Elder Thing

Description of a partial headless body:

Six feet end to end, three and five-tenths feet central diameter, tapering to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths—combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans ... which gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in the Necronomicon.

—H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

In the Mythos canon, the Elder Things were the first extraterrestrial species to come to the Earth, colonizing the planet about one billion years ago.[4] They stood roughly eight feet tall and had the appearance of a huge, oval-shaped barrel with starfish-like appendages at both ends. The top appendage was a head adorned with five eyes, five eating tubes, and a set of cilia for "seeing" without light. The bottom appendage was five-limbed and was used for walking and other forms of locomotion. The beings also had five leathery, fan-like retractable wings and five sets of branching tentacles that sprouted from their torsos. Both their tentacles and the slits housing their folded wings were spaced at regular intervals about their bodies.

Lovecraft described the Elder Things as vegetable-like or echinoderm-like in shape, having radial symmetry instead of the bilateral symmetry of bipeds. They also differed in that they had a five-lobed brain. The Elder Things exhibited vegetable as well as animal characteristics, and in terms of reproduction, multiplied using spores, although they discouraged increasing their numbers except when colonizing new regions. Though they could make use of both organic and inorganic substances, the Elder Things were carnivorous by preference. They were also amphibious.

The bodies of the Elder Things were incredibly tough, capable of withstanding the pressures of the deepest ocean. Few died except by accident or violence. The beings were also capable of hibernating for vast epochs of time. Nonetheless, unlike many other beings of the Mythos, the Elder Things were made of normal, terrestrial matter.

The technology that the Elder Things possessed was not described at length, but was described as being extremely advanced. They are also revealed in At the Mountains of Madness as being the creators of a servitor race, the shoggoths.

While very different from humans, Lovecraft describes the Elder Things as by no means monstrous. They had a complex (if alien) civilization filled with not only great feats of science and architecture, but great accomplishments in the arts, decorating the walls of their cities with impressive carved murals and statues. They are also described as engaging in relatively mundane activities such as agriculture, and trade using currency.

Because they reproduced through spores, there was little biological basis for families to form. They were social and tended to co-habitate in groups, largely with others of their species who they got along with or who shared common interests. Elderian "families" lived in large dwellings, where furniture and other decoration was placed in the center of the rooms, to leave the walls open for murals.

In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames – for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles – and racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.

Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities – certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden – Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.
—H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

In "The Dreams in the Witch-House," the central character is sent through a dimensional portal to a planet in a triple star system (with a yellow, red, and blue star) located "between Hydra and Argo Navis", and populated by Elder Things.

The Elder Things came to Earth from other planets in outer space. The site of their first settlements was in what later became Antarctica - though this was before the breakup of Pangea, and at the time these lands were lush and tropical. Antarctica always remained the heart of their civilization, considered almost sacred, but in time the Elder Things colonized the entire world, first under the seas but eventually spreading to land. During this first undersea colonization they used energy weapons to fight "nameless adversaries". While the Elder Things were always more comfortable under water, after the oceans were fully settled there was a long shift to building cities on land, until their civilization flourished across the entire planet.

The Elder Things may be responsible for the appearance of the first life-forms on Earth, including the entity known as Ubbo-Sathla (although sources differ in this regard). They created the shoggoths from primordial ooze, to be their all-purpose slave race. Other livestock was also adapted, and often abandoned and ignored so long as they posed no threat, from which the rest of terrestrial life apparently evolved.

Exactly how long ago the Elder Things came to Earth is difficult to say, but their civilization was greatly challenged around the time Pangea began to break up (about 200 million years ago). A few cities were destroyed due to the continental drift, but the real challenge was that this momentary weakness invited invasion by "octopoid" aliens from outer space, speculated to be the star-spawn of Cthulhu. For a time the Cthuluoids managed to drive the Elder Things completely back into the oceans - a devastating blow given how much they had been spreading from sea to land up until that point. Nonetheless the Elder Things were able to fight the Cthuluoids to a standstill, and eventually peace was brokered in which the Cthuluoids controlled all the land (except for Antarctica) while the Elder Things retained control of the oceans. In Antarctica, still the center of their civilization, large new land cities were built to accommodate all the refugees and rebuild their power base. While the Elder Things never managed to destroy the Cthuluoids on their own, millions of years later another terrestrial upheaval did that for them: the waters of the Pacific suddenly sank once again, destroying most Cthuluoid cities. The survivors were either killed or fled, and once again the Elder Things reigned supreme on the planet, rebuilding cities across all the continents. The art of creating life from pre-organic materials had been lost, however, so by this point they switched to creating beasts of burden by modifying pre-existing life that had evolved from discarded experiments over millions of years, first from dinosaurs and later from mammals.

