Lloigor (Cthulhu Mythos race)

The Lloigor are a fictional race in the Cthulhu Mythos. The beings first appeared in August Derleth and Mark Schorer's short story "The Lair of the Star Spawn" (1932).

Summary

August Derleth and Mark Schorer originally created a being called Lloigor as one of the Twin Obscenities in their short story "The Lair of the Star-Spawn" (1932). Lloigor and its brother Zhar were typical pseudo-Lovecraftian tentacled monstrosities identified as two of the Great Old Ones. Derleth referred to Lloigor in several other writings, "The Sandwin Compact" (1940) in particular. It was apparently a wind elemental which possessed the ability to somehow draw its sacrificial victims to it, perhaps through teleportation.

Colin Wilson borrowed the name for "The Return of the Lloigor" (1969), but his creatures are very different from Derleth's. The Lloigor[1] take the form of invisible vortices of psychic energy, though they may sometimes make themselves manifest as great reptilian beasts, akin to the legendary dragons. In the distant past, the Lloigor came from the Andromeda Galaxy to the continent of Mu and used human slaves as their labor force. When their power dwindled, the Lloigor retreated below ground and left their former slaves to their own devices. Eventually, these early humans migrated from Mu and populated the earth.

In modern times, the Lloigor are too weakened to pose any real threat to humanity. Nonetheless, they can draw psychic energy from sleeping humans in nearby towns or villages—the victims so affected awaken feeling drained or ill, yet regain all lost vitality by nightfall— with which they can perform strange, preternatural feats, such as causing mysterious explosions or altering the flow of time.

In the 1975 The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the lloigor are mentioned as the gods of the aboriginal natives of the People's Republic of Fernando Po, as well as the original gods of Atlantis. Here, the term appears to be synonymous with Great Old One—for example, H. P. Lovecraft's creation Yog-Sothoth is called a lloigor.

Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison used the Lloigor as the primary villains (possessing the bodies and minds of various superhumans on various parallel earths) in his Zenith series for 2000 A.D.. The names directly corresponded to the names of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones.[2][3] The name "Iok Sotot" and his epithet "Eater of Souls" came from The Illuminatus! Trilogy where it referred to Yog-Sothoth. They are referred to as many-angled ones (possibly the first use of this moniker) and appear to be entities from a reality with more dimensions than our own, so that disconnected bits of them (tentacles, eyes) appear to 'float' around the scene. The many-angled ones have appeared in other works since, most notably Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives.

The term Lloigor is again equated with Great Old Ones in the final chapter of Alan Moore's "Allan and the Sundered Veil" where both terms are used to describe Ithaqqa, a single facet of the self-aware idea known as "Yuggoth". In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier Nyarlathotep is referred to as an emissary of the Lloigor when he is sent to negotiate a truce with the Blazing World at the end of the comic.

A race of creatures known as Lloigor were the subject of the song "Lloigor" by the atmospheric black metal band Dark Fortress. The song references "A thousand young", most likely referring to the thousand young of Shub Niggurath. However the verse of each song refers to a single entity. The Lloigor have also been referred to as Yuggoth, a single entity. This is the first major connection between Shub Niggurath and Yuggoth made in this way.

Notes

  1. ↑ The word Lloigor is similar to the Welsh name for England: Lloegr.
  2. ↑ 2000 AD prog 548, Phase I: 13: "Into the Absolute Elsewhere" http://www.2000ad.org/zenith/tygers.html
  3. ↑ 2000 AD prog 656 Phase III: 15: "Seeing the Light" http://www.2000ad.org/zenith/warinheaven.html

References

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