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As all our readers know too well, one of
the staples of Lovecraftian fiction, whether actually penned by HPL or by his
acolytes, is the "mouldy hidden manuscript". Lovecraft himself invented
several, and thus opened a floodgate for similar efforts by his imitators.
Leaving aside questions about the propriety or effectiveness of this
ever-burgeoning library of "rare" and "secret" texts, the
present essay seeks merely to draw a few boundaries within the cluttered
terrain. In light of recent developments, Lin Carter's glossary "H. P.
Lovecraft: The Books" could stand some updating. But our task is even more
modest than this. For we want simply to describe the principle genres of
occult-related literature now loading the sagging shelves of the Mythos.
Grimoires
First, as might be expected, prominent
among our texts are grimoires, books containing recipes and prescriptions for
spells. Real books of this kind include The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses,
The True Grimoire, and The Great Grimoire. From the Arkham
archives, we might select Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis (Robert
Bloch). Depending on the connotation of "worm", the title might mean either
"secrets of the grave" or "secrets of the Dragon". Dragon would
denote either Satanism (cf. Revelation 12:9) or alchemy, of which the dragon is
the symbol. If "secrets of the Dragon" is intended, we would have a
parallel to the modern European grimoire The Fiery Dragon.
Cultes des Goules by Comte
d'Erlette might be a grimoire, providing that the French "cult" is
taken as meaning "worship", the title then being understood as "The
Worship of the Ghouls". Otherwise, see our next category below. By the way, Eddy
C. Bertin gives the Comte's personal name as "Francois-Honore
Balfour".
There is, surprisingly, similar ambiguity
in the case of the chief Mythos book, the Necronomicon. Only in
Lovecraft's later stories does the book of Abdul Alhazred appear as a grimoire.
In earlier tales, especially "The Hound", the notorious tome is of quite a
different nature (again, see below). Other Mythos grimoires include Lumley's Cthäat
Aquadingen and Michael S. Warnes's Black Tome of Alsophocus.
Demonologies
Before Lovecraft made the Necronomicon
into a grimoire, he was explicit that it fell under the rubric of a
"demonology", i.e., a text like the medieval Malleus Malifecarum, a
guidebook to heretical beliefs, to be used in suppressing them. In "The
Hound", reference is made to "the old Arab daemonologist" Abdul
Alhazred. He hates and fears the horrors he relates. Note his distaste for
wizards in the passages quoted in "The Festival". Interestingly, though HPL
himself turned the book into a grimoire in later years, his followers (Derleth,
Carter, et al.) persisted in seeing Alhazred's tome as a demonology.
Returning to d'Erlette's Cultes des
Goules, it too is likely to be a demonology if "cultes" denotes
"cults" (thus, "Ghoulish Cults"), as in Kenneth Grant's Cults
of the Shadow or in the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Fvindvuf von
Junzt. The latter is, of course, one of the foundational volumes in the Cthulhu
Mythos. It was invented by Robert E. Howard. Incidentally, Von Junzt's first
name as given above is supplied by Lovecraft. A less fanciful version used by L.
Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter is "Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt". As for the
name of the volume itself, it is most often, but incorrectly, translated as
"Nameless Cults". But "unaussprechlichen" denotes
"unspeakable" not in the sense of "unknown", but rather in the
sense of "indescribable" or "unmentionable" (cf. Ephesians
5:12; "It is shameful even to speak of what is done in secret."). Eddy
C. Bertin introduced a thinly-veiled duplicate of Von Junzt's work in his story
"Darkness, My Name Is". It is Kazaj Heinz Vogel's Of the Damned, or: A
Treatise About the Hideous Cults of the Old. Both heresiologists were
eighteenth century Germans.
Probably another demonology is The
Confessions of Clithanus the Monk (August Derleth, "The Passing of Eric
Holme"). It would seem to embody the penitential and/or devotional musings
of a converted warlock. Though it is said to contain at least one spell
summoning a sea-monster, Clithanus may have included it in the course of
refuting and denouncing his former beliefs, much as St. Augustine described
Manichaeanism in his lengthy repudiation of it in his own Confessions. Finally,
Rev. Ward Phillips's Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New English Canaan
is also a work of this kind, being modeled on Cotton Mather's Magnalia.
Scriptures
Our third category is that of occult
scriptures, those books like Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches; The
Satanic Bible; or The Book of Shadows, which are used in occult or
pagan liturgy. They would correspond to the prayer books, missals, and
lectionaries of traditional religions. Cthulhu-cult lore includes scriptures
such as Ramsey Campbell's Revelations of Glaaki, Lovecraft's Dhol
Chants, and Carter's Rituals of Yhe. We might also note HPL's Seven
Cryptical Books of Hsan, which seem analogous to the divination manual I
Ching.
Non-Human Chronicles
Fourth in our list are prehistoric or
extraterrestrial records. The foremost examples are Lovecraft's Pnakotic
Manuscripts, Richard F. Searight's Eltdown Shards, and Clark Ashton
Smith's The Book of Eibon. Regarding the last named, one may question
whether it rightfully belongs to the Cthulhu Mythos at all. In a mood of
extravagant expansiveness, however, HPL adopted Smith's Hyperborean stories
lock, stock, and barrel into the Mythos, mentioning Eibon and "toadlike
Tsathoggua" nearly as often as his own scriptures and demons. Ah well, no
use crying over spilt slime.
