DWDAAT

11-KNOWLEDGE-URANUS

Nyarlathotep: "It wails as it forms and reabsorbs random appendages. Nyarlathotep in this form (one of thousands) has no face, but can take any shape it pleases for short time periods. "

The Black Man, the Crawling Chaos, is the Prime Minister of the Elder Gods and intermediary of sorts between them and the human species. There are contentions that Nyarlathotep is the manifested cosmic deity which Azathoth lays 'behind' on the order of atman/brahman. (see below)

By some this entity is described as the hateful servant of these magnificent cosmic powers beyond the ken of mammalian consciousness, dedicated to our despoil and undoing, and willing to contribute mightily both to our knowledge and our doom.

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"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 chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away." -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

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The Masks of Nyarlathotep are innumerable. Here are some of them specified for ritual encounter purposes:
Humanoid:
Aku-Shin Kage, Black Pharoah (also Set, Tezcatlipoca, Thoth), Bloated Woman, Green Man (also Jack O'Lantern), Horned One (Also Dark One, Devil, Pazuzu), Queen in Red (also Nefertiti), Shugoran, Skinless One, Tick Tock Man.

Monstrous:
Ahtu, The Beast (also Faceless God), Black Bull (also Black Lion), Black Wind, Bloody Tongue, Crawling Mist, Dark Demon (also Pazuzu), Dweller in Darkness, Father of Maggots, Haunter of the Dark (also Fly-the-Light, Sand Bat, Leogg), Kruschtya Equation, Messenger of the Old Ones, Small Crawler, Wailing Writer

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"Nyarlathotep was no conscious invention of HPL at all, since it came to him in a dream and was probably a creative unconscious fusion of two names from Lord Dunsany, the prophet Alhireth-Hotep and the deity Mynarthitep." - Robert M. Price, "The Nyarlathotep Cycle: Stories about the God of a Thousand Forms," published by Chaosium.

"For Nyarlathotep to be the 'soul' of the Other Gods would mean that 'he' is their common essence, that root divinity of which the Other Gods are themselves half-real personifications on a lower level of (human) perception which Sankara called 'lower knowledge' or *avidya,*' ignorance -- that is, a knowledge that correctly apprehends a penultimate level of reality. ... Nyarlathotep, as the 'soul' of the Other Gods, is the undifferentiated Godhead, *Brahman* (a neutral, because impersonal or superpersonal, term).

"He is the soul of the mindless, tenebrous gargoyles who dance. His prophesied coming at the end of the age seems to happen on schedule. His arrival is no invasion, no transgression. He will terminate this world because the cycle is complete, though it is implied there are, and will be, others, since we read in the *Fungi from Yuggoth* that the demiurge Azathoth persists in assigning 'each cosmos its eternal law.'" - Ibid.

"...In this Hindu-Buddhist understanding of the Mythos, Azathoth (the blind idiot creator god familiar from Gnosticism) would represent a lower personification of the Suchness, the Chaos, as a demiurge creator. For him to 'mould the world in play' is, as Hindu cosmogony has it, for the *Brahman* to play a game of illusions with itself, the canonical metaphor for explaining how the delusory world of appearance (*maya*) can have come about in the beginning if really there is but the One. As *laya* ('play') it is not real diversity, only pretend. Azathoth, then, represents creation from the standpont of lower knowledge." -- Ibid.

Exits:
     Gargophias; Q13 in
     Gimel; 13; out

VOID - Depart into the space between the worlds.