The Black Book

The Necronomicon gives us cosmology. Von Junzt gives us field notes.

There are books which claim to reveal mysteries, and books which claim to summon them. Unaussprechlichen Kulten is more disturbing than either.

Unlike the Necronomicon, whose legendary history stretches backwards through translations, lost languages and the dreams of its mad Arab author, the Black Book is disquietingly modern. Its author is a nineteenth-century European scholar. He travels. He consults manuscripts. He joins secret societies. He visits ruins. He interviews people who ought not to know what they know. He compares traditions separated by continents and centuries.

And then he publishes his findings.

The resulting volume is less a conventional grimoire than an ethnography of the impossible - a gazetteer of cults, monuments, objects and traditions which civilisation has mistaken for disconnected superstition.

The horror of Unaussprechlichen Kulten lies precisely there.

Von Junzt has discovered that the legends connect.

IThe book with several names

Robert E. Howard created the volume as Nameless Cults, first mentioning it in “The Children of the Night” and developing it substantially in “The Black Stone” and “The Thing on the Roof”. Within Howard's fiction it is also called the Black Book, not because of the colour of its binding but because of its contents.

The celebrated German title came afterwards.

Lovecraft admired Howard's invention and wanted to borrow it for the growing network of shared references exchanged among the Weird Tales circle. Since von Junzt was German, Lovecraft thought that his book ought properly to possess a German title. His own tentative effort was Ungenennte Heidenthume, approximately “Unnamed Heathenisms”. He asked August Derleth for assistance, and Derleth proposed Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Lovecraft enthusiastically adopted it and passed it back to Howard.

The German is famously dubious. Unaussprechliche Kulte would be a more straightforward rendering of “Unspeakable Cults”; Unaussprechlichen Kulten has the grammatical appearance of a phrase requiring something before it. The later conventional form Von unaussprechlichen Kulten - “Of Unspeakable Cults” - repairs much of the difficulty.

Yet the defective title has arguably become more effective than correct German would have been. It has the peculiar authenticity of an antique bibliographical error endlessly repeated because the original volume is too rare for anyone to check.

There is something appropriately von Junztian about that.

Lovecraft explicitly identified the book as Howard's invention when readers began asking where such forbidden volumes might actually be obtained. His correspondence makes clear that the cross-referencing of fictional books and deities was a deliberate game among the Weird Tales writers, intended to give their stories a shared “pseudo-authoritativeness”.

IIFriedrich von Junzt

Howard originally calls the author simply von Junzt. “Friedrich” was subsequently supplied by Lovecraft; the familiar fuller form Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt belongs to the developing shared mythology rather than to Howard's initial conception. This distinction matters, because the Black Book accumulated fictional bibliography almost as real books accumulate editions and scholarly traditions.

Howard nevertheless gives us a remarkably distinct portrait.

Von Junzt lives from 1795 to 1840. He spends his life travelling throughout the world, entering secret societies and consulting obscure books and manuscripts in their original languages. His published work fluctuates between startling lucidity and profound ambiguity. Some of his assertions appear insane; others are troublingly difficult to refute.

This makes him quite different from Abdul Alhazred.

Alhazred is the inspired madman, the poet-prophet who somehow glimpses a universe beyond conventional human knowledge. Von Junzt is more unsettlingly recognisable. He is an investigator.

He does fieldwork.

He follows references.

He compares sources.

He goes to places.

The implied methodology of Nameless Cults is therefore almost academic. Von Junzt's extraordinary conclusion is reached not through revelation but through research.

The Necronomicon asks us to imagine that a madman knew impossible things.

Unaussprechlichen Kulten asks us to imagine that a sufficiently persistent scholar could verify them.

IIIDüsseldorf, 1839

The original edition appears in Düsseldorf in 1839, only a year before von Junzt's death.

Howard describes copies as thick volumes with heavy leather covers and iron hasps. The edition is already exceedingly rare by the time his narrators encounter it. Its scarcity is not merely bibliographical. Many owners deliberately destroy their copies after learning how von Junzt died.

That is an important detail.

The book has not vanished through ordinary neglect. It has undergone something approaching spontaneous suppression. Its readers themselves decide that possession is undesirable.

This gives the first edition an unusually effective fictional provenance. There is no mysterious medieval order attempting to suppress the truth. No ecclesiastical conspiracy need be invoked. The witnesses simply become frightened.

