The Anachronomicon
Stuart Barrow and Barbara Robson
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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