There cometh the Book of the Forgotten Ones. This shall be for the priests of Maat.

In the name of creation and that which is before it, Aumgn!

—NAHADA 62, “The Forgotten Ones”

The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, Vol. I, No. II, 59

If a reader were to browse through the chapter on Lovecraftian magick in Robert North’s New Flesh Palladium (2006, 4th edition) or The Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (2008), or peruse Kenneth Grant’s later Typhonian Trilogies, especially Outside the Circles of Time (1980), they would come across references to a supposed Lovecraftian occult text or work called The Book of the Forgotten Ones. One of the rituals is discussed briefly in The Necronomicon Files (2003). Yet unlike Necronomicon Gnosis: A Practical Introduction (2007) by Asenath Mason, you cannot exactly go online and buy a nice hardcopy edition of this particular occult text.

Some years ago I received a communication from the Maatian gestalt via the mediumship of Soror Andahadna (Nema).

—Allan Holub, “The Second Book of the Forgotten Ones”

The Cincinnati Journal of Magick, Vol. II, No. VI, 33

The Book of the Forgotten Ones is a channeled text, received by the medium Soror Andahadna (Nema, Maggie Ingalls). The reception of texts from a divine or supernatural source is accepted by many religions and occult groups, examples include Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon or Kenneth Grant and the Book of the Spider. One can even draw a Lovecraftian parallel with the images of Cthulhu created by sensitive artists in “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Nema was a practitioner of Thelema, the system of ceremonial magick created by Aleister Crowley and extended by Kenneth Grant and others, and in 1974 had channeled the book Liber Pennae Praenumbra: The Book of the Foreshadowing of the Feather, which established her own “Maat” current, based on Thelemic principles. She joined the Bates Cabal in Ohio, helped write and publish The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick in 1976, co-founded the Horus-Maat Lodge in 1979, and published a number of works on her Ma’atian magick. She was a member of Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Order for several years, and alongside Michael Bertiaux became one of Grant’s favorite examples of Lovecraftian occults in his Typhonian trilogies.

Soror Andahadna, a contemporary priestess of Maat, has received snatches from beyond the Abyss, and they comprise The Book of the Forgotten Ones. It contains allusions to mysteries that first appeared in the writings of Frater Achad [Charles Stansfield Jones]. It would appear that there exists just without the circle of mundane awareness a complete grimoire of magical formulae. It is perhaps from this lost grimoire that artists and poets have been drawing with increasing frequency over the past century, or since the ‘first whirlings’ of the New Aeon were adumbrated more than four hundred years ago in the writings of Rabelais, and earlier initiates.

—Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time 46-47

“Snatches” is perhaps the best description of it, because if The Book of the Forgotten Ones has ever been a single complete text, I’ve found no record it. What we have are three separate chapters which were published over the space of a decade in the Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, alongside much other Thelemic and Ma’atian material by Nema and the Bates Cabal.

The first chapter is “The Forgotten Ones,” published in Vol. 1, no. 2, pp.59-63 as by NAHADA 62. The text is dated 16 July 1971, which would make this earlier than the Liber Pennae Penumbra, and contains no overt references the Lovecraft Mythos, being for the most part a long series of short declarative sentences and instructions, for example:

Ye know Me, though my name be forgotten, in the dread of impending events. I am the motion of a leaf blown down an empty street. I am the sender of omens. Chant the incantation of My Name. It will destroy you. Pronounce My Name aloud, in repetition—it will banish all but pure Awareness. Descend into My Temple, meet yourself. Bear thence the Wand of the Papyrus, and the sword, the shield of mine devise, and the eye Globe. Ye are twain therein, and learn the Alchemy and Mass of No*.

—NAHADA 62, “The Forgotten Ones”

The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, Vol. I, No. 2, 60

These could be taken as instructions for a ritual, couched in symbolic language for adepts. As to who the “Forgotten Ones” are, Nema would later expand on that slightly in her work Maat Magick: A Guide to Self-Initiation (1995), with a bit of a Jungian approach:

I call our survival urges the Forgotten Ones (FO) because our intellects tend to forget them or to trivialize them. Our individual and collective Egos are artifacts of intellect; it’s ego’s vanity that blinds intellect to the power of the FO. […] The Forgotten Ones include, but are not limited to, the instincts of hunger, sex, fight-or-flight, clanning, communication, curiosity, altruism and religion, all those imperatives or actions ensuring survival of self, offspring, and species. The gods our ancestors worshipped are rooted in the Forgotten Ones, given typical human personalities, then made larger and more powerful than humans. […] The gods and goddesses of the old pantheons gained independent life through centuries of worship and did play a directing role in the spiritual, moral and social lives of their devotees.

