. This primordial city is where the Great Race housed their enormous library.
The library of Pnakotus held the
Pnakotic Manuscripts, a legendary tome containing a detailed chronicle of the Great Race's history, among other things. Copies of this manuscript would later be passed down through the ages, eventually falling into the hands of sinister cults which would guard them into modern times.
*In the
Futurama episode "
A Bicyclops Built for Two", a creature resembling a purple Yithian can be seen as a would-be bride.
*In
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the Great Race and its advanced technology play a part in the story.
*:—"Pnakotic Manuscripts", pp. 242–3. Ibid.:—"Pnakotus", p. 243. Ibid.
*
*
"The Shadow Out of Time" by H. P. Lovecraft
