Forbidden Writings
[August Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos]

The Mad Arab's Testament

The Necronomicon is a primary source for information about the Cthulhu Mythos:

Here and there he had run across vague hints, suggestive sentences, and some of the volumes, vague paragraphs about mythology older than the universe, a strange mythology traceable to long, long dead aspects of ancient and elder Gods of Good and Evil . . . . / It was in the Necronomicon that these long-dead tales were brought together. From this book, Professor Holmes finally drew a consecutive and logical story of the age-long struggle between the forces of cosmic evil and the Elder Gods—the final defeat of the Evil Ones [Great Old Ones (3)], and their ultimate banishment into the far corners of the earth. [Depths]

He went on now to speak of the work of the Arab, Abdul Alhazred, the book Al Azif, which had become the Necronomicon. None other had ever come so close to revealing the secrets of Cthulhu and the cults of Cthulhu, of Yog-Sothoth, and indeed, of all the Ancient Ones [Great Old Ones (3)] . . . [Keeper]

. . . a horrible and exceedingly rare book was written about the Great Old Ones and traffic with them in about the year A.D. 730 at Damascus by an Arab poet named Abdul Alhazred, who was commonly thought to be mad, and who titled his book Al Azif, though it is now more widely known in certain secret circles by its Greek title of Necronomicon. [Lurker]

The book’s title was in Latin—Necronomicon—though its author was evidently an Arabian, Abdul Alhazred, and its text was in somewhat archaic English. / . . . The book evidently concerned ancient, alien races, invaders of earth, great mythical beings called Ancient Ones [Great Old Ones (3)] and Elder Gods, with outlandish names like Cthulhu and Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and Azathoth, Dagon and Ithaqua and Wendigo and Cthugha, all involved in some kind of plan to dominate earth and served by some of its peoples—the TchoTcho, and the Deep Ones, and the like. It was a book filled with cabalistic lore, incantations, and what purported to be an account of a great interplanetary battle between the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones [Great Old Ones (3)] and of the survival of cults and servitors in isolated and remote places on our planet as well as on sister planets. [Witches]

Black, Forbidden Things

This mythology is also chronicled in esoteric texts such as the Book of Eibon (Libor Ivonie), Confessions of Clithanus, Cultes des Goules, De Vermis Mysteriis (Mysteries of the Worm), Celaeno Fragments, R’lyeh Text, Pnakotic Manuscript, Sussex Manuscript, Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults).

. . . which were in part at least chronicled by the Arab, Abdul Alhazred, and by various lesser writers who followed him and left a parallel lore of their own, stemming from the same source, but augmented by various data which had come into being since the Arab’s time. [Lurker]

Moreover, the Cthulhu Mythos had sprung from a collection of incredibly old manuscripts and similar sources purporting to be factual accounts . . . the Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred; the Cultes des Goules, the work of an eccentric French nobleman, the Count d’Erlette; the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, a known aberrant who had roamed Europe and Asia in search of the remnants of old cults; the Celaeno Fragments; the R’lyeh Text; the Pnakotic Manuscript; and the like . . . [Island]

How would I tell him about the weird knowledge hidden in the forbidden texts at Miskatonic University—the dread Book of Eibon, the obscure Pnakotic Manuscripts, the terrible R’lyeh Text, and, most shunned of all, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred? [Beyond2]

 . . . quotations from such books as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, the Pnakotic Manuscript, the Libor Ivonie, and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt . . . [Curwen]

It was the volume of unnameable confessions by the monk, Clithanus. . . . It was the story of the return of the Evil Ones to earth, and the ruin they had worked. Luridly, the monk had painted the pictures of the unspeakable crime and lust with which the earth had been cursed. Then, more briefly, more vaguely, he told how holy men from the interior of Europe had driven these evil genii into the waters of the earth. The holy men had used the forces of the Elder Gods, the power of the Ancient Ones, which they had come upon in some manner. [Depths]

I thanked him and returned to my hotel, burdened with books he gave me-books containing transcripts of the Sussex Manuscript, the Celaeno Fragments, and the Cultes des Goules of the Comte d’Erlette—books which contained in their pages the incredible legendry of the Elder Gods and their banishment of the Great Old Ones from Betelgeuse [Gorge]

Abdul Alhazred describes him as ‘faceless,’ while Ludvig Prinn, in his De Vermis Mysteriis, has it that Nyarlathotep was the ‘all-seeing eye,’ and Von Junzt, writing in Unaussprechlichen Kulten, says . . . [Lurker]

On Celaeno are books and other old records stolen from the Elder Gods; these are the source of the Celaeno Fragments:

I was on Celaeno—in that great library of ancient monolithic stones with their books and hieroglyphs stolen from the Elder Gods. [Curwen]

Celaeno, where they had resumed their studies in the library of monolithic stones with books and hieroglyphs stolen from the Elder Gods by the Great Old Ones at, and subsequent to, the time of the revolt from the benign authority of those Gods. [Sky]

Mind Blasting Knowledge

The knowledge in these books is very dangerous to the reader, and to humanity in general:

