Grandi Antichi

Literary invention
Scritti estate 1926 · «Weird Tales», febbraio 1928

Grandi Antichi — cosmic entities lying dormant, come from the stars in a remote age and now waiting.

First appearance

Great Old Ones. Not to be confused with the Elder Things or with the Elder Gods.

What is told

Cosmic entities lying dormant, come from the stars in a remote age and now waiting. Their awakening is not a moral threat but an astronomical fact: it will occur when the stars are once again in the right position.

In the corpus

They are the load-bearing structure of the corpus, and at the same time the point at which later systematisation has done the most damage.

Publication data

The Call of Cthulhu, «Weird Tales», February 1928.

Caution

Three terms are constantly confused: the Great Old Ones are the cosmic entities; the Elder Things are the extraterrestrial civilisation of At the Mountains of Madness; the Elder Gods are not Lovecraftian at all — Derleth invented them.

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