Some of Henry Kuttner’s most puzzling occult name-drops turn out to have been cribbed directly from The Secret Doctrine. His most often reprinted Lovecraftian tale “The Salem Horror” features most of them. Have you ever found yourself wondering about the derivation of “the Vach-Viraj incantation” or “the Tikkoun Elixir”? What about the blasphemous Book of Iod itself? Stay with me, now.
The terms “Vach” and “Viraj” come from a footnote on page 9 of Volume 1 of The Secret Doctrine: “See Manu’s account of Brahma separating his body into male and female, the latter the female Vach, in whom he creates Viraj”, this last a variant spelling of the vajra, or irresistible thunderbolt of Indra, often used as a penis symbol in Tantric mysticism.
Whence the Tikkoun Elixir? Well, tikkoun or tikkun refers to ritual acts of piety and purification in Kabbalistic Judaism (see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, page 233: “Extinction of the stain, restoration of harmony—that is the meaning of the Hebrew word Tikkun, which is the term employed by the Kabbalists after the period of the Zohar, for man’s task in this world.”), but I’m guessing Kuttner derived it second-hand from The Secret Doctrine, Volume 2, page 25:
“The ‘Heavenly Man’ (Tetragrammaton) who is the Protogonos [i.e., the firstborn of creation as in Colossians 1:15], Tikkoun, the firstborn from the passive deity and the first manifestation of that deity’s shadow, is the universal form and idea, which engenders the manifested Logos, Adam Kadmon, or the four-lettered symbol, in the Kabala, of the Universe itself, also called the second Logos.”
Or perhaps from a footnote on page 706: “The form of Tikkun or the Protogonos, the firstborn, i.e., the universal form and idea, had not yet been mirrored in Chaos.”
In all this, it must not be imagined that Blavatsky is simply laying it on thick. Her genius was in her creative synthesis of many strikingly analogous mythemes drawn from Gnosticism, the Hindu scriptures, the Kabbalah, and who knows what all. MacGregor Mathers performed the same syncretistic feat for the varied Western traditions of ceremonial magic. And of course Lovecraft and Kuttner were doing much the same thing, only for fictional purposes. It is equally obvious, however, that in all these borrowings, Kuttner completely disregarded the original meaning of his terms, merely liking the sound of them.
Though Kuttner will supply his own content for the name Iod, I would suggest that he picked up the name itself from the footnote on page 90 of Volume 1: “In the Kabala the same numbers are a value of Jehovah, viz., 1065, since the numerical values of the three letters which compose his name—Jod, Vau, and twice He—are respectively 10,6 and 5.” My guess is that Kuttner’s “Iod” is a more phonetic spelling of the Hebrew letter Yodh (“Jod”).
Another piece of Kuttner Mythos esoterica pops up in “Hydra”, namely the Chhaya Ritual (also present in “The Hunt”). We have to page through Madame Blavatsky again for this one. And this time we find what we’re looking for on page 17 of the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, in a dense excerpt from the Book of Dzyan:
“The Seven Hosts, the ‘Will-Born Lords’, propelled by the spirit of life-giving, separated men from themselves, each on his own zone. Seven times seven shadows of future men were born, each of his own colour and kind. Each inferior to his father. The fathers, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny were Bhuta, with neither form or mind. Therefore they are called the Chhaya… a shadow with no sense.”
In both “Hydra” and “The Hunt” Kuttner simply employs the word without any of the Theosophic associations. In a Weird Menace tale called “Terror in the House” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1937), he makes it all explicit. The narrator sees a painting a la Pickman, only the picture is titled “The Hunt” (sound familiar?), and “pictured the Chhaya—the ‘boneless ones’ of the Secret Book of Dzyan.” This last is a combination of the titles of Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan and The Secret Doctrine. “The Secret Book of Dzyan speaks of them—‘The Seven Hosts, the boneless, could give no life to beings with bones. Their progeny are called the Chhaya.’” Later on someone uses “the Tikkoun motions” to summon them, as well as the Chhaya chant which goes: “Throg Chhaya thrugga—kad’sh Chhaya… Yin Chhaya”, etc. This is apparently part of the Chhaya Ritual of which we read in “The Hunt” and “Hydra.” Note the vocable “kad’sh”, recalling the chant fragment in “The Salem Horror”: “Ya na kadishtu nilgh’ri….” Here is a reference to the Hebrew word “kadesh”, which means “holy.” Another bit of Kabbalah influence.
Henry Kuttner’s own private corner of the Cthulhu Mythos was, then, apparently derived in about equal measure from Lovecraft, Bloch, Zoroastrianism, and Theosophy. But of course there were some original contributions of his own, and they form the real center of his Mythos. And of this center the Book of Iod forms the nucleus. Lovecraft was intrigued (or perhaps pretended to be) as soon as he heard Kuttner’s title: ‘“The Book of Iod’ surely sounds promising in prospect.” (letter of March 12, 1936).
“Some time I’ll quote darkly from your ‘Book of Iod’—which I presume either antedates the human race like the Eltdown shards and the Pnakotic Manuscripts, or repeats the most hellish secrets learnt by early man in the fashion of the Book of Eibon, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or the dreaded and abhorred Al Azif or Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” (February 16,1936)
“This must be the [unintelligible pseudo-script] mentioned on the seventh Eltdown Shard— & may very possibly be the ‘volume that cannot be’ hinted at in the Necronomicon (ix, 21—p. 598 of the black-letter German copy (in Latin) in the library of Miskatonic University). Some day I must bring pressure to bear & borrow that Negus translation (into Latin, I presume) in the Huntington Library.” (April 16, 1936)
But Kuttner’s Book of Iod actually made its first appearance exactly three years later in “Bells of Horror” (Strange Stories, April 1939), published under the pseudonym Keith Hammond. Until then he had been satisfied sticking to Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm (“The Invaders”) or Lovecraft’s Necronomicon (“The Salem Horror”). The very same month, this time in Weird Tales (“Hydra”), two other occult titles made their debut: the Elder Key, of which we are told nothing else, and the Book of Karnak, which seems to have an Egyptian provenance but may not. We can trace an evolution of this term from the early Dunsanian tales “The Eater of Souls” and “The Jest of Droom Avista”, where we find a place name “Yarnak”, on through “The Salem Horror”, where we hear the word “k’yarnak” as part of a magical incantation, and finally to “Hydra”, where we read of the Book of Karnak. Still, once he had replaced the “Y” with a “K”, it is hard not to believe he didn’t have the occult mysteries of Egypt in mind (though he never once mentions Nyarlathotep).