In 1922, a young writer from Providence included in a story a cursed book that did not exist in any library in the world. A century later, that private joke has generated real sects, complaints of plagiarism among New York occultists and a new Spanish edition of more than 600 pages. The Necronomicon was never written, but it continues to be published, although the insistence with which it returns again and again, of course, suggests that some real mystery lies within its pages.
Neonomicon. Duomo Ediciones has launched this summer a new Spanish edition of the Necronomicon, the book of black magic whose pages torment the protagonists of dozens of stories by both Lovecraft and many of his disciples. The volume brings together in 648 pages almost all the mentions of the Black Book spread throughout the Lovecraftian narrative, with illustrations by Greta Grendel and without ever disguising that we are dealing with a voluminous fictional artifact.
The selection is carried out by the Italian Giuseppe Lippi, who divides the material into three blocks (the dream, the myth and the terror) and signs the prologue, placing the Necronomicon alongside other impossible books of literature, such as ‘Don Quixote’ by Pierre Menard that Jorge Luis Borges conceived or ‘The King in Yellow’ by Robert W. Chambersl. The book is a true atlas, a map of all the times the Providence writer decided to quote, in passing, a book that was never one of his plans to write.
History of the book that never existed. Howard Phillips named the Necronomicon for the first time in ‘The Hound’, a story written in 1922 and published in the magazine ‘Weird Tales’ in 1924, although a year earlier he had already cited its supposed author, the Arab Abdul Alhazred, in ‘The Nameless City’, where we could read the famous couplet about the death that can die. In 1927 he developed the joke with ‘History of the Necronomicon’, an apocryphal chronology that places the original writing of the text in 8th century Yemen, with a translation into Greek around the year 950. The author never hid the invented nature of the book: in a letter to Willis Conover he wrote “there was never any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon: I invented those names.”
Lovecraft continued to name the book throughout his work. In ‘The Feast’ (1925) it appears kept in the fictional town of Kingsport, in a Latin translation attributed to the scholar Olaus Wormius and placed alongside other “legitimate” occult titles of the time. In ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, written in 1927 and published posthumously in 1941, it is the witch Joseph Curwen who keeps his own copy, and the author will mention Yog-Sothoth for the first time. The couplet cited in 1921 reappears, this time explicitly identified as a textual quote from the Necronomicon, in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ of 1928.
Necronomicon superstar. The story in which the book achieves the greatest prominence is ‘The Dunwich Horror’, from 1929. There we will read the most extensive quote ever published by Lovecraft, taken directly from its pages. In the story, Wilbur Whateley searches in vain for a complete copy in the Miskatonic University library; The librarian Henry Armitage denies him, and Whateley is torn to pieces by a guard dog while trying to rob him. Two years later, in ‘He who whispers in the darkness’, the story alludes to the vast chaos that is hidden under the name of Azathoth, protected for centuries by the Necronomicon itself. That same year (1936), in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, the protagonists have already read it before the expedition begins, and it is in its pages where they find the first clue about the shoggoths.
Real Necronomicon. Fiction became a real commodity in 1977, when the publisher Schlangekraft published the so-called Simon’s Necronomicon, a pastiche of Sumerian and Babylonian mythology sprinkled with names taken from Lovecraft’s stories. Behind the project was Herman Slater, owner of the New York esoteric store The Warlock Shop, tired of explaining to his clients that the book of his youthful fantasies did not exist in any library. The actual authorship is usually attributed to the writer Peter Levenda, hidden under the pseudonym Simon.
When the book jumped from the limited hardcover print run to Avon Books’ paperback edition, William S. Burroughs signed an accompanying text calling for “the secrets of the ages to be revealed,” convinced that hiding them would only benefit those who already privately controlled them. There had been talk for some time about the real Necronomicon: the British ceremonial magician Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley’s former secretary, maintained that Lovecraft had unknowingly absorbed teachings from real occult sects active in New England, and that his ancient gods were not pure invention but manifestations of forces that a versed practitioner could summon.
You go to the cinema. The book survived the death of its creator thanks to the most acrobat horror films and comics. In Sam Raimi’s ‘Terrifyingly Dead’, the first sequel to his ‘Infernal Possession’, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis appears recorded on a cassette tape that awakens a forest spirit. And Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows dedicated twelve issues of ‘Providence’ to reconstructing (among other things) the origin of the book, as the culmination of a trilogy that began with ‘The Courtyard’ and ‘Neonomicon’. All rehashes and variants that, paradoxically, have not annihilated the legend of the dark volume, but rather have kept it more alive than ever.
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