by Donald Tyson
Seal of the Eighth Key on the Eighth Gate
Face the direction of the compass ruled by the Eighth Gate, which is southwest by south-that is, slightly to the left of the southwest point. Visualize before you the closed gate in the southern wall of the city of the book so that it is more than large enough for you to walk through without awkwardness.
With the visualized image of the gate clear in your mind and projected upon the astral plane in the direction southwest by south, speak this invocation to Yog-Sothoth, which has the same general form for all the gates:
Guardian of the Gate! Defender of the Door! Watcher of the Way! Who art the stout Lock, the slender Key, and the turning Hinge! Lord of All Transition, without whom there is no coming in or going out, I call thee! Keeper of the Threshold, whose dwelling place is between worlds, I summon thee! Yog-Sothoth, wise and mighty lord of the Old Ones, I invoke thee!
By the authority of the dreaded name, Azathoth, that few dare speak, I charge thee, open to me the gateway of Cancer, the Crab, that lies between the blazing pillar Al Tarf on the right hand and the blazing pillar Acubens on the left hand. As the solar chariot [or, lunar chariot] crosses between these pillars, I enter the city of the Necronomicon through its Eighth Gate. Selah!
Visualize the key of the Eighth Gate in your right hand some six inches long and made of cast silver. Feel its weight, texture, and shape as you hold it. Extend your right arm and use the key to draw upon the surface of the gate the seal of the key, which should be visualized to burn on the gate in a line of white spiritual fire. Point with the astral key at the center of the gate and speak the words:
In the name of Azathoth, Ruler of Chaos, by the power of Yog-Sothoth, Lord of Portals, the Eighth Gate is opened!
Visualize the gate unlocking and opening inward of its own accord upon a shadowed space. On the astral level, walk through the gateway and stand in the darkness beyond. Focus your will upon the alien place distant among the stars that you wish to scry or enter in a dream oracle. Open your mind to receive impressions, and if directions for scrying or obtaining a dream vision are given, follow them. In a more general sense, this ritual and this gate may be used to scry any location on any distant planet, both in normal space and on higher dimensional levels.
After fulfilling the purpose for which this gate was opened, conclude the ritual by astrally passing out through the gate and visualizing it to close. Draw the seal of the Eighth Key on the surface of the gate with the astral key you hold in your hand, and mentally cause it to lock itself shut, as it was at the beginning of the ritual. Speak the words of closing:
By the power of Yog-Sothoth, and authority of the supreme name Azathoth, I close and seal the Eighth Gate. This ritual is well and truly ended.
Allow the image of the gate to grow pale in your imagination and fade to nothingness before you turn away from the ritual direction.
The Ninth Gate
n the Necronomicon mythos, books fulfill the function of conveying forgotten or secret information from the past to the present. They are a bridge across time with a span that may be as short as a few weeks or months in the case of diary records, or as long as millions of years when it concerns texts recorded by alien races that predate humanity. This is a crucial role, since many of the stories depend for their resolution on ancient secrets or arcane magical formulae lost to history.
In Lovecraft's stories, there are certain books that should not exist, and if they do exist, that should never be read. To open them is to risk insanity and death. These are always the books most highly treasured by a few individuals for whom the forbidden is an irresistible lure. An archetypal scene that in many ways typifies the books of the mythos occurs in the story fragment The Book, written in 1935, which appears to be based on another of Lovecraft's dreams. A man discovers a moldering, worm-eaten Latin manuscript book in a rundown second-hand bookshop, and recognizes in it something both potent and dangerous. The sinister proprietor of the shop is only too happy to part with it, and asks for no payment, but makes a sign with his hand to turn aside its evil.
There was a formula-a sort of list of things to say and do-which I recognized as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key-a guide-to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed.
Although this unnamed manuscript book is not the Necronomicon, it expresses the central attraction of Alhazred's work. It is "black and forbidden," containing "guarded secrets" to dimensional portals of which "mystics have dreamed" since the human race was young, secrets that lead beyond the "realms of life and matter that we know." Such books are ancient treasure troves for the mind, the finding of which always carries a heavy price, particularly for those who attempt to make personal use of their secrets.
The ancient bookshop, in which the dread tome is discovered, is itself a kind of time capsule of a period centuries in the past. It is very much the place an antiquarian such as Lovecraft would visit in his dreams. By entering such a shop, the lover of books steps back in time. The shop "reaches back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves," all of them piled with stacks of moldering, worm-riddled books that touch the ceiling, and containing bins filled with more carelessly tumbled books. It was perhaps in such an astral bookshop that Lovecraft dreamed the first vision of his Necronomicon.
