by Mark Latham
In 149 BC, the Senate, foremost among them Cato the Elder, ruled that ‘Carthago delenda est’ – Carthage must be destroyed. The auguries were good: that year, the Romans laid siege to the city of Carthage, eventually sacking the city and retrieving many mystical artefacts and, of course, pages of the Liber Ivonis, though some leaves were reputed to have been destroyed in the fires that raged through the city. The Romans’ victory was so complete that the Phoenician gods who once secured Carthage’s status were utterly destroyed. In far-off R’lyeh, Cthulhu stirred in his endless dreaming as he consumed the energy of these usurper deities. The once-proud people of Carthage were enslaved, their riches taken, and their fields sown with salt as a reminder of what would befall those who opposed the might of Rome and Cthulhu.
The Liber Ivonis
Originally believed to contain a thousand pages, the Liber Ivonis was the oldest and most sinister of the Sibylline books, locked away in the vaults of the Senate in a catacomb sequestered solely for the use of the priesthood. The book – a collection of ancient scrolls – was bound loosely in flayed and tanned human skin, carved and branded with maddening, ever-shifting runes and bearing the painted seal of Cthulhu.
Only fragments of this book survived into the time of the Roman Empire, and they were written mostly in a strange script that only the most senior priest could read. It was this priest’s solemn duty to pass on this knowledge to his chosen successor. The book contained many spells and rites, from the simple summoning and questioning of restless spirits, to the undertaking of the ‘dream quest’ through which the faithful of the priesthood communed with their slumbering god.
The largest cache of surviving papers was found during the sack of Carthage (c.149 BC). Over 30 pages of spells were found, though some were woefully incomplete – the priesthood laments that other sacred pages might have been burned in the great fires that spread across the city. Hope remains, however – two further fragments were later found by a frumentarius searching an abandoned tomb in Parthia. The spy barely escaped with his life, reporting that a horned guardian made of smoke and shadow slew six praetorians who had accompanied him into the sigil-warded chamber.
The Peri ton Eibon – the first Greek translation of the book the Romans called the Liber Ivonis, c.100 BC.
Cults and Secret Societies
By 50 AD, Rome was home to over a million souls, who flocked from every corner of the Empire to make their fortune. An exotic blend of races and creeds living together in a tightly packed, teeming city, the citizens of Rome were born of many beliefs and cultures. It is unsurprising that Rome was home to many strange cults, guilds, and secret societies, all of which operated covertly, pushing their own agendas and clashing with opposition without the plebeians ever realizing the trouble fermenting at their doors.
Cults within Rome numbered in the hundreds. Some were as innocent as the society of wheelwrights, or as fiscally powerful as the collegium of Dionysiac Artificers. Others were dedicated to more radical causes, to the worship of little-known deities, or to the practice of magical rites long thought forgotten. Arguably, the greatest secret society of them all was the priesthood of Rome – the quindecimviri sacris. Although they operated openly, with a public status on a par with lauded senators, their true goals and myriad ritual observances were known to very few.
The Idaeans
The Idaeans worshiped Magna Mater, a Phrygian goddess known outside Rome as Cybele, the Great Mother. Though the priesthood initially attempted to quell the rise of Cybele worship in the capital, it proved a fruitless task, for the Great Mother was a popular deity across the Empire. Known by many names including Inanna, Agdistis, and Ishtar, Cybele is named in the Sybilline texts as Shub-Niggurath, the Dark Mother, that insidious Great Old One so beloved of the Celts. Renaming her ‘Magna Mater’, the priesthood ordered that all temples to Cybele’s many aspects across the Empire be destroyed, and her relics brought to Rome for ‘further study’. One such artefact was a strange slab of meteoric black stone, which fell from the sky over Pessinos in Phrygia during the second Punic War. The Phrygians saw this smooth slab of star-metal as a gift from Cybele, and dedicated it to her. When the Romans found it, it is said that a great magical battle took place before the stone was finally removed and dragged back to Rome, where it was rededicated to Magna Mater, the stone eventually forming the head of a great statue to the goddess. The Idaeans were curious in that many of their number were Gallic slaves, and their militant followers comprised a great number of eunuchs, who are blessed of Cybele. It was the Idaeans’ ultimate goal to break the magical shackles placed upon their goddess and return the meteoric stone to Pessinos. If that should happen, the priesthood feared that the barbarian hordes who worshiped Shub-Niggurath in all her forms would rise to unstoppable prominence.
The Order of Mithras
Many in Rome were unhappy with the rule of the emperors, but few were better placed to do something about it than the Order of Mithras. These embittered soldiers sought to restore the world to an age of myth, where legendary heroes and warrior cults ruled supreme. The secretive temples of Mithras sent out their own warriors into the far corners of the Empire – legionaries whose loyalty lay with their deity rather than the Emperor, and who would snatch artefacts of power from their brother legionaries and keep them from the priesthood so that one day they might be used to overthrow the established regime. The Order of Mithras was a superstitious cult who believed that a military coup was the only hope for Rome’s future.
