The Grimoire Inspired by a Children’s Book written by a Sex Pest: Var Von Brennos’ Gravelording

Long time readers of Nocturnal Revelries may recall an era (mostly 2018 – 2019) when the blog focused on strange grimoires of black magic. Most of these books are boring garbage, and I don’t read many anymore, but occasionally I come across something that piques my curiosity. Such was the case when I found a copy of a book called Gravelording by Var Von Brennos. What the Hell is Gravelording? The book in question was short, so I decided to find out.

Gravelording – Var Von Brennos

Gravelording is becoming a Lord of a Graveyard. Being a Gravelord allows one to converse with the dead and to order them around to do ones bidding. To become a Gravelord takes a huge amount of time and effort, and I am entirely certain the process outlined in this book has never been carried out by any human being. The basic idea is that you spend your nights in a Graveyard and limit your sleep and food intake to bring you closer to death. There’s also instructions on how to make a wand, how to open a Ghoul Gate, and how to reanimate a corpse. The reanimation part is very vague about why you would want to do so.

Most of the book is written in deliberately archaic English, but Var Von Brennos occasionally lapses into the vernacular and tells his readers not to be sloppy (when exhuming corpses from abandoned graveyards).

I enjoyed reading this book for the most part. It reads like something out of a horror story. It advocates the kind of behaviour that you’d expect from a ghoul. This is not surprising considering the fact that the only webpage I can find that discusses the author claims that his background is in Lovecraftian Sorcery. My only real critique of this book is that it seems to be creepiness for the sake of creepiness. The whole concept of this book is so far away from anything that a normal person would ever want to do that it almost felt like a prop book from the set of a horror movie. If I’m wrong about this, I’d love to hear from any true Gravelords out there.

When I got to the end of the book, I glanced through the bibliography and saw some old friends. There, beside the works of Lovecraft were listed Leilah Wendell’s The Necromantic Ritual Book and Liber Falxifer. There were a few other grimoires listed and a book by Neil Gaiman called The Graveyard Book. This caught my eye as I had actually glanced through a copy of the graphic novel version of Gaiman’s book on that very same day. I’d been meaning to read something by Gaiman for a while, so I decided to give it a look. One does not ignore such synchronicities! Once I started reading The Graveyard Book, Gravelording began to make a lot more sense.

The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman

**Harper Collins – 2018 (First published 2008)**

The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod Owens, a child who grows up in an abandoned graveyard after his parents are murdered. He converses with the dead, travels through Ghoul Gates and has the spirits of the dead protect and empower him. It’s a book written for 9-12 year old children, but it has clearly been a huge inspiration on Von Brennos’ work of sinister black magic. Some of the magical incantations in his grimoire are directly lifted from Gaiman’s novel.

Some panels from the graphic novel version of *The Graveyard Book* and some lines from *Gravelording*.

So, to tell the truth, I actually haven’t finished The Graveyard Book yet. I’m listening to the audiobook, and I still have a few chapters left. I’m a bit annoyed though because I was really enjoying the book, and I googled it to see what age group it was initially aimed at. I saw that this book is currently in the news because Disney have just stopped a movie version being produced. Apparently Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual misconduct by 5 different women. Now I obviously don’t know the ins out outs of Gaiman’s sex life, but from what I have read, he does seem to have been quite the creep. This is quite disappointing. Still though, The Graveyard Book is an enjoyable read. If you want to check it out, make sure you pirate a copy so you’re not giving any money to Greasy Gaiman.

Aliens are Demonic Soul Suckers that are Feeding Disinformation to the US Government

Final Events and the Secret Government Group on UFOs and the Afterlife – Nick Redfern

Aliens are not extraterrestrials, they are demons that were set loose by Jack Parsons, and they are trying to bring about the end of the world. (They may also be harvesting human souls.) The Collins Elite, a top secret group within the United States government know about this, and they have been working for decades to make sure this doesn’t happen. (Then again, it is possible that all of the information they have been given/putting out has been disinformation. They may unwittingly aid Satan in bringing about the apocalypse.)

There’s some novel details in here, but the basic premise behind this book (that aliens are demons) is one I have encountered a few times before. The most surprising element of Final Events is that its intended audience seems to be conspiracy nuts and fans of Forteana rather than just evangelical Christians (unlike Bob Larson’s UFO book and Basil Tyson’s UFOs Satanic Terror. The problem is that if you don’t believe in Jesus-hating demons, none of this seems remotely convincing. If you’re not a Christian, there’s no real threat being presented, and all of the people claiming that Aliens are Satan’s henchmen just seem like idiots. Redfern doesn’t come across as preachy, but it does feel like he is trying to frighten his Christian readers. I suppose that is a noble thing to do.

