Starless and Bible Black Widow (3.9)

[For one reason or another I have gotten back into studies that I largely abandoned the best part of a decade ago in favour of video game addiction, and so I am toying with ideas on how to actually continue this series.]

"Help me in my search for knowledge
I must learn the secret art
Who dares to help me raise the one
whose very name near stills my heart . . ."

[Ref Couliano & Walker on late mediaeval / early modern treatises on witchcraft as borderline pornographic works; wherever the hell I read it (prob. Kieckhefer), on books of magic treated as if intrinsically alive / demonic, compared with the way the book in BB is implied not simply to be demonic in so far as its procedures operate through the involvement of demons, but actually has a demon bound to it which obsesses / possesses those who acquire the book & drives them to work the rites.

Observations on Grimoire of Honorius & its reputation & its thus being used as the main model for the book in BB.  Lévi's fantasies & misrepresentation of the work.

(the spell pour faire danser une Fille nue which is used by the protagonist in the game, and by characters in the prequel to the anime, Bible Black Gaiden, in both cases as their first experiment with the book's magic, and with the result of publicly humiliating one of their classmates, appears in two "1670" editions of Honorius as well as the "1517" edition of the Grimorium Verum, but the collections of "plus rares secrets de l'Art magique" in the two volumes have significant overlap; either one was plagiarised from the other, or the same publisher was responsible for both.  The de Blocquel press of Lille, a prolific reprinter of pulp Grimoires in the 19th century, redacted it out of the "1760" edition of Honorius and modified (read: censored) it in Les Véritables Clavicules de Salomon, a re-issue of the GV; Blocquel seems to have had no problem with violence / cruelty against all manner of farm animals, invocation of various major demons, magical abuse of the Mass and curses intended to magically induce a potentially fatal grand mal epileptic seizure (which is pretty much what Pour faire danser une fille nue is represented as doing), but references to nudity were apparently too much for him.)

"Hekas Hekas" & "Zazas" formulas.

General nature of MS. works of magic tending to be fluid things rather than fixed received texts or even stable textual traditions.

How the hell do I tie this back to BW?  Sacrifice shows little actual acquaintance with the literature of Ceremonial Magic (save possibly the reference to Astaroth turning up "in human form," but that was made nonsense of with the rewrites to "Seduction") & the ritualistic portions of their show have more in common with Alexandrian Wicca (story was Sanders actually wrote those bits or at least advised them) than the Clavicle.  The references to magical traditions in the lyrics are pretty vague and scattergun; use of "blood and hair and sweat and ends of fingernails" as magical materia; spells "cast with mirrors, dolls and wax"; bragging about magic books, that "the Clavicles of Solomon are nothing by their side"; controlling the Horsemen of the Apocalypse with "the talisman of Set"; the past lives / reincarnation theme which drives the protagonist's motives is hardly a thing in medieval through to early modern European occulture.]

Starless and Bible Black Widow (1)

[Suggested by Black Widow's 'In Ancient Days' from the album Sacrifice.] 

Oh thou spirit [name], 

By the power of prog rock -- I conjure thee! 

By the dread and terrible name of Zeppelin -- I constrain thee! 

By the might of Jimmy Page's guitar -- I command thee! 

And if thou art still disobedient, I will torment thee for eternity -- or at least, for what shall seem like an eternity -- with bad renditions of Stairway. 

Z.Z.N.Z.

[EDIT: this was originally posted over 10 years ago; I was trying to tag it properly and tidy up the formatting and somehow ended up changing the datestamp on it to today.]

Back to the Beginnings (α)

[The following is part of an extensive fiction, alluded to in a few of the Call of Cthulhu related posts under the "Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore Club" tag.  The books by Gerald Massey referred to, however, are real; for those prepared to risk the SAN hit, copies can be found online at the web-publishing site Scribd; links can be found on the Celephaïs Press blog.]

Adrian Wallace on Gerald Massey.

