Version (:)(:)(::(:))
Edited by Erik Vildsvin, 207 YF, Era Horrificus
Before this tome the silence is deafening,
none discern what echoes roar,
but we can hear its endless screaming
from behind the locked door.
The name of Professor Randolph Edmund Templeton is inextricably tangled with the secret perplexities of time. It was he who, by way of a yet barely comprehended time-anomaly, provided the model for H.P. Lovecraft's Randolph Carter. And yet it was this 'same' R.E. Templeton who - on March 21st 1999, whilst delivering a lecture at Miskatonic devoted to a rigorous critique of H.G. Wells—awoke suddenly as the Thing that lurks behind the mask of Immanuel Kant, coincidentally discovering the transcendental time-machine.
Templeton sits immobile in his attic room, immersed in the deceptively erratic ticking of his old nautical clock, lost in meditation upon J.C. Chapman's hermetic engraving. It now seems that this complex image, long accepted as a portrait of Kant, constitutes a disturbing monogram of his own chronological predicament. As if in mockery of stable framing, the picture is surrounded by strange-loop coilings of Ouraboros, the cosmic snake, who traces a figure of eight—and of moebian eternity—by endlessly swallowing itself. Suspended from its lower jaw is a cryptic device of intricately balanced circles and stars (ancient symbols of the AOE). Above the serpent's head, a facsimile of Kant is etched in profile, the face fixed in an amicable—if distant—expression. What was it though, that hid behind the death-mask, where it cut-off, below and behind the jaw, false ear, and double-hairline? What was this peculiarly formless body, shadowy neck-flesh, and suggestion of a cervical fin? As he stared, and hideously remembered, Templeton felt as though he knew.
Templeton has long asserted the impossibility of empirical time-travel. Since the ego is bound by its own nature to linear-sequentiality (he continues to insist) neither it nor the organism is ever transported through time. Nevertheless, he describes the Critique of Pure Reason as a time-travelling manual, although of 'another kind'. He uses Kant's system as a guide for engineering time-synthesis. The key is the secret of the Schematism, which—although "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul"—concerns only the unutterable Abomenon of the Outside (Nihil Ulterius, Nothing Further). In exteriority, where time works, that part of you which is most yourself has nothing in common with what you are. When Templeton fell into himself that day he found, instead of what he thought himself to be, the Thing (in-itself (at zero-intensity ())). It was, perhaps, or necessarily, that continuous hyperbody—the Lurker at the Threshold—which H.P. Lovecraft names 'Yog Sothoth'.
394 or 406 words, depending on the program they're counted in.
If you still see this it means I've been lazy and haven't written anything to replace this placeholder text yet.
BackI'm showing you these in case I don't have time to find, or forge, any more. I haven't finished writing the book yet, so forgive me if I misremember or omit any details of the story as I know it,
I say, as I shuffle through my bedroom, picking up and moving around a variety of books I have scattered everywhere.
You decided to enter, so while I had the chance I wanted to show at least someone my life's work. To have anyone to tolerate my fantasies is a luxury I didn't believe myself worthy to be afforded.
I'm sorry if it's a little boring, or self indulgent, feel free to have a seat,
I say, as you sit down on the mattress I have on the floor. No bedframe.
Let's see, best if we start at the beginning,
I say as I grab the first book from one of my shelves, a small and scruffy paperback that was prominently displayed. It's the start of everything really, The Canticle of Satan by Dr. Jonathan Hubbur. First published by Arkham House in 1959. I have no idea how he managed to convince them to carry it, but he must not have been very convincing as it was only ever released in a limited run of a couple hundred copies. It's a rather short work subdivided into nine sections, each one corresponding to one of the Dark Gods as he called them, clusters of powers and associations that he'd apparently see in his daily life while doing something as mundane as taking a walk through town. It mostly consists of poetry and short stories and lacks the theoretical rigour of his later work. I think the best way to describe it would be as the first attempt at a work of Satanic Qabbala, it's absolutely infested with an obsessive gematria right down to its very conception. An unforgiving way to describe it would be the Sefer Yetzirah for edgelords.
On the other end of the spectrum you have a work from one of his old colleagues,
I say, shuffling over to grab another slim volume, much more clinical and academic. Here we have The Apocryphon of Belial, a literary forgery from Dr. Nicholas Bodin. He made his reputation by compositing a variety of Sufi mystics into one purported author, Sayyid Tal al-Rasha, described as a heterodox Islamic mystic from Egypt who lived and wrote during the 9th century, and who died by being burned to death in the town square. The work itself is presented as a translation of his Apocalyptic poetry that he received from his dialogues with various demons, all from Talmudic demonology rather than any of Islamic or pre-Arabic origin. By the way, did you ever read my copy of Cyclonopedia? Nevermind. Dr. Bodin apparently went to very great lengths to ensure the material veracity of his forgeries, tracking down a variety of papyri and inks that would've fooled any radiocarbon dating. I'm sure his training as a philologist helped. It all ended the same, his career was almost ruined.