A second catastrophe later struck in the middle of the Permian age, about 150 million years ago, when there was a shoggoth revolt and a war to re-subjugate them. The extreme malleability of the shoggoths, capable of transforming into anything, meant that they were always inherently difficult to control, even through hypnotic methods. The Elder Things still managed to overcome the shoggoths using energy weapons, and achieved a complete victory. Historical murals in their city depict the aftermath, in which wild shoggoths were tamed and broken like wild horses at the urging of armed Elder Things.

A third catastrophe hit the Elder Things in the Jurassic Age, from which they never fully recovered. With the Elder Things weakened by the shoggoth revolt, a new invasion came from outer space, this time by the half-crustacean/half-fungus creatures from Pluto known as the Mi-go. Little by little, the Mi-go drove the Elder things from the northern lands in a slow retreat back to Antarctica, though they were "powerless" to push the Elder Things from the seas even in the north. Desperate, some Elder Things even tried to leave the planet, only to discover that their capacity for interstellar travel had long since atrophied. These wars dragged on for over 100 million years, until by the time of the Pliocene age (5 million years ago), the Elder Things had been completely driven back to Antarctica, and even their ocean cities did not extend north of the 50th parallel (beyond the Antarctic ocean). Even so, the heart of the Elder Things' territories in Antarctica remained intact, though their artwork notably became more "decadent" as they faced outside pressures.

The final blow was the coming of the Ice Ages, about 500,000 years ago, an ecological shift too widespread to resist forever. In response the cities on Antarctica were gradually abandoned, shifting back to the more stable temperatures of the surrounding ocean cities. No further mention is made of the Mi-go by this point in their histories, though it is explicitly unclear if the climate shift drove them off as well. Though their civilization had been in decline for millions of years, the coming of the deathly cold led to one last burst of renewed activity: the Elder Things designed and built a vast new city in the underwater caverns beneath Antarctica, where geothermal power could sustain it indefinitely. Through a phased migration, the population of the metropolis on land was gradually shifted to the new city (compared to the shift from dying Rome to Constantinople). This new city had large construction needs, but by this point the decreasing temperatures had killed off all of the Elder Things' reptilian livestock, and their engineered mammalian livestock were not faring much better, so they had no choice but to breed large numbers of new shoggoths to operate on land. Up until that point in their history, while shoggoths could survive on land, the Elder Things were reluctant to regularly use them outside of the water because it made them more difficult to control. Moreover, by this point in their history the methods of hypnotic/telepathic control over shoggoths had been lost, so that they were now dependent solely on basic spoken commands.

The final fate of the Elder Things is explicitly unclear, and the human scientists in the story openly speculate that their hidden undersea cities may still survive in some places. The ancient metropolis on land, however, once the center-piece of their domains, was left fully abandoned. The strong implication is that the handful of remaining Elder Things were slaughtered in a final revolt by the ever-adapting shoggoths.

The ruins of this city were discovered in 1931 by two members of an Antarctic expedition from Miskatonic University. Four of the eight Elder Things (still alive after millions of years) unearthed by other members of the Miskatonic expedition were described in the story At the Mountains of Madness as being survivors from an early age of the species' civilization. They were killed by a shoggoth while attempting to find a means to enter the subterranean ocean in the Antarctic, apparently unaware of the city's collapse.

Not named, but implied by description, the Elder Things appeared in "The Dreams in the Witch House". It is also mentioned in The Haunter of the Dark that the Shining Trapezohedron, an instrument used to summon Nyarlathotep, was awed by "the crinoid things of Antarctica", implying they worshipped Nyarlathotep.

• Harms, Daniel (1998). "Elder Things". The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (2nd ed.). Oakland, CA: Chaosium. pp. 99–100. ISBN 1-56882-119-0.
• Lovecraft, Howard P. (2005) [1936]. "At the Mountains of Madness". At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. New York, NY: The Modern Library. ISBN 0-8129-7441-7. Introduction by China Miéville.

• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft