On the Origin of the Great Old Ones

There are many unanswered questions in the Cthulhu Mythos.

For example, what is that white polypous thing in the bayou?

Who left that note in Dr. Willett's pocket?

What's the relationship between the Fishers from Outside and the devil-flies?

Did life on Earth start with the Elder Things' experiments, or with Ubbo-Sathla?

And of course, what exactly are the Great Old Ones, and how did they originate?

Needless to say, the truest answer to all these questions is: "you decide". Different authors have provided their own diverging answers, and as readers, we're absolutely free to choose the ones we prefer, or to invent our own.

The theory that I'll discuss here, concerning how the Great Old Ones are created, is one of many possibilities. I don't claim it to be some sort of ultimate headcanon or anything, just one idea that I feel would be fun to analyse in detail.

Part One: The Great Odd Ones?

The Great Old Ones are a pretty odd bunch, aren't they? They come in different sizes and shapes, and with different abilities. Chaugnar Faugn and Rhan-Tegoth are just about the right size for a museum exhibition, while Cthulhu is the size of a mountain.

Well, so what? As Yoda says, size matters not. Don't we know for a fact that Chaugnar Faugn can alter its own material structure to increase in size when it wants?

As for shape, so what? Is it so relevant that Atlach-Nacha looks like a spider, and Nyogtha looks like a gelatinous black mass, and Hastur looks like... something?

This is what Hastur looks like. Art by Virgil Finlay.

Why, we know for a fact that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua are shapeshifters! And if we take the Expanded Mythos into consideration, we know that the Great Old Ones have avatars too. Why not? The Outer Gods surely do, as Lovecraft himself has told us.

(Incidentally, since I'm basing most of this analysis in the Lovecraft Circle stories, I should probably acknowledge that the distinction between Great Old Ones and Outer Gods is, technically, a modern invention. However, there's enough evidence in Lovecraft's tales to back it up, so I'm sticking to it. I plan to write another blog about this subject soon)

Still, I can't shake up the feeling that the Great Old Ones are a miscellaneous group. Some of them might have traits in common with each other, sure, but overall they don't seem like they belong to the same species.

There's a kind of uniformity to the Outer Gods that the Great Old Ones lack. And the most likely reason for this is that Lovecraft often referred to the Outer Gods (or "the Other Gods", as he called them) as a group, and described them collectively: giant, tenebrous, invisible, voiceless, mindless... The Great Old Ones, in contrast, were never addressed as a group, and probably never conceived of as a group until August Derleth did so... by lumping them together with the Outer Gods!

You see the problem here? The Great Old Ones, as a group, have no identity! The best way to describe them is "beings that are kind of like the Outer Gods but not quite".

Part Two: Shub-Niggurath is the new Echidna?

How did the Great Old Ones originate? Where did they come from?

I think we can safely say that the Great Old Ones were spawned by the Outer Gods. We see that in the family trees drawn by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith: both start with Azathoth, who spawned other entities, who in turn gave birth to the likes of Cthulhu and Tsathoggua.

This leads to the next question: are the Great Old Ones simply immature Outer Gods?

Now, in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, the larvae of the Outer Gods are a rather common sight in the Dreamlands, drifting through the cosmic winds in outer space, perhaps waiting to land on some unfortunate planet and grow. ...Are we to assume then that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua started life as those cute amorphous babes? Are they the equivalent of some giant cosmic plankton? ...I suppose that's possible.

The larvae of the Outer Gods. I love this image. Art by Mark J. Ferrari.

Yet, going back to the family trees drawn by HPL and CAS, another thing that these trees show is that each generation seems to go down a notch, from "chaos incarnate" all the way down to "humanoid". We start out with Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan of the Central Void. Then we move on to comparatively lesser entities. It's as if Azathoth's blood was diluted with each generation until we get humanoids.

