THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (6 page)

(Fragmentary)

(An unknown span of time exists between the inscription of Scroll VI and Scroll VII.  When Al-Azrad resumed his writing of
Al Azif
, his focus was not upon the sorrows in his own past, but rather on the ever-recurring nightmares of Cthulhu and fell R’lyeh.  Here, in Scroll VII, he writes of the
Myth of the Matriarch
, a favored tale from Sana’a and Jericho, as well as ancient Babylon.  The Kingdom names “Akkad” and “Sumeru-land,” however, appear to be unique to Al-Azrad’s telling of the tale.  The placement of this scroll before the Second Gathering implies that Al-Azrad believed this Myth to be one of the few surviving tellings of the tale of Cthulhu. ~K.)

~

Herein,

Reader and defiler of my secrets,

Shall you know

Of what little I have learned,

In terror and in bloodshed,

Of the Myth of Matriarchs,

Of the Great Dragon, the
Kulullu,

(Clarice:  Sumerian tongue, the sea monster?)

Which slumbereth in the Abzu,

Deep in the Abyssal Reaches,

The Chaos beneath the sea.

~

O, Abaddon.

~

(lacuna)

(…)

This is the elder fable of the
Sufi
, the lost ideal of the golden age as it was told to me.  Herein, too, lieth my own meager handful of fragments, its thousand revelations, the fable’s lies and truths, thus:

~

The Myth of the Matriarch

~

In the beginning, men did not rule.

In the dawning of civilization, when the people were ruled by Matriarchs, when it is said that the rivers’ spirits spoke to women in tides of dream, whispering unto them to settle their people where the bounty was ever greatest; in this age, the water temples were the first great edifices to be lofted, temples of mighty brick layered in bitumen, adorned all with mosaics pressed in coral and lapis lazuli.

These great temples, these ancestors of the
ziggurats
, were raised in solemn reverence to the goddesses of plenty, of fertility, of harvest.  As the settlements around the temples grew into cities peopled by women of wisdom and men of peace, wealth came.  And with wealth, there came disparity, and envy.

The war-tribes of the north did covet the temple treasures of Sumeru-land, and the warriors of the dunes did envy the lives enjoyed by the hunters of the grassland and the priestesses of waters.  The men of Sumeru-land, once silent, began to speak against the war-tribes of the wasteland.  The voices of these men grew bold, for men were the masters of the hunt and keepers of blade and spear.  Men did pride themselves then as defenders of the mighty walls of the cities of Sumeru, the many-templed glories between the rivers.

As the war-tribes came near and tested these men of eld, arrows took to flight, and men and women bled.  The cities of Sumeru were besieged.  Peoples of harvest and the worship of the water-goddesses turned their minds to war alone.

The war-tribes were beaten back, at great price.  Sumeru was laid low, and the lesser land of Akkad its only remnant.  Flood and fire ravaged many fields, the cities grew ever-inward in their covetous glories and crumbling temples, and where the Matriarchs once ruled there rose the Patriarchs alone.

The age of men began.

In this age, the dreams of men rather than women were deemed sacred and eternal in the war-cities of Uruk, and Nippur, and Eridu.  And it is to these minds of the warlike Patriarchs, sensitive to matters of power and grief and bloodshed, that the goddesses of the waters could not whisper.  Even among the women, the spirits then were silent.  In this void within the tides of dream, where fear and hatred and violence did reign, the whispers of the great
Kulullu
did take hold.

Holy men whose voices were law and destiny to their people, these men became obsessed with the unity and sameness of their one nightmare.  They all did dream in horror of a Sleeper, a tentacled Beast which gloried in death upon a throne of dreams, slumbering deep in the Abzu of the netherworld, the un-sea which lieth far beneath the sea itself:  a Chaos of nightmare.

These dreaming Patriarchs spoke of the tomb-throne and its riches, and the name of the sunken city was R’lyeh.  To some few prophets R’lyeh was the kingdom of the dead and eternal torture, while to others it was the promised city of inverted heaven beneath the waves.  Ziggurats were raised in R’lyeh’s image, and the ruins of the water-temples were cast down.  The name “Cthulhu,” from
Kulullu
, gave way to ritual, and in the mouths of ten thousand worshippers, this Beast was named rather as a lie, as Ti’amtum.

