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.

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.

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.]

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club (2)

[The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Codex of Infinite Stars is a work of questionable ontological status. It is believed by some to be entirely mythical and by others to be a modern hoax; certainly it has never been printed in its entirety, and no known institutional collection on or off this planet (including the BL, the Bodleian, the BNF, the Vatican library, the Miskatonic University Library, the Great Library of Celaneo or the Royal and University libraries of Celephaïs), even those with carefully-guarded manuscript codices or printed copies of the Necronomicon, De vermiis mysteriis or Geschichte von unaussprechlicen Kulten has a copy, although certain purported "excerpts" and "transcriptions" have been circulated in MS. and TS. and printed in occultist journals. While sharing certain themes these "excerpts" differ so wildly in style and tone that it is difficult to believe they are all the work or the same author, or all taken from the same book. It appears that the first of these "excerpts" were manifested in the waking world in the 1970s by a member of a society called the Stellar Temple who claimed to have found the codex in a library attached to an "astral temple" encountered while fleeing a flock of nightgaunts on his way to a reputed access point to one of the Tunnels (a set of connected 'astral' realms believed to be part of the shattered remains of a previous universe). Further "transcriptions" have been made by other Stellar Temple members and freelance magicians; these include hallucinatory prose-poems, rambling pieces of speculative prehistory, strange geometric diagrams which appear to have more dimensions that can reasonably be represented on a flat piece of paper, sketches of alien landscapes and indescribable creatures, &c. &c. &c.

Individual excerpts typically have a 50% chance of having 1d3% Cthulhu Mythos value with proportionate SAN cost, and a 20% chance of containing 1 spell (spell multiplier 1-3). A disreputable publisher called the Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club is rumoured to be in negotiation with various of the "transcribers" to produce a collected edition of the "excerpts," but the BToFELotMC is better known for making extravagant claims and promises than actually ever getting anything into print.

The image heading this article is a sketch purporting to represent the temple housing the Codex, as drawn by a sometime Stellar Temple member (since expelled) called David Calmar.

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club (1)

[This series will present material originally written in connection with a background (contemporary) for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game; since I never actually got round to running that background or even actually writing any scenarios, this material is being made available for any other GMs who want to use it.]

The Epistle of Simon the Magician.

. . . But before I set out how I came to possess this gnôsis, I must counter the noxious lies about me spread by one Loukas, who in his Praxeis makes me out to be the lowest of men, a common sorcerer [γοες] who fooled the people by simple tricks and sought to obtain the favour of the Gods with base coin . . .

The Epistle of Simon the Magician (henceforth EpSM) is a quasi-Gnostic text, purported to be a letter from the "Simon Magus" of early Christian legend to a school or group of disciples (the work has no title in MS., but opens "Simon of Samaria, called the Magician, writing to those seeking to be made perfect").

The earliest known copy of this work appears in Greek, in a papyrus codex found in the Egyptian desert in 1998 c.e. EPsM occupies about three-quarters of the codex and is followed by a scribal note stating that it had been copied in Alexandria in the second year of the reign of the Emperor Julian, from an "ancient copy" found in the Temple of Serapis, "for the benefit of those seeking perfection in the true Gnôsis." This date at least is believed credible based on paleography and the condition of the codex. The remaining leaves are filled with what appear to excerpts from Hermetic texts, also in Greek. The date of composition of EpSM, based on an analysis of the Greek style and usage, is tentatively placed in the latter half of the third century c.e., and certainly no earlier than 200 c.e.; some of the language employed, indeed, appears to reflect the technical terminology of Neoplatonic Theurgy, which would suggest a date somewhat nearer to the claimed time of the known copy. The author attribution (even assuming Simon of Samaria to have been an historical figure in the first place) is thus, as with most works of this class, spurious and the work is an example of pseudoepigraphy.

Contents: As Bentley Layton (see the "genre analysis" of the Nag Hammadi texts &c. in Gnostic Scriptures) might have put it, EpSM has a complex mixture of genres in which various traditional materials are subordinated to others:

I. Epistle from a teacher to a school of disciples.
. . . A. Autobiography
. . . . . . 1. Visionary revelation
. . . . . . . . . a. Theogony
. . . . . . . . . b. Cosmogony and uranography
. . . . . . . . . c. Treatise on the nature and origin of souls.
. . . . . . 2. Mystical "ascent."
. . . . . . . . . a. Description of successive stages of gnosis.
. . . B. Exhortations.

Besides forming a frame for a lengthy revelation-discourse, the autobiography contains an audi alteram partem account of Simon the Magician's set-to with Simon the Rock (the explicit reference to the Praxeis or "Acts of the Apostles" is another pointer to dating EpSM). "Simon" states that he had been initiated into "The Mysteries" (he does not state which of the various Mystery Cults around at the time) prior to his encounter with the new sect and specifically states he was attracted to them by the reputation of their leaders for thaumaturgical powers—a reputation which he claims he later found out was 'worked up by the reports of fools and liars, or won by the use of tricks which I had long ago abandoned'—but after taking their first "initiation" he discovered that (a) the initiation and attached teaching did nothing to increase his knowledge or power, (b) it was considered by the cult to be little more than a preliminary purification, (c) the cult had a second initiation, which he refers to as "transmission of the pneuma," (d) it was this second initiation which was associated with thaumaturgic powers, (e) any progress in the cult, and certainly being accepted for the second initiation, required an exclusive devotion to "this new God of the Hebrews called Jesus" and would thus mean burning his boats so "those gods on whom I once had called would no more hear my voice." Aware also that it was not uncommon among teachers of the Mysteries to require fees, sometimes quite substantial, for their greater initiations, he approached the leader of the cult (he refers to him as "the leader of this sect, a Jew named Simon whom his followers call 'the rock' (ο πετρος)," sarcastically adding that this sounded like the epithet of a gladiator) at the first opportunity and as he puts it, politely enquired what this fee was, whereupon he was told to get lost.