[Adrian Wallace (1881-1944) was an English occultist who, after a few years in the Theosophical society and a year in Crowley's A.'.A.'. (he was acknowledged as having completed the task of a Probationer but resigned rather than take the oath of a Neophyte, not long after J.F.C. Fuller broke with AC), was appointed head of the British section of an organisation called the Stellar Temple (founded 1906 by a resigned former member of Theodor Reuss' collection of orders) and became its world Grand Master in 1919.  The S.T. claimed to teach and transmit what it called the "Stellar Gnosis," apparently an esotericist interpretation of religious and Masonic symbolism in terms of astronomical mythology, derived in part from various nineteenth-century works of comparative religion and speculative prehistory, and partly on a series of "illuminations" the organisation's founder claimed to have had.]

"[...] there is possibly material of value in the writings of Godfrey Higgins, though I am not sure whether it is worth the time it would take to read Anacalypsis at even the most superficial level; the work demonstrates all the intellectual limitations of the period, and ninety years' worth of archaeological discoveries have made nonsense of much of it.  Gerald Massey is another matter.  His writings, while diffuse, contain definite intimations of the Stellar Gnosis.  What is more remarkable is that it is quite clear that he got this through his own independent insights; the scorn he pours on modern esotericists, occultists and Theosophists makes it fairly clear he was not an initiate in the narrow and formal sense.

"The biggest stumbling block I found, especially with Ancient Egypt and some of the lectures, is what seemed to be the man's utter credulity on the subject of Spiritism which also seemed to be at odds with his apparent hostility toward most other forms of Occultism.  It seemed fairly obvious that he had had some kind of experience in these fields, & had known various mediums personally, whereas he probably regarded the T.S. and others, as Crowley put it, as people who talked about Yoga but didn't actually do any.  He would probably have been more sympathetic to the Scientific Illuminism of the A.'.A.'., at least for the time it would have taken him to find out that it was a vehicle for AC's agenda of inflicting another Revelation on the world and setting himself up as a Messiah."

[Letter to Frank Marlow, 1924]

"As regards 19th-century writing on History of Religion and allied subjects, the mainstream is 90% worthless for one set of reasons, including prudery, intellectual conservatism and a fear of upsetting the established churches; the fringe 99% worthless for another set of reasons, mostly a complete lack of critical faculties and incapacity for basic logical reasoning.  Massey, while there is much to fault, is one of the few on the fringe whose works actually repay the time and effort of serious study; even were it to turn out that his central thesis about Egypt being the source of everything was complete nonsense he gives some fairly heavy pointers to various aspects of the 'Starry Wisdom' or Stellar Gnosis.

"You must understand that we do not approach the subject in the first place as historians.  Having a historical background is useful, as we do not operate in a vacuum, but magically speaking it is in fact completely irrelevant whether the primal Stellar Cult actually, factually, historically existed or was simply a figment of Massey's imagination.  The true Stellar Gnosis is experiential and the purpose of reading such as we recommend is merely preparatory; if this or that nation of antiquity also possessed it, so much the better for them! but it is no odds to us, now."

[Memorandum to Stellar Temple students, ca. 1925]

"Massey.  His works are valuable, but diffuse & he does tend to ramble and repeat himself; hence I rarely quoted or cited specifically, although perhaps I should have given him more of a mention than I did--too late to change that now.  Beside the three major works there is a volume of lectures or essays.  (Also he wrote poetry.  Then again, so did Crowley, but I never let that put me off him.)  All are hard to get hold of now but some libraries will have them & copies occasionally come up for sale; I will lend you mine if I can find them.  Read the lectures first to get an overview.  They were intended as popular exposition and polemic, which is why he tends to assert rather than argue & present evidence.  Then read Ancient Egypt--just sit down and read it cover to cover.  You will probably think you understand it.  It is possible--you have shown yourself to be a fairly bright student so far--that  you actually will understand it.  Keep the earlier ones on hand for when he refers back to them, but don’t go too far into them.  Then read Natural Genesis in the same way.  Then read Book of the Beginnings.  Then go back and read Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt again--carefully.  Book of the Beginnings is vital to the whole scheme but unless you understand his system of Typology it just looks like nonsense.  You also have to bear in mind that while he was fairly frank for the time, there are still places where you have to read between the lines.