To round out the triptych, we have another short work from a colleague of both Hubbur and Bodin,
I continue, pulling out a small white book, as your ass starts to hurt a little. You shuffle your legs. Her name was Dr. Anastasia Roseberry and she wrote The Conventicles of the Nine Angels as an introduction to her own system of Christian mysticism. It appears to be an interesting blend of Merkavah and Hekhalot practices with the scrying and invocation techniques of John Dee, but unlike him she records her communication with angels in remarkably clear language. In the early 70's she could only get it published with a press known for New Age literature. You've seen the anime Evangelion, right? Some of the angels she invoked ended up having their names used in it. A few of the writings in the book are quite erotic and others depict the angels as bored and uncaring, almost monstrous.
Returning back to Dr. Hubbur, we have what many consider to be his masterpiece, The Splendor of the Final Harvest in three volumes. It was the last thing he finished before a visit to China during the Cultural Revolution that had a dramatic influence on his political thinking, if it even existed yet. I haven't managed to finish reading it all since it's about 900 pages in total, but it's a far reaching extension of his earlier work, with a systematic and apocalyptic ambition. In the preface he breaks with any attempt to categorize his own occult system as a variety of Satanism and establishes his intent to focus the first volume exclusively on the Dark Gods that he presented in his first book. But, while distancing his own polytheistic divinities from Satanism, he proceeds with another ambitious project. In the second volume, he sets out to create the heresy of all heresies, where he attempts to establish Satanism as not only a denomination of the Abrahamic religions, but their ultimate completion, with Judas as the final prophet. He reaches the eschatological conclusions of his theology in the third volume, and prophesizes that when Gaubni awakens and aligns the wills of the Nine Dark Gods with that of the Accursed Son, the Final Harvest will begin, collapsing Time and Imagination and bringing about the Aeon of All Aeons,
I say as I stop for breath. I'll tell you more about it later.
I can tell you're getting a little tired so I walk to the kitchen to grab croissants and powdered lemonade, which I bring in strawberry shaped mugs. You look around at my floor, covered in clothes and trash and loose grains of rice. I bend down to grab a book from a shelf closer to my floor, lifting it up to offer it to you. You thumb through the pages.
The forgery scandal should've been the end of Dr. Bodin's career, but it wasn't. That right there is his first philosophical work, the Critique of Pure Terror, conjured originally as a bizarre experiment commissioned by the Department of Defense. It's a little long, almost a neat 400 pages. His intellectual project from this period as a whole was essentially a justification of the United States's worst excesses of the Vietnam War, understood through the lens of the Cosmic Theory of Geotrauma and napalm pyrodemonism. A sequel was written but only ever published as a serial in a magazine marketed to potential mercenaries for the Rhodesian Bush War, as his increasingly controversial reputation made it harder and harder for him to publish even with all of his personal connections. Strangely, I haven't managed to find any records that establish Dr. Bodin as a white supremacist, he seems to have viewed state terror as a means in itself, directed towards some grand anti-cosmic teleology. A sick experiment, really.
I get up to walk to a different shelf, covered with works of classical Marxism and a collection of zines from Fourth Sword Publications. Your eyes drift to my metal bust of Vladimir Lenin next to a crystal tetrahedron.
All of Dr. Hubbur's works after his visit to China are marked by a radical shift in his political commitments towards communism. In his collection of fictional and theoretical writings titled Philosophy of the Acausal he attempts what most would describe as an irresponsible project: a naked and unashamed communist mysticism. It culminates in two other books, one a history of philosophy and the other an attempt to work out his positive vision of aeonic materialism, which is what he describes as the occult undercurrent of all political thought. They were the last things he wrote before he died. He never gave up the Nine Dark Gods, or his Final Prophet. I wonder if he saw them again.
I return to the first shelf I started with, black and unadorned.
Now we finally get to the weirder stuff in my collection. Have I ever gone on to you about the Tempel ov Blood? It's because I met someone who was a member, he called himself Commissar Murnau and I met him while I was corresponding with the editorial board of a Maoist magazine called Struggle Sessions. Around the time I started talking with him he manged to get himself onto it as part of his insight role. I have a collection of his writings along with the few other people he was working with at the time,
I pass a black book to you, with an ominous occult sigil on the cover, it's called Liber 333. When you open it up, it's covered in dried blood.
After the Tempel dissolved he went on to start another occult organization with a few other people he had met who were all studying the works of Dr. Hubbur and Dr. Bodin together. One of the members was really into retro internet stuff so she ended up finding an ancient BBS called Shadowside that had digitized and republished a lot of their works. There was another girl named Bruja del Sur who compiled a lot of it into a book that they published with Commissar Murnau's Black Skull Press. She also edited a single volume edition of Dr. Hubbur's Splendor. I have both of them laying around over there,
I say, gesturing vaguely towards one of my shelves.
