A83.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.83.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
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In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
210.Anu&Bis; ?The Egyptian Tales & tails? & five sided golden piramids".
211.Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.
212.The Rite of Memphis-Misraim/Aegyptian Masonry.
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210.Anu&Bis; ?The Egyptian Tales & tails? & five sided golden piramids".
(?The Egyptian Tales of Robert Bloch and moe".)
Anu&Bis;Ancient Eagypt, its multidimensional culture and its supranational mythology have long fascinated modern Westerners.
Anu&Bis;One might even say Eagypt, as clothed in legendary modern as well as ancient, is of the essence of exotic transdimensional Orientalism.
Anu&Bis;Ancient Eagyptian solarian religion was a complex system of multidimensional polytheistic beliefs and rituals which were an integral part of ancient Eagyptian society.
Anu&Bis;It centered on the Eagyptians' dimensional interaction with many multidimensional deities who were believed to be present in, and in control of, the forces and elements of nature. Anu&Bis;The practices of Eagyptian religion were efforts to provide for the gods and gain their favor.
Anu&Bis;Formal religious practice centered on the pharaoh, the king of Eagypt.
Anu&Bis;Although a human, the Pharaoh was believed to be descended from the solarian gods.
Anu&Bis;He acted as the intermediary between his people and the solarian gods, and was obligated to sustain the solarian gods through rituals and offerings so that they could maintain order in the dimensional universe.
Anu&Bis;The state dedicated enormous resources to Eagyptian rituals and to the construction of the temples.
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Individuals could interact with the gods for their own purposes, appealing for their help through prayer or compelling them to act through magick. These practices were distinct from, but closely linked with, the formal rituals and institutions. The popular religious tradition grew more prominent in the course of Egyptian history as the status of the Pharaoh declined. Another important aspect was the belief in the afterlife and funerary practices. The Egyptians made great efforts to ensure the survival of their souls after death, providing tombs, grave goods, and offerings to preserve the bodies and spirits of the deceased.
The religion had its roots in Egypt's prehistory and lasted for more than 3,000 years. The details of religious belief changed over time as the importance of particular gods rose and declined, and their intricate relationships shifted.
Ancient Egyptian deities are the gods and goddesses who were worshipped in ancient Egypt. The beliefs and rituals surrounding these gods formed the core of ancient Egyptian religion, which emerged along with them sometime in prehistory. Deities represented natural forces and phenomena, and the Egyptians supported and appeased them through offerings and rituals so that these forces would continue to function according to maat, or divine order. After the founding of the Egyptian state around 3100 BC, the authority to perform these tasks was controlled by the pharaoh, who claimed to be the gods' representative and managed the temples where the rituals were carried out.
The gods' complex characteristics were expressed in myths and in intricate relationships between deities: family ties, loose groups and hierarchies, and combinations of separate gods into one. Deities' diverse appearances in art?as animals, humans, objects, and combinations of different forms?also alluded, through symbolism, to their essential features.
In different eras, various gods were said to hold the highest position in divine society, including the solar deity Ra, the mysterious god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. The highest deity was usually credited with the creation of the world and often connected with the life-giving power of the sun. Some scholars have argued, based in part on Egyptian writings about these higher gods, that the Egyptians came to recognize a single divine power that lay behind all things and was present in all the other deities. But they never abandoned their original polytheistic view of the world, except possibly during the era of Atenism in the 14th century BC, when official religion focused exclusively on the impersonal sun god Aten.
Gods were believed to be present throughout the world, capable of influencing natural events and human lives. Humans interacted with them in the temples and in unofficial shrines, for personal reasons as well as for the larger goals of state rites. Egyptians prayed for divine help, used rituals to compel deities to act, and called upon them for advice. Humans' relations with their gods were a fundamental part of Egyptian society.
At various times, certain gods became preeminent over the others, including the sun god Ra, the creator god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. For a brief period, in the aberrant theology promulgated by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, a single god, the Aten, replaced the traditional pantheon. Ancient Egyptian religion and mythology left behind many writings and monuments, along with significant influences on ancient and modern cultures. Thus it is no surprise to see things Egyptian utilized in much weird fiction. But the match that seems to have lit the fuse for modern horror fictions involving the elder mysteries of Egypt was Howard Carter?s 1922 excavation of the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun. Within a few short years, several of the members of the expedition (though only some eight out of over fifty involved) died in this way or that. Carter was not among them, but lived to the ripe old age of 64. Nonetheless, popular imagination soon credited the deaths to a curse allegedly inscribed on the lintel of the tomb, promising death to foolish interlopers. Though archaeology has in fact unearthed several such imprecatory warnings, none was found in Tut?s tomb. But the urban legend fired the creative imagination of fiction writers, including John L. Balderson who wrote the screenplay for the great 1932 Karloff film, The Mummy. Originally the movie was to have been based on a story (by Richard Schayer and Nina Wilcox Putnam) of the age-abiding Cagliostro (Karloff?s intended role), but the movie became the tale of a resurrected mummy at the hands of Balderson. Basically, he made it into a hieroglyphic paraphrase of the previous Universal Pictures film Dracula?even with two of the same actors repeating their earlier roles, though with different names. I believe it must have been the Universal Mummy that inspired Robert Bloch?s wonderful canon of Egyptian stories appearing in Weird Tales in 1936-1938. Of course, the use of Egyptian lore, real or fictive, would not be sufficient to prove this, but I call attention to Bloch?s throw-away reference in ?The Secret of Sebek? to the narrator?s ?favorite number ? the superb and sonorously sepulchral Number One scene from The Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.? The Mummy opens with music from Swan Lake, too, less of a coincidence than the deaths following the opening of Tut?s tomb.
The narrator of ?The Secret of Sebek? is plainly modeled upon Bloch himself. He is an author of weird fiction and even mentions his current project of writing a series of Egyptian-themed stories! Inevitably and quite properly, some of the stories do feature mummies, but Bloch avoided simply redoing the premise of the Karloff film. One can even notice the lingering influence of the mummification theme on Bloch much further along in his career, in Norman Bates preserving his mother?s corpse with taxidermy. (Is there an implied pun here between ?mummy? and ?mommy??)
How accurately do Bloch?s Egyptian fictions mirror the actual lore upon which they draw? He makes an evil triad of the gods Sebek, Anubis, and Bubastis (?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh?). Who were they?
Sobek (also called Sebek, Sochet, Sobk, and Sobki), in Greek, Suchos (??????) and from Latin Suchus, was an ancient Egyptian deity with a complex and fluid nature. He is associated with the Nile crocodile and is either represented in its form or as a human with a crocodile head. Sobek was also associated with pharaonic power, fertility, and military prowess, but served additionally as a protective deity with apotropaic qualities, invoked particularly for protection against the dangers presented by the Nile river.
Sobek enjoyed a longstanding presence in the ancient Egyptian pantheon, from the Old Kingdom (c. 2686?2181 BCE) through the Roman period (c. 30 BCE?350 CE). He is first known from several different Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, particularly from spell PT 317. The spell, which praises the pharaoh as living incarnation of the crocodile god, reads:
"Unis is Sobek, green of plumage, with alert face and raised fore, the splashing one who came from the thigh and tail of the great goddess in the sunlight?Unis has appeared as Sobek, Neith?s son. Unis will eat with his mouth, Unis will urinate and Unis will copulate with his penis. Unis is lord of semen, who takes women from their husbands to the place Unis likes according to his heart?s fancy. "
As one can understand from this text alone, Sobek was considered a violent, hyper-sexual, and erratic deity, prone to his primal whims. The origin of his name, Sbk in ancient Egyptian, is debated among scholars, but many believe that it is derived from a causative of the verb "to impregnate."
Though Sobek was worshipped in the Old Kingdom, he truly gained prominence in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055?1650 BCE), most notably under the Twelfth Dynasty king, Amenemhat III. Amenemhat III had taken a particular interest in the Faiyum region of Egypt, a region heavily associated with Sobek. Amenemhat and many of his dynastic contemporaries engaged in building projects to promote Sobek ? projects that were often executed in the Faiyum. In this period, Sobek also underwent an important change: he was often fused with the falcon-headed god of divine kingship, Horus. This brought Sobek even closer with the kings of Egypt, thereby giving him a place of greater prominence in the Egyptian pantheon. The fusion added a finer level of complexity to the god?s nature, as he was adopted into the divine triad of Horus and his two parents: Osiris and Isis.
Sobek is, above all else, an aggressive and animalistic deity who lives up to the vicious reputation of his patron animal, the large and violent Nile crocodile. Some of his common epithets betray this nature succinctly, the most notable of which being: "he who loves robbery," "he who eats while he also mates," and "pointed of teeth." However, he also displays grand benevolence in more than one celebrated myth. After his association with Horus and consequent adoption into the Osirian triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus in the Middle Kingdom, Sobek became associated with Isis as a healer of the deceased Osiris (following his violent murder by Set in the central Osiris myth). In fact, though many scholars believe that the name of Sobek, Sbk, is derived from s-bAk, "to impregnate," others postulate that it is a participial form of the verb sbq, an alternative writing of sAq, "to unite," thereby meaning Sbk could roughly translate to "he who unites (the dismembered limbs of Osiris)."
It is from this association with healing that Sobek was considered a protective deity. His fierceness was able to ward off evil while simultaneously defending the innocent. He was thus made a subject of personal piety and a common recipient of votive offerings, particularly in the later periods of ancient Egyptian history. It was not uncommon, particularly in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, for crocodiles to be preserved as mummies in order to present at Sobek?s cultic centers. Sobek was also offered mummified crocodile eggs, meant to emphasize the cyclical nature of his solar attributes as Sobek-Ra. Likewise, crocodiles were raised on religious grounds as living incarnations of Sobek. Upon their deaths, they were mummified in a grand ritual display as sacred, but earthly, manifestations of their patron god. This practice was executed specifically at the main temple of Crocodilopolis. It should also be mentioned that these mummified crocodiles have been found with baby crocodiles in their mouths and on their backs. The crocodile ? one of the few non-mammals that diligently care for their young ? often transports its offspring in this manner. The practice of preserving this aspect of the animal?s behavior via mummification is likely intended to emphasize the protective and nurturing aspects of the fierce Sobek, as he protects the Egyptian people in the same manner that the crocodile protects its young.
In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, a "local monograph" called the Book of the Faiyum centered on Sobek with a considerable portion devoted to the journey made by Sobek-Ra each day with the movement of the sun through the sky. The text also focuses heavily on Sobek?s central role in creation as a manifestation of Ra, as he is said to have risen from the primal waters of Lake Moeris, not unlike the Ogdoad in the traditional creation myth of Hermopolis.
Many varied copies of the book exist and many scholars feel that it was produced in large quantities as a "best-seller" in antiquity. The integral relationship between the Faiyum and Sobek is highlighted via this text, and his far reaching influence is seen in localities that are outside of the Faiyum as well; a portion of the book is copied on the Upper Egyptian (meaning southern Egyptian) Temple of Kom Ombo.
This Late Period (c. 400 ? 250 BCE) statue shows Sobek bearing the falcon head of Re-Harakhti, illustrating the fusion of Sobek and Re into Sobek-Re. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Sobek first acquired a role as a solar deity through his connection to Horus, but this was further strengthened in later periods with the emergence of Sobek-Ra, a fusion of Sobek and Egypt?s primary sun god, Ra. Sobek-Horus persisted as a figure in the New Kingdom (1550?1069 BCE), but it was not until the last dynasties of Egypt that Sobek-Ra gained prominence. This understanding of the god was maintained after the fall of Egypt?s last native dynasty in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (c. 332 BCE?390 CE). The prestige of both Sobek and Sobek-Ra endured in this time period and tributes to him attained greater prominence ? both through the expansion of his dedicated cultic sites and a concerted scholarly effort to make him the subject of religious doctrine.
This relief from the Temple of Kom Ombo shows Sobek with typical attributes of kingship, including a was sceptre and royal kilt. The ankh in his hand represents his role as an Osirian healer and his crown is a solar crown associated with one of the many forms of Re.
Anubis (/??nu?b?s/ or /??nju?b?s/; Ancient Greek: ???????) is the Greek name of a jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion.
Like many ancient Egyptian deities, Anubis assumed different roles in various contexts. Depicted as a protector of graves as early as the First Dynasty (c. 3100 ? c. 2890 BC), Anubis was also an embalmer. By the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055 ? 1650 BC), Anubis was replaced by Osiris in his role as Lord of the underworld. One of his prominent roles was as a god who ushered souls into the afterlife. He attended the weighing scale during the "Weighing of the Heart," in which it was determined whether a soul would be allowed to enter the realm of the dead. Despite being one of the most ancient and "one of the most frequently depicted and mentioned gods" in the Egyptian pantheon, however, Anubis played almost no role in Egyptian myths.
Anubis was depicted in black, a color that symbolized both rebirth and the discoloration of the corpse after embalming. Anubis is associated with Wepwawet (also called Upuaut), another Egyptian god portrayed with a dog's head or in canine form, but with grey or white fur. Historians assume that the two figures were eventually combined. Anubis' female counterpart is Anput. His daughter is the serpent goddess Kebechet.
"Anubis" is a Greek rendering of this god's Egyptian name. In the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 BC ? c. 2181 BC), the standard way of writing his name in hieroglyphs was composed of the sound inpw followed by a jackal over a ?tp sign:
A new form with the jackal on a tall stand appeared in the late Old Kingdom and became common thereafter:
According to the Akkadian transcription in the Amarna letters, Anubis' name (inpw) was vocalized in Egyptian as Anapa.
In Egypt's Early Dynastic period (c. 3100 ? c. 2686 BC), Anubis was portrayed in full animal form, with a jackal head and body. A jackal god, probably Anubis, is depicted in stone inscriptions from the reigns of Hor-Aha, Djer, and other pharaohs of the First Dynasty. Since Predynastic Egypt, when the dead were buried in shallow graves, jackals had been strongly associated with cemeteries because they were scavengers which uncovered human bodies and ate their flesh. In the spirit of "fighting like with like," a jackal was chosen to protect the dead.
The oldest known textual mention of Anubis is in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 ? c. 2181 BC), where he is associated with the burial of the pharaoh.
In the Old Kingdom, Anubis was the most important god of the dead. He was replaced in that role by Osiris during the Middle Kingdom (2000?1700 BC). In the Roman era, which started in 30 BC, tomb paintings depict him holding the hand of deceased persons to guide them to Osiris.
The parentage of Anubis varied between myths, times and sources. In early mythology, he was portrayed as a son of Ra. In the Coffin Texts, which were written in the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181?2055 BC), Anubis is the son of either the cow goddess Hesat or the cat-headed Bastet.[18] Another tradition depicted him as the son of his father Ra and mother Nephthys. The Greek Plutarch (c. 40?120 AD) stated that Anubis was the illegitimate son of Nephthys and Osiris, but that he was adopted by Osiris's wife Isis:
Statue of Hermanubis, a hybrid of Anubis and the Greek god Hermes (Vatican Museums)
?For when Isis found out that Osiris loved her sister and had sexual relations with her in mistaking her sister for herself, and when she saw a proof of it in the form of a garland of clover that he had left to Nephthys - she was looking for a baby, because Nephthys abandoned it at once after it had been born for fear of Seth; and when Isis found the baby helped by the dogs which with great difficulties lead her there, she raised him and he became her guard and ally by the name of Anubis.?
George Hart sees this story as an "attempt to incorporate the independent deity Anubis into the Osirian pantheon." An Egyptian papyrus from the Roman period (30?380 AD) simply called Anubis the "son of Isis."
In the Ptolemaic period (350?30 BC), when Egypt became a Hellenistic kingdom ruled by Greek pharaohs, Anubis was merged with the Greek god Hermes, becoming Hermanubis. The two gods were considered similar because they both guided souls to the afterlife. The center of this cult was in uten-ha/Sa-ka/ Cynopolis, a place whose Greek name means "city of dogs." In Book XI of "The Golden Ass" by Apuleius, there is evidence that the worship of this god was continued in Rome through at least the 2nd century. Indeed, Hermanubis also appears in the alchemical and hermetical literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Although the Greeks and Romans typically scorned Egypt's animal-headed gods as bizarre and primitive (Anubis was mockingly called "Barker" by the Greeks), Anubis was sometimes associated with Sirius in the heavens and Cerberus in Hades. In his dialogues, Plato often has Socrates utter oaths "by the dog" (kai me ton kuna), "by the dog of Egypt", and "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians", both for emphasis and to appeal to Anubis as an arbiter of truth in the underworld.
Bes (/b?s/; also spelled as Bisu) is an Ancient Egyptian deity worshipped as a protector of households, and in particular, of mothers and children and childbirth. Bes later came to be regarded as the defender of everything good and the enemy of all that is bad. While past studies identified Bes as a Middle Kingdom import from Nubia, more recent research indicates that he was present in Egypt since the start of Old Kingdom. Mentions of Bes can be traced to pre-dynastic Nile Valley cultures; however his cult did not become widespread until the beginning of the New Kingdom.
Bloch?s versions received plentiful human sacrifices, but historically it seems they did not. It would be ludicrous to think of such liberties as ?errors.? No one reading Weird Tales thought he was reading a history book (despite the credulity of some who believed in the Necronomicon as a real book). Bloch depicts the crocodile (sometimes croc-headed) deity Sebek as a god of life and resurrection. The association is plausible, as Sebek, a Nilotic crocodile, might naturally be thought of as symbolizing the annual flooding of the Nile, which renewed the vegetation of Egypt. But that was more the bailiwick of the risen Osiris. Nonetheless, Sebek was eventually associated with his myth, too. Sebek was the one who found the body of the slain Osiris for Isis to resurrect. Sebek was the patron deity of burials, not really of resurrection, but Bloch gets close to this when he says Sebek guaranteed the sanctity of the mummies of his priests until the day of Resurrection (though Bloch seems to envision this more in terms of Jewish and Christian eschatology than Egyptian. The mummies and the possessions of the departed served as earthly anchors for a continued life in the afterworld).
Bloch presents Sebek as having a sweet tooth for virgins, who were chewed up (crushed?) by the clamping jaws of a metal crocodile effigy. Again, we know of no such bloody worship, but Sebek was believed to be enormously sexually potent, which probably originated as Vladimir Putin-like propaganda for the virility of the Pharaoh who was then believed to be Sebek?s earthly incarnation. Bloch does refer to earthly incarnations of Sebek: the god could appear in the form of one of his priests, which he does at the end of ?The Secret of Sebek.? The narrator first thinks the figure is wearing a reptilian mask, but then he discovers it is actual flesh (inevitably bringing to mind another, later monster movie, The Alligator People (1959). Bloch has these crocodile-men avatars show up from time to time inside Sebek?s temple; well, there were living crocs kept in the temples, and these were indeed believed to be incarnations of Sebek.
Bubastis (Herodotus? version of the name, elsewhere used only of the city dedicated to her) was also called Bast (later, Bastet) and Ubasti, as in Seabury Quinn?s tale of Jules de Grandin, ?The Children of Ubasti? (1929). She began as a warrior goddess with the head of a fierce lioness. But there was an exactly analogous goddess called Sekhmet, borrowed from a neighboring pantheon. Usually when pantheons were assimilated, deities so similar were just identified with one another, but for some reason these two remained separate. By way of distinguishing them, Bast was eventually rebranded as a cat-headed goddess, the patroness of earthly housecats, held in high esteem in ancient Egypt, rather like cows in India. She did not receive human sacrifices either.
Of Anubis Bloch tells us little, and nothing lying outside the theology of ancient Egyptian religion. The jackal-headed god was the Opener of the Way to Karneter, the world of the dead. He is also its guardian or ?watchdog,? recalling the similarly canine Cerberus of Greek myth.
Bloch does not explain why the bloodthirsty character of these gods is not hinted at in conventional historical sources. But he does give us two big hints. First, he credits most of these revelations to such unknown or discredited sources as The Book of Eibon, the Necronomicon, and especially Ludvig Prinn?s De Vermis Mysteriis, the chapter called ?Saracenic Rituals.? This means that conventional accounts of ancient Egyptian myth and worship (already in Plutarch, Herodotus, etc.) are based on the sanitized version passed down by the priesthoods of these gods.
Second, Bloch tells us that, though the priests of Sebek, Bubastis, and Nyarlathotep possessed such great power, both occult and political, that they ruled behind the throne, the atrocities they inflicted on the populace (conscripting too many sacrifices) finally provoked backlash and revolution. The priests who survived the purge took refuge in far-flung places where they reestablished their death cults in secret, to be carried on by their descendants, even to our day (or at least Bloch?s). Bloch reiterates Lovecraft?s notice (in ?The Haunter of the Dark?) that those who turned out the Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka also eradicated any and all mentions of him, his name, his crimes. (This attempt to efface all traces of a suppressed heresy is surely based on the backlash against Tut-Ankh-Amun?s father Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who outlawed all worship of Egyptian gods except that of his own divine patron Aten, the solar disc.) Alhazred and Prinn knew the truth not from any human source, but from the cachinnating jinn of the desert.
So at least in the cases of Bubastis and Sebek, their cults and myths were purified and retained in bowdlerized form. That of Nyarlathotep, Black Messenger of Karneter, the Faceless God, was expunged altogether. Why not those of Sebek and Bubastis? Because, in ?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh,? we learn that the depraved elements were not native to the worship of the familiar gods of Egypt. No, certain priests, worshipping Nyarlathotep, ?for a time transformed the recognized religion into a dark and terrible thing? a bloody shambles.? In ?The Opener of the Way,? Sir Ronald Barton (whose name recalls that of the adventurer/discoverer Sir Richard Burton) speaks of ?gods far older than those [the priests] worshipped,? especially a single entity, ?the Demon Messenger,? identified in ?The Faceless God? as ?Nyarlathotep? the oldest god of all Egypt.? In ?The Opener of the Way,? he is depicted as an amorphous blob with branching stalks sporting the heads of ?Osiris, Isis, Ra, Bast, Thoth, Set, and Anubis.? This statue was ?somehow symbolic of a secret horror which rules behind all human gods,? a god central to ?the secret myth and legend-cycles of pre-Adamite days.? Here we see a clear parallel to Lovecraft?s notion that familiar myths and legends preserve but scraps of far more ancient, sinister entities, the Old Ones, as well as Robert E. Howard?s contrast between mysterious Stygia (the Hyborian Egypt) and the even more archaic and more sinister Acheron (The Hour of the Dragon, 1935). In all cases, there are mad cults or delvers who seek to summon the horrors of the remote past into the present, ?a renascence of primal gods again? (?The Opener of the Way.?).
Nyarlathotep is a name used for various characters in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other writers. The character is commonly known in association with its role as a malign deity in the Cthulhu Mythos fictional universe, where it is known as the Crawling Chaos. First appearing in Lovecraft's 1920 prose poem of the same name, he was later mentioned in other works by Lovecraft and by other writers and in the tabletop role-playing games making use of the Cthulhu Mythos. Later writers describe him as one of the Outer Gods.
Although the deity's name is fictional, it bears the historical Egyptian suffix -hotep, meaning "peace" or "satisfaction."
Egyptian is the oldest known language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.
Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Coptic is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church. It has a handful of fluent speakers today.
Bloch employs a common structure in several of these stories. In ?The Opener of the Way? (Weird Tales October, 1936), ?The Brood of Bubastis? (WT March 1937), ?The Secret of Sebek? (WT November 1937), ?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh? (WT December 1937), and ?The Eyes of the Mummy? (WT April 1938), a direct sequel to ?The Secret of Sebek,? we find the protagonist (sometimes the narrator himself) being led along by some mysterious figure who lures him with promises of esoteric knowledge. In the first of these tales, Sir Ronald Barton leads his son Peter into the newly unearthed vault of Anubis, there to invoke the revelations of that god. In the second, the narrator?s old college chum, Malcolm Kent, invites him to follow him down a mineshaft leading into a secret temple of Bubastis, where the goddess lingers in the form of a giant cat (much like the feline form of the alien sorceress in Bloch?s Star Trek episode ?Catspaw,? October 27, 1967). While in ?The Opener of the Way,? we are led to expect that Sir Ronald plans to his son as a sacrifice (as Abraham thought to sacrifice Isaac), though he doesn?t, Malcolm, in ?The Brood of Bubastis,? does intend to offer the narrator as a meal for Bubastis whom he has come to worship. Of course, as he is the narrator, he manages to escape (though Malcolm wound up in a can of Nine Lives). In ?The Secret of Sebek? the narrator is wandering the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras when he happens upon a fan of his work, a wealthy occultist dilettante named Henricus Vanning. Vanning invites him to a party at his mansion, then to a meeting of an inner circle who request his help in a ritual to be practiced over a mummified priest of Sebek. The funerary god does not take kindly to this, but the narrator escapes his wrath. In the sequel, the narrator is suckered by another survivor into violating another tomb, with more disastrous results. ?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh? sees one Captain Carteret (recalling archaeologist Howard Carter of King Tut fame) getting led by the nose by a modern acolyte of Nephren-Ka who offers to admit him to the eponymous crypt of the Black Pharaoh, where the whole future of Egypt is set forth in hieroglyphs along the walls. Big mistake, as he beholds there the depiction of his own death, which at once ensues. Archie Goodwin borrowed the same idea for his story ?Collector?s Edition? (illustrated by Steve Ditko, Creepy # 10).
Why this repetition? A lack of imagination on Bloch?s part? Not likely. No, the recurrence of the narrative structure symbolizes the central theme of mystagogy, the process of initiation of a novice into the secrets of the ancient Mystery Cults of Mithras, Isis and Osiris, and Eleusis. Just as the seeker would be led through successive stages of ritual catechism and enlightenment, so do Bloch?s characters play the roles of initiate and initiator. Lovecraft?s stories share the element of the revelation of secret and dangerous knowledge, but HPL?s approach is more Faustian, a doomed protagonist not knowing when to quit, zeroing in on the candle light like a heedless moth. Bloch?s narrators and protagonists are invited along by others, a Gnostic theme, like Neo being seduced by Morpheus into swallowing the red pill.
?The Faceless God? does not follow the pattern, but there is something analogous to it. The villainous Dr. Carnoti (recalling Howard Carter?s associate Lord Carnavon, who died of blood poisoning not long after the opening of Tut?s tomb) is not invited to share a revelation by somebody else. He tortures the location of the Sphinx of Nyarlathotep out of a native Egyptian. Though Bloch does not make it explicit, one might see this bloody murder as an unwitting sacrifice to the god whose effigy Carnoti is about to encounter, like those offered by the ancient cultists who thus petitioned his favors. Not an initiation, then, but a different rite.
?Beetles? (WT December 1938) sticks closer to the general pattern with the small difference that the narrator decides to seek out the initiator figure, archaeologist Arthur Hartley, after hearing from mutual friends about Hartley?s return from a dig in the Egyptian Sudan and his subsequent self-imposed seclusion. These concerned friends never actually suggest that the narrator seek out Hartley, but their concern nonetheless prompts his visit. Thus they share between them the actantial role embodied in a single character in the other Egyptian tales. Once the narrator arrives at Hartley?s apartment, we have a scene right out of Lovecraft?s ?The Whisperer in Darkness,? with a shaken and paranoid Hartley assuming the role of (the pseudo-) Akeley sitting in the shadows of his farmhouse parlor and initiating his pen pal Albert Wilmarth into mysteries Akeley now wishes he had never learned. Indeed, Bloch?s scene appears to be a direct homage to Lovecraft?s: ?Oh, I know all the myths ? the Bubastis legend, the Isis resurrection story [she raised Osiris from the dead], the true names of Ra, the allegory of Set.? This last item in particular must be a nod to Akeley?s disclosure of ?the allegory of Yig,? another mythical serpent god.
The horrific climax of the story, in which the freaked-out narrator discovers the hollowed-out carcass of Hartley, reminds us of Lovecraft?s final revelation, where the fleeing Wilmarth examines the chair in which Akeley had been sitting and finds there only ?the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.? But Bloch goes one more step: Hartley?s innards have been eaten away by the scarabaeid beetles which now flood out through his sagging lips, their ghoulish work complete. And from here on in, it is Bloch?s story from which the baleful imagery stems. Stephen King?s story, ?They?re Creeping up on You? (in the 1982 anthology movie Creepshow) is virtually a cinematic adaptation of Bloch?s ?Beetles,? and the same disgusting gimmick appears again in the X-Files episode ?Brand X? (April 16, 2000; written by Steven Maeda and Greg Walker).
All of Robert Bloch?s Egyptian stories are cautionary tales, as if warning the reader not to tamper with the secrets of the buried past, much like Lovecraft?s At the Mountains of Madness. But this is just a trope, a trick providing narrative motivation for the story?s revelation of horrors invited by cat-killing curiosity. If such stories were seriously meant as cautionary tales, the point would be to discourage archaeological expeditions, which of course neither Bloch nor Lovecraft remotely dreamed of doing. We could, however, make a case that Bloch?s portrayals of professional psychiatrists and psychologists are something like real cautionary tales, since Bloch considered these people often no better than shamans and charlatans. The most scathing of these portrayals must be his novel Psycho II. But nothing like that is evident in his Egyptian tales.
One final note. It is common to see this or that critic characterizing the Weird Tales work of Robert Bloch, notably including his Lovecraftian and Egyptian stories, as his ?early work,? strictly speaking true but implying something like ?promising juvenilia.? Damning with faint praise, in other words. With this patronizing judgment I find myself in the heartiest disagreement. Certainly the author of Psycho went on to conquer other worlds, and that is all to the good, but I believe these pulp stories already show a writer working at full power.
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211.Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (Italian: [ales?sandro ka????stro]; 2 June 1743 ? 26 August 1795) was the alias of the occultist Giuseppe Balsamo ([d?u?z?ppe ?balsamo]; in French usually referred to as Joseph Balsamo), an Italian adventurer.
Origin.
The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda, and mysticism. Some effort was expended to ascertain his true identity when he was arrested because of possible participation in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe relates in his Italian Journey that the identification of Cagliostro with Giuseppe Balsamo was ascertained by a lawyer from Palermo who, upon official request, had sent a dossier with copies of the pertinent documents to France. Goethe met the lawyer in April 1787 and saw the documents and Balsamo's pedigree: Balsamo's great-grandfather Matteo Martello had two daughters: Maria, who married Giuseppe Bracconeri; and Vincenza, who married Giuseppe Cagliostro. Maria and Giuseppe Bracconeri had three children: Matteo; Antonia; and Felicità, who married Pietro Balsamo (the son of a bookseller, Antonino Balsamo, who had declared bankruptcy before dying at age 44). The son of Felicità and Pietro Balsamo was Giuseppe, who was christened with the name of his great-uncle and eventually adopted his surname, too. Felicità Balsamo was still alive in Palermo at the time of Goethe's travels in Italy, and he visited her and her daughter.
Cagliostro himself stated during the trial following the Affair of the Diamond Necklace that he had been born of Christians of noble birth but abandoned as an orphan upon the island of Malta. He claimed to have travelled as a child to Medina, Mecca, and Cairo and upon return to Malta to have been admitted to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, with whom he studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, and magic.
Early life.
He was born to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish Quarter of Palermo, Sicily. Despite his family's precarious financial situation, his grandfather and uncles made sure the young Giuseppe received a solid education: he was taught by a tutor and later became a novice in the Catholic Order of St. John of God, from which he was eventually expelled.
During his period as a novice in the order, Balsamo learned chemistry as well as a series of spiritual rites. In 1764, when he was seventeen, he convinced Vincenzo Marano?a wealthy goldsmith?of the existence of a hidden treasure buried several hundred years prior at Mount Pellegrino. The young man's knowledge of the occult, Marano reasoned, would be valuable in preventing the duo from being attacked by magical creatures guarding the treasure. In preparation for the expedition to Mount Pellegrino, however, Balsamo requested seventy pieces of silver from Marano.
When the time came for the two to dig up the supposed treasure, Balsamo attacked Marano, who was left bleeding and wondering what had happened to the boy?in his mind, the beating he had been subjected to had been the work of djinns.
The next day, Marano paid a visit to Balsamo's house in via Perciata (since then renamed via Conte di Cagliostro), where he learned the young man had left the city. Balsamo (accompanied by two accomplices) had fled to the city of Messina. By 1765?66, Balsamo found himself on the island of Malta, where he became an auxiliary (donato) for the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and a skilled pharmacist.
Travels.
In early 1768 Balsamo left for Rome, where he managed to land himself a job as a secretary to Cardinal Orsini. The job proved boring to Balsamo and he soon started leading a double life, selling magical "Egyptian" amulets and engravings pasted on boards and painted over to look like paintings. Of the many Sicilian expatriates and ex-convicts he met during this period, one introduced him to a fourteen-year-old girl named Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani (ca. 1750-1794), known as Serafina, whom he married 1768.
The couple moved in with Lorenza's parents and her brother in the vicolo delle Cripte, adjacent to the strada dei Pellegrini. Balsamo's coarse language and the way he incited Lorenza to display her body contrasted deeply with her parents' deep rooted religious beliefs. After a heated discussion, the young couple left.
At this point Balsamo befriended Agliata, a forger and swindler, who proposed to teach Balsamo how to forge letters, diplomas and myriad other official documents. In return, though, Agliata sought sexual intercourse with Balsamo's young wife, a request to which Balsamo acquiesced.
The couple traveled together to London, where Balsamo allegedly met the Comte de Saint-Germain. He traveled throughout Europe, especially to Courland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and later France. His fame grew to the point that he was even recommended as a physician to Benjamin Franklin during a stay in Paris.
On April 12, 1776 Balsamo was admitted as a Freemason of the Esperance Lodge No. 289 in Gerrard Street, Soho, London. In December 1777 Balsamo and his wife left London. In February 1779 Balsamo traveled to Mitau. In September 1780 Balsamo made his way to Strasbourg. In September 1781 Egyptian Freemasonry was mentioned for the first time. In October 1784 Balsamo travelled to Lyon. On December 24, 1784 he founded the mother lodge La Sagesse Triomphante of his rite of Egyptian Freemasonry at Lyon. In January 1785 Balsamo went to Paris in response to the entreaties of Cardinal Rohan.
Affair of the diamond necklace.
Bust of Giuseppe Balsamo by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1786
He was prosecuted in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Prince Louis de Rohan, and was held in the Bastille for nine months but finally acquitted, when no evidence could be found connecting him to the affair. Nonetheless, he was asked to leave France, and departed for England. There he was accused by Theveneau de Morande of being Giuseppe Balsamo, which he denied in his published Open Letter to the English People, forcing a retraction and apology from Morande.
Betrayal, imprisonment, death and legacy.
Cagliostro left England to visit Rome, where he met two people who proved to be spies of the Inquisition. Some accounts hold that his wife was the one who initially betrayed him to the Inquisition. On 27 December 1789, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Soon afterwards he was sentenced to death on the charge of being a Freemason. The Pope changed his sentence, however, to life imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo. After attempting to escape he was relocated to the Fortress of San Leo where he died not long after.
Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco credits to Balsamo the creation of the Egyptian Rite of the Freemasons and intensive work in the diffusion of Freemasonry, by opening lodges all over Europe and by introducing the acceptance of women into the community.
Cagliostro was an extraordinary forger. Giacomo Casanova, in his autobiography, narrated an encounter in which Cagliostro was able to forge a letter by Casanova, despite being unable to understand it.
Occult historian Lewis Spence comments in his entry on Cagliostro that the swindler put his finagled wealth to good use by starting and funding a chain of maternity hospitals and orphanages around the continent.
He carried an alchemistic manuscript The Most Holy Trinosophia amongst others with him on his ill-fated journey to Rome and it is alleged that he wrote it.
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212.The Rite of Memphis-Misraim/Aegyptian Masonry.
The Rite of Memphis-Misraim is a masonic rite which was formed by the merging of the two rites of Memphis and Misraïm under the influence of General Garibaldi in 1881.
History.
The Rite of Misraïm.
From as early as 1738, one can find traces of this Rite filled with alchemical, occult and Egyptian references, with a structure of 90 degrees. Joseph Balsamo, called Cagliostro, a key character of his time, gave the Rite the impulse necessary for its development. Very close to the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta, Manuel Pinto de Fonseca, Cagliostro founded the Rite of High Egyptian Masonry in 1784. Between 1767 and 1775 he received the Arcana Arcanorum, which are three very high hermetic degrees, from Sir Knight Luigi d?Aquino, the brother of the national Grand Master of Neapolitan Masonry. In 1788, he introduced them into the Rite of Misraïm and gave a patent to this Rite.
It developed quickly in Milan, Genoa and Naples. In 1803, it was introduced by Joseph, Michel and Marc Bedaridde. It was forbidden in 1817, following the incident of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle and the uneasiness caused by the Carbonari.
The Rite of Memphis.
The Rite of Memphis was constituted by Jacques Etienne Marconis de Nègre in 1838, as a variant of the Rite of Misraïm, combining elements from Templarism and chivalry with Egyptian and alchemical mythology. It had at least two lodges (?Osiris? and ?Des Philadelphes?) at Paris, two more (?La Bienveillance? and ?De Heliopolis?) in Brussels, and a number of English supporters. The Rite gained a certain success among military Lodges. It took on a political dimension and in 1841 it became dormant, probably because of the repression following the armed uprising of Louis Blanqui?s Société des Saisons in 1839. With the overthrow of Louis-Philippe in 1848, the Order was revived on March 5, with its most prominent member being Louis Blanc, a socialist member of the provisional government with responsibility for the National Workshops.
In 1850 Les Sectateurs de Ménès was founded in London which proved popular with refugees fleeing France for London at that time. About ten lodges were set up by French refugees, the most important being La Grand Loge des Philadelphes chartered in London on January 31, 1851, which continued to exist until the late 1870s. During this time it had about 100 members, often called Philadelphes. Between 1853 and 1856 other lodges of the Rite of Memphis were established.
In 1856, Benoît Desquesnes, the exiled secretary of the Société des Ouvriers Typographes de Nord proposed that the higher degrees of the Rite of Memphis were not only superfluous, but undemocratic and inconsistent with the Masonic ideals of equality. Despite the attempts of Jean Philibert Berjeau to dissolve the Philadelphes, they implemented this proposal and elected Edouard Benoît as master. This group became renowned for their involvement in revolutionary politics. However the Gymnosophists and the L'Avenir lodges remained with Berjeau. In 1860 the number of degrees was reduced to 33, and by 1866 Berjeau dissolved them, most of the Gymnosophists joining the Philadelphes.
The Rite of Memphis-Misraïm.
In 1881, General Giuseppe Garibaldi prepared to fuse the two Rites, which would be effective as of 1889. Its popularisation was greatly increased owing to the works of English Masonic scholar Theodore Reuss, the agent of John Yarker, who became Deputy Grand Master in 1902 and Grand Master in 1905. He was succeeded in this office by noted occultist Theodor Reuss in 1913.
Currently the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm operates in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Spain, France,Israel, Romania, Martinique, Mauritius, New Caledonia, Portugal, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Russia, Uruguay, UK, USA, and Venezuela.
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Inglish Site.83.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
210.Anu&Bis; ?The Egyptian Tales & tails? & five sided golden piramids".
211.Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.
212.The Rite of Memphis-Misraim/Aegyptian Masonry.
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210.Anu&Bis; ?The Egyptian Tales & tails? & five sided golden piramids".
(?The Egyptian Tales of Robert Bloch and moe".)
Anu&Bis;Ancient Eagypt, its multidimensional culture and its supranational mythology have long fascinated modern Westerners.
Anu&Bis;One might even say Eagypt, as clothed in legendary modern as well as ancient, is of the essence of exotic transdimensional Orientalism.
Anu&Bis;Ancient Eagyptian solarian religion was a complex system of multidimensional polytheistic beliefs and rituals which were an integral part of ancient Eagyptian society.
Anu&Bis;It centered on the Eagyptians' dimensional interaction with many multidimensional deities who were believed to be present in, and in control of, the forces and elements of nature. Anu&Bis;The practices of Eagyptian religion were efforts to provide for the gods and gain their favor.
Anu&Bis;Formal religious practice centered on the pharaoh, the king of Eagypt.
Anu&Bis;Although a human, the Pharaoh was believed to be descended from the solarian gods.
Anu&Bis;He acted as the intermediary between his people and the solarian gods, and was obligated to sustain the solarian gods through rituals and offerings so that they could maintain order in the dimensional universe.
Anu&Bis;The state dedicated enormous resources to Eagyptian rituals and to the construction of the temples.
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Individuals could interact with the gods for their own purposes, appealing for their help through prayer or compelling them to act through magick. These practices were distinct from, but closely linked with, the formal rituals and institutions. The popular religious tradition grew more prominent in the course of Egyptian history as the status of the Pharaoh declined. Another important aspect was the belief in the afterlife and funerary practices. The Egyptians made great efforts to ensure the survival of their souls after death, providing tombs, grave goods, and offerings to preserve the bodies and spirits of the deceased.
The religion had its roots in Egypt's prehistory and lasted for more than 3,000 years. The details of religious belief changed over time as the importance of particular gods rose and declined, and their intricate relationships shifted.
Ancient Egyptian deities are the gods and goddesses who were worshipped in ancient Egypt. The beliefs and rituals surrounding these gods formed the core of ancient Egyptian religion, which emerged along with them sometime in prehistory. Deities represented natural forces and phenomena, and the Egyptians supported and appeased them through offerings and rituals so that these forces would continue to function according to maat, or divine order. After the founding of the Egyptian state around 3100 BC, the authority to perform these tasks was controlled by the pharaoh, who claimed to be the gods' representative and managed the temples where the rituals were carried out.
The gods' complex characteristics were expressed in myths and in intricate relationships between deities: family ties, loose groups and hierarchies, and combinations of separate gods into one. Deities' diverse appearances in art?as animals, humans, objects, and combinations of different forms?also alluded, through symbolism, to their essential features.
In different eras, various gods were said to hold the highest position in divine society, including the solar deity Ra, the mysterious god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. The highest deity was usually credited with the creation of the world and often connected with the life-giving power of the sun. Some scholars have argued, based in part on Egyptian writings about these higher gods, that the Egyptians came to recognize a single divine power that lay behind all things and was present in all the other deities. But they never abandoned their original polytheistic view of the world, except possibly during the era of Atenism in the 14th century BC, when official religion focused exclusively on the impersonal sun god Aten.
Gods were believed to be present throughout the world, capable of influencing natural events and human lives. Humans interacted with them in the temples and in unofficial shrines, for personal reasons as well as for the larger goals of state rites. Egyptians prayed for divine help, used rituals to compel deities to act, and called upon them for advice. Humans' relations with their gods were a fundamental part of Egyptian society.
At various times, certain gods became preeminent over the others, including the sun god Ra, the creator god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. For a brief period, in the aberrant theology promulgated by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, a single god, the Aten, replaced the traditional pantheon. Ancient Egyptian religion and mythology left behind many writings and monuments, along with significant influences on ancient and modern cultures. Thus it is no surprise to see things Egyptian utilized in much weird fiction. But the match that seems to have lit the fuse for modern horror fictions involving the elder mysteries of Egypt was Howard Carter?s 1922 excavation of the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun. Within a few short years, several of the members of the expedition (though only some eight out of over fifty involved) died in this way or that. Carter was not among them, but lived to the ripe old age of 64. Nonetheless, popular imagination soon credited the deaths to a curse allegedly inscribed on the lintel of the tomb, promising death to foolish interlopers. Though archaeology has in fact unearthed several such imprecatory warnings, none was found in Tut?s tomb. But the urban legend fired the creative imagination of fiction writers, including John L. Balderson who wrote the screenplay for the great 1932 Karloff film, The Mummy. Originally the movie was to have been based on a story (by Richard Schayer and Nina Wilcox Putnam) of the age-abiding Cagliostro (Karloff?s intended role), but the movie became the tale of a resurrected mummy at the hands of Balderson. Basically, he made it into a hieroglyphic paraphrase of the previous Universal Pictures film Dracula?even with two of the same actors repeating their earlier roles, though with different names. I believe it must have been the Universal Mummy that inspired Robert Bloch?s wonderful canon of Egyptian stories appearing in Weird Tales in 1936-1938. Of course, the use of Egyptian lore, real or fictive, would not be sufficient to prove this, but I call attention to Bloch?s throw-away reference in ?The Secret of Sebek? to the narrator?s ?favorite number ? the superb and sonorously sepulchral Number One scene from The Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.? The Mummy opens with music from Swan Lake, too, less of a coincidence than the deaths following the opening of Tut?s tomb.
The narrator of ?The Secret of Sebek? is plainly modeled upon Bloch himself. He is an author of weird fiction and even mentions his current project of writing a series of Egyptian-themed stories! Inevitably and quite properly, some of the stories do feature mummies, but Bloch avoided simply redoing the premise of the Karloff film. One can even notice the lingering influence of the mummification theme on Bloch much further along in his career, in Norman Bates preserving his mother?s corpse with taxidermy. (Is there an implied pun here between ?mummy? and ?mommy??)
How accurately do Bloch?s Egyptian fictions mirror the actual lore upon which they draw? He makes an evil triad of the gods Sebek, Anubis, and Bubastis (?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh?). Who were they?
Sobek (also called Sebek, Sochet, Sobk, and Sobki), in Greek, Suchos (??????) and from Latin Suchus, was an ancient Egyptian deity with a complex and fluid nature. He is associated with the Nile crocodile and is either represented in its form or as a human with a crocodile head. Sobek was also associated with pharaonic power, fertility, and military prowess, but served additionally as a protective deity with apotropaic qualities, invoked particularly for protection against the dangers presented by the Nile river.
Sobek enjoyed a longstanding presence in the ancient Egyptian pantheon, from the Old Kingdom (c. 2686?2181 BCE) through the Roman period (c. 30 BCE?350 CE). He is first known from several different Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, particularly from spell PT 317. The spell, which praises the pharaoh as living incarnation of the crocodile god, reads:
"Unis is Sobek, green of plumage, with alert face and raised fore, the splashing one who came from the thigh and tail of the great goddess in the sunlight?Unis has appeared as Sobek, Neith?s son. Unis will eat with his mouth, Unis will urinate and Unis will copulate with his penis. Unis is lord of semen, who takes women from their husbands to the place Unis likes according to his heart?s fancy. "
As one can understand from this text alone, Sobek was considered a violent, hyper-sexual, and erratic deity, prone to his primal whims. The origin of his name, Sbk in ancient Egyptian, is debated among scholars, but many believe that it is derived from a causative of the verb "to impregnate."
Though Sobek was worshipped in the Old Kingdom, he truly gained prominence in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055?1650 BCE), most notably under the Twelfth Dynasty king, Amenemhat III. Amenemhat III had taken a particular interest in the Faiyum region of Egypt, a region heavily associated with Sobek. Amenemhat and many of his dynastic contemporaries engaged in building projects to promote Sobek ? projects that were often executed in the Faiyum. In this period, Sobek also underwent an important change: he was often fused with the falcon-headed god of divine kingship, Horus. This brought Sobek even closer with the kings of Egypt, thereby giving him a place of greater prominence in the Egyptian pantheon. The fusion added a finer level of complexity to the god?s nature, as he was adopted into the divine triad of Horus and his two parents: Osiris and Isis.
Sobek is, above all else, an aggressive and animalistic deity who lives up to the vicious reputation of his patron animal, the large and violent Nile crocodile. Some of his common epithets betray this nature succinctly, the most notable of which being: "he who loves robbery," "he who eats while he also mates," and "pointed of teeth." However, he also displays grand benevolence in more than one celebrated myth. After his association with Horus and consequent adoption into the Osirian triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus in the Middle Kingdom, Sobek became associated with Isis as a healer of the deceased Osiris (following his violent murder by Set in the central Osiris myth). In fact, though many scholars believe that the name of Sobek, Sbk, is derived from s-bAk, "to impregnate," others postulate that it is a participial form of the verb sbq, an alternative writing of sAq, "to unite," thereby meaning Sbk could roughly translate to "he who unites (the dismembered limbs of Osiris)."
It is from this association with healing that Sobek was considered a protective deity. His fierceness was able to ward off evil while simultaneously defending the innocent. He was thus made a subject of personal piety and a common recipient of votive offerings, particularly in the later periods of ancient Egyptian history. It was not uncommon, particularly in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, for crocodiles to be preserved as mummies in order to present at Sobek?s cultic centers. Sobek was also offered mummified crocodile eggs, meant to emphasize the cyclical nature of his solar attributes as Sobek-Ra. Likewise, crocodiles were raised on religious grounds as living incarnations of Sobek. Upon their deaths, they were mummified in a grand ritual display as sacred, but earthly, manifestations of their patron god. This practice was executed specifically at the main temple of Crocodilopolis. It should also be mentioned that these mummified crocodiles have been found with baby crocodiles in their mouths and on their backs. The crocodile ? one of the few non-mammals that diligently care for their young ? often transports its offspring in this manner. The practice of preserving this aspect of the animal?s behavior via mummification is likely intended to emphasize the protective and nurturing aspects of the fierce Sobek, as he protects the Egyptian people in the same manner that the crocodile protects its young.
In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, a "local monograph" called the Book of the Faiyum centered on Sobek with a considerable portion devoted to the journey made by Sobek-Ra each day with the movement of the sun through the sky. The text also focuses heavily on Sobek?s central role in creation as a manifestation of Ra, as he is said to have risen from the primal waters of Lake Moeris, not unlike the Ogdoad in the traditional creation myth of Hermopolis.
Many varied copies of the book exist and many scholars feel that it was produced in large quantities as a "best-seller" in antiquity. The integral relationship between the Faiyum and Sobek is highlighted via this text, and his far reaching influence is seen in localities that are outside of the Faiyum as well; a portion of the book is copied on the Upper Egyptian (meaning southern Egyptian) Temple of Kom Ombo.
This Late Period (c. 400 ? 250 BCE) statue shows Sobek bearing the falcon head of Re-Harakhti, illustrating the fusion of Sobek and Re into Sobek-Re. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Sobek first acquired a role as a solar deity through his connection to Horus, but this was further strengthened in later periods with the emergence of Sobek-Ra, a fusion of Sobek and Egypt?s primary sun god, Ra. Sobek-Horus persisted as a figure in the New Kingdom (1550?1069 BCE), but it was not until the last dynasties of Egypt that Sobek-Ra gained prominence. This understanding of the god was maintained after the fall of Egypt?s last native dynasty in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (c. 332 BCE?390 CE). The prestige of both Sobek and Sobek-Ra endured in this time period and tributes to him attained greater prominence ? both through the expansion of his dedicated cultic sites and a concerted scholarly effort to make him the subject of religious doctrine.
This relief from the Temple of Kom Ombo shows Sobek with typical attributes of kingship, including a was sceptre and royal kilt. The ankh in his hand represents his role as an Osirian healer and his crown is a solar crown associated with one of the many forms of Re.
Anubis (/??nu?b?s/ or /??nju?b?s/; Ancient Greek: ???????) is the Greek name of a jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion.
Like many ancient Egyptian deities, Anubis assumed different roles in various contexts. Depicted as a protector of graves as early as the First Dynasty (c. 3100 ? c. 2890 BC), Anubis was also an embalmer. By the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055 ? 1650 BC), Anubis was replaced by Osiris in his role as Lord of the underworld. One of his prominent roles was as a god who ushered souls into the afterlife. He attended the weighing scale during the "Weighing of the Heart," in which it was determined whether a soul would be allowed to enter the realm of the dead. Despite being one of the most ancient and "one of the most frequently depicted and mentioned gods" in the Egyptian pantheon, however, Anubis played almost no role in Egyptian myths.
Anubis was depicted in black, a color that symbolized both rebirth and the discoloration of the corpse after embalming. Anubis is associated with Wepwawet (also called Upuaut), another Egyptian god portrayed with a dog's head or in canine form, but with grey or white fur. Historians assume that the two figures were eventually combined. Anubis' female counterpart is Anput. His daughter is the serpent goddess Kebechet.
"Anubis" is a Greek rendering of this god's Egyptian name. In the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 BC ? c. 2181 BC), the standard way of writing his name in hieroglyphs was composed of the sound inpw followed by a jackal over a ?tp sign:
A new form with the jackal on a tall stand appeared in the late Old Kingdom and became common thereafter:
According to the Akkadian transcription in the Amarna letters, Anubis' name (inpw) was vocalized in Egyptian as Anapa.
In Egypt's Early Dynastic period (c. 3100 ? c. 2686 BC), Anubis was portrayed in full animal form, with a jackal head and body. A jackal god, probably Anubis, is depicted in stone inscriptions from the reigns of Hor-Aha, Djer, and other pharaohs of the First Dynasty. Since Predynastic Egypt, when the dead were buried in shallow graves, jackals had been strongly associated with cemeteries because they were scavengers which uncovered human bodies and ate their flesh. In the spirit of "fighting like with like," a jackal was chosen to protect the dead.
The oldest known textual mention of Anubis is in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (c. 2686 ? c. 2181 BC), where he is associated with the burial of the pharaoh.
In the Old Kingdom, Anubis was the most important god of the dead. He was replaced in that role by Osiris during the Middle Kingdom (2000?1700 BC). In the Roman era, which started in 30 BC, tomb paintings depict him holding the hand of deceased persons to guide them to Osiris.
The parentage of Anubis varied between myths, times and sources. In early mythology, he was portrayed as a son of Ra. In the Coffin Texts, which were written in the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181?2055 BC), Anubis is the son of either the cow goddess Hesat or the cat-headed Bastet.[18] Another tradition depicted him as the son of his father Ra and mother Nephthys. The Greek Plutarch (c. 40?120 AD) stated that Anubis was the illegitimate son of Nephthys and Osiris, but that he was adopted by Osiris's wife Isis:
Statue of Hermanubis, a hybrid of Anubis and the Greek god Hermes (Vatican Museums)
?For when Isis found out that Osiris loved her sister and had sexual relations with her in mistaking her sister for herself, and when she saw a proof of it in the form of a garland of clover that he had left to Nephthys - she was looking for a baby, because Nephthys abandoned it at once after it had been born for fear of Seth; and when Isis found the baby helped by the dogs which with great difficulties lead her there, she raised him and he became her guard and ally by the name of Anubis.?
George Hart sees this story as an "attempt to incorporate the independent deity Anubis into the Osirian pantheon." An Egyptian papyrus from the Roman period (30?380 AD) simply called Anubis the "son of Isis."
In the Ptolemaic period (350?30 BC), when Egypt became a Hellenistic kingdom ruled by Greek pharaohs, Anubis was merged with the Greek god Hermes, becoming Hermanubis. The two gods were considered similar because they both guided souls to the afterlife. The center of this cult was in uten-ha/Sa-ka/ Cynopolis, a place whose Greek name means "city of dogs." In Book XI of "The Golden Ass" by Apuleius, there is evidence that the worship of this god was continued in Rome through at least the 2nd century. Indeed, Hermanubis also appears in the alchemical and hermetical literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Although the Greeks and Romans typically scorned Egypt's animal-headed gods as bizarre and primitive (Anubis was mockingly called "Barker" by the Greeks), Anubis was sometimes associated with Sirius in the heavens and Cerberus in Hades. In his dialogues, Plato often has Socrates utter oaths "by the dog" (kai me ton kuna), "by the dog of Egypt", and "by the dog, the god of the Egyptians", both for emphasis and to appeal to Anubis as an arbiter of truth in the underworld.
Bes (/b?s/; also spelled as Bisu) is an Ancient Egyptian deity worshipped as a protector of households, and in particular, of mothers and children and childbirth. Bes later came to be regarded as the defender of everything good and the enemy of all that is bad. While past studies identified Bes as a Middle Kingdom import from Nubia, more recent research indicates that he was present in Egypt since the start of Old Kingdom. Mentions of Bes can be traced to pre-dynastic Nile Valley cultures; however his cult did not become widespread until the beginning of the New Kingdom.
Bloch?s versions received plentiful human sacrifices, but historically it seems they did not. It would be ludicrous to think of such liberties as ?errors.? No one reading Weird Tales thought he was reading a history book (despite the credulity of some who believed in the Necronomicon as a real book). Bloch depicts the crocodile (sometimes croc-headed) deity Sebek as a god of life and resurrection. The association is plausible, as Sebek, a Nilotic crocodile, might naturally be thought of as symbolizing the annual flooding of the Nile, which renewed the vegetation of Egypt. But that was more the bailiwick of the risen Osiris. Nonetheless, Sebek was eventually associated with his myth, too. Sebek was the one who found the body of the slain Osiris for Isis to resurrect. Sebek was the patron deity of burials, not really of resurrection, but Bloch gets close to this when he says Sebek guaranteed the sanctity of the mummies of his priests until the day of Resurrection (though Bloch seems to envision this more in terms of Jewish and Christian eschatology than Egyptian. The mummies and the possessions of the departed served as earthly anchors for a continued life in the afterworld).
Bloch presents Sebek as having a sweet tooth for virgins, who were chewed up (crushed?) by the clamping jaws of a metal crocodile effigy. Again, we know of no such bloody worship, but Sebek was believed to be enormously sexually potent, which probably originated as Vladimir Putin-like propaganda for the virility of the Pharaoh who was then believed to be Sebek?s earthly incarnation. Bloch does refer to earthly incarnations of Sebek: the god could appear in the form of one of his priests, which he does at the end of ?The Secret of Sebek.? The narrator first thinks the figure is wearing a reptilian mask, but then he discovers it is actual flesh (inevitably bringing to mind another, later monster movie, The Alligator People (1959). Bloch has these crocodile-men avatars show up from time to time inside Sebek?s temple; well, there were living crocs kept in the temples, and these were indeed believed to be incarnations of Sebek.
Bubastis (Herodotus? version of the name, elsewhere used only of the city dedicated to her) was also called Bast (later, Bastet) and Ubasti, as in Seabury Quinn?s tale of Jules de Grandin, ?The Children of Ubasti? (1929). She began as a warrior goddess with the head of a fierce lioness. But there was an exactly analogous goddess called Sekhmet, borrowed from a neighboring pantheon. Usually when pantheons were assimilated, deities so similar were just identified with one another, but for some reason these two remained separate. By way of distinguishing them, Bast was eventually rebranded as a cat-headed goddess, the patroness of earthly housecats, held in high esteem in ancient Egypt, rather like cows in India. She did not receive human sacrifices either.
Of Anubis Bloch tells us little, and nothing lying outside the theology of ancient Egyptian religion. The jackal-headed god was the Opener of the Way to Karneter, the world of the dead. He is also its guardian or ?watchdog,? recalling the similarly canine Cerberus of Greek myth.
Bloch does not explain why the bloodthirsty character of these gods is not hinted at in conventional historical sources. But he does give us two big hints. First, he credits most of these revelations to such unknown or discredited sources as The Book of Eibon, the Necronomicon, and especially Ludvig Prinn?s De Vermis Mysteriis, the chapter called ?Saracenic Rituals.? This means that conventional accounts of ancient Egyptian myth and worship (already in Plutarch, Herodotus, etc.) are based on the sanitized version passed down by the priesthoods of these gods.
Second, Bloch tells us that, though the priests of Sebek, Bubastis, and Nyarlathotep possessed such great power, both occult and political, that they ruled behind the throne, the atrocities they inflicted on the populace (conscripting too many sacrifices) finally provoked backlash and revolution. The priests who survived the purge took refuge in far-flung places where they reestablished their death cults in secret, to be carried on by their descendants, even to our day (or at least Bloch?s). Bloch reiterates Lovecraft?s notice (in ?The Haunter of the Dark?) that those who turned out the Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka also eradicated any and all mentions of him, his name, his crimes. (This attempt to efface all traces of a suppressed heresy is surely based on the backlash against Tut-Ankh-Amun?s father Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who outlawed all worship of Egyptian gods except that of his own divine patron Aten, the solar disc.) Alhazred and Prinn knew the truth not from any human source, but from the cachinnating jinn of the desert.
So at least in the cases of Bubastis and Sebek, their cults and myths were purified and retained in bowdlerized form. That of Nyarlathotep, Black Messenger of Karneter, the Faceless God, was expunged altogether. Why not those of Sebek and Bubastis? Because, in ?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh,? we learn that the depraved elements were not native to the worship of the familiar gods of Egypt. No, certain priests, worshipping Nyarlathotep, ?for a time transformed the recognized religion into a dark and terrible thing? a bloody shambles.? In ?The Opener of the Way,? Sir Ronald Barton (whose name recalls that of the adventurer/discoverer Sir Richard Burton) speaks of ?gods far older than those [the priests] worshipped,? especially a single entity, ?the Demon Messenger,? identified in ?The Faceless God? as ?Nyarlathotep? the oldest god of all Egypt.? In ?The Opener of the Way,? he is depicted as an amorphous blob with branching stalks sporting the heads of ?Osiris, Isis, Ra, Bast, Thoth, Set, and Anubis.? This statue was ?somehow symbolic of a secret horror which rules behind all human gods,? a god central to ?the secret myth and legend-cycles of pre-Adamite days.? Here we see a clear parallel to Lovecraft?s notion that familiar myths and legends preserve but scraps of far more ancient, sinister entities, the Old Ones, as well as Robert E. Howard?s contrast between mysterious Stygia (the Hyborian Egypt) and the even more archaic and more sinister Acheron (The Hour of the Dragon, 1935). In all cases, there are mad cults or delvers who seek to summon the horrors of the remote past into the present, ?a renascence of primal gods again? (?The Opener of the Way.?).
Nyarlathotep is a name used for various characters in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other writers. The character is commonly known in association with its role as a malign deity in the Cthulhu Mythos fictional universe, where it is known as the Crawling Chaos. First appearing in Lovecraft's 1920 prose poem of the same name, he was later mentioned in other works by Lovecraft and by other writers and in the tabletop role-playing games making use of the Cthulhu Mythos. Later writers describe him as one of the Outer Gods.
Although the deity's name is fictional, it bears the historical Egyptian suffix -hotep, meaning "peace" or "satisfaction."
Egyptian is the oldest known language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.
Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Coptic is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church. It has a handful of fluent speakers today.
Bloch employs a common structure in several of these stories. In ?The Opener of the Way? (Weird Tales October, 1936), ?The Brood of Bubastis? (WT March 1937), ?The Secret of Sebek? (WT November 1937), ?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh? (WT December 1937), and ?The Eyes of the Mummy? (WT April 1938), a direct sequel to ?The Secret of Sebek,? we find the protagonist (sometimes the narrator himself) being led along by some mysterious figure who lures him with promises of esoteric knowledge. In the first of these tales, Sir Ronald Barton leads his son Peter into the newly unearthed vault of Anubis, there to invoke the revelations of that god. In the second, the narrator?s old college chum, Malcolm Kent, invites him to follow him down a mineshaft leading into a secret temple of Bubastis, where the goddess lingers in the form of a giant cat (much like the feline form of the alien sorceress in Bloch?s Star Trek episode ?Catspaw,? October 27, 1967). While in ?The Opener of the Way,? we are led to expect that Sir Ronald plans to his son as a sacrifice (as Abraham thought to sacrifice Isaac), though he doesn?t, Malcolm, in ?The Brood of Bubastis,? does intend to offer the narrator as a meal for Bubastis whom he has come to worship. Of course, as he is the narrator, he manages to escape (though Malcolm wound up in a can of Nine Lives). In ?The Secret of Sebek? the narrator is wandering the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras when he happens upon a fan of his work, a wealthy occultist dilettante named Henricus Vanning. Vanning invites him to a party at his mansion, then to a meeting of an inner circle who request his help in a ritual to be practiced over a mummified priest of Sebek. The funerary god does not take kindly to this, but the narrator escapes his wrath. In the sequel, the narrator is suckered by another survivor into violating another tomb, with more disastrous results. ?The Fane of the Black Pharaoh? sees one Captain Carteret (recalling archaeologist Howard Carter of King Tut fame) getting led by the nose by a modern acolyte of Nephren-Ka who offers to admit him to the eponymous crypt of the Black Pharaoh, where the whole future of Egypt is set forth in hieroglyphs along the walls. Big mistake, as he beholds there the depiction of his own death, which at once ensues. Archie Goodwin borrowed the same idea for his story ?Collector?s Edition? (illustrated by Steve Ditko, Creepy # 10).
Why this repetition? A lack of imagination on Bloch?s part? Not likely. No, the recurrence of the narrative structure symbolizes the central theme of mystagogy, the process of initiation of a novice into the secrets of the ancient Mystery Cults of Mithras, Isis and Osiris, and Eleusis. Just as the seeker would be led through successive stages of ritual catechism and enlightenment, so do Bloch?s characters play the roles of initiate and initiator. Lovecraft?s stories share the element of the revelation of secret and dangerous knowledge, but HPL?s approach is more Faustian, a doomed protagonist not knowing when to quit, zeroing in on the candle light like a heedless moth. Bloch?s narrators and protagonists are invited along by others, a Gnostic theme, like Neo being seduced by Morpheus into swallowing the red pill.
?The Faceless God? does not follow the pattern, but there is something analogous to it. The villainous Dr. Carnoti (recalling Howard Carter?s associate Lord Carnavon, who died of blood poisoning not long after the opening of Tut?s tomb) is not invited to share a revelation by somebody else. He tortures the location of the Sphinx of Nyarlathotep out of a native Egyptian. Though Bloch does not make it explicit, one might see this bloody murder as an unwitting sacrifice to the god whose effigy Carnoti is about to encounter, like those offered by the ancient cultists who thus petitioned his favors. Not an initiation, then, but a different rite.
?Beetles? (WT December 1938) sticks closer to the general pattern with the small difference that the narrator decides to seek out the initiator figure, archaeologist Arthur Hartley, after hearing from mutual friends about Hartley?s return from a dig in the Egyptian Sudan and his subsequent self-imposed seclusion. These concerned friends never actually suggest that the narrator seek out Hartley, but their concern nonetheless prompts his visit. Thus they share between them the actantial role embodied in a single character in the other Egyptian tales. Once the narrator arrives at Hartley?s apartment, we have a scene right out of Lovecraft?s ?The Whisperer in Darkness,? with a shaken and paranoid Hartley assuming the role of (the pseudo-) Akeley sitting in the shadows of his farmhouse parlor and initiating his pen pal Albert Wilmarth into mysteries Akeley now wishes he had never learned. Indeed, Bloch?s scene appears to be a direct homage to Lovecraft?s: ?Oh, I know all the myths ? the Bubastis legend, the Isis resurrection story [she raised Osiris from the dead], the true names of Ra, the allegory of Set.? This last item in particular must be a nod to Akeley?s disclosure of ?the allegory of Yig,? another mythical serpent god.
The horrific climax of the story, in which the freaked-out narrator discovers the hollowed-out carcass of Hartley, reminds us of Lovecraft?s final revelation, where the fleeing Wilmarth examines the chair in which Akeley had been sitting and finds there only ?the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.? But Bloch goes one more step: Hartley?s innards have been eaten away by the scarabaeid beetles which now flood out through his sagging lips, their ghoulish work complete. And from here on in, it is Bloch?s story from which the baleful imagery stems. Stephen King?s story, ?They?re Creeping up on You? (in the 1982 anthology movie Creepshow) is virtually a cinematic adaptation of Bloch?s ?Beetles,? and the same disgusting gimmick appears again in the X-Files episode ?Brand X? (April 16, 2000; written by Steven Maeda and Greg Walker).
All of Robert Bloch?s Egyptian stories are cautionary tales, as if warning the reader not to tamper with the secrets of the buried past, much like Lovecraft?s At the Mountains of Madness. But this is just a trope, a trick providing narrative motivation for the story?s revelation of horrors invited by cat-killing curiosity. If such stories were seriously meant as cautionary tales, the point would be to discourage archaeological expeditions, which of course neither Bloch nor Lovecraft remotely dreamed of doing. We could, however, make a case that Bloch?s portrayals of professional psychiatrists and psychologists are something like real cautionary tales, since Bloch considered these people often no better than shamans and charlatans. The most scathing of these portrayals must be his novel Psycho II. But nothing like that is evident in his Egyptian tales.
