The Illuminatus! Trilogy

After this we see street fighting, atrocities, the infliction of punishment on harmless people by men wearing Gruad's eye-and-triangle badge. The Party of Freedom proclaims its own symbol, a golden apple. The fighting spreads, the numbers of the dead mount and Ingel Rild weeps. He and his associates decide on a desperate expedient- unleashing the lloigor Yog Sothoth. They will offer this unnatural soul-eating energy being from another universe its freedom in return for its help in destroying Gruad's movement. Yog Sothoth is imprisoned in the great Pentagon of Atlantis on a desolate moor in the southern part of the continent. The Atlantean electric plane bearing Ingel Rild, Ton Lit and another scientist drifts, trailing feathery sparks, to a landing in a flat field overgrown with gray weeds. Within the Pentagon, an enormous black stone structure, the ground is scorched and the air shimmers like a heat mirage. Flickers of static electricity run through the shimmering from time to time, and an unpleasant noise, like flies around a corpse, pervades the whole moor. The faces of the three Atlantean sages register disgust, sickness and terror. They climb the nearest tower and talk to the guard. Suddenly Yog Sothoth takes control of Ton Lit, speaking in an oily, rich, deep and reverberating voice, and asks them what they seek of him. Ton Lit lets out a terrible shriek and claps his hands over his ears. Froth slips from the side of his mouth, his fur bristles and his penis stands erect. His eyes are delirious and suffering, like those of a dying gorilla. The guard uses an electronic instrument that looks like a magician's wand topped with a five-pointed star to subdue Yog Sothoth. Ton Lit bays like a hound and leaps for Ingel Rild's throat. The electronic ray drives him back and he stands panting, tongue hanging loose, as the Pentagon first and then the ground begin to soften into asymptotic curves. Yog Sothoth chants, "la-nggh-ha-nggh-ha-nggh-fthagn! la-nggh-ha-nggh-ha-nggh-hgual! The blood is the life… The blood is the life…" All faces, bodies and perspectives are skewed and there is a greenish tinge on everything. Suddenly the guard strikes the nearest wall of the Pentagon directly with his electronic wand and Ton Lit shrieks, human intelligence coming back into his eyes together with great shame and revulsion. The three sages flee the Pentagon under a sky slowly turning back to its normal shape and color. The laughter of Yog Sothoth follows them. They decide that they cannot release the lloigor.

Meanwhile Gruad has called his closest followers, known as the Unbroken Circle of Gruad, to announce that Kajeci has conceived. Then he shows them a group of manlike creatures with green, scaly skin, wearing long black cloaks and black skullcaps with scarlet plumes. These he calls his Ophidians. Since At-lanteans have a kind of instinctive check on themselves that prevents them from killing except in blind fury, Gruad has developed these synthetic humanoids from the serpent, which he has found to be the most intelligent of all reptiles. They will have no hesitation about destroying men and will act only on Gruad's command. Some of his followers protest, and Gruad explains that this is not really killing. He says, "Atlanteans who will not accept the teachings of the Party of Science are swinish beings. They are a sort of robot who has no inner spiritual substance to control it. Our bodies, however, are deceived into feeling as if they are our own kind, and we cannot raise our hands against them. Now, however, the light of science has given us hands to raise." At this meeting Gruad also addresses his men for the first time as the "illuminated ones."

At the next meeting of the Party of Freedom the Ophidians attack, using iron bars to club people to death and slashing throats with their fangs. Then the Party of Freedom holds a funeral for a dozen of its dead at which Ingel Rild gives an oration describing the ways in which the struggle between Gruad's followers and the other Atlanteans is changing the character of all human beings: