Four Books...

Codex Dagonensis

“Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man

And downward fish; yet had his temple high

Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast

Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,

And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds...”

-John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book I

This work is one of four volumes which appeared in northern Germany around the year 400 AD. The four books are the Codex Dagonensis, the Codex Maleficium, the Codex Spitalski (also known as The Leprous Book) and the Cthaat Aquadingen. Each of these titles shows distinct congruencies in the nature and layout of the material that they present and it is thought that all of them were prepared and written by the same author, or by a group of authors working from a single source. Each, however, has had its own unique ride through history.

As with many books of this nature, the titles are arbitrary and are usually derived from their content or the nature of their discovery: the Codex Dagonensis is known as such due its extended discourse upon Deep Ones and their religious practices, especially relating to the entity Dagon. It may be that each of the four books represents an attempt to produce a single volume of lore prepared at four different locations and occasions; given the strangeness of the name Cthaat Aquadingen, it’s possible that this title was meant to cover all of this material. Subsequent events – including editing, additions, and re-workings of the material - have meant that the reintegration of all this matter under that heading is no longer possible.

The Codex Dagonensis concerns itself mainly with the nature, society and worship of the Deep Ones. Obed Marsh of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, possessed a copy of this work and used it to help create the form of worship of his Esoteric Order of Dagon: copies of the book were made and the material amended to adhere more closely to the rituals of that Order, which themselves derived mainly from the Ponape Scriptures and other related sources. After the forced disbanding of the sect in Innsmouth in 1928, Marsh’s original copy of the Codex and several of the translated versions were presented to the Library at Miskatonic University, where members of the Order still consult them from time to time.

Apart from the Deep One information, the Codex Dagonensis also contains the Nyhargo Dirge (for destroying zombies and other corporeal undead creatures); several magical protections to thwart summonings; information about the Elder Sign; a series of rituals concerned with the Great Old One, Tsathoggua; as well as the Third and Eighth Sathlattae: the Third Sathlatta protects against Bugg Shash - the Devourer - when chanted at midnight; however, such protection only lasts until such time as the subject’s death. It is not known what the Eighth Sathlatta does.

(Source: Brian Lumley, The Cyprus Shell)

Latin; Author(s) unknown; circa. 400 AD; 1D8/1d12 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +10 percentiles; 22 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Breath of the Deep; Call/Dismiss Dagon; Call/Dismiss Mother Hydra; Consume Likeness; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Gate; Elder Sign; Grasp of Cthulhu; Nyhargo Dirge; Raise Night Fog; Summon/Bind Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash)

The Teachings of the Esoteric Order of Dagon

This is a work which seeks to ease the transition of those affected with the so-called ‘Innsmouth Look’. It is a clear manual outlining the nature of the Deep Ones, their connexions to humanity and to the denizens of the deep. It outlines the whereabouts of Deep One colonies and helps in the identification of others who are undergoing the change. As well, it contains many prayers to Cthulhu, Father Dagon, and Mother Hydra and discusses with some perspicacity the nature of these entities.

An early edition of this work dating from Elizabethan times is kept in the British Library; another version published in the early 1800s resides in the Miskatonic University Library collection. Yet another version in Spanish has been identified in the Library of the University of Toledo.

(Source: Bruce Ballon, et.al., Unseen Masters)

Elizabethan English; Author unknown; 16^th Century; 1/1d3 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +2 percentiles; 1 week to study and comprehend

Spells: Contact Deep One; plus a 40% chance of one of the following: Alter Weather; Attract Fish; Bless/Blight Crops

English; Author unknown; early 19^th Century; 1/1d3 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +2 percentiles; 1 week to study and comprehend

Spells: Contact Deep One

Spanish; Author unknown; 1902; 1/1d3 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +2 percentiles; 1 week to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Contact Deep One

Invocations to Dagon

A passing reference in a news journal dated 1851 is the earliest sighting of this work, although the likelihood is that it is much older. The Invocations were never published; they were written by Asaph Waite and circulated amongst the adherents of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in the town of Innsmouth. After the destruction of that town in 1928 (during which Asaph Waite was killed), the manuscript disappeared and its current whereabouts are unknown.

That being said, the Restricted Section of the Miskatonic University Library has several pages from the Invocations. From these meagre gleanings it is clear that the work is a collection of prayers and ritual devotions seeking the intercession of Father Dagon in the worship of Great Cthulhu.

English; Asaph Waite; prior to 1851; 1d4/1d8 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +9 percentiles; 16 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Unknown

*****

Codex Maleficium

As with the Codex Dagonensis, the Codex Spitalski, and the Cthaat Aquadingen, the Codex Maleficium first appeared in northern Germany around the year 400 AD and was possibly meant to be identical with them. Scholarship has posited the notion that the book was originally written in German, or Gothic, or derived from sources in those languages: it could be that all four of these works are in fact the same book, compiled and written in four different locations and intended to be called the Cthaat Aquadingen, given that text’s mangled German (or Gothic)/Latin title. However, later amendments and additions have rendered the book unable to be reintegrated as a single volume and it now stands alone as a discrete text.

The Codex Maleficium was captured and named early after its discovery by the Inquisition and removed to the holdings of the Holy Roman Empire; it now resides within the Vatican and access to it is severely restricted. Transcriptions of the work were prepared, heavily edited and annotated, coded in the Inquisitorial Alphabet, to be used as a reference work for Vatican agents. These copies mostly refrain from outlining the ritual procedures of the text, preferring to gloss over material deemed too blasphemous for the tastes of holy warriors. Excerpts from other captured books were also included in this printing as a means of comparing, codifying and contrasting the practices of disparate heretical groups.

Like the Codex Dagonensis, the Codex Maleficium contains information on the Elder Sign, incantations designed to thwart magical summoning, the Nyhargo Dirge for dealing with the corporeal undead and several Tsathogguan rituals. Unlike any of the other related books, this is the only source for the First Sathlatta; what this incantation may do is unknown, a situation which will likely not change until the Vatican removes their restrictions of access.

(Source: Brian Lumley, The Cyprus Shell)

Latin; Author(s) unknown; circa. 400 AD; 1D8/1d12 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +10 percentiles; 22 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Augur; Baneful Dust of Hermes Trismegistus; Barrier of Naach-Tith; Bind Enemy; Blight/Bless Crop; Call/Dismiss Dagon; Call/Dismiss Mother Hydra; Cast Out Devil; Consume Likeness; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Gate; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Dust of Suleiman; Elder Sign; Evil Eye; Find Gate; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Nyhargo Dirge; Powder of ibn-Ghazi; Summon/Bind Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash); Unmask Demon; View Gate; Voorish Sign; Warding; Warding the Eye

Latin, in the Inquisitorial Alphabet; Vatican translator(s) unknown; the Vatican, circa. 1250 AD; 1D2/1d4 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +3 percentiles; 4 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: None; although 20% of copies will have 1D3 of the following: Augur; Baneful Dust of Hermes Trismegistus; Bind Enemy; Cast Out Devil; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Dust of Suleiman; Find Gate; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Powder of ibn-Ghazi; Unmask Demon; View Gate; Voorish Sign; Warding; Warding the Eye

*****

Codex Spitalski (aka “The Leprous Book”)

Like the Codices Dagonensis and Maleficium, the Codex Spitalski is one of several texts each of which may have been an abortive attempt to compile and publish the Cthaat Aquadingen. It is theorised that the Codex Spitalski is the earliest of these attempts.