I know that the US government has put money into researching bizarre ideas, and I’m sure there’s some military guys who do think that aliens are evil, but this is clearly a book of bullshit. It’s not even a case of misinterpretations either. Most of this was obviously just made up. I’m not saying that Redfern made it up himself, but if he didn’t, his sources definitely did. The guy who put him onto this story was a priest who had been approached by members of the ultra-secretive Collins Elite. I liked the first few chapters, but after a while it got a little boring. Many of the sources it references are absolute tripe too. It discusses both the work of Kurt Koch and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. It also mentions last week’s book, the bizarre Round Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. Seeing all these titles mentioned alongside the work of my old friends, Whitley Strieber and Aleister Crowley, was fun. It’s nice to know that there are other people out there who spend their time reading this stuff.

Final Events didn’t exactly blow me away, but I enjoyed reading it. I am quite sure that I’ll be reading more books by Nick Redfern in the future. Apparently he has one in which he claims that the alien bodies found at Roswell were actually those of progeria patients. LOL. Definitely checking that one out soon.

Did the Zodiac Killer Clean his Dildos?

I’ve been planning on reading Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac for a while. I’ve gotten into weirdo true-crime books recently, and this is the book that served as the basis for the 2007 movie of the same name. The Zodiac killer, in case you don’t know, was a freak who killed 5 people over the course of a year and then spent 5 years writing threatening and bizarre letters to newspapers. For one of the attacks, he wore an executioner’s hood with his weird symbol sewn onto it. He claimed to have killed 37 people, but there is no proof that his kill count was this high. His letters boasted of collecting souls to serve as his slaves in the afterlife, and some of these letters were written in code. One of these codes was only cracked a few years ago. This guy was a real weirdo. Robert Graysmith was a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the newspapers that received Zodiac’s first letters. He followed the case as it progressed and kept researching it for years after the Zodiac stopped sending letters.

**Berkley Books – 1987 (First published 1986)**

Zodiac lays out the facts of the case and focuses on pinning the blame on one particular subject, Bob Hall Star. Bob Hall Star is a pseudonym for Arthur Leigh Allen. Allen was the only person named by police as a Zodiac suspect. He was in the areas when the murders took place, he had bloody knives in his car on the day of one of the killings, he told his friends that he planned to become a killer named the Zodiac, and bombs were found in his house. Nobody was ever able to prove that he was the Zodiac, but it was proven that he molested children and didn’t wash his dildos after shoving them up his own ass.

“Several large, uncleaned dildos rolled out at his feet.” – Zodiac Unmasked: Chapter 8

I’m not convinced that Arthur Leigh Allen was definitely the Zodiac, but I really enjoyed this book. It’s well researched non-fiction, but it has a strong narrative, and it almost felt like a novel. I also really liked the movie that was based on it. You should definitely watch that if you haven’t.

So Zodiac was published in 1986, but Arthur Leigh Allen was still free at that time, and nobody had been charged in the Zodiac case. In 2002, Graysmith put out a second book on the Zodiac case containing information that came to light after his first book had been published.

**Berkley Books – 2003 (First published 2002)**

Zodiac Unmasked is roughly twice as long as the first book. It’s not nearly as entertaining. The narrative structure and suspense have been replaced with meticulous, repetitive and sometimes boring detail. While the first book reads like a novel, the second feels like a vendetta. Robert Graysmith was certain that Allen was the killer.

I think that Arthur Leigh Allen was a disgusting human and a good suspect, but his handwriting and DNA didn’t match that found on the Zodiac artefacts. It’s certainly possible that he found a a way to make that happen, but it’s also possible that he was just an attention seeking creep who enjoyed the notoriety that came with being a suspect.

The first book sold millions of copies. It’s tells an interesting story. The second book merely presents more evidence to believe that story and will only be interesting to people who are already super interested in the Zodiac case. While the movie was based on both books, only a few scenes in the movie are based on parts of the second book. Admittedly, my favourite scene, the interrogation of the suspect, is taken from Zodiac Unmasked.

