English, written by Nigel Blackwell, 1920, sextodecimo, blue plasterboard with marbled endpapers and blue-stained page edges. Though date of publication is 1920, the spine is in remarkably poor condition, the back cover is cracked, multiple pages are dog-eared, there are some notes in the margin which are in Swahili. There is no listed publisher. A bookplate on the front interior cover indicates it belongs to Harvard University.
Research
This book was was published with a large amount of controversy (almost any mention of Blackwell in the press was during this time), after the author’s presumed death during a 1919 expedition into the Belgian Congo. His estate contested between the author’s various heirs, his notes were compiled and published by one of the parties in an attempt to profit from them. In the resulting lawsuit, the opponents of the book’s publication eventually prevailed; the presses were stopped and most of the already completed copies were destroyed. The book existed in a sort of legal limbo. The heirs opposed publication out of fear of scandal due to the contents. Only the book’s semi-scholarly approach prevented it being banned outright. Blackwell was not affiliated with any academic organization, and didn’t make public the findings of his expeditions.
Initial Reading
A collection of the papers of Nigel Blackwell, a minor self-funded African explorer. No attempt has been made to organize the work and it lacks an index, the topics vary widely. The primary focus of the work is African cults and esoteric religious practices, the more gruesome and bloody the better. Some of the more tame areas covered are cannibalism and bestiality. The author treats these topics, which he researched with first hand accounts with African tribesmen, with an unexpected amount of credence.
Full Reading
Blackwell’s interests focus on marginal or secretive tribal religions, particularly those involved in blood sacrifice and other macabre rites. Clinical in its presentation and style, the work outlines the rites and practices (sometimes pre-colonial, but more often focused on the modern era) of numerous African groups and traces links between these religions and cults in the Americas.
Blackwell’s writing style is dense and often references the works of other authors without clarification or explanation of the cited work’s connection to his topic. These cryptic references reduce the clarity of the book and reinforce the impression that this is a raw and unfinished work that would have been well served by an editor. His frequently stated fixation with the notion that Africa, being relatively untouched by Christianity and Islam, held the keys to the “truth” about human religion and history grates on the educated reader, as well. The text is gruesome, unwholesome, and deeply shocking.
Of particular interest is a short segment about Kenya’s “Bloody Tongue” cult, describing paraphernalia and symbols identical to those in New York. The Mountain of the Black Wind is discussed, though no location is given or can be inferred from context. A marginal (Swahili) note mocks Blackwell’s limited knowledge of the group. Also of interested is that the spine has been broken open to a section about a Niger River delta cult’s grisly necromantic rites designed to raise the dead and make them into slaves called “ciimba”.
Quotes
“Beyond the reach of the great Abrahamic faiths, Africa retains the primal truths of human society and religion; society is as raw and unformed as the landscape. The Gods are known by their old names and not prettied up by hymns and incense. It is here in this great continent of the Id that Man may truly know himself. That Man, as a whole, is so brutal and untamed at his heart, only shocks the unlettered or those blinded by the false trapping of the prison we have built for ourselves in our so-called civilization.”
“The cult, named in whispers by the natives ‘The Bloody Tongue,’ is supposedly based far in the interior, but has followers in Mombasa, Nairobi, and even Muslim Zanzibar. Their idols are human shaped though surmounted with a long red trunk instead of a head, and it is rumoured that more than one missionary has discovered that when the whites leave, the natives swap a head topped by a crown of thorns for one with a bloody ‘tongue’.”
“The sorcerer would then rend flesh from his own body, usually the arm, and spit the bloody offering into the mouth of the body supposed to be raised. A great chanting would be then undertaken by both sorcerer and his audience. The words are not in the native Yoruban. I have attempted to capture them phonetically: “Hu ning lui mugluwal naf wugah nagal atzu tuti yok sog tok foo takun. Atzu tuti fu takun! Hu ning lui. (Compare viz. Waite and Zimmerman)”
“As the priestess whirled around the fire-lit circle, chanting dim words from an ancient spell, the cult executioners busied themselves with their screaming sacrifices. As the blood flowed, a chill wind sprang up, and I felt a flash of fear: the wind had become visible, a black vapour against the gibbous, leering Moon, and slowly my terror grew as I comprehended the monstrous thing taking form. The corrosive stench of it hinted at vileness beyond evil. When I saw the great red appendage which alone constituted the face of the thing, my courage died, and I fled unseeing into the night.”
Spells
Binding of the Ciimba
Masks of Nyarlathotep 