Great Race of Yith

The Great Race of Yith is an ancient, cone-bodied civilization whose defining power is the projection of minds across time. It is described as having used that ability to study the past and future, build an archive of terrestrial life, and outlast successive bodily forms. Its history reaches far beyond human chronology, but the account of it is mediated by fragmentary memories, old traditions, and ruins whose significance is not conclusively established.

Identity and Deep-Time History

The Great Race is presented as one of many highly evolved dominant races that preceded humanity. The surviving account places its era roughly fifty million years before human arrival, while its mental heritage is older still: minds from a dying world sent themselves forward en masse into the bodies of an Earth species, leaving their original forms to die. The resulting civilization was therefore a migration of minds into a new bodily home, not simply the rise of a species in one place and time.

Its members are described as immense, rugose cones about ten feet high, with a head and other organs attached to thick, distensible limbs extending from the apex. They moved by expanding and contracting a viscous layer at the base of the body. Their large paws or claws could click or scrape against one another to produce speech. This unfamiliar form is part of the account’s larger challenge to human assumptions: the Great Race’s continuity depends on mind, rather than on a stable body or a single era.

Mind Projection and the Exchange of Bodies

The Great Race’s central achievement was its ability to send a mind into another period and another living body. With mechanical assistance, a projecting mind moved forward through time until it reached its chosen era, then entered a representative of that period’s highest life-form. The displaced mind was cast backward into the projector’s body and age. The Great Race member could then live as a member of the future species, learning its knowledge and techniques; the displaced mind, meanwhile, was guarded and questioned by trained investigators.

The exchange was intended to be reversible. After gathering the knowledge it sought, the projecting mind built an apparatus to restore both minds to their proper bodies and periods. The process could fail if either body died during the exchange. In that case, the explorer might be left to live out a life in an alien body in the future, or the displaced mind might remain in the Great Race’s form and past. The account says such permanent exiles were rare, especially among the Great Race itself, because severe penalties were imposed for displacing its members. Forced exchanges and other complex cases were also described as having been corrected.

The Great Race’s method of inquiry was not confined to bodies whose languages its members could reproduce. When an exchanged mind spoke a language beyond their physical capacity, the investigators could construct machines to reproduce it, like an instrument. Once their initial disorientation had passed, captive minds could be allowed to travel and consult the civilization’s records, in return for services and under precautions. The scale of the exchange thus extended from an individual’s altered life to a systematic collection of knowledge across eras.

Archives, Knowledge, and Memory

The civilization’s archives were said to contain records of every terrestrial species, including their histories, arts, languages, achievements, and psychologies. Its members selected information and practices from different eras according to their needs. Learning about the past was more difficult than learning about the future, while the latter could be approached through the projection process and the study of a chosen future life-form.

A dream-fragment describes the archive as a colossal underground structure near the center of a Great Race city, built to endure as long as the civilization itself and to withstand severe upheavals of the Earth. Its records were written or printed on durable cellulose sheets, bound in books that opened from the top. Each book was kept in a light, rustless grey-metal case marked with mathematical designs and the title in the Great Race’s hieroglyphs. The cases occupied locked, rectangular vaults. The section devoted to humanity and the furry and reptilian species that preceded it lay on the lowest, vertebrate level.

Memory management was as essential to the system as collection. When an exchanged mind returned to its own future body, mechanical hypnosis removed what it had learned about the Great Race’s age. The account attributes this policy to the dangers of carrying large amounts of knowledge forward: a few clear transmissions had produced, or were expected to produce, great disasters. Most returnees retained only a faint, fragmentary dream-shadow of the exchange, though some remembered more. The resulting gaps did not entirely prevent knowledge from passing down the ages; rare combinations of surviving memories and traditions were said to have left hints, including traces of a human cult mentioned in the Necronomicon.

Conflict, Successive Forms, and Surviving Traces

The Great Race’s dominance included a confrontation with the Elder Things, an ancient species said to have ruled Earth and three other planets. After migrating from Yith, the Great Race used its instruments to drive these beings into the inner Earth and seal their routes back to the surface. Later signs of renewed activity prompted further closures and safeguards. The fear associated with these incursions shaped the Great Race’s caution toward the buried world below its cities.

The account also makes the Great Race’s bodily future uncertain. When its terrestrial era approached its end, its most capable minds were expected to migrate into the bodies of a future beetle civilization. Later migrations would carry minds onward to other forms, including bulbous, plant-like beings on Mercury. This prospect repeats the civilization’s own origin: survival through the transfer of mind when a body or world nears its limit.

The Great Race’s history reaches the human present through imperfect material evidence. In a letter to Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a prospector reported carved stones in the Great Sandy Desert, east of the gold field near Pilbarra. Local traditions, as relayed by the correspondent, associated great marked stones and underground structures with danger. The prospector described weathered blocks bearing carved curves and proposed an archaeological expedition; he and Dr. Boyle offered to assist. In 1935, an expedition led by Peaslee excavated about 1,250 blocks, many of them carved megaliths. The scale, age, and scattering of the stones suggested immense geological change, but their original arrangement remained undiscovered.

The most intimate apparent link was also the least secure. In the ruins, Peaslee believed he found a metal case containing a book whose ancient, brittle pages bore English words in his own handwriting. He did not bring the case back, and neither the underground corridors nor the object had been independently verified. The revelation makes the archive’s temporal reach seem to touch human life, while the missing proof preserves the difference between a recovered history and a compelling but unresolved account.