Druid Library

  Although the early Celts wrote very little down, there were also Irish tales of infamous collections of works, which stretched back into early times. One of these was the rumoured Druid Library. In 1186, a famous Irish preacher and exorcist, St. Ambrose O’Coffey, came to the monastery of St. Columcille’s Seat at Magilligan in North Derry to die. With him he brought a collection of extremely ancient manuscripts that was reputedly the greatest collection of works on witchcraft and evil worship anywhere in Western Europe. Some texts were allegedly written on tree bark, others on dried human skin. A number were copied by the monks onto parchment for storage in the monastery. After St. Ambrose’s death, the library was kept at Magilligan to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. St. Columcille’s Seat was destroyed in 1203 by Donnell McLaughlin—a chieftain of Donegal—and “certain foreigners” (probably half-Viking raiders) but there is no mention as to what became of the library.

  St. Columcille’s Chest

  Tradition says that the library was split up and hidden before the attack. Indeed a connected legend says that part of it was secreted in a chest—known as St. Columcille’s Chest—and hidden in a cave somewhere along the coast. What became of the remainder of the Library is unknown. In the late 18th century, the legend continues, workmen building the Mussenden Temple on the estate of Frederick Hervey, the Earl-Bishop of Downhill, discovered the chest and brought it to Hervey himself. He managed to open it and found part of the contents still intact. What he read there disturbed him so greatly that he left the area, and afterwards could not sleep in a house for more than two consecutive nights. He died in 1803, reportedly a broken man. The chest was removed to Derry (where Hervey was Bishop) and has disappeared from the annals of history. That is the story, although there have been mentions of fragments of the Druid Library surfacing elsewhere. The ground on which the monastery stood is now a field—no trace of the structure remains—but is still treated with suspicion by some locals.

  Viking Magic

  As well as these ancient Celtic texts, the folklore of the West was also dominated by stories of books of Viking magic. In Celtic thinking (and in the thinking of other ancient peoples) evil and darkness resided in the North and so it seemed logical that the Scandinavian countries should be home to some of the blackest magics. The ferociousness of Viking attacks on Celtic settlements, of course, did not help matters much and it was thought that the lands to the North were frozen, bleak places in which the Devil and grim old gods still dwelt. There were rumoured to be Black Schools existing amongst the Viking communities in places such as Iceland where sorcerers were schooled in enchantments and witchcrafts of the vilest kind. Curiously, many of these schools were reputedly attached to Christian establishments.

  Jon Arnason

  The Scandinavian folklorist Jon Arnason, who published a collection of folktales on ghosts and magic in Iceland in 1862, mentions a particularly nefarious Black School that existed somewhere in the country (although he gives no specific location for it) that circulated a number of ancient books and grimoires throughout Scandinavia. There are also many tales from Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland concerning Runebooks and Omenbooks which were said to contain witchcraft “of the darkest kind” in circulation throughout much of Western Europe and which hinted at gruesome deities that had been worshipped in the Northern lands since earliest times.

  Could any of these books—Middle Eastern, Celtic, or Scandinavian—been a basis for the “abhorred” Necronomicon? It is impossible to know for certain but at least some of them might have served as the inspiration for that tome.

  Apart from the Necronomicon, a number of other titles continue to surface within the confines of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Book of Dzyan transcribed by H.P. Blavatsky has already been mentioned but there were others—many of which were added to the Mythos by writers other than Lovecraft himself. A number of these may have had their origins in the literature produced around the medieval as well as in the early days of the Enlightenment as scholars were trying to replace these beliefs with myths of former days.

  Malleus Malificarium

  From the late 15th century onwards, the interest in witchcraft began to reach new heights. The reason for this was, arguably, the writing and circulation of one book which enjoyed the seal of Papal authority. This was the Malleus Malificarium (The Hammer of the Witch), which had been commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII (1484–1492). Similar to previous Pontiffs, Innocent was concerned about the continuance of “heresies” in remote rural areas—particularly in parts of Germany—which still contained elements of old Pagan worship. Although essentially a relatively weak Pope overall, Innocent was determined to deal with these heresies as soon as he took up Papal office. Almost immediately he convened a Council, which appointed two respected Dominican theologians to investigate the problem in the Hertz, Mainz, Trier, and Treves areas of Germany and Austria where it was considered that such heresies were at their height.

  Jacobus Sprenger

  The first of these investigators was Jacobus (James) Sprenger (1430–1494). Sprenger had been born in Basle and had joined the Dominican Order there, showing early promise as a scholar. In 1480, he was appointed as Professor of Theology at the University of Cologne and was later appointed Inquisitor Extraordinary for the Province of Mainz, Treves, and Cologne. His investigative partner was Heinrich Kramer (1430–1505) who had been born in Schletstadt in Alsace. In 1474, he was appointed as Chief Inquisitor in the Tyrol, where he earned himself something of a reputation as a “hardliner” against alleged witchcraft, but he also worked in Bohemia and Moravia. His appointment was to “give teeth” to the investigation because Sprenger had no real experience in legally persecuting Witches. And there is little doubt that Kramer had a deep interest in witchcraft, for in 1485, he drew up a damning treatise on the subject, which afterwards was incorporated into the Malleus. Kramer had also worked as an Inquisitor in Innsbruck but had been banished from the city by the local bishop who referred to him as “a bigoted old fool.” Nevertheless, he was the person that Innocent wanted and so was appointed to investigation with Sprenger.

