Necronomicon
The Necronomicon, also referred to as the Book of the Dead, or under a purported original Arabic title of Kitab al-Azif, is a fictional grimoire (textbook of magic) appearing in stories by the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers.
Lovecraft approved of other writers building on his work, believing such common allusions built up "a background of evil verisimilitude".
[3] Capitalizing on the notoriety of the fictional volume, real-life publishers have printed many books entitled Necronomicon since Lovecraft's death.
[5] 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.
In a letter to Willis Conover, Lovecraft elaborated upon his typical answer: Now about the "terrible and forbidden books"—I am forced to say that most of them are purely imaginary.
Robert Bloch devised the idea of Ludvig Prinn and his De Vermis Mysteriis, while the Book of Eibon is an invention of Clark Ashton Smith's.
Robert E. Howard is responsible for Friedrich von Junzt and his Unaussprechlichen Kulten.... As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, and supernatural themes—in all truth they don't amount to much.
What is transliterated as "Abdul" in English is actually a noun in the nominative form ʿabdu (عَبْدُ, "servant") and the definite article al- (الـ) 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 modern first name-surname format).
According to this account, the book was originally called Al Azif, 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.
In his last years, he lived in Damascus, where he wrote Al Azif before his sudden and mysterious death in 738, which, according to Ibn Khallikan, happened when he was "seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses".
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).
The Elizabethan magician John Dee (1527 – c. 1609) allegedly translated the book—presumably into English—but Lovecraft wrote that this version was never printed and only fragments survive.
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.
[17] 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.
"[18] In "The Nameless City" (1921), a rhyming couplet that appears at two points in the story is ascribed to Abdul Alhazred: That is not dead which can eternal lie.
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: Nor is it to be thought...that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone.
Other than the obvious black letter editions, it is commonly portrayed as bound in leather of various types and having metal clasps.
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.
[23] A hoax version of the Necronomicon, edited by George Hay, appeared in 1978 and included an introduction by the paranormal researcher and writer Colin Wilson.
David Langford described how the book was prepared from a computer analysis of a discovered "cipher text" by Dr. John Dee.
The resulting "translation" was in fact written by occultist Robert Turner, but it was far truer to the Lovecraftian version than the Simon text and even incorporated quotations from Lovecraft's stories in its passages.
Grant claimed that the Necronomicon existed as an astral book as part of the Akashic records and could be accessed through ritual magic or in dreams.
