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.

The Reality Police

(written many years ago and buried on a file of random notes on background for occult-themed fiction on my hard drive ever since)

Magick can be considered as the art and science of producing changes in consciousness (Fortune)

Therefore advertising, political spin-doctoring, etc., are all species of magick (any sufficiently advanced applied psychology is indistinguishable from magick).

But the greatest magicians of all are those who can produce culture-wide paradigm shifts. (This is what Crowley meant by describing people like Buddha, Mohammed et al as Magi; and behind them, people like Luther, Blavatsky, etc., as 8=3). John Dee, who was probably responsible for the British Empire (he certainly coined the name) is in the running; but the greatest of the modern era were those who created the modern era - Marin Mersenne and René Descartes.

We can imagine a politically conservative group who desperately want to preserve the modernist paradigm (probably because their power and prestige depends on it). They will therefore do everything in their power to rubbish and discredit any kind of belief in magick, precisely because they do believe in magick (even if this belief is never expressed in such terms) and understand the power of belief. Outfits like CSICOP (whose prominent members include a number of ‘stage magicians’, who if they know their art at all know about manipulating peoples’ perceptions) may therefore be considered nothing less than a species of reality police.

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.