Other survivals from nonhuman times and
climes include Derleth's Celaeno Fragments and R'lyeh Text;
Lumley's G'harne Fragments; and Carter's Zanthu Tablets and Ponape
Scripture. The last volume is, down to the very palm-fronds it is printed
on, a take-off on the already fictitious Stanzas of Dzyan or Book of
Dzyan trumpeted by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists.
Monographs
We come next to consider a whole raft of
anthropological treatises, beginning with two by Derleth's Professor Laban
Shrewsbury: Investigations into the Myth-Patterns of Latter-Day Primitives,
with Especial Reference to the 'R'lyeh Text' and Cthulhu in the
Necronomicon. These monographs were probably based on real-life works of
scholarship like Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and
Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, and crank volumes like W.
Scott-Eliot's The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, all mentioned
by Lovecraft.
Lin Carter contributed a shelf full of
titles of this kind. His archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland single-handedly
produced Prehistory in the Pacific: A Preliminary Investigation with
Reference to the Myth-Patterns of Southeast Asia, and Polynesian
Mythology, with a Note on the Cthulhu Legend-Cycle, and The Prehistoric
Pacific in the Light of the 'Ponape Scripture', and finally The
Civilization of Mu, a Reconstruction in the Light of Recent Discoveries, with A
Synoptic Comparison of the 'R'lyeh Text' and the 'Ponape Scripture'.
Shrewsbury should have sued him. (Carter also embellished Lovecraft's brief
mention of Gottfried Mülder, who wrote The Secret Mysteries of Asia, with a
Commentary on the 'Ghorl Nigräl'.) In view of all this, it seems nearly
miraculous that Brian Lumley's Sir Amery Wendy-Smith did not pen a tome with a
title like Seismological Surveys of Mid-African Myth-Patterns, with
Particular Reference to the 'G'harne Fragments'. . . . Now don't go getting
ideas.
Inspired Poetry
Our next group of writings is constituted
by the works of decadent poets. This is actually one of the oldest of the Mythos
genres. The most famous example is Justin Geoffrey 's People of theMonolith
(in Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone", and Howard-and-Derleth's,
"The House in the Oaks"). This notion of a too-sensitive artist driven
to madness (though not delusion) by his visions of ultra-telluric horrors
actually comes from HPL's "The Nameless City". There Abdul Alhazred, in his
earliest appearance, is called "the mad poet". Asleep at the site of the
buried city of intelligent dinosaurs, Alhazred wakes up in a cold sweat and
sings this famous couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Similarly, Justin Geoffrey awakens after a
bad night's sleep at the ancient shrine of toad-like Gol-Goroth, and composes
these lines:
They say foul things of Old Times still
lurk
In Dark forgotten corners of the world,
And gates still gape to loose on certain nights,
Shapes pent in Hell.
The musical compositions of Erich Zann and
the pictures of Edward Upton Pickman derive from similar inspiration, as does Azathoth
and Other Horrors by Lovecraft's poet Arthur Pickman Derby, We might also
mention the disturbed sculptor Henry Anthony Wilcox and the demented writer
Robert Blake.
Fritz Lelber in his "The Terror from
the Depths", introduces his own mad poet, who is, like him, a German. He is
Georg Roister Fischer, author of The Tunneler Below. Lumley's poetess is
Ariel Prescott (Visions from Yaddith). Lin Carter serves as the literary
agent for poets Edgar Henquist Gordon (Night Gaunts) and Wilbur Nathaniel
Hoag (Dreams from R'lyeh) and prose writers Phillip Howard ("The
House of the Worm" and "The Defilers"), and Amadaeus Carson (Black
God of Madness), the latter pair being spin-offs from HPL's "Robert
Blake", a fictional surrogate of his pal Robert Bloch. One may speculate that
this genre of "inspired fiction" might have promised some welcome
relief from the overuse of crumbling grimoires and chronicles in Mythos stories.
But has it perhaps already been done to death? We know we're in trouble
when Lumley actually has a character leaf through one of Lin Carter's works
side-by-side with the Necronomicon!
Variant Versions
Last but not least, we consider a new and
hopeful genre --- the "variant version". Here the idea is that a particular
and peculiar edition of a well-known Mythos text holds special secrets. The
implication is that the legends have grown in the telling, evidently by
interpolation or mediumistic rewriting of the text by psychics. The clearest
example of this is Lumley's Original Notes on the Necronomicon by
occultist Joachim Feery. Lumley has characters call the work an
"often-fanciful reconstruction" of Alhazred's text, containing
pericopae unattested in any known manuscripts. We should probably so understand
Bertln's "Liyuhh, the almost unknown German translation, or rather
adaptation and analysis of the R'lyeh Text". Such tendentious recensions of
older texts are hardly uncommon. Many grimoires have reached their present form
by such an evolutionary process of redaction. Eldon J. Epp has also studied the
theological slant of the famous "Western Text" of Luke-Acts in the New
Testament. The "variant version", then, is a clever and innovative
departure in Mythos lore, though its very attractiveness as a literary device
will probably soon lead to its exhaustion. Would that new Mythos writers would
imitate the originality of the creators of the several genres, rather than
slavishly copying the specific products of that originality.
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