Post by Rik Wallin on Mar 30, 2007 9:10:16 GMT -6
This is the Necronomicon FAQ by Colin Low:
I guess all those people who still think the Necronomicon is an invention
of Lovecraft's just aren't keeping up with the fast-moving pace
of modern occult scholarship. It is time to repost the Necronomicon FAQ.
Q. What is the Necronomicon?
The Necronomicon of Alhazred, (literally: "Book of Dead Names")
is not, as popularly believed, a grimoire, or sorceror's spell-
book; it was conceived as a history, and hence "a book of things
now dead and gone", but the author shared with Madame Blavatsky a
magpie-like tendency to garner and stitch together fact, rumour,
speculation, and complete balderdash, and the result is a vast
and almost unreadable compendium of near-nonsense which bears more
than a superficial resemblance to Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine".
In times past the book has been referred to guardedly as "Al
Azif", or "The Book of the Arab". It was written in seven
volumes, and runs to over 900 pages in the Latin edition.
Q. Where and when was the Necronomicon written?
The Necronomicon was written in Damascus in 730 A.D. by Abdul
Alhazred.
Q. Who was Abdul Alhazred?
Little is known. What we do know about him is largely derived
from the small amount of biographical information in the
Necronomicon itself - he travelled widely, from Alexandria to the
Punjab, and was well read. He had a flair for languages, and
boasts on many occasions of his ability to read and translate
manuscripts which defied lesser scholars. His research
methodology however smacked more of Nostradamus than Herodotus.
As Nostradamus himself puts it in Quatrains 1 & 2:
"Sitting alone at night in secret study;
it is placed on the brass tripod. A slight
flame comes out of the emptiness
and makes successful that which should
not be believed in vain.
The wand in the hand is placed
in the middle of the tripod's legs.
With water he sprinkles both the hem
of his garment and his foot.
A voice, fear; he trembles in his robes.
Divine splendour; the god sits nearby."
Just as Nostradamus used ritual magic to probe the future, so
Alhazred used similar techniques (and an incense composed of
olibanum, storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish) to clarify the
past, and it is this, combined with a lack of references, which
resulted in the Necronomicon being dismissed as largely worthless
by historians.
He is often referred to as "the mad Arab", and while he was
certainly eccentric by modern standards, there is no evidence to
substantiate a claim of madness, other than a chronic inability
to sustain a train of thought for more than a few paragraphs
before leaping off at a tangent. He is better compared with
figures such as the Greek neo-platonist philosopher Proclus (410-
485 A.D.), who was completely at home in astronomy, mathematics,
philosophy, and metaphysics, but was sufficiently well versed in
the magical techniques of theurgy to evoke Hekate to visible
appearance; he was also an initiate of Egyptian and Chaldean
mystery religions. It is no accident that Alhazred was intimately
familar with the works of Proclus.
Q. What is the printing history of the Necronomicon?
No Arabic manuscript is known to exist; the author Idries Shah
carried out a search in the libraries of Deobund in India, Al-
Azhar in Egypt, and the Library of the Holy City of Mecca,
without success. A Latin translation was made in 1487 (not in the
17th. century as Lovecraft maintains) by a Dominican priest Olaus
Wormius. Wormius, a German by birth, was a secretary to the first
Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada,
and it is likely that the manuscript of the Necronomicon was
seized during the persecution of Moors ("Moriscos") who had been
converted to Catholism under duress; this group was deemed to be
unsufficiently pure in its beliefs.
It was an act of sheer folly for Wormius to translate and
print the Necronomicon at that time and place. The book must have
held an obsessive fascination for the man, because he was finally
charged with heresy and burned after sending a copy of the book
to Johann Tritheim, Abbot of Spanheim (better known as
"Trithemius"); the accompanying letter contained a detailed and
blasphemous interpretation of certain passages in the Book of
Genesis. Virtually all the copies of Wormius's translation were
seized and burned with him, although there is the inevitable
suspicion that at least one copy must have found its way into the
Vatican Library.
Almost one hundred years later, in 1586, a copy of
Wormius's Latin translation surfaced in Prague. Dr. John Dee, the
famous English magician, and his assistant Edward Kelly were at
the court of the Emperor Rudolph II to discuss plans for making
alchemical gold, and Kelly bought the copy from the so-called
"Black Rabbi" and Kabbalist, Jacob Eliezer, who had fled to
Prague from Italy after accusations of necromancy. At that time
Prague had become a magnet for magicians, alchemists and
charletons of every kind under the patronage of Rudolph, and it
is hard to imagine a more likely place in Europe for a copy to
surface.
The Necronomicon appears to have had a marked influence on
Kelly; the character of his scrying changed, and he produced an
extraordinary communication which struck horror into the Dee
household; Crowley interpeted it as the abortive first attempt of
an extra-human entity to communicate the Thelemic "Book of the
Law". Kelly left Dee shortly afterwards. Dee translated the
Necronomicon into English while warden of Christ's College,
Manchester, but contrary to Lovecraft, this translation was never
printed - the manuscript passed into the collection of the great
collector Elias Ashmole, and hence to the Bodleian Library in
Oxford.
There are many modern fakes masquerading as the Necronomicon.
They can be recognised by a total lack of imagination or
intelligence, qualities Alhazred possessed in abundance.
Q. What is the content of the Necronomicon?
The book is best known for its antediluvian speculations.
Alhazred appears to have had access to many sources now lost, and
events which are only hinted at in the Book of Genesis or the
apocryphal Book of Enoch, or disguised as mythology in other
sources, are explored in great detail. Alhazred may have used
dubious magical techniques to clarify the past, but he also
shared with 5th. century B.C. Greek writers such as Thucydides a
critical mind and a willingness to explore the meanings of
mythological and sacred stories. His speculations are remarkably
modern, and this may account for his current popularity: he
believed that many species besides the human race had inhabited
the Earth, and that much knowledge was passed to mankind in
encounters with being from other "spheres". He shared with some
neo-platonists the belief that stars are like our sun, and have
their own unseen planets with their own lifeforms, but elaborated
this belief with a good deal of metaphysical speculation in which
these beings were part of a cosmic hierarchy of spiritual
evolution. He was also convinced that he had contacted these
"Old Ones" using magical invocations, and warned of terrible
powers waiting to return to re-claim the Earth - he interpretated
this belief in the light of the Apocalypse of St. John, but
reversed the ending so that the Beast triumphs after a great war
in which the earth is laid waste.
Q. Why did the novelist H.P. Lovecraft claim to have invented the
Necronomicon?
The answer to this interesting question lies in two people: the
poet and magician Aliester Crowley, and a Brooklyn milliner
called Sonia Greene.
There is no question that Crowley read Dee's translation of the
Necromonicon in the Ashmolean, probably while researching Dee's
papers; too many passages in Crowley's "Book of the Law" read
like a transcription of passages in that translation. Either
that, or Crowley, who claimed to remember his life as Edward
Kelly in a previous incarnation, read it in a previous life! Why
doesn't he mention the Necronomicon in his works? He was
surprisingly reticent about his real sources - there is a strong
suspicion that '777', which Crowley claimed to have written, was
largely plagiarised from Allan Bennet's notes. His spiritual debt
to Nietzsche, which in an unguarded moment he refers to as
"almost an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom" is studiously
ignored; likewise the influence of Richard Burton's "Kasidah" on
his doctrine of True Will. I suspect that the Necronomicon became
an embarrassment to Crowley when he realised the extent to which
he had unconsciously incorporated passages from the Necronomicon
into "The Book of the Law".
