The Cthulhu Mythos · Grimoire
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
also known as Nameless Cults; The Black Book; Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten
Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt
A German study of surviving secret cults, printed in Düsseldorf in 1839. Its author was strangled six months later in a locked room, and the manuscript of his second book was torn to shreds.
The Black Book exists to be cited, and its biography is the citation. Note the shape of it: a small first edition, a censored second, a debased third. That is how a real dangerous book decays — not by being destroyed but by being progressively made safe, until the only edition anyone can find is the one with the frightening parts removed. Howard understood the joke perfectly. The 1909 New York edition is a cheap reprint, and cheap reprints are how the twentieth century defanged everything.
Howard and Lovecraft were doing something in 1931 that fandom would not have a word for until much later: they were writing a shared universe through its footnotes. No crossover, no team-up, no continuity meeting. Just two authors agreeing to consult the same imaginary shelf.
On the readability rating. Howard’s narrators paraphrase von Junzt at length and quote him in short bursts. The passages that matter are always the ones the narrator declines to reproduce.
From the book
They lurk in the dark places of the world, and the doors that are closed are not closed for ever. Paraphrase of von Junzt as reported in "The Black Stone", 1931
In-world history
Von Junzt spent a lifetime in the world's forbidden places and printed the Black Book in Düsseldorf in 1839 in a small folio edition. He returned from Mongolia, locked himself in his study, and was found with the marks of talons on his throat. His friend Alexis Ladeau read the surviving manuscript, burned it, and cut his own throat. A London edition of 1845 is heavily bowdlerised; the 1909 New York edition is worse.
Why it matters
Robert E. Howard's contribution to the shared library. Its existence is the clearest evidence of what Lovecraft was building: not a set of stories but a common bibliography that several writers could cite, so that the invented scholarship of each would corroborate the others.
Appearances
- The Children of the Night (1931) — Robert E. Howard First appearance
- The Black Stone (1931) — Robert E. Howard The narrator reads von Junzt on the monolith in Stregoicavar
- Out of the Aeons (1935) — H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald Cited by Lovecraft in the shared apparatus
Connected volumes
- Related to Necronomicon · The Cthulhu Mythos
Catalogue record
- Category
- Grimoire
- World
- The Cthulhu Mythos
- Language
- German
- First appearance
- "The Children of the Night", Weird Tales, 1931
- Readability
- Quoted
Sources
- Robert E. Howard, "The Children of the Night", Weird Tales, April/May 1931; "The Black Stone", Weird Tales, November 1931.
- Robert M. Price (ed.), Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard (Chaosium, 2001), on von Junzt's place in the shared apparatus.
Added by house · last checked 2026-08-05