Unaussprechlichen Kulten

Unaussprechlichen Kulten is a work of forbidden elder lore whose marginalia become material evidence in Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s investigation of his lost years. First encountered among books he studied in an altered state, it returns in his later research as an object bearing annotations he cannot remember making and cannot explain.

Place Among the Forbidden Books

During his altered state, Peaslee’s reading included von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, alongside other rare works associated with occult and forbidden lore. The surviving marginal notes offered tangible evidence of how closely he had studied such books. Reports of his connections with occultist leaders and scholars circulated during this period, though they were never proved; his conspicuous consultation of rare volumes helped fuel the rumors.

The Later Examination

As Peaslee tried to understand his amnesia and recurring visions, he systematically examined medical, historical, and anthropological records, and eventually read the forbidden works that his secondary personality had been interested in. Some were the same copies consulted during his altered state. Their marginal notes and apparent corrections disturbed him because he recognized neither the acts of writing nor, in some cases, the languages involved.

The Unexplained Hieroglyphs

Most of the marks in these volumes were written in their respective languages, which the annotator appeared to know with scholarly fluency. In Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, one note consisted of curving hieroglyphs in the same ink as the German corrections. Peaslee could match the characters unmistakably to forms that repeatedly appeared in his dreams, although their meaning remained just beyond his recollection.

Evidence and Uncertainty

The librarians’ records indicated that Peaslee himself had consulted the volumes before and attributed all the annotations to his secondary state. That conclusion made the book more than a record of unusual reading: it connected his lost period, his unremembered scholarly abilities, and the dream characters in a physical object he could inspect. Yet the evidence did not resolve how he had produced the hieroglyphs or what they meant. The annotations therefore sharpened the mystery without settling whether his visions arose from forgotten experience, acquired stories, or knowledge beyond his conscious memory.