In 1918 Crowley was in New York. As always, he was trying to
establish his literary reputation, and was contributing to "The
International" and "Vanity Fair". Sonia Greene was an energetic
and ambitious Jewish emigre with literary ambitions, and she had
joined a dinner and lecture club called "Walker's Sunrise Club"
(?!); it was there that she first encountered Crowley, who had
been invited to give a talk on modern poetry.
It was a good match; in a letter to Norman Mudd, Crowley
describes his ideal woman as "rather tall, muscular and plump,
vivacious, ambitious, energetic, passionate, age from thirty to
thirty five, probably a Jewess, not unlikely a singer or actress
addicted to such amusements. She is to be 'fashionable', perhaps
a shade loud or vulgar. Very rich of course." Sonia was not an
actress or singer, but qualified in other respects. She was
earning what, for that time, was an enormous sum of money as a
designer and seller of woman's hats. She was variously described
as "Junoesque", "a woman of great charm and personal magnetism",
"genuinely glamorous with powerful feminine allure", "one of the
most beautiful women I have ever met", and "a learned but
eccentric human phonograph". In 1918 she was thirty-five years
old and a divorcee with an adolescent daughter. Crowley did not
waste time as far as women were concerned; they met on an
irregular basis for some months.
In 1921 Sonia Greene met the novelist H.P. Lovecraft, and in
that year Lovecraft published the first novel where he mentions
Abdul Alhazred ("The Nameless City"). In 1922 he first mentions
the Necronomicon ("The Hound"). On March 3rd. 1924, H.P.
Lovecraft and Sonia Greene married.
We do not know what Crowley told Sonia Greene, and we do not
know what Sonia told Lovecraft. However, consider the following
quotation from "The Call of Cthulhu" [1926]:
"That cult would never die until the stars came right again
[precession of the Equinoxes?], and the secret priests would
take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume
His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then
mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and
wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown
aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.
Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to
shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth
would flame with a holocaust of ecstacy and freedom."
It may be brief, it may be mangled, but it has the undeniable ring
of Crowley's "Book of the Law". It is easy to imagine a situation
where Sonia and Lovecraft are laughing and talking in a firelit
room about a new story, and Sonia introduces some ideas based on
what Crowley had told her; she wouldn't even have to mention
Crowley, just enough of the ideas to spark Lovecraft's
imagination. There is no evidence that Lovecraft ever saw the
Necronomicon, or even knew that the book existed; his
Necronomicon is remarkably close to the spirit of the original,
but the details are pure invention, as one would expect. There is
no Yog-Sothoth or Azathoth or Nyarlathotep in the original, but
there is an Aiwaz...
Q. Where can the Necronomicon be found?
Nowhere with certainty, is the short and simple answer, and once
more we must suspect Crowley in having a hand in this. In 1912
Crowley met Theodor Reuss, the head of the German Ordo Templi
Orientis (O.T.O), and worked within that order for several years,
until in 1922 Reuss resigned as head in Crowley's favour. Thus we
have Crowley working in close contact for 10 years with the
leader of a German masonic group. In the years from 1933-38
the few known copies of the Necronomicon simply disappeared;
someone in the German government of Adolf Hitler took an interest
in obscure occult literature and began to obtain copies by fair
means or foul. Dee's translation disappeared from the Bodleian
following a break-in in the spring of 1934. The British Museum
suffered several abortive burglaries, and the Wormius edition was
deleted from the catalogue and removed to an underground
repository in a converted slate mine in Wales (where the Crown
Jewels were stored during the 1939-45 war). Other libraries lost
their copies, and today there is no library with a genuine
catalogue entry for the Necronomicon. The current whereabouts of
copies of the Necronomicon is unknown; there is a story of a
large wartime cache of occult and magical documents in the Oster-
horn area near Salzburg. There is a recurring story about a copy
bound in the skin of concentration camp victims.
This F.A.Q. was compiled using information obtained from
"The Book of the Arab", by Justin Geoffry, Starry Wisdom Press,
1979
Colin Low has never read the Necronomicon, never seen the
Necronomicon, and has no information as to where a copy may be
found.
