The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"From our point of view," Mama Sutra went on, "they are intolerably hideous in these manifestations. There is a reason for that. They were the source of the worst terrors experienced by the first humans. Our DNA code still carries an aversion and terror toward them, and this activates a part of our minds which the psychologist Jung called the Collective Unconscious. That is where all myth and art come from. Everything frightening, loathsome and terrible-in the folklore, in the paintings and statues, in the legends and epics of every people on earth-contains a partial image of a manifestation of the lloigor. 'As a foulness shall ye know Them,' a great Arab poet wrote."

"And they've been at war with us through all history?" Danny asked unhappily.

"Not at all. Are the stockyards at war with the cattle? It's nothing like war at all," Mama Sutra said sinply. "It's just that they own us."

"I see," Danny said. "Yes, of course. I see." He looked into his empty glass dismally. "Could I have another?" he murmured.

After Miss Mao had brought him another bourbon, he took a huge swallow and slouched forward in his chair. "There's nothing we can do about it?" he asked.

"There is one group that has been trying to liberate humanity," Mama Sutra said. "But lloigor have great powers to warp and distort minds. This group is the most maligned, slandered and hated people on earth. All the evil they seek to prevent has been attributed to them. They operate in secret because otherwise they would be destroyed. Even now, the John Birch Society and various other fanatics- including an evil genius named Hagbard Celine- struggle ceaselessly to combat the group of whom I speak. They have many names, the Great White Brotherhood, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, the Golden Dawn… usually, though they are known as the Illuminati."

"Yes!" Danny cried excitedly. "There was a whole bunch of memos about them at the scene of the crime that started this case."

"And the memos, I would wager, portrayed them in an unfavorable light?"

"Sure did," Danny agreed. "Made them seem the worst bastards in history. Pardon me, ma'am." I'm getting drunk, he thought.

"That is how they are usually portrayed," Mama Sutra said sadly. "Their enemies are many, and they are few…"

"Who are their enemies?" Danny leaned forward eagerly.

"The Cult of the Yellow Sign," Mama Sutra replied. "This is a group serving one particular lloigor called Hastur. They live in such terror of this being that they usually call him He Who Is Not To Be Named. Hastur resides in a mysterious place called Hali, which was formerly a lake but is now just desert. Hali was by a great city in the lost civilization of Carcosa. You look as if those names mean something to you?"

"Yes. They were in the notes of the professor who disappeared. The other case that I was convinced was connected with this one."

"They have been mentioned- unwisely, I think- by certain writers, such as Bierce and Chambers and Lovecraft and Bloch and Derleth. Carcosa was located where the Gobi Desert is at present. The major cities were Hali, Mnar and Sarnath. The Cult of the Yellow Sign has managed to conceal all this rather thoroughly, although a few archeologists have published some interesting speculations about the Gobi area. Most of the evidence of a great civilization before Sumer and Egypt has been either hidden or doctored so that it seems to point to Atlantis. Actually, Atlantis never existed, but the Cult of the Yellow Sign carefully keeps the myth alive so nobody will discover what went on, and still goes on, in the Gobian wastelands. You see, the Cult of the Yellow Sign still goes there, on certain occasions, to worship and make certain transactions with Hastur, and with Shub Niggurath, a lloigor who is known in mystical literature as the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, and with Nyarlathotep, who appears either as a solid black man, not a Negro but black as an abyss, or else as a gigantic faceless flute player. But I repeat: you cannot understand the lloigor by these manifestations or cross sections into our space-time continuum. Do you believe in God?"

"Yes," Danny answered, startled by the sudden personal question.

"Take a little more of your drink. I must tell you now that your God is another manifestation of some lloigor. That is how religion began, and how the lloigor and their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. Have you ever had what is called a religious or mystical experience?"

"No," Danny said, embarrassed.