Starless and Bible Black Widow (3.9)

[For one reason or another I have gotten back into studies that I largely abandoned the best part of a decade ago in favour of video game addiction, and so I am toying with ideas on how to actually continue this series.]

"Help me in my search for knowledge
I must learn the secret art
Who dares to help me raise the one
whose very name near stills my heart . . ."

[Ref Couliano & Walker on late mediaeval / early modern treatises on witchcraft as borderline pornographic works; wherever the hell I read it (prob. Kieckhefer), on books of magic treated as if intrinsically alive / demonic, compared with the way the book in BB is implied not simply to be demonic in so far as its procedures operate through the involvement of demons, but actually has a demon bound to it which obsesses / possesses those who acquire the book & drives them to work the rites.

Observations on Grimoire of Honorius & its reputation & its thus being used as the main model for the book in BB.  Lévi's fantasies & misrepresentation of the work.

(the spell pour faire danser une Fille nue which is used by the protagonist in the game, and by characters in the prequel to the anime, Bible Black Gaiden, in both cases as their first experiment with the book's magic, and with the result of publicly humiliating one of their classmates, appears in two "1670" editions of Honorius as well as the "1517" edition of the Grimorium Verum, but the collections of "plus rares secrets de l'Art magique" in the two volumes have significant overlap; either one was plagiarised from the other, or the same publisher was responsible for both.  The de Blocquel press of Lille, a prolific reprinter of pulp Grimoires in the 19th century, redacted it out of the "1760" edition of Honorius and modified (read: censored) it in Les Véritables Clavicules de Salomon, a re-issue of the GV; Blocquel seems to have had no problem with violence / cruelty against all manner of farm animals, invocation of various major demons, magical abuse of the Mass and curses intended to magically induce a potentially fatal grand mal epileptic seizure (which is pretty much what Pour faire danser une fille nue is represented as doing), but references to nudity were apparently too much for him.)

"Hekas Hekas" & "Zazas" formulas.

General nature of MS. works of magic tending to be fluid things rather than fixed received texts or even stable textual traditions.

How the hell do I tie this back to BW?  Sacrifice shows little actual acquaintance with the literature of Ceremonial Magic (save possibly the reference to Astaroth turning up "in human form," but that was made nonsense of with the rewrites to "Seduction") & the ritualistic portions of their show have more in common with Alexandrian Wicca (story was Sanders actually wrote those bits or at least advised them) than the Clavicle.  The references to magical traditions in the lyrics are pretty vague and scattergun; use of "blood and hair and sweat and ends of fingernails" as magical materia; spells "cast with mirrors, dolls and wax"; bragging about magic books, that "the Clavicles of Solomon are nothing by their side"; controlling the Horsemen of the Apocalypse with "the talisman of Set"; the past lives / reincarnation theme which drives the protagonist's motives is hardly a thing in medieval through to early modern European occulture.]

Starless and Bible Black Widow (1)

[Suggested by Black Widow's 'In Ancient Days' from the album Sacrifice.] 

Oh thou spirit [name], 

By the power of prog rock -- I conjure thee! 

By the dread and terrible name of Zeppelin -- I constrain thee! 

By the might of Jimmy Page's guitar -- I command thee! 

And if thou art still disobedient, I will torment thee for eternity -- or at least, for what shall seem like an eternity -- with bad renditions of Stairway. 

Z.Z.N.Z.

[EDIT: this was originally posted over 10 years ago; I was trying to tag it properly and tidy up the formatting and somehow ended up changing the datestamp on it to today.]

Back to the Beginnings (α)

[The following is part of an extensive fiction, alluded to in a few of the Call of Cthulhu related posts under the "Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore Club" tag.  The books by Gerald Massey referred to, however, are real; for those prepared to risk the SAN hit, copies can be found online at the web-publishing site Scribd; links can be found on the Celephaïs Press blog.]

Adrian Wallace on Gerald Massey.

[Adrian Wallace (1881-1944) was an English occultist who, after a few years in the Theosophical society and a year in Crowley's A.'.A.'. (he was acknowledged as having completed the task of a Probationer but resigned rather than take the oath of a Neophyte, not long after J.F.C. Fuller broke with AC), was appointed head of the British section of an organisation called the Stellar Temple (founded 1906 by a resigned former member of Theodor Reuss' collection of orders) and became its world Grand Master in 1919.  The S.T. claimed to teach and transmit what it called the "Stellar Gnosis," apparently an esotericist interpretation of religious and Masonic symbolism in terms of astronomical mythology, derived in part from various nineteenth-century works of comparative religion and speculative prehistory, and partly on a series of "illuminations" the organisation's founder claimed to have had.]

