Mi-go

Mi-go
Mi-Go
Migo.jpg
An interpretation of the Mi-Go by Ruud Dirven

The Mi-go are a race of extraterrestrials in the Cthulhu Mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft and others. The name was first applied to the creatures in Lovecraft's short story "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), taking up a reference to 'What fungi sprout in Yuggoth' in his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (192930) and there describing the contrasting vegetation on a couple of alien dream-worlds.

Contents

Summary

The Mi-go are large, pinkish, fungoid, crustacean-like entities the size of a man with a "convoluted ellipsoid" composed of pyramided, fleshy rings and covered in antennae where a head would normally be. According to two reports in the original short story, their bodies consist of a form of matter that does not occur naturally on Earth. Interestingly, they are capable of going into suspended animation until softened and reheated by the sun or some other source of heat. They are about 5 feet (1.5 m) long, and their crustacean-like bodies bear numerous sets of paired appendages. They also possess a pair of membranous bat-like wings which are used to fly through the "ether" of outer space (a scientific concept which is now discredited). The wings do not function well on Earth. Several other races in Lovecraft's Mythos have wings like these as well.

The Mi-go can transport humans from Earth to Pluto (and beyond) and back again by removing the subject's brain and placing it into a "brain cylinder", which can be attached to external devices to allow it to see, hear, and speak.

In The Whisperer in Darkness the Mi-go are heard to give praise to Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath, suggesting some form of worship, although in newer works by authors other than Lovecraft, the Mi'Go are at war with the Elder Gods. Their moral system is completely alien, making them seem highly malicious from a human perspective.

One of the moons of Yuggoth holds designs that are sacred to the Mi-go. The symbols inscribed upon the moon are useful in various processes mentioned in the Necronomicon.[citation needed] It is said that transcriptions of these designs can be sensed by the Mi-go, and those possessing them shall be hunted down by the few remaining on earth.[1]

Hastur apparently despises the Mi-go. His cult, servants of "Him Who Is Not to be Named", are dedicated to hunting them down and exterminating the fungoid threat.[citation needed] However, in the original story a human ally of the Mi-go mentions "Him Who is not to be Named" in the list of honored entities along with Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath. It should be noted, though, that Lovecraft never made a connection between Hastur and "Him Who Is Not To Be Named", and that Derleth was the one to do so.

Other appearances

The Mi-go's inaugural appearance in comic books was the first three issues of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness that featured the Miskatonic Project, created by Mark Ellis.

The Mi-go are also prominent antagonists in Pagan Publishing's Delta Green sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. According to the guide, there are three castes: scientist, soldier, and worker. This raises the possibility that other castes may exist. The book also says that the Mi-go usually have five pairs of appendages though the number can vary up or down from that. Normally, the first pair is designed for grasping and manipulating, but in the scientist caste it is usually the first two pairs. The remaining appendages are used for locomotion. The soldiers may have two or more pairs of wings. Some individuals do not have wings at all if they are deemed unnecessary to their task. The Mi-go apparently can modify their own bodies. It is also suggested that all their external accoutrements are actually extruded at will from the central gelatinous mass similar to the way the Shoggoth extrude body parts. In the Delta Green setting, the "Greys" are actually puppets remotely-controlled by the Mi-go.

They are distinguished by their mastery in various fields of science, especially surgery. Although they originate from beyond our solar system, they have set up an outpost on Pluto (known as Yuggoth in the mythos) and sometimes visit Earth to mine for minerals and other natural resources. The Mi-go normally communicate by changing the colors of their orb-like heads or by emitting odd buzzing noises. They can also speak any human language upon receiving the appropriate surgical modification.

The Mi-Go are also one of the main enemies of humanity in the role-playing game CthulhuTech, a game which combines Lovecraft's fiction with tropes and themes from mecha anime, in which their name is spelled Migou (see below); however, they are commonly referred to as "bugs" by humans.

Here they are presented much as in the original Lovecraft stories, and somewhat similar to the way they are portrayed in Delta Green; being masters of science and genetics, and in particular human genetics. Their hostility to humanity could be seen as jealousy that humans had created a technology that they had never thought of, combined with a fear of humanity's growing power threatening them. Although it is stated that they have emotions vastly different from our own, their campaign on Earth seems to have developed into genocidal hatred against humans.

In Allan and the Sundered Veil, Allan Quatermain, Randolph Carter, John Carter of Mars, and the Time Traveller encounter Mi-go, which are stated as being the same as Morlocks.

In "To Mars and Providence", the Mi-go engage in trade with the Martians from The War of the Worlds.

The Mi-go also appear in the final segment, directed by Brian Yuzna, of the movie Necronomicon .

A Mi-go is scripted to walk across the stage during the "Tentacles" number of A Shoggoth on the Roof, prompting Armitage to narrate it as "some horrible creature... I do not even want to know what that is".

The horror themed miniatures game HorrorClix, which features Cthulu as a colossal figure, has a Mi-Go as a unique figure in its The Lab expansion.

The Mi-Go also appear as sinister brain collectors in the short story "Boojum", written by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear.

Origin of the word

It is possible that Lovecraft encountered the word migou in his readings. "Migou" is the Tibetan equivalent of the yeti, a semi-mythical humanoid being who lives in the high mountain ranges of that country'[2] While the Mi-go of Lovecraft's mythos is completely unlike the migou of Tibetan stories, Lovecraft seems to equate the two, as can be seen in the following excerpt from "The Whisperer in Darkness":

It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzarai of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times — or even to the present.

Notes

  1. ^ In "The Whisperer in Darkness", a "black stone with unknown hieroglyphics" from Yuggoth is among the items owned by the narrator that the Mi-go want to recover as part of their plot to lure him to the Akeley farmhouse.
  2. ^ Mi-go is the compound word for "man-wild" (wild man; Wylie: mi rgod; Tib: མི་རྒོད་) in Tibetan and is pronounced me-gö. (See Goldstein, pp.251, 792, 794.)

References

  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon (1st ed. ed.). Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Pub. ISBN 1-56184-129-3. 
  • Detwiller, Dennis (1998). Delta Green Eyes Only Volume One: Machinations of the Mi-Go (1st ed. ed.). Seattle, WA: Pagan Publishing. 
  • Goldstein, Melvyn (2001). The New Tibetan-English Dictionary of Modern Tibetan (1st ed. ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 

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