Friday 27 April 2018

In whom do you put your trust?

The Centre is only such because one point of the Compasses is put there; and wherever that point is put, thereby becomes the Centre.

If you start in one corner of a square or rectangular room, provided you persist on whichever path you take around the edge -- whether with your left, or your right, hand to the wall -- you will eventually reach the opposite corner.

The grain which sprouts and brings forth fruit does not die at all; there is no discontinuity, no catastrophe; it is only an “uninformed and partial view of facts” that sees one.

H.A.B., on the other hand, died, was buried, and stayed dead and (after a couple of re-interrals) buried.

It is a common mistake of mystics to decry all paths other than the one they are personally following as false and worthless. For them, perhaps they are; but this does not mean they are so for all aspirants.

One might have hoped that the symbol set used in speculative Freemasonry would have served to counter the tendency towards a hylophobic dualism which has plagued esotericist schools and mystical philsophy throughout recorded history; in Wilmshurt's case it patently didn't.  Abstract intellectuality with no material on which to work is just as useless as sense data with no thought to process them.  In the former case you may have a nice shiny and sharp set of tools but with no materials to work on, you can't build anything; in the latter you're at best limited to dry-stone walling (J.S.M. Ward, in one of his little handbooks on the symbolism of the Craft rituals, suggested that the use of "cowan" as a Masonic out-group term had its origin in a dialect word for a dry stone waller).

I am not actually sure how common the notion is among esotericist interpretations of Masonic ritual which distinguish the "first temple" and "second temple" degrees in terms of the former being concerned with building the "moral" character of the initiate -- the ordinary civic virtues inculcated in the Craft degrees, for instance -- and the latter with his "spiritual" personality; that is to say, I'm pretty sure I didn't make it up, but can't remember where I first came across it.  It should be remembered though, that the second temple could only be built after the first had been destroyed -- the woodwork burnt to ash, the gold and silver looted (generally by Kings of Judah who needed to hire mercenaries or bribe invaders to go away), the bronze broken up and not one stone left standing upon another.

Elaborate accounts of rituals of Initiation in the Pyramids in works not clearly marked as fiction raise the obvious question to anyone with the slightest inclination toward scepticism who has not by this point thrown the book across the room in disgust—“and you know all this how?”  A Mystery-cult, by definition, keeps its doctrine and ritual secret.  The hard evidence for the very existence of anything resembling the Greek mystery-religion paradigm in Egypt prior to the Ptolemaic period (to which period the Mystery-rite of Serapis, and probably those of Isis and Osiris as worked in the Græco-Roman world, owe their origin) is, to say the least, minimal.  Those Mystery-cults whose existence is well-attested from contemporary references—at Eleusis, Samothrace, &c.—for the most part did such a good job of keeping their secrets that by the nineteenth century C.E. (long before, actually) it was open for any imposter to assert, or darkly hint, without fear of refutation, that their ‘real’ teaching was . . . whatever s/he wanted it to have been

[Most of the above remarks were originally written as footnotes to an edition of The Meaning of Masonry by W. L. Wilmshurst which I had planned to issue on the Celephaïs Press imprint; however the book annoyed me so much that I gave up on it a short way into the fifth chapter.  Apparently a lodge under Wilmshurst's influence (founded by him, rather) is still operating in Leeds 6.]

Friday 9 March 2018

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Random and Arbitrary Time Period Club (7)

[The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Tome of Ceïhkal (Tomus Ceïhkalis).

This is a part-autobiographical work written in horribly tortured Latin around 1550 by an anonymous author.  An analysis of the Latin style suggests, while not proving conclusively, that the author's first language was German, or possibly Dutch, a hypothesis supported by a few passing references to places where the author claimed to have lived and studied.  The meaning of the title is unknown, being nowhere explained in the text; it is speculated that "Ceihkal" is a corrupted or fabricated angelic name.  The work opens with the statement, "This is the book CEÏHKAL, the record of my Knowledge of and Communications with those from Outside, now set down for the benefit of those who desire true Triumph in the Ways of the ancient Wisdom"; the name is not mentioned again.

The Tome has never been printed; it exists in a handful of quarto and folio MS codices, six of which are known to exist in various institutional collections (Keeper's whim as to which); a seventh was stolen from a private collector in 1974.  Additionally, since the 1950s, duplicated copies of a typescript of the work with partial English translation (frequently either inaccurate or descending into gibberish through over-literal translation of the convoluted Latin sentence structure) have been circulating amongst occultist groups and occasionally come up for sale.  While the original typist did in fact transcribe the entire work (the complete TS. of the original Latin runs to 326 foolscap sheets, single-spaced), most extant copies have pages missing, out of order, or rendered illegible by scorch marks or suspicious stains.

