Burning Books
“Dort,
wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”
("Where
they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings").
-Heinrich Heine
The practice of burning books has cropped
up throughout history, for at least as long as books and writing have been
around. It usually appears as a symptom of obscurantism, or the urge by
authorities to control or limit the spread of knowledge. Also known as
biblioclasm or libricide, wherever it occurs it causes great distress as its
consequences and impact on human culture and knowledge are extremely damaging
and often irreplaceable. Book burning typically happens as the result of a
sense of moral or ideological outrage and targets specific works that are
problematic for a current regime. In modern times, many religious organisations
promote book burning – especially those against which they have an often
dogmatic agenda – as a rite of passage for new converts; mostly though,
libricide is an act of suppression, seeking to control and moderate thought and
ideas within a culture. Within the context of a Call of Cthulhu game, the act
of book-burning means that copies of rare and blasphemous tomes are made all the
more difficult to locate and to access.
At all times, book burning is an
emotionally-charged practice. In ancient times, books were expensive to produce
and considered very valuable: flagrantly burning them was an exercise in waste
and a rebuff to the hours of work which had gone into their production, not to
mention their writing and composing. It is also a highly visible form of
conduct: it draws a line in the sand between the pro-biblioclasts and their
enemies and creates a focus for public declarations of allegiance. New converts
to Christianity are often enjoined to come along to burnings in order to purge
themselves of their ‘evil’ rock ‘n’ roll CDs and Harry Potter books; rarely do
these groups acknowledge that early translations of their own Bibles were burnt
in similar fashion – along with their translators and printers, whose names
they would be hard-pressed to summon forth.
The list of reprehensible purges is long
and woeful, and often leaves one scratching one’s head in attempting to
understand the rationale behind the destruction: why were the first books in Braille
destroyed in Paris in 1842, for example? However, there are several major
occurrences that have impacted heavily upon the written knowledge of the world
and these are listed here:
The Burning of the Books - Qin Dynasty,
China 213 BC
In 213 BC, Qin Shih Huangdi, the first
Emperor of China ordered the destruction of all books throughout the Eighteen
Provinces. This act was largely an attempt to rein in the literati so that they
would not be able to contradict the new Emperor by citing precedent. The only
books to escape the burning were texts on agriculture, medicine, construction
and divination; even the writings of Confucius were not spared from the flames.
Along with the texts, the writers (where they were still alive) and the contemporary
scholars of the day were all buried alive so that they could not revive the
texts or the thinking behind them.
The rationale behind this event was the
adoption of the form of government which would prevail during the First
Emperor’s reign. Huangdi had the choice of Confucianism, which taught that all
people were essentially good and that they would do good – even if they only
adopted the appearance of goodness - if guided correctly; Mohism, which taught
that all people are equal and that in order to be good, people must be taught
to actually be good; or Legalism, an inverse offshoot of Confucianism that
believed all people to be inherently evil and therefore prone to undermining
the Will of Heaven. In that Legalism gave Huangdi the ability to do whatever he
wanted, without having to mollycoddle the populace, he chose the latter, burnt
libraries and buried scholars alive.
(There is an irony about all of this:
during the uprising of the Han peoples and the overthrowing of Huangdi after
his incredibly harsh rule, the Royal Library at Chang’an was accidentally
destroyed by fire: it transpired that copies of all the previously destroyed
books had been kept there against future need.)
Chinese texts pre-dating 213 BC have been
re-compiled from hidden copies which suffered as they were moved from hiding
place to hiding place, or were re-written from the memories of aging scholars
who had escaped persecution. Such works are liable to be flawed and their
methods untrustworthy, especially when it comes to knowledge of the Mythos; in
fact, during the Song Dynasty, some books, considered imperfectly restored,
were again consigned to the flames. Some original fragments have survived in
the form of weather-beaten scraps but, by their fragmentary nature, are
probably more dangerous and obscure than their use warrants, as the Keeper
desires.
At the Siege of Peking, The Hanlin
(“Forest of Pencils”) Library, which abutted the Foreign Legation quarters, was
torched by the Chinese attackers trying to invade the Westerners’ stronghold.
This repository held the winning essays from literally thousands of years of
Imperial examinations and is a shameful codicil to the history of book burning
in the Chinese Imperial age.
Diocletian’s Destruction of Egyptian
Alchemy Texts
In 292 AD, Diocletian removed and
destroyed by fire all of the texts within the Library of Alexandria which had
to do with alchemy; it seems to have been a thing with him – in 303 he burnt
Christian writings as well. The motivations behind these latter conflagrations
seem fairly clear as politically motivated, but alchemical texts? Maybe he was
afraid of wizards undermining the value of gold...
