I am no closer to finding anything approaching an original copy of any part of the Ars Holistica. Other ancient texts have not been outside my reach. The Lesser Key of Solomon was worthless, although quite intriguing from a historical perspective. The Grimoire of Honorius seems to be a earlier version of the Lesser Key, and thus suggests that both are are best genuine fakes. I am currently reviewing the Bhavagad Gita, and have recovered much of the early writings of Rumi. Others have proven more elusive. Of De Vermis Mysteriis and Liber Ivonis I have found only scraps and references from other authors. I have begun to doubt the veracity of their existence and may be forced to consign them to the same circular file where the great fraud Necronomicon rests. But I push on.
I have found useful information in some classic works, The Voice of the Fire, Liber Null, and other surviving texts of the golden age have served me well. My wife treats my research and experimentation alternately as a quaint philosophical endeavor to keep me busy and as a disturbing obsession whose implications unsettle her. The turning point was her recurring nightmare of the faceless man in the suit that stood ominously at the foot of our bed nightly in her dreams. I correctly identified the spirit as a psychic parasite, feeding off her dreams or fears in the night to sustain itself, and attempted an exorcism using a traditional shamanic method I found in a purported translation of the Xanthu tablets. I was unable to dislodge the being, which seemed to have fused in symbiotic fashion to the inner sanctum of my wife’s mind. I ventured into the Shadowlands and decided that since I could not wrest it free without harming her substantially, I would put the thing to work.
I captured the unnamed spirit and named it XXXXX XXXXXX to bind it into service of myself and my wife. I took a piece of feral ether and domesticated it. I provided it with a less frightening form, a young gentle voiced butler who would serve a guide to my wife in her Shadowlands, her dreamtime. Now the being only returns to its faceless slender form when it serves its other designated purpose, defending my wife’s dreams from other fears and psychic threats. A stray dog is now a guard dog and loyal pet. A parasite is now a symbiote. The whole affair has left my wife impressed with the potential of my research and unsettled by the implications. She listens politely and occasionally asks questions, but no longer engages my in conversation regarding my latest findings.
So much was lost, and so much potential remains untapped. But I push on.
Having been researching the Liber Paginarum Fulvarum, which supposedly drives men mad. Supposedly one man managed to read the whole Liber Paginarum Fulvarum and was never seen again. Apparently the book became several pages thicker after this occurred. I doubt much of the veracity of these reports, information can warp so far as time stretches out from the original point of creation. But I feel as though the story may contain a grain of truth. In my experimentation suggests that one cannot practice magick without contributing to magick. Magick seems unavoidably intertwined with storytelling, with language, with meaning and metaphor. And a magician cannot practice magick without use of language, without telling their own story.
As I seek the Ars Holistica, my Holy Grail, I find myself realizing that my own exploration is weaving itself into the story of the tome itself. The magick is language and my quest for language has created new language, my quest for story has created new story. Which is more important? My writing about the Ars Holistica or the Ars Holistica itself? People have told me that the Ars Holistica may be fictional, like the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and the Song of Seven or the Infinity Codex or the Necronomicon. I don’t believe that, and doesn’t belief power a magician’s work?
From my recent readings of Bhagavad Gita:
yaj jñātvā na punar moham
evaḿ yāsyasi pāṇḍava
yena bhūtāny aśeṣāṇi
drakṣyasy ātmany atho mayi
The document I recovered translates the passage as follows: Having obtained real knowledge from a self-realized soul, you will never fall again into such illusion, for by this knowledge you will see that all living beings are but part of the Supreme, or, in other words, that they are Mine.
But when I tried to translate this myself, the passage seemed different.
yat jñātvā na punaḥ moham evam yāsyasi; pāṇḍava
which knowing never again illusion like this, you shall- O son of Pandu
yena bhūtāny aśeṣāṇi drakṣyasy ātmany atho mayi
by which living entities, all you will see the supreme soul, in other words, me
Perhaps my ability to interpret the language in insufficient compared to the translation I found, but I feel as though the translation I found seems to shoehorn in a great deal of assumptions and cultural baggage that is no present in the text.
I am struck by a comparison with a Translation I found of Rumi “Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.”