I read such things as mortal man is not meant to know, such things as would blast the sanity of the imaginative reader, such things as are best destroyed, for the knowledge of them may be as grave a danger to mankind as the fearful consequences of a return to terrestrial dominion of those Great Old Ones who were exiled forever from the star-kingdom of Betelgeuse by the Elder Gods whose rule these evil ones had defied.[Lurker]

It was by accident that we stumbled on a strange chapter of occult lore that would have been much better hidden. We were students of occult literature, and we had often come upon curious hints and suggestions of unnameable horrors—not precisely the kind of thing you run across in Black Mass jargon—and there were always strange names allied to such hints, and references to the Older Gods [Elder Gods (1)] . . . and certain others purporting to be mad genii of evil [Great Old Ones (3)] who inhabited outer space before the world was born . . . [OutThere]

Modern Sources

Some accounts of recent events shed light on the Cthulhu Mythos, to those who are familiar with it:

. . . the Johannsen narrative . . . the Greenbie account . . . If one has no belief in Cthulhu and the pantheon of Elder Gods and Ancient Ones, such accounts are meaningless, and all too readily dismissed as hysteria; if one keeps an open mind, however, such accounts become damnably suggestive. [Island]

Some modern writers of fiction have drawn on the Cthulhu Mythos in their work, perhaps revealing truths in the guise of fiction:

. . . these manuscripts and books . . . had been seized upon by writers of contemporary fiction and freely used as the source for incredible tales of fantasy and the macabre, and these had given a kind of aura of authenticity to what, at best, was a collection of lore and legends perhaps unique in the annals of mankind but surely little more. [Island]

At the same time another of us found disturbing parallels in the fiction of certain British and American writers, suggesting that they, too, were aware of this strange mythology. [OutThere]

It is not clear which British writers are referred to here, though Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood are likely candidates. The American writers are probably the Lovecraft circle, along with a few precursors such as Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce:

I refer the skeptical to the occurrence at Devil Reef off Innsmouth and direct their attention to those curiously batrachian survivals one may yet find in isolated places in the vicinity of both Innsmouth and Newburyport, as well as to the thinly disguised fiction of it by the late H. P. Lovecraft. [Curwen]

In Derleth's world, a Lovecraft-like character named Ward Phillips writes fiction about the Cthulhu Mythos:

He [Ward Phillips] grew older, and his fictions found their way into print, and the myths of Cthulhu; of Hastur the Unspeakable! of Yog-Sothoth; and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young; of Hypnos, the god of sleep; of the Great Old Ones and their messenger, who was Nyarlathotep—all became part of the lore of Phillips’ innermost being, and of the shadow-world beyond. [Lamp]

Punishments for Those Who Reveal Too Much

The cults of the Great Old Ones punish those who reveal their secrets, including notably Abdul Alhazred:

“Can it be other than the Arab Alhazred?” . . . “Tortured and slain, beyond question,” agreed Professor Shrewsbury calmly. “Legend has it that he was snatched by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a great audience; this is the story the twelfth century biographer, Ebn Khallikan, hands down; but it is more than possible that the devouring was an illusion and that he was brought here to undergo punishment and death for his temerity in revealing the secrets of the Ancient Ones. . .” [Keeper]

But now the apparition seemed to be trying to say something more in its eerie fashion; the pathetic, tongueless figure, eyeless, too, for eyes and tongue had been removed before death in the torture inflicted upon the mad Arab for his temerity in writing about the secrets of the Ancient Ones and their minions, appeared to wish grievously to say something of significance. [Keeper]

Modern people who wrote of such things have also died mysteriously:

And what happened to [Albert] Wilmarth in the mountain country of Vermont, when he came too close to the truth in his research into the cults of the Ancient Ones? And to certain writers of what purported to be fiction—Lovecraft, [Robert E.] Howard, [Robert H.] Barlow—and what purported to be science—like [Charles] Fort—when they came too close to the truth? Dead, all of them. Dead or missing, like Wilmarth. Dead before their time, most of them, while still comparatively young men. My uncle had their books—though only Lovecraft and Fort had been extensively published in book form—and they were opened by me and read, with greater perturbation than ever, for the fictions of H. P. Lovecraft had, it seemed to me, the same relation to truth as the facts, so inexplicable to science, reported by Charles Fort. If fiction, Lovecraft’s tales were damnably bound to fact—even dismissing Fort’s facts, the fact inherent in the myths of mankind; they were quasi-myths themselves, as was the untimely fate of their author, whose early death had already given rise to a score of legends, from among which prosaic fact was ever more and more difficult to discover. [Seal]

That the professor feared for the life of the sailor Fernandez seemed obvious, though he never said as much directly; yet he told . . . of the curious illness which removed from the terrestrial scene—after the publication of tales purporting to be fiction, and revealing progressively more and more about the Cthulhu-Nyarlathotep-Great Old Ones cults, particularly the hellishly revelatory novel, At the Mountains of Madness, hinting at strange terrible survivals in arctic wastes—that great modern master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft. [Curwen]

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