THE DARK MESSENGER
by John Beal


Nyarlathotep
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark one to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard:
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he had chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.
H.P. Lovecraft.

The above poem is from H.P. Lovecraft's sonnet cycle, The Fungi From Yuggoth, which he completed on January 4, 1930. On closer inspection of the poem, I recalled some information in Robert Bloch's story, The Faceless God which may shed some light on this cryptic verse.

Bloch writes; "(Nyarlathotep) was the oldest god of all Egypt; of all the world. He was the god of resurrection, and the Black Messenger of Karneter. There was a legend that one day he would arise and bring the olden dead back to life."

This seems to connect with the first stanza of the poem, mentioning his re-emergence in Egypt and presenting his message, which goes unheeded, but seems in both to imply the resurgence of the Cthulhu Cultus.

Bloch continues:... "In the North the ice-flow melted, and Atlantis fell. New peoples overran the land, but the desert folk remained." (The Serpent-people in The Nameless City?) "They viewed the building of the pyramids with amused and cynical eyes. Wait, they counselled. When the day arrived at last, Nyarlathotep again would come out of the desert, and then woe unto Egypt! For the pyramids would shatter into dust, and temples crumble to ruin."

It continues in a most apocalyptic manner, expressing Nyarlathotep's evocation as the signal for the time when: 'The stars would change in a most peculiar way, so that the Great Old Ones could come from the Outer Gulf."

A title of Nyarlathotep is 'The Crawling Chaos', this image can be likened to a fractal model of a bifurcating geometric pattern. Fractal geometry is produced between dimensions, and thus the crawling chaos could be represented by a fractal image such as a fungal conglomeration which cryptically infests the universe we live in and the 'Outer Gulf of Kenneth Grant's Universe B, branching mycelium every so often fruiting and sporing, sending messengers to spread its clandestine, unspoken word. The lines by Lovecraft; "Throngs spread around, frantic for his commands, but leaving, could not tell what they had heard;" could relate to the Aeon of Maat, the wordless Aeon. Nyarlathotep in this role would equate with Aiwaz in relation to the messenger of the aeon 'behind' the aeon of Horus - Aiwaz' counterpart or double. In the glossary to Outside The Circles Of Time, Kenneth Grant says of Horus-Maat, "The double current which fuses the Aeons of Horus and Maat thus opening the Gate for the return of the Great Old Ones". Grant also states in The Magical Revival, that Crowley ranked Aiwaz as "ancient among the Ancient Ones... even in the land of Sumer", again equating Aiwaz with Nyarlathotep as "the oldest god of all Egypt and of all the world."

Lovecraft's idea of the noxious sea birth could compare to many ancient legends such as Atlantis, Lemuria and Thule, as well as his own myth of R'lyeh, all of which, in the final epoch, shall resurface and reclaim their dominions.

In the double of Aiwaz/Nyarlathotep, there is another interesting chaos theory image - that of the strange attractor/repulsor. A system which when modelled I imagine to look similar to a double helix, connected by devil polymers across the apparent central void. (The double helix shape - because of both Nyarlathoteps and Aiwaz' roles as messengers - equating them with Mercury and thus the caduceus).

To explain, a strange attractor is a series of possibilities which are present in a given system. According to Mandlebrot in The Fractal Geometry Of Nature, a strange repulsor is all the possibilities which do not fall within the attractor. Since it is unlikely, for example, for snow to fall in the Sahara, this would be a point on the repulsor. However, the two are obviously joined because it is probable over vast aeons, or by man's intervention, to produce effects in the attractor which would have normally been located on the repulsor, i.e. the ice-age and the greenhouse effect. Thus there are seemingly invisible links, devil polymers between the two systems caused by what Lorenz's successors termed 'the Butterfly effect' - something apparently insignificant changing things on a grand scale. If, however, the events are cataclysmic enough, then it is theoretically possible for the repulsor and attractor to change places, going perhaps from the chaotic systems of today to the stagnant order of Ragnorok's frozen world's-end, or the Biblical fire-and-brimstone conflagration.