And yet, so much of the Ancient European and North American loves the form and flower of language and symbol. My copy of the Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century advises that practitioner …the exorcist, being prepared with the pentacles of Solomon, the two seals of the earth, and other necessaries, he must bind upon the top of his wand, a bundle of St. John’s wort (milies perforatum), with the head of an owl; and, having repaired to the spot where the corpse of the self-murderer lies… How could the ancient practitioner of Europe use these things and get results, while the ancient practitioner of India or China felt that such things were impediments?
Perhaps they are seeking different things?
I have my first lead of note! I have found references in the Jericho University Library to the Ars Holistica having been the subject of an in depth study by one Victor Jaspaul St. Pierre nearly a hundred years ago! He compiled his study into a book called the Holistic Companion, which is cheeky in it’s wordplay. The Holistic Companion includes numerous sections transcribed wholesale from the Ars Holistica! It’s the best lead I have thus far and have taking the liberty of duplicating the sections following this entry for my own future reference.
Based on my preliminary review of the sections preserved in the Holistic Companion, I can see why the Ars Holistica was so shocking when it first appeared. The book is somehow far more extensive in what is to be considered magick, and yet the work seems to be entirely naturalist in philosophy… how can magick by non-supernatural in nature and yet encompass all of reality?
Furthermore, St. Pierre candidly admits that he only ever recovered about half of the original text of the Ars Holistica. The remainder of the Holistic Companion concerns itself with St. Pierre’s expedition to the Misty Island to recover the incomplete copy of the Ars Holistica that he used for the writing of the Holistic Companion.
Jericho University records indicate that St. Pierre was committed to a Sanitarium fice years after completing the Holistic Companion. I consulted with the Jericho Sanitarium . There records indicate that St. Pierre kept insisting that what he was suffering from was ‘false’ insanity. Naturally, they didn’t release St. Pierre based on his insistence that his insanity wasn’t ‘true’ insanity. In fact St. Pierre died in the Sanitarium. he apparently became more and more unhinged- although I wonder how much his time in the sanitarium contributed to that? He also meditated daily right up until his final year in the sanitarium. But he never left that horrible building.
I’m unsure how to approach this, but I push on.
How strange. The Archmage seems not to be the author of the Ars Holistica Companion. Apparently his student pulled a version of Plato’s trick with “the Republic”. Modern Scholars seem to think that the Archmage never existed or that he never found the Ars Holistica. His student Clive Barrows is generally suspected to be the actual author, although Barrows never achieved the rank of archmage in any mystical tradition. Probably why he used his teacher’s name, pad the credibility. But this does raise the question, can the tales be trusted?
Still, Josephine says that she thinks the whole thing is worth investigating. She says she studied briefly under Barrows, and that although the guy wasn’t formally ranked with any order, he was still very good at what he did. Josephine also thinks St. Pierre was a real guy, based on her interactions with Barrows.
So, lot’s of conflicting information. But as R.A. Wilson used to say, “Don’t trust anything that doesn’t make you laugh.”
Or was that Spider Jerusalem?
Josephine has delayed the trip to the East Coast to look for Ars Holsitica. (that’s Archmage Josephine Malla, I just realized I hadn’t identified her in the other entries, how will my legacy look if I don’t name my teacher?) One of Josephine’s other students- Genevieve Cheung has sent a request for assistance up from the Blasted lands in the South. Apparently she found a city that’s not on any map and doesn’t match the cultures that used to live there. It’s a distraction, but I understand the excitement.
There wasn’t much in the letter. It arrived by pony and was vague to the point of being obtuse about basic nouns. I suspect that Genie was concerned that rivals might intercept the letter, and if that’s so then this must be a spectacular find indeed.
We should be underway by the end of the week.
We are underway. Traveling through the Blasted Southlands. Most of the land is barren, the Fall practically salted the earth. People just don’t learn, I suppose. Humanity had to see the Fall coming. I mean the name makes it sound sudden, but the historical accounts describe something slow and ominous a spreading death where people dug their own graves and prayed that they were digging gardens. They had to have seen it.
