Inside the Necronomicon

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Inside the Necronomicon Rumored to be the source of black magic, many have sought in vain for the fabeledNecronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. Here now the true story behind the most infamous book never written. by Jason Colavito INTRODUCTION Like every edition of the pulp horror magazine Weird Tales, the February 1924 issue gave its readers a mix of horror, dark fantasy and unclassifiable stories. That month, readers could peruse Burton P. Thom's short story "The Thing That Should Not Be," Richard Presley Tooker's novella Planet Paradise, and Mary Sharon's poem "The Ghost." But Weird Tales volume 3, issue 2 had something else within, something that would spawn debate for the next eight decades. Deep inside, on page fifty, was a small story by an obscure Providence, Rhode Island author namedH. P. Lovecraft. The title of the story was "The Hound." Of the story itself, its plot revolved around a pair of decadents who devoted their lives to the morbid to find something exciting in their moribund life. But vastly more important and more interesting was the reference book the characters consulted to identify a particular and grotesque amulet freshly extracted from a grave: [W]e recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomiconof the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. Soon, however, other mentions of the dread book would come from Lovecraft's pen, and many other pens as well. Around the world some would begin to suspect that the Necronomicon was more than a literary device, perhaps even the secret source of black magic itself. With that short mention in that February's Weird Tales, the improbable history of the greatest book never written began. THE ORIGINS OF THE NECRONOMICON In 1927, Lovecraft set down the history of the accursed Necronomicon in an essay. The book, he said, was "composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D." Written in the last years of Alhazred's life, the blasphemous tome, originally titled Al-Azif, contained all the secrets that the poet had discovered during his long study of dark arts in the wastes of Arabia. The book was translated into Greek and Latin during the Middle Ages but suppressed by the Church, though a few copies are said still to exist down to the present day, hidden away in secret places where few can obtain them. Within its pages, which some say were bound in human skin, Alhazred allegedly wrote of the mysteries of the Old Ones, monstrous entities traveling under names like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth who ruled earth in the ancient past and await the time when they will return. These beings were supernatural, trans-dimensional and utterly indifferent to the small, weak mass of humanity. That was the story anyway. "I must confess," Lovecraft wrote in a 1934 letter, "that this mostrous & abhorred volume is merely a figment of my own imagination!" In fact, Lovecraft said that the very concept of the Necronomicon came to him in the course of a dream. Ironically, that subconscious origin for the blasphemous tome would become a key ingredient in the growing myth of the book. Several years earlier, Lovecraft had introduced the name Abdul Alhazred in his 1921 story "The Nameless City," where the narrator happens upon a great ruin in the sandy deserts of Arabia: It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie,  And with strange aeons even death may die. Lovecraft then assigned his mad poet as author of his dream-book Necronomicon. In 1937, Lovecraft wrote in a letter that the very name Abdul Alhazred was the name he used when playing Arabian Nights as a boy: "Years later I thought it would be fun to use it as the name of a forbidden book author." All told, Lovecraft would write sixty-two major short stories, about eighteen of which (depending on how you count stories and references -- see here ) would mention the dreaded Necronomicon. Immediately upon completing "The Hound," Lovecraft used the Necronomicon in his next story, "The Festival," written in 1923 and published two years later. In this story he did something revolutionary, placing the Necronomicon alongside the very real Saducismus Triumphatus and Daemonolatreia. As one of Lovecraft's friends, Psycho author Robert Bloch wrote, "Lovecraft mixed ancient mythology and occult literature by real authors with books and theologies of his own devising. He did this so well that in many short stories, one cannot tell the difference between the two without a lifetime's knowledge of the subject." This technique allowed Lovecraft to give a verisimilitude to his fictional world, a veneer of plausibility that imbued his tales of cosmic terror with a grounding in the plausibily real. To bolster the illusion, Lovecraft encouraged other writers of weird fiction, like his friends Bloch, and Clark Ashton Smith, to use his creations, and in exchange he mentioned their literary concoctions: "It rather amuses the different writers," Lovecraft wrote, "to use one another's synthetic demons and imaginary books in their stories--so that Clark Ashton Smith often speaks of my Necronomicon while I refer to his Book of Eibon." Frank Belknap Long was the first to take up the Necronomicon, including it in his short story "The Space-Eaters." Lovecraft also slipped references to his self-created mythology into the work of clients like Hazel Heald or Adolph de Castro, for whom he ghost-wrote or revised stories. In one revision, Zealia Bishop's "The Mound," Lovecraft slipped in a reference to his octopus-headed god Cthulhu, this time under the name Tulu, providing what seemed to be an independent variant of a real myth to the untrained eye. The combined effect of many different, and seemingly unconnected, authors all referencing what seemed to be the same dark mythology led many readers to mistakenly believe that the Necronomicon and its spawn were real works. So convincing was this intertextual fetish that the world's most famous skeptic, James "The Amazing" Randi, took the book as real in his Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), though some believe this was Randi's misguided attempt at humor. THE BLASPHEMOUS TOMES Lovecraft died in 1936, but his creations did not die with him. Lovecraft's friend August Derleth took up where the author had left off, founding a book company named after a fictional city in Lovecraft's stories. Arkham House published collections of Lovecraft's works, and it sponsored frequent publication of stories that shared the strange world of Cthulhu and the Necronomicon. But the stories that came out of Derleth's Arkham House were subtly different from Lovecraft's own. Lovecraft always wrote of his alien beings as being beyond good and evil, outside forces that were indifferent to humanity. Derleth changed this concept and wrote instead of two groups of primal entities, one good one evil, both struggling to rule the world. This subtle shift would become important as the legend of the Necronomicon grew. In the decades immediately following Lovecraft's death, his stories began to become increasingly popular as