"Aside from being somewhat credulous about Spiritism the man seems to have been more or less a materialist & Darwinist when he wrote all this & would probably have retched at our understanding of the Stellar Gnosis, but there is still useful stuff in there, just as magicians and 'Neo-Pagans' should read Frazer even though he takes it as read that Magic is a mass of error and delusion and regards the notion of any 'pagan revival' with horror (vide his introduction to Spirits of the Corn &c.).  In Natural Genesis he repeatedly puts the boot into metaphysicians, modern esotericists and Theosophists, despite which H.P.B. quotes him favourably and ran a lot of his essays in Lucifer magazine, possibly on an ‘enemy’s enemy’ basis.[*]  I’m not sure what he would have thought of AC’s ‘Scientific Illuminism.’

"Churchward [**] on the other hand can be safely ignored; what is of value in his books is not original and most of the rest is just drivel.

"If nothing else (and there is much else) Massey is significant in that he was practically the only writer of the period to put the phallic cultus in proper perspective at a time when the mainstream just ignored it or tried to pretend it didn’t exist, and idiots like Inman, Jennings and Forlong tried to reduce everything else to it, seeing a Lingam in every standing stone, every vaguely conical hill, &c., &c.  I still cringe when I think about Forlong’s attempts to explain Stonehenge."

[Letter to Osric Arras, 1941.]

[*] A slight exaggeration; according to an index to Lucifer, Massey contributed (a) a short poem and a 4-page article to vol. i no. 2 (Oct. 1887), (b) a book review (well, rather an extended essay which took the book as text for a 10-page sermon) to vol. i no. 3 (Nov. 1887), (c) a brief book review (possibly; the piece is initialled "G.M." and the book under review was a volume of poetry rather than having any connection with Massey's later interests), a promotional blurb for a projected reprint of his book on Shakespeare's sonnets and a retort to some of Blavatksy's criticisms of his article from the October 1887 issue, in vol. i no. 5 (Jan. 1888), and (d) a short article on "Luniolatry," supplementary to his lecture on the same subject, in vol. i no 6 (Feb. 1888).  A pseudonymous and highly favourable piece on "Gerald Massey in America" including a lengthy quote from one of Massey's privately printed lectures, appeared in the September 1888 issue. Additionally, Blavatsky added multiple dissenting remarks in footnotes and afterwords to Massey's articles.   Wallace's involvement with the Theosophical Society was somewhat later (1902-1908) than the publication of the first volume of Lucifer so he was possibly not speaking from direct acquaintance.

[**] Albert Churchward (1852-1925), a writer on Masonic symbolism and speculative prehistory and a friend of Massey in the latter's later years.  Under Massey's influence he wrote a book called Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man (London: Swann Sonnenscheien, 1910; second edition London: George Allen & New York: E.P. Dutton, 1913) which was favourably reviewed by J.F.C. Fuller in the Equinox ("in every sense a great book [...] forms an excellent seventh volume to Gerald Massey's monumental work.")  His elder brother, James Churchward, wrote  a number of books on the Lost Continent of Mu. 

Velle Omnia, Velle Igitur Nihil

A true Initiation never ends.
Therefore there is no such thing as a perfect initiate.

Therefore, by declaring someone to be a perfect initiate you are declaring that, as far as you are concerned, that person no longer exist (and that any obligations they might foolishly have contracted to you are now null).

Leeroy and Joan? (3)

The Yellow Book.

Not to be confused with the 1890s publication of that name, this is a generic term for a species of magical grimoire / notebook kept by Yellow Sign adepts. Such works are individual, but typically contain information giving +2-20% / + 1d4 ranks King in Yellow Mythology and +1d6-3 percentiles Cthulhu Mythos and costing 1d8 SAN (this for the first time one is read: the benefit for reading later books is less, quite possibly zero, as they have much in common), 1d6-2 spells such as Contact King in Yellow, Song of the Hyades, Summon / Bind Byakhee, etc. Spell multiplier 1d4+1, representing how clearly or cryptically spells are described. All YBs contain the Yellow Sign, on the outside or inside of the front cover; not all have yellow binding.

Leeroy and Joan? (2)

An origin myth of the Yellow Sign cult.

[I claim no originality at all for this but leave it to the reader to work out where I lifted it from.]