But when we passed through the ruins of Albuquerque, I saw cracked driveways with the rusted corpses of cars still in those driveways. Cars! The kind that ran on oil! People had used them right to the end. It makes no sense. I guess the world they chose to see didn’t match the world that they were making. What did they think they were doing to the world? Pumping that much carbon into the air, killing so many foundation species, spewing poison across seven continents, what did they think the result would be? How does a whole culture live inside such an insane shared delusion? Couldn’t anyone see the looming apocalypse? Or did the group consensus shout them down?
We’ll pass through the ruins of Truth or Consequences later today. It seems appropriate.
We’ve passed in to what was once the Chihuahua region of Mexico. We’re still in the desert regions, but will make our way southwest to the Highlands soon. That’s where Cheung found her phantom city. The dry heat here creates mirages. Several porters have run off in search of lakes that they were screaming about and had to be forcibly stopped. Water rations are, of course, low- but not unreasonably so. I think people fear the possibility of running out, more than they are hurt when something actually runs out. The story we tell ourselves seems to hurt or harm us more than the actual event.
That said, one poor porter ran straight across a South American Rattlesnake as he charged towards an illusory lake and the snake (crotalus durissus) bit him. Venomous Pit Viper, much different venom response than from the bite of a North American Rattlesnake. The poor man suffered progressive paralysis that spread throughout his body. He began to notice distortions in his hearing and soon went blind. I told him fables of an non-existent anti-venom that I claimed we had administered, after he went blind in a paralyzed limb. He would recover I told him, reasoning that this lie might help him muster the mental energy to help his body fight the venom. And if he died, my lie would have comforted him in final moments I hoped. He did seem cheered by my fable, and mustered his last strength, but could not seem to sustain it. Further, the paralysis was not a stiffening of the limbs but a very unnerving loosening of the muscles. He slowly went limp as a rag doll and had increasing trouble speaking and eventually breathing. In the end he suffocated to death, and no story I told him could prevent the snake’s venom from ending his life.
I’ve not watched a man die right before me prior to this. The priests tell me that the soul is reincarnated and comes back to try again until it achieves Buddha nature. The Catholics tell me that the soul goes to heaven to sit beside their Jesus in the afterlife- blissful for eternity. But in that man’s slowly dying body, I saw no soul. I saw a machine made from muscle, bone and sinew- running on a fuel base of oxygen and sugar. I saw a organic mechanism slowly lose function and break. I saw no soul, only the frantic increasingly malfunctioning flailing of a meat sack powered by chemical lightning. What comfort is there is that? Is the lie better for the comfort it brings? But the porter is still dead.
And I am reduced to calling this man who lived and died in front of me: The Porter, because I never before thought to ask his name.
We have reached Cheung’s basecamp, situated in a small Tarahumara village named Amador. The village is predominantly a cinnabar red with a dirty linen white and the occasional accents of corn yellow and obsidian black and lapis lazuli blue. There is a hum of trilled Rs and shushing sounds in the Spanish spoken here. We were expected and the whole village seemed ready to meet us. Outwardly they appeared friendly, but I could not help but notice that there was a tension in their welcome as we entered. People stood stiff, faces were hard, even when smiling. Cheung’s expedition has either not made friends or has done something of which the local disapprove. I mentioned this quietly to Josephine as we shared a welcome meal of cornmeal mush and some milky alcoholic beverage with a sour taste. Josephine indicated that she would watch, but that she suspected I was over worrying.
I watched the faces of the locals in the fire light that same evening. They do not trust us. Cheung indicated that the site is less than a mile away, but that the locals will not let her set up camp at the city itself. The city apparently arrived centuries ago. According to the stories, it was not their when the villagers went to sleep, and was there when they woke up. Nobody who has explored it has ever come out alive, or at all in fact. Cheung had to bribe the village with a great deal of wealth from the expedition to be allowed to explore the ruins at all- not currency mind you, but guns and machetes and compasses and the like. The locals use a barter economy, everyone knows everyone and IOUs are stored by collective memory and enforced by social shaming. As such, our silver and copper coins are only interesting to them as jewelry. This has forced me to think of the idea of money. It is a measure of value, but it only has value to a person who is a part of the story where that money has value. It literally has value because we say it does.