The idea of Nyarlathotep being, "the crawling chaos that howls beyond the stars... surrounded by idiot flute players," is also interesting; perhaps the flute players are playing fractal music, for example the nocturnal sound of insects or 'Al Azif', believed to be the howling of demons, is a fractal noise as are the sound of the wind and the irregular beating of cardial fibrillation. In Cults Of The Shadow, Grant says of Choronzon that, "Its number 333 is that of Shugal, 'The Howler', whose types are the jackal and the fox, both emblematic of Set... The abode of Choronzon is in the desert of the Abyss beyond the pylon of Daath." This connects Nyarlathotep to Choronzon through the symbols of the Howling Guardian/Opener of the Way in the desert of the Abyss.

Taking Grant's idea of 'Universe A and B' as strange attractor and repulsor, creates a most interesting model to work with. For example, the Universe A attractor being designed like the Tree of Life, and the Universe B repulsor constituting the Tunnels of Set. Thus they are linked in Daath by Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos, in this model portraying a devil polymer itself in and between universes A and B.

Using a sigil designed from the name Nyarlathotep I investigated the Cthulhu mythos deity through dream working. On the first night, that of 13th April 1990, nothing of consequence occurred. The next day however, around 7a.m. I received a sudden vision of kraken limbs rearing up in the air.

That night I had a very interesting dream. The dream began with me driving along a moorland road. After driving through a red light in a tiny hamlet, I turned down a desolate road. The car skidded to a halt at the top of a precipitous, fog-filled ravine. Then I heard the statement; "Nyarlathotep is 'the Dreamer"' and an eye glyph appeared before me, with the pupil and iris half obscured by the upper lid. Lines came from the centre of each lid, descending from the lower lid and ascending from the upper, both joining curved lines around the eye. Associated with the glyph was a pervading stench of putrefaction.

At this point the kraken tentacles crossed before my vision and I awoke with a sudden lurch as if from a deep slumber.

After returning to sleep I saw the word KANZD in vivid, fiery letters in the air above the abyss. I thought in the dream that the word revolved around the letter N, or Nun. Then, when the word disappeared, I found myself at the bottom of the ravine beside an amorphous, black, colossal form. It had recognisable 'appendages' protruding from its surface which included human torsos; bald-headed, night-sky-black men. The heads of the men were totally featureless, and the black colossus was ingesting them and expelling them continually, like a huge female Surinam Toad. (This animal has a peculiar method of caring for its young, the spawn sinks through the skin on its back then, when fully developed, little toads emerge.)

High above, on the edge of the ravine, I caught a glimpse of a winged figure which I believed to be a Nightgaunt. It threw a screaming woman head over heels as a sacrifice to the colossus, then with claws outstretched its featureless head peered after the descending figure. With a sense of great relief I realised that I was invisible to both the winged-creature and the amorphous colossus.

Upon awakening I began to investigate the symbols and words of the dream. I quickly found relevant information in Crowley's Liber 777 on the letter Nun, in which he states its meaning as; "a fish, a symbol of the death force of scorpio, generation through putrefaction." Thus a connection is made with the Cthulhu Mythos, through the scorpion which symbolises Cthonic regions, and also with the dream imagery, relating to the stench of the colossus and the birthing of the black men. Using gematria the entire word yielded three numbers which I believe are of importance. Two of these numbers were 562 and 13, KANZD (500+1+50�7+4 = 562, and 5+6+2 = 13).

The number 562 corresponds to the word Primordial, whilst the number 13 corresponds to; Unity, Emptiness, A City of Edom, and the message: He shall come.