The early movements of this manuscript are unknown; however the work was published in an extremely abridged form, with additional material elaborating the evil-doings of witches, at the height of the witch hunting frenzy in Northern Europe. This edition was produced by a Copenhagen publishing house and was entitled De Spedalske Bog (“The Leprous Book”) - a warning as to the toxic virulence of its subject matter, which only served to increase interest and therefore, its distribution. The original manuscript became known thereafter as the Codex Spitalski: the word ‘spitalski’ is a mistransliteration from the Danish ‘spedalske’ which means ‘leprous’; poor scholarship assumed that the word was a family name, possibly of a previous owner, and the title stuck. The manuscript languished in the holdings of the publishing house until it passed into the hands of successive later buyers; it now resides in the Restricted Section of the Library of the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Like the other volumes with which it is associated, the Codex Spitalski contains a series of Tsathogguan rituals, information regarding the Elder Sign, the Nyhargo Dirge which deals with the corporeal undead and some chants to prevent the effects of summoning spells. Unlike the other works, it is the only version to contain the Second Sathlatta, the effects of which are unknown.

(Source: Brian Lumley, The Cyprus Shell)

Latin; Author(s) unknown; circa. 400 AD; 1D6/1d10 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +9 percentiles; 22 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Augur; Barrier of Naach-Tith; Bind Enemy; Blight/Bless Crop; Cast Out Devil; Clutch of Nyogtha; Consume Likeness; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deity: Nyogtha; Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Bad-Corpse Dust; Create Gate; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Elder Sign; Evil Eye; Find Gate; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Nyhargo Dirge; Raise Night Fog; Summon/Bind Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash); Unmask Demon; View Gate; Warding; Warding the Eye

De Spedalske Bog

Danish; “Junior Philopatreias” (Sören Rosenlund) translator; Copenhagen, 1773; 1/1D3 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +2 percentiles; 3 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Augur; Blight/Bless Crop; Elder Sign; Evil Eye; Raise Night Fog; Warding; Warding the Eye

*****

Cthaat Aquadingen

“Ye Science as practiced by a Majority of ye Prime Ones was & is & always will be that of ye Path of Light, infinitely recognized throughout Time, Space & all ye Angles as beneficent to ye Great All’s Continuation. Certain of ye Gods, however, of a rebellious Nature, chose to disregard ye Dictums of ye Majority, & in ye constant Gloom of ye Dark Path renounced their immortal Freedom in Infinity & were banished to suitable Places in Space & Time. But even in Banishment ye Dark Gods railed against ye Prime Ones, so that those Followers of ye Light Path must needs shut them Outside of all Knowledge, imposing upon their Minds certain Strictures & ye fear of ye Light Path’s Ways, & impressing into their Bodies a Stigma defying Generation; that ye Sins of ye Fathers might be carried down through Eternity & visited upon ye Children & ye Children’s Children forever; or until a Time should come as was once, when all Barriers crumble, & ye Stars & Dwellers therein, & ye Spaces between ye Stars & Dwellers therein, & all Time & Angles & Dwellers therein be falsely guided into ye ultimate Night of ye Dark Path – until ye Great All close in & become One, & Azathoth come in His golden Glory, & Infinity begin again...”

-from ‘Contacting Cthulhu in Dreams’, Cthaat Aquadingen

(Brian Lumley, The Burrowers Beneath III: Cursed the Ground)

Although inextricably linked with the three other texts mentioned above, the Cthaat Aquadingen is a far more potent beast than any of them. Scholars have theorised that the original sources for this work were composed in German, or the Gothic tongue, or by a speaker of one of those languages with a less-than-perfect facility in Latin; whichever is the true state of affairs, the Cthaat Aquadingen contains much the same information as those other texts and is the most complete of any of them in this regard.

The origin of the title is unknown: ‘aquadingen’ is a corrupt admixture of German, or the Gothic tongue, with Latin, translating roughly as “things of the water”; the word ‘cthaat’ remains undeciphered, although some scholars have tentatively suggested that it may be a word in the language of R’lyeh.

While the original manuscript of the book has been lost forever, the first printing of the work took place around the 11th or 12th Centuries AD, and, of these, it is believed that only five copies remain. One of these was rumoured to have been bound in human skin and was in the possession of Titus Crow; if this is the case then it was probably destroyed along with his house and the rest of his library. A partial transcription and a translation reside in Oakdene Sanatorium, while another copy is held at the Great Library of the Dreamlands. The British Museum has consistently denied having a copy, despite persistently re-surfacing rumours.

The Cthaat Aquadingen, as does the Codex Dagonensis, concerns itself mainly with the Deep Ones and other Mythos phenomena and spells connected to the seas and oceans. In addition, it dwells at length upon those supernatural entities known as ‘the Drowners’ - Yibb-Tstll and Bugg-Shash - including the Third Sathlatta which offers protection from the latter. The text also covers Nyarlathotep in its avatar as the ‘Small Crawler’, the Nyhargo Dirge, certain rituals to do with the Great Old One Tsathoggua, invocations to foil summoning spells, and the Elder Sign.

Of the Sathlattae, created by the Ptetholites in eons passed, the Cthaat Aquadingen contains almost all of them including - along with the Third - the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Sathlattae. The effects of these incantations are mostly unknown although it is reported that the Ninth “no longer works” for some reason; perhaps the majority of the others are also similarly temporally or dimensionally restricted in some fashion. The Sixth Sathlatta has a variety of uses: if chanted before sleeping it allows the chanter to contact Yibb-Tstll in dreams; if chanted by a circle of thirteen ‘adepts’ at the beginning of any calendar year it will summon that entity to our reality; if inscribed upon a wafer and eaten by an intended victim, it will summon a phenomenon known as ‘The Black’ to destroy the target. This process also requires the Hoy-Dhin Chant, which is only found in the Necronomicon, in order to be successful.

(Source: Brian Lumley, The Cyprus Shell)

Latin; Unknown author(s); c.11th-12th Centuries AD; 1d8/2d8 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +13 percentiles; 46 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Augur; Baneful Dust of Hermes Trismegistus; Barrier of Naach-Tith; Bind Enemy; Breath of the Deep; Call/Dismiss Dagon; Call/Dismiss Mother Hydra; Cast Out Devil; Consume Likeness; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Nyarlathotep (as The Small Crawler); Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Bad-Corpse Dust; Create Gate; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Dust of Suleiman; Elder Sign; Find Gate; Grasp of Cthulhu; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Nyhargo Dirge; Raise Night Fog; Summon/Bind Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; The Sixth Sathlatta (Contact Deity: Yibb-Tstll; Summon/Bind Yibb-Tstll; Call The Black); The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash); View Gate; Voorish Sign; Warding; Warding the Eye

*****

“Ghe’phnglui, mglw’ngh ghee-yh, Yibb-Tstll, Fhtagn mglw y’tlette ngh’wgah, Yibb-Tstll, Ghe’phnglui mglw’ngh ahkobhg’sh, Yibb-Tstll; THABAITE! – YIBB-TSTLL, YIBB-TSTLL, YIBB-TSTLL!”

-The Sixth Sathlatta

(Brian Lumley, “The Horror at Oakdene”)

A copy of the Cthaat Aquadingen crossed the Channel from the Low Countries during the medieval period – possibly in the hands of refugees fleeing the Black Death - and found its way into England. There, it was translated into the English idiom of the times and stored within the holdings of Durham Cathedral.

The Black Death took a higher toll amongst ecclesiastics than any other sector of the community in England and the Durham Cathedral monasteries were wiped out almost to a man. It seems that the Middle English version of the Cthaat Aquadingen disappeared during this time and its whereabouts remain unknown.

