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.