One of the most interesting parts from Zodiac Unmasked was the description of stuff that was found in Arthur Leigh Allen’s House after he died. The police found child-porn, bombs, guns and a video cassette. They weren’t allowed watch the video until they got special permission, but they were hoping that it might contain a confession or perhaps even footage of one of the Zodiac murders. When they got the permission and finally watched the tape, it was a video of Arthur Leigh Allen mooning the camera.

The Zodiac and Arthur Lee Allen, AKA The Dirty Dildo Boys

While it wasn’t as good as the first book, I still quite enjoyed Zodiac Unmasked. I listened to an audiobook version, and I found its repetitive nature quite soothing. It was the perfect thing to listen to before falling asleep. There are other books on the Zodiac Killer, and I may well read them in the future. It really is a fascinating case.

Cliff R. Stevens’ How To Attain Anything You Want Through Mind Visualisations!

I was originally planning to post about a different book today, but then I discovered a 600 page sequel that I felt I should read before posting about it, so I had to read something quick to get a post done on time for the weekend. I haven’t had to resort to reading anything from Finbarr in almost a year, and I know that I probably say this every time, but I genuinely think this was the worst one yet.

The general idea here is that if you think about getting the things you want, you will get them. The message of this book is dumb, but the amount of effort put into pushing this message is minimal. Cliff R. Stevens treats his readers like the morons they definitely are. I have summarised the entire text below.

If you want to get a thing, you must really want the thing. This is 2/3s of the work.
For 10 minutes after work and 10 minutes before bed, think of getting the thing you want. If this approach doesn’t work it’s your fault. Don’t blame the Occult.

Don’t give up, and don’t be dirty and visualise somebody else’s wife. Also, don’t worry about this approach working or not because doubts interfere with the magnetism of your desires. Unfortunately, this approach might not work well with personal health problems because they cloud the mind and interfere with visualisation. It’s ok to visualize material things because God wants us to have things. that’s why he made them.

There you have it. Pure crap. The only part of this book that I found easy to swallow was when the author stated:

Ne’er a truer word spoken.

There’s Psychic Aliens on the Moon (and they have nice boobs): Ingo Swann’s Penetration

Ingo Swann was one of the big names in the development of remote viewing. One of the characters in the movie version of The Men who Stare at Goats is based on him, and he did actually work with the American government on bizarre military projects attempting to harness psychic power.

Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy – Ingo Swann

This book, published in 1998, tells of how Ingo was approached by a weirdo named “Axelrod” in the early 1970s to work on a top secret project. Axelrod may have been a US government agent, a Russian spy or maybe even an alien. If I remember correctly, Ingo drew Axelrod’s attention by boasting of visiting Jupiter with his mind. Anyways, once he agreed to join the project, Ingo was kidnapped by a weird set of twins (possibly clones or aliens) and taken to a secret location. Then Axelrod gave him some coordinates on the dark side of the moon and Ingo visited them (in his mind). There were aliens up there, and they were able to see Ingo even though his body was actually on Earth. Ingo came back pretty quickly once he had been spotted.

After this, Ingo went home and got back to work. This was the kind of thing that happened to him regularly, and he actually completely forgot about it until he saw a really sexy lady in a grocery store a few years later. He walked closer to her to get a better look at her boobs (really), and then saw the weird twins that had kidnapped him for Axelrod a few years prior. Once he saw them, he realised that the sexy lady was actually an alien, so he ran away.

He was contacted by Axelrod shortly after, and they arranged to meet up again. Axelrod flew him up to Alaska to show him a UFO. The UFO almost killed them with a death-ray, but they hid behind a rock and managed to escape.

The rest of the book presents Swann’s arguments for the moon being an alien spaceship. Ever wonder why we stopped going there in the early 70s? It’s because NASA knows it’s full of aliens. There’s a lot of nonsense about government cover-ups and conspiracies. They don’t want us to know the moon is full of aliens, and they really, really don’t want us to know that we all have psychic powers.

This is stupid garbage. The bullshit story at the beginning was moderately entertaining, but the spew at the end was pure diarrhea. It’s sad to think that there’s twats out there who take this kind of crap seriously. I wouldn’t normally allow myself to read a book about remote viewing, but the cover and title of this one made it hard to resist. Not only does the book fail to keep the promises made by the cover image and titillating title, but it also completely fails to answer the question that makes up the subtitle of the book. The notion of telepathy between extraterrestrials and human is barely touched upon. Swann wrote another book on “psychic sexuality” that I considered reading for a laugh, but I don’t think I’ll bother.

