Introduction from a student of the Necromancer’s Diary

As someone who researches the arcane and unusual artifacts of mystical significance, I chanced upon this diary purely by accident while researching a series of grisly murders that occurred in London in the mid-1800s. These were lesser-known killings than the more famous Whitechapel murders attributed to one Jack the Ripper decades later. My hunch as to why these murders did not become better known is that the authorities did not know what to make of them, given the condition of the bodies, and because there was the hint of scandal of an upper-class sort around them (for four of the victims were eventually identified), that it was kept quiet in all but the highest circles. There is also the peculiar nature of their discovery: The six victims included two young men of good family, two women, also of good family. They had been entirely eviscerated, their facial features obliterated so that it was difficult if not impossible in some cases to identify them, and on their bodies, occult symbols and monstrous creatures had been tattooed, to the extent that not an inch was left that was not somehow painted over with the tattoo. In going over papers at Scotland Yard, in their historic records library, I learned of the existence of this diary, or rather a fragment of the diary, and, through a series of collectors, managed to purchase a photocopy of it, which I’m reprinting here. Some of the pages were illegible or drawn over with symbols and a language I could not precisely translate, if it was anything more than nonsense.

The nature of a diary is not toward narrative. It is an accounting of events, generally in order. Certain unnecessary sections have been eliminated, including Gravesend’s obsessive bookkeeping, house accounting, as well as his sketches and diagrams of both the human body and of fantastical machines that are his ideas, apparently, of how to either torture a human being, or how to drill into the earth. The stuff of science fiction novels or pornography. This diary in your hands is slightly different, for there is something of a narrative to it, although this utterly falls apart in its latter half. It is not about order, but about disorder, and this seemed to speak to the state of mind of its author. If we are to believe there is some truth to Gravesend’s grand conspiracy, of Watchers who follow his moves and direct him to his fateful destination, we would give in to the madness that was Gravesend himself. As you perhaps have read from other books written about the man, he was “the most evil man in existence,” or at least that is what the newspapers called him, when he held his famous “Summoning Demons” parties of the late 1800s at his magnificent estate called Harrow. We must understand a little of Gravesend in his later life to put this account of his youth into context.

While Gravesend died in the mid-1920s, outliving his own son, he was not a well-known personage of his time, except among occult circles, and I suspect he enjoyed keeping it that way. In his younger years, he had some fame, primarily from claiming that he was bringing what he called the Age of Baphomet into the world through spiritual endeavors and gatherings that read like a Who’s Who of the occult world. (This information can easily be found in the other books related to Gravesend, including the famous memoir, The Oracle by the mysterious Isis Claviger, a clairvoyant of the early twentieth century who claimed to be the reincarnation of one of Gravesend’s first human sacrifices. She also claimed she was a reincarnation of Astarte, a priestess of the ancient world who was the mythic founder of the Chymera Magick and of the flower called herein “Lotos.”)

What is remarkable is that at such a young age, he was willing to keep record of these grisly and immoral goings-on of his early life. That he was willing to write down the secrets of this legendary group, the Chymera Magick, and at least a fragment of its initiation rituals, which primarily have to do with sex and murder.

A note on the Chymera Magick: This was an order of occultists whose aim is unknown, but which claimed to have originated in Egyptian and Greek Mystery religions combined with a shoddy alchemy and sense of Black Magic, in the nineteenth-century mystical way of thinking of it. Stealing slightly from the Cabala and the Eastern traditions, as well as from the medieval sense of witchcraft and divination, the Chymera Magick seemed to disband in 1914. I believe it merely went further underground. The infamous book of the Chymerians (as they called themselves) has never been recovered, although Gravesend refers to it within this mishmash of a diary that seems half-brag of his sexual exploits and half-delight in the horror of his devilry. The Grimoire Chymera, as it is called, is most likely a fabrication.

The stories surrounding the Grimoire Chymera were many. Some believed they had the ability to change shape within a range of creatures: to a wolf, to a raven, to serpent. Or the ability to change between man and woman and back again. The language, or as the Chymerians had it, “The Words,” of something called The Veil of the Profane, a place reached with something akin to the opium pipe with the extract of a plant they simply called “Lotos.” While we don’t know what plant this is, there is a good chance that Gravesend and his fellow Chymerians were simply “chasing the dragon” in opium dens, which were popular during much of his life. Additionally, there was the usual—and nearly hackneyed—idea of changing base metals to gold, of acquiring wealth through the mental and magnetic enslavement of others of lesser will. They had maps of the ancient, buried world wherein occult treasures could be found. The key to all mystical texts also supposedly could be found in the Grimoire Chymera: the code of the Bible, the genuine translation of the sayings of Jesus, the spells within the epic of Gilgamesh, among other items lesser known today. The Grimoire also contained the exact formula for gravity defiance, that individual human flight could be possible with the application of a salve on the skin and a long bout of meditation. Purportedly, there was a way to become briefly invisible, to murder someone by simply kissing him on the neck, and to read the minds of the weakest among humankind in order to have dominion over them. There was also a section in this book that went into the thousand names of the gods, and why mankind had lost the ability to speak directly to them.