To the superstitious common soldier, religious charms were not always a symbol of deep-rooted faith, but merely a way of entreating all of the gods for luck in battle. Some legionaries would wear symbols of Cthulhu alongside those of Mithras, Mars, and Mercury, without worrying overmuch about the conflicting ideologies at play.
The Herodians
A secretive cult heralding from Judaea, the Herodians still practiced magic long forbidden by their Roman rulers, and the most powerful amongst them garnered a fell reputation for sorcery. Through rituals of sympathetic magic they moulded great beasts of clay to serve as physical conduits into which monstrous entities could be given blasphemous life. More than once, lumbering monsters – known to the Herodians as ‘golems’, but named in the Liber Ivonis as ‘Gugs’ – tore through the immigrant slums of the Aventine and Emporium, only to be brought down by legionaries and vigiles – the city watchmen – at a great cost in Roman blood. With each rampage, it became harder for the priesthood to suppress tales of monsters within the city itself.
It was whispered that the Herodians summoned a cult of assassins from far Judaea to do their bidding. Belonging to an ancient order, these sicarii (‘dagger-men’) were highly trained killers, masters of poisons and blades, with a predilection for dark magic. The sicarii were desperate men, for their hatred of the Romans knew no bounds, driving them to jeopardize their very souls in their thirst for vengeance. In 160 AD, the celebrated prefect Quintus Lollius Urbicus – former governor of Britannia – almost succeeded in tracking down the heads of the Herodian cult within the Aventine, only to be murdered under mysterious circumstances. Urbicus was renowned as a moderate man, who embraced the melting-pot of cultures within Rome, and yet he was afforded no mercy. Such was the gruesome and inexplicable manner of his death that his predecessors shied away from offending the Herodians forever after, much to the chagrin of the priesthood.
Roman archers try to bring down a marauding Gug in the narrow streets of the Aventine.
The Argonauts
Long believed to be the subject of myth, the ancient Greek cult of Hera, known colloquially as the Argonauts, was a secret society which remained active for centuries. Dedicated to reclaiming long-lost sacred artefacts of the Olympian gods, the Argonauts found themselves opposed to the priesthood due to the Romans’ plunder of ancient sites of power.
Though Greece was a power long spent, there were those nobles who still remembered the old tales and secretly worshiped the old gods. These wealthy pat
rons lent resources to the Argonauts, who trained warriors to be as bold and hardy as Jason himself, and used their wealth to manipulate Rome’s enemies, particularly the Persians and the barbarians of Germania and Britannia. Led only by men said to be of Jason’s line, the Argonauts sought to wrest artefacts of great power from the hands of the priesthood and protect them until such time as they could be used for the good of all.
The leaders of this estimable cult had in their possession a copy of the Peri ton Eibon, a fragmentary Greek translation of the Liber Ivonis. The Book of Eibon was considered the utmost heresy by the priesthood, as it made accessible all the rites for so long written only in the sacred aklo script. With this book, the Argonauts deciphered much of the priesthood’s plans. While the information contained within these scraps was insufficient to cause real harm to the priesthood’s ambitions, it was enough to convince the Argonauts of Cthulhu’s manifest evil, and of Rome’s utter corruption.
The Priests of Iram
Unknown to the priesthood of Rome, a religious sect operated in subterranean caverns beneath the city’s streets. Founded by Arabian slaves and joined by many desperate men and women, this cult claimed to have been founded in the fabled lost city of Iram, which was once home to the ‘Elder Ones’. Upon the altar of their principal temple was a relic so powerful that it shone with dark light and pulsed with energy. All who drew near to it would receive thoughts that were not their own, their wills fully subverted by the bizarre, alien fossil.
The high priests could not enter the temple without first imbibing a concoction of mind-altering herbs, for otherwise they would go mad from the many voices inside their minds. The high priests transcribed messages from the relic and conducted the will of their fossil-god to their followers. For the relic was no mere idol: it was a carrion-lord, a creature whose body is long dead but whose soul lives on, trapped for ever. It was man-sized and barrel-shaped, with tendrils and a five-stemmed ‘head’ atop its strange, fungal body. Its great wings were outstretched from the altar, fastened to pillars either side of the temple, while its petrified body sat inert like some bulbous, blasphemous statue.
It called itself the Alter Prioris, the ‘Elder Thing’, and though its messages were too rapid and complex for human minds to comprehend, slowly, gradually, it taught its disciples its ways: ways of magic, of science, and of summoning.
The Alter Prioris communicated its will only through the Priests of Iram; others who heard the manifold voices of the Elder Thing scratching inside their heads were driven irrecoverably mad.
