Necronomicon Tarot - I Magician

Key I - Magician: Nyarlathotep

Here we have a nice departure from the traditional Magician. Nowhere to be found are the symbols of the four suits in the Minor Arcana. Instead, we see Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, consuming the soul of someone who has obviously displeased him underneath the stars in the vast desert of the Empty Space.

The traditional Magician card is a card of skill and mastery and it's easy to see why Tyson chose Nyarlathotep out of all the fiendish cosmic beings of Lovecraft's mythos to represent the Magician. The Old Ones and Other Gods in the mythos are either exiled to the stars, like Yog-Sothoth, or in a death-like slumber, like Cthulhu. But not Nyarlathotep. He walks among us freely and interacts with the human race often taking the form of an Egyptian man whose appearance resembles that of the ancient Pharaohs. He is not bound by the laws of the cosmos that imprison his cosmic brethren.

He is a trickster and a showman and many are drawn to his exhibitions but those who witness them leave both fascinated and horrified. Consider this excerpt from Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep:

"And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilization came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare."


In Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, we also learn that Nyarlathotep can assume a thousand and one forms and also rules over Earth's gods in Kadath. At the end of Randolph Carter's dream-quest for this frozen mountain in the Dreamlands, he is met by Nyarlathotep. Earth's gods were so enamored by Carter's dream city of Boston that they have left Kadath to live and play there. Nyarlathotep spares Carter but issues his final order and warning before they part company:

"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back Earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."


The Magician is cosmologically related to Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods. In the Lovecraft mythos, Nyarlathotep is the Messenger of Azathoth, the blind idiot god who sits in the center of ultimate chaos piping his cracked flute and spinning forth the strands of the Universe.

All of these elements make Nyarlathotep a natural choice for the Magician in the Necronomicon Tarot. He is crafty, skillful, master of lesser gods, a shapeshifter, messenger and agent of greater cosmic forces and able to pass through all time and space as effortlessly as the wind passes through the trees.

In readings, I usually interpret this card as representing skill, craft and mastery but also, looking at the card art, this could also represent a teacher of knowledge that transcends the physical world to impart a potent, perhaps even terrifying lesson.

The book says:

"With his left hand Nyarlathotep peels away the lower portion of his black silk caul, revealing part of his face within the oval of his hood. Yet no face is there to expose, for where nose and mouth should be there is only a blackness speckled with the same stars that are behind him in the night sky so that the illusion is given that his head is hollow and that the stars may be seen through his hood.....Nyarlathotep consumes the human essence of the poor fool who displeased him, but whether this is for some strange, incorporeal sustenance or for a darker and more sinister purpose, who can know?"

I'm not that familiar with HP Lovecraft (other than to know it's fairly dark rather than neutral) but this reminds me of the philosophical notion of peeling away the layers of an onion only to find there is nothing there and the existential notion of the indifference of the universe.

The fleshing out of ideas the skeleton represents the foundation while Nyarlathotep represents the fleshing out bit, the two need each other to become manifest, or to make an idea manifest and to prevent it from just becoming an illusion.
This is confirmed in the grimoire of the necronomicon in the section about Nyarlathotep it says

"the original soul of the pharaoh was consumed in his cold fire, and Nyarlathotep took up habitation in the shell of flesh which he rendered deathless by means of his alchemy"

The skills are there, the tools are there you need to do something with them in order to move forwards or make best use of them.

Nyarlathotep is like the psychopomp who can travel between the different worlds and dimensions, and also the messenger of the gods.

This could indicate in a reading having to travel to get want you want, having to rely on messages and letters from others, putting togeather an advertising campaign.