The Book of Eibon is older than the Necronomicon by a margin measured not in centuries but in ice ages.

Eibon of Mhu Thulan wrote it shortly before the glaciation of Hyperborea, knowing the continent was ending and wanting something of the knowledge to survive. Something did. Most did not. What remains is enough to make the Bureau's senior archivists nervous on a recurring basis, and the Bureau's senior archivists are nervous about most of the things they oversee, so the comparative is meaningful.

The Author

Eibon was the high priest of Tsathoggua, a sorcerer of the Hyperborean court, and (by his own account, repeated in three independent passages) a personal friend of the god he served. The relationship was not devotional in the ordinary sense. It was collegial.

Eibon and Tsathoggua worked together on problems that neither could solve alone. Their preserved correspondence, which survives in fragments embedded in the longer text, reads like two scholars with complementary specialties trading observations about a shared field. Eibon brought human pattern-recognition, written record-keeping, and access to the surface. Tsathoggua brought twelve thousand years of memory and a perspective on the deep crust that no surface researcher could match. They appear to have liked each other. Eibon refers to Tsathoggua, in one passage, as "my long friend."

The phrase has not been adequately translated. "Long" in the original Hyperborean carries a temporal sense the Latin loses entirely.

Structure

Not a spellbook or mythology. A practical manual divided into three sections:

Entity documentation. The gods and things worshipped in Hyperborea, with field observations on each. Habits, hungers, summoning vectors, conditions under which contact is sustainable. Eibon writes with the clarity of someone who personally knew his subjects and did not feel the need to impress the reader.

Ritual mechanics. How to contact, bind, and negotiate with the documented entities. Written with the clarity of an engineering text. Diagrams in the original. Some of the diagrams are reproduced in the surviving Latin. Some are not, and the omissions correlate with the entities the translators considered most dangerous.

The long record. A history of pre-human Earth, going back to the period when Tsathoggua's ancestors arrived from elsewhere. The Yithian archives, when the Bureau gained partial access to them in the 1930s, corroborated approximately seventy percent of Eibon's long record on points where the two sources overlap. The seventy percent is the impressive number. The remaining thirty percent is the worrying one, because most of it concerns events the Yithians had no incentive to omit.

Translation History

The original Hyperborean script is lost. No surviving fragment of the book exists in its native language. The earliest surviving version is a Latin translation produced in the twelfth century by a monk named Caius Phillipus Faber, working from a French intermediary that may or may not have been faithful. The French intermediary itself worked from an unidentified Greek source. The Greek source claimed descent from a Phoenician transcription. The chain of custody is unverifiable past the Latin.

Translations have proliferated and corrupted since. A Middle English version called the Liber Ivonis appeared in the fifteenth century and contains material absent from the Latin, suggesting the translator had access to a different source. One the Bureau has never identified. The Miskatonic copy is the Latin, acquired in the 1890s from ꫀY̲̋Ć᳀S̡𓆗J̶̓F̯͞R̓̀̒Y̸͋̐. It is missing the ritual section. Someone removed those pages before the book reached the Orne Library, and the removal was clean enough that the binding was undisturbed. Whoever did it knew bookbinding.

Clark Ashton Smith worked from an unspecified source in the 1930s and produced English renderings of passages no other modern researcher had seen. Smith never explained where his source material came from. The Bureau's working hypothesis is that he did not have a physical source.

Relationship to Other Texts

The Necronomicon references the Book of Eibon by name in three passages. Alhazred knew the book existed, had read fragments, and deferred to Eibon on matters concerning Tsathoggua and the Voormis. This is unusual. Alhazred rarely deferred to anyone. The deference suggests either that Alhazred recognized Eibon as the senior researcher in a shared field (which is the Bureau's preferred interpretation), or that Alhazred had personal reasons for not contradicting an account written by a man who had been the high priest of a still-extant god. Both interpretations may be correct.

The Pnakotic Manuscripts predate the Book of Eibon and are referenced within it. The Yithian archives contain a summary of Eibon's long record that postdates Eibon's death by an unknown interval and was, by the Yithians' own account, transmitted to them from "the surface mind of a sorcerer whose continent is now ice."

The chain of references is unbroken. The book is a node in a network that has been operating across deep time.