"[...] there is possibly material of value in the writings of Godfrey Higgins, though I am not sure whether it is worth the time it would take to read Anacalypsis at even the most superficial level; the work demonstrates all the intellectual limitations of the period, and ninety years' worth of archaeological discoveries have made nonsense of much of it.  Gerald Massey is another matter.  His writings, while diffuse, contain definite intimations of the Stellar Gnosis.  What is more remarkable is that it is quite clear that he got this through his own independent insights; the scorn he pours on modern esotericists, occultists and Theosophists makes it fairly clear he was not an initiate in the narrow and formal sense.

"The biggest stumbling block I found, especially with Ancient Egypt and some of the lectures, is what seemed to be the man's utter credulity on the subject of Spiritism which also seemed to be at odds with his apparent hostility toward most other forms of Occultism.  It seemed fairly obvious that he had had some kind of experience in these fields, & had known various mediums personally, whereas he probably regarded the T.S. and others, as Crowley put it, as people who talked about Yoga but didn't actually do any.  He would probably have been more sympathetic to the Scientific Illuminism of the A.'.A.'., at least for the time it would have taken him to find out that it was a vehicle for AC's agenda of inflicting another Revelation on the world and setting himself up as a Messiah."

[Letter to Frank Marlow, 1924]

"As regards 19th-century writing on History of Religion and allied subjects, the mainstream is 90% worthless for one set of reasons, including prudery, intellectual conservatism and a fear of upsetting the established churches; the fringe 99% worthless for another set of reasons, mostly a complete lack of critical faculties and incapacity for basic logical reasoning.  Massey, while there is much to fault, is one of the few on the fringe whose works actually repay the time and effort of serious study; even were it to turn out that his central thesis about Egypt being the source of everything was complete nonsense he gives some fairly heavy pointers to various aspects of the 'Starry Wisdom' or Stellar Gnosis.

"You must understand that we do not approach the subject in the first place as historians.  Having a historical background is useful, as we do not operate in a vacuum, but magically speaking it is in fact completely irrelevant whether the primal Stellar Cult actually, factually, historically existed or was simply a figment of Massey's imagination.  The true Stellar Gnosis is experiential and the purpose of reading such as we recommend is merely preparatory; if this or that nation of antiquity also possessed it, so much the better for them! but it is no odds to us, now."

[Memorandum to Stellar Temple students, ca. 1925]

"Massey.  His works are valuable, but diffuse & he does tend to ramble and repeat himself; hence I rarely quoted or cited specifically, although perhaps I should have given him more of a mention than I did--too late to change that now.  Beside the three major works there is a volume of lectures or essays.  (Also he wrote poetry.  Then again, so did Crowley, but I never let that put me off him.)  All are hard to get hold of now but some libraries will have them & copies occasionally come up for sale; I will lend you mine if I can find them.  Read the lectures first to get an overview.  They were intended as popular exposition and polemic, which is why he tends to assert rather than argue & present evidence.  Then read Ancient Egypt--just sit down and read it cover to cover.  You will probably think you understand it.  It is possible--you have shown yourself to be a fairly bright student so far--that  you actually will understand it.  Keep the earlier ones on hand for when he refers back to them, but don’t go too far into them.  Then read Natural Genesis in the same way.  Then read Book of the Beginnings.  Then go back and read Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt again--carefully.  Book of the Beginnings is vital to the whole scheme but unless you understand his system of Typology it just looks like nonsense.  You also have to bear in mind that while he was fairly frank for the time, there are still places where you have to read between the lines.

"Aside from being somewhat credulous about Spiritism the man seems to have been more or less a materialist & Darwinist when he wrote all this & would probably have retched at our understanding of the Stellar Gnosis, but there is still useful stuff in there, just as magicians and 'Neo-Pagans' should read Frazer even though he takes it as read that Magic is a mass of error and delusion and regards the notion of any 'pagan revival' with horror (vide his introduction to Spirits of the Corn &c.).  In Natural Genesis he repeatedly puts the boot into metaphysicians, modern esotericists and Theosophists, despite which H.P.B. quotes him favourably and ran a lot of his essays in Lucifer magazine, possibly on an ‘enemy’s enemy’ basis.[*]  I’m not sure what he would have thought of AC’s ‘Scientific Illuminism.’