ever-greater numbers of people found his work through reprints in Weird Tales, anthologies, and Arkham House books. Soon there were scattered reports that readers actually tried to find copies of the Necronomicon at public libraries and old book shops, prompting Lovecraft to say he felt "quite guilty" for all the confusion. A bookseller named Philip Duschnes went so far as to publish a hoax catalog featuring a listing for the Necronomicon. As time passed, hoaxers began placing fake entries for the abhorred volume in the card catalogs of university libraries. Both Yale and UC Berkeley once sported listings for the mad Arab's work. Others began to plant fake references to the book in the bibliographies of legitimate works into the 1970s. Even Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, placed the Necronomicon in his reference works for his 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead. It was obviously a joke, as he named Lovecraft as the editor. However, spoofs and pranks like that lent a false reality to the book that never existed. Just a few years previous, in 1973, George Scithers and Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague de Camp had released a volume they claimed was the original Arabic text, under its original title Al-Azif. However, the text was nothing but a few pages of meaningless calligraphy repeated over and over again. As de Camp admitted, "Having decided that if the Necronomicon did not exist, it should, George Scithers hired an artist to decorate blank pages with a series of squiggles vaguely resembling Arabic and Syriac writing." But this self-described "little hoax" had nothing of the impact of the Simon Necronomicon. Not long after, in 1977, a man known only by the name of Simon released an inexpensive paperback edition of the Necronomicon, which he claimed was a genuine translation of the text written by Abdul Alhazred in the wastes of Arabia. The next year George Hay, along with many other authors including Colin Wilson, releasedThe Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names. Hay, too, claimed that his volume was the genuine book of the mad poet, but Wilson quickly admitted that the book was a pure fake designed for entertainment, not magic. Wilson even wrote an article about it, "The Necronomicon: Origin of a Spoof" (in Crypt of Cthulhu, 1984). But the Simon Necronomicon did not seem to be joking. New York City, the hub of so many cultural phenomena, was also the hub of occult thought during the first heyday of the New Age in the 1970s. As Daniel Harms and John Wilson Gonce III discovered while researching the Necronomicon, "Into this atmosphere walked a supposed Eastern Orthodox bishop known as 'Simon'. He carried a manuscript that, he claimed, two monks of his denomination had taken from a library or private collection as a part of the biggest book heist in recent history." Despite claiming to be a bishop, Simon was not above making money, and he released 666 copies of Necronomicon in hardcover, and a full paperback edition appeared in 1980. The Simon volume purported to be a series of magical rituals for invoking the dread gods of the Lovecraftian pantheon. Though it warned its readers not to attempt any of the rituals, it reprinted previously known instructions for magical rites. "It mostly consists of ritual récipé texts transcribed from various Mesopotamian sources, Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian, with assorted references to Lovecraftian (and Derlethian) deities tossed in at random," said Dan Clore, an author and researcher into the history of weird fiction. Alternative history author David Icke, who believes that a race of intergalactic lizard people have a base in theGrand Canyon and plotted to kill Princess Diana, presented the Simon Necronomicon as an important tool for researching "serpent, demon, [and] reptlilian (sic) references." He appears to take the book at face value, though he prides himself on being the "most controversial" author and speaker on earth, so his acceptance of the bizarre may simply be part of the package. Yet while Icke and many of the people buying the paperback assumed they were getting the trueNecronomicon, others were not so sure. The Simon book tells its readers that owning an original copy can produce all manner of harmful side effects, so "as a matter of policy, we cannot honour any requests to see the Necronomicon in its original state." Harms and Gonce had their suspicions: "When the introduction states up front that no one will be allowed to view the book's manuscript, it already indicates that something fishy is up." They managed to track down the illustrator of the Simon Necronomicon, Khem Caigan, whose work continues to masquerade as genuine ancient mystical symbols. When Avon books asked Caigan to illustrate the sequel to the Necronomicon (as though there were such a thing), Caigan refused, but Avon simply reused the earlier drawings: "Take it from me, artists dont like it much when folks walk off with their work without at least a token nod of appreciation." Caigan confirmed, though, that the manuscript to the Simon volume was hand typed with sketchy illustrations that did not seem to be genuine copies of eighth-century originals. Dan Clore noticed that the Simon volume contained another mistake that gave away its hoax nature. While it claimed to be the dread volume of Lovecraft, the Simon volume specifically stated that the cosmic entities described therein were in a great cosmic battle: "Lovecraft developed a kind of Christian Myth of the struggle between opposing forces of Light and Darkness," Simon wrote. But this is not a concept from Lovecraft, and the idea was first introduced by August Derleth after Lovecraft's death. Derleth took scraps from Lovecraft's notebooks and turned them into "posthumous collaborations" that were nearly all written by Derleth, complete with this new vision of what had become known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Also, Derleth, as publisher of Lovecraft's works, wrote introductions and prefaces to the works laying out his Christian-influenced scheme, but it was one Lovecraft specifically refuted. In "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," Lovecraft wrote: He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath upon mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. However, Derleth had forever changed Lovecraft's universal order and divided the imaginary pantheon into warring factions, the good Elder Gods, and the bad Ancient Ones (or Old Ones). He also further subdivided the Ancient Ones into Aristotle's elemental forces, so that Cthulhu became a water god, and the Old One's messenger Nyarlathotep, strangely, became a god of earth. This scheme forced Derleth to invent new fictional creatures to fill out his elements, introducing Cthugha as fire and Ithaqua the Wind-Walker as air. Intriguingly, many of these undisputed inventions of August Derleth appear in the supposedly ancient Necronomicon of Simon. In fact Simon repeats a most basic mistake that Derleth perpetuated. In Necronomicon, Simon says of the Old Ones devotees: "Chief among these is Cthulhu, typified