NECRONOMICON PHENOMENON

By Shade Oroboros 817

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

  
   What Hath Cthulhu Wrought?

   Most folks seem to prefer the relatively illusory safety of a fictional Necronomicon. Allegedly created by the infamous writer of weird tales H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s, it has like so many other hideous things (say, Bush Republicans) emerged dripping with slime into our so-called "reality" in a bizarre series of multidimensional forms and come unstuck from “time” in a vast retroactive secret history. Love is a many-tentacled thing, after all. The nightmare worlds of HPL’s hyperactive dream-life inspired his many friends to collaborate in creating a new mythology of demons and deities, twisted cultists and accursed townships, and an imaginary library of similarly awful forbidden tomes. We might note that the man had fewer female characters than J.R.R. Tolkien, and that one of the most notorious turned out to be a mere shell possessed by her father at the end of the story. After his death countless imitators continued to spawn new aspects of what became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, manifested in a now enormous media and publishing empire including some very good and much absolutely dreadful writing, literary criticism, film and television, music and role-playing games, action figures and graphic novels, tarot decks and Goth fashion accessories, decals and T-shirts, caps and coffee-mugs. HPL himself was always active in what was then called the Amateur Press movement and in that tradition we now have generations of fanzines, vigintillions of them. Many on-line. And… Cthulhu porn! Just do a search… google, amazon, eBay… he’s freakin’ ubiquitous.

   The HPL film guide Lurker in the Lobby lists some 30 major films, 20 shorts and 7 television episodes, mostly from Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. A Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance references more than 2,600 stories, poems and novels, and that was way back in 1999. 

   If Crowley and Lovecraft were returned to earth today, they would probably have the same first words: “Where the hell are my royalties, you bastards?”



   The Other Ones

   If this Necronomicon did not in fact exist it would become necessary to invent it, and so quite a number of people have. From the moment it first appeared in fiction people began harassing booksellers and slipping cards into library catalogs (including Yale, Boston Public and the Library of Congress, as early as the 1930s). Lovecraft actually wrote a brief history and chronology of its alleged editions, and he and his friends liberally sprinkled imaginary (?) quotations into their stories.

   Perhaps the first real attempt was by L. Sprague de Camp, who in 1973 threw together a melodramatic 7-page preface with a few pages of endlessly repeating indecipherable Arabic alphabetics in the great American capitalist tradition of finding a market and filling a need. It was titled AL AZIF: The Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred (the fabled Mad Arab who is said to have scribed it). Save your money for something with more actual content.

   Perhaps the most entertaining for intellectual fans are The Necronomicon: the Book of Dead Names (done as a straight-faced recreation of the perhaps legendary Dr. John Dee translation) and The R’lyeh Text: Hidden Leaves from the Necronomicon, which in addition to the fanciful grimoires include collections of high quality articles compiled from occult scholar Robert Turner, George Hay, Colin Wilson, L. Sprague de Camp, Angela Carter and several other contributors. These are pretty good efforts.

   More recently magical author Donald Tyson contributed the atmospheric Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred. Since this so-called article is essentially a book review gone quite horribly wrong, I will quote myself from Silver Star III: “The most recent attempt at discovering H.P. Lovecraft’s mythic grimoire in the realm of dream and recreating it in the waking world, and overall a rather effective one, scribed by a genuine magical authority and presented in a surprisingly elegant (for Llewellyn!) tome billed as the autobiography of the fabled Mad Arab himself. I was lucky enough to pick it up used, and my first thought was “This must be the real thing. It killed its first owner so quickly that it is still in mint condition!” Mr. Tyson has also unleashed a second volume called Alhazred: Author of the Necronomicon and a tarot deck, The Necronomicon Tarot Kit.

   I should also note The H.P. Lovecraft Tarot, with art by Daryl Hutchinson and a manual by Eric C. Friedman. The major arcana depict the gods or entities of Lovecraft’s hideous visions, while the four suits are Men, Tomes, Artifacts and Sites. It’s a nice piece of art… well, maybe nice is the wrong word here.

