The Necronomicon, also referred to as the Book of the Dead, or under a purported original Arabic title of , is a fictional grimoire (textbook of magic) appearing in stories by the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound","The Hound", by H. P. Lovecraft Published February 1924 in "Weird Tales". YankeeClassic.com. Retrieved on January 31, 2009 written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft's "The Nameless City".Though it has been argued that an unnamed copy of the Necronomicon appears in the 1919 story "The Statement of Randolph Carter", S. T. Joshi points out that the text in question was "written in characters whose like (narrator Randolph Carter) never saw elsewhere"—which would not describe any known edition of the Necronomicon, including the one in Arabic, a language Carter was familiar with. S. T. Joshi, "Afterword", History of the Necronomicon, Necronomicon Press. Among other things, the work contains an account of the Old Ones, their history, and the means for summoning them.
Other authors such as August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith also cited the Necronomicon in their works. Lovecraft approved of other writers building on his work, believing such common allusions built up "a background of evil verisimilitude". Many readers have believed it to be a real work, with booksellers and librarians receiving many requests for it; pranksters have listed it in rare book catalogues, and a student smuggled a card for it into the card catalog of the Yale University Library.
Capitalizing on the notoriety of the fictional volume, real-life publishers have printed many books titled since Lovecraft's death.
Origin and etymology How Lovecraft conceived the name Necronomicon is not clear—Lovecraft said that the title came to him in a dream. Although some have suggested that Lovecraft was influenced primarily by Robert W. Chambers' collection of short stories The King in Yellow, which centers on a mysterious and disturbing play in book form, Lovecraft is not believed to have read that work until 1927.Joshi & Schultz, "Chambers, Robert William", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 38
Donald R. Burleson has argued that the idea for the book was derived from Nathaniel Hawthorne, though Lovecraft himself noted that "mouldy hidden manuscripts" were one of the stock features of Gothic literature.Joshi, "Afterword".
Lovecraft wroteH. P. Lovecraft: Selected Letters V, 418 that the title, as translated from the Greek language, meant "an image of the law of the dead", compounded respectively from "dead", "law", and "image"., , . Robert M. Price notes that the title has been variously translated by others as "Book of the names of the dead", "Book of the laws of the dead", "Book of dead names" and "Knower of the laws of the dead". S. T. Joshi states that Lovecraft's own etymology is "almost entirely unsound. The last portion of it is particularly erroneous, since is nothing more than a neuter adjectival suffix and has nothing to do with (image)." Joshi translates the title as "Book considering (or classifying) the dead".Joshi, S. T. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Mythos Books, 2008) pp. 34–35.
Lovecraft was often asked about the veracity of the Necronomicon, and always answered that it was completely his invention. In a letter to Willis Conover, Lovecraft elaborated upon his typical answer:
Reinforcing the book's fictionalization, the name of the book's supposed author, Abdul Alhazred, is not even a grammatically correct Arabic name. What is transliterated as "Abdul" in English is actually a noun in the nominative form (, "servant") and the definite article () and amounts to "servant of the" with the article actually being part of the second noun in the construct, which in this case is supposed to be "Alhazred" (traditional Arabic names do not follow the European first name-surname format). But "Alhazred", even if considered as a corruption of (, "the presences") though it seems unlikely, itself is a definite noun (i.e., a noun prefixed by the definite article) and thus "Abdul Alhazred" could not possibly be a real Arabic name.Petersen, Sandy & Lynn Willis. Call of Cthulhu, p. 189. Lovecraft first used the name "Abdul Alhazred" as a pseudonym he gave himself as a five-year-old,Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, pp. 107–108, John Hunt Publishing, 2012 and very likely mistook "Abdul" to be a first name while inventing "Alhazred" as an Arabic-sounding surname.
Fictional history
In 1927, Lovecraft wrote a brief fictitious history of the Necronomicon. This fictitious history was published in 1938, after his death, as "History of the Necronomicon". According to this account, the book was originally called , an Arabic word that Lovecraft defined as "that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of demons", drawing on a footnote by Rev. Samuel Henley in Henley's translation of Vathek.Lovecraft, H. P. Selected Letters II: 1925–1929. Arkham House, 1968, pp. 201–202. Transcribed at "Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, 27 November 1927", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive. Henley, commenting upon a passage which he translated as "those nocturnal insects which presage evil", alluded to the diabolic legend of Beelzebub, "Lord of the Flies" and to Psalm 91:5, which in some 16th century English Bibles (such as Myles Coverdale's 1535 translation) describes "bugges by night" where later translations render "terror by night". Classical Arabic lexicographer Ibn Manzur (1233–1311 CE) defines ʿazīf (عَزيف) in Lisan al-Arab as the sound of wind or the rustling of desert sand - traditionally attributed by ancient Arabs to the eerie voices of the jinn - rather than nocturnal insects.Ibn Manzur. Lisan al-Arab [The Tongue of the Arabs] (in Arabic). Dar al-Ma'arif, vol. 9, p. 29. In the 10th century, Arab geographer Al-Hamdani (893–945 CE) recorded in Sifat Jazirat al-Arab that specific desert dunes were historically known as maʿāzif al-jinn ("musical instruments or haunts of the jinn"), tying the term directly to Arabian desert geography and folklore.Al-Hamdani, Abu Muhammad al-Hasan. Kitab Sifat Jazirat al-Arab [Description of the Arabian Peninsula] (in Arabic). Edited by David Heinrich Müller, E.J. Brill, 1884, p. 267. British explorer H. St. John Philby documented this phenomenon in his 1933 account The Empty Quarter, describing how sliding sand dunes produced loud, organ-like vibrations ("singing sands") that local Bedouins attributed to the jinn, providing a field-observed explanation for the ancient tradition of ʿazīf.Philby, H. St. John (1933). The Empty Quarter: Being a Description of the Great South Desert of Arabia Known as Rub' al Khali. London: Constable & Company. (Arabic translation by H. A. Ahmed, Obeikan Bookshop, 2001, pp. 270–271).
