N is for Necronomicon

So the Pagan Blog Project is on the letter R right now and I'm posting way behind. 

I was busy doing important nothing! Whatever, here's another N.

So. You want to know about the Necronomicon, eh? As you should!

Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The Book... of the DEAD. "Bound in human flesh and inked in blood, this ancient Sumerian text contained bizarre burial rites, funerary incantations and demon resurrection passages. It was never meant for the world of the living." I think it's actually illegal for anyone to call themselves a horror fan and NOT know that line.

The Necronomicon is a fake grimoire made up by the author Howard Phillips Lovecraft in the 1920s. In the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and those of his contemporaries (such as August Derleth) the Necronomicon was said to have been written by 'the Mad Arab' Abdul Alhazred sometime before the year 738. Lovecraft himself stated quite firmly that the book was a fiction of his own creation, as was the history of it. He referenced other writers such as Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard, who had also created 'terrible and forbidden' books in their fiction.

So. We got that? The Necronomicon is fake.

"But Mama," you might be saying, "I saw the damn thing for sale in a used bookstore! It had a black cover with some white squiggles on the cover, and the back mentioned the Mad Arab and everything!"

Yeah, that's it

That, boils and ghouls, is what we in the biz know as "The Simon version" so called because the supposed 'editor' went under the pseudonym 'Simon'. It was published in 1977, and has been reprinted about a million times since. The version I own - bought for fifty cents at a garage sale - is the paperback version printed in 1980 and contains a 'preface to the second edition' in which makes some pretty fantastic claims.

Now, here's the thing about the Simon book: up until the 'Prefatory Notes'? The thing is actually not obviously bullshit. The author spends a fair amount of time making links between H.P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley via Sumerian mythology and what was then accepted occult history.

Various Sumerian deities are equated to the Ancient Ones and Elder Gods of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and then to deities Crowley mentioned in his rituals. For example, the Dunwich Horror was compared to Choronzon (Crowley) and then to Pazuzu (everyone's favourite movie devil!). Further comparisons are made between the fictional Azathoth and the Egyptian Thoth, as the author claims 'Azag' is Sumerian for 'Magician' and Thoth of course is... well, Thoth. Azathoth, the author claims, is therefore "a Lord of Magicians."

...except anyone who reads Lovecraft knows Azathoth is the 'blind idiot god' of pure chaos. Sooo, that's a bit of a stretch there, Simon, if you want us to buy that Lovecraft was on the same wavelength as Crowley or even some dead Sumerians.

The book really goes off the rails in the prefatory notes, where the most typically Lovecraftian elements concerning forbidden books are laid out: renegade priests, sudden disappearances, and of course tragic accidents that befall those involved with the book.

The publisher also claims, of course, that they cannot show us the original Necronomicon manuscript from which they've gleaned their translation. Natch.

These things all point to the fact that the Simon Necronomicon is simply an occult text based vaguely on Sumerian myth, with the Lovecraft connection conceived as half marketing strategy and half obvious joke.

So then why the hell do people still believe the Necronomicon is real?

Kenneth Grant, a disciple of Crowley's, believed that Lovecraft and Crowley shared an unconscious connection in that they both drew on the same occult forces in their work... although Lovecraft interpreted these as pure imagination. Lovecraft himself was a pure materialist, finding the thought of real magic downright ridiculous and insulting. Still, this didn't stop him from claiming in the fictional history of the Necronomicon that one of the translators of the dreaded book was the famous Elizabethan magician John Dee.

Still, these are pretty flimsy claims to authenticity. The real issue at play is that everyone wants there to be an almighty grimoire somewhere, a book whose very name inspires dread, and whose study causes calamity and disaster.

There are other versions of the Necronomicon floating about, of course: Donald Tyson seems to have made it his life's mission to write extensively on the subject - he has put out a version of the book closer to the source material than the Simon version, and a few other Lovecraft-related tomes including a real-life spellbook based on the Cthulhu mythos.

This last, The Thirteen Gates of the Necronomicon, is a pretty hefty volume that tries to place the various deities and creatures of Lovecraft's stories in a magical system based on the thirteen 'true' zodiacal constellations. This is a book that truly does aim to blue the line between fiction and reality.

So. Does it work?

(There's a token chaos magician out there right now yelling, "sure!")

My answer is "dunno." I own the book - I can see it from where I'm sitting right now. ...watching me...

No, seriously, I got it when my mom's shop closed up.

I've yet to read it, but I will. And when I do, dear readers, you'll be the first to know if I summon a shoggoth. And on that note, I leave you with this...