Middle English; Unknown translator; c.14th Century AD; 1d6/2d6 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +8 percentiles; 36 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Alter Weather; Augur; Baneful Dust of Hermes Trismegistus; Barrier of Naach-Tith; Bind Enemy; Breath of the Deep; Call/Dismiss Dagon; Call/Dismiss Mother Hydra; Cast Out Devil; Consume Likeness; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Nyarlathotep (as The Small Crawler); Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Bad-Corpse Dust; Create Gate; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Dust of Suleiman; Elder Sign; Find Gate; Grasp of Cthulhu; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Nyhargo Dirge; Raise Night Fog; Summon/Bind Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; The Sixth Sathlatta (Contact Deity: Yibb-Tstll; Summon/Bind Yibb-Tstll; Call The Black); The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash); View Gate; Voorish Sign; Warding; Warding the Eye

Although the location of the Middle English Cthaat is a mystery, partial copies in manuscript form have turned up throughout England over the years. These usually have only the Sixth Sathlatta as the entirety of their spell complement although some have shown a bit more variety.

The best known of these copies is housed in Oakdene Sanatorium and several unfortunate episodes are on record surrounding it.

English; Unknown translator; various dates; 1d4/2d4 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +6 percentiles; 29 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: The Sixth Sathlatta (Contact Deity: Yibb-Tstll; Summon/Bind Yibb-Tstll; Call The Black); there is a 10% chance that 1D6 of the following spells will also be present: Alter Weather; Augur; Baneful Dust of Hermes Trismegistus; Barrier of Naach-Tith; Bind Enemy; Breath of the Deep; Call/Dismiss Dagon; Call/Dismiss Mother Hydra; Cast Out Devil; Consume Likeness; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Nyarlathotep (as The Small Crawler); Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Bad-Corpse Dust; Create Gate; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Dust of Suleiman; Elder Sign; Find Gate; Grasp of Cthulhu; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Nyhargo Dirge; Raise Night Fog; Summon/Bind Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash); View Gate; Voorish Sign; Warding; Warding the Eye

*****

“...And then shall the gate be opened, as the Sun is blotted out. Thus the Small Crawler will awaken those who dwell beyond and bring them. The sea shall swallow them and spit them up and the leopard shall eat of the flesh of Rudraprayag in the Spring.”

A version of the Cthaat Aquadingen was translated into Hindi around the time of the Indian Mutiny. This version was enhanced with a plethora of mystical predictions and some new spells, interspersing the other material. This additional material is distributed randomly amongst the other text, rendering any attempt at chronological arrangement (without hindsight) impossible. Many of the predictions involve Nyarlathotep in its various forms but this, as well, is of no use in trying to organise the material. In most other particulars, the book is the same as the English version of the Cthaat Aquadingen.

(Larry DiTillio & Lynn Willis, “Masks of Nyarlathotep: Kenya”)

Hindi, in the Devanagari Script; Unknown translator; c.14th Century AD; 1d4/2d4 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +6 percentiles; 29 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: Affect Weather; Barrier of Naach-Tith; Bind Enemy; Call/Dismiss Dagon; Call/Dismiss Mother Hydra; Cast Out Devil; Contact Deep One; Contact Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua; Contact Deity: Cthulhu; Contact Deity: Nyarlathotep (as The Small Crawler); Contact Deity: Tsathoggua; Create Bad-Corpse Dust; Create Gate; Curse of Darkness; Detect Enchantment; Dust of Suleiman; Find Gate; Hands of Kali; Identify Spirit; Imprison Mind; Powder of ibn-Ghazi; Elder Sign; Nyhargo Dirge; Strike Blind The Sixth Sathlatta (Contact Yibb-Tstll; Summon/Bind Yibb-Tstll; Call The Black); The Third Sathlatta (Banish Bugg-Shash); Unmask Demon; View Gate; Voorish Sign; Warding

*****

Notes on the Cthaat Aquadingen

“Many & multiform are ye dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from ye very prime. They sleep beneath ye unturned stone; they rise with ye tree from its root; they move beneath ye sea, & in subterranean places they dwell in ye inmost adyta. Some there are long known to man, & others as yet unknown, abiding ye terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are ye most dreadful & ye loathliest of all are haply still to be declared.”

-Joachim Feery, 1901

Joachim Feery (died 1934) was the son of the German Baron, Ernst Kant, and, like his father, a dedicated researcher of the supernatural. Feery had a more theoretical approach to his studies however, unlike his father who died in a Westphalian asylum, claiming that a demonic entity named Yibb-Tstll had taken control of his mind.

Feery is mainly known for the series of limited edition books which he printed, each an extended commentary on a particularly notorious book of forbidden lore, with annotations and quotations. These works include The Book of Dzyan, the Cthaat Aquadingen, De Vermis Mysteriis and, most infamously, the Necronomicon. These publications have expanded the range of these hard-to-access tomes and are often utilised by hard metaphysicians where the original texts are unavailable.

A word of caution, however: while generally well-received, Feery’s books were examined by other authorities on these works and his quotations and supplementary material were found to be somewhat at odds with the original matter, if not entirely unsupported by the text. His response was that his researches had been supplemented by material which had come to him in dreams. As a result, the reception of his publishing efforts has been universally cool.

(Source: Brian Lumley, “An Item of Supporting Evidence”)

German; Joachim Feery; 1901; 1D2/1D4 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +4 percentiles; 12 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: None

*****

Nyhargo Dirge

The Nyhargo Dirge is a potent ritual against undead zombies, restless skeletons and other corporeal entities forced into activity after their demise. It affects Mummies, Skeletons, Vampires, and Zombies; it has no effect upon Ghosts, Golems, Scarecrows, Werewolves, Wraiths, or the minions of Glaaki. It is equally ineffective against humans under the effects of the spells Compel Flesh, the Voodoo spell Create Zombi, Enthrall Victim, the Mi-Gos’ Hypnosis, the image created by a Remortification spell, or the target of a Soul Trap. It will destroy a corpse driven by the spell Seek Heart, and it will reverse the effects of the spells Transfer Body Part and Transfer Organ (causing the affected organs and members to cease functioning and mortify). Additionally, it will neutralise and reverse the Voodoo spell Sending of the Dead.

The Dirge requires the chanting of a very long and complex series of verses. Given this, translations or transliterations are sometimes incomplete or incorrect. If the copy of this spell that the players are about to use does not derive from either, the Codex Dagonensis, the Codex Maleficium, the Codex Spitalski or the Cthaat Aquadingen, there is a 20% chance that the verses are wrong and that the spell will not work.

The spell requires a moonless night upon which to be cast. The caster removes himself to a secluded outdoors locale and takes with them a staff, or stone (or some other similar object) and begins to chant the Dirge over this item while painting upon it the spell’s accompanying symbols in their own fresh blood (at least 1 HP’s worth). Whilst doing so, they sacrifice 2 POW.

The spell takes at least 2 hours to chant. In order to correctly chant the ritual words, the caster must roll under their INT score on 1d20. Chanting the ritual requires all of the words to be uttered in the proper order except for the last one: when the spellcaster wishes for the spell to take effect, they strike the ground with their chosen object and say this final word; the spell then comes into play:

The area of effect of the Dirge is spherical, 100 metres across, and centred at the point where the staff or stone (or other item) strikes the ground. This means that subterranean or flying undead creatures within the area are affected also. Eligible creatures within the zone are shredded into minute fragments as if caught in a bomb blast – utterly destroyed.