"Churchward [**] on the other hand can be safely ignored; what is of value in his books is not original and most of the rest is just drivel.

"If nothing else (and there is much else) Massey is significant in that he was practically the only writer of the period to put the phallic cultus in proper perspective at a time when the mainstream just ignored it or tried to pretend it didn’t exist, and idiots like Inman, Jennings and Forlong tried to reduce everything else to it, seeing a Lingam in every standing stone, every vaguely conical hill, &c., &c.  I still cringe when I think about Forlong’s attempts to explain Stonehenge."

[Letter to Osric Arras, 1941.]

[*] A slight exaggeration; according to an index to Lucifer, Massey contributed (a) a short poem and a 4-page article to vol. i no. 2 (Oct. 1887), (b) a book review (well, rather an extended essay which took the book as text for a 10-page sermon) to vol. i no. 3 (Nov. 1887), (c) a brief book review (possibly; the piece is initialled "G.M." and the book under review was a volume of poetry rather than having any connection with Massey's later interests), a promotional blurb for a projected reprint of his book on Shakespeare's sonnets and a retort to some of Blavatksy's criticisms of his article from the October 1887 issue, in vol. i no. 5 (Jan. 1888), and (d) a short article on "Luniolatry," supplementary to his lecture on the same subject, in vol. i no 6 (Feb. 1888).  A pseudonymous and highly favourable piece on "Gerald Massey in America" including a lengthy quote from one of Massey's privately printed lectures, appeared in the September 1888 issue. Additionally, Blavatsky added multiple dissenting remarks in footnotes and afterwords to Massey's articles.   Wallace's involvement with the Theosophical Society was somewhat later (1902-1908) than the publication of the first volume of Lucifer so he was possibly not speaking from direct acquaintance.

[**] Albert Churchward (1852-1925), a writer on Masonic symbolism and speculative prehistory and a friend of Massey in the latter's later years.  Under Massey's influence he wrote a book called Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man (London: Swann Sonnenscheien, 1910; second edition London: George Allen & New York: E.P. Dutton, 1913) which was favourably reviewed by J.F.C. Fuller in the Equinox ("in every sense a great book [...] forms an excellent seventh volume to Gerald Massey's monumental work.")  His elder brother, James Churchward, wrote  a number of books on the Lost Continent of Mu. 

Velle Omnia, Velle Igitur Nihil

A true Initiation never ends.
Therefore there is no such thing as a perfect initiate.

Therefore, by declaring someone to be a perfect initiate you are declaring that, as far as you are concerned, that person no longer exist (and that any obligations they might foolishly have contracted to you are now null).

Leeroy and Joan? (3)

The Yellow Book.

Not to be confused with the 1890s publication of that name, this is a generic term for a species of magical grimoire / notebook kept by Yellow Sign adepts. Such works are individual, but typically contain information giving +2-20% / + 1d4 ranks King in Yellow Mythology and +1d6-3 percentiles Cthulhu Mythos and costing 1d8 SAN (this for the first time one is read: the benefit for reading later books is less, quite possibly zero, as they have much in common), 1d6-2 spells such as Contact King in Yellow, Song of the Hyades, Summon / Bind Byakhee, etc. Spell multiplier 1d4+1, representing how clearly or cryptically spells are described. All YBs contain the Yellow Sign, on the outside or inside of the front cover; not all have yellow binding.

Leeroy and Joan? (2)

An origin myth of the Yellow Sign cult.

[I claim no originality at all for this but leave it to the reader to work out where I lifted it from.]

The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign was founded in Carcosa a century or so prior to its destruction, by supporters of a member of the royal family who ended up on the losing side in a dispute about the succession to the throne.  Through a series of political intrigues, the group ended up becoming the power behind the throne but never gained the strength to openly seize the crown.

When a Mi-Go mining and research expedition was discovered to have landed on Carcosa’s planet, the Yellow Sign leadership denounced their activities, believing they would destabilise that world’s precariously balanced orbit (it being in a binary star system), rendering it uninhabitable by humans.  After a few years of agitation, war ensued between the fungi and Carcosa.  The magicks commanded by the Yellow Sign (mainly based around summoning monsters to fight for them, not from the Outer Void but from the unending nightmares of Carcosan “saints”—spiritually / psychically powerful individuals—who were soultrapped in statues while still alive) were no match for the Mi-Go's advanced technology and Carcosa was devastated, with over 90% of its population killed in the first month or so of fighting.