   There is a very bad movie Necronomicon. In general, as with the fan-boy fiction, there are far more dreadful lovecraftian films than good ones. Short list of recommendations: Roger Corman’s The Dunwich Horror and EA Poe’s Haunted Palace; John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, The Thing, and Prince of Darkness; and the very funny Cast A Deadly Spell. There are several volumes of a Necronomicon film journal edited by Andy Black, without any esoteric material.

   There is also a very good Necronomicon anthology (which includes more fragments, stories, and the important essay A Critical Commentary Upon The Necronomicon by New Testament theologian and editor Robert M. Price) from the multi–volume Chaosium anthology series of Mythos literary gems and/or shining trapezohedrons. The series includes over 30 volumes so far by authors old and new, notably including an excellent recent 3-volume collection of Arthur Machen, an edition of commentaries on Blavatsky’s Stanzas of Dyzan, and the Clark Ashton Smith-inspired Book of Eibon, which includes contributions from chaos magician Stephen Sennitt and many others. More chaos magic pops up in The Starry Wisdom anthology from another publisher, and in the works of Phil Hine including his Pseudonomicon.

   Perhaps the oddest is Necronomicon the Pillow, a large soft fluffy version that unfolds several pages of little stuffed entities; the company makes a wide assortment of plushy toys including Santa Cthulhu (with jingle bells on his tendrils), Elvis Cthulhu, superhero Cthulhu, Cthulhu bunny slippers (more tendrils) and assorted other cute cuddly qlipothic entities.

   We may note that the flying Necronomicons with teeth which appeared in the film Evil Dead 3 were so popular that they have later appeared in several Japanese computer games. Down by the old mainstream…

   Perhaps the most genuinely obscure is Frank G. Ripel’s Magic of Atlantis: Sauthenerom: the Real Source of the Necronomicon, a 1985 grimoire of the Typhonian stellar tradition translated from Italian and published in Slovenia. Along with some more magical (in the semi-Crowleyan vein) material it includes some clearly lovecraftian texts.

   Also unlikely to be easily found is a small pamphlet of seals and goetic invocations titled Necronomitonic Sex Magick, edited by Alli Zuan and described as “The Vilest, Blackest Book of Magick ever to be published in the Western World.” Sadly it isn’t, but gets points for enthusiasm.

   Perhaps the second best known is by the Swiss artist of H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon, designer of the film Alien and creator of the Giger Tarot, about as lovecraftian as it gets. Perhaps one Necronomicon alone, however, stands squamous rugose cone and shoulders above the others.


 
   The Simonomicon: Testimony of the Mad Bishop

   The most notorious and popular version of this handy handbook is generally referred to as Simon’s Necronomicon, easily available at any mall in America. It, along with the late Anton Szandor LaVey’s Satanic Bible (and the companion volume Satanic Rituals, which includes a lovecraftian ritual) has never gone out of print since it was published, has become an icon of pop culture and teenage rites of passage, and has frequently been found at the scenes of amateur blood sacrifices and other sordid murders.

   Many magicians refer to Simon’s Necronomicon as a fraud, although it is largely made up of ancient and authentic Sumerian texts ornamented with a series of magical seals of dubious provenance. Many pixels of internetery fuel the debate, and perhaps the most thorough print resource is The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft’s Legend by Daniel Harms & John Wisdom Gonce III, published by Weiser in a revised and expanded version in 2003. I kept meaning to review this, as it is a substantial (342 pages) work of both genuine occult history and lovecraftian criticism, with far more information on the Simon controversy than I intend to provide here. If you like this stuff, you want that book.

   However, the question of what makes a magical text authentic (aside from ascribed antiquity) is a slippery if not slimy one. King Solomon did not write the Greater & Lesser Keys of Solomon, and Pope Honorius probably did not author the grimoire credited to his name. Medieval custom often involved recruiting an author long gone to give an aura of authenticity to more recent productions, but at some point some human is inspired to make this kind of stuff up. Eventually they become an authority to be slavishly followed, no matter how fragmentary or incoherent their text.

   Someone who actually knew quite a lot about magick wrote Simon’s Necronomicon. It is in fact a relatively complete system based on self-initiation through a series of planetary gates, giving access to a catalog of useful spirits. It does recommend banishing rituals (however futile), and let us add that it calls upon ancient Pagan gods, rather than the endless Judeo-Christian verbiage of the Solomonic tradition of grimoires. And my point is that considering the many thousands of copies sold, more people have been exposed to and quite possibly practiced Simon’s rituals than all those medieval grimoires put together.