Jim Keith’s Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History

This is a book of texts that the government and the mainstream media didn’t want you to see! I use the past tense there because the stuff in here is very dated. It’s a Feral House compilation job, similar in style to Apocalypse Culture. I’ve had copies of the Apocalypse Culture books for years, but I’ve never read through either from start to finish because I don’t want to read the paedo-stuff. (Both books contain essays from real creeps.) I only read Secret and Suppressed because it contains “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism”, an extended version of James Shelby Downard’s Kill King 33° essay which was originally published in the first edition of Apocalypse Culture. The second edition of Apocalypse Culture replaced Kill King 33° with “The Call to Chaos: From Adam to Atom by Way of the Jornada del Muerto”, another piece by Downard. The second volume of Apocalypse Culture contains an entirely separate essay by Downard called “America, The Possessed Corpse”.

While “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism” is a longer version of the “Kill King 33°” essay in Apocalypse Culture, it’s actually not quite as long as the document titled “Kill King 33°: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy”. This document was co-written by our old pal Michael A. Hoffman II. This contains a few more details than the version in Secret and Suppressed. These extra details deal with stuff from Downard’s autobiography.

Honestly, all versions of this essay are truly ridiculous nonsense. The main idea is that JFK was assassinated by the Freemasons. The proof for this lies in the spellings of certain words and how they might be translated, some numerological nonsense, and some not-so-coincidental coincidences. Apparently the three tramps, the ones photographed in the park after JFK was killed, represent 3 of the characters in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s 1949 absurdist play. Godot, the character who never shows up in that play, is obviously JFK. This play was written 14 years before Kennedy’s assassination. I assume Samuel Beckett was a member of the Illuminati to have this kind of foreknowledge. Later on, Downard points out that the guy who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s alleged assassin, was named Jack Ruby. RUBY! Ruby slippers! Ruby slippers send you home. Jack Ruby sent Lee Harvey Oswald home! This has been there the whole time, and we didn’t notice it! WAKE UP!!!

Honestly, I was planning on doing a more in depth post on the writing’s of James Shelby Downard, but this has been enough. He was either a very insane person or a CIA psyop to make conspiracists look crazy.

Here’s a recap of the other pieces in Secret and Suppressed:

Essay	Author	Notes
My Father Is a Clone	Gary Stollman	This was really cool. In 1987, a crazy man got into a TV studio, put a gun to the newsreader’s head and made him read out a diatribe about the CIA, aliens and his replacement father. Cool.
An Open Letter to the Swedish Prime Minster From a Survivor of Electromagnetic Terror	Robert Naeslund	This dude believed he was a victim of a mind control experiment. Boring.
Remote Mind Control Technology	Anna Keeler	Unreadable technical writing about mind control technology. Barely skimmed this one. Probably all true, but I’m not really interested.
Is Paranoia A Form of Awareness?	Kerry W. Thornley	The dude who knew Lee Harvey Oswald and created Discordianim reflects on conspiracy theories.
Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism	James Shelby Downard	Discussed above.
Subliminal Images in Oliver Stone’s JFK	Dean Grace	A list of what the title describes. I haven’t seen that movie in years. I didn’t rewatch to check the list. Maybe I will when I am old and have more free time.
Terminator III	Associated Press	Newspaper articles about racist games that were available in the early 1990s. It’s surprising how naive people were about the insidious ways we would come to use technology.
The Masonic Ripper	Jim Keith	Jack the Ripper was a freemason. I came across this idea in Alan Moore’s From Hell. I assume it’s originally from another book.
The Erotic Freemasonry of Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf	Tim O’Neill	There once was a mason named Nick, He liked others to play with his…
Rumors, Myths and Urban Legends Surrounding the Death of Jim Morrison	Thomas Lyttle	I thought Jim Morrison was cool when I was 15. I become less interested in him as each year passes.
The Last Testament of Rev. Jim Jones	Jim Jones	This is a transcription of the Jonestown Death Tape. I had heard this recording before, but not since becoming a parent. I was able to read this, but I couldn’t listen to the recording of the babies screaming while their parents murdered them. Too much.
The Black Hole of Guyana	John Judge	This essay posits that the People’s Temple commune was a CIA experiment. I reckon it’s easier for some people to believe that a faceless government organisation would be capable of committing such an atrocity than any one specific person. Jim Jones was a real cunt.
Behold, A Pale Horse A Draft of Danny Casolaro’s Octopus Manuscript Proposal	Kenn Thomas	I am planning on reading Thomas’s book about the Octopus and Danny Casolaro soon.
Why Waco?	Ken Fawcett	The Waco tragedy was deliberate. Duh.
An Invitation to War	Ambassador April Glaspie & Saddam Hussein	American diplomat encouraging Saddam to start a war.
Inside the Irish Republican Army	Scott Smith	Scott Smith interviews an Irish freedom fighter. Brits out.
Recipes for Nonsurvival: The Anarchist Cookbook	Esperanze Godot	The Anarchist Cookbook is designed to kill the Anarchists who try to make its recipes. I remember getting a pdf of the anarchist’s cookbook when I was a kid. It was very disappointing. Never tried anything from it.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars		This is the document that somebody left in a photocopier than William Milton Cooper published in his Behold a Pale Horse
Secrets from the Vatican Library		This is a very long, boring document that claims that the bad jews kill children and drink their blood. There are good jews too, but it’s never discussed how to tell them apart.
AIDS: Act of God or the Pentagon?		When I was a kid, I was told that AIDS started when a man shagged a monkey. This story claims otherwise. I am not convinved.
“Clinton is the best guy for us”		Some American guy working for a pro-Israel organisation boasts about his political power.
Exposing the Nazi International		A neo nazi describes his relationship with Otto Skorzeny, a Nazi soldier who faked his own death. Boring and probably all bullshit.