Realising the city faced total destruction, the leader of the Yellow Sign—a mage and descendant of the Carcosan royal family named Yhtill—embarked on a scheme to save at least a dream or memory of it.  Most of the surviving inhabitants—some willingly, some less so—were soultrapped in imperishable crystals set into the side of the mountains overlooking Carcosa, or buried in caverns beneath said mountain, in a permanent dreaming state, that their memories of the city might maintain a lasting simulacrum of its glory days in the Dreamlands, which would endure for æons after the original was reduced to rubble.

In order to protect himself while co-ordinating the summoning of the dream Carcosa, Yhtill constructed a magical shell around himself, anchored in a yellow robe and a full-face mask which he donned.  This “shell” was empowered with basic attack and defence functions and inherited a powerful hostility to the Mi-Go.

Something went wrong.  In channelling the energies required to coalesce the dream Carcosa, Yhtill went insane and the “shell,” empowered to an unanticipated degree, raged out of control and completed the ruin of the real-world city.  The effects of Yhtill’s madness warped the dream Carcosa, populating its night with black stars and moons that seemed to pass in front of the taller towers of the city.  In awe of the power of the new being, the surviving Yellow Sign members declared it their god and King.

Leeroy and Joan? (1)

[This is a work of fiction, produced as background material in connection with the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Yellow Sign Cult.

The notion of a Yellow Sign cult was probably crystallised by August Derleth in his development of the mythology of Hastur the Unspeakable.  Lovecraft throws in references to Hastur, the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign in a long laundry-list of names drawn from Bierce, Chambers, Dunsany, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and his own writings in The Whisperer in Darkness and later in the same story has pseudo-Akeley refer to a cult connected with “Hastur and the Yellow Sign” as hostile to the fungi from Yuggoth, but made no further reference to these names in his stories.

In one of the stories in The King in Yellow we encounter a delusional individual who believes himself to be a descendant of the Imperial Dynasty of America, and who is in the habit of issuing orders sealed with the Yellow Sign, which in another story, Chambers un-describes as “a curious symbol or letter . . . neither Arabic nor Chinese.”  The King in Yellow appears as a god-like, possibly mythical, figure in these stories; the narrator of “The Repairer of Reputations” believes that even if he can ascend to the Imperial Throne of America he will still be subject to the King in Yellow: “he is a King whom Emperors have served.”  We have only the vaguest hints of any organised cult or society based around the King in Yellow or with the Yellow Sign as their emblem.

The take on the Yellow Sign cult in this background is based on taking Hildred Castaigne’s beliefs as the founding myth of a secret society, rather than one man’s elaborate delusions as fed and developed by a small-time con-artist.  This tied in with the mythology of the Priory of Sion described in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the ultimate aim of which society was supposedly to set a descendant of the Merovingian Kings (who were in turn, according to the mythology, descended from Jesus of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala) on the throne of a restored French monarchy and ultimately a united Europe.

In this setting, the King in Yellow is a god-like entity (not strictly a GOO, though of similar power level) served by the Yellow Sign cult.  He appears roughly anthropomorphic, the precise details of his form and features hidden by a pallid mask and tattered yellow robes.  Most of his minions are human, although the cult leaders believe (through some highly questionable genealogies) themselves to be descended from various old European noble and royal families, and ultimately from the royal family of a long-lost realm (sometimes represented as being in a distant star system, associated with Aldebaran and the Hyades), and seek to claim the thrones, first of various European nations, then of a united Europe, and ultimately of the whole world under the authority of the King in Yellow; they occasionally summon Byakhee and other minor Cthulhoid entities as servitors.  The cult’s power-centre is the city of Carcosa; long destroyed on the physical plane (there are contradictory stories concerning its original location), it still exists in some kind of “astral” realm (it is not directly accessible from the Dreamlands).  The geography and environs of Carcosa are utterly alien; it appears to be in a binary star system, its night sky marked by three moons, at least one of which appears to pass in front of the taller towers of the city, and ‘black stars.’  Carcosa stands on the shores of the Lake of Hali; the initiation into the highest ranks of the Yellow Sign is reserved for those who have ‘sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali’ which involves voyaging astrally to Carcosa and descending into the lake.  The cult uses the play The King in Yellow to gain converts; hidden messages in the play cause those who read it or see it performed to become susceptible to control by the cult leaders using a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion.  The cult is currently sponsoring a movie production.

