“Yes, you know something of sacrifice, don’t you, doctor? And you know something of the power that sacrifice brings. The power that only sacrifice can bring?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” I had meant to state it boldly, to defy him, and yet, somehow it came out only as a whisper.
“Oh, I think you do, Dr. Weston. I think you know precisely what I mean. Yes, doctor. The Old Ones have sought a return before. He has sought it, the messenger, the harbinger of the doom of all things. And he almost had it. But you stood in the way. As you always do, it seems. But how to defeat him without the Oculus? How to stand against the crawling chaos with nothing to arm yourself? It must have taken quite a sacrifice to have banished him, if only for a time. Quite a sacrifice indeed.”
I stayed silent, refusing to give him the dignity of an answer. Or perhaps fearing to do so. Zann’s grin grew so wide that it threatened to split his face in half.
“Tell me, professor, when you killed your son-in-law, when you murdered William Jones, how much power did you feel then?”
From somewhere behind and above echoed a shriek, a pitiful “No!” as filled with sorrow and despair as any I have ever heard. And my heart sank to the pit of my stomach, for I recognized that voice.
Chapter 16
Journal of Henry Armitage
July 24, 1933
I should have acted more quickly. I should have seen it coming. But even as Zann set the trap, and even as Carter walked headlong into it, I did not think. Not until I heard Rachel scream. Carter spun around, and in his face I saw that the joy he should have had in seeing us, his liberators, was instead bitter sorrow. And then there was Zann, his eyes aglow with feverish light, with madness and hatred mixed into one.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “I see we have company.”
A sickening thud echoed through the room. The fire in Zann’s eyes went out, and he collapsed to the ground at Guillaume’s feet. If only he had reached him a few moments earlier.
“Let’s go!” Guillaume whispered, as loudly as he dared. But his caution was in vain. The sound of hurried footsteps was already close. The soldiers had heard Rachel’s cry, and they were coming.
“Rachel,” I said, but she did not hear me. She and her father were in their own world. She, staring into the pit where he stood. He, gazing up to her with a look that had transformed from shock to resignation, an acknowledgement of guilt. But this was not the time.
“Rachel! We have to go.”
I grabbed her arm and jerked her forward, veritably dragging her down the rough stairs of the temple into the pit below.
“This way!” Guillaume gestured to the tunnel opposite the one through which we had passed earlier. “They are coming. We have to find another way out.”
We ran, and I was glad that Carter and Rachel had seemed to snap out of their trance, at least temporarily. We dashed out of the temple just as the Germans entered it behind us. It would take only a moment for them to figure out what had happened, so that was the time we would have for our escape.
Guillaume led, and I hoped that whatever sense of direction he was using to guide us was true, though I feared that we were running blindly. Who could know how far these tunnels extended or to where they would eventually lead? I had read once of explorers in the catacombs of Paris losing their way, desperately trying to conserve light as they wandered through endless chambers of ivory white bones. Some of them never emerged. Would that be our fate as well?
We’d been running for only a couple of minutes when we were undone. A soldier stepped from behind a wall and pointed his rifle at us. “Stoppen! Hände hoch!” he shouted, gesturing at us with the barrel of his gun. We threw up our hands, and I saw in my mind’s eye an execution, bullets to the back of the head, all of us dead in a dark and desolate cavern.
Then something inexplicable happened. It seems that sometimes, Heaven shines on those that would do its bidding; and this time a small miracle was worked in our favor. The rocks above the soldier must have been loose, for his shouts seemed to shake them onto his head. He collapsed beneath their weight. It was a lucky break indeed.
Still, we could hear pursuit behind us, and I thought that perhaps our luck truly was about to run out. Fortunately, the tunnel ran out first. In the darkness and in our haste, we did not even notice when it ended in a short—but sharp—drop into the River Spree.
Down we plunged into its icy depths. Were it not for the adrenaline that burned through our veins, I have no doubt that we would have frozen to death that night. We made our way to the shore with no small amount of difficulty, fortunate to discover that we were not far from Margot’s apartment. We found her waiting there, worried to distraction, having been forced to flee from her position outside the building when a garrison of soldiers arrived. She threw her arms around Guillaume and kissed him with a passion I have rarely seen. From his reaction, he had rarely seen it either. But yet again, there was little time for such revelry.
“I can’t be sure that I wasn’t seen,” Margot said as we warmed ourselves in front of her hearth. “And while I doubt anyone would have recognized me—why would they, after all?—I would put nothing beyond the power of the SA.”
“No,” Carter said, “and in the end it doesn’t matter. We have to go. We can’t stay here.”
“I’m coming with you,” Guillaume said.
“So am I,” Margot added. Guillaume started to protest, but Margot shot him a look that silenced him before he had said even a word.
Carter shook his head. “We’ve put you in too much danger already. I owe you my life. All of you.” Carter’s eyes met Rachel’s, but she quickly looked away. A moment of truth would come. I hoped that she kept her head about her long enough for us to get out of Berlin.
“This is bigger than you,” said Margot. “Bigger than all of us. Whatever this Dr. Zann is planning, it must be stopped. And with the resources he has, you need all the help you can get.”
