Sigsand
One of the features of the Carnacki are their brevity. WHH hardly bothers to explain the explainable. The Sigsand Manuscript and the magick of the Sammaa Ritual are presented to Dodgson, Arkwright, Taylor and the reader as already accepted facts and often alongside the scientific lectures of a Proffessor Garder.
Sigsand Manuscript
First mentioned in Gateway Of The Monster and usually referred to as 'Sigsand MS' the Sigsand Manuscript was aparently written in the 14th Century and among other things would seem to contain the Saamaa Ritual (see below) as one is rarely mentioned without the other.
First quotes given concern the shape of the pentacle "Thee mownts wych are thee Five Hills of safetie. To lack is to gyve pow'r to thee demon; and surlie fayvor thee Evil Thynge". And shortly after on how some elemets cannot be used a second time - neither "yarbs nor fyre nor water".
In House Among the Laurels he quotes the Sigsands warning not to have any flames within the pentacle "They're must noe lyght come from wythin the barryier".
The basis of Carnacki's Spectrum Defense in The Hog is taken from this quote "Avoid diversities of colour; nor stand ye within the barrier of the colour lights; for in the colour Satan hath a delight. Nor can he abide in the Deep if ye adventure against him armed with red purple. So be warned. Neither forget that in blue, which is gods colour in the heavens, ye have safety"
Saaamaaa Ritual
The Second Sign of the Saaamaaa Ritual is mentioned first as part of the creation of a pentacle purely for a single person, Carnacki himself, in Gateway of The Monster. It appears to be scaleable as in House Among The Laurels a larger version for eight men is required and for t the Eight Signs of the Saaamaaa Ritual are used instead.
Appearing to be only used as an absolute last resort - the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual is in The Whistling Room and not even by Carnacki. It is heard whispered into the room by persons unknown while Carnacki is in the greatest peril.
"Instantly the thing happended that I have heard once before"
"There came a sense of dust falling continuosly and monotonously and I knew that my life hung uncertain and suspended for a flash in a brief reeling vertigo of unseeable things. Then that ended and I knew that I might live. My soul and body blended again and life and power came to me"
Later Arkwright requests clarification on this and mentions that he knows "Of course" that the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual was used by the Ab-human Prietts in the Incantation of the Raaaee. This prompts several questions on its own - is the Saaamaaa from non-terresrial source, does Arkwright have specific historical occult interest and is 'Prietts' a miss-spelling of Priests ? (Forgotten Futures - The publishing notes which can be found here do mention a high degree of printing mistakes).
In his answer Carnacki mentions another scientific source, 'Harzans Monograph', and how he believes the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual was used by a Protective Force governing the Outer Circle to save his life. See Monstrosities
Harzans Monograph
Harzans Monograph on Induced Hauntings is mentioned in The Haunted Jarvee. It concludes that hauntings are often produced by temporary "vibrations" set up by some outside cause. Harzan claims to have succeeded in producing "counter vibrations" on three occasions and is this research that prompts Carnacki's own experiements with Counter Vibration Aparatus
The origin of these vibrations seems to be Carnacki's and is explained with regard to the Jarvee, a haunted ship
"She may have developed it during the years owing to a suitability
of conditions or it may have been in her from the very day her keel was
laid. I mean the direction in which she lay, the condition of the atmosphere,
the state of the "electric tensions". the very blows of the
hammers and the accidental combining of materials suited to such as end
- all might lead to such a thing. And this is only to speak of the known.
"
Haunted Jarvee
If much of Carnacki (and WHH's) theories atempt to overlay a scientific veneer to such concepts and demons and angels is this the atempt to explain 'luck'? As WHH's career as a writer was built on his terrible early career serving at sea and the classic naval horror stories that resulted perhaps the Haunted Jarvee can be seen as a atempt to control that old bane of sailors - "The Unlucky Ship"
Professor Garder's Lectures
Seemingly a contemporary physisist, Prof Garder seems to be studying very early particle physics and how it may relate to the then current craze of Spiritualism.
Gateway of the Monster cites "Experiments with a Medium" in which he surrounded a medium with a current of a certain number of vibrations in a vaccum resulting in his loss of 'postion' within the Immaterial. This, and the failure of the standard Sigsand pentacle in the undocumented Noving Fur Case, provides Carnacki with the inspiration to create the Electric Pentacle. Later in House Among the Laurels he suggests that a better technical explanation of this experiment is found in Garders Lecture on "Astraal Vibrations Compared with Matero-involuted Vibrations Below the Six Billion Limit"
"Addenda to Harzans Monograph and Astral Co-ordination and Interference" Carnacki's own notes on another occult tome together with an explanation of the Outer Circle, the Outer Monstrosities and the Protective Force which intervenes to protect human-vibration from them.
"False Re-Materialisation of the Animate-Force through the Inanimate-Inert" is referred to as a theory about the potential danger of inanimate objects and rooms. Mentioned in The Whistling Room, it appears to be Carnacki's own theory.
Further Reading
Within a few decades of the first publication of the Carnacki stories the concept of occult tomes full of dangerous knowledge were to become something of a cliche. First HP Lovecraft, then many others each created their own sanity threatening volume to flesh out the disturbing set of interconnected cosmic horror stories that would be refered to as the "Cthulhu Mythos". Lovecraft's "Necronomicon" remains by far the most famous and has been the source of several movies of note.
The many, aparently coincidental, similarities between WHH's work and the Cthulhu Mythos are perhaps best discussed in relation to his classic non-Carnacki novels The Night Land (1912) and The House on The Borderland (1908). In truth they all probably share the same source material, RW Chambers monumentally disurbing collection of short stories published as The King in Yellow (1895).
For more detail see Forgotten Futures - The Carnacki Cylinders