And the book itself explains why.

Howard tells us that its main subject is the survival of cults and objects of dark worship which von Junzt believed still existed in his own time.

That single point separates the Black Book from much later Mythos treatment.

It is not originally a catalogue of spells.

It is a catalogue of survivals.

IVThe geography of the impossible

One of von Junzt's subjects is a black monolith standing among the mountains of Hungary.

The Black Stone receives relatively little space in his enormous survey because, according to Howard, von Junzt believes the cult associated with it to have disappeared centuries before. That qualification is revealing. The greater part of Nameless Cults concerns organisations and practices which he believed had not disappeared.

The implication is considerably more disturbing than the particular horrors of “The Black Stone”.

If the Hungarian cult is exceptional because it is extinct, what occupies the rest of the book?

Von Junzt has apparently travelled through the nineteenth-century world finding remnants of religious traditions extending back beyond conventional history. Modern geography overlays another map - an older geography of shrines, rites, sacred objects and forgotten allegiances.

The civilised world has not replaced this landscape.

It has merely built over it.

In “The Children of the Night”, the book is invoked in a discussion of the supposed survival of the cult of Bran, alongside traditions associated with Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua and other beings. The point is again continuity: ancient belief has not necessarily vanished simply because historians have ceased recording it.

Von Junzt's achievement is therefore cartographic.

He has noticed that apparently isolated survivals belong to a pattern.

VThe doctrine of keys

“The Black Stone” supplies one of the most significant ideas associated with von Junzt: the Key.

The Hungarian monolith is not merely an idol or archaeological curiosity. The narrative ultimately treats it as a surviving point of contact with something older - a mechanism through which events, beings or conditions belonging to an otherwise inaccessible past can intrude upon the present.

“The Thing on the Roof” develops the idea much more literally.

Von Junzt describes an ancient temple hidden in Honduras. The last priest lies mummified within it, wearing a crimson, toad-shaped jewel. The jewel is a “key” to the temple's treasure. The corrupt Bridewall translation preserves this much but fails to explain what the key actually opens. The unexpurgated German edition supplies the missing context.

The explorer Tussmann assumes the treasure to be gold.

This is an entirely reasonable interpretation and an entirely fatal one.

The jewel opens a subterranean chamber. What the temple possesses as its ultimate treasure is not wealth but its god - a huge, hoofed, tentacled thing which has been dormant rather than dead. Tussmann takes the key away and eventually discovers that opening a door is not the same thing as closing it.

Here the Black Book ceases to be merely descriptive.

Its information is operational.

It tells a sufficiently attentive reader where something is, what object is associated with it, and how the pieces fit together.

Von Junzt does not need to print an invocation.

Coordinates may be enough.

VIWhat von Junzt had actually seen

Howard repeatedly refuses to tell us how much of the Black Book rests upon hearsay.

That uncertainty is part of the construction.

Von Junzt unquestionably travels widely. He possesses information difficult to explain without personal observation. In “The Thing on the Roof”, his account of the Honduran temple is so exact that Tussmann concludes that von Junzt must have visited the place himself. Even more troublingly, he knows details about the sealed interior which local traditions do not appear to preserve.

How did he acquire them?

Howard leaves the question unanswered.

But the possibilities narrow unpleasantly.

Either von Junzt obtained reliable testimony from people connected with the cult, or he entered the temple.

The distinction may not matter very much.

His research method evidently ceased at some point to resemble ordinary antiquarian scholarship. To write Nameless Cults, he did not merely study dead religions.

He gained access to living ones.

VIIThe missing manuscript

The most frightening work by von Junzt may therefore not be Unaussprechlichen Kulten at all.

During the final months of his life he works continuously upon another manuscript.

Then, in 1840, he is found dead inside a locked and bolted room. The unfinished manuscript has been torn apart and scattered around him. Marks resembling those of taloned fingers remain upon his throat.

His closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau, undertakes to reconstruct the scattered pages.

He succeeds.

He spends the night reading them.

Then he burns the manuscript and cuts his own throat with a razor.

Howard wisely tells us nothing more.

It is one of the finest lacunae in the shared Mythos.

The published Black Book contains material its author was prepared to reveal. Its very existence suggests that von Junzt was not habitually timid about publishing disturbing conclusions.

