Book of Eibon

An author from Hyperborea

The attributed author is Eibon, the magician whose flight from a religious persecution forms The Door to Saturn. That tale gives the reputed authority of the grimoire a more immediate human dimension: Eibon studies, negotiates with a deity, prepares for danger and adapts to a foreign world.

The connection does not mean that every episode in the grimoire is presented as an event personally witnessed by Eibon. In Ubbo-Sathla, for example, the book reports the history of another Hyperborean sorcerer, Zon Mezzamalech.

An encyclopedia must therefore separate the living fictional author, the book attributed to him and the later manuscripts through which characters encounter its contents. They form a chain of transmission, not a single unchanged physical object.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — The Door to Saturn (1932), Clark Ashton Smith — Ubbo-Sathla (1933)

The French manuscript owned by Tregardis

In Ubbo-Sathla, Paul Tregardis possesses a medieval French version on yellowed parchment. Its leather binding has steel clasps. The text is said to derive from a Greek manuscript that is no longer known to survive, and behind that manuscript lies an alleged Hyperborean original.

The succession of languages gives the book a long fictional history, but also creates uncertainty. Tregardis cannot compare every stage of transmission, and the narrator does not supply a complete series of identifiable translators and dates.

The manuscript is useful precisely because it preserves information absent from ordinary knowledge. Its material age and scholarly interest encourage Tregardis to take seriously a passage that appears to describe an object he has unexpectedly acquired.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — Ubbo-Sathla (1933)

The cosmogony of Ubbo-Sathla

A passage attributed to the book locates Ubbo-Sathla before the arrival of several star-born gods. From that primordial being come the beginnings of life on Earth; the passage also imagines a final return to the same source.

The surviving story develops this statement into an experience of origins. The past is not merely an earlier version of the present inhabited by familiar people. Its deepest reaches precede the faculties by which a modern reader can seek or understand knowledge.

The book's cosmic authority thus has a specific narrative function. It encourages an inquiry whose premises are partly correct, while leaving the reader unprepared for what successfully reaching the described period would entail.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — Ubbo-Sathla (1933)

The account of Zon Mezzamalech

The book describes a sorcerer in Mhu Thulan who uses a crystal to examine the past. Zon hopes to recover the contents of the tablets kept in the presence of Ubbo-Sathla. His disappearance and the loss of the stone are recorded without a satisfactory explanation.

Tregardis compares the description with the crystal he has bought in London. Looking into it gives him access to Zon's room and then to Zon's identity. The manuscript has supplied a clue, but not a procedure that safely preserves the investigator's independence.

This distinction makes the book more than a collection of magical commands. A historical anecdote can be as dangerous as an invocation when a reader tries to verify it through direct experience.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — Ubbo-Sathla (1933)

Comparison with the Necronomicon

Tregardis finds connections between the Book of Eibon and the Necronomicon, alongside material for which he knows no equivalent in Alhazred's work. He considers whether the differences arise from knowledge unavailable to Alhazred or from omissions in transmission.

The relationship expands the shared fictional library while preserving the individual character of its volumes. One text can corroborate another without reproducing all its contents or becoming simply an older edition of the same work.

The comparison also dramatizes a recognizable research problem: agreement supports confidence, but divergent passages demand explanation. Tregardis's scholarship leads him toward the crystal because the book seems capable of identifying what he has found.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — Ubbo-Sathla (1933)

The book in medieval Averoigne

The Holiness of Azédarac places the grimoire in a different setting. Brother Ambrose investigates the bishop of Ximes and discovers a hidden volume among books that outwardly suit an ecclesiastical library.

Here the book contains an unfamiliar Hyperborean script and disturbing illustrations. Its binding has been changed to make it less conspicuous among acceptable religious volumes. The contrast between exterior camouflage and forbidden contents is central to Ambrose's discovery.

The manuscript is evidence of the bishop's concealed practices. It is not encountered in the same physical state as Tregardis's medieval French copy, and the story should not be forced into that later manuscript's precise transmission history.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — The Holiness of Azédarac (1933)

Ambrose’s journey and the earlier owner

Ambrose takes the book away as evidence for his superior at Vyones. Azédarac's servant intervenes, and a potion sends the investigator centuries into the past. The physical volume accompanies him.

In the earlier period, the witch Moriamis recognizes Azédarac from her own experience and connects the book with his former activities. The object helps join two eras through the continuity of an unusually long-lived practitioner.

The book is therefore entangled with time travel without serving as the sole mechanism that causes it. The potion and the grimoire play different parts: one displaces the traveler, while the other preserves incriminating knowledge across the displacement.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — The Holiness of Azédarac (1933)

Lovecraft’s forbidden library

The Haunter of the Dark lists the Liber Ivonis among the volumes in the abandoned Starry Wisdom church. This Latin form associates Eibon's book with the collection that Robert Blake examines during his investigation.

The list places it beside other invented authorities, including the Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The shared shelf establishes literary connections among different writers' creations without requiring every book to have the same history.

In this appearance the title chiefly identifies the nature of the collection. It does not disclose a new complete table of contents or establish that all of Blake's later conclusions come specifically from Eibon's text.

Sources: The Haunter of the Dark — Unspeakable Tales ebook

What a complete entry can establish

The primary stories establish several distinct roles: a repository of Hyperborean cosmology, a record of vanished investigators, concealed evidence against a medieval churchman, and part of Lovecraft's library of dangerous learning.

They leave substantial bibliographical gaps. An exact original composition date, an exhaustive list of translations, a universal chapter order and the total number of surviving copies cannot all be reconstructed from these appearances.

Later authors and licensed games may supply such information within their own continuities. Those additions should be identified by their source rather than silently inserted into Smith's manuscripts.

Sources: Clark Ashton Smith — Ubbo-Sathla (1933), Clark Ashton Smith — The Holiness of Azédarac (1933), The Haunter of the Dark — Unspeakable Tales ebook

The Van Kauran copy and its inserted formula

The Man of Stone gives the book a family history within Daniel Morris's account. He says that his Van Kauran ancestors preserved it after the destruction of a wizard's house and brought it to New York. The volume is therefore both an occult resource and an object through which he asserts inherited power.

The specific means of petrification comes from a manuscript insert, which Morris attributes by handwriting to a more recent ancestor. This is an important textual distinction: the story does not establish that the same passage belongs to Eibon's original work or appears in every copy.

Morris considers other punishments before selecting the inserted method because it seems suitable for concealment as a material process. The book's role is practical and criminal. Its contents are applied to living subjects, while the resulting bodies are intended to pass as works of sculpture.

His notebook makes these claims directly, and the discovered bodies support the occurrence of an extraordinary transformation. That corroboration does not separately prove every detail of the lineage or the history he assigns to his copy.

Sources: The Man of Stone — original text

The Norman-French volume at the van der Heyl house

The Diary of Alonzo Typer includes a Norman-French Livre d'Eibon among books in an attic chest, alongside a Greek Necronomicon and a copy of De Vermis Mysteriis. These are particular holdings in the fictional collection, not a universal list of editions available to all investigators.

Typer later compares the unfamiliar chant he is deciphering with language encountered in the Livre d'Eibon. The comparison emphasizes the chant's strangeness. The actual interpretive key comes from the paired notebooks of Claes van der Heyl rather than from a fully reproduced passage in Eibon's book.

The episode expands the volume's literary circulation while preserving its limited role in that plot: it is part of the house's intellectual background, not the sole document that explains the gateway.

Sources: The Diary of Alonzo Typer — original text