Jorge Luis Borges is the Buenos Aires writer who, as a young man in 1922, read the Necronomicon and officiated a rite to Hastur, and who reappears in 1966–67, blind, as director of the National Library. He links the gestas of Cthulhu Buenos Aires and Operativo Cóndor.
| Type | Character |
| Era | 1922; 1966–67 |
| Spanish entry | Jorge Luis Borges |
History
1922
Borges is a young ultraist of Prisma and Crítica and a fine Latinist. His friend Xul Solar, who practices Crowley’s rites and wants to surpass the master, brings him the History of the Necronomicon and news of a copy at the University. Borges obtains the Necronomicon; he alone can read its Latin. With Xul and six young artist-occultists, among them Beatriz Guerrero and Victoria Ocampo, he sets up monoliths at the Ocampo country house and officiates the rite to contact Hastur.
The rite opens a reading door to Carcosa: all share the vision of a palace of masks where the King in Yellow shows no face under his pale mask. It goes wrong: Beatriz is marked, later pregnant, and the group disperses. Borges leaves the circle; Xul takes the book and disappears, to Borges’s relief. David Cherney, master of the lodge, orders the collective vision investigated.
Blindness
Over the following decades Borges goes blind, which enrolls him among the Blind. In this world losing one’s sight is an initiation rather than a medical accident.
1966–67
At the close of Operativo Cóndor investigators consult Borges, now blind and director of the National Library on Calle México. He frames the final invocatory text: an Argentinized pastiche of The Dunwich Horror («Yog-Sothoth es la puerta y la llave», “Yog-Sothoth is the gate and the key”; «el gran Tulú es su primo», “great Tulú is his cousin”) crossed with Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and “the library where the sign and the symbol are”.
Conflicting accounts
- His blindness is hereditary in the biography; in the chronicle it is the price of the pact made by reading the book.