Secret and Suppressed was a fairly interesting read. A lot of really fucked up things have happened since it was published though, and the paranoia that this book attempts to induce is widespread at this point. I think a lot of the claims made in this book are inaccurate, but I believe that things are just as bad as it makes them out to be.

Charlie Returns: The Shadow Over Santa Susana

I went a bit mad on books about Charles Manson last year. I remember seeing this book at the time, but I had had a little too much Charlie, so I put it off. Recently, I have been reading about James Shelby Downard, and any amount of research on that chap will bring you to a writer called Adam Gorightly. I was searching for a copy of Gorightly’s book about Downard, and I remembered that Gorightly had written a book about Manson.

The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control, and the Manson Family Mythos – Adam Gorightly

Gorightly doesn’t really push any specific theory of what happened, and in truth, there wasn’t a huge amount in here that I haven’t come across before. The Helter Skelter hypothesis is covered, but Gorightly also hints at some of the ideas that Tom O’Neill would later explore in Chaos. Mae Brussell, a name I recently became familiar with during my research on the Gemstone File, popped up a few times in here. She claimed that Manson was a CIA pawn used in an attempt to destroy 1960s counterculture. He was just another patsy like Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. At this point I would be surprised by any book dealing in conspiracies that doesn’t somehow drag in JFK.

Gorightly is a Discordian and counterculture kinda guy, and I found the tone of the book to be quite similar to Sanders’ The Family. The Shadow was written at a much later date though, and it includes much on what happened after the trial. It gets into the Son of Sam connection and even the Hand of Death cult that Henry Lee Lucas was a part of. I’m planning to do a detailed post in the future on the Son of Sam/Manson connection. I know that connection is probably made up, but I’ve come across it in quite a few different books now.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this book was how it made me feel. It was comforting to come back to the Manson case, almost like meeting some old friends for coffee. I’ve been planning to read the revised version of Nikolas Schreck’s Manson book for a while, but now I reckon I’ll save it for the next time I have the blues. The Shadow Over Santa Susana would be pretty good for somebody who didn’t know much about the Manson story, but it was also pretty good for me as a refresher.

Was the Author of this Trashy Horror Novel a Satanist? Bernard King and Aubrey Melech: Blood Circle and Missa Niger

When I saw the cover of this book, I knew I’d have to read it. I picked it up a few months ago, but it opens with a quote from another book called Missa Niger: La Messe Noire, and when I looked that book up, I decided to do it before starting on Blood Circle. I read it and wrote a post about Missa Niger, but shortly before publishing it I discovered something intriguing and had to go back to read Blood Circle too.

Blood Circle is a nasty horror novel. That cover is not misleading. It’s brutal, sadistic and bloody.

