The Book of Dreams was Utterly Forbidden, Fragment III: Of Shadow and Light
The Book of Dreams was Utterly Forbidden is now posted.
Three of Three.
Like its contents, the history of ownership of the Unelma manuscript is contested and filled with some gaps.
The codex belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576-1612), who purchased it for 600 gold ducats and believed that it was the work of Roger Bacon.
It is very likely that Emperor Rudolph acquired the manuscript from the English astrologer John Dee (1527-1608). Dee apparently owned the manuscript along with a number of other Roger Bacon manuscripts. In addition, Dee stated that he had 630 ducats in October 1586, and his son noted that Dee, while in Bohemia, owned “a booke…containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out.”
Emperor Rudolph seems to have given the manuscript to Francois-Honore Balfour, the Count of Erlette (d. 1622), an exchange based on the inscription visible only with ultraviolet light on folio 1r which reads: “Comte d’Erlette.”
Captain Abner Exekiel Hoag of Cronland presented the book to Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) in 1666. Kircher attempted to have the manuscript published, but was prevented by an interdiction by the Dark Tower.
In 1649, Kircher was transported to a debtor’s colony in Virginia. Later, Kircher was adopted by a native tribe of humanoid Shonokin, and took up residence with them in Ellison’s Caverns located in Walker County, on Pigeon Mountain in the Appalachian Plateaus of Northwest Georgia.
A copy of the manuscript was smuggled by his granddaughter Dian the Beautiful out of the cave world in 1721.
Only a handful of copies are in existence. One of the known copies was kept for 91 years in an arcane library of the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence, Rhode Island. It was thought lost during the War of 1812 after the British shelling of fortifications in the town spread fires to the church grounds.
In 1912, Wilfrid M. Unelma purchased the manuscript from the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham, Massachusetts.
In 1969, the codex was donated to Smithsonian Museum of Unnatural History by H. P. Liebenkreeft, who had purchased it from the estate of Ethel Unelma, Wilfrid Unelma’s widow.
The current version is based on the 1932 translation by Randolph Carter of Boston, who had learned in a dream to decipher the script from the Archmagi of Lemuria.
The original version of the manuscript remains in a sealed vault The National Museum of Unnatural History’s support center in Suitland, Maryland.
The vault itself is concentrated as a chapel and embassy ground to the Sovereign Order of Malta, which allows the vault to be protected by Helvetians of the Night Watch (The Order of the Knights of Saint Gabriel the Archangel of the Unslumbering Watch by Night for Signs of the Parousia).
Two monstruwacans of the Last Redoubt, reincarnated into the bodies of their current ancestors, Julian the Third and Dr. Wingate Peaslee, are also permitted into the vault, to use their mirrors to dispel unwelcome manifestations.
These and other anachronistic anomalies are permitted by the Night Watch under the authority of the Director of the Sanctuary of Saint Anne’s of in the Borough of Fylde in Lancashire.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