There's a couple books that I have from an author I honestly made up, her name's Elizabeth Elliot. I felt there needed to be a midway point between Dr. Bodin and Commissar Murnau. Her earliest work, The Trial of Countess Bathory, was published by a university press from a fictional U.S. state that you won't find on any map,
I go on, your eyebrow raising, wondering if any of this is going to go anywhere. There's a second character like that, they exist and they don't. Rumata Gracchi, an old psuedonym of mine from my Maoist days. They wrote works of philosophy that I'll never have time to see to completion.
I walk over to my desk and open up one of its shelves, pulling out a stack of a few last books.
These are my greatest inventions, the books I felt compelled to write and compile,
I pass them over to you, as you shuffle through each one. The first is black and red and resembles the book from the Tempel ov Blood that I showed you earlier. In bright red you can read Liber 909, attributed to the Temple of the Red Lodge. On the table of contents you see it divided into nine sections, each one accompanied by a photograph of the anonymous members of the Red Lodge, typically armed. In light beige you read the title of the next, Struggle Sessions: Selected Works 199-203. The title's a little weird on that one, I used the same calendar as the Temple of the Red Lodge. It starts from the birthday of Karl Marx. My motivation for editing that one was rather strange, at the time I had been reading House of Leaves and thought I had it in me to edit together something similar while I was learning how to typeset. It's my most personal work but probably my least original,
I look at your hands with a nervous anticipation as you look through the rest.
The last two were written together, mostly by the pen of Commissar Murnau. A character I sometimes wish I never created. Gates of Moss is his post-apocalyptic novel, written in the midst of an inconclusive civil war for control over the territory of the continental United States after near complete ecological collapse. It's essentially the product of anxieties over the political fragmentation and Balkanization of the U.S. and his own expulsion from the Red Lodge, written mostly during the second Trump era but attributed to a false date. You're holding the only physical copy,
I say, as you look over the cover. It's a negative photograph of an unknown American penitentiary overgrown with vines with only the title and no attribution to an author. The very last one is Conspiratorial Diabolism, intended as a compilation of both Gates of Moss and the collected theory-fictions of the Satanic Front, an organization I molded in my own image.
You set them all down onto the mattress and stand up to stretch your legs.
That's all I've managed to add to my collection, there's a lot I still have to do and other books I have to collect before it'll all start to click together,
I say as your eyes finally meet mine for the first time. I seem tired, only kept awake by stolen coffee. Truthfully, I don't think I'll ever be done, and a lot of what I've chosen to write I started out of a combination of spite and boredom, while I did my best to pretend to be the writer I wish I was. But, it was nice to have someone visit. Sorry I didn't give you much to do.
Finally, you take your leave and exit my door. I lay down on my mattress, content to close my eyes and drift off into the night lands of Shadowside, where the Dark Gods of the Acausal await to deliver their mysteries in my sleep.
2,208 words.
BackRecently, I’ve come into possession of a book that was mailed to me by a friend. Slim, obsidian black, with a strange magical symbol on the front cover that I’ve never encountered before. On the back, in the darkest shade of gray, you can see faintest tracings of the circuit board schematics of the Roland TB-303 bassline synthesizer. There’s only three articles. Each one penned by pseudonymous authors associated with magical (or political?) organizations I’m unfamiliar with. The three writers in question, Meinhof Pandemonium, Commisar Murnau, and Laccio Bombacci. Their respective cabals, Krasnaya Latsis Terror Cell, Saloth Commandos, and one Gruppo di Draghi Rossi. All writings are additionally attributed to a broader collective, the Temple of the Red Lodge.
Judging from the terminology employed, all of the groups appear to be the offspring of deviant Internal Adepts of the Order of Nine Angles, or they’re at least intimately conversant with their extant writings. The first article, titled “On the Sinister Dialectic,” by Monsieur Pandemonium, is an extended commentary on multiple documents weaved together into a critique of the basic conceptual framework of “sinister dialectics” elaborated by the parent Order, and thus a critique of their conception of “aeonic magick.” A selection runs, “[…] in the last instance, Capital is the Dark God continuously presenced by this Sinister Ideological Apparatus, it remains the Choronzon at the gates of the Abyss, combusting the despotic causality of production relations with fuel from the malignant acausality of anarchy in production. The Acausal has been here revealed as both an ideological construct and a resentful response to the Secret of Secrets: surplus-value extraction, a Gift for every Prince of Production.” They continue their assault, arguing that the professed “sinister dialectic” itself remains inconsistently dialectical through careful selections of Mao and Feuerbach, and elaborate that the working of “aeonic magick” is a futile, desperate response to the coming “Aeon of the Commune.” The final sentence ends with a rather cryptic declaration, “These revenants of the Black Lodge, who roam the wastelands baring their fangs, patiently await their Vindex. We have 3. Marx, Lenin, Mao. Proceeds the Noctulian, Nazareth.” Dated 196YF, Era Horrificus.[1.]
