Great Race of Yith

Enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference . . . Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flowerlike appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was ringed with a rubbery grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.

—H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time

A species of time-traveling mental entities, fleeing their own world’s destruction. They came to Earth and took over the minds and bodies of the cone-shaped beings dwelling here. The combination of the Earth-born bodies and the minds of the aliens made the Great Race.

In the aeons that followed, the Great Race divided the Earth between themselves, the mi-go, and Cthulhu’s kin. Cthulhu and his kind ruled from the Pacific and the lost lands of R’lyeh and Mu. The mi-go controlled the North, while in the south the Great Race were supreme. Their greatest city was Pnakotus, in modern-day Australia.

Time Travel: The Great Race are so-named because they conquered time so thoroughly—the only race known to have done so. A member of the race can send its mind forward or backward through time and across space, pick out a suitable subject and trade minds with it; whenever a member of the Great Race takes over the body of a being, that being’s mind is transferred into the body of the Great Race individual, there to stay until the being now inhabiting its old body sees fit to return and trade places once more. With this technique the race has traveled en masse through time and space and conquered other planets.