THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (11 page)

I grieve not, I am already dead and mankind must know what is to come, so that the end is a Last War of defiance, and not a pathetic slaughtering of the lamb.

~

In fulfilling my return, know ye well:

The Akhutu believes itself to be eternal.  But our world is more ancient than any but the most fearless dare believe.  In all of the billions of this world’s years, there are many more aeons yet to unfold ere the finality of Gaia’s destruction by ice and fire.  Great Cthulhu himself will leap from this world once the aeon of slaughter ends and he is sated, hunting other worlds to further greaten himself and glorify his psyche, as he seeks the ultimate power which he believes will allow him to endure the destruction of the Omni-Kosmos and so the rebirth of Azathoth.

(Whateley:  Does this mean Cthulhu intends to survive the end of the universe, the “Big Crunch”?  The Second “Big Bang”?  What is to be reborn after the collapse and the end of time?)

And so while the Cult and humanity itself will eventually perish utterly, for a time of some thousands or millions of years Cthulhu in his triumph will revel and feast upon our world.  Even after war and cataclysm, in the aeon of Cthulhu’s triumph there will be a need for some few mortals to remain.  As we are harvested, the chosen few will serve as the instruments of destruction and be gloried with every pleasure which the dying slaves of the innocent can rendereth unto them.

It matters not to the Akhutu whether Cthulhu rises in this lifetime, or the next, or a dozen generations hence.  The Cult believes itself to be one, a unity of minds which is of many bodies and a single will.  As the conduit of Great Cthulhu’s dreams, the Cult is a hive, a legion of interlaced vessels all resonating with the oneness of the Sleeper’s revelations.  When some few of the Akhutu die, the survivors revel to know that the oneness of their body is shorn in blood and growing stronger.

And are they wrong to believe so?  I cannot say.  It is said that the Cult began when the holy men, the shaking men
(Clarice has written here:  “Epileptics?”)
were first called sacred by our ancestors who were the
Troglodytae
, the crawlers in darkness and the dwellers of the caves.  When our dreams began, Cthulhu knew.  And as our ancestors’ first dreams of beauty created the Dreamlands, so were the first nightmares of the Sleeper and his festering adorations in the corpse city of R’lyeh.  From the beginning, beauty and evil intertwined.

Our ancestors believed their nightmares were the calling of the earth.  They worshipped Gaia with their blood.  From such were born the Akhutu.  The Cult is so the vilest of mortal cabals, and the eldest.  It has endured the fall of empires, it has passed beyond confines of language and kingdom and through the veils of utmost secrecy, into every land of this earth.

As horrible and degraded as the Akhutu may be, as bestial and inhuman as I judge them to remain, they still are ever fervent in their primal oneness, the bloodthirsty atrocity of their faith.

So, in killing them, will you stand among the righteous.

~

(Note bene:  The author Howard Phillips Lovecraft claimed that there were no discussions of the Cult of Cthulhu contained within the
Necronomicon
.  This may be true; however, it must be remembered that Dee’s encrypted text purports itself to be a true and faithful rendering of the remnants of the work of Olaus Wormius and therefore
Al Azif.  Al Azif
precedes the
Necronomicon.
  Does this mean that a later and second
Necronomicon
, translated and published after Dee’s version, was created by another; and that this partial work contained none of the scrolls which speak of the Cult itself?  Did Lovecraft himself possess such a “successor” text, and did he write the fiction of what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos as a veiled testimony of all he had learned within?  I do not possess sufficient evidence at this time to insist that a
“Lesser Necronomicon”
exists.  Without further proof, I am loathe to purport a hypothesis of Lovecraftian ownership of such a work, and leave myself open to professional disgrace.  But I will say that even if such a theory is improbable, it is certainly not impossible. ~K.)

SCROLL XIX

Of the Cult’s One Primal Sacrifice,

And the Blasphemies

Where They Revel in the Marshes of Salt

(
This scroll appears to mirror some repetitive passages in other scrolls, and John Dee in his translation has written: 
“The year anno Domini DCCXXXVII?”
  This implies that this scroll may be a later writing of Al-Azrad, which he then decided to bundle in the earlier works which constitute this Fourth Gathering of
Al Azif. 
It is likely that he decided he had more forbidden secrets which he wished to reveal at last. ~K.)