Tsathoggua's granddaughter mated with a Voormi and gave birth to Knygathin Zhaum, who looked basically like a hairless Voormi (er, at first). Meanwhile, Lovecraft's version of the family tree has Cthulhu's descendants include "Yogash the Ghoul" and "Ghoth the Burrower (one of the Little People)". Now, Ghouls and Little People are strange creatures, but definitely closer to humans than they are to Cthulhu. A few generations down we have HPL and CAS themselves, who were completely normal humans (hopefully). Additionally, we know that the Great Old Ones have the power to create other species. The Spawn of Cthulhu, the Miri Nigri, the Tcho-Tchos, etc.

The idea of all these beings (Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, ghouls, humans, etc.) as part of one big dysfunctional cosmic family makes perfect sense, as long as we look upon Azathoth and the others as actual gods and demigods. Honestly, this kind of thing happens all the time in mythology. The fact that a ghoul is the grandchild of a space octopus-man isn't any stranger than how Loki (an Asgardian born from an Ice Giantess) is the father of a giant wolf, a sea serpent and the humanoid goddess Hel. Or the fact that multi-headed dogs and dragons, gorgons and sphinxes and the Nemean lion are all children or grandchildren of Echidna.

And, by the way, the fact that the family trees drawn by HPL and CAS differ at some key points is also perfectly consistent with how real mythology works, in that the parentage of many gods and entities is disputed. One must remember that, even from an in-universe perspective, the Mythos was written down by human beings. Just as in the real world Lovecraft and Smith might have had different ideas about Tsathoggua's parentage, perhaps in-universe Alhazred and Eibon were working with different assumptions as well?

Part Three: Cthulhu the middle manager?

So it seems that the Great Old Ones were spawned by the Outer Gods.

But when the Great Old Ones mate with other species and have children, their bloodline is diluted until we get puny humans and icky formless spawn. What we're seeing here is a variation of one of Lovecraft's favorite themes: degeneration. But for a new Great Old One to be created, we might need an Outer God to sire them.

We know that the Outer Gods reproduce. Randolph Carter has seen their cosmic larvae. Are we to suppose that these larvae will become Great Old Ones someday? Are the Great Old Ones just "juvenile" Outer Gods?

It's possible, but, to me, it doesn't seem likely at all.

In "The Dunwich Horror", we read about Yog-Sothoth's species (i.e. the Outer Gods, although in this story they're called "the Old Ones"). We learn, among other things, about how they're related to Cthulhu.

“

Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly.

„

In other words, Cthulhu is related to the Outer Gods, but is not one of them. It doesn't sound like he's an "Outer God in training" to me.

Another evidence comes from The Whisperer in Darkness, in which Wilmarth tells us:

“

I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth.

„

Now, it's possible that the first and second parts of this statement are unrelated, but I don't think so. By the way the sentence's written, it sounds like Cthulhu's birth really was somehow connected to... What was that? "Half the great temporary stars of history" you say? What does that even mean?

I'll tell you what it means: a "temporary star", in Lovecraft's time, is what we'd call a nova today. Or perhaps a supernova. Sounds like when Cthulhu was born (or left his homeworld), a great number of stars went kaboom! The creation of Cthulhu must have been an epic event, nothing so humble as a larva drifting out of the Dreamlands.

Based on these pieces of evidence, I believe that the Outer Gods have two methods of reproduction.

1. The first method (asexual?) gives birth to larvae, which will grow into more Outer Gods.

1. The second method (sexual?) gives birth to a different order of creatures. Not Outer Gods, but Great Old Ones.

But why? If the Outer Gods can spawn more Outer Gods (by larvae), why do they need to create Great Old Ones at all?

Because the Great Old Ones are valuable assets to communicate with their servitor races. The Outer Gods, for all their power, aren't really fit to communicate with other species. One must recall that they are invisible, voiceless and mindless. Nyarlathotep, "their soul and messenger" has been observed to communicate with humans, but just one messenger (even one with 1001 forms) isn't optimal for keeping track of potentially trillions of servants on countless worlds and galaxies.

(Of the others, Abhoth can speak telepathically to humans too, but there are a number of reasons why I believe Chaosium made a mistake when they classified Abhoth as an Outer God, not least of which because Abhoth describes himself as their "coeval", as opposed to one of them.)