These words seem of relevance to Nyarlathotep in the following ways: 'Primordial' is a word associated with Nyarlathotep's role as the oldest god of all Egypt. The word 'Emptiness' is provocative of the voidal abyss in which Nyarlathotep resides as the Crawling Chaos, whereas a City of Edom could relate to the Nameless City wherein the Serpent-people dwell awaiting his return, predicted by the message, "He shall come."

The word 'Unity' relates to the next number I obtained through a numerological method which I now realise is erroneous. However, as a purely intuitive method I stand by its results as being perhaps more important than the previous two equations. I obtained the number 22 through a self-created version of the Aiq Bekar method (5+1+5+7+4=22).

This number connects the idea of unity with the Tarot card Justice. In Liber 777 Crowley states that the number suggests; "the completion of imperfection," and "finality, and fatal finality", phrases with which I immediately began to perceive a link between Nyarlathotep and the Greek messenger goddess Nemesis. Other correspondences gave clearer evidence for my initial connection, for example the number also implies "The daughter of the Lords of Truth. The ruler of the Balance" and an even more straightforward connection appears in Crowley's statement that the number represents:

"Nemesis the ultimate automatic Justice of Nature."

This phrase was interesting in the light of Dr Richard Muller's 'Nemesis Theory", where he proposes that a dark companion star to the sun upon entering the Oort comet cloud, showers the inner solar system with comets approximately every 26 million years, thus causing the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period. Dr Muller has given the star (which has yet to be discovered) the name Nemesis, the avenging messenger of the gods, bringing retribution to the presumptuous. The discovery in the boundary layers between where mass extinctions occurred and younger rock strata of crystals called Tektites also links to the idea in Lovecraft's story, The Haunter Of The Dark of The Shining Trapezohedron, a crystal used to send messages across "the horrible abyss of radiance."

In the same story Lovecraft writes that spectators thought they glimpsed "something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like speed towards the east," imagery very reminiscent of the Nemesis theory. The main character of the story Robert Blake says upon observing the objects descent; "What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the shape of a man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets." This excerpt implies a connection between Nyarlathotep and the Nemesis star, which casts meteor-like destruction from the comet-cloud or black planets. Lovecraft used a segment of his poem entitled Nemesis to introduce the story which reads:

I have seen the dark Universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim - where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

This section of the poem seems to portray the Oort cloud as the black planets, untouched by the suns rays and thus unknown, unnamed and unheeded. Another section of the same poem seems to relate directly to Nyarlathotep as the most Ancient god of all Egypt, and connects Nemesis to the frozen North lands where as previously cited Robert Bloch says; "the ice-flows melted and Atlantis fell."

I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
The Jewel-deck'd throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy,
dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic Isle.


Thus Lovecraft himself seems to have connected Nyarlathotep and Nemesis in his poems of the same names. In a further section of the poem Nemesis, there appears a description of Nyarlathotep as the Crawling Chaos inhabiting the void:

Thro the ghoul guarded gateways of slumber,
past the wan-moond abysses of night,
I have liv'd o'er my lifes without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek 'ere the daybreak,
being driven to madness with fright.


In The Dreamquest Of Uuknown Kadath Nyarlathotep the "Yellow masked" is regarded as the "horror of infinite shapes and dread souls" and is creator of a maze filled with "madness and the voids wild vengeance," which are his "only gifts to the presumptuous", which again connects him with the role that Nemesis fulfils in Greek mythology.

Returning to the number 22 again, it is interesting that it also relates to Crowley's Liber 418, The Vision And The Voice in which I found many interesting statements one of which foreshadows Bloch's phrase in The Faceless God where he speaks of the destruction of the Pyramids and Temples, and of when the stars are right for the return of the Old Ones. In Liber 418 Crowley says that; "The Obelisks are broken; the stars have rushed together: the light hath plunged into the abyss: the Heavens are mixed with Hell."