Amidst the autobiographical account of the author's encounters with various practitioners and teachers of magic, secret cults and scholars of ancient lore, can be found information from which a number of Contact and Contact Deity spells (for, inter alia, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu) can be constructed; the author was more concerned with communicating with Those from Outside than actually summoning them to visible appearance or physical manifestation, regarding the latter as dangerous in all cases and pointless in most; there are hence no Call / Dismiss or Summon / Bind spells in the work.  While the work refers to few of the Great Old Ones or other Cthulhoid entities by name, using various periphrastic titles instead, a reader with a small amount of Mythos knowledge will be able to deduce who or what given passages refer to.  The work also contains the knowledge of the true Elder Sign.  For the complete work, +8 Mythos, 1d6 / 2d6 SAN, spell multiplier 3.

["Ceihkal" is an acronym of "Cthulhoid Entities I Have Known And Loved," the allusion being to the series of drug-culture books by Ann and Alexander Shulgin.]

Concernynge ye Old Ones.

This is the collective title for a collection of writings in 16th-century English and bad Latin by one Michael Calmar, which exists in a handful of MS. copies, the most complete in the occult special collection at Leeds University Library (this is a collection of fair copies made by Calmar for a colleague, crudely bound, and the overall title is unique to this copy); while many rough drafts and first fair copies of individual pieces are extant, they have been split up and dispersed.  It contains some useful Mythos knowledge, but interspersed with instructions and ritual fragments on Solomonic-style ceremonial magick, digressions, fulminations against rival magicians and denunciations of the author of De doctrina antiqua et mysterio iniquitatis and the editor of Ye Booke of ye Arab (a forged Necronomicon with a fake translation credit to John Dee that circulated in MS. amongst magicians in the late 16th century and was eventually printed in the 1970s).

Calmar's "Rite to Calle Yogge-Sothothe" is conceptually viable (unlike that in Ye Booke of ye Arab which was deliberately written to be ineffective), but is only given in outline and needs to be worked up (successful skill check [DC 25 Spellcraft in d20] needed, and major expenditure of magic points and POW needed to actually get a physical manifestation  In a modern (ca. 2000 or later) setting, a ritual which has been thus worked up is in internet circulation.

Calmar's "Rite of Cthulhu" will serve as a Contact Cthulhu spell if the magician can write a reasonable invocation of Cthulhu to put in the centre of it; that provided is incomplete and uninspired, a "poor pretence at poetry."  His "Rite of Dismissal" is completely useless against Cthulhoid entities, or anything else for that matter, although his instruction for "ye formation of ye Magick Circle," by substituting in the correct form of the warding Elder Sign is a valid form of the Empower Circle of Protection spell (Calmar erroneously states that the true form of the Elder Sign is an ancient rock carving he saw near Ilkley in Yorkshire; this, while one of the "Old Ones' Signs" is not the Elder Sign and has virtually none of the powers attributed to the Elder Sign).  The piece "Ye Feaster from ye Starres" is partly plagiarised from De Vermis Mysteriis and contains the Summon / Bind Star Vampire spell.

Under the head "Ye Charactrs of Magick Arte" Calmar gives the 32 Aklo letters, with their phonetic value and a few magical correspondences; Calmar gives no information about the Aklo language and appears to have been unaware of the 48 Aklo Unveilings.  "Concernynge Hym in ye Gulph" gives a brief account of Azothoth, mostly plagiarised from other writers and containing nowhere near enough information to even start constructing the Call / Dismiss Azathoth spell (a fragment purportedly by Calmar titled "To Call Furth Hym in ye Gulph" exists but on internal evidence (specifically, the presence of some glaring anachronisms) is a later fake.