Andrea, a teenage girl, goes to pick some herbs at night, but when she’s out, she runs into a Satanic ceremony where a virgin is being deflowered. Andrea, also a virgin, gets very horny and starts masturbating. Later on in life, she becomes very successful, but the guy who she saw performing the satanic ceremony goes on a killing spree. One thing leads to another and it becomes apparent that they’re going to be reunited pretty quickly. If I go into much more detail, I’ll ruin the story, but I can say that this is extremely nasty stuff. There’s really disgusting parts of this book. Somebody shits on a cross, somebody else fucks their own child, and several people are slowly skinned alive. I was genuinely a bit surprised at how damned unpleasant this book was.

I really dislike when authors use song lyrics as part of their writing. I don’t mean when they use a lyric as an opening for a chapter, although that does suck. I mean when they actually put the words of the song that the character is listening to into their text. It’s such a lame thing to do, and whenever I see it, I assume it’s because the author was listening to that song at the time. Stephen King does this quite often. It’s embarrassing and unnecessary. Bernard King chooses to do this with one of his characters. He has him listening to Vigilante by a band called Magnum. I hadn’t heard this song before, so I checked it out. Terrible. King describes this as “good strong music” and as having a “powerful sound”. Haha. It’s pure shit.

Blood Circle is pretty good. The author clearly had a good idea of what he was talking about. I liked that the ending wasn’t happy, and there were a few plot twists that actually surprised me. The writing was alright, but the book is only 300 pages and it took me a week to finish. It wasn’t one of those “I can’t wait for the next chapter” kind of novels. I’d say you’ll probably enjoy it if you are a sadistic, satanic pervert.

Ok, so let’s get back to this interesting Missa Niger book that’s quoted at the beginning of Blood Circle. Bernard King also thanks the author, one Aubrey Melech, for allowing him to quote from that book and for helping in his research. He follows this with a brief note about how some of the events described in Blood Circle may actually be happening.

Missa Niger: La Messe Noire, A True and Factual account of the principal ritual of Satanic worship The Black Mass – Aubrey Melech

This book claims to be the actual script for a black mass. A mere 500 copies were published in 1986, and at that time, the only other printed version of a Black Mass had appeared in Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals. Melech acknowledges this in Missa Niger but claims that his text is more authentic.

In truth, there’s not much in here that I haven’t come across many times before. This is a fairly tame rendition of the black mass. It includes blasphemy and desecration of the Host, but it steers clear of human sacrifice. I suppose the one feature that stood out to me was the inclusion of an altar girl. A kid attends the mass, pisses in a cup and then the priest splashes the audience with the wee. Honestly, if I was conducting an infernal ritual, I’d leave this part out.

This is also a very short book. It’s about 70 pages long, but most of these are taken up with the Latin version of the mass with the English translation on the opposite page. It’s the kind of thing you’d easily read in one sitting.

In the introduction, the author claims that he is publishing this text for scholarly purposes and not for people to use. I can’t believe that anyone would be that naïve, but on closer research it seems that his motivation to put this out may have been even more sinister. There are people out there who believe he did it purely to make money!

A Satanic internet nerd (and I mean that with sincere respect and admiration) compared the two texts and wrote a detailed analysis of them. They are supposedly so similar that it seems probable that they either came from the same document or that Melech plagiarized LaVey’s text. This guy goes on to claim that Missa Niger was created and published by Melech (who is just a pseudonym for Bernard King) to coincide with the release of Angel Heart, the movie version of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, a novel about Satanist that features scenes of a Black Mass. He believes that King created the text at the behest of Alan Parker, the film’s director. In The Lure of the Sinister, The Unnatural History of Satanism, the author, Gareth Medway, claims that Bernard King is Aubrey Melech. He says that he confronted King about this and that King said Melech was a Satanic friend, but apparently other people confirmed to Medway that King and Melech were the same person. Medway notes that King is an Odinist rather than a Satanist and suggests that the publishing of the Missa Niger text wasn’t an entirely sincere undertaking. This idea is bolstered by the other books that King put out. Most of his novels are mythological fantasy stuff and his non-fiction books are all about Runes. I was a little disappointed by this. I had hoped that Bernard King was a devout Satanist using his books to spread a doctrine of evil.

I enjoyed reading both of these books, but my favourite part of writing this post was reading the stuff on the Synagoga Satanae website from 2002. I genuinely miss the days of angelfire websites. I only hope that people will be looking back on my website in 20 years time.