Carter sighed. “I’m afraid you don’t know the half of it. Zann’s only a small part of whatever is going on. I don’t think Zann ever thought I would leave Berlin, at least not alive. He told me things during the interrogation. Or more often he just let them slip. Zann was looking for something. Two things actually. The Staff of Dzyan, and the Oculus.”
Margot’s eyes clouded with understandable confusion, but I knew all too well what this meant.
“Dzyan,” I muttered.
Carter nodded. “It takes more than the Oculus to stop Nyarlathotep. The staff and the stone are one. Together, they can send him back to the void. That’s why Zann wants them.”
“Nyarlathotep?” Margot muttered, stumbling over the strange word. Carter waved it off.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “Just trust me when I say that he is bad news.”
Margot shook her head. “But you said there was more to it than Zann?”
“It seemed that time was of the essence to him. Apparently, the devotees of Nyarlathotep are hard at work in Paris, trying to find the staff in the last place it was rumored to be.”
“The catacombs…”
Carter looked at me and nodded. “Exactly.”
Now Guillaume interrupted. “So you don’t know where the staff is?”
Carter shook his head. “Unfortunately, I don’t. But I know where we have to look.”
“Paris.”
“Exactly.”
“And if someone else finds it first?”
Carter didn’t answer. There was no point. I’m not even sure why I asked the question.
“Then we should rest,” Margot said. “There’s a train to Paris that leaves at 6 a.m. That’s less than an hour.”
“And I wish we could be on that train,” I said, “but I think we should only move at night—as long as we are in Germany, at least. We’ll lay low here until the sun sets.”
And with that, we gathered our things and prepared for yet another journey.
Chapter 17
Portram Campbell Tobin, A Guide to Spirits and Otherwordly Beings, 2nd Edition (1907), Chapter 33
While the demon Pazuzu has received much scholarly attention in demonology for its tendency to possess virginal girls at the cusp of womanhood, there is another malevolent entity of far more dangerous potential, one whose name is obscure to all but the most learned in the hoary tomes of antiquity. I refer, of course, to the being known as Nyarlathotep.
Long shrouded in mystery, the name Nyarlathotep appears rarely in the ancient texts, absent altogether from the canonical books of the Holy Bible, Torah, and Koran. This absence is of particular note since the first recorded instance of the invocation of the spirit appears in the infamous scroll of Imhotep, discovered among the items in the eponymous sorcerer’s tomb beneath the sands of the great Memphis burial grounds. As such, it would seem that reverence for, and indeed the fear of, Nyarlathotep would have been widespread amongst the denizens of ancient Egypt, and thus his name should have been well-known amongst all the peoples of the Mesopotamian region.
A possible explanation of this absence lies in the peculiar nature of the god often referred to as “the crawling chaos.” It seems that the name of Nyarlathotep was considered a powerful curse, the mere utterance of which could lead to dire consequences both for the object of the curse as well as him who would cast it. Thus, Nyarlathotep came to be known by any number of epithets—the whisperer in the darkness, the black man (often evoked by European witch-cults), the haunter of the dark, the harbinger, the great messenger, he who strides in shadow, and the stranger, to name but a few. In fact, it seems that Nyarlathotep was but one of the proper names by which the god was summoned. References—in the Bible and elsewhere—to Moloch, Kesan, Zanoni, and Azazel have been interpreted as possible invocations of Nyarlathotep.45
Many scholars have noted the apparent dualistic relationship between the god Nyarlathotep and the Biblical Christ. Nyarlathotep is said to be the son of Azathoth—known simply as Chaos in the Greco-Roman pantheon—the slumbering god who sleeps at the center of all things. It is this Azathoth—chief among the Old Gods, the being whom even Cthulhu is said to fear—who gave birth to the swirling darkness, to the formless void of which the universe consisted before the present age. According to the lore of the ancient Ashmodai, when Azathoth awakens, the world will end, and the void will hold sway once more. And it is Nyarlathotep who will, one day, awaken his father, ushering in a second darkness of unending night. That he will do so eventually is seen as the inevitable end of all things, with echoes of Ragnarök in the Norse tradition.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that early Christians viewed Nyarlathotep as the ultimate antichrist. This belief, once widespread, was considered a heresy of the first order by the clerics of the ascendant Roman Catholic Church. The first council of Nicaea decreed that the term antichrist referred to a minion of Satan—a fallen angel, and most certainly not a god of equal stature with Yahweh—and decreed it anathema to teach of the existence of Nyarlathotep or to promulgate any theories about his relation to Christianity or the Hebrew God. It is thus unsurprising that the name of Nyarlathotep is missing from the scriptures we possess today, even if it would have featured prominently in original sources now lost and presumably destroyed.
But some early-Christian references to Nyarlathotep do survive. The heretical sect known as the fraternitatis oculus—the Brotherhood of the Eye—were meticulous in documenting and protecting the early stories of Christ. Of particular interest to our study is an account of Christ’s temptation in the desert, one altogether different from the tale that comes to us in three of the four gospels. According to their traditions, it was not Satan that appeared to Jesus as he fasted in the wastes of ancient Israel, but Nyarlathotep himself.
