Old Ones (1):
Crinoid Old Ones, Antarctic Old Ones
[HPL Mountains (online text)]: An ancient race of extraterrestrial origin, whose population on earth centered in Antarctica. Most of our information about this race was collected by Lake, Dyer, and Danforth, of the Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition of 1930-31.
Physiology
The rather outre physique of the Old Ones has been minutely described for us by Lake, and can be summarized as follows:
- The are roughly barrel-shaped, about six feet tall. They are dark grey, flexible, and infinitely tough.
- At the top of the body, there is a yellowish, five pointed head with an eye at the end of each point. Red tubes extend from the inner angles of the head and terminate in mouths.
- At the bottom of the body, there is a starfish-like arrangement of five flexible legs, each ending in a triangular paddle. Between each leg there extends a reddish tube used for excretion.
- On the body there are five bulging lengthwise ridges. In furrows between the ridges are wings that can fold up or spread out like fans, to an almost seven-foot wing spread. From each ridge, at the equator, grows a light grey flexible arm that divides and subdivides into a total of 25 tentacles.
During dissection, Lake found the blood to be a thick, dark-green fluid. He noted many evidences of both animal and vegetable characteristics. He concluded that the beings were amphibian, capable of breathing but also adapted to long airless periods. Like vegetables, they are able to obtain nourishment from inorganic sources, but greatly prefer organic and especially animal food.
The physiology of the Old Ones gradually degenerated after settling on earth; they became smaller, coarser and simpler, with many atrophied and vestigial organs. In rock of Cambrian or pre-Cambrian date, Lake found a triangular, striated footprint of the Old Ones, about a foot in greatest diameter. Later he found a similar footprint, but slightly smaller and more primitive or decadent, in strata from Comanchean times.
Dyer concluded that the Old Ones are strictly material and originated within our own space-time continuum, in contrast to the Cthulhu spawn and Outer Ones, whose first sources can only be guessed at.
Effect on Dogs
Dogs show an intinctive hostility to the Old Ones, their acrid scent, and their soapstone stars.
Life Cycle
The Old Ones reproduce like certain primitive vegetables, by way of spore-cases at the tips of the wings. Very few of the Old Ones die except by violence, and they bury their dead vertically in five-pointed mounds with indented dots.
Lake and his party discovered to their cost that Old Ones can be revived after millions of years of frozen dormancy: "awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch," perhaps as a result of exposure to (slightly) increased heat; in the heated tents, Lake noted a thawing of the specimens that restored their "blood" to its fluid state. Later it was observed that "the ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle."
Language
Lake speculated that they could vocalize a wide range of musical piping notes, but no articulate syllables. Later, Dyer and Danforth heard a shoggoth utter the phrase Tekeli-li, in piping tones covering a wide range; they concluded that the shoggoth was imitating the speach of the Old Ones.
The Old Ones' written language consisted of groups of dots; these were observed on their bas-reliefs, on their five pointed soapstones, on their improvised snow graves for their fallen companions, near the cave mouths on the mountains, on the buildings of the antarctic city, and on scraps of paper written on by the recently deceased Old Ones. The shoggoths left similar marks in slime on walls near the dead Old Ones.
Five Pointed Stones
They used small five-pointed soapstones for currency and possibly for other unknown reasons; such stones were found near the specimens discovered by Lake.
Space Travel
The Old Ones traveled through the interstellar ether on their vast membraneous wings, and arrived when earth was still devoid of life. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions. During the Jurassic, the Old Ones discovered that they were no longer able to leave the atmosphere.
Creators of Earth Life
The bodies of the Old Ones reminded Lake of references in the Necronomicon to Elder Things (3) supposed to have created all earth-life as a jest or mistake. Lake also recalled the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake. The Old Ones were the makers and enslavers of earth life, and the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. The Old Ones created earth-life for food and other purposes. They created viscous, living masses called shoggoths to be their servants. They allowed various cell-groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life, exterminating any that became troublesome. They used a primitive simian ancestor of humanity for food and amusement. Eventually the Old Ones lost the art of creating new life from inorganic matter, but remained able to mold species already in existence.