as a Sea Monster, dwelling in the Great Deep, a sort of primeval Ocean; a Being that Lovecraft collaborator August Derleth wrongly calls a 'water elemental.'" Even while refuting the idea of Cthulhu as a creature of water, he assumes that the Cthulhu is sea monster. But Lovecraft said that Cthulhu communicated through transmitted thought, and he became trapped in his city of R'lyeh when it sunk beneath the waves. Now Cthulhu cannot speak because "the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse." If Cthulhu was a monster of the sea, why does the sea both imprison and restrict him? But the Simon Necronomicon continues to draw the faithful to its cause, as do many of the other hoaxes. Today there are at least ten different fake Necronomicons available. In response, the Church of Satan set up a web page devoted to debunking the Necronomicon hoax because they say they receive a "large amount" of e-mail asking about the book. Though they admit that the Simon volume, and all other published versions, are fakes, they hedge on whether they can be used as a genuine magical grimoire, especially since many Satanists (including, it was rumored, Church founder Anton LaVey) use the book for magical rituals. According to the Church, "A careful look at The Satanic Bible will tell you that Dr. LaVey encouraged the magician to use any and all elements of fiction, fact and fancy to create his Intellectual Decompression Chamber." An occultist who goes by the name of Frater Nigris (Black Brother) goes further. Nigris believes that theNecronomicon can be both real and a figment of Lovecraft's imagination as a sort of spiritual terma, or sacred text: "The writing of this tome at any time after Lovecraft's fabrication, in the special context of termas and grimoires, does nothing to disprove its value or its origin. Just because Lovecraft was perceptive enough to imagine such a text, this does not mean that it did not exist in some fashion (be it within or without the dimension we call 'earth')." Thus the dream becomes the reality. CULTURAL IMPACT But even though every expert admits that the Necronomicon is a creation of the incredibly fertile imagination of H. P. Lovecraft, the legend refuses to die, and today more people than ever believe the book is real, mostly because more people than ever before have run across references to the book. Just as Lovecraft wanted, many of his friends made reference to the book after his death, and today's generation of authors, like Richard L. Tierney and Ramsey Campbell, continue that tradition down to the present day. Perhaps the best recent story featuring the Black Book is "Settler's Wall" (1988) by Robert A.W. Lowndes, a disturbing tale about a wall that has only one side. Like the best Necronomicon tales, the book is mentioned only in passing. Beginning in the 1960s, Hollywood began to incorporate Lovecraftian references into some of its movies, even basing the (mediocre) Boris Karloff film Die, Monster, Die! on Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." And in 1970, Dean Stockwell starred in the laughably bad Dunwich Horror, based on the story of the same name. That film featured the Necronomicon several years before any of the hoax editions emerged. In the years since, the Necronomicon has guest-starred in numerous small films and even had its own movie, 1996's poorly-reviewed H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. But by far, the Necronomicon's most prominent role was in the Evil Dead movie trilogy. The three films, Evil Dead (1983), Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987), and Army of Darkness - Evil Dead III (1993), follow the adventures of a discount store employee who finds the Necronomicon in a cabin in the woods and accidentally ends up in the middle of a zombie murder massacre, both in the woods and in medieval England (don't ask). In the third film, the Necronomicon is the object of an epic quest, and it has a bigger role than many of the actors. In the 1980s a company called Chaosium released a role-playing game by the name of Call of Cthulhu, and it made use of the Necronomicon and other Lovecraftian props. By the 1990s the game had become relatively popular, with its own convention (NecronomiCon), and Chaosium had sprouted a line of books to collect Cthulhu-oriented stories. In 1996, they released The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab. The book contained short stories featuring the book, supposed translations of the book, and scholarly essays digesting the meaning of quotations from the book. Pointedly, it was published under the Chaosium Fiction imprint. But by far, the rise of the internet contributed more to the legend of the Necronomicon than anything since Lovecraft. Websites devoted to the book sprang up during the mid- and late-1990s, and they varied in quality from the scholarly to the stupid. Many professed a belief in the reality of the blasphemous tome, and still others offered versions of the book on-line, often taken from the published hoaxes (hey, if it claims to be 1300 years old, it couldn't very well be under copyright, they reasoned). Some people, like Kendrick Erwin Chua and Dan Clore have put up pages exposing the not-so-hidden truth of the Necronomicon to counter the pages that profess its legitimacy. A quick search of the internet finds that most of the people claiming the tome as true rely on a document called the "Necronomicon Anti-FAQ" by Colin Low. In it, Low spins a wild tale that Lovecraft's wife, Sonia Greene, learned of Elizabethan sorcerer John Dee's English translation of the Necronomicon from famed Satanist Aleister Crowley and then passed it on to her husband. The tale was patently absurd (Lovecraft did not meet Greene until after he published his first story featuring Alhazred), and Low readily admitted that it was a piece of conspiratorial satire, an in-joke. However, some real sorcerers were upset that Low attributed some of Dr. John Dee's magical insights to the Necronomicon instead of the patriarch Enoch. Enochian magician Josh Norton said, "Some modern readers, lacking a sense of humor and irony, have taken his work seriously; as a consequence, the myth of Dee's connection with the book has taken on an air of Utter Authority among certain gullible portions of the magickal community." But all of the attempts to explain the Necronomicon or to produce a copy of it miss the point. TheNecronomicon is terrifying and powerful because it is unseen. It is something spied only dimly, hidden in the dark places and glimpsed only in furtive glances over misshapen shoulders. To expose it to sunlight is to deprive it of its power. Lovecraft understood this, and that is why he refused to write a Necronomicon: "If anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it," he wrote not long before his death. The Necronomicon has had quite a history for a book that was never written, a history that Dennis Maggard summed up wonderfully in his Cthulhu Hymnal lymerick "Necronomicon": The Necronomicon? You can't be shown one! While the libraries never will loan one! But if it's so rare And guarded with care Why does every nut case seem to own one?