  The book that the two Dominicans produced was to complement a Papal Bull entitled Summis desiderantes, which Innocent issued on 5th December 1484. In it, he attacked the heresies in Germany and instructed the German Inquisition to condemn and punish alleged instances of witchcraft with the utmost severity. The book that Sprenger and Kramer produced became a witch-hunters manual, detailing all sorts of horrors, which the Ungodly could commit. This book, with its Papal backing, was to set the tone for many other such volumes.

  Demonoltria Libri Tres

  There is little doubt that the French Catholic priest Nicholas Remy (1534–1600) was influenced by this terrible work. He published his own text Demonoltria Libri Tres (Demonology Book III) which for many years, became a textbook for those persecutingwitches and the main source for the study of the works of Satan on Earth. Nor was it only officers of the Catholic Church who produced these monstrous tomes on witchcraft and on the persecution of witches.

  Jean Bodin

  The Calvinist French witch-hunter Jean Bodin (1530–1596) also penned several treatises on the matter, advocating the use of torture, even in the cases of invalid persons and children. In order to justify such horrendous views, such people detailed the rituals and blasphemous incantations, used by alleged witches to fulfil their evil designs. Such horrors presented in manuscript form, terrified and sickened those who read them and some of these treatises were to perhaps establish the basis of some of the terrible volumes of the Cthulhu Mythos.

  Compendium Malificarum

  It was a relatively unknown priest from Milan, however, who was to produce the most terrible book. In 1608, Francesco Maria Guazzo produced a catalogue of terrors, which he entitled the Compendium Malificarum (A Compendium of Witches). This would give, in graphic and terrible detail, the powers and practices of Witches and depraved people who had sold their souls to the Devil. It shocked the early modern world with its explicitness. Guazzo’s work has never really been equalled for the sheer terror it created in the minds of European scholars and it firmly established what was to become known as the “witch craze” in the religious mind of the day.

  This was a craze that was to last throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries until the birth of what became known as the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment, when science came to the fore and the old superstitions began to fade away. Even then, the interest in the occult did not appear to die out. The thinkers of this time were anxious to explain away some of the superstitions that had gripped their ancestors or to place them within a new scientific context, so as to better understand them. This led to a plethora of books, combining what had formerly been considered to be witchcraft with science.

  Alchemy

  In a sense, magic always had its scientific and philosophical side. Alchemy—the art of transforming or creating matter from other elements—had always been considered as a magical operation. It would, however, form the basis of recognizable science. Philosophy, too, was connected into magical thought. From earliest times, the Gnostics had taught salvation through knowledge.

  Gnosticism

  The origins of Gnostic belief are unclear and are still a matter for research and debate. Nor was there any single universal doctrine in Gnosticism—the term was used to denote disparate groups of thinkers who shared a generally common philosophical outlook—but the basic tenets of the belief contended that human salvation lay not through faith and obedience of God’s Laws (as the Christian Churches taught) but rather through an understanding of the underlying mysteries and secrets of the Universe itself. This drew the seeker closer to the Monad (the One), which lay at the centre of all things surrounded by lesser emanations known as Archons. Those who gained such knowledge became beings of considerably greater power than those who did not. Lovecraft’s fiction mirrors some of the Gnostic beliefs.

  Azothoth

  In Lovecraft’s books, at the centre of the Universe, the mad, blind god Azathoth seethes and bubbles whilst around him, lesser entities come and go. Certain individuals attempt to make contact with some of the lesser brings and ultimately with the central deity itself, which usually sends them mad. The fits in with some Gnostic thinking that the Monad was essentially “unknowable” and that seeking out too much knowledge about it would ultimately destroy the seeker. The finite minds of mortals were not equipped to handle the infinite.

  Gnostic writings influenced many seekers during what became known as the Age of Enlightenment. The pursuit of esoteric knowledge was now closely linked to the Divine and those engaged in such pursuits used this as a justification for their researches.

  Raymond Lully

  No man embodied such a quest more than the medieval figure of Raymond Lully (Ramon Lul) whose thinking enjoyed something of a renaissance during this period. Lully seemed to successfully combine the scientific search with that of the supernatural journey—combining the scientific with the mystical—and this appealed to many of the Enlightened thinkers.