I quote from a translation of a fragmentary text recovered in a cave just outside of ancient Ephesus:
And in those days Jesus went unto Sinai, in Egypt, to the great desert through which he had passed as a child. There, for forty days and forty nights, he waited. The sun had not yet climbed high on the fortieth day when the stranger appeared to him, as Christ knew he must.
“Son of light,” said the lord of shadow, “why do you come to this desert to perish? For you have debased yourself, clothed in the filth of this world. It need not be so. Forsake the light, for every day will surely end in darkness.”
But Jesus answered and said, “It is written, ‘The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. For no darkness will last forever.’”
Then the harbinger lifted his hand to the heavens, and the day did turn to night. The constellations wheeled above, and the harbinger spoke, “Look to the abyss above, son of light. The stars are like dust, pinpricks on a funeral shroud, swallowed by the night that surrounds them. For it is the shadow that covers all.”
But Jesus answered and said, “It is written, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. For without light, there can be no shadow.’”
Nyarlathotep was enraged, and he took up a sword, saying, “Son of light, it is written, ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.’”
But Jesus answered him and said, “It is written, ‘He is despised and rejected of men, and of men will he die. For it is not your place to take me, and is not my time to go.’”
Then Jesus reached forth his hand and took up wood from a cedar and a pine and a cypress, weaving them into a staff. His other hand he swept across the dirt, and from the earth he formed a shining pyramid of stone which he pressed into the head of this staff. A flash erupted from it, and before the brilliance of the staff and stone Nyarlathotep fled, as all darkness must flee the light.
This story is remarkable not only for its failure to adhere to the traditional temptation motif, but also because of its inclusion of the Staff of Dzyan and the Eye of God—the combination of which is the only known weapon, according to legend at least, that can defeat Nyarlathotep. It is hotly debated among scholars whether this is the first depiction of the Oculus myth, or whether it predates Christianity altogether. In any event, the staff and Oculus, if they ever existed, have long since been lost to antiquity.
* * *
Carter Weston, The Gods of Ancient Days, (1920),
Chapter 6, Pages 85–86
While the mode and method of worship vary wildly across cultures and religions, there is one element that seems to be universal—sacrifice. It is sacrifice by which the adherents of the faith prove their devotion, and it is through sacrifice that the priest and the penitent harness the power of the gods.
Sacrifice can come in many forms and under many names. In the Buddhist tradition, personal sacrifice is necessary to achieve enlightenment, particularly through the shedding of taṇhā, or cravings. Similar acts of self-control are required in the three great religions to emerge from Mesopotamia—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each of these faiths calls upon the believer to give up the carnality of the material world for spiritual enlightenment, to reject “sin,” ordinarily encompassing hedonistic, sybaritic pleasures.
But while we have come to associate sacrifice in the modern day with personal strength and self-betterment, true sacrifice, as envisioned by the ancients, was often bathed in blood. The core tenets of these faiths was that the life-force was just that—a natural force as strong as gravity or magnetism, and one just as subject to exploitation. And through sacrifice, such energy could be released and harnessed.
Animal sacrifice was most common, though human sacrifice was also prevalent. Whether we look to the Aztecs and Incas of the Americas, the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancient Chinese and Greeks, the druidic faiths, or the ancient religions of the Fertile Crescent, the tendency to turn to human sacrifice in times of crisis was nearly universal. Even the Romans—who generally eschewed human sacrifice—embraced the practice when the armies of Hannibal threatened to destroy their ancient capital.
; In some of these societies, human sacrifice was more thoroughgoing. The Aztecs were known to cut the hearts from thousands upon the festival of Acolnahuacatl, a god who was said to drink the blood of humanity. And his thirst was nigh unquenchable.
It is in Moloch, however, that we see the most dramatic example of sacrifice as a means to achieve power, and the cost that such power often entails. For not just any offering would please the dark god of ancient Canaan. He required the most precious gift of all—the life of the firstborn sons and daughters of his followers. In return for this devotion, Moloch was said to grant his adherents power and wealth beyond imagining. It is not surprising that many of the greatest nations among the ancient Fertile Crescent were known to worship him.
Biblical sources indicate that burning alive was the preferred method of conferring the offering to the god. There is, however, an interesting anecdote within the infamous Necronomicon that posits another theory of Moloch altogether. According to the mad Arab Alhazred, some followers of Moloch were known to practice a form of crucifixion. The Necronomicon speaks of fields of wooden crux decussata, the saltire of the St. Andrew’s Cross, with children, from newborn babes to teenagers, nailed nude and spread-eagled, their screams and cries echoing across the plain. Only when their pain was so great that they began to lose consciousness was the final blow struck: the offering was slit from gullet to groin. Often, the internal organs were allowed to spill upon the ground. For special offerings, they were removed and ritually placed in esoterically significant locations.
This alternative manner of sacrifice described in the Necronomicon is remarkable as it mirrors precisely the method of worship employed by the followers of “he who walks in shadow,” Nyarlathotep. Can there be any doubt that Moloch is simply yet another denotation of the Great Old One?
He Who Walks in Shadow Page 9