© 2002 Jason Colavito. All rights reserved.

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http://www.mundoesotericoparanormal.com/el-necronomicon-y-su-verdad-oculta/

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El Necronomicon y su verdad oculta

MEP 29 DE ENERO DE 2013COMMENTS (3)

El escritor estadounidense H.P. Lovecraft supuestamente creó el libro conocido como “El Necronomicon”. En el mundo gótico de horror de Lovecraft “El Necronomicon” es un libro que según afirman algunos contiene la realidad terrorífica de la historia oculta del mundo además de oscuros rituales con el poder de destruir toda vida en la tierra. Lovecraft a través de sus novelas despertó el interés sobre el Necronomicon tanto en sus seguidores más acérrimos, lectores curiosos y estudiosos del ocultismo. Con el paso del tiempo se ha discutido sobre la veracidad del Necronomicon y su existencia. ¿Cuál es la oscura verdad oculta detrás de grimorio de ficción de H.P. Lovecraft?

A través de los años los expertos en ocultismo han teorizado sobre este macabro libro y con el paso del tiempo también han aparecido muchas copias falsas del Necronomicon. Pero las mejores pistas sobre la verdadera historia detrás del mítico Necronomicon las podemos encontrar en los propios trabajos de Lovecraft. Es cierto que Lovecraft admitió que su Necronomicón era una obra de ficción, pero en su propia biografía sobre el Necronomicon en 1927, hace muchos errores deliberados que dan pistas sobre la verdad detrás de la ficción de Lovecraft. Según afirman muchos expertos, Lovecraft probablemente era consciente de que no era oportuno revelar la verdad a través de sus cuentos y novelas. Lovecraft dijo que su Necronomicon fue escrito en el 700 d.C. por un árabe loco llamado Abdul Al-Hazred en Damasco. Pero, ¿quién fue el verdadero autor de este notable libro? El astrólogo y escritor Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan fue señalado por muchos como el verdadero autor aunque el místico judío Alhazen ben Joseph también fue propuesto. La mayoría, sin embargo, sugiere que el verdadero nombre del loco árabe Abdul Al-Hazred era Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn, conocido como Ibn al-Rawandi o Rhazes.

La historia del Necronomicon

Rhazes nació en el año 827 d.C. en Marwarrudh actual norte de Afganistán. Al principio de su vida se unió al Islam ganando el reconocimiento entre ellos. También estudió la Cábala, el Sufismo, el árabe y el gnosticismo cristiano. Él escribo varios libros, tanto en la teología y la filosofía de los cuales sólo quedan algunos fragmentos. Después de algunos años estudiando el ocultismo Rhazes comenzó a realizar peregrinaciones y expediciones a lugares remotos y salvajes. Pasó varios meses con un desconocido maestro en el desierto de ad-Dahna antes de desaparecer por más de 10 años sin dejar ni rastro en el desierto rojo de Rub’ al Khali. Según su propia escritura, vivó durante este tiempo en la mítica ciudad perdida de Iram donde estudió enseñanzas antiguas y secretas. Cuando se fue de Iram viajó a Alejandría, El Cairo, y luego a la necrópolis de Saqqara, en Menfis. Rhazes dedicó el resto de su vida al estudio de las ciencias ocultas y la escritura de su libro, “Al Azif”.

El Al Azif fue editado a unos pocos ejemplares entre los místicos árabes y teólogos. El libro se prohibiópor su contenido y todas las copias conocidas fueron destruidas. A principios del año 1100 d.C., Al Azif fue traducido al griego probablemente en el monasterio de San Pablo, el anacoreta en Egipto, y al parecer le dio el título de “Νεκρονομικòν (Necronomicon)”. En 1211 d.C. la traducción griega estaba prohibida y todas las copias conocidas fueron quemadas por orden del Patriarca de Constantinopla Miguel IV.

A principios del siglo XIV el Al Azif se tradujo por primera vez al latín por Arnaldus de Villa Nova (1235-1311), probablemente basado en el libro original perdido del Al Azif. En 1389, el Papa Bonifacio IX prohibió todos los libros relacionados con el Al Azif, tanto la traducción de Arnaldus como la versión griega. Las órdenes de Bonifacio IX era quemar todas las copias que se pudieran encontrar. Algunas fuentes afirmaron que una de las traducciones griegas del Necronomicon llegó a Rusia en la caída de Constantinopla en 1453. El libro se mantuvo al parecer en la en la biblioteca privada del zar hasta la caída del imperio zarista. Hay rumores sobre copias que se imprimieron durante el año 1500. Rasputín decía poseer uno de estos libros, que supuestamente era un regalo de la tercera esposa de Tsar Nicholas. No se conoce ninguna de estas copias hoy en día. La única copia conocida del texto árabe original “Al Azif” y la traducción prohibida griega fue destruida o robada cuando los beduinos saquearon el monasterio de San Pablo y quemaron su biblioteca en el año 1448 d.C. En 1541, el alquimista y místico alemán Theophrastus Paracelsus imprimó su propia traducción alemana de la versión al latín de Arnaldus. Una copia del libro de Paracelsus se dice que fue tomado como botín por los suecos en Praga en 1648, pero fue probablemente destruido en el gran incendio en el Palacio Real de Estocolmo en 1697. Durante el año 1600, el inglés místico John Dee terminó su propia traducción al inglés del Necronomicon. El texto no se publicó hasta después de la muerte de Dee. Meric Casaubon imprimó la traducción al Inglés de Dee en una edición muy limitada en 1651. En 1652 el médico danés Olaus Wormius realizó una nueva impresión de Arnaldus en Alemania.

El Necronomicon de Simon

Otra de las versiones más conocidas es el llamado Necronomicon de Simon. Avon Books fue fundada en 1941 por la Corporación de Noticias de América (ANC) para crear un rival para la edición de libros de bolsillo. Avon publicaba novelas baratas, así como colecciones de cuentos dirigidas al público más joven. Entre los escritores que fueron publicados se encontraba H.P. Lovecraft. Tras cambiar de propiedad un gran número de veces en los años 40, 50 y 60 Avon decidió dar un giro en sus publicaciones a mediados de la década de 1970. Se desconocen los motivos por el cual decidieron crear una versión propia del Necronomicon, pero lo que muchos afirmaron es que se trataba de algo más que del simple objetivo de hacer dinero. De este modo, en 1977 Avon Books publicó el “Necronomicon de Simón”. Se tituló así debido que fue escrito por un hombre identificado sólo como“Simon”. El libro pretendía derivar su contenido desde la mitología Sumeria, sin embargo lo que realmente se trataba era más de la mitología Babilónica y su introducción trató de identificar los Grandes Antiguos y otras criaturas introducidas en Mythos de Lovecraft con dioses y demonios Sumerios y Babilónicos. Los cuentos presentados en el libro eran una mezcla de mitos mesopotámicos y una historia desconocida sobre un hombre llamado el “árabe loco”. Lo extraño de la publicación era que el Necronomicon de Simon no tenía vinculación directa con los escritos de Lovecraft. De hecho, Lovecraft escribió muy poco acerca del Necronomicon, habiendo sólo unos pocos pasajes de sus historias en las cuales cita al libro. Tal vez el más conocido es:

“Que no está muerto lo que puede yacer eternamente, y con los evos extraños aun la muerte puede morir.”

Este clásico pasaje no está incluido en el Necronomicon de Simon, lo que para algunos es una prueba de que el “Necronomicon” realmente existió.