But the Great Old Ones are not like the Outer Gods at all! The Great Old Ones speak to their servants! Cthulhu and Chaugnar Faugn communicate through dreams. Zhar and Lloigor speak telepathically. Tsathoggua might actually speak verbally. While the Outer Gods spend most of their time in the Central Void, beyond time and space, the Great Old Ones dwell on planets. The Great Old Ones are in fact a necessary layer of cosmic middle-management. The interface between creator and cultist.

Part Four: The Gods of Earth need babysitting?

There's another factor in the equation concerning the Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods, and the Outer Gods' larvae. That would be the Gods of Earth, featured in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. Where do they fit in?

Well, despite being also known as "the Great Ones", the Gods of Earth don't seem to have anything in common with the Great Old Ones.

Unlike the Great Old Ones, the Gods of Earth are humanoids, although with some distinctive features (long narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, pointed chin). In the past, the Gods of Earth married the daughters of humans in the Dreamlands, and many Dreamlanders who are their descendants share their distinctive look.

Yet, despite being worshiped as gods, it's very clear that the Gods of Earth aren't particularly powerful in any way. At most, they might have been able to perform some impressive tricks and become worshiped, but the facade of being gods is so thin that the Gods of Earth are actually scared of humans, and prefer to spend their time dancing on top of the Dreamlands' mountain ranges, where mankind can't reach them.

Apparently, the only reason these guys continue to be worshiped at all is because the Outer Gods protect them. Only twice in recorded history did the Outer Gods bother to interfere with Dreamlands' Earth, and one of these was to punish Barzai for pestering the Gods of Earth.

Once again: why? Why would the Outer Gods bother to protect the Gods of Earth? Why are the weakling Gods of Earth so important to them that the ultimate gods are willing to act as babysitters?

One might imagine a number of reasons, ranging from the Gods of Earth being a source of food to the Outer Gods, to being something like Nyarlathotep's pet project. But it seems to me that the most logical idea would be that the Gods of Earth are allies of the Outer Gods. Important allies, it seems.

Just because the Gods of Earth are weak, doesn't mean they can't have an important role in the Outer Gods' plans for the universe. Plans that, according to "The Dunwich Horror", involve reclaiming the Earth.

And yet... That's the Waking World's Earth, though, not the Dreamlands. Are the Gods of Earth present in the Waking World? Actually, I believe they are.

Remember the K'n-yanians from The Mound? Those are aliens who look pretty much like humans, although "their faces had many subtle differences". They claim to have been brought to Earth by Cthulhu, and that humans are their descendants. The K'n-yanians can perform some nice tricks: telepathy, necromancy, becoming invisible, passing through walls, projecting illusory images in the skies... And exploring other parts of the world in their dreams.

K'n-yanians. Can't you picture those faces carved on Mt. Ngranek? Art by Pete von Sholly.

Isn't it logical to assume that the K'n-yanians have access to the Dreamlands too? And if so, could the K'n-yanians and the Gods of Earth be in fact one and the same?

The K'n-yanians, a humanoid species with psychic abilities, worshiped as gods in the Dreamlands, and important enough to be protected by the Outer Gods and to have been brought to Earth by Cthulhu.

Keep this in mind, I'll come back to it later!

Part Five: Wilbur Kathulhn?

Let's go back a little bit. So far, we've established that the Outer Gods seem to have two methods of reproduction. They can spawn larvae which presumably grow to become new Outer Gods. Or they can spawn Great Old Ones.

How do they do the latter?

In "The Dunwich Horror" we witness the second way in which the Outer Gods can have children: by mating with mortals. The Whateley twins are sons of Yog-Sothoth.

But surely, the Whateley twins aren't Great Old Ones! ...Are they?

Let's think about this. At 15 years old, Wilbur Whateley was almost 9 ft tall, and his brother was the size of a barnyard. Only Wilbur's head and hands could pass off as human, the rest was a monstrous amalgamation of eyes, scales, fur, tentacles, and tail that had to be concealed by his clothes. The Dunwich Horror was an invisible monstrosity with multiple legs, mouths, and a human face.