There are several types of books that figure prominently in the mythos. The grimoires are book of magic signs, rituals, and chants for the purpose of opening occult doorways, or having commerce with inhuman intelligences such as the Old Ones. The ancient histories tell of lost civilizations and forgotten gods that were on the Earth before the evolution of humanity. Their contents may have been set down by alien scribes, such as the early chapters of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, which were written by members of the Great Race of Yith, or may have been drawn from the akashic library by a psychic medium such as Rudolf Yergler, author of the Chronicle of Nath. Another type of book are the diaries in their various forms where events are recorded, sometimes for the benefit of future generations within the world of the story, but always for the benefit of the reader, as the advancement of the plot depends on them. From what we know of the Necronomicon based on those few fragments that Lovecraft quoted in his stories, it is a combination of ancient history and grimoire.
Lovecraft mingled in his mythos the titles of real books and imaginary books with a complete lack of discrimination. Which is which is not always self-evident, and the confusion is enhanced by Lovecraft's tendency to attribute imaginary contents to real texts. It is easy to get the impression that Lovecraft was an expert on books dealing with esoteric topics. Nothing could be further from the truth. His own interests lay in astronomy, architecture, genealogy, history, and various sciences-he knew almost nothing about occult books in an overt sense. He drew many of the names of the books he refers to from the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in one letter to a friend bemoaned his own lack of background knowledge in this area, since it would lend his stories greater plausibility. He was afraid that readers would easily see that he was simply dropping names from the encyclopedia.
He was not completely lacking in knowledge of occult matters, however. He had read some material on Madame Blavatsky and her new religion of Theosophy, a bit about the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu, and was at least aware of the existence of Aleister Crowley, for whom he expressed aversion. The story that his wife knew Crowley is not true, but it is entirely possible that she knew people in Crowley's wider circle. Lovecraft was writing in the heyday of the Astrum Argentum and the Ordo Templi Orientis, C
rowley's occult organizations. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was operating under the leadership of S. L. MacGregor Mathers' widow, Moina. Theosophy was doing a booming business under Blavatsky's successor, Annie Besant, and spiritualism was at the height of its popularity, as evidenced by Houdini's keenness to publish books debunking it.
Lovecraft studied spiritualism in preparation for ghostwriting a book with C. M. Eddy to be published under Harry Houdini's name, which was to have been titled The Cancer of Superstition. Houdini had already had a book cobbled together in 1924 on the same subject, A Magician Among the Spirits. Houdini's death in 1926 prevented Lovecraft from putting his newly acquired knowledge to use. However, his study of spiritualism shows that his understanding of occult matters was growing throughout his lifetime. Had he lived twenty more years, he might have been quoting from Mathers' translation of the Book of Abramelin the Mage and Crowley's Book of the Law.
A written record referred to by the occult investigator Alonzo Typer in reference to a malignant spiritual presence he encountered on April 17, 1935, at the deserted van der Heyl farmhouse, in the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York. The unseen presence was described by Typer as "appallingly evil and definitely nonhuman." He wrote that it "towers like a colossus, bearing out what is said in the Aklo writings." In the attic of the old house Typer found a book containing "variations in the Aklo formulae" that he had not previously known to exist. Within the book was the "third Aklo ritual" by which the unseen spiritual presences in the house might be rendered tangible and visible.
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
This is the original Arabic title for the Necronomicon. The title signifies the night noises of desert insects, which were said by the Bedouins to be the howling of demons. In his History of the Necronomicon, Lovecraft indicated that no copies of the original Arabic text survive.
(The History of the Necronomicon)
The complete works of Albertus Magnus were published in Latin under the title Opera Omnia at Lyons in 1651 by Peter Jammy in twenty-one folio volumes. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, this substantial set formed part of the library of the necromancer Joseph Curwen, and is described as "Peter Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus."
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
A Latin work by Raymond Lully. It formed part of the library of Joseph Curwen.
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
A book of "nightmare lyrics" composed in childhood by the precocious genius Edward Pickman Derby, and published when he was eighteen. His childhood friend, Daniel Upton, referred to the writings as "Edward's demoniac poems." Some of them were written when Derby was only seven years old.
(The Thing on the Doorstep)
The ancient witch Keziah Mason tells Walter Gilman that he must accompany the Black Man of the witches to the throne of Azathoth, at the center of ultimate chaos, where he must sign his name in blood in the book of Azathoth, and take on a secret name as a member of the witch coven. The book of Azathoth appears to be the prototype for all the books of pacts that appear in the transcripts of the European witch trials, in which the witch makes her mark in her own blood in a book proffered by the Devil at the sabbat, as a binding contract with the forces of evil. The majority of witches were women, but men were also witches, and followed the same procedure in joining the coven and pledging fidelity to the Devil, who appeared at the sabbat in the form of the Black Man-a man robed in black whose face was concealed.
