Lloigor (Cthulhu Mythos race)

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The Lloigor are a fictional race in the Cthulhu Mythos. The beings first appeared in Colin Wilson's short story "The Return of the Lloigor" (1969).

[edit] 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, two more additions to the fiendish fictional menagerie known as the Great Old Ones. Derleth referred to Lloigor in several other writings, "The Sandwin Compact" (1940) in particular. It was apparently a wind elemental and 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 creation. The Lloigor^[1] take the form of invisible vortices of psychic energy, though they may sometimes manifest themselves 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.

Most other authors use the Wilson entities rather than the Derleth and Schorer conception^{[citation needed]}. In Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy, 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.. However, once again these Lloigor are a departure from what went before. They are referred to as 'The 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 Strosses 'The Atrocity Archives', but it's not clear if these 'Many-angled ones' are considered to be related to the original Cthulhu Lloigor

Lloigor are also mentioned in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.

[edit] References

August Derleth [1940] (2000). "The Sandwin Compact", Quest for Cthulhu. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-0752-6.

Derleth, August; Mark Schorer [1932] (2002). "The Lair of the Star-spawn", in Robert M. Price (ed.): Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos. New York, NY: Random House. ISBN 0-345-44408-6.