Tomorrow we will head into the ruins to see what the fuss is about. I am sure that it our continued exploration of the ruins that has worried them. We have purchase their tolerance of our behavior. Behavior that must seem incredibly reckless to the locals given their history with the ruins. I wonder how long this purchased tolerance will last?
I don’t know what set them off. That sounds wrong, like they’re children or pets or livestock. I don’t know what misunderstanding provoked the local’s outrage. I certainly know that they didn’t want us poking around in the strange city. I know that, despite Cheung’s promises that they would let us work, the locals were extremely tense and nervous to a degree that left me uncomfortable. The city itself distracted me, or I’d like to think I might have noticed and been able to prevent the exchange the ruined everything. But the city, compassionate Buddha, the city! It’s an American City, as in the old United States of America- from before the Fall. And I don’t mean that the buildings were done in the style of a Pre-Fall American City. I mean that all evidence suggests- apart from the obvious geographic discrepancy- that this is the city of Arkham, Massachusetts. This is the home of the Miskatonic University! The goal of Archmage St. Pierre. I cannot imagine that this is a coincidence. It makes no sense. But nothing makes sense here.
The Majority of the villagers here are Tarahumara, noted for preferring not to fight. But the shifting sands of post Fall climate has pushed disparate groups together, and I recognized a second group amidst the first: The Zetas. Not a true ethnic group, like the Tarahumara, the Zetas are a neo-tribal group formed after the Fall from surviving members of Los Zetas Drug Cartel. Now a warrior culture with a kind of heroic mythology based upon a grossly romanticized history of their pre-fall origins, the Zetas acted as a kind of Warrior caste within the more gentle Tarahumara. I suspect it was conflict with the Zetas was the cause of the conflict. The Zetas, I dealt with before everything went wrong seemed quite honorable and I quite respected them. It is strange to think of these heroic men and women as descending from drug dealers and human traffickers. But I imagine that the Kings of the Old World would not look so noble if we could view them without the lens of history in the way.
Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that history was merely an agreed upon lie? In any event, the expedition continued without major incident for nearly two weeks. The locals, especially the elders, were becoming ever more nervous about our activities. Josephine and Cheung weren’t oblivious to the rising tensions, and tried to placate and bribe as best they could. Whatever the locals’ concern, they must have known we would stumble across it eventually. Did they think that we would just leave alone whatever mysterious concern they had about the city? They didn’t tell Josephine or I. Perhaps they told Cheung, and she didn’t think to tell us. I suspect however, that they simply assumed we would understand the danger for ourselves. I suspect that they couldn’t imagine that we might view this city as anything other than an highly dangerous taboo location to avoid wherever possible. I suspect that we see what we expect to see and we assume that others see the same world as we. This expedition has been a lesson in the error of such assumptions.
Josephine is dead. Cheung is holed up in the village council room with the remaining porters and mercenaries, guns bristling out every window as the Zetas lay siege, We were better armed than the locals, although not so much better armed that they could not fight back- thanks to how we were forced to do business with them. Still when the initial argument between our translator Angelo Murano and the representative of the Zetas escalated into a physical altercation and then to a knife fight, our side was able to quickly overwhelm the locals with firearms and a willingness to use them. I do not think this is something of which we should be proud, many of the casualties were unarmed when the bodies were examined. And the counterattack, when it came, was silent and without mercy. Josephine made the mistake of assuming the Zetas would still be interested in negotiation. They weren’t. They did not attack en masse, but struck quickly from the shadows, picking off members of the expedition one by one. With Angelo and Josephine dead, nobody could speak the local dialect well enough to even surrender- and I doubt they would have listened.
When the final attack came, a coordinated series of silent strikes, I was cut off from the rest of the expedition as they retreated to the council hall. Realizing I was out in the open with no defense save my Allegheny Model .38 Special Revolver, I ran for the only location I could be confident that they would not enter: the displaced city of Arkham. I would hope to justify the conflict as one of self-defense, but I doubt that others will see it that way. I now sit in amidst the ruins of Pre-Fall New England architecture in the midst of the Mexican Highlands trying to make sense of my plight and find a way home.