"De Magno Innominando" gives no clue about the real identity of the Not-to-be-Named One, probably because Calmar didn't have a clue to give.  "Of ye Lorde of ye Woodes, & ye Black Goate" is a set of vague ramblings about Shub-Niggurath, including a postscript purporting to give an account of a ritual of Shub-Niggurath which Calmar had been permitted to attend on the condition that he should give a pledge of secrecy, and should not know the place of the rite nor see the faces of the worshippers.  Of the six extant copies of this section, three omit the postscript entirely, two give a heavily abridged version of it, presumably containing all that Calmar felt his pledge of secrecy permitted him tell even his closest colleagues, and the remaining one, believed to be an early draft, is (a) written in a cipher (English rendered phonetically in the Aklo script) and (b) very cryptically expressed even then, although it does appear that the ritual produced a physical, or at least visible, manifestation of the goddess; unfortunately (?) even the fullest account is too vague to reconstruct the Call Shub-Niggurath spell.

Friday 2 March 2018

And these three men made a solemn vow . . .

In any case, H.A.B. is simply a letter-shift cipher for I.B.C., John Barleycorn, the Frazeran vegetation-spirit (Abiff, אביו, being a corruption of Abib, אביב, "green shoots, ears of corn").  Robert Burns, while not the original creator of the song, gave it something of a working-over which influenced later versions, and is known to have been a Freemason.

[To be absolutely clear: the above is not meant particularly seriously.]

Tuesday 13 February 2018

Cthulhoid Gnosticism.

[This is material produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.  It is not represented or recommended as a real-life magical / mystical path.]

This was originally conceived as a "Mythos Heresy" to be added to a few presented under that head in the d20 CoC rulebook published way back whenever.  There's nothing especially Gnostic about it, really, it was named because of the parallels with classic gnostic myth.  The immediate suggestion was probably the "Apocalypse of Eibon" by Bible scholar and writer of weird fiction Robert M. Price, as published in the Chaosium Book of Eibon compilation.

Like the Derleth heresy, this scheme describes a cosmic conflict between Mythos deities (specifically the Outer Gods, to use the CoC classification) and supposedly beneficient, or at least not actively toxic to humanity, Elder Gods, which ended with the former being imprisoned, but places the "fall" and conflict much further back.  Specifically, the act of rebellion for which the Outer Gods were imprisoned was the creation of the present universe (referred to in certain mystical works as the "Wrong of the Beginning"), and this universe is their prison.

The principle text in which this set of ideas is developed is the Epistle of Simon the Magician, an incomplete description of which I posted on this blog some years ago.  "Simon's" cosmogonic myth enumerates eight "Primals," four of whom are the chief super-celestial deities, the other four of whom were exiled and are now the principle Outer Gods.  An epithet that can reasonably be translated "Elder Gods," is, confusingly, applied to the entire ogdoad.  Of the four who were not exiled, the first has names or titles like First Thought or The Parent of the Entirety, the others are variously named, e.g. Wisdom, Foresight, Prior Acquaintance, Incorruptibility, Eternity, &c., &c., the point being they all represent things the author thinks the mani(n)fested Universe lacks.  The four rebels are known as First Madness or the Demiurge (Azathoth), Mind or Intellect or Memory (Nyarlathotep), Life (Ζοë) or the All-Mother (Shub-Niggurath) and Space/Time or Potentiality (Yog-Sothoth).

In any case, when the "Ring Pass Not" was established to prevent the Outer Gods from returning to the realm of the Primals, an astronomical number of relatively blameless souls were also trapped. The Elder Gods then caused certain secrets by means of which such souls could ascend past this barrier to be inscribed on indestructible tablets and cast into the universe.  These though ended up being stolen by the Outer Gods who wanted to enslave the souls, and eventually came into the possession of Ubbo-Sathla.  Cthulhu and the other GOO are comparatively insignificant in this scheme; by some accounts they are, or are descended from, the denizens of the Broken Spheres (the shattered remains of a previous failed creation attempted by Azathoth et al.).

The cosmology of this school represents the physical universe as a finite but unbounded Einsteinian curved space, being the 3-space bounding a four-dimensional hypersphere.  The interior of this hypersphere, known as the Gulf, is considered the celestial realm and the domain of the Other Gods; at the centre of it is the court of Azathoth, "He in the Gulf."  The Dreamlands exists as a kind of vague border between the physical universe and the Gulf.  

Displaced from this system a comparatively short distance in a fifth dimension are the broken spheres or Tunnels.  Their precise geography is unclear since no-one has thoroughly explored them and returned to tell the tale.  There are variously said to be seven, or ten, or eleven, or thirteen, or twenty-two, or thirty, or three hundred and thirty three of them.  Various portals, rifts, &c., connect them with the material universe and Dreamlands.