Who is Harry Angel? William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel and Angel’s Inferno

I’ve been doing a lot of non-fiction recently, so here’s a couple of novels about the Devil:

Falling Angel

**Warner Books – 1986 (First published 1978)**

Falling Angel is a classic. There’s at least 70 editions of the book, and it was turned into a big Hollywood movie in the 80s with Robert DeNiro and Mickey Rourke. I’ve had a copy on my bookshelf for a long time, but I only sat down to read it recently. It was great. I had seen the movie years ago, and I had an idea where it was going, but I still found the book very suspenseful and very enjoyable.

Harry Angel is a private detective who has been hired to find a missing popstar named Johnny Favourite. The guy who hired him is a rich weirdo named Louis Ciphre. Harry finds himself in a world of murder, voodoo and Satanism pretty quickly.

It’s more of a hard-boiled detective novel with supernatural elements than a straight horror novel, but that’s what makes it so great. There’s lots of suspense, and I got through it in a couple of sittings. It’s a really fun book to read. It made me realise exactly what Richard Jaccoma was going for when he wrote his werewolf novels. (The first of those books came out a year after Angel Heart, the movie version of Fallen Angel, and I doubt this was a coincidence.)

If you haven’t read Falling Angel, you should.

Angel’s Inferno

More than 30 years after Falling Angel was published, Hjortsberg started work on a sequel. He finished Angel’s Inferno shortly before he died in 2017. It wasn’t published until 2020.

It wasn’t great. It starts where the last book left off, and the main character is now on the run. He heads to Paris and buys a lot of expensive clothes and eats some fancy food while plotting revenge. The characters and their interactions are enjoyable enough, but the suspense and mystery of the first book is almost entirely absent. The plot is modelled on that of the first book too, but the twist ending here was just a bit too ridiculous for my taste. This book was far longer too. It wasn’t absolutely horrible to read, but it pales in comparison to Falling Angel. I’m glad I didn’t spend 40+ years waiting in anticipation for this.

Michael Fitzgerald’s Nazi Occult War

I recently enjoyed James Herbert’s Rats books, and I’ve have been planning on reading his Nazi horror novel The Spear for years. It’s been a long time since I read anything about Nazi occultism, and I thought I’d read a non-fiction book on the topic refresh my memory first. I’ve had copies of Francis King’s Satan and Swastika and Peter Levenda’s Unholy Alliance on my shelf for years, both of which I plan on reading at some point, but I also had a copy of Michael Fitzgerald’s The Nazi Occult War on my kindle. I hadn’t heard anything about it, but I’m finding ebooks easier to get through recently, so it was an easy choice to make.

This was not a bad book, but I have encountered nearly all of its information elsewhere. It goes into some of the bullshitty stuff, but it doesn’t get bogged down in any one topic. There are sections on Nazi ceremonies and the SS that could be taken from a high-school history book. With all the bullshit rumours about the Reich’s UFOs and Hitler being a Satanist, it’s easy to forget quite how mental the Nazis truly were. This book does feature chapters on Atlantis, the Vril society, and the Holy Grail too though. I think it would serve as a good primer on the topic of Nazi occultism. I had a leaf through a paper copy of the book, and I was quite impressed with the layout. It looks really good. While I certainly wasn’t blown away by any element of this book, it served its purpose. I was reminded of all of the other books I have read about Nazi occultism.

The obvious starting point for this kind of thing is Nicholas Goodrick Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism. This was one of the first books I reviewed on here, and it describes the occultists who actually influenced the Nazis. Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moynihan’s The Secret King takes a more specific look at one of these loonies, a chap named Karl Maria Wiligut, and I had a good laugh when I read von Liebenfels Theozoology. Goodrick-Clarke wrote another book, Black Sun, about the conspiracies and nutty ideas that sprang up after the fall of the Nazis (much of which stemmed from Pauwels and Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians, and if you’re going to read that you might as well read Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race too. It’s fiction, but unlike the fiction I list below, it actually inspired the Nazis rather than being inspired by them.) I enjoyed Black Sun more than Occult Roots of Nazism because it was about the bullshit that was clearly made up. A good companion work to Black Sun would be Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos, an interesting book which takes a closer look at some of these insane theories. Speaking of insane, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny is a must read for anyone researching the Nazi quest for the spear that pierced the side of Christ. Of course, this spear wasn’t the only holy relic they tried to get their hands on. I also spent a lot of time and effort researching Otto Rahn and the Nazi quest for the holy grail.