The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign was founded in Carcosa a century or so prior to its destruction, by supporters of a member of the royal family who ended up on the losing side in a dispute about the succession to the throne.  Through a series of political intrigues, the group ended up becoming the power behind the throne but never gained the strength to openly seize the crown.

When a Mi-Go mining and research expedition was discovered to have landed on Carcosa’s planet, the Yellow Sign leadership denounced their activities, believing they would destabilise that world’s precariously balanced orbit (it being in a binary star system), rendering it uninhabitable by humans.  After a few years of agitation, war ensued between the fungi and Carcosa.  The magicks commanded by the Yellow Sign (mainly based around summoning monsters to fight for them, not from the Outer Void but from the unending nightmares of Carcosan “saints”—spiritually / psychically powerful individuals—who were soultrapped in statues while still alive) were no match for the Mi-Go's advanced technology and Carcosa was devastated, with over 90% of its population killed in the first month or so of fighting.

Realising the city faced total destruction, the leader of the Yellow Sign—a mage and descendant of the Carcosan royal family named Yhtill—embarked on a scheme to save at least a dream or memory of it.  Most of the surviving inhabitants—some willingly, some less so—were soultrapped in imperishable crystals set into the side of the mountains overlooking Carcosa, or buried in caverns beneath said mountain, in a permanent dreaming state, that their memories of the city might maintain a lasting simulacrum of its glory days in the Dreamlands, which would endure for æons after the original was reduced to rubble.

In order to protect himself while co-ordinating the summoning of the dream Carcosa, Yhtill constructed a magical shell around himself, anchored in a yellow robe and a full-face mask which he donned.  This “shell” was empowered with basic attack and defence functions and inherited a powerful hostility to the Mi-Go.

Something went wrong.  In channelling the energies required to coalesce the dream Carcosa, Yhtill went insane and the “shell,” empowered to an unanticipated degree, raged out of control and completed the ruin of the real-world city.  The effects of Yhtill’s madness warped the dream Carcosa, populating its night with black stars and moons that seemed to pass in front of the taller towers of the city.  In awe of the power of the new being, the surviving Yellow Sign members declared it their god and King.

Leeroy and Joan? (1)

[This is a work of fiction, produced as background material in connection with the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Yellow Sign Cult.

The notion of a Yellow Sign cult was probably crystallised by August Derleth in his development of the mythology of Hastur the Unspeakable.  Lovecraft throws in references to Hastur, the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign in a long laundry-list of names drawn from Bierce, Chambers, Dunsany, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and his own writings in The Whisperer in Darkness and later in the same story has pseudo-Akeley refer to a cult connected with “Hastur and the Yellow Sign” as hostile to the fungi from Yuggoth, but made no further reference to these names in his stories.

In one of the stories in The King in Yellow we encounter a delusional individual who believes himself to be a descendant of the Imperial Dynasty of America, and who is in the habit of issuing orders sealed with the Yellow Sign, which in another story, Chambers un-describes as “a curious symbol or letter . . . neither Arabic nor Chinese.”  The King in Yellow appears as a god-like, possibly mythical, figure in these stories; the narrator of “The Repairer of Reputations” believes that even if he can ascend to the Imperial Throne of America he will still be subject to the King in Yellow: “he is a King whom Emperors have served.”  We have only the vaguest hints of any organised cult or society based around the King in Yellow or with the Yellow Sign as their emblem.

The take on the Yellow Sign cult in this background is based on taking Hildred Castaigne’s beliefs as the founding myth of a secret society, rather than one man’s elaborate delusions as fed and developed by a small-time con-artist.  This tied in with the mythology of the Priory of Sion described in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the ultimate aim of which society was supposedly to set a descendant of the Merovingian Kings (who were in turn, according to the mythology, descended from Jesus of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala) on the throne of a restored French monarchy and ultimately a united Europe.