I guess all those people who still think the Necronomicon is an invention
of Lovecraft's just aren't keeping up with the fast-moving pace
of modern occult scholarship. It is time to repost the Necronomicon FAQ.
Q. What is the Necronomicon?
The Necronomicon of Alhazred, (literally: "Book of Dead Names")
is not, as popularly believed, a grimoire, or sorceror's spell-
book; it was conceived as a history, and hence "a book of things
now dead and gone", but the author shared with Madame Blavatsky a
magpie-like tendency to garner and stitch together fact, rumour,
speculation, and complete balderdash, and the result is a vast
and almost unreadable compendium of near-nonsense which bears more
than a superficial resemblance to Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine".
In times past the book has been referred to guardedly as "Al
Azif", or "The Book of the Arab". It was written in seven
volumes, and runs to over 900 pages in the Latin edition.
Q. Where and when was the Necronomicon written?
The Necronomicon was written in Damascus in 730 A.D. by Abdul
Alhazred.
Q. Who was Abdul Alhazred?
Little is known. What we do know about him is largely derived
from the small amount of biographical information in the
Necronomicon itself - he travelled widely, from Alexandria to the
Punjab, and was well read. He had a flair for languages, and
boasts on many occasions of his ability to read and translate
manuscripts which defied lesser scholars. His research
methodology however smacked more of Nostradamus than Herodotus.
As Nostradamus himself puts it in Quatrains 1 & 2:
"Sitting alone at night in secret study;
it is placed on the brass tripod. A slight
flame comes out of the emptiness
and makes successful that which should
not be believed in vain.
The wand in the hand is placed
in the middle of the tripod's legs.
With water he sprinkles both the hem
of his garment and his foot.
A voice, fear; he trembles in his robes.
Divine splendour; the god sits nearby."
Just as Nostradamus used ritual magic to probe the future, so
Alhazred used similar techniques (and an incense composed of
olibanum, storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish) to clarify the
past, and it is this, combined with a lack of references, which
resulted in the Necronomicon being dismissed as largely worthless
by historians.
He is often referred to as "the mad Arab", and while he was
certainly eccentric by modern standards, there is no evidence to
substantiate a claim of madness, other than a chronic inability
to sustain a train of thought for more than a few paragraphs
before leaping off at a tangent. He is better compared with
figures such as the Greek neo-platonist philosopher Proclus (410-
485 A.D.), who was completely at home in astronomy, mathematics,
philosophy, and metaphysics, but was sufficiently well versed in
the magical techniques of theurgy to evoke Hekate to visible
appearance; he was also an initiate of Egyptian and Chaldean
mystery religions. It is no accident that Alhazred was intimately
familar with the works of Proclus.
Q. What is the printing history of the Necronomicon?
No Arabic manuscript is known to exist; the author Idries Shah
carried out a search in the libraries of Deobund in India, Al-
Azhar in Egypt, and the Library of the Holy City of Mecca,
without success. A Latin translation was made in 1487 (not in the
17th. century as Lovecraft maintains) by a Dominican priest Olaus
Wormius. Wormius, a German by birth, was a secretary to the first
Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada,
and it is likely that the manuscript of the Necronomicon was
seized during the persecution of Moors ("Moriscos") who had been
converted to Catholism under duress; this group was deemed to be
unsufficiently pure in its beliefs.
It was an act of sheer folly for Wormius to translate and
print the Necronomicon at that time and place. The book must have
held an obsessive fascination for the man, because he was finally
charged with heresy and burned after sending a copy of the book
to Johann Tritheim, Abbot of Spanheim (better known as
"Trithemius"); the accompanying letter contained a detailed and
blasphemous interpretation of certain passages in the Book of
Genesis. Virtually all the copies of Wormius's translation were
seized and burned with him, although there is the inevitable
suspicion that at least one copy must have found its way into the
Vatican Library.
