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.

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.