Caveats: only the caster of the Dirge can set it off – no-one else; if the object upon which the spell has been cast is destroyed or thrown into running water, the spell is neutralised; if the caster fails to make their INT roll, they still lose their POW and the HP’s worth of blood, and the spell doesn’t work; seeing the effects of the Nyhargo Dirge forces those so doing to lose 1D8 points of Sanity.

*****

The Sathlattae of the Ptetholites

The Ptetholites were a proto-human race which existed before the Hyperborean Age (between 900,000 and 1,000,000 years ago), the coming of which spelt their doom. Little is known of them, other than that the Hyperboreans were keen to eliminate them and that they went to great pains to do so. In the end, the Hyperborean wizard Edril Ghambiz used the Ptetholite’s own magic against them – specifically, the Sixth Sathlatta – summoning the Black to terrorise Yibb Tstll’s own worshippers.

Along with worship of this particular menace, the Ptetholites were known to offer sacrifice to Arwassa and Ithaqua, although, as in the case of Yibb Tstll, whether this was true worship or simple propitiation and manipulation is unknown. It’s likely that the Ptetholites were roughly organised into clan alliances and fought constantly among themselves. Remarkably, for such a primitive race, they developed their own form of writing, although few traces of this remain:

Early copies of the Cthaat Aquadingen contain the Sixth Sathlatta written in Ptetholite glyphs, with a Latin translation; The Kishite Recension of the Book of Eibon contains some fragments purporting to be from “the Nyahites of Ptathlia”, which may be a reference to these people. The most comprehensive collection of Ptetholite writing however, is to be found on the Broken Columns of Geph.

In the Seventies, an object known as the Phitmar Stone was unearthed. The inscriptions on this tablet are in several different forms of Ancient Egyptian writing, in a dialect dating from the Old Kingdom. Within these texts are transcriptions taken from the Broken Columns: this has some interesting implications when taken in the light of the existence of an ancient document dating from the Roman Republic: several sub-Saharan tribes known to the Romans worshipped Yibb-Tstll under the guise of “Chuma”; their worship and rituals were outlined in a – now lost – series of scrolls, written in the Egyptian Hieratic script, and known as the Chuma Scrolls.

The Chuma Scrolls

This sheaf of five scrolls contains information about the cult of Chuma amongst the sub-Saharan tribes. They are written using the Hieratic script, the ‘shorthand’ version of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs; what language they have been written in is unknown and may well be some form of sub-Saharan dialect. They contain information about contacting and summoning the god (Yibb-Tstll in his avatar as Chuma), his blood (“the Black”), and also minions, the Nightgaunts. Copies of the Chuma Scrolls were said to have been housed within the Serapeum of Alexandria and in the libraries of Carthage; if so, they have almost certainly been lost forever.

In Hieratic, in an unknown language; translated by unknown scribes from a sub-Saharan original, c.1800BC; 1D6/2D6 Sanity Loss; Cthulhu Mythos +8 percentiles; 8 weeks to study and comprehend.

Spells: “Awaken Chuma”, “Call the Black” (The Sixth Sathlatta); Summon/Bind Nightgaunt; any others the Keeper desires.

*****

The Sathlattae of the Ptetholites are a series of complex, multifarious rituals, each of which has several applications. Many of the Sathlattae do not seem to work – according to those who have the opportunity to attempt them – which raises some interesting speculations.

Of the Ninth Sathlatta, it is said that this ritual “no longer works”. This may mean that this particular spell, and likely some of the others, are constructed to function only in particular time periods, “when the stars are right” for instance. It may also be that the spells are dimensionally predicated: some of the Sathlattae may only work in the appropriate dimension, the Dreamlands for example, or on some other planet. Further research is obviously required.

The following list shows the various Sathlattae, the volumes in which they are found and their current status.

First Sathlatta – Codex Maleficium

Capabilities unknown

Second Sathlatta – Codex Spitalski

Capabilities unknown

Third Sathlatta – Codex Dagonensis; Codex Maleficium; Codex Spitalski; Cthaat Aquadingen

Banish Bugg-Shash

Fourth Sathlatta – Cthaat Aquadingen

Capabilities unknown

Fifth Sathlatta - Cthaat Aquadingen

Capabilities unknown

Sixth Sathlatta - Cthaat Aquadingen; The Chuma Scrolls

Contact Yibb-Tstll

Summon/Bind Yibb-Tstll

Summon “The Black” (requires the Hoy-Dhin Chant from the Necronomicon)

Seventh Sathlatta - Cthaat Aquadingen

Capabilities unknown

Eighth Sathlatta - Cthaat Aquadingen

Capabilities unknown

Ninth Sathlatta - Cthaat Aquadingen

No longer works

Review: "The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smaug"

JACKSON, Peter (Dir.), “The Hobbit – The Desolation of Smaug” New Line Cinema/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Wingnut Films, 2013.

By way of kicking off this review, I’m going to repeat a point I made last year: there’s a pronunciation guide that accompanies Tolkien’s epic saga and it tells any reader who cares to wander into the Appendices, how to say those funny Elvish, Dwarven, whatever, words. You might choose to look it up yourself – given that Peter Jackson et.al. obviously chose not to – or you might opt to experience the polyglot miscellany of the movie’s dialogue on its own merit. For the present exercise, I will write all of the names that I have to discuss phonetically, and let you, the reader, gauge how far off the mark the script, direction and dialogue coaching is, in these movies.

First off, this series has a distinct odour to it. You know the reek that contaminates those Disney film sequels that show up a couple of years after the original animated treat hits the cinemas? “Aladdin’s Winter Holiday Adventure”; “Mulan II: Mulan versus the Golden Horde”; “The Little Mermaid: Ariel and Ursula’s Tap Dance Face-Off”: they look like the real deal but there’s something off about them. Perhaps some of the original voice talent couldn’t return for the sequel; maybe it’s because one of Disney’s second-string animation studios has pushed it through to deadline. “The Hobbit”? Like that.

It’s not just the patchy dialogue that adds to this either. There are little giveaways all through the piece. In the compositing, eyelines are often shaky: in Laketown when Bard and T-Horin (see what I did there?) square off, neither of them seems to be actually staring the other in the eye; and the scenes in BEE-orn’s house were a jumble of big and little objects and creatures that didn’t seem to fit any perspective at all. It seems that the visual trickery crew at Weta Workshop have become somewhat lackadaisical in their approach and have taken a ‘she’ll be right’ view of these matters.

The make-up is a little iffy too. I’ve never liked the ‘hobbit-feet’ thing, but throughout “Lord Of The Rings”, we only have to endure them a handful (heh) of times in close-up. With the dwarves, the actors are forcing their skills through drenching layers of latex and fake hair to begin with; but was there really any point in forcing them to wear prosthetic hands as well? There’s a bit where T-Horin is scrabbling at the secret door, looking for the keyhole, and his bulky plastic hands are 1) lumpen and awkward, and 2) obviously made of rubber; at another point, Lego-lass and Tauriel (I’ll get to this name in a minute) are making dialogue and you can clearly see the loose edge of her rubber ear as she turns her head for a second. These are things that absolutely would not have happened in the “LOTR”.

