Xothan

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Xothans (AKA "Old Ones", "Great Old Ones", "Star-Spawn of Cthulhu", "Race of Cthulhu", and the like) are an alien race from Lin Carter's short stories, The Xothic Legend Cycle

Description

A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing . . . was of a somewhat bloated corpulence . . . It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.... A mountain walked or stumbled.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (fiction)

In Lin Carter's Xothic Cycle, the Xothan race as it is known on Earth was founded by Cthulhu and its "bride" Idh-yaa, who spawned Ghatanothoa, Cthylla, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog, who between them spawned a host of servitor races similar to themselves. Cthulhu is said to be their leader and high priest on Earth, though the race appears to have colonized other worlds besides Earth, with even those entities known to inhabit Earth having once dwelt on other worlds in the Solar System before migrating to Earth.

As aliens originating from the planet Xoth, they are partly immaterial and invisible, entities which somehow "filtered down" or "leaped" or "flew" from that world to Earth in a prehistoric era "when the stars were right", mostly settling into the general vicinity of what is now the Pacific Ocean but then was a major continent which over time would become Mu and/or Lemuria, and which would include regions that are now submerged beneath the ocean such as Ponape, R'lyeh, and the Abyss of Yhe.

These entities are powerfully psychic, apparently arriving on Earth through some form of astral projection from which they either manifested on this world in semi-material bodies they constructed for themselves, or by stealing the bodies of the amphibious denizens of primitive Lemuria in the Pnakotic Age. Though they remain partly immaterial and invisible, the Xothan race can be dimly spied by human beings, perhaps via thought projection; in this way, the Xothans are perceived by human beings in dreams and in person as titanic, gelatinous, polypous, and seemingly amphibious entities, consisting of a variable mix of anthropoid, octopoid,and draconic features, typically including such features as corpulent and pulpy bodies, clawed feet and hands, leathery webbed bat-like wings, and tentacles.

In spite of an aquatic or amphibious appearance, however, the Xothans on Earth who were on Lemuria and Mu when those land masses sank beneath the waves seem to have been trapped in their "houses" or "tombs" by the ocean's waters, imprisoned in these "tombs" in a state that Abdul Alhazred described in the Necronomicon as "not dead, but dreaming" - awaiting an age when their stars will once again be right for their return, an age when Cthulhu will call out psychically to all of humanity to awaken them to the new reality of the new age of the Xothan apocalypse, when man will either instantly die out from the shock or horror, die at the hands of other men who have gone mad from the revelations of the the Old Ones, or go mad themselves, joining in with the throngs of other madmen revel and shout and kill and rave alongside the Xothans in their reign of "a thousand and one years" on earth, until the end of yet another ageon Earth for them comes to past.

The Xothans appear to have mastered their alien arts of science, technology, and magic, becoming powerful wizards and scientists who were able to manipulate energy, matter, time, and space to create many strange wonders of architecture, art, and technology, ranging from biologically engineering servitor races from raw protoplasm, to constructing sprawling cyclopean city complexes of non-Euclidean and extra-dimensional architecture where angles can behave as if they are obtuse and acute at the same time, the interiors are larger than the exterior, hallways extend through the dimension of time rather than space, and other sanity-shaking effects are possible. The technological capabilities of the Xothan civilization - such as it was - are, however, a peculiar mix of brutally primitive - buildings of simple, raw, stone blocks constructed with brute force by Shoggoth slave labor, and other stone-age technologies, for example - and technologies so far in advance of human beings that they seem indistinguishable from magic.


Associated Mythos Elements

Settings:

Great Old Ones:

Servitor Races:

Locations:

Tomes and Cults:


References

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