(The Dreams in the Witch House)
A supposed ancient text written in the Senzar language, it is mentioned by Lovecraft in several places in his fiction. Madame H. P. Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society and an accomplished trance medium, claimed to have read part of it, and published the fragment at the beginning of her 1888 work The Secret Doctrine. The Stanzas of Dzyan, as they are alternatively called, are in the form of seven brief chapters with numbered paragraphs, most of which consist of no more than a single sentence. It is claimed to be the teaching of the Sons of the Fire-Mist, a hierarchy of beings who projected their minds from Venus into the primitive minds of the ancient Lemurian race in order to elevate and civilize them. Lovecraft made a single reference to these mysterious super-beings, calling them the "Children of the Fire Mist" in his short story, Through the Gates of the Silver Key.
In the very first sentence of her earlier but no less monumental 1877 work, The Veil of Isis, Blavatsky wrote in a guarded way concerning the book that contained their teachings. "There exists somewhere in this wide world an old Book-so very old that our modern antiquarians might ponder over its pages an indefinite time and still not quite agree as to the nature of the fabric upon which it is written." A little further in her text she made reference to a time frame of 70,000 years in connection with "the Oriental Kabalists," but it is not clear if we are to assume this to be the age of the Book of Dzyan. Elsewhere, in the first sentence of Isis Unveiled, she was a little more precise about the surface upon which the book is penned. `An Archaic Manuscript-a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some specific unknown process-is before the writer's eye."
Blavatsky was coy about the physical reality of the Book of Dzyan. In her preface to the Secret Doctrine, she wrote:
It is more than probable that the book will be regarded by a large section of the public as a romance of the wildest kind; for who has ever even heard of the book of Dzyan?
The writer, therefore, is fully prepared to take all the responsibility for what is contained in this work, and even to face the charge of having invented the whole of it.
(Blavatsky, Sec. Doc., vol. 1, p. viii)
There is another possibility, which the dreamer Lovecraft might have regarded as an interesting speculation-that the psychic and trance medium Blavatsky read the stanzas of the Book of Dzyan on the astral level, in the akashic records. The akashic records are a great storehouse that holds the accumulated wisdom of all of human history, and of the history of many other intelligent beings as well. If so, then when Blavatsky wrote that she had the book before her eye, she would not necessarily have been lying. A book written on palm leaves could not have survived over 70,000 years (unless preserved by some occult force), but once written, even if that writing took place on some plane of reality other than the physical plane we inhabit, it would be forever present in the library of the akashic records.
(The Haunter of the Dark; The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
Three editions of this work are known to exist, the oldest in the Latin language bearing the title Liber Ivonis; another in Norman French that is titled Livre d'Eibon; and the English edition. The author of the work is unknown. The Book of Eibon was the invention of Lovecraft's friend, Clark Ashton Smith, but Lovecraft made reference to it a number of times in his stories.
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer; Out of the Aeons; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Thing on the Doorstep; The Shadow Out of Time; The Haunter of the Dark)
A grimoire mentioned by Claes van der Heyl in a note left wrapped around an ancient key in the van der Heyl farmhouse in the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York. He wrote, "That which I have awaked and borne away with me, I may not part with again. So it is written in the Book of Hidden Things."
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
Alhazred wrote in the Necronomicon of those "who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse." The guide referred to by Alhazred is 'Umr At-Tawil, the Most Ancient One, whose name is rendered "the Prolonged of Life."
Thoth was the Egyptian god of wisdom, and the scribe who recorded the result of the weighing of the heart of the newly dead to determine its worth. He is pictured with the head of an ibis, writing on a clay or wax tablet with a reed pen. The early Christian writers demoted Thoth to the status of a demon, and credited him with the invention of gaming with dice. Later, when pl
aying cards were introduced to Europe, Thoth was also said to be their inventor. The Greeks when they came to rule Egypt created a hybrid god known as Thoth-Hermes. They attributed to this god many occult secrets, which were recorded in numerous books. The best of these are what we know today as the Hermetica.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
The narrator of the unfinished story, The Book, finds a worm-riddled manuscript book written in medieval Latin in a decaying second-hand bookstore near the river. The title page and the early leaves are missing. It is described as "a key-a guide-to certain gateways and transitions" that lie beyond normal three-dimensional reality. He recites the ninth verse from a formula in the book near its end, "a sort of list of things to say and do," and transitions through the first dimensional gateway. As a consequence, he acquires a familiar spirit that scratches outside his attic window His perception of reality is forever changed, for he now sees not only the present but also the past and future of things.
This unfinished story reads like the transcription of one of Lovecraft's dreams. The narrator is given no name, no place nor time. The ancient bookstore with its "ceilinghigh shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves" is very much a dream vision.
(The Book)
An ancient record that speaks of the descent to the Earth from the Moon of the people of the gray stone city of Ib. One night they came down through the mist along with their city and a vast lake. They settled in the land of Mnar. The writing on the cylinders states that these creatures were green-skinned, had bulging eyes, flabby lips, and were without voices.