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.]