Cities (entwined with verdant jungles) that
Were old before inhabitants took them
Now blind intra-cosmic polyps are sat
In the crystalline core of the world gem...
Anyone who knows their Lovecraft is aware of the Yith. They are the race of superbeings who sent their minds out through time and space to possess various members of other species, partly to acquire knowledge for its own sake, but also to spy out the terrain, so to speak. The Yith can transfer themselves en masse to occupy the minds of other species and thus survive various cosmic catastrophes, natural or otherwise, that threaten their survival. When Lovecraft first describes them, they've got impending polyp trouble.
In 'The Shadow Out of Time' we see the Yith from the perspective of a hapless economics professor who finds himself inhabiting the body of a Yithian who lives hundreds of millions of years ago. Back then, the Earth was an alien planet and Lovecraft has great fun outlining the general weirdness of it and its inhabitants. From this and many other texts, poet and sometime Cardinal Pete Cox has produced a series of poems that illuminate various phases of Yithian history. As well as Lovecraft's circle, he references Stapledon's Fourth Men colonising Venus, and Stephen Baxter's mysterious super-race, the Xeelee.
The result is a series of short, thought-provoking verses with teasingly erudite notes. Cox takes us to culture of Tsan-Chan, three thousand years in the future, and offers a description of a resource-poor world inhabited by those who could not leave. 'The ancient world began slowly to die/ Certainty in ruins became a guess'. But we also see the final end of the Earth as sentient beetles swarm on its surface. Six million years ago, silicon-based life inhabited one of Jupiter's moons (a 'shard of Phaeton'), while four billion years hence life clings on desperately under the surface of Mercury.
Overall, then, this is more of a science-fiction/fantasy pamphlet, but forms part of a wider uber-mythos that Cox has been working on for decades. As such it's another piece in a potentially infinite (or at least, really big) mosaic of strange visions and arcane knowledge.
If you would like to learn more about the Yithian cosmos, send an SAE to Cardinal Cox at:58 Pennington
Orton Goldhay
Peterborough
PE2 5RB
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