The second chapter is “Return of the Elder Gods: An Invocation of the Forgotten Ones” in The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick vol. 1, no. 3, pp.17-26 (1978), as by “Nema and the Shadow.” Unlike the previous chapter, this is a completely different style, much more expositional and less ceremonial; it discusses the Elder Gods, their relation to the Forgotten Ones, and how (and why) to invoke the latter to aid against the invasion of the former. This is the ritual discussed in The Necronomicon Files (2003, 120-1); the paragraph in The Book of Lies 145 seems based directly on The Necronomicon Files. In one of those “as above, so below” turnabouts, it seems that:

In the Macrocosm, these forces are the Elder Gods; in the Microcosm, they are the Forgotten Ones. to our present Consciousness, these gods are Qlipothic, constituting the Dark aspects of the anti-Universe and the human Unconscious respectively. Admittedly, there is a certain danger inherent in contact them; but there is sure disaster in neglecting to do so.

—Nema and the Shadow, “Return of the Elder Gods”

The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, Vol. I, No. 3, 17

While not explicitly Mythos-related (unless you count the term ‘Elder Gods’ in a sense Lovecraft never used), there are details of the work that suggest Nema was definitely being inspired by the work of Kenneth Grant, particularly Cults of the Shadow (1976) and Nightside of Eden (1977). It is notable that in Maat Magick, Nema writes:

Mr. Grant expresses a dangerous experience in Nightside, one that can be approached “in person” only from above the Abyss. […] He speaks more eloquently on the subject than anyone since H. P. Lovecraft. Unlike H.P. L., Mr. Grant is a conscious adept and priest of the eldrich [sic] dark; rather than speak of unspeakable horrors, he presents useful information about the denizens of the tunnels and the dangers of the Nightside. (209)

What really brought all this together was “The Second Book of the Forgotten Ones” in The Cincinnati Journal of Magick vol. II, no. 6, pp.33-53 (1988) by Allen Holub. This essay is an exegesis on Nema’s channeled text, along with a channeled text of his own received 7 January 1976, and directly connects these workings with the Lovecraft Mythos…sortof:

By way of introduction; this essay discusses a collection of forces deemed variously the Elder Gods, the Old Ones, and the Forgotten Ones. The two former names are unfortunate as they associate these forces with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Though Lovecraft may or may not have been in contact with these beings, his fearful ravings are of little use to the practicing magician. As far as I can determine, the forces discussed below have no relation whatever with the begins contacted by Lovecraft, even though some of them bear the same names. This similarity of nomenclature may be attributed to Lovecraft having indeed reached the Portal, that is, the verge of true communication with the Dark Forces. However, instead of communicating with them, he was eaten by them. The forces Lovecraft represents in his stories are not the true Elder Gods at all but are the shadows of the Elder Gods distorted to the point of unrecognizability by madness. For these reasons, the forces here will be called the Forgotten Ones, a name they choose for themselves. These are not the gods of the Lovecraft Mythos.

—Allen Holub, “The Second Book of the Forgotten Ones”

The Cincinnati Journal of Magick, Vol. II, No. VI, 33-34

Holub’s forceful assertion that the Forgotten Ones/Elder Gods are not the same as any entities in Lovecraft’s fiction appears to be a direct confirmation that some people did see the connections. Kenneth Grant appears to blithely ignore this entirely in his chapter on “The Forgotten Ones” in Outside the Circles of Time, and given the relative scarcity of the original journals, it’s possible few people were the wiser. Whether Holub was ever speaking for Nema on the matter is unknown.

In content, these snippets of The Book of the Forgotten Ones are both disappointing and interesting. The original channeled text and ritual by Nema appear to represent her genuine spiritual and occult leanings and practice, related as they are to the Ma’at current; Holub and Grant both seized on these as inspiration and raw material for their own expansion of the material. In the case of Kenneth Grant—who was apparently eager to seize on any magical practice vaguely related to his own Lovecraftian leanings—this resulted in the rather wider dissemination of The Book of the Forgotten Ones than it would otherwise have gotten.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).