The Burning of the Library of Alexandria
The Library of the Serapeum in Alexandria
was renowned as the greatest repository of human knowledge available in its
day. Amongst other priceless texts, it was supposed to hold the original
Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, etched onto an enormous table-cut
emerald and prised from the skeletal fingers of its author. In 392 AD at the
behest of Theodosius I, the Library was looted and burned at the order of Pope
Theophilus of Alexandria. Re-building took place thereafter; however, the
damage had already been done: in 640, or thereabouts, the building caught fire
once more and was completely destroyed.
The Destruction of the Cathar Texts
At the height of the Albigensian Crusade
in the Languedoc region of southeastern France, all texts of the Cathars –
deemed heretical by the Church – were consigned to the flames. A very few of
these texts survived and even a translation of the Necronomicon made it through
unscathed; but, for the most part, a great body of Gnostic lore was
irreplaceably lost.
The Burning of the House of Wisdom
Library in Baghdad
In 1258, the Mongols invaded Baghdad and
imposed their usual form of welcome upon the populace. In destroying the
greatest repository of Islamic lore (along with that of all the other libraries
in the city) they tossed every book that they could find into the Tigris River:
the waters were said to have run black for six months thereafter, from all of
the ink that was washed away.
Arabic and Hebrew Books at Andalucía
In 1499, at the insistence of the Spanish
Inquisition, about 5,000 books in Arabic and Hebrew were torched in the public
square at Granada under the direction of Ximénez de Cisneros, then Archbishop
of Toledo. The stated reason for their destruction was that the content of the
works was homoerotic; however it is questionable as to whether this would apply
to all of the texts.
The Sacred Texts of the Mayan People
"We found a large number of books in
these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as
superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya)
regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”
-Diego de Landa
On July 12th 1546, Father
Diego de Landa, acting Bishop of Yucatan, burnt the sacred Mayan texts, after
spending months ingratiating himself with their keepers and convincing them of
his interest in preserving this knowledge. He claims to have destroyed 27
deerskin texts, although other sources claim up to 99 documents were burnt.
Along with the books, around 5,000 religious idols were also immolated. De
Landa was later recalled to Rome on charges of having acted illegally in regard
to the texts; however, he was released after three months of investigation.
The Burnings of Communist Russia
Under Stalin, it was not just people who
were ruthlessly and systematically expunged in the name of realpolitik. Many
books were destroyed, particularly Jewish texts, and many more were hidden away
until such time as they could be published without fear of being suppressed: a
classic case is Bulgarkov’s The Master and Margarita, which waited forty years
between creation and publication.
The Burning of Jewish, Anti-Nazi and
‘Degenerate’ Books by the Nazis
Since the instigation of the Nazi regime,
many books were cited as being antithetical to Hitler’s cause; in particular
Richard Euringer, director of the libraries of Essen, compiled a list of around
18,000 works which were deemed offensive to the National Socialists. From
thence forward, sporadic eruptions of book burning took place around the
country, culminating in an enormous rally in Berlin, at the Opernplatz on the
10th of May in 1933: around 20,000 books were stripped from various
institutions and consigned to the fire by members of the SA and of various Nazi
youth groups.
The Cultural Revolution
In a full circle moment, the Chinese
represent yet another instance in the suppression of human knowledge. During
the Cultural Revolution, beginning on August 20th 1966, many written
works – especially Chinese texts on genealogy – were targeted as part of an
effort to remove the Four Old Things from Chinese culture. These were “Old
Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas”: many priceless and
irreplaceable touchstones of Chinese culture were destroyed in this movement
and, since the 1990s, the Chinese government has quietly gone about restoring
and reversing as much of the destruction as they can.
*****
So what does this mean as far as the
Cthulhu Mythos is concerned? Obviously, any attempt to target books and other
works that are deemed damaging or offensive to the culture is going to include
these works, as far as they are known within the culture. Some Mythos tomes are
simply so rare and obscure that they never fall under the biblioclastic
microscope; others definitely get caught up in the net and are purged in their
turn. Given that purges occur throughout history, Keepers should try to be
aware of them and factor this in to the rarity of the volumes they distribute
to their players. The instances discussed here are only a few that have taken
place, and represent only those where discrete volumes and bodies of thought
are known to have been lost forever.
The maddening thing for the Powers That
Be is that, often, where one individual has an idea, so too, another has the
same thought and such instances of parallel cognition are well-documented,
especially in the world of scientific publishing. For so many books lost to the
fire, it can be said that they somehow, somewhere, rise again in a different
form, their ideas intact.
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