[The Book of the Secrets of the Houses of Hermes, as deciphered by the Stellar Temple, lists 22 Tunnels which have been explored by different individuals and appear to be distinct from, but connected to, each other, and to have reasonably consistent properties, but it should not be assumed that there is a one to one correspondence between the Tunnels and the Broken Spheres; there could be additional "spheres" not there catalogued, or it could be that multiple Tunnels are contained within a single "sphere."  The number is a direct result of the fact that the author of Book of the Secrets . . . was consciously trying to shoe-horn their scheme into the symbolism of the Tarot trumps.  Some have suggested that the Tarot Trumps themselves are a distorted and dim reflection of the Tablets of the Elder Gods as stolen by the rulers of the Tunnels; actually, though, there are not 22 tablets but (at least) 23.  The whereabouts of the 23rd are unknown although suggested locations include mis-catalogued in the stacks of the Great Library of Celaneo, being used as a coffee table in the palace of the terrestrial gods atop Kadath in the Cold Waste, in the cavern of Abhoth in the lightless realm of N'Kai, buried on the moon near the crater Tycho, or at the bottom of a toxic chemical spill in a sealed-off basement of the School of Colour Chemistry at the University of Leeds.]

Magicians and cultists influenced by this school of thought can be roughly divided into two schools: using the jargon of late 19th century and later Western occulture they can be called "Right Hand Path" and "Left Hand Path."  The RHP Cthulhoid Gnostic aims to bust out of the multiverse by a process of mystic "ascent" (such as is described in later sections of the Epistle of Simon the Magician, or in the "Atone for the Wrong of the Beginning" ritual reputed to be deducible from inscriptions on some of the Tablets of the Elder Gods) and return to the super-celestial realm; the LHP Cthulhoid Gnostic aims to "become as the Old Ones" in order to make existence in this universe bearable and potentially even fun.

Wednesday 7 February 2018

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Random and Arbitrary Time Period Club (6)


[The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Book of the Secrets of the Houses of Hermes.

This collection of short prose-poems in English, with no author credit in any extant copy, circulated in manuscript and typescript in the early 1920s before being privately printed in an edition of 250 copies in London in 1925 (16mo., viii + 88).  In 1994 a London-based publisher called Focus Books (originally specialising in early 20th century literature and poetry, but from 1988 to 1997 they branched out into occultist subjects, initially in connection with studies of Yeats) issued a facsimile reprint and at the same time had the text printed as an appendix to the second edition of Beneath the Trees of Eternity by Osric Arras.

In itself, this work contains no Mythos knowledge and no spells, and has no SAN cost.  For years it was dismissed by academics and occultists alike (those who were even aware of its existence) as a piece of incoherent and uninspired drivel loosely based on the symbolism of the Tarot Trumps and attempting to imitate T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land.  The author appears to have been under the influence both of published occultist literature (the title is a loose paraphrase / English translation of part of the title of a shorter work by Aleister Crowley published in the Equinox) and the teachings of groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (specifically, the work follows the order and attributions of the Trumps taught in the G.D.).  In the 1950s, though, members of a magical fraternity known as the Stellar Temple discovered that what had previously been thought to be typographical ornaments at the foot of each chapter in the print edition (missing or inaccurately copied in many of the MSS. and TSS.) were sigils, and that using a spell known as Symbolic Gate they could be combined with the versicle which heads each chapter and a name encoded into the main text in order to access one of a set of interconnected astral realms known as the Tunnels.

The Tunnels can also be reached through the Dreamlands, but the route is risky.  Merely to reach the access point (sometimes called "The Gate of the Secret of the Universe") requires first travelling through territory disputed between Nyarlathotep and Nodens and roamed by nightgaunts, shantaks and Hunting Horrors, and then approaching perilously close to the court of Azathoth.  A few permanent portals are believed to exist in the subterranean realms of Yoth and N'kai (some did exist in K'n-Yan, but these have been sealed with the Elder Sign and the passages leading to them collapsed for at least 100').

The 22 rulers of the Tunnels are believed to be Outer Gods who developed independent personalities and rebelled against Nyarlathotep æons ago and established a realm in the ruins of a previous universe (the "broken spheres" mentioned in the Epistle of Simon the Magician).  It is rumoured that before the first ages of Humanity, when Ubbo-Sathla retreated to the subterranean realms, the tablets of the pre-mundane gods were carried off to the Tunnels and each ruler currently holds one; thus brave or reckless magicians and seekers of elder lore (particularly members of the Stellar Temple) occasionally risk the journey into the Tunnels in search of the knowledge of the primal æons.  Not all return; there are occasional reports of human figures trapped in strange and "sticky" geometrical shapes in the Tunnels.