History
The history of the Old Ones was inferred by Dyer and Danforth, on the evidence of bas-reliefs they observed in the antarctic city of the Old Ones. Since Dyer and Danforth had no knowledge of the Old Ones' language, their conclusions should be considered incomplete and tentative at best.
The Old Ones arrived in the Archaean period. At that time, the entire globe was covered with water. Their earliest settlements were in the Antarctic Ocean, but spread further north over time. After a land mass developed near the south pole, they began creating cities on land as well. Few or none of their first cities remained beyond the Archaean stage.
Sometime after the early Achaean and before the Carboniferous period, continents separated from the antarctic land mass and drifted north. Upheavals created new land in the South Pacific. A land-dwelling race of octopi arrived, presumably the spawn of Cthulhu. The Cthulhu spawn and the Old Ones battled over territory, and only the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn. Later, the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with it the city of R'lyeh and the Cthulhu spawn, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet.
Gradually the Old Ones shifted to living mostly on land. By the Carboniferous period, the whole globe, both land and underwater, was scattered with the Old One's vast stone cities. But the antarctic remained the center of their civilisation.
In the middle of the Permian age, the Old Ones waged and eventually won a war of subjugation against their rebellious shoggoth slaves.
During the Jurassic, earth was invaded by the Mi-Go or Outer Ones. The Outer Ones drove the Old Ones out of the northern lands. Still, the Old Ones gradually receded to the south, and by Pliocene times had no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America, and even their ocean cities extended no further than the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude.
Dyer suspected that the Old One's history might be mythologized or censored for reasons of pride, and noted that their annals failed to mention many advanced races of beings who figure in legend.
Antarctic City and Environs
The mountains surrounding the antarctic city of the Old Ones are dotted with stone cubes and ramparts and cavemouths. The cavemouths are often approximately square or semicircular.
The city itself, first revealed through a mirage reflected by the atmosphere over the mountains, features stone buildings with a variety of geometrical shapes such as cones, cylinders, pyramids, and spires in clusters of five. The city extends alongside the mountains for about three hundred miles, but only about thirty miles in width. At least one of the ramparts is star-shaped, and many other features are five-pointed.
The city is near a far older city reputed to have been the original settlement of the Old Ones, when the area was still on a primal sea-bottom.
The Mountains of Madness
The Old Ones of the antarctic city shunned and feared a range of violet mountains, some 300 miles to the west, and over forty thousand feet in height. During the decadent period, some of the Old Ones made strange prayers to those mountains. Dyer suspected that Kadath in the Cold Waste might lie beyond those peaks. The Old Ones recoiled in terror from certain objects that washed down in a river from these mountains. In a mirage, Danforth thought he saw a reflection of what lay beyond those mountains, and never fully recovered his sanity. Although he would never clearly discuss what he saw, his arcane hints included a mention of Yog-Sothoth.
Final Retreat
With the advent of glacial periods between 1 million and 500,000 years ago, the Old Ones withdrew gradually to undersea cities off the antarctic coast and to an abyss of underground water near their antarctic city, kept warm by the Earth's internal heat. There the Old Ones built a new city, partly out of reused elements from the old one. On exploring a tunnel leading downward from the antarctic city toward this abyss, Dyer and Danforth encountered a shoggoth and concluded that that entire race of the Old Ones had probably been destroyed by their shoggoth slaves.
Nyarlathotep
Robert Blake said that the Shining Trapezohedron was fashioned on Yuggoth, and the Old Ones later brought it to earth. The Old Ones treasured it and placed it in its curious box. This fact suggests a link between the Old Ones and Nyarlathotep, since the Shining Trapezohedron is a device for summoning an avatar of that being [HPL Haunter (online text)].
Captives of the Great Race
The psychically-transplanted captives of the Great Race included some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of paleogean Antarctica [HPL Time (online text), AWD Space]. The Great Race sometimes waged war against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centered in the antarctic. S'gg'ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, chiselled pictures on the walls in the city of the Great Race in Western Australia. [Time]
Survivors on Another Planet
In one of his visions, Walter Gilman visited a city where he saw shining metal carvings of the Old Ones, and then a couple of living Old Ones [HPL WitchHouse (online text)].
Synonyms: Elder Ones (1); Great Old Ones (2).
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