(The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game).
The Martin Gardner Necronomicon.
(Based on material in some Cthulhu Mythos stories by Colin Wilson)
Following the looting of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1203-1204 e.v.), a few copies of the Greek translation of Alhazred's monsterpiece found their way to Western Europe. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, one came into the possession of an English monk known as Martin the Gardener, who set out to translate selected sections into Latin, accompanying his translation with a hostile theological commentary in order to deflect suspicions of heresy. Martin's translation was unfinished at the time of his death and has never been printed, although partial copies began circulating through unknown channels since the mid fourteenth century and a number still exist. In total, Martin translated about 60% of the Greek Necronomicon, although no extant MS. contains all these translations; tables, diagrams, and detailed descriptions of magical procedures are universally missing (hence spell multiplier 2, and only about a third of the spells in the complete work are in this translation) and in many copies Martin's commentaries are not distinguished from the text.
Martin's commentaries give essentially a Christianised gloss on Alhazred's account of the Great Old Ones, arguing that Cthulhu and co. were an allegory of the dragon and his angels mentioned in the Apocalypse of John.
De Doctrinâ Antiquâ et Mysterio Iniquitatis
(otherwise known as, me having a go at August Derleth)
"Of the Ancient Lore and the Mystery of Iniquity" by one Comte d'Erlette (fl. early 16th century in France, presumed to be an ancestor of the author of Cultes des Goules) is a short work of Mythos lore in Latin (in the print edition, the text of the original runs to about 200 octavo pages). It circulated in manuscript in Western Europe for a time and influenced some English writers who in the late 16th century prepared various forged Necronomicons or collections of purported "excerpts" or "fragments" of the Necronomicon to make money from gullible magicians. De Doctrina was privately printed in Paris in 1885 (in Latin, with a brief introduction in French) in an edition of about 250 copies. This edition is complete, but has been bulked out by five additional forged chapters mostly containing feverish speculations about incubi and succubi plagiarised from Sinistrari's Demoniality (which itself has been alleged to have been a nineteenth-century French forgery; the publisher's account of how it was found is scarcely calculated to inspire confidence). The occult special collection at Leeds University Library contains two copies; one of the print edition (from the same provenance as their first editions of Lévi), and a MS. codex in very poor condition with some hostile and sarcastic marginalia in English by Michael Calmar (English magician, fl. late 16th century).
This work conveys a small amount of Mythos knowledge and has some workable magic, but contains much that is misleading or downright false. Most of the Mythos material is derived from Martin the Gardener's translation and commentary on the Necronomicon; d'Erlette however took Martin's idea that Cthulhu and the GOO were an allegory of the dragon and his angels from the Apocalypse and turned it on its head, arguing that the war in heaven described by John of Patmos was an allegorical or distorted account of a cosmic war in which the Old Ones or Ancient Ones (Antiqui) where defeated and bound by the Dei Prisci ('Elder Gods'); the book also contains several long apocalyptic passages extrapolated from passing remarks by Alhazred concerning the eventual return of the Old Ones. The work has also been much mocked for attempting to shoe-horn the GOO into the classical scheme of the Elements; the 'potestas ignis, qui Cthugha vocatur' is not known to be mentioned anywhere prior to de Doctrina; Cthulhu's attribution to water is rendered questionable by the fact of his being somewhat inconvenienced by being at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and Ithaqua, while he has a clear air aspect, is a comparatively minor GOO. D'Erlette also has much to say about the power of a modified pentagram figure which he calls the Signum priscum which he claims was used by the Elder Gods to bind the Old Ones. This, while having some power as a banishing and warding symbol, is not the true Elder Sign. The work contains a few spells, including Summon / Bind Byakhee, most of the others fairly minor, rather obscurely described. +6 Mythos (counted against the Arabic, Greek or Martin Gardner Necronomicon), 1d4 / 1d8 SAN, spell multiplier x2.
[EDIT: this is a real tangent, but apropos of Sinistrari's Demoniality, I later (2021) turned up this essay by Alexandra Nagel (apparently web-published 2008) which argues for the work being genuine, pointing out that two MSS. of the work survive in Italian institutional collections, substantially similar to the text published in 1875 in Paris though showing evidence of revisions, and was published in an Italian translation in 1986.]
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