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Spoiler Thread for Leaf 002
🕑 Added 2018-06-23 13:57:54 +0000 UTCLeaf 002 was a real milestone. How do you start the Necronomicon?!? I decided to start with the meaning of Al-Azif, (the whispering of demons) as that is the source of Abdel’s occult knowledge. I’ve then thrown in two new elements: the "Worm Toung" and “cursed with sight beyond [his] years”. What is that all about? Well, the first is the ability to communicate with Ghouls, something both Randolph Carter and Richard Pickman were able to do in Dreamquest of Unknown Kaddath (and which we will revisit later). The second comes from a Lovecraft poem from the Fungi from Yuggoth cycle:
IV. Recognition
The day had come again, when as a child
I saw—just once—that hollow of old oaks,
Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes
The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.
It was the same—an herbage rank and wild
Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes
That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes
Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.
I saw the body spread on that dank stone,
And knew those things which feasted were not men;
I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,
But Yuggoth, past the starry voids—and then
The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,
And all too late I knew that it was I!
Since we know Abdel’s fate (torn apart by invisible demons) I thought it would be fascinating if Abdel did too. This becomes a great motivation for his desire to delve into forbidden knowledge of the occult as he looks for ways to save himself from this fate.
The rest of page 3 is giving a broad overview of the End Game, and name drops races from At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu, as well as hints about The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Whisperer in Darkness, etc.
I never want to fall into the trap of over-categorization like August Derleth and Lin Carter, but the idea of The Four Paths is a way to order the various approaches to worshiping (and benefiting from) the Mythos. In this way the various approaches are kept distinct, and practitioners can have preferences (as Wilbur shows in his journal in the Dunwich Horror: “Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth [...] which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air.”).
We then end the page with a reference to a plot element from The Thing on the Doorstep; one that (based on the opening sentences of this story) would be of great interest to Abdel Hazred.
In the marginalia, we have an introduction from Sir Randolph Carter (based on a Dee original) and the first hint that this translation was never intended for publication by Dr. John Dee. We will see more of this as the book progresses. Marginalia by Carter will be followed by his initials (following the pattern established by Edward Kelly), but Dr. Dee’s notations start with the Greek Delta, as was his practice. They each have their own voice, and will comment on Abdel’s text accordingly.
Page 4 continues with Abdel’s overview of his cosmology. Based on Lovecraft’s “Out of the Aeons” I am positing that Shub-Niggurath is the only Mythos “deity” native to Earth. All the others were drawn here by her call. This isn’t a huge deal, but I like that it gives her a more defined place in the story since she is invoked by all sorts of cults. As I mentioned on the last Spoiler post, I’m using “Mystery” instead of “Mythos” in the text. I am striving to not have this read like a Chaosium RPG supplement, so slight adjustments in phrasing are required. Plus “Cthulhu Mythos” was a term coined by August Derleth, Lovecraft preferred “Yog-Sothothery”!
Jumping ahead to page 45, Abdel has entered a scene straight out of From Beyond as he becomes a devotee of Ibn Yakrib. Nug (along with Yeb) is another deity from the Lovecraft story “Out of the Aeons”. I’m a fan of these lesser-known characters as it would be very tedious if everyone worshipped Cthulhu! The symbols on this page were inspired by an authentic Icelandic spell book.
Page 46 introduces an age-old complaint: “they’re doing it wrong”. This will be a reoccurring aspect in the Necronomicon for a few different reasons (not the least of which being that it is a component of all actual religions) and here Ibn Yakrib throws some shade at other mystics. But pretty quickly we transition to a physical trial for Abdel, and a description of an event that no doubt influenced the woodcut back on page 2. This of course sets him on the path we have seen in page 47-48 of the first Leaf.
That’s all for Leaf 002!
Comments
Christian Matzke
I will NEVER use Derleth's methodology, I promise you that. The paths align with Wilbur's reference, plus Deep Ones and Migo (more or less). So not elementals but locations for contact?
Ooh. This is interesting; I got most of the references, but some flew right over my head. I do have one question, though; I really like what you’re doing with the footnotes, and while I admit I was a little unnerved by the references to Air, Water, etc. (“Please no Derleth, please no Derleth, please no Derleth!”) this post has put me more at ease with regard to what you intend to do with those, but in your post “Research Materials,” you mention that you’re thinking of this, in part, as being 200 short stories that need to be linked together. Will those vignettes build fully on one another, or will they be more self-contained? I ask because, at least in the first two leaves, the transition from Ibn Yakrib to another mystic in the desert in the space of a page or two was a little...I don’t want to say JARRING, exactly, but really, how many mystics can there be hiding out in one desert? This may be a very silly question, and I apologize for my worries, but we aren’t going to have 200-ish random characters popping up for a page or two and then disappearing again, vignette by vignette, are we? It’s just what you’ve got so far is SO good, stylistically and artistically, and I would very much want the narrative itself to live up to everything else. Oh! I lied, actually; I do have one other question. In several stories, (From Beyond, Colour, and Whisperer come to mind, though Dreams in the Witch House is where this is really used most intriguingly), Lovecraft weaves modern science into his story, with the conceit (in Witchhouse, particularly) that some of the ancient, secret, hidden lore contains scientific and mathematical knowledge, presumably gifted to the writers by nonhuman sources, that has snuck on through the centuries hidden and unnoticed. This was also used to brilliant effect in the H.P.L.H.S.’ Dark Adventure Radio Theater episode for Witchhouse, which among other props included a torn page from Gilman’s journal, with physics scrawlings that, if you know something about the subject matter, are actually brilliantly relevant to the story itself (proto-M-theory, for example). Will this play any prominent role in your Necronomicon, in terms of the conception of the world described by Alhazred, the sigils contained within (which might represent, say, relativistic equations, just in a completely different notation), etc.? I don’t know what background you may or may not have in that area or what resources you may have access to, in terms of folks who DO know enough about those subjects to be able to help you, so maybe that’s not really practicable (and even if it IS, I imagine you can’t say much about it due to spoilers), but...well, I don’t even know what my question is, I guess. I’d love to see that, if you’ve got that planned I’m elated, if you don’t have it planned the book already looks brilliant.
