Song of my soul, my voice isdead,Die thou, unsung, as tearsunshedShall dry and die inLost Carcosa."The King in Yellow"
Like a lot of sullen, dorky kids, I first became interested in the occult in my early teens, and the subject interests me to this day....as a sullen, dorky adult. I've bought a lot of books over the years, but three books I purchased at that heady time really stick out in my memory: the first three "occult"-related books I bought.
I might have already read Drawing Down the Moon (Margot Adler, RIP) when I bought these books - I'm not sure - but Adler's book was the first serious study of Wicca I'd read. Even then I knew the wheat from the chaff. It seems incredible to me now, but I found Adler's book in my high school library. I may be wrong, but I'm not sure we'd see it in a public school these days. Even then, anything vaguely "occult" was hard to find in school libraries, B. Dalton's, or Waldenbooks, the leading bookstores at the time. This was, after all, the 1980s, and the US was experiencing a moral "Satanic" panic, hysteria that ruined hundreds of good peoples' lives. QAnon is essentially the same phenomenon, but in this current iteration the "Satanists" have been identified as left-leaning politicians. In the Middle Ages, it was "the Jooz...."
Let's make a blunt aside: QAnon is Antisemitism in disguise.
Those early forays into the occult were not the most auspicious, but for me, they were very potent, even dangerous....
- The Magic Power of Witchcraft by Gavin and Yvonne Frost
- The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey
- Necronomicon (the so-called "Simon" version) by ?
I knew - even then - that the Necronomicon ("the" isn't in the title but Lovecraft uses it and it seems awkward without it) was a work of fiction, but I still felt there was something powerful in it; not in the rituals it contained, not in the incantations, but in the very book itself, the object; it was as if it - literally - radiated some kind of measurable power. Almost like a homing beacon for otherworldly forces.
Voodoo works because people believe it works. Voodoo is a kind of gaslighting. Tell a believer they've been cursed and they will freak out. I believed some books radiated power, so they did.
40 years and 20+ addresses later, across 4 states and 2 continents, my original copies of The Satanic Bible and the Necronomicon are still with me. I just recently moved and most of my books got put in boxes. 2 in particular did not.
The Necronomicon fascinates me because although it was an invention of Lovecraft - a fiction - many occultists insist it is based on something "real." They maintain that although Lovecraft presented his accounts of the tome as fiction, he was speaking of literal eldritch forces and occult traditions. For these people, the book is dangerous. I never believed it could summon ancient entities, but I too, for a while, feared the book enough to resist actually opening it until some time after I'd purchased it. But I was 12 or 13 years old and had a pretty active - and not always healthy - imagination. From about 8 to 10 years old I couldn't sleep alone. I'd awake during the night and lie there in a near panic until I got enough courage to run to my sister's room and sleep next to her. I don't know why; but such was the mind of a kid who a few years later would treat the Necronomicon seriously: An arguably neurotic child....not a "reasonable" adult....
The idea of the Necronomicon is so alluring that someone actually took the time to write it. This is the "Simon" Necronomicon that I purchased. Simon is mentioned in the book's introduction as the person who re-discovered the manuscript. Lovecraft himself claimed that he got the idea from Gothic stories, where "mouldering manuscripts" were often a trope, and he referred to the book throughout his oeuvre. But the "Simon" version was originally published in 1978, long after Lovecraft's death in 1937.
Like The Satanic Bible, my copy is an Avon paperback. The covers are not dissimilar: nothing except the title and a similar sigil, all white on black. Necronomicon has a bit of ornamentation, but otherwise the books are both stark, and about the same dimensions all around.
When I first bought the book, I knew it was fiction, and at the time I was barely familiar with Lovecraft. I mean, come on. The "Mad Arab"? It was obvious the book was akin to The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, published at the height of Twin Peaks mania. To expand the fictional universe....and make some coin. Upon reflection, I find my reaction to the book puzzling; I knew, or at least strongly suspected, it was fiction, yet on some level I was a bit "frightened" of it. Maybe even then I was on some level aware of the precepts of chaos magic, that is to say that even fiction can be used effectively in ceremonial "magick." Fiction or no, I knew it was powerful, because so many of the people I knew who were into the occult spoke of it in hushed tones and seemed to fear it. It was catching. It comes back to that comment about voodoo: it works because people believe it works....
My great hope is that somebody some day will write and even stage The King in Yellow, the play mentioned in several stories of Robert W. Chalmers' eponymous collection. It is an obvious thing to do: a malevolent play, a shocking diary, an accursed grimoire. The fame of the stories in which they are found is such that readers are left wanting more, they want to actually read these disturbing things. Some have suggested Lovecraft was inspired by Chalmers" fictitious play when he invented the Necronomicon, but apparently he did not encounter Chalmers' work until after he had already created his own....
Shadows here of Don Quixote and perhaps one of the inspirations for Foucault's Pendulum....
The Simon Necronomicon is a bit silly, really. Lovecraft himself knew he could never write something as horrible as the book was said to be. He knew hints and brief citations were much more effective. And he was right. The Simon Necronomicon is just too obviously fabricated to fill the reader with cosmic horror and dread - unless the reader is a 10-year-old neurotic who can't sleep alone....Guilty! To recreate the power of the fictional book is impossible. Chalmers wrote a few stanzas of The King in Yellow, but would never have been able to write an entire work with the effect of his fictional play. The King in Yellow was said to have driven people mad. It burned through Europe like an epidemic. A diseased meme. If he'd written it for real, one would read it, not go mad, and then poof! The illusion - ruined.
H. P. Lovecraft, quoted by Peter H. Gilmore:
....one can never produce anything even a tenth as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about. If anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it.
The Simon Necronomicon is still in print and still sells a fairly decent amount of copies per year. Most probably bought by newly-minted Lovecraftians. A novelty for the collection.
Peter Gilmore, Magus of the Church of Satan, wrote an essay about the book which is worth reading. The book has retained an air of mystery even in this era where almost all information can be accessed 24/7. The book's true author isn't known for certain, although Gilmore sheds some light on that.
Gilmore also writes that the fact the book is a fiction doesn't make it useless as a magical tool:
Satanists understand that any prop that is sufficiently stimulating can be used in personal ritual, so if the materials contained in this book send the proper chill down your spine, then certainly avail yourself of them. As Magistra Nadramia has said: “Working with and expressing your emotions in the ritual chamber using this particular little black book is perfectly valid Satanic magic. 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.
But, he adds:
Just don’t fool yourself outside the ritual chamber into the belief that you are using some authentic ancient tome handed down by Elder Gods to their human, or humanoid, servitors.
This reminds me of chaos magic and the tenet that "belief is a tool." One can perform bibliomancy with a Bible or Donald Duck cartoons, and have equally valid results.
Anyway, I stumbled across Gilmore's essay because I was interested in learning a bit more about Gilmore's biography. I wasn't looking for Necronomicon information at all. That said, I recently pulled out my copy to look through for the first time in over a decade, and it's sitting on the table next to my laptop. So, when I clicked on Gilmore's essays and saw he'd written about it, my spider senses tingled.
For some reason I wrote Nina Simone on a recent collage and then went to the metro after I'd finished collaging for the day; there I noticed a new poster about an upcoming concert in homage to....Nina Simone.
When it rains it pours.
The coincidence of coming across an essay about a book I'd only just pulled off the bookshelf in over a decade made me think:
"Drring-drring! Synchronicity calling. Write something."
And here it is.