Yet apparently there were things he had withheld.

Near the end of his life he finally attempted to write them down.

Something then entered a locked room.

And the only other person known to have read the result decided that neither the manuscript nor himself should survive the experience.

The missing manuscript establishes an outer boundary to the Black Book's horror. Whatever Unaussprechlichen Kulten contains, it represents von Junzt exercising restraint.

VIIIThe Bridewall translation, 1845

Five years after von Junzt's death, a London printer named Bridewall issues a pirated English translation.

It is disastrous.

Howard describes it as sensationalist, filled with grotesque woodcuts, typographical mistakes and mistranslations. In “The Thing on the Roof” one error actually relocates the Temple of the Toad from Honduras to Guatemala. More importantly, portions whose meaning is crucial are rendered incomprehensible.

This introduces another remarkably effective device into the imaginary bibliography.

There is not one Black Book.

There are textual traditions.

Information depends upon edition.

A reader may possess the right book and still possess the wrong text.

Indeed, in Howard's world textual criticism becomes a survival skill. The difference between a reliable German sentence and Bridewall's botched English rendering may determine whether the reader understands what a “key” opens before using it.

The corruption of a text is normally an inconvenience to scholarship.

Here it can kill you.

IXThe Golden Goblin edition, 1909

The next important edition appears in New York in 1909, published by the wonderfully named Golden Goblin Press.

Unlike Bridewall's vulgar production, this is an expensive and beautifully manufactured book. Howard gives its illustrations to the fictional artist Diego Vasquez.

It has, however, been heavily censored.

Approximately one quarter of the original text has been removed. The publishers intend a more widely marketable edition but make it so lavish that the price itself restricts circulation.

The result is another paradox.

Bridewall preserves more material but corrupts it.

Golden Goblin translates and presents the work more respectably but deliberately removes material.

The Düsseldorf edition alone offers both authenticity and completeness.

No wonder collectors seek it.

And no wonder they subsequently regret doing so.

XLovecraft opens the Black Book

Once Lovecraft adopts von Junzt's work, its intellectual scope expands.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House”, Walter Gilman consults Unaussprechlichen Kulten alongside the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon, attempting to correlate supposedly occult traditions with advanced mathematics concerning space and other dimensions.

This is already significant.

The old occult texts may contain garbled descriptions of phenomena which mathematics can approach independently.

Magic begins to look like misunderstood physics.

But it is in “Out of the Aeons”, written for Hazel Heald, that Lovecraft most dramatically develops von Junzt's book.

There the Black Book reproduces ideographs derived from ancient monoliths and secret ritual traditions. Those symbols correspond to markings upon an inexplicable archaeological object. Von Junzt's stories connect them with immense reaches of pre-human history and with the cult of Ghatanothoa, supposedly transmitted across lost civilisations and surviving into historical cultures around the world.

The book has become something larger than Howard's occult ethnography.

It is now a comparative database of anomalies.

A nineteenth-century researcher has inadvertently assembled fragments of a history extending beyond humanity.

XIFrom occultism to deep history

This transformation is crucial.

Von Junzt apparently believes he is studying secret cults.

But when his evidence is taken seriously, “cult” becomes an inadequate category.

The organisations he records are merely human institutions preserving memories of something much older than human religion. Their gods may not be gods. Their myths may not be myths. Their rituals may represent corrupted procedures whose original purposes have been forgotten.

In “Out of the Aeons”, the traditions surrounding Ghatanothoa extend backwards towards the lost continent of Mu and then diffuse through Atlantis, Leng, K'n-yan, Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, China, Africa, Mexico, Peru and eventually European witchcraft. Lovecraft's purpose is not to present credible anthropology, but to suggest a hidden continuity beneath conventional history.

Von Junzt therefore occupies a fascinating epistemological position.

He thinks he has discovered the history of occult religion.

What he may actually have discovered is the archaeological debris of humanity's contact with non-human intelligences.

XIIIs Unaussprechlichen Kulten actually a grimoire?

Calling the Black Book a “grimoire” is convenient, but misleading.

Howard does not principally present it as a manual of ceremonial magic.