In this setting, the King in Yellow is a god-like entity (not strictly a GOO, though of similar power level) served by the Yellow Sign cult.  He appears roughly anthropomorphic, the precise details of his form and features hidden by a pallid mask and tattered yellow robes.  Most of his minions are human, although the cult leaders believe (through some highly questionable genealogies) themselves to be descended from various old European noble and royal families, and ultimately from the royal family of a long-lost realm (sometimes represented as being in a distant star system, associated with Aldebaran and the Hyades), and seek to claim the thrones, first of various European nations, then of a united Europe, and ultimately of the whole world under the authority of the King in Yellow; they occasionally summon Byakhee and other minor Cthulhoid entities as servitors.  The cult’s power-centre is the city of Carcosa; long destroyed on the physical plane (there are contradictory stories concerning its original location), it still exists in some kind of “astral” realm (it is not directly accessible from the Dreamlands).  The geography and environs of Carcosa are utterly alien; it appears to be in a binary star system, its night sky marked by three moons, at least one of which appears to pass in front of the taller towers of the city, and ‘black stars.’  Carcosa stands on the shores of the Lake of Hali; the initiation into the highest ranks of the Yellow Sign is reserved for those who have ‘sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali’ which involves voyaging astrally to Carcosa and descending into the lake.  The cult uses the play The King in Yellow to gain converts; hidden messages in the play cause those who read it or see it performed to become susceptible to control by the cult leaders using a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion.  The cult is currently sponsoring a movie production.

The historical origins of the Yellow Sign cult are unclear; while the cult’s leaders claim a fantastical antiquity for their organisation, all that can be said for certain is that it existed in some form in the mid 16th century in England, and probably other European nations as well.  An unpublished and never-performed play by Christopher Marlowe, The King in Rags and Tatters, is believed to have been written as a satire on the cult which was gaining influence in the court of Queen Elizabeth; some conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Yellow Sign arranged Marlowe’s death in a tavern brawl after learning of the work’s existence.   While highly active in Paris in the years prior to the French Revolution, the cult failed in their goal which was to put one of their own members on the throne.  They had heavily infiltrated French Freemasonry, but so had the Illuminati, the Cthulhu cult, and just about every other cabal, cult, conspiracy and secret society in the game, so their plots tended to cancel each other out and the actual course of events took everyone by surprise; the main beneficiaries were the ghoul packs of France.

Decades later, the Yellow sign managed to gain some influence in the “Second Empire” of Napoleon III.  An author called Maurice Joly wrote an exposé of their plans under the title Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu; while on the surface this was simply a satire against the regime, it contained certain double meanings designed to alert those knowledgeable in such things.  Joly was arrested and imprisoned for his pains; the Dialogue was plagiarised by the French anti-Masonic movement of the 1880s and 1890s; the anti-Masonic version was in turn plagiarised by elements in the Russian secret police circa 1900 and modified in the interests of anti-Semitism, becoming the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion [1] (the later ‘Priory of Sion,’ frequently mis-spelt ‘Priory of Zion,’ was a hoax inspired by the Yellow Sign cult).  

The Yellow Sign itself is the characteristic symbol of the cult; it simultaneously suggests a Chinese character, an Arabic ligature and the triskele or three-legged emblem of the Isle of Man, without actually being any of them.  The cult has historically been careful about where it publicly displays the sign, although in recent years some street gangs which the cult uses to terrorise certain urban neighbourhoods have adopted it as a territory marker.  

Hastur in this continuity is not a GOO and is not identical with the King in Yellow, but is the name of one of, or a constellation of, the Black Stars of Carcosa, sometimes superstitiously worshipped as a minor god by the inhabitants of Carcosa; one title of the ruler of Carcosa (who is not the King but subject to him) is ‘the son of Hastur’ and the leaders of the cult claim their position ‘by their right in Hastur.’  The spells Call / Dismiss / Free Hastur the Unspeakble, and Unspeakable Oath / Unspeakable Promise do not exist in this continuity.  The spell Song of Hastur exists and is known to some Yellow Sign cultists but is more often called Song of the Hyades.  Byakhee and the spell Summon / Bind Byakhee exist; the King in Yellow apparently has some limited authority over Byakhee, though they are not an unmitigated servitor race; nor are they the creatures undescribed in “The Festival.”  There is a Contact but no Call / Dismiss spell for the King in Yellow; the King comes and goes as he wills.[2]

Notes.