Plot and pacing suffer from this ‘she’ll be right’ attitude too. There’s a case for foreshadowing in these works: the journey to the Lonely Mountain and the encounter with SmOWg is a prelude to Froh-doh’s holiday at Mount Doom. This is a classic literary motif which hearkens back to the Bible. In “The Hobbit”, much of the plot is simply filler material designed to throw impact onto events in the later “LOTR” films, which would be fine if the “The Hobbit” was made before those three movies. In the first “Hobbit” we got the three trolls, Gandalf’s moth trick and the Eagle Boys Pizza Delivery Service; the second “Hobbit” layers it on again: here’s rain-drenched Bree, complete with Peter Jackson stumbling through the night, violently decapitating carrots; here’s the Prancing Pony with menace lurking in the shadows; there’s a fight with a giant spider; here we are encountering feisty elves in an extravagant forest; here’s one of our diminutive heroes struck down by a morg-ool-weapon and healed by a she-elf with a bunch of King’s Foil; here’s the corrupt city ruler misled by the weaselly advisor. See? It’s easy: this stuff writes itself.

(What’s the opposite of foreshadowing I wonder? Anticlimax? Tedium?)

The pacing gives things away too. The despair of the dwarves at the secret door – having missed the last light of Durin’s Day – flicks on and off again like someone’s working a switch. It’s as if the scriptwriters looked over their day’s effort and said ‘we need a bit of teary-eyed, dramatic dialogue here’ and just patched it in. These moments in “LOTR” are never contrived and are genuinely moving; here, they come off half-cocked. I suspect it’s Jackson’s inflexible notion that ‘dwarves’ equal ‘funny’, so he refuses to give them any gravitas whatsoever. For him it’s a cast made up of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, Gummo, Larry, Curley, Moe, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and W.C. Fields: you don’t waste the love scenes or the stirring monologues on these guys. Although when these types of scenes do fall into their laps, there’s a feeling that it’s only being grudgingly offered. The fact that they’re all dressed like extras from a live-action Asterix movie doesn’t help either (for Christ’s sake, why can’t they just yank that stupid axe-head out of BIFF-er’s head?!)

(Seriously: have they actually read The Hobbit? T-Horin Oakenshield is at least the equal in majesty of THAY-oden; GLOH-in is supposed to be a wise elder, not a cunning street pedlar (despite their cover story of travelling merchants, which is supposed to be a ruse that everyone they meet sees straight through). Bomb-Ber is supposed to be the spiritual core of the group, not a spinning-barrel-of-destruction, target for cheap fat jokes. In the book, these guys drip majesty; you can smell the lineage and heroism coming off them; in the movie, it’s all nyuck, nyuck, nyuck! Whoops! [Fart!])

The opening scene is a pacing issue too; or a case where the editor dropped the ball, however you want to read it. It’s a flashback to Bree, a year before the meeting at Bilbo’s house, wherein Gandalf meets T-Horin at the sign of the Prancing Pony. There’s menace in the shadows, a cameo by Jackson, some off-kilter eyelines (foreshadowing as hard as we can here!): Gandalf says ‘dude, I’ve been telling you for ages to shoo that dragon out of your Scrooge McDuck money bin. Why don’t you man up and get it done?’ To which Master Oakenshield says, ‘alright’. Then we cut to Bilbo in close up with the words “Twelve Months Later” across the bottom of the screen in some bog-standard, non-Middle-Earth-y font that just screams ‘we couldn’t be bothered’. What is this scene doing? What purpose does it serve? Not much to my mind, except that it begins the erosion of Gandalf’s trustworthiness:

One thing we learn from this movie is that Gandalf is not great at commitment: ‘Dudes’, he says, ‘I’m comin’ with you guys to the ‘Mountain, dudes!’; then it’s, ‘Crazy elf forest ahead, dudes! But I just remembered I’ve got this really important - thing - I have to go get done, but you’ll be cool, right? I’ll see you later on at the Overlook, fo’shizzle!’. And then he pulls a no-show. Sure it’s because he ditched Radagast (and who wouldn’t ditch the bunny-rider with bird-shit in his hair – not cool dude) and went mano a mano with the Witch King, but it’s just impolite to make a date and not show up. Where are your birdy friends now, G-man? Tardiness in wizards was almost excusable in “LOTR”; “The Hobbit” demonstrates that it’s a chronic fault.

And yes, I know it happens in the book, but there, it’s handled differently. The way Jackson et.al. work it, it’s highlighted, made more obvious; it comes off as a character flaw, not a mysterious sub-text as Tolkien wanted it.

The connective tissue between all this re-working of the “LOTR” material (aka., ‘foreshadowing’) is more of the goofy, fighting free-for-all that dominated the first film (and which demonstrates the fact that Jackson hasn’t quite gotten over his brush with “Tintin”). This time we get the Elvish version, as well as all the gravity-defying Dwarven high-jinks, with Lego-lass along for the ride. Orlando Bloom’s stony-faced portrayal of wood-elf virtuosity makes all his character’s flash moves seem a bit ho-hum, like it’s just another day at the office (and maybe it is); he also seems much chunkier than the “LOTR” Lego-lass too, which was a little distracting. In fact, the guy who plays Bard in the film, looks more like Lego-lass than Lego-lass does. Weird.

The fighting brings up another point: Jackson wanted this movie to be seen in 3-D with a high frame-rate. This was obviously his vision for the film. If you don’t go to see this flick in a cinema that offers these options, you will be Punished. Big time. In two dimensions, things flash across the screen too fast to recognise, and things roar out of the background too fast to follow. You don’t see half of the dwarven pratfalls (thank God!) and you miss all the Elven slick moves. So if you do go and see it in ‘normal mode’, use the fight scenes to kick back, maybe visit the loo, ruffle your popcorn a bit and await the next piece of ‘foreshadowing’.

Of the few things I liked about the first “Hobbit”, the second film starts to erode them also. The orcs were very cool, despite being on ‘bad-ass overdrive’ in comparison to the good guys; now they’re being ramped up even more. The second-in-command orc (“Bolg”) seems to have metal plates inserted into his body between his ribs: I’m no doctor, but that kind of affectation screams ‘tetanus’, and ‘septicaemia’, to me. Rather than increase the opposition’s offensiveness (in all senses) between instalments, they should have just built them to a certain level and left it at that. If World War Two had been a fashion show, the Nazis would have won hands down; in this story, the orcs are definitely ahead on points, but they’re starting to push it just a little (spiked collars are so last week).

What else? Did you know that ‘Tauriel’ is a cabbalistic angel of the Zodiac? I applaud the inclusion of another female character in the cast and the way that they accomplish this is a great way to facilitate things. But there are those pesky Appendices in Tolkien’s books (not to mention university-accredited academics who can speak the Elven tongue fluently) who might have provided a name more in keeping with Tolkien’s vision. Seriously, in this day and age, did they think nobody would notice? I’m not sure about the romantic sub-plot they’re developing with her and Kee-lee (seriously, I’m seeing the dwarf/elf equivalent of ligers in their future) and the healing scene had most of the audience at the session I was in, tittering inappropriately; but I’m happy to wait and watch (despite knowing what’s coming!).

Last year, I said that “An Unexpected Journey” seemed like a bunch of reiteration that was intended to set up the pay-off to come; after “The Desolation of SmOWg”, I feel as though I’ve just watched a low-budget, Readers’ Digest re-telling of “The Lord of the Rings” (now with MORE dwarven humour! Nyuck, nyuck!). Possibly, my experience would have been better if I’d shelled out the big end of fifty bucks to see it in Hyper-Dimensional, Smell-O-Ramic, Sensurround-O-Vision™, but I suspect not.

If you go down to the woods today, you’ll find it’s same-old, same-old in Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth.

Two tentacled horrors.

PS: Don’t go see this film if you’re a Tolkien tragic, or a “LOTR” fan desperate for a fix (you know who you are): go and see it for Martin Freeman, who is fantastic. (Go, Watson!)

