(Head and Tail of the Dragon, used with incantations to Yog-Sothoth)

TheNecronomicon is a supposedly ancient book, invented by the fantasy and horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) as a plot device for some of his stories. Lovecraft first used the title in his story The Festival, written in 1923, but two years earlier he had included the name of the imaginary author of the Necronomicon, the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, in his story The Nameless City, in connection with a couplet from the dread text:

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

When Lovecraft was five years old, he read an edition of the Arabian Nights and developed a passion for Persian things. He made his mother decorate a corner of his bedroom with Oriental hangings and an incense burner. One of his adult relatives suggested as a joke that he should start calling himself Abdul Alhazred. The name stuck in Lovecraft's nearly photographic memory, and later found use in his fiction.

In The Nameless City Lovecraft wrote: "Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages.... It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet..." The protagonist of the story has a predictably horrifying experience in the city, and falls to babbling the couplet over and over like a maniac as hoards of half-transparent reptiles threaten to engulf him.

The hero of The Festival finds himself waiting in a room filled with "hoary and mouldy" books about the occult, and among them "worst of all, the unmentionableNecronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation, a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered." At the end of the story, the hero, who has of course gone mad, quotes one paragraph from the book:

"The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws: till out of corruption horrific life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

The reputation of the Necronomicon rests both upon Lovecraft's power as a storyteller, and on the fanciful history he concocted for the book, which is interwoven with true elements. For example, there really was an historical figure named "Olaus Wormius" as unlikely as this name sounds.

According to Lovecraft's own fictional history, the book was written around the year 730 at Damascus by the Arab poet Abdul Alhazred, who had been born at Sana in Yemen. The original Arab title for the work was Al Azif. In 950 it was translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas, and received the Greek name Necronomicon, which Lovecraft translated as "The Book of Dead Names." All copies of the Greek text were ordered burned by the Patriarch Michael in the year 1050 -- by this time the Arab text had been lost. Some Greek copies escaped, however. In 1228 Olaus Wormius translated the Greek text into Latin. Both the Latin and Greek editions were suppressed by the Papal Censors at the command of Pope Gregory IX in 1232. A German black letter edition appeared around 1440, and sometime in the first half of the next century (1500-1550), the Greek text was reprinted in Italy. The final known version of the work was a Spanish translation from the Latin text, made around 1600.

In Lovecraft's tales, those interested in the Necronomicon can always consult the copy kept under lock and key in the library of Miskatonic University, a center of study that Lovecraft also invented. Considering how dangerous the book is, his characters find it surprisingly easy to gain access to it.

And just why is the Necronomicon so dangerous? Not so much for anything specific it contains, but because of the terrible things it hints about, matters better left undisturbed in the mud at the bottom of the subconscious sea of the human race.

Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is a group of stories, poems and novels written by him and by other writers centered around the premise that at some dim time in prehistory the earth was ruled by a race of monstrous and evil entities known as the Great Old Ones. They were cast down from their seats of power and driven from our world, but they did not cease to exist. They continue between the dimensions of normal time and space, dreaming and waiting for the time when they shall be able to rule the earth once again, as they did in days of old.

On the matter of the Great Old Ones, Lovecraft wrote in his story The Call of Cthulhu:

"In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms."

Connected with the lost city of the Old Ones is the hideous chant "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" which translates into English as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

The Old Ones count among their number the blind idiot god Azathoth; the all-in-one and one-in-all Yog-Sothoth who can travel between time and space; the hideously-piping Nyarlathotep who is the unwelcome herald of the Old Ones; the octopus-like Cthulhu who lies dreaming in R'lyeh beneath miles of ocean water; Hastur the Unspeakable, half-brother to Cthulhu who dwells upon the air; and Shub-niggureth, the ever-fertile black goat of the woodlands with a thousand young.

These dreaded beings are dead in every normal human sense of the word, yet they cling to a strange super-dimensional vitality that seems to derive from the human unconscious mind. In forgotten backwaters of the world where degenerate and twisted tribes practice evil rituals, or among groups of decadent black magicians, the Old Ones cause dim memories of their former power and glory to stir. They form a bond with those who abandon their humanity and worship them, as the precursors of the human race did millions of years ago.

Certain locations on the earth where the veil between dimensions is thin, such as the frozen Plateau of Leng in Antarctica, or Irem, the Arabian desert City of Pillars, or the drowned R'lyeh, are particularly favorable for making this unholy contact. Hints of their existence, and of how they may be contacted, are sometimes recorded in obscure occult texts such as the Necronomicon. This is why the book is supposed to be so powerful, and so evil. For if the Old Ones succeed in forcing a doorway permanently open onto our time and space, they will destroy and enslave the world.