Más allá de la leyenda

El Necronomicón, en todas sus versiones es considerado por los expertos como uno de los libros más peligrosos de la humanidad. Las ideas horribles y las verdades oscuras que este libro, de una manera terriblemente convincente, da a sus lectores a menudo han llevado a la locura y la muerte. Además de las antiguas verdades y profecías premonitorias, el libro también contiene hechizos y encantamientos que en manos equivocadas puede crear un daño impensable. Todas las copias originales conocidas del Necronomicon se mantienen bajo llave y no están disponibles al público. Varias organizaciones y sociedad por diferentes razones buscan todas las copias del libro que se encuentra aún en manos privadas. Cualquier intento de difundir el contenido del Necronomicon ha acabado en tragedias debido a accidentes que son atribuidos a la maldición que parece acompañar al libro, siendo un gran misterio todo lo que rodea el mundo del Necronomicon.

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The Cult of Cthulhu: Who Wrote the Necronomicon? - Red Ice Creations

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http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/08aug/cthulhucult.html

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The Cult of Cthulhu: Who Wrote the Necronomicon? 2006 08 07By: Edward O’Toole | phenomena.cinescape.com From the insane depths of Lovecraft’s Mythos comes the dark and satanic sect The Cult of Cthulhu. Phenomena’s Esotericist-at-Large Edward O’Toole takes a plunge into the Abyss to visit them, and also find out just who wrote the Necronomicon. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange æons, even death may die.” Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) was a genius. Legend has it that he never laughed or even smiled. Ever. With the eldritch horrors that he wrote about floating around in his head that is quite understandable. Unlike Edgar Allen Poe, from whom his writing was greatly inspired, Lovecraft described his tortured nightmares in his writings – his Unconscious screamed through his pen and the memories of a childhood with an institutionalized syphilitic and psychotic father combined with an alternate reality in the vein of Lord Dunsany led to the creation of one of the most famous genres of fiction – the Cthulhu Mythos (a term coined posthumously by fellow Mythos writer August Derleth). Like Arthur Machen (1863 – 1947), Lovecraft dreamed of ancient terrors, a subsistent evil that lurked beneath the thin veil of everyday reality – an evil visible in nightmares and to the insane. But, as some would argue, is that where it begins? Solely in the imagination of an early 20th Century pulp fiction writer? How could one man have envisioned so much? Surely he must have got his ideas from somewhere – he couldn’t have invented them all. Skeptics will quickly assert that Lovecraft’s creations were bastardizations of Sumerian and Babylonian mythology and that as his preferred method of introducing a Horror was through implication rather than overt description, he merely set the scene for others of his group (e.g. August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard) to build upon and develop the complex Mythos as is known today. But what about the Necronomicon, the fabled book of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred (written in 730 CE in Damascus and previously known as Al Azif, according to the propagated legend)? Skeptics would state that Abdul Alhazred was Lovecraft’s childhood pen name and that the version widely available in bookstores today (the ‘Simon’ version) was written in 1977 by Peter Levenda, Herman Slater, Jim Wasserman, Larry Barnes and 'Khem Set Rising' in order to cash in on the pop-culture occultism of the period; or, they could mention a handful of other hoaxes such as those written by L. Sprague DeCamp, Colin Wilson and Lin Carter. They might also point out that Lovecraft’s lack of classic Greek means that his intended meaning of Necronomicon actually more closely translates as ‘A Classification of the Dead’ rather than ‘The Image of The Law of The Dead’ (which would be Necronomoeikon) and does in fact sounds far creepier (src. The Straight Dope). Brushing such Skepticism, and approximately half a century, aside, The Necronomicon – and the Mythos – remerged in popular horror movies such as The Evil Dead and also at a time when the Church of Satan was getting a good footing in popular occulture, especially as an alternative to Wicca. This re-emergence fuelled interest not only in the fiction of Lovecraft but also in Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian mythologies and the early medieval esoteric texts such as the Lemegeton and Agrippa’s (which had, a century earlier, been the province of the idle rich and unheard of by the masses). Lovecraft’s creations can be seen as a step along a route that includes Hieronymus Bosch, HR Giger, Clive Barker, EA Poe and other writers and artists who have examined the darker aspects of the imagination for their Muse. Like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Lovecraft’s concept of The Woman in his writings was a stark and unforgiving one – no romance, no beauty, no femininity. The setting of his tales in New England and Massachusetts, especially confined to fictional small, otherwise normal towns like Arkham and Dunwich is echoed greatly in Stephen King’s Castle Rock, and it is this setting of unmentionable terror and evil in a location the Everyman can associate with that has ensured both the fiction and the Mythos persevere. Chaosium’s amazingly popular Role Playing game ‘Call of Cthulhu’, brought an entirely new generation of fans and adherents into contact with the great Lovecraft in the 1980s and 90s (I myself was an avid player as it was one game where when the Keeper, the CoC GamesMaster, was good as it was terrifying). “ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn” (In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming) And from the world of fiction and fantasy into the very real and evil world of the Cult of Cthulhu. Founded by High Priest Darrick Dishaw, aka Venger Satanis, and combining the 4th way, the writings of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, Laveyan Satanism and Chaos magic, the Cult of Cthulhu proudly asserts itself as: “a religion of darkness, slime, and tentacles. It is a key for designing the universe and becoming God. The paradigm of flowing, inky blackish green ichor is here…” Phenomena Magazine is the first to interview this dark and twisted sect. Ed: When did you form