In today's episode we are taking a different approach. We are starting off in the realm of fiction and learning about the Necronomicon, a fictitious book made up by a man we've discussed in the past. Then we switch gears and head into the real world, the land of the living, as some say, except we are looking at the land of the dead. We will be discussing a few true life Necronomicon books, or books of the dead. We have some examples of true to life books discussing preparation of the dead, helping them cross over, even what to do and expect when you get to the other side. Without further ado, let's get into this by visiting a previous subject, the one and only magnificently weird… H.P. Lovecraft!
Since we've discussed ol H.P. in a separate episode we are not going to get into the man himself really. If you want to hear our take on Lovecraft, make sure to check out episode 37 from way back in January of 2020. What we are going to look at, however, is the book that he references in 10 separate stories. Those stories include: The Call of The Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Haunter of The Dark, The Thing On The Doorstep, and several others. The book we are talking about is, of course, the mother fuckin’ necronomicon. That's right… The Necronomicon as most of you know it, was made up by Lovecraft himself. The book became such a part of his stories that Lovecraft wrote a short history of the book itself. That being said, let's see what the history of the book is as written by the creepy genius, himself:
Original title Al Azif—azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons.
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. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.
In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho’ surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice—once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. Spanish)—both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius’ time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greek copy—which