I am an idiot. I am a blithering moron. I have found the library of the Miskatonic University and at the doors to the library I have found a raft of dead bodies at the doors to the Library. These men and women, all local and all shamans or spirit workers of some sort judging from their rotted garb, have clearly committed suicide. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that they ritually sacrificed themselves, likely to empower the wards that they have painted on the doors and windows to the library. I am not versed in the local magickal tradition, but the intent is clear- these are wards against entry and almost certainly are laced with curses to prevent or dissuade entry. This is what they feared. The Miskatonic was rumored to have many ancient eldritch manuscripts such as the Book of Eibon, the Book of Iod, De Vermis Mysteriis, Liber Ivonis, supposedly even a copy of The King in Yellow and, course, the John Dee translation of the legendary Necronomicon. I can only assume that this is what provoked the conflict. They realized that we would transgress their wards and brave their curses, things that these men and women of their people had died to empower and protect. We would drag into the light, dark secrets which they had sacrificed in order to contain.
And now, I feel obligated to prove their fears correct.
Here I am, after all. and so many of mine are dead, and so much has been lost. But this is where Archmage St. Pierre quested, this is where the Ars Holistica is supposed to rest. But I must pass through the wards, and although I do not know the sigils or their meaning, I can sense their power, and I need to slip their effects somehow. I wonder if I can create a shell, an armor of my ignorance. Magick is irrevocably tied to language, after all. Perhaps I can make my incomprehension of the wards into an armor, a disbelief in their effects. Armor myself in denial and march through the grisly tableau as though it were a Sticktown cafe.
I must try.
I am not alone. I do not know how the man entered the library. He is a local boy, apprentice to the Shaman of the village. I recognize him from early interactions, although I never met him directly. The boy must have had another entrance, where I don’t know. But somehow he entered the library without disturbing the wards that I had to traverse. He is injured, several bullet wounds in the arms and legs. The boy was ridiculously luck, none of the bullets lodged in his body, the shape of the wounds suggest that he was running away when shot.
I encountered him at the librarian’s desk in the entrance of the library. He was shaking from loss of blood (and likely terror of the place where he now stood), but he held me off with an obsidian ceremonial knife and an Ehrenfeld 9mm pistol he undoubtedly obtain from us. He spoke some English and some Northern Spanish, enough to warn me off coming any closer. In fits and starts he made clear to me that he would die before allowing me to release the dark secrets of this place.
And then he collapsed from shock and blood loss.
I will attempt to tend his wounds, and hope my minimal first aid skills are up to the task, though he may try to kill me should I succeed. I cannot do otherwise. We have destroyed this village, and these people’s lives. I must do what I can. I doubt that I can ever forgive myself for my part in this tragedy.
The dreams! Compassionate Buddha, the dreams are enough to drive me mad. Trapped in a horrible parody of the neighborhood in Sticktown where I was raised, I wandered through impossibly large gates like the great gates of Chinatown in old sunken San Fransisco. Guided by a black hound made of the night itself, so cold my hand turned blue if I tried to touch it, I wandered through crumbled and ruined temples into the Miskatonic Library. There the books pulled themselves open and great horrors rent themselves loose from the books. A great grey insectile Alien monster with hungry mandibles loomed behind me at the corner of my vision, great masses of wings and tentacles wrapped in shadows and wreathed in smoke and fire poured from the pages of the ancient tomes lodged on the rotting shelves that surrounded me. The young apprentice screamed at me in his own dialect and though I could not understand the words, I knew his meaning without any doubt.
“You did this.” His words screamed at me in a language I could not understand.
“You did this!”
The dreams will not stop. The boy himself if doing little better. I have cleaned his wounds with my personal first aid kit and the anti-septic swabs (and some of the vodka from my flask when the swab ran out) and the last of the water in my water bottle, bottled with a fire made from books of tax law (I doubt anyone will care for this book burning). The boy has a fever, but he seems to be recovering. He sleeps fitfully, and has yet to wake fully these past three days. I worry that I he may not wake at all. I would not wish to be trapped in that dreamland I visit these nights. And from his disturbed sleep, I suspect that visits the same dreamlands as I.
