A Chronology of Delomelanicon

 

 (Compiled from various sources)

c.16000 bc A legend found in the Asclemandres gives this fanciful date as that of Satan’s fall to Earth, where he writes the Delomelanicon.

c.2000 bc During the IX Dinasty, the book titled The Nine Gates (Ta en Pest Seb) is written. Centuries later (see c.284), it is rendered in Greek as Delomelanicon.

1300 bc Turis Papyrus mentions Ta en Pest Seb.

c.284 bc Demetrius Falereus, placed in charge of the Alexandrian library by Prolomeus Sother, orders the Greek translation of all the books in the library and the transcription on papyri of all those works written on other materials (such as tablets). It is probably at this point that The Nine Gates is translated under the title Delomelanicon.

I bc – II ac Delomelanicon is quoted several times in the Asclemandres, a text belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum.

c.247 bc The poet Callimacus of Cyrene prepares a catalogue of the Alexandrian library. Fragment 13 (of the 25 surviving portions), the same one that lists the obscure Babylonian poem The Victory of the Old Ones (believed by professor Andrés Venustiano Carranza to be another source document for Alhazred’s Kitab Al-Azif) there is a partially-unreadable title believed by Carranza to be Delomelanicon.

c.200 bc Delomelanicon is translated to Latin as De Tenebrarum Regis Novem Portis (a more faithful rendering) and De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, the latter manipulated and adapted by Hebrew Gnostic scholars.

c.600 ac A partial listing from the Alexandrian library lists Delomelanicon, mentioning the nine magickal enigmas it encloses.

640 ac The Arabs conquer Alexandria and burn the library. General Amr ibn-al-As, the city’s conqueror, disregarding the orders of Caliph Omar, follows the advise of, Johannes Phillipus, a commentator of Aristotle and the last librarian of Alexandria, and retrieves a large part of the magickal-occult materials kept in a “secret section” of the library and sends it off to Syria, to Damascus. According to Ibn al Qifti in his book Tarik al-Hukam, the caravan which transported the forbidden books saved from burning –among them, Delomelanicon- is assaulted and the books stolen; professor Andrés Venustiano Carranza speculates that the thieves may have been bandits, but they might also have been members of the very secret brotherhood of scholars which maintained the secret section of the library, of which Johannes Phillipus was also a member (which some of his collaborators went so far as identifying as the forerunners of Giacomo Cagliostro’s Egyptian Freemasonry).

c.735 Abdul Alhazred writes Kitab Al-Azif, including in its corpus various documents he retrieved from those stolen after their rescue from the burning of the Alexandrian library’s secret section, among them Delomelanicon and The Victory of the Old Ones. From it, Alhazred develops the Nine Psalms of Lunacy.

1188 Both Latin versions come to the hands of the Templars.

1266 Roger Bacon (1220-1292) obtains De Tenebrarum Regis Novem Portis and changes the nine illustrations to better adapt them to his times. He claims it is the same copy once held by Solomon, which is of course a fantasy. He is possibly the author of the Latin incunabulum known as the “Noctiluca” (name derived from a verse in the final 9^th section, “ab luce noctiluca, veni, venias tenebrae”).

1350 Pérez-Reverte claims that a copy of Delomelanicon belonging to Roger Bacon is burned by personal orders from pope Innocent VI, who declares “it contains a method to invoke the demons”. This is obviously spurious, since Bacon died 1n 1292.

c.1450 “Liber nocte tenebrae; ab luce noctiluca” (the “Book of night’s shadow from light of shining moon”) heavily relies on the incunabulum “Noctiluca”, and is in some ways inferior to it.

c.1500 “De viis inferni” (“The Pathways of Shades”), another incunabulum, its name derived from the verse “de viis inferni, qui portas sereas confregisti”.  

1592 The book is obtained by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who adds the two texts, the frontispieces (“Sic Luceat Lux” and “Cum superiorum privilegio veniaque”), and the comments to the illustrations.

1662 A Greek copy of an earlier Hebrew edition of Delomelanicon is confiscated from William Potter’s collection of forbidden documents in colonial New Haven, and burned.

1666 Aristide Torchia prints a translation of Delomelanicon in Venice as De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis: he expands its contents with his own understanding of diabolism.

1600 (February) Aristide Torchia is burned at Campo dei Fiori.  

1880 Sir Richard Burton writes The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî, also known by researchers as the Necronomicon-incognito, since it is a lengthy poetic text adapted and derived from one or several editions of the Nine Gates texts, either from their separate editions or from the Kitab Al-Azif.

XIXth Century “Alte Könige der neun Türen” (“Old Kings of the nine Doors”), a printed cult pamphlet, undated and uncredited, appears to be a direct literal translation, though it fails to cite the source.

1935 Bruno di Angelo is charged by Aleister Crowley, his teacher at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily (this must have happened between 1920-1923), to translate Torchia’s De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis into Italian. Oddly, Di Angelo mentions that the 1666 copy he worked from has been deposited at the Vatican Library.

1993 Arturo Pérez-Reverte writes El club Dumas.

1999 Juan López de Rojas translates Di Angelo’s Italian version to spanish, after finding the manuscript in Florence, and publishes it online through the occultist José Cadaveria in January as Las Nueve Puertas del Reino de las Sombras, including the few annotations made by Crowley in the margins. It is, however, a poor, incomplete and shortened version of Torchia’s text. It is impossible to know whether he chose to simplify the text or he worked from an incomplete copy, his claims of working from the original manuscript notwithstanding.

1999 Roman Polanski films The Ninth Gate. For the film, some changes are made in Bacon’s illustrations; however, the ninth illustration is closer to the original than the one used by Pérez-Reverte.

2008 Ambrose Bertram Hunter compiles Necronomicon: Annotated New Verse Rendition, a volume with several variant texts derived from The Nine Gates, such as the Nine Psalms of Lunacy and Burton’s The Kasîdah, along with the Wormius version of The Tablets of Enoch, a Vetero Testamentary apocrypha.

2015 Frank G. Ripel publishes Delomelanicon, Il Libro delle Nove Porte, consisting of an Italian translation of De Tenebrarum Regis Novem Portis and De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, focusing on the aspects of ceremonial magick and Necronomicon Gnosis. On this year, V.L.S.L.V. edits Деломеланикон: Алхимия Хаоса, a Russian translation of De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, emphasizing the Gnostic elements.