Great Race of Yith

The Great Race of Yith (also known as Yithians) are a fictional species of sapient extraterrestrial entities, created by H. P. Lovecraft for his novella The Shadow Out of Time. Their most notable feature is an ability to coercively exchange minds with individuals of other species, even across great spans of time and space. 
They are often depicted as large cone-shaped invertebrates, the form of a prehistoric Earth species whose bodies the Yithians projected their minds into. In this incarnation, they built a flourishing civilization about two hundred million years before the present day.
Their civilisation as it existed in Earth's distant past was eventually wiped out by a race of even more ancient extraterrestrial (possibly extradimensional) beings known as the flying polyps, which the Yithians had already fought several terrible wars with. However, the Yithians themselves survived by again projecting their minds en masse, into a future insectoid race that will one day inherit the Earth long after mankind has ceased to be.
==Description==
The shape of the original forms the Great Race had on Yith is unknown; after migrating to Earth, they housed themselves in a species native to our planet, beings resembling large cones with a muscular foot for locomotion and four extensible arms or tentacles projecting from the apex. Two of these arms ended in claws or pincers, the third terminated in four clustered trumpet-like organs, and the fourth was topped with a spherical yellow "head" with three dark eyes, four stalked flower-like hearing organs on top, and a number of green tentacles dangling beneath. Their blood was dark green and very thick.
The Great Race spoke using their pincers to produce a series of clicks and scraping sounds, probably also with some form of telepathy, and wrote using their head tentacles. They ate and drank using their red, trumpet-like organ, the food described as an almost liquid, grey substance. The Great Race shared only two senses with humans, hearing and seeing, but possessed other senses inaccessible to other species inhabiting a Yithian body.
The Great Race was sexless and reproduced via seeds laid in water; however, due to their longevity, which could last several thousands of years, reproduction rarely happened.
==Mind control==
Yithians gained very advanced and evolved minds that allowed them to project their consciousnesses across time and space, taking over the minds of other creatures from not only other time periods but other planets and universes. While the Yithian inhabited the body, the captive mind was projected into the body of the inhabiting member of the Great Race; though the difference in personality of the target of the mind-exchange was usually noticeable and the person affected considered oddly repulsive to everyone (at least for humans), the Yithians could easily function in the society they had projected into. However, to return to their original time and body, they needed to build a machine described as a construct of metallic poles and glass tubes.
==Society and Culture==
The Yithians lived in a society that was described as being similar to an authoritarian socialism, in the sense that all vital resources were evenly distributed between individuals. Their leaders were voted into power by people who passed certain tests that qualified them to vote. Crimes were hardly ever committed, but were still effectively punished through a variety of means, such as removing some privileges, incarceration, execution, or dealing the perpetrator a severe emotional trauma; punishment was not dealt until the reason why the crime was committed was clearly understood.
Yithians built several countries and also inhabited some buildings that were already present from the flying polyps; these countries were rarely ever at war, though civil wars occasionally happened. In spite of rarely needing to fight, they had a very strong military which used weapons able to create devastating electrical charges, which were effective against their polypous foes, and soldiers thusly armed were always assigned to guard the ruins and trapdoors where the flying polyps had been imprisoned. 
A large part of their culture was the amassing of knowledge from throughout time and space. When a Yithian swapped their mind with that of another creature, it did its best to learn as much as possible about the society, art, and scientific knowledge of the time period. Meanwhile, the mind of the creature taken over was thoroughly interviewed, or interrogated, by specifically trained Yithians, who, while often able to speak the language of those they interrogated, used machines to reproduce the languages of those they could not. 
The other minds in the bodies of the Great Race were considered prisoners and supervised to make sure that they could not harm themselves; however, they were not treated badly and could work to gain increasing amounts of privileges and freedoms (even traveling the various cities of the Yith civilisation) by writing reports about their home time periods. In this way, these mind exchange expeditions provided twofold methods of gathering scholarly information about the time period they wish to study, firstly from the observations brought back by the returning Yithian mind after its time spent in the subject's body and time period, and secondly from the interviews and firsthand accounts written into reports by the subject's mind during its time spent in the Yithian body.
When the Yithian projected into another age wishes to to exchange their minds back into their original time and body, they needed to build a physical apparatus of some sort, described as a construct of rods and wheeled mirrors. Relative to the elapsed time after the original exchange, both bodies needed to remain alive for the reverse exchange to occur. In the case where the host body dies (along with the expeditionary Yithian mind in it), the minds remained swapped, and the mind in the Yithian body was treated with extreme kindness by other Yithians.
Though natural death rarely occurred among the Yithians in their own time, when it did occur Yithians were interred in ceremonial fashion. 
Yithians had a traumatic relationship with the flying polyps due to their unnamed but atrocious acts against the Yithians. Mentioning them was an extreme taboo and it was very hard to find any information on them. Despite the fact that Yithian cities being built over and around the even more ancient buildings that were created by the flying polyps, many of those were left standing vacant even within the cities, due to some superstitious abhorrence among the Yithians.
==History==
The Great Race of Yith came from a planet called Yith, escaping the planet by swapping minds with a cone-shaped species on Earth that existed over 200 million years ago. They also went to war with two other species, the Flying Polyps and the Elder Things. The Yithians were successful in the war against the flying polyps, and trapped them under Earth. On Earth, they built the city Pnakotus, located in Australia's Great Sandy Desert. Pnakotus holds the Pnakotus Manuscripts, Yith's history. The Great Race of Yith saw their own downfall in the future due to a resurgence of the Flying Polyps, escaping their doom by eventually swapping minds with a terrestrial beetle race that evolves on Earth in the distant future, long after humanity's extinction. In that far future time, the Flying Polyps are known to no longer have any presence on Earth.
==In Other Media==
*Futurama: In the episode "A Bicyclops Built For Two", a member of the Great Race of Yith appears as one of the brides of Alcazar, an alien shapeshifter who can assume the form of each of his brides' species. Both the Yithian bride and Alcazar's Yithian form resemble Lovecraft's description of the species, but are considerably smaller, being about the size of a human.Alcazar at the Futurama wiki
*Doctor Who: In Cwej: The Series, a prose spin-off of the Doctor Who universe,Cwej: The Series at the TARDIS wiki the planet Yith was mentioned as having been taken over by the Superiors to terraform it into a duplicate of their Homeworld.Yith at the TARDIS wiki Although the Great Race themselves were not mentioned, the apparent implication was that this was the calamity which originally forced them to evacuate Yith and transplant themselves into the familiar primeval-Earth creatures. An alternative interpretation, however, is that the Superior colonists of the post-terraforming Yith were the original Great Race, which would mean they were not actually native to Yith.
*Haiyore! Nyaruko-san: In the light novels and anime, the character Kurei Tamao gets possessed by a Yithian named Isuka.
*Identity V: The Shadow, also known as "Ivy" and "Shadow of Time and Space", is a hunter who seems to be possessed by a Yithan individual that is unusually hostile and malevolent for its race. It can generate a Terror Radius that causes madness in the human survivors it is hunting and can also temporarily separate itself from its host body, whereupon it takes the appearance of a ghost-like figure with a blue, translucent body. The Yithian is also able to swap its mind with the human Survivors it is hunting, in order to gain information on the group.The Shadow at the Identity V wiki
==Gallery==
==References==
Category:Sapient Species
Category:Species Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Extraterrestrial Species