In this manner, worship of Cthulhu became separate from the worship of the Beast.  The Beast cult was of the Kingdoms’ feast-halls, while the worship of Cthulhu faded into secrecy.

Ages past this in fabled Babylon, the name of the Beast Ti’amtum became Tiamat.  Thus did the worship of the Great Dragon beneath the seas become a lie.  Those who worshipped Tiamat knew not the nightmare in itself, they knew only the dream of Cthulhu as it was spoken to them by the Patriarchs.  They did not know the nightmare’s name.

In hundreds of years, even this secret truth was lost.  But to those who still worshipped in blood and secret, the truth-knowers who chanted the one true name—the Cult of Cthulhu—did exalt Him in cavern, in temple ruin and in fen.

The Cult of Tiamat is nothing now, murdered by its own foolish lies and hatreds, its lords never comprehending the lie in its own sanctity.  Tiamat is a fable, Cthulhu is the real.  The Cult of Cthulhu, those evil ones who know the truth of the dark prophecy and the coming End of Days, yet lives on.

Again the centuries passed in legion, floods tore the earth and the seas receded.  Fertile river-lands became marshes choked with sand.  Wars were waged over what little of the Akkadian glories still remained of lost Sumeru-land, and plague and famine followed in their wake.  The nightmare of men came to dominate the water-dream of the women, and soon it was that the worship of the water-goddesses was forbidden in the ruins and then in the cities themselves.

Gods were then named as lords on high, rulers of the many heavens.  There was Marduk, and there was Yahweh.  There was Baal and a hundred more.  We have had Mithras, we coveted Jesual and so then he was lost to us, but all of these were only the dreams of men themselves.  The only truth, in horror, was the outsider dream which came from the Thing which whorls beneath, Cthulhu, in his great palace of R’lyeh.

Outside the secrecy of the Cult, men know nothing.  But in his eternal tomb, Cthulhu slumbereth and dreameth on.  When he doth wake, the End of Days is come.

Such is the fable.  Such is the end of the golden age.

~

In scrolls hereafter I shall speak of my own truths, my own nightmares, the horrors which I have seen and the lies of faith which hath been shattered by revelations and the Beasts from beyond the spheres.  Some little of what I have learned, from
Sufi
or
fakir
, is at peace with this Myth of the Matriarchs.  Deeper secrets, from the voices of Ghuls and trances of Klocha, from the near-ruined hieroglyphs of buried Hadoth, tell me of far darker Things.

Yet the names of the fable I here preserve, for they are in languages now known to a precious few.  As the Crescent rises and war reigns high once more upon its throne of plague, the sages are lost and even the echoes of their whispers soon die thereafter.  But I, disciple of Klocha, know some little of the dead tongues, and I so do set this here, the Myth of the Golden Waters.

Glory to fallen Akkad, lost Sumeru.

~

(The contents of this Scroll are troublesome, as they imply that knowledge of Sumer, Akkad and other primal cultures of the Fertile Crescent was still extant in scattered repositories of tablets and even scrolls in the time of Al-Azrad.  It also implies that there was a secret oral tradition of a myth now nearly lost to us.  Frazer’s
Golden Bough
speaks in echoes of this remnant, but later scholarship tells us that these ancient civilizations were practically unknown in the 8th century A.D.

Akkadian is certainly an extinct language, and in Al-Azrad’s time was virtually unknown.  And yet, Al-Azrad’s inclusion of Sumerian and Akkadian names throughout
Al Azif
speaks to the veracity of this survival.  That which was lost was long forgotten, but not to everyone.  Was the burning of the Library of Alexandria the event which destroyed the majority of these records?  History does not tell us.

The mystery is beyond my expertise, but it is certainly fascinating.  Regarding Al-Azrad’s own belief (which was apparently touched upon in Ibn Khallikan’s lost scroll of the
Wafayat
) that the Arabic language stems from an Akkadian root, I can say a little more.  This seems false, as Arabic has far more in common with Nabataean, Aramaic, Hebrew and even Phoenician when compared to Akkadian and the related Babylonian dialects.  Still, we wonder:  what languages did Al-Azrad write the original
Al Azif
in, besides Arabic?  Dee’s secret inscription alludes to the Aklo tongue and the Naacal.  Did John Dee obscure all of these original forms with Edward Kelley’s crystal scrying, turning a multi-linguistic treatise into unified Enochian?  Or was the Latin of Olaus Wormius the point at which almost all of Al-Azrad’s original words were lost?  These riddles are crucial to our understanding of the
Necronomicon
(especially the purported effectiveness of its spells and formulae), but they will probably never be answered. ~K.)