After this rejection he travelled some more, and, growing somewhat weary of the life of a wandering thaumaturgist, took up with another (unnamed) teacher, from whom he learnt to "turn his attention to the Divine Mind." On so doing (the description of the process is obscurely phrased but seems to imply some kind of ritual invocation; certain phrases used in the Greek suggest the technical terminology of Neoplatonic Theurgy) and received from "Mind" a lengthy revelation. This revelation is written in (somewhat defective) Greek hexameter verse, probably out of convention rather than because "Simon" had any particular liking or affinity for the form. The revelation opens with a cosmogonic myth, here loosely paraphrased in English:

IN THE BEGINNING there was nothing save the great First Thought;
First Thought, who from self contemplation did become insane.
As to how long this madness lasted, it may not be said;
This happens in Eternity, for Time as yet was not.
An æon or an instant passed, First Thought came to itself,
By casting forth its madness as the first separate being.
This first separate being had no mind, but awesome pow’r
And blind insatiable will to create and to destroy.
Nor did this being have as yet a name, and even though,
In latter ages, certain names have been bestowed on it,
These names it were not well to speak nor even yet to write.
Thus there became First Madness. And thus First Thought knew fear.
Then with its primal unity now shattered past repair,
The First Thought did again create, six more separate beings;
These were Space/Time, and Life, and Wisdom; Mind, and then two more,
But these last two, their names and pow’rs, are yet unknown to me.
And thus became the Ogdoad, the primal Elder Gods.
And then did Mind reflect upon this Primal company;
And thought: Though we have all this pow’r, to what end shall it serve?
Then, prompted by dim memories of something yet to come,
Mind thought to make a Universe of matter and of form.
The raw power of First Madness in the matrix of Space/Time
Would shape the raw materials which Life could animate;
The three remaining Primals, Mind thought, would not serve this cause,
Not representing anything this kind of world should need.

The universe thus created by these four Primal demiurgic powers proved unstable, and imploded messily. But

This fall, though cataclymsic was yet in no sense complete:
The rulers of this universe, the Kings of Ancient Time,
Lurked on within the ruins of the cosmos that collapsed.
For while these worlds be shattered, still their broken shells remain.

There then follows a rather confused account on the nature and origin of souls as manifested in humans and other sentient beings in the present creation, in the course of which the metre first becomes strained, then breaks down completely and is finally abandoned. The beings peopling the first universe did not have souls as such; some were essentially automata, others were animated by a greater or lesser 'spark' of the First Madness; and since this universe collapsed due to structural flaws rather than the First Madness deliberately withdrawing Its power, the most powerful of these inhabitants, the "Kings of Ancient Time" or "Great Ones of Old Time" survived, and lurk on in the broken spheres. In any case, the creation of souls is ascribed to Wisdom and the two unnamed Primals; their existence is initially almost as 'angels' in the realm of the Primals. After some indeterminate period has passed:

Once more did Mind reflect and think, What use to have a mind
If one may not learn from mistakes, and try the task again?
So yet once more the great First Madness did put forth its pow’r;
Within the matrix of Space/Time a Universe took shape.
Now Mind did look upon these works, and thought that they were good;
Or, if not good, they at the least were better than last time.
Then First Madness assumed a place within the great gulf fixed,
and Life surged forth to populate the countless worlds new-formed.
And once more did First Thought know fear.

And so First Thought took counsel with the three who yet were loyal,
And, fearing lest this Universe should founder like the last,
Established they the Ring Pass Not, and set their seal thereon,
Imprisoning the Primal pow’rs who had defied their will.

Along, however, with the four rebellious Primals and an unknown number of the Great Ones of Old Time, an astronomical number of largely blameless souls are entrapped within the universe.

[Desunt cetera.]

The papyrus codex containing EpSM was later stolen during a break-in at the museum where it was being studied.  Prior to this, a complete English translation had been prepared and submitted to various academic journals, but was universally rejected as "sloppy and uncritical"; several reviewers took exception to the translator's comparing the cosmogonic myth with teachings of modern occultist groups and legends contained in Theosophical literature.  The translation has had a limited circulation in MS. and TS., although the translator herself has disappeared (along with all extant photographic prints and negatives of the papyrus) after being sacked in a dispute over alleged plagiarism and fraudulent expenses claims.

For the translation: +4 Mythos, 1d3 / 1d6 SAN, spell multiplier x 2; spells include Contact Nyarlathotep, Create Skrying Window, Journey to the Other Side.