Mama Sutra nodded thoughtfully, "It is as I feared," she said finally. "I think I can shed light on the matter, but you will be well advised to leave the police force and seek the protection of the Illuminati after you have heard. You are already, at this very moment, in great peril." She lapsed into silence again, and then said, "You will not see the picture of what is happening now, until I give you more of the background."
For the next hour, Danny Pricefixer sat transfixed as Mama Sutra told him of the longest war in history, the battle for the freedom of the human mind waged by the Illuminati against the forces of slavery, superstition and sorcery.
It began, she repeated, in ancient Carcosa when the first humans were contacted by the serpent people of Valusia. The latter brought with them certain fruits with strange powers. These fruits would be called hallucinogens or psychedelics today, Mama Sutra said, but what they did to the brain of the eater was not in any sense a hallucination. It opened him to invasion by the lloigor. The chief fruit used in these rites was a botanical cousin of the modern apple, yellowish or golden in color, and the snake people promised, "Eat of this and you shall become all-powerful." In fact, the eaters became enslaved by the lloigor, and especially by Hastur, who took up residence in the Lake of Hali; distorted versions of what happened have come down to us in various African legends about people who had commerce with snakes and lost their souls, in the Homeric tale of the lotus eaters, in Genesis, and in the Arabic lore utilized in the fiction of Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce and others. Soon, the Cult of the Yellow Sign was formed among the eaters of the golden apples, and its first high priest, Gruad, bargained with Hastur for certain powers in return for.which the lloigor were fed on human sacrifices. The people were told that the sacrifices were good for the crops-and this, in fact, was partially true, for the lloigor ate only the energy of the victim, and the body, buried in the fields, gave back its nitrogen to the soil. This was the beginning of religion-and of government. Gruad controlled the Temple, and the Temple soon controlled Hali, and, then, all of Carcosa.
So things went for many thousands of years, until the priests were rich, fat and decadent, while the citizens lived in terror and slavery. The number of sacrifices increased ever, for Hastur grew with each victim whose energy he absorbed and his appetite grew with him. Finally, among the people, there arose one who had been refused admission to the priesthood, Ma-lik, and he taught that humanity could become all-powerful, not through eating the golden apples and sacrificing to the lloigor, but through a process he called rational thought. He was, of course, fed to Hastur as soon as the priests heard of this teaching, but he had followers, and they quickly learned to keep their thoughts private and plan their activities in secret. This was the age of midnight arrests, purge trials and accelerating sacrifices in Carcosa, Mama Sutra said, and eventually the followers of Ma-lik-the few who had escaped extermination-fled to the Thuranian subcontinent, which is now Europe.
There they met little people who had come down from the north after the snake folk had exterminated each other in some form of slow, insidious and stealthy civil war. (Apparently, the snakes never met in a single battle during all this time: the poison in the wine cup, the knife in the back and similar subtle activities had slowly escalated to the deadly level of actual warfare. The serpent people had an aversion to facing an enemy as they killed him.) The little people had had their own experiences with the lloigor, long ago, but all they remembered were confused legends about Ores (whom Mama Sutra identified with the Tcho-Tchos) and a great hero named Phroto who battled a monster called Zaurn (evidently a shoggoth, Mama Sutra said.)
Many millenniums passed, and the little people and the followers of Ma-lik intermarried, producing basically the human race of today. A great law-giver named Kull tried to establish a rational society on Ma-lik's principles, and fought a battle with some of the serpent people who had surprisingly survived in hidden places; most of this got lost in exaggeration and legend. After more thousands of years, a barbarian named Konan or Conan arose, somehow, to the throne of Aquilonia, mightiest kingdom on the Thuranian subcontinent; Konan brooded much about the continuing horrors in Carcosa, which he sensed as a threat to the rest of the world. Finally, he disappeared, abdicating in favor of his son, Conn, and reputedly sailing to the west.
Konan, Mama Sutra said, was the same person who appeared in the Yucatan peninsula at that time and became known as Kukulan. He was evidently seeking, among the Mayan scientists, some knowledge or technology to use against the lloigor. Whatever happened, he left them, and only the legend of Kukulan, "the feathered serpent," remained. When the Aztecs came down from the north, Kukulan became Quetzalcoatl, and human sacrifice was instituted in his name. The lloigor, in some fashion, had turned the work of Konan around and made it serve their own ends.
Carcosa meanwhile perished. What happened is unknown, but some students of ancient lore suspect that Konan actually circumnavigated the globe, collecting knowledge as he went, and descended upon Carcosa with weapons that destroyed both the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all traces of the civilization that served it.
Throughout the rest of history, Mama Sutra went on, the Cult of the Yellow Sign never regained its former powers, but it has come very close in certain times and certain places. The lloigor continued to exist, of course, but could no longer manifest in our kind of space-time continuum unless the Cult performed very complicated technical operations, which were sometimes disguised as religious rituals and sometimes as wars, famines or other calamities.
Over the intervening ages, the Cult waged steady warfare against the one power that threatened them: rationality. When they couldn't manifest a lloigor to blast a mind, they learned to fake it; if real magic wasn't available, stage magic served in its place. "By 'real magic,' of course," Mama Sutra explained, "I mean the technology of the lloigor. As science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has commented, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The lloigor have that kind of technology. That's how they got to earth from their star."
"You mean their planet, don't you?" Danny asked.
"No, they lived originally on a star. I told you they were not made of matter as we understand it. Incidentally, their origin on a star explains why the pentagram or star shape always attracts their attention and is one of the best ways of summoning them. They invented that design. A star doesn't look five-pointed to a human being, but that's what it looks like to them."
Finally, in the 18th century, the Age of Reason appeared to be at hand. Tentatively, as an experiment, one branch of the Illuminati surfaced in Bavaria. They were led by an ex-Jesuit named Adam Weishaupt who had inside knowledge of how the Cult of the Yellow Sign operated and performed its hoaxes and "miracles." The real brain behind this movement, however, was Weishaupt's wife, Eve; but they knew that, even in the Age of Reason, humanity was not ready yet for a liberation movement led by a woman, so Adam fronted for her.
The experiment was unsuccessful. The Cult of the Yellow Sign planted fake documents in the home of an Illuminatus named Zwack, whispered some hints to Bavarian government and then watched with glee as the movement was disbanded and hounded out of Germany.