[1] The anti-Masonic prototype of the Protocols is an invention for the purposes of this background, suggested by (a) references in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (hardly a reliable source of information) which alleges the existence of Masonic references in the Protocols as published and, while acknowledging the connection of the Protocols with Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers suggests that it was nevertheless somehow connected with the Priory of Sion, and (b) Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, an anti-Masonic conspiracy work which alleges that the Jack the Ripper murders were directed, and the police investigation obstructed, by a Masonic clique in order to cover up the birth of the illegitimate child of a member of the British royal family and a Whitechapel shop-girl, in the course of which it is claimed that the Protocols was a genuine document of a Masonic conspiracy prior to being modified in the interests of anti-Semitism.  The fact that the Leo Taxil hoax was taken seriously makes the existence of an anti-Masonic proto-Protocols in 1890s France credible, but I have no positive evidence that any such thing ever happened.

[2] Should it ever be necessary to bring an avatar of the King into play, use the stats for the King in Yellow in 5^th edn. or d20 CoC.  There are rumours that occasionally circulate to the effect that the King is an avatar of Nyarlathotep and that the phrase “the waxen mask and the robe that hides” in the ritual refer to this form.  These rumours are false, and have probably been started by Nyarlathotep himself in the hopes that the Yellow Sign will start worshipping him under one of his actual forms.

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.]

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 y^e 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 Y^e Booke of y^e 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 Y^e Booke of y^e 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 "y^e formation of y^e 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 "Y^e Feaster from y^e Starres" is partly plagiarised from De Vermis Mysteriis and contains the Summon / Bind Star Vampire spell.

Under the head "Y^e 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 y^e 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 y^e Lorde of y^e Woodes, & y^e 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.

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.]

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.

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.]

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club (3)

(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.]

To call forth Him in the Gulf

And at the last from Inner Egypt came

The strange dark one to whom the fellahs bowed

Silent and lean and cryptically proud

And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.

Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,

But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;

While through the nations spread the awestruck word

That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the seas a noxious birth began
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold

The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled

Down on the quaking citadels of man.

Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play

The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.

Out in the mindless void the dæmon bore me,

Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,

Till neither time nor matter spread before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.

Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand

While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered

In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.

These danced insanely to the high, thin whining

Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,

Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining

Give each frail cosmos its eternal law.

"I am His Messenger," the dæmon said,

As in contempt he struck his Master's head.

H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep" and "Azathoth" from Fungi from Yuggoth.

Continuing a vague theme from the previous, in the spirit of general recklessness I've just stuck on Scribd a "Ritual to call forth Him in the Gulf" that I wrote about five years back and left sitting on my hard drive since I was too lazy to ever go out and do it.

The first two pages in a bad pastiche of 16th-century English comprise "flavour text" intended to connect this with the "Rite to call Yog-Sothoth" I wrote some years prior and have very little to do with the ritual itself. The "Prayer to Lord Iok-Sothoth" (a pastiche of the Pater Noster by Richard Tierney IIRC which appeared in the Chaosium Book of Eibon compilation) is omitted for copyright reasons.

The Rite of Yuggoth (fragments)

[This was conceived as a parody / pastiche of Crowley's Rites of Eleusis. Only a small part was ever written. Follows.]

There are four principal officers, who are not to be named. To conceal their identities, they are referred to below as Alice, Noel, Zoe and Jack. Alice is dressed in white, Noel in grey, Zoe in black, Jack in a fragmented and clashing mixture of colours (assuming octarine dye to be unobtainable). There is also a doorkeeper.

Alice is addressed as "Most Unspeakable,"
Noel as "Warden of the Silver Key,"
Zoe as "Warden of the Trapezoid Stone,"
Jack as "Keeper of the Infernal Flame,"
and the doorkeeper as "Guardian of the Outer Gateways."

The Temple in darkness. Music--Holst's "Neptune," eventually faded into silence.A: (knocks)
N: (knocks)
Z: (knocks)
Spotlights up on A, N and Z.
A: Venerable Warden of the Silver Key, what is the hour?
N: Most Unspeakable,

It is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.

