Serpent people
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The serpent people of Valusia are a fictional pre-human race in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. They were invented by Robert E. Howard for his Conan and King Kull stories and were much used by Lin Carter for his Conan pastiches. They also appear in the works of another Weird Tales contributor, Clark Ashton Smith.
In Robert E. Howard's King Kull stories, the serpent people worship a god known as the Great Serpent. Later writers would identify the Great Serpent with the Great Old One Yig and with the Stygian serpent god Set from Howard's Conan stories.
[edit] Valusia
Valusia is a fictional country in the Kull stories of Robert E. Howard. Located in a fertile area near the center of the supercontinent Pangaea, Valusia was the seat of the First Empire of the serpent people during the Paleozoic era. The empire was based on sorcery and alchemy, but collapsed with the rise of the dinosaurs about 225 million years ago during the Triassic era.
Abraham Merritt also depicted a similar pre-human serpentine race surviving from the Mesozoic era in his story "The Face in the Abyss" which first appeared as a short story in a 1923 issue of "Argosy" magazine. It would be another seven years before its sequel, "The Snake Mother," appeared in "Argosy," and yet another year before the book-length version combined these two tales, in 1931. In this story line, the last surviving Serpent-Woman is an ally of the human protagonists.
[edit] References
- Harms, Daniel (1998). "Serpent people", The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, 2nd ed., Oakland, CA: Chaosium, pp. 263–4. ISBN 1-56882-119-0.
- —Ibid, "Valusia", pp. 314–5.