The fourth book of the Ophidian Ennead, Beneath the Trees of Eternity, contains a more detailed description of the Tunnels based on a programme of exploration undertaken by members of Arras' lodge from around 1958-65 (which saw three members driven insane, one trapped in the Tunnels and one eaten by gribbly things with tentacles).  In addition to the names, sigils and versicles it assigns a colour (although without access to whatever paint catalogue Arras was using, several of these are unclear) and musical key to each.  The title of this book alludes to certain supposed parallels between the network of the Tunnels and the scheme known as the "Tree of Life" used by Kabbalists and modern Hermetic magicians.

The header image "Descent into Tunnel 13" was drawn by a sometime Stellar Temple member known as David Calmar although it is unclear (owing to his utter slackness about keeping a Magical Diary) whether its production actually involved an evocation of the Tunnel in question or it was simply a work of imagination fueled by a combination of sleep deprivation, Pro-Plus and reading Arras' books.  In any case, Calmar was expelled from the Stellar Temple when it turned out he had collected about 200 pages worth of the order's not-for-publication instruction papers, about half of which were nominally beyond the degree he then held, re-typeset them, added a large number of hostile comments and sarcastic footnotes and recirculated them among S.T. members.

Tuesday 30 January 2018

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Random and Arbitrary Time Period Club (5)

[The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

Chains of Belief.

Full title: Chains of Belief, or, an Attempt to Chart the Course and Descent of the Underground Stream of Forbidden Worships, Unholy Rites and Nameless Cults from its Earliest Sources to the Present Day.  London: privately printed, no date but circa 1890.  2 volumes, 4to., pp. xlii + 536, viii + 616 with a foldout chart bound uniform with the two volumes.  Chart is missing in many otherwise extant copies.

The title and structure of the work owe more than a little to an only slightly more mainstream title on History of Religions from around the same period, Major-General J.G.R. Forlong's Rivers of Life (1883).  Over half of the actual Mythos content of Chains of Belief is plagiarised from von Junzt's Geschichte von unaussprechlichen Kulten (Dusseldorf, 1839) which was called Nameless Cults in its first English translation; this includes material that was made unintelligible by printer's errors and bad translation in the "Bridewell" edition (London, 1845 according to the imprint, but the publisher is otherwise unknown and some bibliographers have suggested the work was actually issued back-dated and under a false imprint by John Camden Hotten), and omitted altogether in the "Golden Goblin" reprint (New York, 1909); it is otherwise rather diffuse but some Mythos lore not in von Junzt can be found amidst the sludge.

The nameless author of this work claims to be a retired Army officer whose attention was drawn to Mythos matters while putting down native revolts in unspecified British colonial holdings in Africa, but gives so few details on this point that his account is impossible to confirm or refute; and in any case the cults treated of, both in sections lifted from von Junzt and in the apparently original material, are from all over the world .  The foldout chart accompanying the work summarises its conclusions in diagrammatic form, purporting to track various cult streams from legendary prehistoric civilisations like Atlantis, Hyperborea and the lost continent of Mu to the mid nineteenth century.  Within the lurid descriptions of certain rituals a few spells could potentially be learned, but they are scarcely coherently described; hence, for the whole work +10 Mythos (+6 of which is counted against the original von unaussprechlichen Kulten), 1d6/2d6 SAN, spell multiplier x 1 (and in general only minor spells should be learnable; Keeper's choice as to what).

[The real-life genre of 19th-century fringe and speculative works on History of Relgion and allied subjects, in some of the more demented cases (see also Higgins' Anacalypsis and the major works of Gerald Massey), borders on one subset of Mythos tomes of which Nameless Cults is the best-known example.  If relatively innocuous works such as Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe or Frazer's Golden Bough have SAN costs (as per some editions of the CoC rulebook), then Rivers of Life definitely should.]

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Random and Arbitrary Time Period Club (4)

[The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Ophidian Ennead.

[This is loosely heavily based on a real-life series of books sold as non-fiction (i.e., the three "Typhonian Trilogies" of Kenneth Grant) which, amongst many other things, sought to connect the themes of Lovecraft's work to real-world occultist traditions.]