Wilbur Whateley, a kind of intimidating teenager. Art by I. N. J. Culbard.

The fact that the two brothers look nothing alike is foreshadowed in the Necronomicon passage that describes the children born to mortal women who have been impregnated by Outer Gods: "of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them". This plurality of appearances is exactly what we observe in the Great Old Ones!

The Whateley twins were killed rather easily: Wilbur torn apart by a dog, his brother destroyed by incantation spells. But what if the world hadn't been saved by a pooch and a librarian? What would have happened if the Whateleys had continued to grow? Increasingly larger, perhaps increasingly more monstrous... Perhaps, if allowed to live longer, they would become increasingly harder to kill?

The conclusion we can draw from all this is that the Great Old Ones aren't just spawned by the Outer Gods: they are, specifically, the result of a union between an Outer God and a mortal.

It's interesting to imagine a scenario in which Wilbur Whateley survived to grow as large as Cthulhu and opened up the gates for his father's race to reconquer Earth. After that, would he have left the Earth at some point to settle on some other world? Perhaps along with his twin brother (à la Zhar and Lloigor)? Would he have created a new race (the Spawn of Wh'lburr?) to serve him?

Conversely, it's interesting to imagine that Cthulhu wasn't always a god, but was once just like Wilbur: a man born to a completely normal woman of his home planet.

This idea is not new: apparently, no less a personage than Lin Carter might have believed in it! Because Carter claims that Cthulhu, like the Whateley twins, is the son of Yog-Sothoth, who mated with "a female denizen of a world called Vhoorl", "deep in the twenty-third nebula".

Even more interesting is that, unlike Khhaa'yngnaiih (the name of Cthulhu's home planet in Neil Gaiman's "I, Cthulhu"), Vhoorl is not something that Carter made up, but originates from a Mythos story called "The Guardian of the Book", by Henry Hasse.

Now, Hasse is one of the lesser known members of the Lovecraft Circle, and most of these have at least one claim to fame (Searight created the Eltdown Shards, Rimel created Yith, etc.). "The Guardian of the Book" is not an inconsequential tale by any means (for one thing, it is the first story to confirm that B'Moth and the Hunters from Beyond are part of the Mythos), but it's probably most notable for introducing Vhoorl, the most commonly accepted name for Cthulhu's homeworld today.

However, Hasse doesn't claim that Cthulhu is from Vhoorl. Not exactly anyway.

What happens in the story is that the protagonist meets a strange little man from another planet, who gives him a nameless book to read. The book's preface tells of a seemingly normal guy, a mathematician named Kathulhn, who lived on the planet Vhoorl, and who used higher mathematics to contact beings from other dimensions: a collection of creatures adequately known as the Evil Ones.

"You have not even thought to connect that 'Kathulhn' mentioned in the Preface with that tentacled and ever-damned Kthulhu reputed to have come to Earth eons ago", the strange little man points out at one point, but explains no further.

Taken at face value, "The Guardian of the Book" isn't really compatible with the rest of the Mythos. The Evil Ones are nothing like the Outer Gods, and Kathulhn is simply killed, making it difficult to assume that Kathulhn could have been the same entity as Cthulhu. But what if the story told in the little man's book was a fictionalized account mixed with some kernels of truth?

Lin Carter seems to suggest so, not only by making Vhoorl the homeworld of Cthulhu, but by choosing Yog-Sothoth specifically to be the father of Cthulhu, and claiming that Yog-Sothoth mated with "a female denizen" (i.e. presumably an ordinary mortal woman) of Vhoorl. What Carter describes is so suggestive of "The Dunwich Horror" that I can only assume that the parallel is completely intentional.

Cthulhu, or Kathulhn, wasn't born a god. He was born to a Vhoorlian woman who was her planet's equivalent of poor Lavinia. The story of how he contacted the "Evil Ones" might have been allegorical, but perhaps he did contact higher entities, and perhaps he didn't really die, after all. "That is not dead which can eternal lie..."