Review: Culbard's "The Shadow Out of Time"

LOVECRAFT, H.P., & I.N.J. CULBARD, “The Shadow Out Of Time”, SelfMadeHero, London, 2013.

Octavo-sized duodecimo; perfect-bound in gatefold illustrated wrappers; unpaginated (120pp.), with many illustrations. Very good.

I came across this quite by accident in the local new book store in Leura. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular – just checking the new releases so that I could seem to talk intelligently with the customers in the shop where I work – but once I spotted it I knew that it would be coming home with me.

Essentially, this is a graphic novelisation of Lovecraft’s novella, stretching from dream-haunted Arkham to the land Down Under. The comics format is especially good for telling such tales of the weird and fantastic, because – fundamentally – it is not limited by annoying factors such as a budget. The recently-aborted attempt by Guillermo del Toro to film “At The Mountains Of Madness” demonstrates exactly why filmic interpretations are so often destined to fail, either never leaving the drawing board, or dying due to woeful execution. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve said often enough in the past that sometimes economic constraints serve to create ingenious work-arounds, as in the case of the HPLHS’s “Call of Cthulhu”; but the graphic novel approach shifts the whole exercise onto a different playing field, unlimited by such restrictions.

The really BIG Lovecraft works – “Mountains”, “Shadow over Innsmouth” “Haunter of the Dark” – require a Peter Jackson-like approach to film: there’re so many essential notes that have to be struck, before even thinking about adding anything extra, that your resources are used up right from the start. Smaller works such as “Cool Air”, “From Beyond”, even “Whisperer”, require fewer fundamental elements, most of which are available to hand, that there is scope to polish and embellish around the edges of what are – in essence – simple tales. (For my money, as a fan of del Toro’s “Cronos”, I think he’d do a wonderful job of “Cool Air”.)

Graphic novels overcome the need to search for exotic locales, or rare and expensive equipment and set pieces, with the stroke of a pencil. Need huge cyclopean ruins? Done. Want soul-shattering expanses of outer space? Done. It’s that easy.

Of course, like any transliteration from one medium to another, the material has to be massaged to fit the new format. In the present case, most of the descriptive passages of the original text can be done away with – the illustrations step in and fill that objective. What’s left are the pacing and the delineations of character. In the present instance, this is a commanding performance: action and reaction flow seamlessly across the narrative, encapsulating the thoughts and emotions of all the players.

The other chore that the interpreter of such material has to address, is hitting all of the beats. If something is left out, there’s a world of fans out there that will definitely wail and moan about it. Again, the graphic format can subsume a lot of this effort and the author/illustrator on this work has done an excellent job. After these things have been accomplished, all that remains is for the creator to embellish and place emphasis. For the first time here, we start to run into some issues.

In the original story, the narrative moves inevitably to a specific conclusion; that is, the thing that Dr Peaslee finds buried in the sands of Australia’s western deserts. Reading HPL’s tale, it’s easy to see that this event, and what it entails for the protagonist, are his motivations for writing the narrative, indeed for putting pen to paper: this is the gimmick; the trick of the story, if you will. Culbard moves the focus away from this; it still happens – and takes place in the narrative stream where it is supposed to – but its impact is greatly watered down. Perhaps, after such a long period of time since the first publication of the story, Culbard felt that this revelation was too pat for today’s sophisticated reading audience; he’s not the first writer to have altered an original tale for such reasons, as any number of recent adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple stories will demonstrate.

To my mind, this is a weakness. If the story is worth re-telling, then the intentions of the original author should be preserved. Without these, it becomes a different story with different goals. I don’t mind if a later adaptation places emphasis on unexplored themes which are already extant in the material, that’s fine: that’s merely embellishment, not a re-working.

In this case, Culbard places emphasis on the relationship between Peaslee senior and his son Wingate. We see the disintegration of the Peaslee domestic arrangement, and the further family disharmony which forces the younger academic from the home of his mother and her new husband. This certainly does not paint the former Mrs Peaslee in the light of an ideal parent, but it does add a layer of complexity to the narrative which does nothing to detract from it. Unfortunately, this theme of single fathers and their relationships with their offspring becomes the point of the story for Culbard and, sadly, deflects the hammer-blow of HPL’s final, dreadful revelation. The horror lies in what the Great Race is doing; not the incidental damage that they accrue to the families of individual people whose lives they affect. The ramifications of the Yithians’ time-hopping are profound, across the whole of humanity, and shouldn’t be equated with the effects of, say, a fatal car crash on one family unit. It may be that Culbard was reaching for a way to make the cosmic horror more personal and identifiable; if that’s the case, I don’t think it entirely worked.

There are other things which Culbard slips in which are cute and very entertaining. In one scene, the Yithian Peaslee and his guide perform a ‘drive by’ past the snoozing Cthulhu: Peaslee asks why the Great Race didn’t occupy this titanic creature? The guide dismisses the notion by saying sniffily that “it does nothing but sleep”. Other references to Mythos lore pop up here and there – the Mi Go; the Elder Things – and these work well within the context of the story, laying a backdrop, or timeline, of Mythos encroachment upon the Earth.

My final comments are to do with the artwork. For the most part, this is workman-like stuff, adequately fulfilling its purpose. Culbard has obvious fun with various cosmic horrors and manages to break the mould a little in places: his Yithians are entirely unique and add a benign pathos to what are essentially unknowable monsters. I was less interested in his Flying Polyps which seemed a little sketchy and lacking menace. At its best, the art is great at conveying the scope of the environments and the pace of the action; at worst, it can seem somewhat flat.

That being said, the whole project manages to capture the essence and spirit of HPL’s work (despite the tinkering mentioned above): there is serious skill involved in adapting something like this and doing it so seamlessly. Culbard has also penned versions of “The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward” and “At The Mountains Of Madness” (for which he received the British Fantasy Award in 2011); I’d be keen to check out either of these on the strength of this offering.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: Beyond Black

Mantel, Hilary, Beyond Black, Harper Perennial / HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 2005.

Octavo; paperback, with illustrated wrappers; 451pp. Somewhat cocked; text block and page edges lightly toned; minor wear to covers. Very good.

“There are nights when you don’t want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don’t want them and you can’t send them back. The dead won’t be coaxed and they won’t be coerced. But the public has paid its money and it wants results.”

Before the Booker Prizes, before the quotes taken out of context, before overnight world-wide instant acclaim, Hilary Mantel wrote a bunch of other books. Most importantly for me, and any similarly-minded readers out there, she wrote this book – Beyond Black – a two-fisted, nitrous-fuelled, headrush into the Unknown, Beyond the Veil. This is a book for cover-judgers: what you see is what you get. This book goes – blasts – into some dark, dark places; it has plenty of humour along the way, teamed up with some withering exposés of the human condition, but the subject matter and the humour is as black as it gets – beyond black.

The story revolves around two partners in the psychic business: Alison, or Al, who comes from impoverished roots and who has spoken with ghosts ever since she can remember, and lost, directionless Colette, a ruthlessly efficient business-woman newly cut loose from her dead-end marriage and her dead-head husband. In seeking purpose and answers for why her relationship crashed so badly, Colette encounters Al and Al proposes that she becomes her personal assistant and business partner. Colette reluctantly agrees; not because she has reservations about the supernatural, but because she needs to work: one of her previous prognosticators told her that she would find true love by charting a new direction and cutting loose from old ways, and by meeting a man at her new job.

