Yesterday morning, a new folder arrived on my desk. The sole name of Grave Upheaval made my skin crawl, but I opened it anyway, driven by my instinctive curiosity and my hunger for the unknown. What awaited inside was almost too much for me to bear, it almost broke me. Just recalling this is hard for me. However, I’ve agreed to testify in front of this comity, so here’s the complete story.

As I opened the folder, this picture fell and landed on the ground. I turned and looked at it defiantly, maybe I was just trying to convince myself that I wasn’t afraid and that will be another case quickly closed…

Evidence A

The first mystery was almost immediately put out of the way: the title. Even though the case file informed me it had no title, and that this was only meaningless scribblings, I knew I had seen these types of letter somewhere before. I quickly went to my library and took out my copy of John Dee’s Book of Enoch, and quickly deciphered the bottom inscription as Sciomancy. Sciomancy is the divine art of communication with ghosts. This was amateur work, however, as the Enochian alphabet was only used here to use as a substitute for the Latin one; everybody knows that Enochian is supposed to be written right to left and has its own words and rules. This fact further led me to believe that this case was a child’s play, but it soon wasn’t a game anymore.

I listened to the accompanying audio tape provided with the case. I’ve brought it to you so the members of this comity can also hear and perhaps better understand my perspective in this strange series of events.

As you can hear, the whole spectrum is drenched in a mystical atmosphere and weighed down by low pitched guitar notes and slow drumbeats, only here and there picking up and blasting waves of unrelenting polka beats. This sounded quite similar to yet another Austrialian band that goes by the name of Portal. Even though their later teachings somewhat branched off from the heavy worship, their previous works were relatively alike to this. Sciomancy is, I believe, Grave Upheaval’s attempt at expanding on the methods and approach of the earlier life of Portal.

After listening to the recording, I had a strange feeling. A feeling that it could not end like this. There has to be more to the story. Any normal agent would have been glad to submit a basic report on the available evidence, but not me. I just couldn’t sleep, so I called one of my informant, [redacted], and we arranged a meeting. He was very brief and dismissive, like he couldn’t believe that what I was looking for could give me any supplementary information, but he finally cooperated, and gave me some copies of the inside of Sciomancy‘s booklet. I thanked him and headed back to the office, with the pictures safe under my arm.

As I sat behind my desk and laid the images on it, I was shocked. There were signs and symbols that I recognized, but also many that I had never, ever seen, even during my most obscure assignments. There were a lot of Mephistopheletic imagery, for example, with drawings of skulls, chalices, daggers, and so on. The easiest one to decipher was page 5, which simply used the Early Medieval Irish alphabet known as Ogham to substitute for English letters. I can lend you my copy of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, if you wish to know more, but in short he explained that this alphabet came from a lost Aegean civilization who taught it to many cultures, who then spread to Europe. It kept its supernatural signification as the language of the trees in Ireland and can be used for divination with the spirits. Here’s the page in question.

Evidence C

I see you seem to have lost me a bit, there. I’m sorry, I’m getting to the point. By putting these Ogham inscriptions in conjunction with the Modern English language, I was able to get this rough transcription:

Delving unto Oblivion
[illegible]

Maze of burst stars
Onward to the great knowing
[illegible] where
[illegible] began
For when end heralds
Naught [illegible]

Nothingnes [sic]

Some fragments are too worn to be decipherable, but maybe an expert could be able to salvage the few remaining words. I didn’t have the time to send it over, since you called me to this hearing. Nevertheless, with the words available to me at the time, I was able to make some assumptions and draw the conclusion that this is in fact an ode to the void, possibly even calling the unutterable names of various Gods and Deities to which these cultists pray.

On further pages, the writers seem to have taken a different approach, combining various obscure scripts and writing systems in the same words, in order to – and that’s my theory – confuse the supernatural entities they are trying to conjure. I have yet to succeed in cracking this madman’s code, but there are still a few lines written entirely in Ogham or Latin which are legible:

Death rites written by the athame of sight

Tetragrammaton

There is also, on one page, the mention of Hades, along with the Roman numerals V and XII, an hourglass, the alchemical symbol for night, and a ram’s skull. On yet another page is a human skull, the symbols of the cross and of Scorpio, the process of Separtion. Under it is the Enochian name of Amorgmo, or Omorgma, if they forgot to write it sinistrogyrally. On top of that, crumbs of Theban, the Witches’ alphabet, can be seen here and there, and sigils are carved for protection or darker summonings.

Finally, two constellations are drawn, under what I assume is the aforementioned athame of sight. The first of which is as of yet unidentified, but it looks suspiciously like one half of the Gemini constellation, while the other is the instantly recognizable Orion.

This is possibly a potent occult manuscript, and its contents should be sealed to prevent any other incident like the one for which you have brought me here. For now, however, I need more time to find out exactly what it implies, and who exactly is behind this. You know it was locked in my office, and that [redacted] had no right to break my lock and access these dangerous files.

I deny all accusations that I was involved, in one way or another, with the death of [redacted].

This is my final statement.

A digital promotional copy of the album was sent to us.