I wish I had never come here.
How to begin? Such things have happened!
The dreams grew worse and worse. Soon I could not sleep. As such, my fatigue began to cause me to see the dreams as I stood awake, and the line between the Shadowlands and the Bonelands blurred even more. I could not tell what was false and what was true. I could not trust my own perceptions. Finally, as tentacles wrapped around my ankles, and I fought to convince myself that I was hallucinating them only, finally then I had a mad idea.
I picked up the apprentice from the Librarian desk where he lay covered in fluttering leathery wings that I hoped desperately were merely my sleep deprived mind. I carried him carefully back out the front door, through the wards and curses and lay him at the front steps. He woke at this point, and groggily asked me three times what I was doing, first in his own dialect, then in Northern Spanish, finally in English. I told him I was dealing with the evil permanently and marched back through the wards. He screamed that I should not face such darkness alone, but would not cross the wards himself and clearly was not well enough to sneak back through his secret entrance.
I emptied out my flask of its remaining vodka onto a pile of paper torn from random books and put my lighter to the pile. The flames seemed to spread too quickly, greedily devouring the aging paper. I marched myself through the screaming phantoms and monstrous tentacles and wings and lingering mist, and snatched volume after volume of famous or infamous books and threw them onto the spreading blaze. I could not tell how much of the smoke and fire was real and how much was hallucinate, which complicated matters, but I strove to consign all the dark manuscripts of the library to said fire. It must be said that I was perhaps too invested in this activity and not as cautious about my inability to distinguish fantasy from reality at this critical juncture. Several times during my ordeal I noticed that my coat was smoldering or outright ablaze and had to stop to put out the flames. In retrospect this might have warned a more prudent man that the fires were becoming more real than phantom, but I remained blissfully unaware. Perhaps blissful in the wrong word. I was stoically invested in my work, it had become holy work in my mind and I had unwittingly committed myself to complete it no matter the cost. By the time I noticed that my fire now blocked my escape through the warded front doors, it was too late.
I considered my fate and continued shoveling forbidden volumes into the fire, though by this point my actions were largely irrelevant. The Library would burn. I began to worry about the highland forests then, but there was little I could do. I consigned myself to my death and began, for the first time in a long time to chant the sutras and attempt to feebly in my last moments taken refuge in the Buddha. And then again, I heard the shouts of the apprentice in broken English. He had crawled back through his secret entrance and now, with me again carrying him, he directed me back through a series of narrow hallways to an opening in the wall hidden by a fallen bookshelf which led us out of the library and into the fresh air. I expressed, as best I could, my fear that the forest would burn. The apprentice shook his head and pointed out that the exterior of the buildings were soaked and mossy and only the inner library was likely to burn.
We climbed a hill on the opposite side of Arkham as the apprentice’s village and watched the fire. Sure enough, The fire burnt itself out in just a few hours, choking on lack of oxygen in the collapsed building and stopped by the dampness of the exterior walls. I was relieved, and said as much to my erstwhile rescuer. The apprentice for his part said that I had redeemed myself with my actions, and by taking such treacherous actions myself had done great service to the village, far greater than the damage done by my colleagues.
I must confess, that looking at the apprentice’s wounds, and thinking of the bloodshed probably still underway in the village I did not agree. But is was heartening to hear it.
But the greatest shock was yet to come. The apprentice asked about the expedition and its purpose and why we would go digging in such a dangerous place through such dangerous secrets. I explained the tale of Archmage St. Pierre and his quest and the Ars Holistica. This excited the apprentice. He indicated that book I described was not dark knowledge, but the foundational to true insight into the nature of the Shaman’s vision. He then directed me to a hut deeper in forests, clearly the working office of a shaman or witch doctor. Once inside, he levered himself on a reed mat and began searching through a shelf of boxes and bowls and books and finally produced a small pile of notebooks that were in dangers of falling apart from moisture damage. But the identity of the books was unmistakable: these were the surviving fragments of St. Pierre’s journals!
I do not know how I will return home. I do not know if any other than myself survived from the expedition. I do know that I am not the man who left Sticktown, he died in that blaze. I am somebody else. I must now discover who that is.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 