~

The obsession of Akhutu, the Cult of Cthulhu, is to quicken the time of the un-god’s return.  In dominating thralls and slaves, in murdering the sharers of their secrets, in culling mad dreamers of R’lyeh’s whispers and making of them priests, the Akhutu bringeth the minds of mortals to resonate with the dreaming of He Who Sleeps Beneath the Waves.  For the greater the legion of mortals who dream of him and believe in him, the quicker shall R’lyeh rise, and so bring Great Cthulhu his triumph and our butchery.

I write of this so that you, who read this, shall know of the coming of Cthulhu, and how the Cult accelerates his coming, attuning minds and bodies to the death-dream resonance of his oneness, speeding the rising of R’lyeh.  The more cultists and defilers we shall destroy, the longer is his death’s lingering.  For an aeon farther still, may the Kingdom of Men yet endure.

~

But there are greater powers than the Cult which we cannot hope to conquer.  There are the Brethren of the Stars, Cthulhu’s own kind who slumber with him beneath R’lyeh.  Too, there are the Deep Ones of Lord Dagon, who breed with our maidens and rise forth as the instruments of His will.  And what of his mortal servants?

They are weak, and proud and vain, reveling in the certainty of their triumph.  It is these that you must kill.  The more I reveal to you of Great Cthulhu and his Cult, the more you will knoweth him; and though in destroying them you yourself shall become a beast, the bloodshed you bring will serve to slow the coming of our Apocalypse, the End of Days.

~

To find and destroy the Cultists of Cthulhu, the temples and the rituals shall you know.

Many of the temples are ruins, for the unholy places of eld were raised where lines of power—those fractures of passage, which scab and slide between the spheres—intersect and render tangible the opening of the Gates, the pathways of the ‘Umr at-Tawil. 
(Clarice Whateley has written in the margin:  “Ley lines?”)

In the wasteland, the lairs of the Cult are few.  As Great Cthulhu slumbereth beneath the waves, so do his servitors favor shorelines, ancient seas whose beds are now dry, and poisonous waters such as the Scarlet Sea, and the Sea of Salt east of Jerusalem.  Where there is water, the resonance of the dreams is ever greater.  In the Rub’ al Khali, the Akhutu are little known; but in the salt marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates, their crumbling shrines and horrific idols there are many.

These marsh-shrines can be found where the trees of weeping rise above the reeds.  Such places are not reverent temples of brick and bitumen, but rather cleared hollows in the wilderness where the idols of Cthulhu have been raised upon the stones of the fallen temples of old.  When one strides the salts and there finds a hewn circle within the marshes, where all the trees are shorn and piled in dams of waste, and the salt-waters coil about the idol of a Thing that is neither cuttlefish, nor dragon, nor man …
Mnemba
...

Such are the marsh-shrines of Cthulhu.

There will be a monolith in the center of all:  perhaps a remnant of a Khomite obelisk, or a shattered pillar raised from lost Persepolis, or I too have seen a great cedar carved all with hollows, chained all about, the bloodied and shrieking forms of dying children chained into the cedar where they did die slowly in horror, and the innocent blood dripped down to be lapped from the mud by the Cultists in their ecstasy.  Far worse horrors there are, but this I have seen.

The monolith, whether stone or wood or blasted clay, is the Cult’s unholy symbol of R’lyeh.  Upon or before that vile symbol they will place the greatest and most blasphemous of their treasures, the image of The Mountain Which Strides, the Great Cthulhu.

And they will dance in circles about their idol, abandoning themselves as the dreams of the Sleeper course into the idol and the tentacles of psyche overbear their frenzied minds.  At times, those whom they have brought for sacrifice will be forced at blade-point to dance naked before the idol, until the entire Cult riseth with a shriek of triumph to tear the exhausted dancers apart with tooth and claw.  So is the idol bathed in blood, for the dead flesh of Cthulhu must have sustenance to firm itself within our own reflection of the Real.