In Liber 777 the number 22 also corresponds to the phrases: "A man, dark, yet delicious of countenance", and "A dark man, in his right hand a spear and laurel branch and in his left a book", both perfect descriptions of Nyarlathotep as the dark messenger. This last description is also interesting due to its striking similarity to the generally accepted persona of the ancient god Mithras, a God which I believe also connects to Nyarlathotep/Nemesis. The final correspondence of the number 22 as meaning a 'Human-faced bull' connects the number to the constellation Taurus and thus to Aldebaran, the follower of the seven sister stars the Pleiades.

Originally the name Aldebaran was given to the entire cluster of the Hyades, another set of seven sister stars. The first link between any of the Cthulhu mythos deities and Aldebaran came in Robert W. Chamber's The King In Yellow where it was said to be the bright twin of the dark star, home of Hastur. It is also regarded by August Derleth as the star where some of the Cthulhu deities emanated from. In this respect it is interesting to quote from The Whisperer In Darkness by Lovecraft; "To Nyarlathotep, mighty messenger must all things be told. And he shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides and come down from the world of seven suns to mock..." Perhaps Hastur, the King in Yellow, is one of Nyarlathotep's "thousand other forms", since in the story, The Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath Nyarlathotep is, as mentioned previously, described as wearing a "Yellow mask." Whilst in the story; The Crawling Chaos by H.P.Lovecraft and Elizabeth Berkeley, the destruction of the Earth is seen by a being on "Cetharion of the Seven Suns".

Returning briefly once more to the realm of fractal geometry, it is interesting to note that John Dewey Jones in his stories about 'The Amygdalan Sects' writes of a fraternity which use the red glowing Aldebaran as a meditation aid to 'fractal/chaos gnosis'.

Aldebaran was once one of the main stars which made up the ancient constellation of Mithras, consisting of the modern Taurus and Perseus. E. O. James in the book, The Ancient Gods states that Mithras was "the mediator between the celestial powers and the human race" thus connecting this deity with the role of Nyarlathotep/Nemesis. Equally the generally acknowledged appearance of the deity is of a figure holding a spear, a 'shield' or wheel of fortune on which all the stars are emblazoned, and a cloak which is symbolic of the real heavens, whose fate Mithras mediated. The figure is similar to the descriptions both of Nyarlathotep as the black messenger described previously, and also to the image of Nemesis, who according to Robert Graves in "The White Goddess" in her role as Diana of the woods held a staff in one hand and a wheel of fortune in the other, to show that she is the destroyer of the old year and the instigator of the new. Thus the wheel of fortune and other imagery seems to connect all three deities.

In The Haunter Of The Dark, Nyarlathotep forecasts that "When the stars are right", then the old ones shall rise once more. Richard L. Tierney in his work, When The Stars Are Right connects the rising and sinking of R'lyeh through astrological charts to that section of the heavens specifically containing Aldebaran and The Hyades. Quoting from Ptolemy he states that Aldebaran "has the same temperament of (sic) Mars", probably due to its red colour and the fact that it is regarded as the eye of the bull. This is interesting due to the constellation of Mithras containing the 'evil-eye' stars Aldebaran (The Follower) and Algol (The Ghoul).

In the December 1989 issue of "Scientific American" there appeared an article by David Ulansey entitled The Mithras Mysteries, in which he proposes that the Mithraic Cult was based on the realisation that "the acceptance of astrology led to a growing belief that the true dwelling place of the gods was in the realm of the stars." Mithras he contends, had power over the changing Aeons of time, controlling the rotating constellations on the Celestial Equator. He was associated with Taurus because around the time of the initial Mithras Cult (4200 - 2000 BC) Taurus was beginning its descent as the symbol of the Aeon, being replace in the procession through time and space by Aries. Thus, Mithras as the controller of the Aeons, has the power to produce the moment "when the stars are right", being able to destroy the old Aeon and introduce the new. Thus all three deities turn the wheel so that it will, to quote Robert Graves in The White Goddess when speaking of Nemesis, "one day come full circle and vengeance be exacted on the sinner."