The two women cannot be more dissimilar: Al is hugely obese, a mountain of soft flesh, while Colette is small, slim and angular – all hard lines and jutting bones. Colette is very direct, believing that all questions have simple, straightforward answers; Al’s world is nebulous and inexplicable: nothing is what it seems and she usually doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain to Colette what is happening. And then, to make things messy, there’s Morris.

Morris is Al’s spirit guide. No-one but Al can see him, but he makes his presence known to all. Morris is dead; an ex-jockey, drunkard, foul-mouthed, lecherous pervert, who – to Al’s great misfortune – was a mate of all the low-life lawless workmen for whom Al’s mum, Emmie, was the ‘town bike’. At the age of eight, one of Emmie’s regulars – “Keef” – brought his fighting dogs to the house and one of them tried to kill Al: since then she has scars and a peculiar affinity for spectral dogs and their mournful sense of loss - finding themselves without their owners in the land of the dead - or still suffering the pain and bewilderment of mistreatment at the hands of brutal owners. Morris, who acts as a conduit for Al, bringing the dead to talk through her to their surviving family members, has the nasty habit of bringing Al’s mum’s dead lovers to stay with him, forcing Al to keep moving to new houses, free of spectral taint, shaking off the unwanted unliving.

Colette, as well as organising and re-vivifying Al’s accounts, marketing and methods of client management, also decides that Al should produce a book. Consequently, they embark upon some recorded sessions wherein Colette interviews Al about her past and her working methods. Chunks of the book are transcripts of these sessions and there are some brilliant moments of golden dialogue. These trips down memory lane throw Al into long periods of self-examination: her childhood, filled as it was with the most horrible mental, emotional and physical abuse, has been mercifully blanked by her psyche and she remembers most of it as simply an unpleasant haze. Unfortunately, Colette’s questioning and Morriss’s unwelcome visitors start to open some messy worm-cans.

Mantel masterfully orchestrates the mechanics of talking to the dead and the activities of those who facilitate the process. She has a needle tapped straight into the veins of those who seek out psychic practitioners for comfort of solace: she mercilessly portrays their obsessive, compulsive self-abuse and wallowing. As well, she conjures a gallery of psychic operators – tarot card readers, palmists, druids, tasseomancers – who are as cynical and money-focussed as any suit-wearing operator from London’s Golden Mile. However – and here’s where Mantel’s brilliance shows through at its best – we meet all of these people through Al, whose generosity of spirit and need to remain “professional” and cater for everyone’s needs, never allows them to become truly the monsters they could be.

Al tells us that the dead are petty, self-obsessed and have hang-ups about the most ridiculous things – one spirit insists that Al pass on a message about the location of a missing cardigan button; another repeatedly tells her that she’s been looking for her best friend for over thirty years; Morris spends most of his time with his dick out. This is the reason, she tells Colette after some persistent questioning, why they don’t bother explaining what Heaven and Hell and God are like. Sometimes Al explains, the dead aren’t forthcoming at all; then she has to fall back on her telepathy to impress her clients. Colette becomes more confused and tries to spot the difference between ‘Al being a medium’ and ‘Al being telepathic’, to no real effect.

The matter-of-fact treatment of the supernatural here is what makes the whole package work. The psychics all compete for new innovations that will allow them to corner the market – Vedic palmistry versus Traditional; Vastu instead of Feng Shui – but their squabbling for buzz-words is merely the gloss on top of the given that is the communication with those “passed over”. At one “psychic fayre” on the weekend of Princess Diana’s funeral, they warily circle each other each trying to be the first to receive a communication from HRH, but trying not to make it look opportunistic. Ironically, Al is the only one who does get an audience, but it happens in her hotel room where no-one except Colette (who doesn’t understand what’s happening) is there to see it.

Ultimately, what drives Al (with Colette, stumbling briskly in her wake) is the knowledge of What Comes Next, and her desperate fear to avoid it, just as she tried to avoid the casual, brutal realities of her childhood. In essence, Al becomes a dweller on the hinterlands, neither here nor there, pacifying the living and trying to keep the dead under control. As you read on, your realisation of the subtleties (and grotesqueries) of her position become terrifying clear.

It’s not only the source material that makes this a great read; it’s also the consummate writing that it showcases. Mantel has a gimlet eye and pins down the bleak urban landscapes which our two heroines tear through with uncanny and beautiful accuracy. Try this:

“A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.”

In a world where so much of what gets published is just bad writing that should never have made it to the page, this is a breath of fresh air. Or rather, a great, gulping, lung-filling sense of relief that there is a master at work out there in the field.

And of course, this gets the full five Tentacled Horrors from me, along with a stern injunction to find it and read it!

Review: The Ghost of 29 Megacycles

Fuller, John G., The Ghost of 29 Megacycles, Souvenir Press Ltd., London, 1985.

Octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine-titling; 257pp. Near fine in like dustwrapper, now protected by archival–quality non-adhesive plastic film.

I’m only halfway through this at the moment but I’ve already got up such a head of steam that I need to de-pressurise a bit before I go on. This is a book about technology being used to determine if there are ghosts out there; about science going head-to-head with “things beyond the veil”, and I had high hopes of a satisfying conclusion.

It’s not that I have a superstitious mind, or that I believe prima facie in the supernatural: when I was a kid, like a lot of kids, I wanted magic and spooks and monsters to be real. Too often I found that exploring the world for the supernatural led to pat answers about how “magical” the world is, if you look at it in just the right way; that is, if you use your imagination and play nicely. Not satisfying. I was reading about actual monsters - werewolves being hunted through the villages of 16^th Century France; the Amityville Horror; UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle: I didn’t want someone at the end of the show saying “how much fun was that? See what we can do if we all play the same imaginary games?” Going through all of the cut-and-thrust, only to be told what a great, fictional story it all is, was the ultimate cop-out to my 8-year-old way of thinking.

This attitude remains with me today. I don’t mind following through on an investigation only to find out that some phenomenon is the result of creaky floorboards, glowing marsh gas and a few over-active imaginations; I don’t mind the Scooby-Doo ending if it’s reached intelligently and logically; however, I REALLY dislike being dragged through a narrative, hooked along by someone else’s poor assumptions.

This I think is one of the reasons I like Charles Fort (what he stood for anyway; not his writing style). His basic premise is that too often, in any field of human endeavour, people become blinkered by their assumptions about what ought to be happening and refuse to look at what’s actually going on. His main target was the scientific community which, having structured itself in such a way as to discount anything which doesn’t fall within its consensus-backed, peer-reviewed parameters, refuses to even look at anything anomalous. To this end he wrote (turgid, poorly-expressed, incendiary, convoluted) lists of anything that was out of the ordinary, so that it stood on record until such a time that science advanced far enough to be able to understand what had been going on. Fort didn’t have any answers; what he did have was a bee in his bonnet about people who refused to lift their heads up and look around.

The thing that really griped Fort’s cookies was that the scientific community claimed to have all of the answers. It annoyed him that Science, when confronted with the Unknown, often declared in a patronising manner “there has to be a rational explanation”, without then going on to provide one. Discount and move on: this seemed to him to be Science’s standard operating procedure. There are echoes of Fort’s annoyance in every episode of the X-Files, where Government deniability swoops in to conceal, appropriate and cover-up anything that seems strange and unusual. Fox Mulder: the modern-day Charles Fort.

So, I thought this book would be something a little refreshing: the scientific community setting out seriously to discover the nature of Life After Death.