Part Six: When the stars are right... they go BOOM?!

But wait! As much fun as it might be to imagine that Cthulhu and all other Great Old Ones came to be in the same way that the Whateley twins did... Doesn't that contradict Wilmarth's statement from The Whisperer in Darkness?

“

I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth.

„

As I said, there are many ways to interpret this statement, including the possibility that the first half is completely unrelated to the second, i.e. Wilmarth is just telling us of two unrelated things he learned. However, the way the phrase is written suggests some relation, perhaps not necessarily of strict cause-and-effect (i.e. Cthulhu's birth was the reason why half the temporary stars in history flared forth).

As I said, "temporary stars", in Lovecraft's time, are what we'd call novae or possibly supernovae today. Supernovae are kind of rare: the last one that occurred in our galaxy was witnessed by Johannes Kepler in 1604. Ordinary novae are more common, but seem to be restricted to binary star systems. Whatever the case, the image conjured by the sentence is of some enormous event, with new lights appearing as "temporary stars" in the night sky and possibly disastrous results for the biospheres of nearby planets.

When the Whateley twins were born on Groundhog Day, er, I mean, "Candlemas", the dogs barked a lot and the creatures of the hills were noisy. ...And that's it. No stars blew up that night, as far as we know. Does that nullify the idea that Cthulhu was born in the same way that Wilbur was?

Not necessarily. Perhaps the "temporary stars" come later...

Let's remember that the Outer Gods were planning to reconquer the Earth, and Wilbur was going to "open up the gates" to them, so that the Earth could be cleared off. Wilbur himself wonders "how I shall look when the Earth is cleared and there are no Earth beings on it".

"No Earth beings" left. Yup, there's no doubt here that the Earth is going to be completely sterilized, and that no native life will remain. One of the ways the Outer Gods might be planning to accomplish this would be to induce the sun to go nova. Or perhaps the "gates" that Wilbur is supposed to open are portals leading to the interior of a star, or some other place from which destructive blasts of energy will flare forth, scorching the Earth in the process.

It would be indeed terrifying for Wilmarth to learn that this was the fate of Vhoorl when Kathulhn became Cthulhu. Even more so if he knew that roughly a month before, the Earth had been spared from a similar fate by the timely intervention of a library's guard dog.

Part Seven: The grand and messed-up history of Earth!

We might never understand the reason why the Outer Gods would want to leave the Central Void and conquer planets like Earth. Just as the microscopic animals that drift in the ocean probably don't understand why a whale would leave the abyssal depths and surface to breathe (and probably swallow them up in the process). The whole picture is literally too big for them to grasp.

Prehistoric Earth. Art by Jeff Remmer.

Whatever the reason, at some point, the Outer Gods ruled the Earth. Invisible but not imperceptible. "The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness". It's possible that they reigned supreme during the Cenozoic, after the Great Race of Yith escaped into the far future. It's likely that the Flying Polyps were their agents, along with a number of Great Old Ones who are known to dwell on our planet. Atlach-Nacha, Chaugnar Faugn, Zushakon, Rlim Shaikorth, Zhar, Lloigor, etc. Each one with servitor races that followed them. The native races of Earth could communicate with the Great Old Ones in dreams, and formed cults to worship them.

At some point, just as the whale returns to the ocean depths, so did the Outer Gods return to their own realm. The Flying Polyps went underground, and so did many of the Great Old Ones, paving the way to the emergence of man.

However, the Outer Gods had plans to return. And for that, they would need a compatible species that Yog-Sothoth could mate with, and sire a new Great Old One. A Great Old One born, not out of a distant world or a distant era, but to the Cenozoic Earth itself. One born under our familiar constellations, and capable of opening up the gates.

The Outer Gods' agents still had enough influence to communicate with the Earth's native races in dreams and keep the cults alive. The likes of Cthulhu, Tsathoggua and Yig were worshiped by the native intelligences of our planet: the reptilian Yothics, the anthropoid Voormis, and the black-snouted Winged Ones. But these species weren't quite compatible with the Outer Gods. Made out of too ordinary matter, their genetics didn't add up.