A: Venerable Warden of the Trapezoid Stone, what is the place?
Z: Most Unspeakable, it is the place where Yuggoth rolls alone in black æthyr at the rim.
A: Since it is so, let us celebrate the Rite of Yuggoth.
(pause)A: Guardian of the Outer Gateways, see that we are not disturbed.
D: Most Unspeakable, I can see that we are all already disturbed.
Spotlight up on J. J recites Lovecraft's "Nemesis."A: Keeper of the Infernal Flame, I direct you to banish the space-marks.
J: (conducts a simple version of Banishing Ritual of the Space Marks, making complete circuit of the room)
A: Venerable Wardens, to your duties.
N: Our duties, Most Unspeakable?
A: (gives the appearance of being asleep, and does not respond)
Z: Brother, do not disturb the rest of Most Unspeakable.
N: Who knows what dreams may haunt the sleep of Most Unspeakable?
Z: Should Most Unspeakable awake, the dream would then dissolve.
with naught thereof remembered, saving that a dream has been.
N: Yet what is there to fear from dissolution of a dream?

[At which point inspiration failed. The general idea is that in the final analysis, nothing happens, but it happens in a very verbose and pompous way, much of it in 14-syllable unrhymed iambics, and with several of the Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets thrown in.]

[A later fragment: A. still apparently asleep.]

N: . . . and pray you never meet me in my myriad other forms.
Z (blanks, looks confused, as if she's just heard the wrong cue).
N (slightly irritated): In my myriad other forms?
Z (picks up script from under her chair, if not reading from it anyway, and searches through as if looking for her cue. At this point all the officers drop out of character and the lines following are spoken in a normal conversational tone. J. cringes, head bowed, right hand covering face with fingers spread out.
Z (eventually): You missed a page.
N: What? (checks script as above).
Z., N. and J. leave their spots and huddle together comparing their scripts.
N: I didn't miss a page. The muppet who printed this (expletive) script missed a page.
J: Crap. Dunno how that happened. Sorry about this, guys.
N: Well, shall we just carry on before people get bored and leave?
Z: I think we should take a break.
A (sits up suddenly): Intermission!

House lights up. A vendor wanders in selling what he claims is crispy fried octopus; either one of the officers or an audience plant gets into an argument with the vendor, claiming that this is really taken from tentacled monstrosities from the outer void.

[desunt cetera]

Starless and Bible Black Widow (3.5)

Actually, there is a third version of the "Sacrifice" album available, and a number of the Youtube links on my earlier post were taken from it. In 2007 Demons of the Night Gather to see Black Widow Live (or more simply, "Black Widow: Live") was released on the Mystic Records label as a two-disc (CD + DVD) set. While marketed as a live album, regardless of the presence of any "demons of the night" the only human audience at that performance was a German TV crew. Black Widow were performing for a pop-music show called Beat Club, and prior to the studio audience turning up recorded the entire 55-minute "Sacrifice" stage set complete with "Black Magic ritual" sequences (said to have been based in part on advice from self-styled "King of the Witches" Alec Sanders; certainly the ritual "opening" during the introduction of "In Ancient Days" uses similar phraseology to early Wiccan rituals).

This was apparently the last time Black Widow performed this set; according to later recollections by band member Clive Jones, about this time (apparently late in 1970) there were disagreements within the band over continuing with the trademark "Black Magic" theme which while gaining much publicity had led to a planned US tour being cancelled and the band's songs being refused airplay by the BBC. Two members of the band left and the second album, titled simply "Black Widow" consisted of more mainstream commercial prog-rock numbers.

Starless and Bible Black Widow (3)

A remark on the album "Sacrifice." There exist effectively two versions of this album; between the original demo recordings made in 1969 and the recording of the final version as released in 1970, Kay Garrett who sang the main vocal part on "Way to Power" and "Seduction" and duetted with Kip Trevor on "Come to the Sabbat," "Attack of the Demon" and "Sacrifice" left the band after getting married; these songs were reworked with Kip Trevor on main vocals throughout, and in the case of "Seduction" and "Attack of the Demon" the lyrics changed. The demo recordings were eventually released in 2000 as "Return to the Sabbat" and remastered and slightly cleaned-up versions appeared on the 2002 compilation "Come to the Sabbath -- Anthology." The song that suffered most from the changes was "Seduction." The opening lines:

"You asked me to come to you Prayed to have me here Here I am in human form Throw away your fear."

coming just after "Conjuration" (more or less the same on both versions) in which the magician declares:

"To make my dream come true I call the lady Astaroth, come join me here."

makes far more sense spoken by the demon summoned (when one recalls the common demand in Solomonic-stylee Grimoires for the spirit to appear "in fair human form") to the magician rather than vice versa. Astaroth, of course, while in the Grimoires and later demonologists a male arch-demon, is patently a corruption (possibly via the Hebrew plural form) of Ashtoreth, a Caananite goddess called Astarte by the Greeks (Milton at least realised this). Like almost every other major Caananite deity except Yahweh, she suffered demonisation in later Judæo-Christian thought.

Starless and Bible Black Widow (2)

Help me in my search for knowledge

I must learn the secret art

Who dares to help me raise the one

Whose very name near stills my heart . . .

Black Widow, "Come to the Sabbat"

A sacrifice, a sacrifice

You say you want a sacrifice

You say the words too easily

To know just what you mean.

Black Widow, "Sacrifice"

In case anyone cares, or is even reading this, the title of this series of posts was suggested by a string of tenously connected and comparatively obscure pop-culture references. Black Widow was a British prog-rock back of the late 1960s / early 1970s which was briefly notorious for a "Black Magic" (yes, with the capital letters) pose, including a highly theatrical stage show involving a mock human sacrifice, which earned them some sensational press coverage and was occasionally referenced in coffee-table books on "occult" subjects. Their album "Sacrifice" tells a Dennis Wheatley stylee story of a nameless magician, who boasts of wielding great power in previous lives ("In Ancient Days"), and attempts to regain these powers by the study of ancient magical books ("Way to Power") and hanging out at the Witches' Sabbat ("Come to the Sabbat"); he summons the demon Astaroth with the intent of helping the current incarnation of his lover from a previous life ("Conjuration"). She turns up, as the Grimoires put it, "in a fair human form, without deformity or tortuosity" and he promptly forgets why he was conjuring her in the first place, is overcome by the demon's "stinking breath" as the Goëtia cryptically puts it ("Seduction"), is mocked by the demon and learns that all his sins have damned his soul in hell ("Attack of the Demon") and ends up, as far as I can tell, repeating the crime / tragedy of a previous life by killing his lover as a sacrifice to the demon ("Sacrifice").

"starless and bible-black" was a coinage of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, used in his famous radio play Under Milk Wood to describe a heavily overcast night in an era and place when this would not have meant the sky being dull orange from light pollution. It was later (1974) used as the title of an album by King Crimson, another British prog-rock band. Starless and Bible Black Sabbath was the title of a 2006 album by Japanese band Acid Temple Mothers conceived as a tribute to King Crimson and early Black Sabbath.  (Black Sabbath really didn't like being confused with Black Widow.)

Finally, Bible Black (バイブルブラック) was in the first instance a Japanese computer game (of the "visual novel" style which has generally not been very popular in the Western market), released in 2000, subsequently turned into a 6-episode straight-to-video animation (with various prequels, followups and sidestories), both later translated into English (the anime having a dub so abysmal it turns what was meant to be a dark and horrific story into a comedy, and has been widely mocked on YouTube). The plot revolves around the mayhem which ensues when a bunch of high school students find an old grimoire (apparently something like the Constitution of Honorius bound up with a luridly pornographic treatise on witchcraft), and proceed to try out the spells contained therein, largely (this being an "ero" or if you prefer "hentai" game and anime) in order to get laid.

"Have you ever read the books

that I wrote centuries ago?

The Clavicles of Solomon

is nothing by their side.

They lay bare secret arts

that stood the ravages of time

and practices once more exposed

that everyone should know."

Black Widow, "Way to Power."

And just for the record, in the ritual in the prologue of the first episode / opening of the game, they're not chanting "Jesus" (official subtrack) or "Satan" (dubtrack) but

Z.Z.N.Z.

EDIT: fixed a bunch of dead YouTube links to Black Widow tracks.