The underlying theme of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos has many powerful echoes in the mythologies of ancient cultures around the world. It is probably for this reason that it struck such a chord of response in readers. We find in it similarities to the myth of the Archons of Gnosticism, who together with the arch devil and god, Yaldabaoth, gave shape to the material world and rule over the human race. There are also echoes of the Jewish myth of the fall of the angels, and more specifically of the Watchers who descended to earth to sin with the daughters of mankind, and to teach their offspring forbidden arts and sciences. The legend of the fall of Atlantis is in harmony with Lovecraft's mythos as well, as are the more modern Enochian communications of the Elizabethan magician Dr. John Dee.

The other day while I was reading The Magic Arts In Celtic Britain by Lewis Spence (first published in London by Rider in 1945), I happened across this passage, which has bearing on the general topic of mythic correspondences with Lovecraft's Great Old Ones:

"But I must not close this chapter without some more particular reference to the nature of the darksome spirits who populated the submarine localities of which I have spoken. As I have said, these were the Fomorians. The word implies 'Dwellers under the Sea', and they are perhaps best described as the gods of an ancient discredited pantheon, who were in opposition to the deities of light, as represented by the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were worshipped by a later race. They are alluded to as monstrous and misshapen forms, deformed and frequently equipped with but one leg or arm apiece, and with the heads of bulls, horses or goats. The chief of this band of demon-like creatures was that Balor, the one-eyed, of whom more than one mention has already been made. They appear to have waged continual war against the Tuatha Dé Danann, by whom they were conquered in the terrific battle of Moytura. But they were by no means crushed by this defeat and continued to harass the gods of light for generations chiefly by employing their undoubted powers of sorcery." (Spence. Magic Arts In Celtic Britain. New York: Dover, 1999, pages 25-6)

These tales are so primal, so ancient, that they may well be part of our racial memory, just as is the myth of the Great Flood. If credence is given to the notion that an individual human being can draw upon this racial memory, as the psychologist Carl Jung believed, then it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Lovecraft in his frequent strange dreams and nightmares glimpsed something true about the distant past of the universe, perhaps so far back in the past that the human race had not even begun to take the shape we know.

There are numerous intelligent, educated individuals who entertain this possibility. Notable among them is Kenneth Grant, who is arguably the rightful head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and the author of many books on magic and the occult. Those interested in the reality that may underlie the Cthulhu Mythos should study Grant's Outer Gateways and his Nightside of Eden, both recently reprinted by Skoob Books.

A very clear distinction must be made between the underlying mythic current that lends Lovecraft's stories their intuited sense of plausibility, and the actual details contained in the stories, most of which are completely fictional and had no existence outside of Lovecraft's fertile imagination. The actual names and characteristics of the Great Old Ones are fictional. The places associated with them, such as the Plateau of Leng, are fictional. The book the Necronomicon is fictional.

Perceiving that so many gullible human beings were willing to believe that such a book as the Necronomicon existed, writers came along who wrote collections of quasi-occult gibberish and titled them the Necronomicon. There is nothing particularly wrong with this sort of harmless fun, provided those who buy these books realize that they are concoctions of the imagination. I have two of them in my own library.

One is The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names "edited" by George Hay and introduced by Colin Wilson, first published by Neville Spearman in 1978 -- and I do mean "first published."

The other is The Necronomicon, Edited with an Introduction by Simon, copyrighted in 1977 by Schlangekraft Inc., and published by Avon in 1980 -- I am honored to own the first printing of the Avon edition.

It seems to me that at some time in the past I read a third version of the Necronomicon, but I cannot locate this book in my library and cannot remember how I may have come across it. Most likely I read it in a dream, which is not too unusual an occurrence for me -- I've written numerous books in repeating dreams, and often find myself in strange libraries reading curious old texts while I lie asleep.

Other published versions of the Necronomicon exist. They numbered around half a dozen or so, the last time I checked. But I've only read the two in my library, and the one in my dream. Both of the published texts are of limited interest -- the dream text was somewhat better, as I recall.

By all means, purchase, read, study, memorize and take to heart any and all of the books sold in the stores with the title Necronomicon, but for heaven's sake remember as you do so that they are phonies, each and every one. The only genuine Necronomicon is the one you will read in your own dreams, as I did, and as Lovecraft did.

Those seeking serious information about the Necronomicon should consult The Necronomicon Files, a comprehensive and surprisingly sane examination of the Necronomicon phenomenon. Here you will find a link to the complete text of Lovecraft's brief bogus history of the Necronomicon.

Concerning the curious connnecting thread that links Gnostic theology, the Book of Enoch, the New Testament Book of Revelation, the Elizabethan magician Dr. John Dee and his communications with the Enochian angels, the Victorian era secret society of practical magic known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the magician and Great Beast Aleister Crowley, the dreamer and writer H. P. Lovecraft, and the writer and magician Kenneth Grant (and perhaps I should not exclude myself from this list) read the essay "Dr. John Dee, the Necronomicon, and the Cleansing of the World -- A Gnostic Trail" by Colin Low, to be found at A Miscellany of Essays.