the Cult of Cthulhu and what was your inspiration? DD: Let's see... I guess you could say that I was forming the Cult of Cthulhu way back when I first started reading HPL and delving into Satanism. Lovecraft's stories crystallized something inside me; it gave me a new version of "reality." A paradigm of grotesque servitors and monstrous demonic gods behind the scenes of a terribly bleak, nihilistic, yet fantastical universe. However, I started pouring my energies into this idea, the Cult of Cthulhu, in the summer of 2004. I performed a ritual during a midnight rainstorm surrounded by green illumination; I stood facing the night in my 12th story apartment. That was the "conception" of this Lovecraftian occult lodge, and it was "born" on the following Walpurgisnacht 2005 during the Cthulhu One convention I organized in Madison, WI. The ritual's date was inspired by Anton LaVey's May Eve ritual which gave birth to the modern Satanist movement. Ed: Where are your headquarters? DD: I work, write, paint, practice magic, and meet with Cultists, out of my home in Madison, WI. I'm planning on moving into bigger, grander digs this fall. And I hope this will be one of the focal points of the Cult of Cthulhu. Ed: How many members do you have and do you have branches? DD: Before the restructuring, the Cult of Cthulhu didn't have any official members; those who felt connected to the idea of a Cthulhu Cult would discuss various topics in the Yahoo group, email me personally, and conduct rituals on their own. So it's hard to tell how many "members" we actually had. Now that we have a structure, we can count official members. Although, this new order has just begun, so it's tough to say how many will join in the next few weeks, months, or years. Eventually, I plan on the Cult of Cthulhu members numbering in the thousands. Ed: How does one join the Cult of Cthulhu? DD: On the cult’s website: www.CultofCthulhu.net , there are instructions on how to join. Right now, all you have to do is fill out an application and mail it in with a $30 money order. This is the discounted rate, basically the price for 2 people going to dinner for an evening. I wanted to initially keep it very low for those who have supported the Cult of Cthulhu since the beginning. In 2007, the lifetime membership will go to $50. This cost pays for the System of Dark Occult Science, the annual Cult of Cthulhu newsletter, and for the time and money it costs to run the organization itself, the website, etc. To join one needs a basic knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft, sorcery, the desire to learn and eventually do things... to change one's life. Ed: What is the pantheon of the Cult of Cthulhu? Are you restricted solely to the Cthulhu Mythos? DD: Obviously, we include all of Lovecraft's many hideous Gods, servitors, monsters, etc. However, since the Old Ones and their minions are fairly unknown and vague, we also include Satan. Satanism, as outlined by Anton LaVey, has always been a huge inspiration to me. I identified with it 15 years ago and still do. Really, nothing is fixed in the Cult of Cthulhu, or at least not much. So, if a Cultist wants to worship Set or Space Ghost, then he's welcome to. As you can see, I've also taken on a lot of Chaos Magic in my philosophy. And in Chaos Magic, it doesn't matter what or who one focuses their energy on. If you create your own "reality", then that is the universe you live in. Ed: Do you believe the Cthulhu Mythos is real and if so why? DD: Yes. I believe the Cthulhu Mythos is real. Partially because I choose to put my belief into it, and also because it makes sense to me. I feel a kinship with those entities, how they are described and what they are about. I favor a religion that sees humanity as a kind of mistake. An abnormality which has potential (at times), but is mostly worthless and repugnant. Ed: What is the aim of your Cult? What are your goals? DD: Our goals are to bring the Old Ones back. To awaken the Ancient Things from outside of space and time. And also to awaken them inside ourselves. The Cult of Cthulhu believes strongly in bettering one's life; making real life changes that affect the magician and those close to him. And eventually, of course, we want to destroy "reality" and take over the world. Ed: Ah. Would you say your Cult was evil and if so why? DD: Yes, the Cult of Cthulhu is evil. Why? Because we create our own morality and ethics. We choose for ourselves and do what we must to benefit ourselves. Cultists are admittedly selfish beings, all humans are. The Will To Power is a singular philosophy which drives us. Ed: What is your opinion on magic and how is it used in the Cult of Cthulhu? DD: I've been practicing magic all my life. I always had this feeling that there were certain barriers and obstacles which didn't necessarily have to be there. I've always disliked authority, and I see the generally accepted views of "reality" as the greatest authority of all. And I laugh in its face. It only has power because everyone, more or less, agrees with it. I've created a lot of good things in my life. Hard work and magic have been instrumental in these changes. Magic is evolution, change which comes from outside... and that's what the Cult of Cthulhu is all about. Ed: Thank you for the interview. To summarize, it is clear that while HP Lovecraft’s writings live on in the hearts of fiction lovers the world over, his insane visions of the horror that lurks beneath the surface of reality also live on – and are even worshipped. It is difficult to find one single occult forum that has not at some point debated the veracity of the Necronomicon, or find a daemonologist who has not explored the temptation of summoning beings that should never be evoked – those that lie not dead, but sleeping and waiting. Edward O’Toole, Slovakia, July 2006 – Non Serviam Edward O’Toole’s controversial book the Sophia Bestiae, concerning the True and Evil Nature of God, is available on Amazon or can be obtained from the publisher here. The Aestheteka Website is here and The Aestheteka Forum can be found here. Article from: http://phenomena.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp ?aff_id=0&this_cat=Alternate+History&action=page&obj_id=4 868&type_id=2&cat_id=85&sub_id=0# Related: Weird Tales - The Necronomicon, HP Lovecraft, Abdul Alhazrad, Aleister Crowley, Michael Aquino, John Dee & Peter Levenda  Satan, God, H.P. Lovecraft and Other Mephitic Models: An Interview With Paul Laffoley The Occult, Magick & Ritualism Kenneth Grant and the Merovingian Mythos The Mark of the Beast: The Secret Gematria of 666