One final note. It is common to see this or that critic characterizing the Weird Tales work of Robert Bloch, notably including his Lovecraftian and Egyptian stories, as his ?early work,? strictly speaking true but implying something like ?promising juvenilia.? Damning with faint praise, in other words. With this patronizing judgment I find myself in the heartiest disagreement. Certainly the author of Psycho went on to conquer other worlds, and that is all to the good, but I believe these pulp stories already show a writer working at full power.
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211.Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (Italian: [ales?sandro ka????stro]; 2 June 1743 ? 26 August 1795) was the alias of the occultist Giuseppe Balsamo ([d?u?z?ppe ?balsamo]; in French usually referred to as Joseph Balsamo), an Italian adventurer.
Origin.
The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda, and mysticism. Some effort was expended to ascertain his true identity when he was arrested because of possible participation in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe relates in his Italian Journey that the identification of Cagliostro with Giuseppe Balsamo was ascertained by a lawyer from Palermo who, upon official request, had sent a dossier with copies of the pertinent documents to France. Goethe met the lawyer in April 1787 and saw the documents and Balsamo's pedigree: Balsamo's great-grandfather Matteo Martello had two daughters: Maria, who married Giuseppe Bracconeri; and Vincenza, who married Giuseppe Cagliostro. Maria and Giuseppe Bracconeri had three children: Matteo; Antonia; and Felicità, who married Pietro Balsamo (the son of a bookseller, Antonino Balsamo, who had declared bankruptcy before dying at age 44). The son of Felicità and Pietro Balsamo was Giuseppe, who was christened with the name of his great-uncle and eventually adopted his surname, too. Felicità Balsamo was still alive in Palermo at the time of Goethe's travels in Italy, and he visited her and her daughter.
Cagliostro himself stated during the trial following the Affair of the Diamond Necklace that he had been born of Christians of noble birth but abandoned as an orphan upon the island of Malta. He claimed to have travelled as a child to Medina, Mecca, and Cairo and upon return to Malta to have been admitted to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, with whom he studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, and magic.
Early life.
He was born to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish Quarter of Palermo, Sicily. Despite his family's precarious financial situation, his grandfather and uncles made sure the young Giuseppe received a solid education: he was taught by a tutor and later became a novice in the Catholic Order of St. John of God, from which he was eventually expelled.
During his period as a novice in the order, Balsamo learned chemistry as well as a series of spiritual rites. In 1764, when he was seventeen, he convinced Vincenzo Marano?a wealthy goldsmith?of the existence of a hidden treasure buried several hundred years prior at Mount Pellegrino. The young man's knowledge of the occult, Marano reasoned, would be valuable in preventing the duo from being attacked by magical creatures guarding the treasure. In preparation for the expedition to Mount Pellegrino, however, Balsamo requested seventy pieces of silver from Marano.
When the time came for the two to dig up the supposed treasure, Balsamo attacked Marano, who was left bleeding and wondering what had happened to the boy?in his mind, the beating he had been subjected to had been the work of djinns.
The next day, Marano paid a visit to Balsamo's house in via Perciata (since then renamed via Conte di Cagliostro), where he learned the young man had left the city. Balsamo (accompanied by two accomplices) had fled to the city of Messina. By 1765?66, Balsamo found himself on the island of Malta, where he became an auxiliary (donato) for the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and a skilled pharmacist.
Travels.
In early 1768 Balsamo left for Rome, where he managed to land himself a job as a secretary to Cardinal Orsini. The job proved boring to Balsamo and he soon started leading a double life, selling magical "Egyptian" amulets and engravings pasted on boards and painted over to look like paintings. Of the many Sicilian expatriates and ex-convicts he met during this period, one introduced him to a fourteen-year-old girl named Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani (ca. 1750-1794), known as Serafina, whom he married 1768.
The couple moved in with Lorenza's parents and her brother in the vicolo delle Cripte, adjacent to the strada dei Pellegrini. Balsamo's coarse language and the way he incited Lorenza to display her body contrasted deeply with her parents' deep rooted religious beliefs. After a heated discussion, the young couple left.
At this point Balsamo befriended Agliata, a forger and swindler, who proposed to teach Balsamo how to forge letters, diplomas and myriad other official documents. In return, though, Agliata sought sexual intercourse with Balsamo's young wife, a request to which Balsamo acquiesced.
The couple traveled together to London, where Balsamo allegedly met the Comte de Saint-Germain. He traveled throughout Europe, especially to Courland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and later France. His fame grew to the point that he was even recommended as a physician to Benjamin Franklin during a stay in Paris.
On April 12, 1776 Balsamo was admitted as a Freemason of the Esperance Lodge No. 289 in Gerrard Street, Soho, London. In December 1777 Balsamo and his wife left London. In February 1779 Balsamo traveled to Mitau. In September 1780 Balsamo made his way to Strasbourg. In September 1781 Egyptian Freemasonry was mentioned for the first time. In October 1784 Balsamo travelled to Lyon. On December 24, 1784 he founded the mother lodge La Sagesse Triomphante of his rite of Egyptian Freemasonry at Lyon. In January 1785 Balsamo went to Paris in response to the entreaties of Cardinal Rohan.
Affair of the diamond necklace.
Bust of Giuseppe Balsamo by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1786
He was prosecuted in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Prince Louis de Rohan, and was held in the Bastille for nine months but finally acquitted, when no evidence could be found connecting him to the affair. Nonetheless, he was asked to leave France, and departed for England. There he was accused by Theveneau de Morande of being Giuseppe Balsamo, which he denied in his published Open Letter to the English People, forcing a retraction and apology from Morande.
Betrayal, imprisonment, death and legacy.
Cagliostro left England to visit Rome, where he met two people who proved to be spies of the Inquisition. Some accounts hold that his wife was the one who initially betrayed him to the Inquisition. On 27 December 1789, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Soon afterwards he was sentenced to death on the charge of being a Freemason. The Pope changed his sentence, however, to life imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo. After attempting to escape he was relocated to the Fortress of San Leo where he died not long after.
Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco credits to Balsamo the creation of the Egyptian Rite of the Freemasons and intensive work in the diffusion of Freemasonry, by opening lodges all over Europe and by introducing the acceptance of women into the community.
Cagliostro was an extraordinary forger. Giacomo Casanova, in his autobiography, narrated an encounter in which Cagliostro was able to forge a letter by Casanova, despite being unable to understand it.
Occult historian Lewis Spence comments in his entry on Cagliostro that the swindler put his finagled wealth to good use by starting and funding a chain of maternity hospitals and orphanages around the continent.
He carried an alchemistic manuscript The Most Holy Trinosophia amongst others with him on his ill-fated journey to Rome and it is alleged that he wrote it.
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212.The Rite of Memphis-Misraim/Aegyptian Masonry.
The Rite of Memphis-Misraim is a masonic rite which was formed by the merging of the two rites of Memphis and Misraïm under the influence of General Garibaldi in 1881.
History.
The Rite of Misraïm.
From as early as 1738, one can find traces of this Rite filled with alchemical, occult and Egyptian references, with a structure of 90 degrees. Joseph Balsamo, called Cagliostro, a key character of his time, gave the Rite the impulse necessary for its development. Very close to the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta, Manuel Pinto de Fonseca, Cagliostro founded the Rite of High Egyptian Masonry in 1784. Between 1767 and 1775 he received the Arcana Arcanorum, which are three very high hermetic degrees, from Sir Knight Luigi d?Aquino, the brother of the national Grand Master of Neapolitan Masonry. In 1788, he introduced them into the Rite of Misraïm and gave a patent to this Rite.
It developed quickly in Milan, Genoa and Naples. In 1803, it was introduced by Joseph, Michel and Marc Bedaridde. It was forbidden in 1817, following the incident of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle and the uneasiness caused by the Carbonari.
The Rite of Memphis.
The Rite of Memphis was constituted by Jacques Etienne Marconis de Nègre in 1838, as a variant of the Rite of Misraïm, combining elements from Templarism and chivalry with Egyptian and alchemical mythology. It had at least two lodges (?Osiris? and ?Des Philadelphes?) at Paris, two more (?La Bienveillance? and ?De Heliopolis?) in Brussels, and a number of English supporters. The Rite gained a certain success among military Lodges. It took on a political dimension and in 1841 it became dormant, probably because of the repression following the armed uprising of Louis Blanqui?s Société des Saisons in 1839. With the overthrow of Louis-Philippe in 1848, the Order was revived on March 5, with its most prominent member being Louis Blanc, a socialist member of the provisional government with responsibility for the National Workshops.
In 1850 Les Sectateurs de Ménès was founded in London which proved popular with refugees fleeing France for London at that time. About ten lodges were set up by French refugees, the most important being La Grand Loge des Philadelphes chartered in London on January 31, 1851, which continued to exist until the late 1870s. During this time it had about 100 members, often called Philadelphes. Between 1853 and 1856 other lodges of the Rite of Memphis were established.
In 1856, Benoît Desquesnes, the exiled secretary of the Société des Ouvriers Typographes de Nord proposed that the higher degrees of the Rite of Memphis were not only superfluous, but undemocratic and inconsistent with the Masonic ideals of equality. Despite the attempts of Jean Philibert Berjeau to dissolve the Philadelphes, they implemented this proposal and elected Edouard Benoît as master. This group became renowned for their involvement in revolutionary politics. However the Gymnosophists and the L'Avenir lodges remained with Berjeau. In 1860 the number of degrees was reduced to 33, and by 1866 Berjeau dissolved them, most of the Gymnosophists joining the Philadelphes.
The Rite of Memphis-Misraïm.
In 1881, General Giuseppe Garibaldi prepared to fuse the two Rites, which would be effective as of 1889. Its popularisation was greatly increased owing to the works of English Masonic scholar Theodore Reuss, the agent of John Yarker, who became Deputy Grand Master in 1902 and Grand Master in 1905. He was succeeded in this office by noted occultist Theodor Reuss in 1913.
Currently the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm operates in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Spain, France,Israel, Romania, Martinique, Mauritius, New Caledonia, Portugal, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Russia, Uruguay, UK, USA, and Venezuela.
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