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Wednesday 19 April 2023

The Anachronomicon

A sensational find has been announced in a leading bibliographical journal - a book was discovered in the archives of a German family by one Professor Hasburg of the University of Munich. The book has been reliably dated using physical methods to the early 11th century. It is written in three languages - Latin, Arabic and Akkadian, the language of the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian Empires, which was thought to have died out in the 1st Millennium BCE and was not rediscovered until the late 19th century. While the find is largely denounced as a hoax, the scientific support for its veracity is considerable.

Possibilities

1 The human race will not dominate the earth forever. Humankind will be succeeded by an alien race that we would find horrific to behold; a race far more accomplished than our own. Their remote ancestors in our own time have not yet discovered Earth, but our planet presents a rare opportunity for them, as it can be transformed with relative ease to the conditions they require. The Anachronomicon has been sent from the future by their descendents to help them to realise this destiny. It contains rituals that will alert the present members of the race to the presence of humanity and grant them passage across the cosmos. They have used their limited knowledge of human history to prepare the manuscript in the three human languages of which most knowledge has survived into the far future. The anachronistic dating is a result of the stress of time-travel on the material of the book, and small inconsistencies between the results of available dating methods are apparent upon closer examination.

2 From the Latin text, the tome appears to have been written by Giordano Nola, an 11th century Benedictine monk. In the seventh century, a pious young girl called Dymphna was possessed by a Yithian, one of a race of creatures from the distant past who send their minds travelling through time by taking possession of human minds. Usually, they erase all memories of this possession from the minds of their victims, but this particular Yithian was careless. The memories were enough to drive Dymphna mad. For her trials and the strange events surrounding her life, she was later recognised by the Catholic Church as a saint, patron of the insane. Some hundreds of years later, the fingerbone of St Dymphna was held as a sacred relic in the monastery in the care of Giordano Nola. This connection drew him to the attention of the Yithian that had caused St Dymphna’s legendary insanity in the first place. Nola was able to record some of the creature’s memories before being overwhelmed like Dymphna before him.

3 The book is a hoax. Hasburg, a disciple of Nyarlothotep, had found a mainly empty book from the 11th century and created the Anachronomicon from it using his specialist knowledge. His intent is to disseminate the Akkadian writings - Hasburg feels that a controversial tome will receive more attention than a simple discovery, hence the Anachronomicon. The writings contain a hypnotic image, which is being used to recruit experts in ancient languages in order to perform a ritual which will summon Nyarlothotep in his pure form.

Copyright (c) 2001 Barbara Robson and Stuart Barrow


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