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.