   If rituals (the Catholic mass, Buddhist mantras, the Gardnerian circle casting, the LBRP) gain power through spoken repetition, then how long does it take to become real? If you call them, will they come?

   If it does not matter if the grimoire is real, are the entities real?

   Kenneth Grant, in his Triple Typhonian Trilogies, has devoted considerable discussion to the cosmos unveiled by the prophet HPL. Mr. Grant’s sense of humor, while not as apparent as Simon’s, is subtle, dry, and frequently present. His thesis is based on the fact that many of HPL’s tales were based on his dreams, that despite the rejection of his conscious mind HPL was involuntarily contacting these entities on the astral plane as he slept. In this theory, the Necronomicon is an astral grimoire, existing on the plane of thought, which is existentially as real (so far as we know) as anything else we might experience. See my review of “Shower of Stars” Dream & Book: the Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism by Peter Lamborn Wilson in Silver Star IV.

   Chaos magicians have invoked these entities and discovered that if you call them, they will indeed come; again, see Phil Hine’s Pseudonomicon and the records of many others.

   What sparked this article, however, is that recently Simon spoke up.

   For decades there was only The Necronomicon and the lesser companion The Necronomicon Spellbook, a slender guide to using the magical seals. However, he has recently emitted two new and substantial volumes which may revive his reputation as both an accomplished occultist and a cultural historian. The first is Dead Names: The Dark History of The Necronomicon, which is a clever and quite funny history of the process of producing the original edition and also a detailed memoir of the NYC occult scene in the 1970s where this took place, including both OTO events and the explosion of Wicca and many other strange phenomena. I must confess that I was there: in my teenage Wiccan years I worked for publisher Herman Slater of the Warlock Shop, later the Magickal Childe, and I knew Simon and many of the other folks involved. So for me reading this resulted in a fair amount of hysterical laughter and a few gritty flashbacks to repressed memories (all of my best memories are repressed, that’s why I take my Repressitall every day!). Cthulhu aside, there was plenty of paranoia around, since this was the summer of Son of Sam. Occult conspiracy trappings aside, this book is a very entertaining read for a day at the beach. This was the peak of the psychedelic era and the Occult Revival, and here is one of the few decent and detailed accounts of these turbulent times.

   Then there is also The Gates of the Necronomicon, a far more substantial user’s guide to the main volume, weaving stellar mythology and the magicks of many ancient civilizations in Asia, Europe and the Middle East into a remarkably coherent explanation as to what Opening the Gates really means. It is also an account of the roots of shamanism, Taoism, ceremonial magick, Gnostic heresies and wandering bishops, conspiracy theory and what might actually be a substantial contribution to the study of occultism by someone who is, like it or not, a genuine scholar in the field. It is well worth reading just for his Prolegomena to a Study of Occultism.

   And when you are done, check out Unholy Alliance by Peter Levenda, who appears as a character in Dead Names, and see if you make any connections…



   Necronom.com

   Perhaps it’s just the fact that the Internet is a million miles wide and only an inch deep and possessed of a transient Buddha-nature, but many of the referenced websites seem to be mysteriously gone. One hopes that nothing bad has happened to them, nothing hideous, unspeakable, mind shattering, or fatal. Wikipedia is still there, and since I know you are looking up favorite occultists and rock bands while you should be working, you might as well start there. Or if you have a residual sense of humor, try Cthulhu on Google Image and get 99,300 pictures in 0.09 seconds. Be careful on the sex sites…

   I have not even scratched the surface of the vast realm of Lovecraftian literature here. Indeed, even though I (as you may well have surmised) have a long-term unhealthy interest in collecting this stuff I am way behind on reading it. I have piles of Classic Cthulhu pastiches, tales set in ancient Egypt or among inbred hillbillies (a whole novel in dialect!), mysteries hard-boiled, Holmesian and otherwise, and yes, deviant erotica… that can wait… sometimes I review the more outstanding items in my column in this journal. My friends often express the opinion that I am not a well man, and they may be right. I very much resent going down in this deep dark well, they have to lower me screaming in a large bucket.