The story is as follows: a well-known industrial engineer named Meeks, a staunch member of the scientific community, approaches our author to ask him to write an unbiased, impartial record of his discoveries in finding a method to communicate with the Dead. This scientist claims to have found a way to get ghosts to communicate with the living through an extension of principles outlined as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena), working with the spirits of dead scientists to refine the process. It sounded pretty whacky to me (as it would to anyone really) but I decided to take the ride and see where it took me.

The book started off with many authorial assertions from Fuller that he was unwilling to take on the task, that he found the whole thing too preposterous. This was followed by claims to have researched all of the people involved, to see if they were members of the lunatic fringe (and thus to be avoided). Then we had the face-to-face meeting where we were told that everyone present was “normal” and earnest, in no way fruity or demonstrably unhinged. Meeks and his wife meet Fuller and his wife and they discuss the project over tea: Meeks is calm of aspect, steadfast in his beliefs, engaging in manner. The wives are supportive and engaged on both sides of the equation, and we get some homey exchanges of dialogue between Fuller and his missus about what the project entails and where it’s going.

It took less than this much to make my “baloney senses” start tingling.

Arguably, it’s my Gen-X attitudes showing, but when anyone tries this hard to convince me that everything’s OK, I automatically start picking at the cracks. The book to this point followed a well-trod path of deflecting suspicion and reservation: I was being asked not to harbour a feeling that anything other than what I was being told was going on. Strike one: I don’t like being told what to think, and I can see a soft-soap job coming a mile off.

We next had chapters of background, both of Meeks and Fuller, specifically, his past books which rang like self-promotion and advertising. To be frank, it was boring and I kept wanting him get to the punchline. Eventually, we started to hear about Meeks’s initial experiments wherein a cabal of technicians gathered regularly in a rented room with some hard-core audio and other electronic equipment to download information from the Afterlife, in the company of a medium.

What? A medium?

Here’s where the fantasy unravels: we’re told that our scientific researchers are wary of accepting the evidence of spirits from The Other Side, but that the main tentpole of their investigation is a crystal-ball-gazing, tarot-card-shuffling medium. Sorry: given that the presence of the one automatically assumes the fact of the other, as far as scientific method goes this is shooting itself in the foot from the get-go.

Further assertions of serious attitude follow: we’re told that the experiments begin with an earnest prayer; that the medium is not some gypsy-descended fruitcake, but is a reluctant acknowledger of the “gifts” they have been imbued with. Really? Seriously, they could be prayers to Satan at the start of a Black Mass for all I care, it just says that there’s all kinds of bias going on here, not just the taking for granted that dead people live on after “moving on”.

But wait: there’s more. Meeks tells us that, after many sessions tweaking an oscilloscope and twitching a metaphorical cat’s whisker, he has discovered that people “over there” live a life of pure thought and spiritual development; some people arrive less-than-perfectly adapted and must be schooled in ascending to higher grades of spiritual excellence. “Life” is spent enjoying the prospect of mental and spiritual attunement, passing on to higher states of phantasmagorical excellence. And there are scientists over there working night and day to find ways of communicating with their loved ones.

Come On! Seriously? Despite the fact that it all sounds mind-bogglingly tedious, has anyone else noticed that all of this material is being made available by one single individual whose “abilities” are assumed, cannot be measured or quantified, and are probably pure hogwash? Well, Meeks and his cabal of serious-minded researchers certainly have no problems with this, and Fuller is keen to make sure that we readers don’t either.

(Insert here the sound of a book flying across the room to bounce off a wall.)

This is no journalistic effort: it’s crap. Fuller’s assumptions – which he may have been sold on by Meeks – are creaky and don’t hold up to any reasonable examination. The premise that mediums exist, that psychic energies swirl around us and can be manipulated by schooled, talented individuals, is not a given, so any “research” which takes off from this premise is necessarily flawed and untenable. Let’s not even mention that a lead chapter outlining the author’s other literary efforts reeks of self-promotion and warns that this entire effort is likely to be an exercise in unit-shifting rather than revelation. Oh, did I just mention that? My bad.

I feel, like Fort, that I shouldn’t be judgemental and that I should keep an open mind about the assertions here. However, I’m not an idiot: the world has rules and it has a lot of snake-oil salesmen. I’m prepared to be astonished by new discoveries, not to be made to swallow a line.

Forty years on, there are still no monsters, ghosts or UFOs; sadly, there are still a lot of bullshit shovelers.

No Tentacled Horrors for this con-job.

*****

Travellers'...

Travellers’

Established: 1819

 

“‘If I had a conscience,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘I would not remain a member here. I’m a member because the food is the best in London’

‘I like the food at the Travellers’ just as much,’ Hargreaves said.”

-Grahame Greene, The Human Factor

Addresses:

1819-1822: 12 Waterloo Place

1822-1832: 70 Pall Mall, SW1

1832-Present: 106 Pall Mall, SW1

Entry Restrictions

Men only, on the proviso that they have “travelled out of the British islands to a distance of at least five hundred miles from London in a direct line”; a stipulation of membership is that all nominated candidates must name at least four foreign countries which they have personally visited.

 

Famous Members

Prince Talleyrand (1754-1838)

Lord Castlereagh (1769-1822)

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)

George Canning (1770-1827)

Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857)

Earl of Aberdeen (1784-1860)

Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865)

C.R. Cockerell (1788-1863)

Sir William Parry (1790-1855)

Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871)

Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860)

FitzRoy of the “Beagle” (1805-1865)

Arthur Balfour (1848-1930)

Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947)

Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003)

 

Skills Augmented:

Anthropology, Credit Rating, Other Language, History; Navigation

Areas of Speciality:

Diplomatic Relations; Foreign Affairs; Historical Matters; Travel Literature; Cartographic issues

 

History

Once peace had been restored in Europe, After the Napoleonic Wars, A group of English gentlemen – amongst them Lord Castlereagh – saw a need for an organisation which could use its experience of foreign countries and manners to facilitate new connexions with former enemies. The idea was that a Club of well-travelled individuals could provide hospitality to foreign travellers, which would then facilitate reciprocal relations overseas.

The Club was originally established at Waterloo Place, its ideals enshrined in its charter and the head of Ulysses chosen for its badge; however the premises there were soon deemed to be unfit. Charles Barry was commissioned to design and build a new headquarters and in the meantime, the Club relocated to 70 Pall Mall before taking up residence in the house which he built at 106. The building is redolent of overseas architectural influences, mainly Italianate, which spoke strongly of the Grand Tour, an essential part of any young man’s upbringing at the time. Barry received £1,500 and lifetime membership for his efforts.

 

Principal rooms in the Traveller’s Club include the Library – often cited as one of the most elegant venues in London – and the Map Room, home to many rare and important original travel documents, on the ground floor. The Bramall Room opens out onto the Carlton Gardens to allow pleasant meanderings in warmer weather.

The interior is lavishly decorated in mahogany and brass, designed also by Barry, with an ornate handrail up the main staircase, installed to allow the French Prince Talleyrand to access the upper levels in his later years. Amongst all this finery, there are also excellent examples of art, objets and decorations from across the globe.

 

“Treddleford sat in an easeful armchair in front of a slumberous fire, with a volume of verse in his hand and the comfortable consciousness that outside the club windows the rain was dripping and pattering with persistent purpose. A chill, wet October afternoon was emerging into a black, wet October evening, and the club smoking-room seemed warmer and cosier by contrast. It was an afternoon on which to be wafted away from one’s climatic surroundings, and The Golden Journey to Samarkand promised to bear Treddleford well and bravely into other lands and under other skies...”

-Saki, “A Defensive Diamond”