  Born in Palma, Majorca somewhere between 1232 and 1236, Lully (Lul or Llul) became heavily involved in the Christian Church as a missionary in the Middle East. However, he was also a man with a curious and philosophical mind and the writings and debates of the early Arabs fascinated him. He became interested in the writings of the early Christians, particularly Gnostic branches of them that were to be found in the Arab lands. He also became interested in alchemy and astronomy. In these times alchemy was considered a sin because, through experimentation (and the supposed creation and transformation of substances) it was deemed to tamper with the order of things that God Himself had established. Astronomy, too was considered as a sinful practice because it was thought to query and explain the order that God had created in the Firmament. In order to protect themselves from Church attention (this was the age of the Inquisition) many alchemists and astronomers wrote down their experiments and findings in code, usually in some mystical or quasi-religious format. Thus the alchemist’s literature is littered with accounts of strange journeys, of bizarre landscapes and encounters, unnatural births and of “alchemyical weddings,” all seeking to conceal research and works that individual practitioners had carried out. Lully was no different. Some of his works—treatises, books—are couched in obscure terms . It was the fashion to try and “decode” some of these writings in order (it was thought) to discover and understand esoteric truths. Lully took his theories one step further. Greatly influenced by the astronomical and mathematical works of the Arabs (he had intently studied and learned Arabic), he was convinced that knowledge could be “created” using mathematical and scientific formulae. In order to prove this, he constructed a set of machines, that could “create” permutations of ideas which were fed into them and which were then supplemented by Lully’s own thought and mathematical equations.

  Ars Magna

  The result was a massive work known as the Ars Magna, which was reputedly Lully’s greatest work. It is a set of combinations of ideas linked by philosophical and mathematical equations—many of them in diagrammatic form. Some of these were said to represent stellar constellations and a few of them bear a resemblance to ancient symbols found amongst the Mound Builders of America. This led to a fevered speculation that perhaps Lully had discovered arcane secrets of the Universe which were known by some other more ancient peoples and, as late as the 1930s, he was still being hailed as a great alchemist and occultist, almost as a forerunner of Madame Blavatsky—even though it appears that he had always opposed the occult and saw himself more as an early scientist. When Lully died in Tunis in 1315, he was reputed to have left behind a series of treatises, which were filled with esoteric knowledge and claimed to describe the ultimate secrets of Creation. A number of these were believed to have turned up during the Age of Enlightenment but have been subsequently proved to be forgeries. Nevertheless, the idea of an ancient civilization that had some kind of advanced knowledge and which was connected to certain other cultures in the world gained widespread interest, mainly through his work. Books, interpreting his work and the work of other alchemists and philosophers—including the works of the English alchemist, occultist, and follower of Johannes Kepler, Robert Fludd (1574–1634)—proliferated throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. Such works were highly popular in respected circles—almost the Da Vinci Codes of their day.

  The interest in ancient magic, however, hasn’t gone away. Indeed, if anything, the emerging new scientific philosophies had increased investigation into it—particularly into ritual magic and the use of incantations. In the 17th, 18th and into part of the 19th centuries, grimoires (books of spells and ritual) began circulating widely in Western Europe. Many of these claimed great antiquity, stretching back to the early Middle East.

  The Key of Solomon

  The greatest of these books was allegedly, The Key of Solomon, which was later split into two books—The Greater and Lesser Keys. This was attributed to the celebrated Biblical king who was famed for his wisdom and also for his command of demons and reputedly dated from the 1st century A.D. From this single source, many other grimoires had their origin as students copied what were supposedly fragments of the original work. In 1350, Pope Innocent VI certainly ordered a volume known as The Book of Solomon to be destroyed but whether this was indeed the Key, as some students claim, is open to question. A text named the Book of Solomon was condemned by the Church around 1559 but copies of it were widely circulated amongst scholars in Europe at the time. A Greek version of this work dating from somewhere between 1100 and 1200 is said to be housed in the British Museum in London. Excerpts, directly copied form the Key, would form the basis of another grimoire in wide circulation during the 18th century—The Secret of Secrets.

  The Sacred Book of Abra-melin the Mage

  Another celebrated grimoire was The Sacred Book of Abra-melin the Mage which gained some credibility in the late 19th century when an allegedly 14th century copy of it was “discovered” in the Biblioteque de L’Arsenal by the occultist S.L. McGregor Mathers, a member of the famous Order of the Golden Dawn (which was to gain some notoriety by including Aleister Crowley in its ranks). According to McGregor Mathers, this was a translation of a work of “potent power” which had been written by an ancient Hebrew magician named Abraham ben Simeon. This volume was widely circulated in Paris and London during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and still enjoys a certain status amongst many occultists.

  Grimoire of Pope Honorious

  A third major grimoire was perhaps incorrectly attributed to Pope Honorious III who occupied the Pontificate from 1216–1227. There is little to connect this old and frail Pontiff with the occult—most of his Papacy was concerned with the Fourth Lateran Council and proclaiming the Fifth Crusade. Nevertheless, the Grimoire of Pope Honorious was believed to be a potent and terrible book, directly transcribed either by the Pope himself or under his direction, from ancient Semitic texts, which formed part of the Kabbalah (a body of mystic Jewish literature that featured heavily in rabbinical magic). Its alleged Papal connections seemed to give it added status and so it circulated widely amongst scholars of the occult during the 18th century. It is still considered to be something of a magical text today.