f the Old Ones and Elements

agon was referred to as "Leader of the Deep Ones", but he was not the primary Water -Being worshiped. Indeed it was the very son of Him whom Dagon and the Deep Ones served. The wizards of the sea-god cult called him Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deeps, one of the 3 sons of Cthulhu who had been mighty gods in elder Mu before the cataclysm destrothed that shadow- haunted and primal continent in prehistoric times. Early man had worshiped a pantheon of divinities that had come down from the stars when the Earth was young. These beings were essentially malign and had ruled man through fear, being more demons than gods; the most common term for them was "the Old Ones," and they were not even remotely human-like.

They had some innate correspondences to the four elements of earth, air, fire and water: for example, the chief divinity, a winged, octopus-headed monstrosity named Cthulhu, was a sea-elemental; his half-brother, Hastur, was an air-elemental (and costantly at odds with Cthulhu); another, named Cthugha, was a fire-elemental, and so on. These were known as the Great Old Ones, and subservient to them was a second group of minor entities called the Lesser Old Ones, comprised of beings who served the Great Old Ones as leaders of their minions or servants. For example, the minions of Cthulhu were called the Deep Ones, led by Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, and the minions of Cthugha were the so-called "Flame-Creatures," whose leader Fthaggua, dwelt on a world called Ktynga, while the great air-elemental, Hastur, was served by the Outer Ones, under their leader N'gha-Kthun. These beings were identified with the famous Abominable Mi-Go.

These Old Ones having warred against and been defeated by a superior, rival pantheon called the Elder Gods, who either banished them to distant stars (as Cthugha to Fomalhaut and Hastur to Aldebaran), or imprisoned them at various places upon the Earth. Cthulhu himself they locked away in a sunken stone city called R'lyeh beneath the Pacific; his son Ghatanothoa they sealed within the mountain on Mu, and his second son, Ythogtha, was imprisoned in a chasm in Yhe, a Muvian province, while Zoth-Ommog lay chained beneath the ocean off the "Island of the Sacred Stone Cities."

Cthulhu had fathered 3 godlings on a female entity named Idhyaa, who dwelt on or near the "dim green double star, Xoth," in the aeons before his descent to this planet. Thus the materials relating to Cthulhu and his sons is sometimes called the Xothic Legend-Cycle.

As for the twin leaders of this rebellion, Azathoth the Demon-Sultan and Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source, they were reduced to idiocy by the Elder Gods, who thrust Azathoth beyond the physical universe into primal Chaos from which he can never return, while Ubbo-Sathla they confined forever at the subterranean place referred to only as "gray-litten Y'qaa, beneath ancient Hyperborea.