The Simonians
The worshippers of Jupiter and Minerva within the capital hid amongst their number a small but growing sect of hedonistic occultists. Taking their lead from their founder, Simon Magus, the Simonians were ostensibly a gnostic cult, growing in the second century AD after an influx of nobles and slaves from Syria Palaestina. The Simonians did not truly follow the Roman gods, but instead venerated their order’s founders – Simon and his wife, Helena – in the guises of Zeus and Minerva.
Simon of Gitta, c.37 AD. The infamous sorcerer was rumoured to be behind Tiberius’ death, though accounts on the matter vary considerably.
Simon Magus was a sorcerer and theurgist of some repute. Proclaiming himself first a messiah, and then a god, he was called ‘the Great One’ by the Samaritans, owing to his mastery of the dark arts. Reputedly, he was able to levitate at will, to change his form, and to raise the dead. Indeed, those who practiced Simon’s fragmentary rituals were believed to be necromancers of great power and to populate their subterranean hiding-places with reanimated, cadaverous sentinels which feasted upon the flesh of intruders.
The priesthood did not know for certain which of the Elder Gods or Great Old Ones imbued Simon Magus with such power, but it was certain that he was opposed to Cthulhu. His followers continued to practice hedonistic and depraved rituals, believing that no physical act could be either good or evil but could only bring them closer to their mysterious founder, whom they venerated as ‘the one who shall abide forever’. To the priesthood, only its own deity could lay claim to such an epithet, and so it rooted out the Simonians wherever they could, hoping to learn their secrets and then destroy them.
Many legionaries dreaded the day that orders would be given by the priesthood to open some ancient temple or sealed catacomb. Many tales abounded from wild-eyed veterans of the horrors that lurked in darkened chambers beneath the red-litten world.
The Quindecimviri Sacris
From their gilded temple-college within the Senate, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis – one of four major colleges of the priesthood of Rome – extended their political reach and ambition. Due to their strict control of the Sibylline texts and other relics of great power, the quindecimviri sacris became the most important of all the religious collegia (the other collegia being the pontifices, augures, and epulones), holding considerable influence even over the Pontifex Maximus – Rome’s high priest – himself. When officials of Rome spoke of the ‘priesthood’, it was not the common holy man, or flamen, to whom they referred, but rather this shadowy council of 15.
The quindecimviri sacris advised (some would say ‘controlled’) the Emperor and Senate on all matters of import, from the arrangement of public feasts and the timing of the great arena games to the waging of war. Indeed, many say it was the priesthood that really overthrew the kings of old, leading to the formation of the Senate and the establishment of a long line of puppet-emperors to be the head of the new republic.
The gladiatorial arena was the priesthood’s way of circumventing the Empire’s outlawing of human sacrifice. Through the symbolic appearance of gladiators like the myrmillo and retiarius, Cthulhu was often represented in the arena.
The fall of the Roman kings was assured when Tarquinius turned upon Atilius, the chief of the decimviri sacrorum. Atilius asserted that the ‘Great Old One’ had spoken to him in a dream, outlining the relinquishing of the King’s power to the growing priesthood. Tarquinius ruled that Atilius had committed treason, and that if he was so enamoured with the great god of sunken R’lyeh, he could join him at his earliest convenience. Atilius was stitched into a sack upon the King’s orders, rowed out to sea and tossed overboard. Rather than quell the priesthood, the incident galvanized it; Cthulhu showed it the way to true power, and that way did not include the antiquated monarchy. The priesthood controlled many facets of daily life in the Empire, most notably religious practices. Gone were the days of dark ritual and sacrifice performed by any passing conjurer or shaman. Now, the many faces of Cthulhu were hidden behind socially acceptable avatars, such as Jupiter, Neptune, and Mars.
A patrician of the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, keepers of the Sibylline texts, and most powerful priests in Rome.
The practice of ‘magic’ was outlawed across the Empire. The quindecimviri sacris ensured that the state-sanctioned religions, as governed by the pontifices, included amongst their tenets dictates warning against the magi, sagae, and all other practitioners of forbidden rites. Of course, these strictures were put in place only to make the power of the priesthood absolute, for the practice of magical rites was essential to the continued prosperity of Rome. Citizens unwittingly took part in magic daily, their libations and sacrifices at altars across the Empire lending power to the priesthood’s covert rituals. Even the gladiatorial arenas were part of the great rituals to appease Cthulhu; unwitting slaves were bedecked with the icons of Cthulhu’s enemies, such as the trident and net of Nodens, and forced to compete to the death. The arena’s sands were awash with blood, and from the fallen the priesthood augured the fortunes of the Empire.
True sorcerers, however, still existed. The druids of Britannia and Germania, the viziers of the Black Pharaoh of Egypt, and the Magi of Parthia were among the most powerful and feared practitioners of magic in the Empire. Their very existence weakened the power of Rome. Their stubborn refusal to bow to Rome or succumb to the legions was a source of constant chagrin to the priesthood.
In the most opulent villas of senior Roman figures, what appear to be little more than hedonistic festivals in celebration of the household spirits are often much more sinister.