SCROLL XX

To Be Known by the Avenger

As a Signifier of the Defiled Ones,

A Rite of the Cult of Cthulhu

In seeking out the Cult and the fell places in which they worship, the Canticle of the Beyond is one of the blasphemous rites which you shall be compelled to hear and to behold.  When the Akhutu has gathered in chant and sacrifice, their priests are vulnerable and their servitors lie blind in their adoration.  When the enemy is gathered thus, a coiling of vipers, you must strike.

This rite praiseth not only Cthulhu, entombed in the deeping of our world; but elsewhere as well, the other great powers of the Beyonding.  Who can know the Canticle’s full purpose or its meaning?  May it be a ceremony of blood tribute, or merely a presage to sacrifice?  I myself believe that this black rite is never chanted by the Cult of Cthulhu alone, but too, by the many who are in legion.  The Cults of Shub-Niggurath, of the King in Yellow, of the Lord in Ebon himself may well indulge themselves as well in all these mysteries.

But never have I known a sage or sorcerer alone to conduct this rite.  Even by Nyarlathotep in his crueler condescensions, this rite has never been asked of me.

What means this?

As canted by the Cult of Great Cthulhu, perhaps the Canticle’s purpose is to appease those powers who are not only thirsty for the blood of innocents and the damned, but for release into our world.  Mayhap, it is a sacrifice made prior to greater worship of Cthulhu Himself, so that undesired interest from Those Who Lurk Beyond is not received by the Cult who entreats of Him.  For Cthulhu, yet dreaming, is a dead Thing.  He slumbereth, and his worship oft requires much sacrifice—or greater, the orgiastic rituals of the Deep Ones, which I shall delve into further in accordance to my purpose—to ever have impact upon the incessant silent thundering of his will.

The rite may be in praise of these higher powers, seeking their aid and boon, imploring them to shatter through the spheres and to hasten the time of the stars coming to be right.  Thus it would be as well to hasten the rising of R’lyeh.

Yet what of summoning?  Why not bring these hideous powers forth?

This rite is not one which beckons, but rather one which
abjures
.  The truths of Yog-Sothoth, the gate and key and opener of the gate, are not venerated in this Canticle and this alone tells us much:  the summoning of the horrors from Beyond is not its purpose.

Be it known that the Cult of Cthulhu believes that its own survival rests upon the fruitions of this ritual.  Its disruption, and the slaughter of those present, is ever worthy of thy vengeance.

We need not understand the Canticle, after all.  We need only slaughter those who sing.

Find those which canteth thus, and silence them.  Scatter them to the dust.  And shall ye free the innocents, those who were to be sacrificed?  No.  The ritual must endeth all.  Be merciless.

~

In Praise of the Farther Powers,

The Canticle of the Beyond

~

Hear us, O mighty ones

Who lord over oblivion!

We speaketh in blood,

We pray to thee in sacrifice.

All praises to They who leap between the stars,

Who are ageless, who feast upon the worlds,

Blind and numberless

Which coil as cinders round

The blackest frosts of the Utter Void.

Adoration to thy will, feast and hear us!

~

Praise unto the Mother, Shub-Niggurath,

For she is Queen and Lady of the Wood.

Where the cedars rise over the blood pits,

She rises, the Entirety.  Her gifts of the flesh,

The Thousand Young

Rise as a reseeding of this earth,

A sowing of fields of flesh

Presaging His greater harvest.

~

May she thwart the coming of the Hunters,

The destroyers who reave our journeying,

Who desecrate the gifts of the tribe of Leng.

Serve to shelter the ways of our own passage

From the Hounds who hunt,

The Beasts of Tindalos.

Time and the Void are one,

The opening of the gates,

The fracturing of spheres

Is hastened by our sacrifice.

~

As we lay death-gifts in breathing

Before the mighty ones who reap of us,

So do we serve the Chaos

Who is all, O Azathoth.

Hear us, let the paths

Of the unworthy be unmade!

~

The Great and Elder,

They shall glory in our sacrifice.

From the crystal pools of night

To the shardings of the Void,

From the shardings of the Void

To the crystal pools of night,

Beyond and so ever before us,

Ever shall be our praises of Great Cthulhu,