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http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2005/11nov/occultnecronomicon.html

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Weird TalesThe Necronomicon, HP Lovecraft, Abdul Alhazrad, Aleister Crowley, Michael Aquino, John Dee & Peter Levenda 
2005 11 24
By Jeff Wells | rigorousintuition.blogspot.com

"A dangerous book. The theological equivalent of a loaded gun." - William S Burroughs on the Necronomicon.

Two different version of the The Necronomicon

Into the Mauve Zone 

The Necronomicon isn't supposed to exist, but - like so many things that shouldn't - it does. And how it's come to exist makes an interesting, and troubling story.

But first, let's talk about HP Lovecraft, who imagined the book into fiction. I've mentioned previously his influence upon occultists of the Left Hand Path. (And Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis, has written an excellent overview of Lovecraft Magick here.)

Figures such as Michael Aquino, who composed a "Call to Cthulhu" ritual before he left the Church of Satan to found his Temple of Set, have adopted aspects of Lovecraft's mythos and imagery of hungry, tentacled gods in order to stimulate their own magick. (Also by Aquino, the "Ceremony of the Nine Angles" includes an evocation of Lovecraft's Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath.)

Kenneth Grant, a living disciple of Aleister Crowley who believes himself to be his rightful heir , founder of the "Typhonian" OTO and the first apostle of the Cult of Lam, takes things much further. Grant believes Lovecraft, a self-described "mechanistic materialist," to have been a "natural adept" who was able to unconsciously enter the abyss. (Lovecraft claimed many of his ideas came to him in disturbing dreams.) According to Grant's understanding of Qaballah, and following the Crowley model, the abyss is entered by Daath, the 11th circle of power on the tree of life. Grant calls it the "Mauve Zone."The Necronomicon Files co-author John Wisdom Gonce III describes it as a "kind of Sephirothic worm-hole allowing access not only to the Qlippoth [the shells of horror and disease that mirror the Sephiroth as a Tree of Death], but also to other nonhuman worlds." To Grant, the Qlippothic universe is connected by 22 "Tunnels of Set" - sort of a underworld autobahn of demons and sundry horrors. And to Grant, it's all good. Gonce writes: "the universe of the tunnels is perceived as evil only by those who are unenlightened about their real importance. In Grant's view, the abhorrent entitites lurking in the Tunnels of Set are not 'evil spirits' per se, but primal atavisms within the human consciousness, which the magickal practitioner can access by means of sex magick rituals."

Grant makes much of what he regards as unaware correspondences between Lovecraft, Crowley and others. Elizabethan occultist John Dee mentioned an Enochian demon called "Choronzon" who he said may interfere with a magician's work. Crowley called Choronzon "the Breaker-Down of all Thought and Form," and said he was the guardian of the gateway of Daath. Grant says Lovecraft knew him as "Yog-Sothoth," for this line fromThe Dunwich Horror: "Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate."

Occultist Barry Walker elaborates on the correspondences, and on the "Mauve Zone":

To illustrate this link here are some examples cited by Grant: Al Azif [Lovecraft's Arabic title for original manuscript of the Necronomicon], the book of the (mad) Arab. This book is referred to as all powerful in a magical sense corresponds to Crowley’s Al vel Legis. Crowley claimed this book to contain the supreme spells. The Great Old Ones from the Mythos = The Great Old Ones of the Night Time, a phrase which occurs in rituals of the Golden Dawn. The Cold Waste, Kadath = Hadith, the Wonder of the Waste, a title taken by Crowley etc. etc. There are many other parallels but these point out the path for you to follow if you want to find others.The above list shows how there are indeed links between what was understood to be only “fictions” and a “real” occult tradition. It seems that Lovecraft was a channel, chosen or random, for ideas to ooze into our reality from beyond. The place where these ideas come from has become known amongst Typhonian occultists and others as the Mauve Zone, a place where the concepts such as “real” and “unreal” lose any meaning, a zone which can spill from the pages of a book into the mind of its reader, opening up a gate though which the Great Old Ones can, once again, gain a footing on our world.

Simon Says 

H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu

But that's enough of that for now. What was this about the Necronomicon?

Even if you haven't read Lovecraft you must have heard of it. It's a supposedly 1,200 year old text by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazrad (a name Lovecraft coined as a boy), containing fearsome spells for invoking the "Old Ones" of the Cthulhu Mythos. And of course it was Lovecraft's invention, and it provided a nice linking device for his fiction. But apart from a few quotes salted in his stories, he didn't write it.

So what is that paperback book that hasn't gone out of print for 25 years?

There have been a number of claimants to the title, but by far the most popular - and also, seemingly, the most "magickal" - is known as the Simon Necronomicon.

The legend of this Necronomicon is that in 1972, two monks who had been stealing precious books from university libraries across the United States delivered a copy to "Simon," a translator of rare manuscripts who was also involved in international espionage. Simon took his translation to New York City's Magical Childe bookshop. The shop's owner was Herman Slater, described by Daniel Harms in The Necronomicon Files as a "showman-occultist of the old school." William S Burroughs dropped in and "after going through the pages and a few lines of powder, he offered the comment that it was 'good shit,'" illustrator Khem Caighan told Harms. The Simon Necronomicon went through several small print runs with occult presses, before being picked up by Avon Books in 1980, where it has served as the Joe Camel of chaos magick to American youth ever since.

There is considerable dispute about the book's provenance. Particularly the identity of "Simon."

Alan Cabal's "The Doom that Came to Chelsea", published in the New York Press, June 3, 2003, offers an answer:

Into this bubbling swamp of spiritual fecundity stepped Peter Levenda, aka "Simon." Charming, soft-spoken and aloof, well-versed in all aspects of occult theory and practice, he eased his way to the center of the scene. The Necronomicon was a team effort. Herman provided the sponsorship, while the design and layout were the work of Jim Wasserman of the OTO, a raving cokehead from Jersey named Larry Barnes whose daddy had the production facilities and a fellow who called himself Khem Set Rising (who also designed the sigils). The text itself was Levenda’s creation, a synthesis of Sumerian and later Babylonian myths and texts peppered with names of entities from H.P. Lovecraft’s notorious and enormously popular Cthulhu stories. Levenda seems to have drawn heavily on the works of Samuel Noah Kramer for the Sumerian, and almost certainly spent a great deal of time at the University of Pennsylvania library researching the thing. Structurally, the text was modeled on the wiccan Book of Shadows and the Goetia, a grimoire of doubtful authenticity itself dating from the late Middle Ages.

"Simon" was also Levenda’s creation. He cultivated an elusive, secretive persona, giving him a fantastic and blatantly implausible line of bullshit to cover the book’s origins. He had no telephone. He always wore business suits, in stark contrast to the flamboyant Renaissance fair, proto-goth costuming that dominated the scene. He never got high in public.

In short, he knew the signifiers and emblems of authority, and played them to the hilt. He hinted broadly of dealings with intelligence agencies and secret societies operating at global levels of social influence. He began teaching classes in the back room, and showed a genuine knack for clarifying and elucidating such baroque encrypted arcana as John Dee’s Enochian magick system in such a way as to make it understandable even to a novice. He also lacked the guts to let a woman know when he was through with her, or so Bonnie said. She was positioned to know at the time, despite her failing marriage to Chris Claremont, the comic book author who put the X-Men on the map. Chris was her third husband. I was her fourth, and last.

As Simon, Levenda threw parties with various forms of live entertainment and staged rituals presented by the various groups that swarmed around the shop. He had no political enemies on the scene, owing to his adamantine and resolute refusal to affiliate with any one group. There has always been a very heavy crossover factor between the Renaissance fair/Society for Creative Anachronisms crowd, the science-fiction fan circuit and the occult/wicca scenes. Simon had friends throughout all of these arenas, and they all showed up to support this effort at unity.

In case you missed it, that's Peter Levenda, author of Unholy Alliance and Sinister Forces.