In the "History", Alhazred is said to have been a "half-crazed Arab" who worshipped the Lovecraftian entities Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu in the early 700s CE. He is described as being from Sanaá in Yemen. He visited the ruins of Babylon, the "subterranean secrets" of Memphis and the Empty Quarter of Arabia. In his last years, he lived in Damascus, where he wrote before his sudden and mysterious death in 738, which, according to Ibn Khallikan (whom Lovecraft's manuscript erroneously identifies as a "12th cent. biographer", though he lived in the 13th century, 1211–1282 CE), happened when he was "seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses". In subsequent years, Lovecraft wrote, the "gained considerable, though surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age." In 950, it was translated into Greek and given the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, a fictional scholar from Constantinople. This version "impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts" before being "suppressed and burnt" in 1050 by Patriarch Michael (a historical figure who died in 1059).
After this attempted suppression, the work was "only heard of furtively" until it was translated from Greek into Latin by Olaus Wormius. (Lovecraft gives the date of this edition as 1228, though the real-life Danish scholar Olaus Wormius lived from 1588 to 1654.) Both the Latin and Greek text, the "History" relates, were banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, though Latin editions were apparently published in 15th century Germany and 17th century Spain. A Greek edition was printed in Italy in the first half of the 16th century. The Elizabethan magician John Dee (1527 – ) allegedly translated the book—presumably into English—but Lovecraft wrote that this version was never printed and only fragments survive.
According to Lovecraft, the Arabic version of had already disappeared by the time the Greek version was banned in 1050, though he cites "a vague account of a secret copy appearing in San Francisco during the current [20th] century" that "later perished in fire". The Greek version, he writes, has not been reported "since the burning of a certain Salem man's library in 1692", an apparent reference to the Salem witch trials. (In the story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", the character Alonzo Typer finds a Greek copy.) According to "History of the Necronomicon" the very act of studying the text is inherently dangerous, as those who attempt to master its arcane knowledge generally meet terrible ends.
Appearance and contents
The Necronomicon is mentioned in a number of Lovecraft's short stories and in his novellas At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. However, despite frequent references to the book, Lovecraft was very sparing of details about its appearance and contents. He once wrote that "if anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it."Letter to Jim Blish and William Miller, Jr., quoted in Joshi, "Afterword".
In "The Nameless City" (1921), a rhyming couplet that appears at two points in the story is ascribed to Abdul Alhazred:
The same couplet appears in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), where it is identified as a quotation from the Necronomicon. This "much-discussed" couplet, as Lovecraft calls it in the latter story, has also been quoted in works by other authors, including Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath, which adds a long paragraph preceding the couplet.
In his story "History of the Necronomicon", Lovecraft states that it is rumored that artist R. U. Pickman (from his story "Pickman's Model") owned a Greek translation of the text, but it vanished along with the artist in early 1926.
The Necronomicon is undoubtedly a substantial text, as indicated by its description in "The Dunwich Horror" (1929). In the story, Wilbur Whateley visits Miskatonic University's library to consult the "unabridged" version of the Necronomicon for a spell that would have appeared on the 751st page of his own inherited, but defective, Dee edition. The Necronomicon introduces the incantation with this passage:
The Necronomicons appearance and physical dimensions are not clearly stated in Lovecraft's work. Other than the obvious black letter editions, it is commonly portrayed as bound in leather of various types and having metal clasps. Moreover, editions are sometimes disguised. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for example, John Merrit pulls down a book labelled Qanoon-e-Islam from Joseph Curwen's bookshelf and discovers to his disquiet that it is actually the Necronomicon.
Many commercially available versions of the book fail to include any of the contents that Lovecraft describes. The Simon Necronomicon in particular has been criticized for this.The Simon Necronomicon, a review.
Locations According to Lovecraft's "History of the Necronomicon", copies of the original Necronomicon were held by only five institutions worldwide:
The British Museum The