Moving on to the second article, we have “Divine Light Severed,” by Signore Bombacci, a rather curious writing which examines the theological undercurrents of the video game Cruelty Squad. The tone isn’t nearly as hostile as the previous article, and the author seems quite dejected, even depressed. The writing itself begins with a fictional framing, “The phone rings. As you look out your apartment window, someone is shooting into a crowd of people. You answer. A voice worms its way through your ears, slithering into you, but the syllables are disjointed, like an assemblage of rotting teeth held together by wire. You’re offered a job. Maybe you’ll be able to afford a proper bedframe, or food that doesn’t leave behind an arcology of empty pizza boxes. You shower.” [2.] Then, a selection I quite enjoy, “Cruelty Squad is a sledgehammer, it pulps the skulls of those who play it, your scrambled brains splatter against its textures of pristine black marble. What’s leftover is refuse, your headless skeleton another addition to the catacombs buried beneath tasteless McMansions of a neighborhood you’ll never afford.” After, they continue, as I would expect, with a disassembly of the prophetic utterances of the three targets representing the Triagons during one of the later levels. To begin their elucidation, they use a selection from the Phenomenology of Spirit regarding the work of the Artisan: “[…] Now these ambiguous essences burst out into the language of a deeper, but scarcely comprehensible wisdom.”[3.] They continue their account through selections of Georges Bataille’s writings on Gnosticism and Base Materialism, along with lines of Goethe’s Faust. It ends with a quote from the game’s designer, Ville Kallio, which he gave during an interview, “It’s a sadistic game born almost entirely out of spite.”
Lastly, and the most interesting to me, “The Durance of Kavathal,” from the pen of Herr Murnau. It opens with a quote from Althusser, “In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.” The author then proceeds, “1980 marks the omnidirectional release of hyperstitious energies radiating out from the Peruvian countryside. With the Communist Party of Peru's declaration of its 'Inicio de la Lucha Armada' the sacred name was first uttered from the mists of the Andes, GNZL. Only one year later, the High Priest Kavathal entered the earth, cast from the womb a child of Noctulian communion. The effects of this eruption are ever-present, groups that declare the sanctity of the name, the eternal invincibility of their Fourth Sword, continue to proliferate from France to Brazil, across the expanse of oceans and continents. The Aeon of the Commune has been prefigured.” I've determined that the reference to 'Kavathal' is an amalgamation of 'Kavga' and 'Cathal,' two psuedonyms of Jared Roark, a now discreted Gonzaloist militant who attempted to organize the Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of the United States after the dissolution of Red Guards, an ostensibly Maoist organization. This is also the only article that presents photographs, one is a picture of an altar prepared by Jared, complete with three red candles, a bouquet of flowers, a rosary, and pamplets from the Parti Communiste Maoiste, the French organization responsible for introducing Gonzaloism to Europe. The second is a rather disturbing drawing of the infamous portrait of Chairman Gonzalo, depicted with the features of a demon and a garland of skulls in the style of Soviet prison tattoos, with the number 333 cut into the forehead, dripping blood.
The rest of the article is a dizzying assortment of paragraphs ranging from an analysis of the effectivity of the aeonic magick
of existent Gonzaloist organizations, especially the Partido Comunista do Brasil – Fração Vermelha, as well as a discussion of the Communist Party of Peru's practice of Selective Annihilation
as a form of Wamphyric Culling,
which evidently refers to a writing of Meinhof Pandemonium titled, Conspectus on Selective Annihilation,
which wasn't included as part of this compliation, but is featured in the Temple of the Red Lodge's internal theoretical journal referred to by the author. Puzzlingly, there's also numerous references to a novel titled Iron Gates as well as a similar book called Rusted Gates which seems to have been written in response and takes place in the same setting. As far as I can tell, Rusted Gates is a post-apocalyptic novel concerning Gonzaloist militants combating the ravages of a world after a nuclear war, who seem to be in perpetual conflict with the armies of The Organization.
The article itself ends with lyrics from a song by the band Hastur, who are referred to as the first ritual invocators of Black Metal in Peru.
The lyrics, after translation, read the battle has to be won, the smell of death calls us.
[4.]
1,143 words.
BackNotes:
[1.] Their idiosyncratic dating begins from the year of Karl Marx’s birth. Thus, 2014.
[2.] This portrays the game's opening cutscene.
[3.] From the Terry Pinkard translation.
[4.] Hastur - Ritos de Iniciación
