The Black Book of Tsan-Chan

The Black Book of Tsan-Chan (literal title An Account of the Throne of the Kingdom of Heaven, For the Edification of the Pious Low-Castes, typically abridged to ATKH) has, even by the standards of black books pertaining to the Secret History, a damnably strange path to publication. In an age when one can find a translation of the Kitab al-Layl at the local Barnes and Noble and new translations of Unspeakable Cults is featured on NPR, the ATKH remains obscure among its fellow tomes, despite the novelty of its history.

We begin with the earliest manuscript, which is the last chronologically and has not yet been written. It will be a king's list of the rulers of Tsan-Chan, accompanied by some sermons and parables. The simple mythic narrative is typical for the genre: the rising of the dragon Tulu from the sea, the Age of Tribulation, the arrival of the Anointed Emperor, the unification of the Tsan and Chan, and further deeds of the royal line across its first seven dynasties.

The primary text is written in Vulgar Tsani at a very simple reading level, accompanied by large, colorful illustrations. The back sections and margins are filled with commentary written in Imperial Standard Tsani, offering direction to any priests who might be using the book as part of their ministries, as well as some practical advice for traveling through the outer provinces.

The Account's author will be an anonymous clerk of the great imperial bureaucracy, writing during the placid period at the end of the 7th Dynasty just before the turmoil that marks the transition to the 8th. We know nothing else: the short colophon at the end self-identifies only as "This Most Humble Servant of the Emperor", with the only other detail of note being that the author sprained their wrist while writing, and apologizes for the poor handwriting in the back third. No copies of this text exist, and none will for some three millennia and change.

The version of the book that we know comes from the polymath sorcerer-scholar Ghyanggal, a diplomat to both the Deep Ones and the Serpentmen during the 12th Dynasty (~6140 CE), some 300 years after the ATKH was originally published. To the great fortune of occultists everywhere, Ghyanggal was one of the minds pulled through time by the Yithians, and had been imbued with perfect recall as part of his state training. He spent some seventeen decades in Pnaktous copying out everything he had ever read in his life up to that point. (see The Man Who Invented Occultism (Bernard, 1971) and A New Stylus, Damn It! (Sevarini, 2014) for more information on Ghyanggal and his time in the Library)

From here we split off into three lineages, all based on the Pnakotic Text: the Akkadian Script, the Modern Manuscript, and the Doggerland Manuscript. As befitting the ATKH, their publication and discovery dates are consequential.

The Akkadian Manuscript, initially written by a priest in the service of Naram-Sin, was a problem from the beginning. The priest's memories of his time in the Pnakotic Library were fragmentary, the tablets were recovered in poor condition and lacking much connective text, and the translation into English in the 1890s was nothing short of butchery. It is an incoherent garble of nightmare visions, pseudo-prophecy, terrifying monsters and very large airquotes occult knowledge. Over a third of the text was written by the English translator, and less than 15% is actually shared with the ATKH. Crowley loved it, the bastard, and it is more well-known in pop-occultism than either of the other manuscripts, a fact that never ceases to cause scholars of secret history to grind their molars to dust in frustration. There is nothing redeeming about this version (if it even classifies as a translation of the ATKH), save for an interlude (thankfully not cut by the translator) wherein the priest affectionately describes some of the cats he cares for at the temple.

The Modern Manuscript is the simplest, most accurate, and least-read of the three manuscripts - an English translation of Ghyanggal's work, which had been recovered with the rest of the Pnakotic Corpus in 1935. Several additional translations have been made since, but the simplicity of the core narrative is such that it has remained mostly unchanged. The lack of popularity is likely in large part to the format: half of the text is a picture-book, and the other half is a dry theological treatise of a religion practiced by no one. While interesting to specialists, the general public will certainly look elsewhere.

The Doggerland Manuscript was, despite being written first chronologically, discovered last; found inside a repurposed mi-go brain cylinder recovered from the bottom of the North Sea in 1963. As a translation it is both accurate and beautiful - clearly the work of a skilled author and orator - but it is most noteworthy for being written in Yithian, Aklo, and Gnopkeh - thus providing an enormous overnight advancement in scholars' ability to translate previously-indecipherable works of the sorcerer-kings of Simmargh. Complicating matters is its adoption by white supremacists into the "Hyperborean Cycle" (a collection of mostly-unrelated and often entirely fraudulent) texts credited to an ancient human civilization claimed to be the inheritors of the Great Old Ones.) Given the contents of the text, it is believed by an increasing number of yithian scholars (that is, human scholars who study yithians) that we have entered a self-fulfilled causal loop, wherein awareness of the empire of Tsan-Chan and dissemination of its theology among American Christo-nationalists will eventually give rise to the conditions that create the book. However, as the causality of yith-connected epochs appear to have some level of variable determinism (See The Library of Stone Mirrors (Bergere 2011), The Fractal Key (al-Safi, 1996) and The Irrelevant Ages (Brown, 2018) for further information), some amount of threat-mitigation is still believed to be possible (See The Best of All Possible Futures (Talabi, 2020) for an overview of such efforts).

Cultic activity based on the ATKH (outside of the aforementioned New Age and Hyperborean cults) is minor. Tsani religious practices have proven remarkably difficult to translate to the modern age - simultaneously demanding too much for the casual spiritualist and offering too little for the malignant narcissist. Even within those communities where it has grabbed a foothold the book itself (or any of the recovered Tsani texts) is less important by far than the idea of it, or ideas spun off from it.

No rituals described in the ATKH contain any anomalous properties - likely intentional on the part of the Empire, so as to remove any potential tools of rebellion.