Cosmicism without consolation
Restricted shelves, dubious authorities and badly lit staircases
A side-archive for material that belongs to City of Dis but not quite to its ordinary essay catalogue: source-critical Lovecraftiana, imaginary books treated with unreasonable bibliographical seriousness, fictional scholarship, curious histories and other subjects which become stranger the more carefully one checks the references.
Nothing here is presented as occult revelation. Where fiction is being examined, the distinction between what the primary text actually says and what later tradition wishes it had said is part of the point.
What H. P. Lovecraft actually tells us about the Necronomicon, stripped of later Mythos additions, occult hoaxes and cinematic furniture. Abdul Alhazred's grimoire turns out to be something stranger: a catastrophically premature scientific encyclopaedia.
Descend to the restricted shelfA future route through fictional grimoires, pseudobiblia and books which acquired cultural lives outside the stories that invented them.
Shelf not yet cataloguedA future source-critical series separating Lovecraft's own unstable cosmic background from the tidier pantheons, genealogies and rule systems imposed by later writers.
Further descent pending