Almost one hundred years later, in 1586, a copy of
Wormius's Latin translation surfaced in Prague. Dr. John Dee, the
famous English magician, and his assistant Edward Kelly were at
the court of the Emperor Rudolph II to discuss plans for making
alchemical gold, and Kelly bought the copy from the so-called
"Black Rabbi" and Kabbalist, Jacob Eliezer, who had fled to
Prague from Italy after accusations of necromancy. At that time
Prague had become a magnet for magicians, alchemists and
charletons of every kind under the patronage of Rudolph, and it
is hard to imagine a more likely place in Europe for a copy to
surface.
The Necronomicon appears to have had a marked influence on
Kelly; the character of his scrying changed, and he produced an
extraordinary communication which struck horror into the Dee
household; Crowley interpeted it as the abortive first attempt of
an extra-human entity to communicate the Thelemic "Book of the
Law". Kelly left Dee shortly afterwards. Dee translated the
Necronomicon into English while warden of Christ's College,
Manchester, but contrary to Lovecraft, this translation was never
printed - the manuscript passed into the collection of the great
collector Elias Ashmole, and hence to the Bodleian Library in
Oxford.
There are many modern fakes masquerading as the Necronomicon.
They can be recognised by a total lack of imagination or
intelligence, qualities Alhazred possessed in abundance.
Q. What is the content of the Necronomicon?
The book is best known for its antediluvian speculations.
Alhazred appears to have had access to many sources now lost, and
events which are only hinted at in the Book of Genesis or the
apocryphal Book of Enoch, or disguised as mythology in other
sources, are explored in great detail. Alhazred may have used
dubious magical techniques to clarify the past, but he also
shared with 5th. century B.C. Greek writers such as Thucydides a
critical mind and a willingness to explore the meanings of
mythological and sacred stories. His speculations are remarkably
modern, and this may account for his current popularity: he
believed that many species besides the human race had inhabited
the Earth, and that much knowledge was passed to mankind in
encounters with being from other "spheres". He shared with some
neo-platonists the belief that stars are like our sun, and have
their own unseen planets with their own lifeforms, but elaborated
this belief with a good deal of metaphysical speculation in which
these beings were part of a cosmic hierarchy of spiritual
evolution. He was also convinced that he had contacted these
"Old Ones" using magical invocations, and warned of terrible
powers waiting to return to re-claim the Earth - he interpretated
this belief in the light of the Apocalypse of St. John, but
reversed the ending so that the Beast triumphs after a great war
in which the earth is laid waste.
Q. Why did the novelist H.P. Lovecraft claim to have invented the
Necronomicon?
The answer to this interesting question lies in two people: the
poet and magician Aliester Crowley, and a Brooklyn milliner
called Sonia Greene.
There is no question that Crowley read Dee's translation of the
Necromonicon in the Ashmolean, probably while researching Dee's
papers; too many passages in Crowley's "Book of the Law" read
like a transcription of passages in that translation. Either
that, or Crowley, who claimed to remember his life as Edward
Kelly in a previous incarnation, read it in a previous life! Why
doesn't he mention the Necronomicon in his works? He was
surprisingly reticent about his real sources - there is a strong
suspicion that '777', which Crowley claimed to have written, was
largely plagiarised from Allan Bennet's notes. His spiritual debt
to Nietzsche, which in an unguarded moment he refers to as
"almost an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom" is studiously
ignored; likewise the influence of Richard Burton's "Kasidah" on
his doctrine of True Will. I suspect that the Necronomicon became
an embarrassment to Crowley when he realised the extent to which
he had unconsciously incorporated passages from the Necronomicon
into "The Book of the Law".
In 1918 Crowley was in New York. As always, he was trying to
establish his literary reputation, and was contributing to "The
International" and "Vanity Fair". Sonia Greene was an energetic
and ambitious Jewish emigre with literary ambitions, and she had
joined a dinner and lecture club called "Walker's Sunrise Club"
(?!); it was there that she first encountered Crowley, who had
been invited to give a talk on modern poetry.
