The Forbidden Book

"Also," Donaldus continued, "I'll probably tell the story--at least in spots--in a somewhat poetic style. Don't let that put you off. It merely helps me organize my thoughts and select the significant items. I won't be straying in the least from the strict truth as I've discovered it; though there may be traces of paramentals in my story, I suppose, and certainly one ghost. I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence."

from Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness

A paramental, according to Thibaut de Castries's cult book Megapolisomancy (prediction of the future by means of large cities) is the spirit being, in the strictest sense of a malevolent dæmon (attendant, ministering, or indwelling spirit), or ganglionic energy, manifested in a particular city or megapolis.

Thibaut de Castries's cult-book Megapolisomancy is a forgotten menacing occult book of frightening symbolic wisdom possessed by the protagonist Franz Westen and his neighbour Donaldus in Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness. Strictly speaking, the ominous and forbidden book is itself a demonic parody of Lovecraft's original fabricated mythical book, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon. Instead of containing, like Lovecraft's esoteric book, "biographies and the secrets of the planet's dread early history" of a new, blood-curdling evolutionary mythology of god-like, sidereal creatures lurking beneath the earth, Leiber's made-up volume reads forboding, spiritual or prophetic, meaning in the modern urban architecture of the city like a demonic Book of Life.