It is a grand mythos that the Chymera Magick introduced through their circle, and it is my guess that they duped many of their members into believing that they were something more than a fraternity of murder, greed, and sexual licentiousness.

More specifically, the life of Justin Gravesend began and ended in his twenty-first year when he left school and his uncle-benefactor. Justin went down to London, where he first met the man who would be his Mage, his Guide, his Master through his initiation into the Chymera Magick. He refers to this man only as The Necromancer, giving him no Christian name whatsoever, and by this title we know him, and have no idea what further exploits this Necromancer may have had. The Necromancer is obviously a bisexual deviant, someone who finds greatest gratification in perversion, and who is very likely, by the standards of his day, a sadist in the tradition of the writings of the Marquis de Sade (of which, no doubt, Justin and his contemporaries knew well.) While the Necromancer has his share of young women, in a Casanova-like style, he seems peculiarly attracted to men, using them for what he called “Sex Magick,” which seems to be none other than sexual deviancy disguised as a transformative experience.

Certainly, young Justin Gravesend came under his tutelage and experienced what he considered orgiastic visions. But we must remember that these are the words of a young man, experimenting with narcotics and sex and what he calls “the disordering of the senses” through violence.

“Awaking the sleeping beast” is his other phrase, and seems to be a philosophy of the Chymerians in general.

It will be of note that this diary merely ends. It does not reach a satisfactory conclusion, and it is perhaps the beginning of a second diary that Gravesend might’ve kept. We know of his life after his twenty-first year. He became a captain of industry, a robber baron of sorts, and then retired early to build his greatest creation, the house known as Harrow up the Hudson River of New York. Despite amassing great wealth and building an estate of considerable proportions after his time with the Necromancer, Gravesend seemed to enter a quiet period of his life. In his thirties, he married, raised a child, and although other legends have been connected to the man and his home, he seemed to have settled down in much the same way that young people everywhere settle down to a life of comparable normalcy. By the age of forty-six, he was entirely retired, living as landed gentry at Harrow. In the 1920s, Gravesend died, having outlived his own son. The house went to his grandson, and then to someone outside the family named Alfred Barrow, who eventually turned it into, and sold it off as, a school. When the school shut down, it went through at least two more ownerships, dogged as any architectural madness might be by legends of crime and murder and haunting. (I visited the grounds of Harrow in late 2002, although it is now completely closed off from the road with razor wire and ugly chain link fences, a blight on the natural beauty of the area surrounding it, like a pre-Berlin Wall Checkpoint Charlie.)

I have tried to track down the real person who is behind the title Necromancer, but so far my pursuit has been unsuccessful. I did locate more about one particular player in his drama, the little girl named Isis, who later become a psychic and a writer on the supernatural world and its exploration. In the diary, she is an enigma to Gravesend and to any who read about her. But I know there are other documents that will tell me more about her.

One final note: the city referred to as Nuvo Cartigius, or New Carthage, is obviously not on any map, nor does there seem to be an island off Greece that corresponds to its greater location. Most likely, this is a gathering place for the Chymerians, perhaps a villa of sorts on one of those small, unremarkable islands among the larger ones in the Mediterranean Sea. I will provide a brief glossary at the end of this printed form of the diary for those who are new to the Chymera Magick and its occult terms.

One thing the sharp reader will notice is that, despite his writing in the 1800s, Gravesend seems to have a twentieth-century perspective on his adventures. This has led more than one scholar (see Emil Marquand’s thesis, presented to the Prague International Occult Congress, 2000, on “The Occult Elite in America and England: 1850–1900”) to postulate that Gravesend himself did not write the diary at the time he experienced it, but perhaps dictated it to a secretary of some sort when he was an older man. While this seemingly moot point can be ignored, it is a possibility of which to be aware while reading of these miscreant and diabolical (in the classical sense) adventures.

Editor’s Note: Owing to Gravesend’s lack of precise dates for his diary entries, we have taken it upon ourselves to divide the diary into chapters for easier divisions of events and occurrences. The so-called “Visionaries,” as Gravesend called his drug-induced dreams, are set off as their own subsections. These were a mishmash of notes, nearly poems, which should not be taken at face value as I believe they were Gravesend’s poetic mysticism, more savage than Blake’s, perhaps, but similar in that they are to be taken as fantasies—often sexual—of a disturbed and possibly addicted mind. We did not set them down in any particular order. Although they are number 1, 2, 3, etc., they were gathered in piles, torn from other notebooks, included here as an illumination of the state of mind of Justin Gravesend in his youth.

—James Wandigaux, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus,
The College of Arts and Sciences, Rutherford
University, Surrey, New York