SCROLL VIII

Of the Tyrant Dead and Dreaming ~

He Who Shall Riseth Upon His Throne

And So Our World,

The Great Cthulhu

These are the revelations of the Great Cthulhu.

Bartered with my own blood and grief, these secrets are the manifestation of He who will rise out from R’lyeh and be master of our world; He who shall reign over us in slaughter; He who will feast and glory; He who shall leave the world a husk and so plunge on unto other worlds, other aeons, hastening the End of All, the collapsing of the Omni-Kosmos.

Eternal returning, in death we shall be reborn.  O Azathoth,
ia!

(The Omni-Kosmos is a topic of considerable complexity, which Al-Azrad speaks of in far greater detail in later Scrolls of
Al Azif
.  In essence, the Omni-Kosmos is the “metaverse,” the infinite matter and energy web into which all possible universes are interwoven, comprising ten (or more?) tiers of intertwined dimensions.  Here, he alludes that the collapse and rebirth of the Omni-Kosmos is the sole purpose of Azathoth, and that Cthulhu has some significant role to play in the quickened destruction of the metaverse’s current incarnation.  The Omni-Kosmos is apparently regenerative, reborn through its own destruction and the death of all its lifeforms. ~K.)

These secrets have come to me from the ruined shrines of Shub-Niggurath, drowning beneath the harbor of Alexandria; from the stones of the shattered Pharos and its sigils.  Too, these secrets come from the hieroglyphs of Hadoth; from the whispers of the crone Klocha, she who tormented and exalted me; from the reflections of the Shining Trapezohedron; from the petroglyphs of the Nameless City, the tomb-gifts under Irem, the funereal discs of Babel and my own nightmares of dread R’lyeh itself.

Of Great Cthulhu, these secrets are to you a weapon.  He is eternal, the End of Days cannot be averted.  For we are less than insects before the Great Old Ones, and of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu is beyond even Them.  Dread Cthulhu is the one who soweth, the one who reaps of mortal flesh.  To we who shall be reaped, who struggle on in vain, He is the unconquerable.

But the cataclysm of our slaughter can be delayed, by the blood sacrifice in war of the valorous and the wise.  You who do find these scrolls, blood shall be the binding, and you are mine.

~

You, reader, will sacrifice yourself.  As one who will dare to defy Cthulhu, you will rise, and for those you do adore, you will slay to the last.  Knowing that our world is coming to an end, and only we few stand to protect it and allow it to linger on, how can a valorous man or woman do anything but fight against the rising of the One?

There is no other worthy destiny.  Fools might flee upon winds of nepenthe into the Empire of the Blackened Mind, but their bodies will be annihilated; cowards might kill themselves, but their children will face the slaughter of the End of Days in their stead.  We can fight and slay those who hasten the One’s rising, but Time shall ever be our greatest enemy.

Learn of the Cult, and taketh from them everything ... by blade and by thy own treachery.  Give no honor to the evil.  Slay.  Show no mercy, for mercy before Cthulhu is the death struggle of the hopeless.

For the greatest weakness of Cthulhu is that in death and dreaming, he needs the legions of the weak to do his bidding.  Without his Brethren of the Stars, without the Deep Ones, without Dagon and the mortals who receive his dreams and bow to him, aeons will pass before the black tomb of R’lyeh shall be opened.  Yet with their aid, and if the Cult is not disrupted?  His rising will come in thirteen hundred years. 
(Clarice has written here:  2030 A.D.?)

So sayeth the Lord in Ebon, Nyarlathotep.

And so these secrets are for you not in the vain belief that you can destroy Great Cthulhu himself; rather, these are the sacred secrets of his Cult, and it is well to remember that those who worship him—even the Deep Ones themselves—are mortal.  Learn what horror lies beneath you and seek it, annihilate it.  Wherever you see these signs, where you find the echoes of these secrets, do not falter.  Find Cthulhu’s worshippers, and slay them.

By your hand, and by my resurrection in your mind:  in centuries long after my own sacrifice, so is my beloved Adaya to be avenged.