The historical origins of the Yellow Sign cult are unclear; while the cult’s leaders claim a fantastical antiquity for their organisation, all that can be said for certain is that it existed in some form in the mid 16th century in England, and probably other European nations as well.  An unpublished and never-performed play by Christopher Marlowe, The King in Rags and Tatters, is believed to have been written as a satire on the cult which was gaining influence in the court of Queen Elizabeth; some conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Yellow Sign arranged Marlowe’s death in a tavern brawl after learning of the work’s existence.   While highly active in Paris in the years prior to the French Revolution, the cult failed in their goal which was to put one of their own members on the throne.  They had heavily infiltrated French Freemasonry, but so had the Illuminati, the Cthulhu cult, and just about every other cabal, cult, conspiracy and secret society in the game, so their plots tended to cancel each other out and the actual course of events took everyone by surprise; the main beneficiaries were the ghoul packs of France.

Decades later, the Yellow sign managed to gain some influence in the “Second Empire” of Napoleon III.  An author called Maurice Joly wrote an exposé of their plans under the title Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu; while on the surface this was simply a satire against the regime, it contained certain double meanings designed to alert those knowledgeable in such things.  Joly was arrested and imprisoned for his pains; the Dialogue was plagiarised by the French anti-Masonic movement of the 1880s and 1890s; the anti-Masonic version was in turn plagiarised by elements in the Russian secret police circa 1900 and modified in the interests of anti-Semitism, becoming the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion [1] (the later ‘Priory of Sion,’ frequently mis-spelt ‘Priory of Zion,’ was a hoax inspired by the Yellow Sign cult).  

The Yellow Sign itself is the characteristic symbol of the cult; it simultaneously suggests a Chinese character, an Arabic ligature and the triskele or three-legged emblem of the Isle of Man, without actually being any of them.  The cult has historically been careful about where it publicly displays the sign, although in recent years some street gangs which the cult uses to terrorise certain urban neighbourhoods have adopted it as a territory marker.  

Hastur in this continuity is not a GOO and is not identical with the King in Yellow, but is the name of one of, or a constellation of, the Black Stars of Carcosa, sometimes superstitiously worshipped as a minor god by the inhabitants of Carcosa; one title of the ruler of Carcosa (who is not the King but subject to him) is ‘the son of Hastur’ and the leaders of the cult claim their position ‘by their right in Hastur.’  The spells Call / Dismiss / Free Hastur the Unspeakble, and Unspeakable Oath / Unspeakable Promise do not exist in this continuity.  The spell Song of Hastur exists and is known to some Yellow Sign cultists but is more often called Song of the Hyades.  Byakhee and the spell Summon / Bind Byakhee exist; the King in Yellow apparently has some limited authority over Byakhee, though they are not an unmitigated servitor race; nor are they the creatures undescribed in “The Festival.”  There is a Contact but no Call / Dismiss spell for the King in Yellow; the King comes and goes as he wills.[2]

Notes.

[1] The anti-Masonic prototype of the Protocols is an invention for the purposes of this background, suggested by (a) references in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (hardly a reliable source of information) which alleges the existence of Masonic references in the Protocols as published and, while acknowledging the connection of the Protocols with Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers suggests that it was nevertheless somehow connected with the Priory of Sion, and (b) Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, an anti-Masonic conspiracy work which alleges that the Jack the Ripper murders were directed, and the police investigation obstructed, by a Masonic clique in order to cover up the birth of the illegitimate child of a member of the British royal family and a Whitechapel shop-girl, in the course of which it is claimed that the Protocols was a genuine document of a Masonic conspiracy prior to being modified in the interests of anti-Semitism.  The fact that the Leo Taxil hoax was taken seriously makes the existence of an anti-Masonic proto-Protocols in 1890s France credible, but I have no positive evidence that any such thing ever happened.

[2] Should it ever be necessary to bring an avatar of the King into play, use the stats for the King in Yellow in 5^th edn. or d20 CoC.  There are rumours that occasionally circulate to the effect that the King is an avatar of Nyarlathotep and that the phrase “the waxen mask and the robe that hides” in the ritual refer to this form.  These rumours are false, and have probably been started by Nyarlathotep himself in the hopes that the Yellow Sign will start worshipping him under one of his actual forms.