We know that the Great Old Ones could and did mate with the Earth races (e.g. Tsathoggua's granddaughter mated with a Voormi), but this route only led to the creation of new races like the Ghouls and the Formless Spawn. It wouldn't lead to the creation of a new Great Old One. For that, the injection of fresh Outer God blood would be needed. They needed something compatible with Yog-Sothoth specifically, and the native Earth races weren't.

The Shoggoths might have been just as incompatible, or simply not intelligent enough or developed enough at this point (or perhaps they were deemed somehow unfit due to having been created by Cthulhu's enemies, the Antarctic Elder Things).

Another servant race that might have been compatible, the Mi-Go, did have outposts on Earth, but wasn't really adapted to survive there. The Mi-Go can't fly properly on Earth, can't consume Earth food, hide away from sunlight and avoid the moonlight. Modifying the Earth's biosphere to suit the Mi-Go might have worked, but would likely have led to the extinction of the other servant races (the Yothics, Voormis and Winged Ones), which would not benefit the Outer Gods at this point.

Yog-Sothoth and the others had no choice but to introduce a new species. A species bred and raised in the safe environment of the Dreamlands.

And thus the so-called Gods of Earth, protégés of the Outer Gods, were brought to the Waking World by Cthulhu, to eventually become known as K'n-yanians. Looking outwardly human, they did have some traits in common with the Outer Gods that created them. They could become invisible or intangible, and had access to psychic abilities and the power to manifest themselves as ethereal beings in the sky, and to visit the Dreamlands.

Cross-breeding the anthropoid Gyaa-Hua (possibly just another name for the Voormis, or a related species) with the reptilian Yothics gave birth to the Gyaa-Yoth species, but who knows what else? Could the K'n-yanians themselves have mated with the Yothics and given rise to the Serpent People, who share their capacity for illusion and necromancy? Could they have mated with the Gyaa-Hua and given birth to the human race, of which some individuals are capable of magic as powerful as mind transference? What else did science, cross-breeding and sorcery give birth to? White Apes? Deep Ones? Worms of the Earth?

Whatever else happened, we know that humans descend from the K'n-yanians.

In the Dreamlands, the descendants of the "Gods of Earth" share some distinctive features. In the Waking World, it seems that the lineage became more mixed. But the human species still had K'n-yanian blood in them, and hence the existence of witches and sorcerers, people capable of channeling psychic abilities, influencing the weather or the minds of animals. Necromancy, mind transference, extrasensory perception... All legacies of the K'n-yanians who mated with mankind's anthropoid ancestors. Alien heritages mixed up in a bubbling gene pool, until a wizard named Whateley realized that his daughter was compatible with Yog-Sothoth, and that their union would spawn the new Great Old Ones needed to signal the return of Yog-Sothoth's race. To open up the gates, so that the Earth would be scorched and a new "temporary star" would be visible in the sky of distant worlds, just like when Vhoorl was consumed several aeons ago, when Kathulhn became Cthulhu.

What would have happened to the loyal servitor races and cultists? Would they have been consumed indiscriminately or transported safely to another place (the Dreamlands?) to continue to serve their masters?

We'll never know, because this ragnarok was fortunately prevented. ..Or was it just postponed?

People who have been body-snatched by the Yithians can tell that mankind's reign will end at some point, and the next era will be one of peace and prosperity for the Yithians, inhabiting the bodies of the Coleopterans. The Flying Polyps will be truly extinct then. But the Coleopterans themselves won't last forever, and there will be other races after them, up until the Earth's dying days.

Is this just one timeline out of an infinite number of possibilities?

In the Central Void where time is meaningless, Azathoth dreams to the sound of flutes, "whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining gives each frail cosmos its eternal law". Our universe is but one of many, just as the theory I just wrote about here is merely one of many. The possibilities are limited only by Azathoth's imagination, and by our own!

The Court of Azathoth. Art by Nick Smith.