The "Ophidian Ennead" by Osris Arras is a collective designation for a series of nine books published 1972-2002, totalling around 3000 octavo pages, in English or some language vaguely connected therewith.  Compared to most Mythos tomes they are easy to obtain (the fifth is the rarest, having never been reprinted since the 1980 first edition; copies in good condition frequently change hands for over £200 on the collector's market and most of those that were in public libraries have been stolen).

The first volume, The Art and the Masters: an Account of the Revival of Magick, purports to be a historical study of Western occultist groups and movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s (much of it was in fact recycled from articles Arras had written for Man, Myth and Magic, a popular encyclopædia on occult subjects originally published as a weekly magazine ca. 1970), with an excessive emphasis on the work of a 20th-century English magician called Adrian Wallace (1881-1944) but frequently wanders off into magical theory, fanciful numerology, speculative prehistory and apparent gibberish.

The second volume, Awakening the Unknown God, was founded around material on magical theory and practice which originally comprised footnotes, appendices and digressions that were excised from The Art and the Masters when the first fair-copy typescript was rejected by the publishers on grounds of length.  The remaining volumes (Voices in the Penumbra, Beneath the Trees of Eternity, The Angles In Between, That Darkly Splendid World, The Gate of the Secret of the Universe, Beyond the Spaces Known to Men and The Key Stone of the Arch of Enoch) are not readily describable.

Taken individually, none of them makes a great deal of sense, but a careful reading and cross-referencing of all nine (which takes 2d6 months and requires access to a well-stocked library or fast Internet connection to chase down Arras' more obscure allusions) grants +10 Cthulhu Mythos, 1d6 + 4% Occult (most of the latter from the incidental study and side-reading needed to make sense of the work) and costs 2d8 SAN.  Both benefit and SAN loss are reduced if an incomplete set is studied and significantly reduced if the final volume is omitted since it is, as the title suggests, the key-stone of the entire edifice.  Spell multiplier 2 -- a few spells are scattered throughout the volumes (including the true Elder Sign,* which Arras learnt from the Tome of Ceikhal), but they are not very clearly described.

Key Stone contains some strange discussion and quasi-Kabbalistic analysis of the 11-letter English word "INFESTATION" which Arras claims is "the Word of the Strange Æon," a technical concept he attempts to explain, not very clearly, in various places in the Ennead; he links it to Gerald Massey's comments at the start of Vol. ii of A Book of the Beginnings, referring to a prophecy of the 'End of the World' in 1881, the year of that book's publication, and interpreting this as "the ending of an Old World (or Æon) and the beginning of a New" although for Arras the Strange Æon did not being as a single cataclysmic event but "came into mani(n)festation" over several decades from about 1875 to the early 1930s.

The volumes of the Ennead are sometimes fancifully referred to the Sephiroth of the Qabalistic "Tree of Life" (excluding Malkuth, which is referred to the practical work), not in simple order, rather Art and the Masters to Hod, Awakening the Unknown God to Yesod, Voices in the Penumbra to Netzach, Beneath the Trees of Eternity to Binah, The Angels in Between to Chokmah, That Darkly Splendid World to Geburah, The Gate of the Secret of the Universe to Chesed, Beyond the Spaces Known to Men to Kether, with The Key-Stone of the Arch of Enoch in Tiphareth as the central balance of the whole edifice, which draws together themes of the other works as eight strands of a spider's web woven by Atlach-Nacha over the unfathomable Abyss (the spider, according to Crowley's 777, being one of the zoötypes of Tiphareth), or as eight tentacles of . . . well, of some gribbly thing with tentacles.

[*The account of these tomes was written for an in-progress Call of Cthulhu background in which the August Derleth "eye in a pentagram" Elder Sign is 'fake' -- i.e., it appears in various books on magick beginning with De doctrina antiqua et mysterio iniquitatis and has limited powers as a banishing and warding symbol if used by someone who knows what they're doing, but does not have the powers of the Elder Sign to affect Cthulhoid / extradimensional entities.  The branching tree sigil from a Lovecraft letter is considered the true Elder Sign.]

[There also exists a detailed backstory for a cult which Arras led (the "Stellar Temple" mentioned in connection with the Codex of Infinite Stars); in this background it was a schismatic branch of an occultist society which itself started as a schism from Theodor Reuss' collection of orders, but the post-WWII history of this society and its factions closely parallels the post-Crowley O.T.O. and was heavily influenced by rather petty motives on my part; parts of it were little more than a vehicle for having a go at certain people in the latter organisation(s). I thus do not intend to publish it in its present form.]