Its contents include:

• descriptions of cults;
• accounts of remote ruins;
• sacred objects;
• traditions concerning ancient beings;
• symbols and inscriptions;
• reports obtained from secret societies;
• comparisons between surviving beliefs;
• warnings; and
• cryptic references to “keys”.

Lovecraft adds ideographs, comparative mythology and traditions of extreme antiquity.

The resulting work looks less like The Key of Solomon than an impossible mixture of Frazer, archaeology, ethnography, travel literature and intelligence dossier.

Von Junzt is cataloguing a clandestine world.

That makes his book uniquely dangerous.

A spell requires belief or participation.

A gazetteer merely requires an address.

XIIIThe Black Book and the Necronomicon

The two books complement one another because they approach the same fictional reality from opposite directions.

The Necronomicon looks outward.

It speaks of cosmic entities, other worlds, dimensions, immense histories and conditions fundamentally alien to ordinary human existence.

Unaussprechlichen Kulten looks around.

It asks where traces of those things can still be found on Earth.

Alhazred gives us cosmology.

Von Junzt gives us field notes.

The Necronomicon says that humanity inhabits a universe in which monstrous things exist.

The Black Book adds the rather less comfortable observation that some of them have addresses.

XIVA plausible bibliographical reconstruction

The major publication details derive directly from Howard and Lovecraft rather than from the considerably more elaborate bibliographies constructed by later Mythos writers and role-playing material.

XVWhat we should not add

Later writers have expanded Unaussprechlichen Kulten enormously. Detailed chapter lists, additional cults, precise surviving copies, spells, biographies of von Junzt and elaborate publication histories have accumulated around it.

These are often ingenious.

They are not Howard's Black Book.

The source-critical version is simultaneously smaller and more frightening.

Howard never tells us how many cults von Junzt documented. He does not provide a table of contents. He does not systematically describe spells. We are not told precisely what von Junzt encountered during his travels or how he entered his secret societies.

Above all, Howard does not tell us what the second manuscript contained.

Those absences should be preserved.

Like the gaps in Lovecraft's Necronomicon, they are not deficiencies waiting for later writers to repair.

They are where much of the horror lives.

XVIThe book as evidence

The most striking feature of Unaussprechlichen Kulten is that its fictional authority repeatedly increases when someone checks it.

This is the exact reverse of what ought to happen to the ravings of a crank.

A sceptical reader investigates a place von Junzt mentions.

The place exists.

An object is supposed to be there.

It is there.

A structure is described.

The description is accurate.

Symbols recur in cultures which ought to be unrelated.

They match.

A surviving local tradition seems absurd.

Von Junzt has encountered another version of it thousands of miles away.

Eventually the uncomfortable question is no longer why anyone should believe von Junzt.

It is how von Junzt knew.

That is perhaps Howard's most successful invention.

The terror lies not in the book's obscurity but in its reproducibility.

XVIIThe last field researcher

Von Junzt's death can consequently be read in several ways.

Perhaps one of the cults he exposed killed him.

Perhaps something he discovered during his final journey followed him home.

Perhaps the second manuscript recorded knowledge which attracted the attention of whatever that knowledge described.

Howard does not decide.

The locked room prevents a mundane explanation without quite making a supernatural one compulsory.

But there is a darker possibility.

Von Junzt may simply have continued doing what he had always done.

He investigated.

For forty-five years he had opened doors, entered forbidden societies and followed apparently absurd traditions towards their sources. The Black Book records the results up to 1839.

Then he found one more thing.

Whatever it was, it did not remain safely on the page.

XVIIIConclusion: the book that tells you where to look

The Necronomicon is frightening because it makes the universe larger.

Unaussprechlichen Kulten is frightening because it makes the Earth smaller.

There is nowhere comfortably distant for its horrors to reside. Von Junzt finds them in European mountains, Central American ruins, secret societies, old manuscripts and inherited rites. Civilisation is merely the most recent occupation layer. Beneath it remain older loyalties and older inhabitants.

The Black Book is therefore not fundamentally a book of magic.

It is a book of connections.

Its terrible proposition is that folklore, archaeology, occultism and isolated monstrosities cease to look ridiculous once someone possesses enough information to put them on the same map.

Von Junzt did.

His readers are repeatedly warned against following him.

They repeatedly follow him anyway.

And that is the final elegance of Unaussprechlichen Kulten. It need not contain a single effective spell.

It need only contain directions.