It was a good match; in a letter to Norman Mudd, Crowley
describes his ideal woman as "rather tall, muscular and plump,
vivacious, ambitious, energetic, passionate, age from thirty to
thirty five, probably a Jewess, not unlikely a singer or actress
addicted to such amusements. She is to be 'fashionable', perhaps
a shade loud or vulgar. Very rich of course." Sonia was not an
actress or singer, but qualified in other respects. She was
earning what, for that time, was an enormous sum of money as a
designer and seller of woman's hats. She was variously described
as "Junoesque", "a woman of great charm and personal magnetism",
"genuinely glamorous with powerful feminine allure", "one of the
most beautiful women I have ever met", and "a learned but
eccentric human phonograph". In 1918 she was thirty-five years
old and a divorcee with an adolescent daughter. Crowley did not
waste time as far as women were concerned; they met on an
irregular basis for some months.
In 1921 Sonia Greene met the novelist H.P. Lovecraft, and in
that year Lovecraft published the first novel where he mentions
Abdul Alhazred ("The Nameless City"). In 1922 he first mentions
the Necronomicon ("The Hound"). On March 3rd. 1924, H.P.
Lovecraft and Sonia Greene married.
We do not know what Crowley told Sonia Greene, and we do not
know what Sonia told Lovecraft. However, consider the following
quotation from "The Call of Cthulhu" [1926]:
"That cult would never die until the stars came right again
[precession of the Equinoxes?], and the secret priests would
take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume
His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then
mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and
wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown
aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.
Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to
shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth
would flame with a holocaust of ecstacy and freedom."
It may be brief, it may be mangled, but it has the undeniable ring
of Crowley's "Book of the Law". It is easy to imagine a situation
where Sonia and Lovecraft are laughing and talking in a firelit
room about a new story, and Sonia introduces some ideas based on
what Crowley had told her; she wouldn't even have to mention
Crowley, just enough of the ideas to spark Lovecraft's
imagination. There is no evidence that Lovecraft ever saw the
Necronomicon, or even knew that the book existed; his
Necronomicon is remarkably close to the spirit of the original,
but the details are pure invention, as one would expect. There is
no Yog-Sothoth or Azathoth or Nyarlathotep in the original, but
there is an Aiwaz...
Q. Where can the Necronomicon be found?
Nowhere with certainty, is the short and simple answer, and once
more we must suspect Crowley in having a hand in this. In 1912
Crowley met Theodor Reuss, the head of the German Ordo Templi
Orientis (O.T.O), and worked within that order for several years,
until in 1922 Reuss resigned as head in Crowley's favour. Thus we
have Crowley working in close contact for 10 years with the
leader of a German masonic group. In the years from 1933-38
the few known copies of the Necronomicon simply disappeared;
someone in the German government of Adolf Hitler took an interest
in obscure occult literature and began to obtain copies by fair
means or foul. Dee's translation disappeared from the Bodleian
following a break-in in the spring of 1934. The British Museum
suffered several abortive burglaries, and the Wormius edition was
deleted from the catalogue and removed to an underground
repository in a converted slate mine in Wales (where the Crown
Jewels were stored during the 1939-45 war). Other libraries lost
their copies, and today there is no library with a genuine
catalogue entry for the Necronomicon. The current whereabouts of
copies of the Necronomicon is unknown; there is a story of a
large wartime cache of occult and magical documents in the Oster-
horn area near Salzburg. There is a recurring story about a copy
bound in the skin of concentration camp victims.
This F.A.Q. was compiled using information obtained from
"The Book of the Arab", by Justin Geoffry, Starry Wisdom Press,
1979
Colin Low has never read the Necronomicon, never seen the
Necronomicon, and has no information as to where a copy may be
found.