Levenda is forthcoming about his involvement in the publication of the SimonNecronomicon, however he hasn't yet mentioned it in his other published works, despite frequent references to the cursed book. He has usually claimed his efforts were limited to translation. Asked on his Sinister Forces Q&A forum about his alleged authorship, he responds: "There is a lot of speculation on the Net and everywhere else about this, most of it in error as can be expected, but a book will be published next year that will clarify my role and the role of Simon in the controversy. In short, however: Did I have something to do with it? Yes. Did I write it? No. Other than that, I guess we will all have to wait for the book to come out next year." (I presume that book will be the third volume of Sinister Forces: "The Manson Secret.")

Levenda added more detail in this interview a few years ago with the editor of Dagobert’s Revenge:

My involvement was on the translation side. I've been around occult groups in New York since the late Sixties. I was a friend of Herman Slater of the old Warlock Shop in Brooklyn Heights before it moved to Manhattan and became Magickal Childe. I was around during the famous Witch Wars of the Seventies, when it seemed that everyone was casting spells on everyone else. I was there when Gardnerians and Welsh Trads and Alexandrians and Sicilian Trads sat down around a table in the back of Herman's shop to settle the War and make peace once and for all. Herman had once interviewed neo-Nazis in New York in the 1960s and we had a lot of interests in common. I never joined any of the groups, that wasn't my intention or inclination, but I was a familiar face around the campfire, so to speak. My fascination has always been on the degree to which religion and occultism influence mainstream politics; Unholy Alliance began as an academic study of this before it turned into a Nazi history. As for the Necronomicon, it was part of a stash of stolen books. The story is told, I think, in other places and I have been asked this before -- also on the Internet -- so to summarize: in the 1970s a couple of Eastern Orthodox monks pulled off the biggest rare book heist in the history of the United States. It was a continuing crime, the books being taken from libraries and private collections all over the country (and, it was said, Canada and Mexico). They were finally busted, and did federal time, but most of the books were never recovered. The Necronomicon was part of this swag as were a lot of occult books. It was in Greek, handwritten, but the problem was that much of the Greek was unintelligible. My modest contribution to this was recognizing that some of the Greek was an attempt to phoneticize Babylonian and Sumerian words. I am not one of the people arguing that this Necronomicon is THE Necronomicon, or that Lovecraft was even aware that it existed. I think Lovecraft heard the name through one of his friends in the Golden Dawn, and used it creatively. If the Simon Necronomicon is a hoax, I think it would have been better done and more closely followed the Cthulhu Mythos. I kind of like the fact that William Burroughs was into it, and wrote Simon and L. K. Barnes a letter praising it as an important spiritual breakthrough.

He went a bit further some time later in conversation with Daniel Harms:

"My role in the Necronomicon affair was as a general editor of the translated text. I also did much of the background research....I researched Sumarian lore at the NY Public Library, for instance, and provided some of the bibliography for Simon's introduction."

Harms adds:

Levenda also wrote a short promotional article on the Necronomicon, which has turned up at the American Religions Collection at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Davidson Library. Next to his byline, someone has written in "Simon (Editor of Necronomicon)" Levenda was receiving half of the royalties from the Simon book, so he must have had an important hand in the book.

It is fiction. But saying "it's only fiction" isn't much of an argument when it comes to magick, which could be called the science of make believe. Tibetan magick, for instance, includes the creation of "tulpas": entities willed into existence by disciplined acts of imagination. Many of the classic grimoires are falsely attributed to figures of antiquity or myth - The Key of Solomon, for instance - but that's irrelevent to the occultists who use them to release the power of their own will. That the Necronomicon could be invested with a similar authority by those who believe should not surprise. (Gonce writes he has known some who use its spells to have experienced similar poltergeist-like phenomenon, including ominous rappings on walls, as though something were trying to pass through.)

Jack Parsons' inspiration wasn't found only in figures such as Aleister Crowley and the great occultists; it was also in pulp fiction such as Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think, a story of hereditary werewolves that revive the old gods under the leadership of the "Child of Night," the product of a magickal birth. A story like that would naturally bear considerable frisson for an self-styled Antichrist trying to crash the world system by invoking "Babalon" as a magickal "moonchild." John Carter's Sex and Rockets quotes Williamson as saying that, on meeting Parsons, "I was astonished to discover he had a far less skeptical interest in such things than I."

Seventeen-year old Roderik Ferrell was leader of a Kentucky "vampire clan," guilty of occult-inspired animal mutilation and murder, and a good deal of that inspiration was drawn from the Necronomicon.

Gonce writes:

Investigations into the background of Roderick Ferrell revealed that his interest in the Necronomicon was far more than casual. His possession of the book at the time of his arrest was no coincidence. According to seventeen-year old Audry Presson, a friend of Ferrell's at Eustis High School, Ferrell often discussed the Necronomicon with her over the telephone. Presson testified under cross-examination by defense attorney Candice Hawthorne that she and Ferrell had shared an interest in the book, although he took it more seriously than she did. Psychologist Wade Myers III testified that Ferrell "felt he was able to get powers from this book."

Gonce adds that "Simon's" book, particularly the section "The Conjuration of the Watcher," may have influenced the Vampire Klan's animal sacrifice, by advising readers

...to not make their sacrifices to demons neither too large nor too small for fear that the evil spirits will not answer when summoned or else grow too powerful. He follows this with an anecdote about a priest from Jerusalem who worshipped the "Old Ones" and sacrificed sheep to demons. Human sacrifice also seems to be encouraged by the Simon Necronomicon, as seen on page 19: "strive ever onward...though it mean thine own death; for such a death is as a sacrifice to the Gods, and pleasing.

I learned of Levenda's disputed but clearly significant part in the Necronomicon only Saturday evening, after writing that day's post praising the second volume of his Sinister Forces. My opinion hasn't changed, but it's been informed.

There is at least a terrific irony that the author of a study of evil and occult influence in American life can also be credited with a how-to book on demonic invocation marketed to the young and impressionable, which advocates animal and human sacrifice.

Article from: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/11/weird-tales.html

---

Related: Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis

Inside the Necronomicon

The Necronomicon Anti-FAQ

Satanic Connections To The U.S. Military (Michael Aquino)

Jack Parsons, an Occult Rocket Scientist

John Dee - Scientist, Magician and Alchemist

Attempted manipulation of UFO manifestations

666: What's in a Number?

Ars Goetia

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