The Book That Should Not Exist

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

IThe problem of the Necronomicon

There is an obvious difficulty in writing about the Necronomicon: almost everybody knows what it is, and much of what almost everybody knows about it is wrong.

A century of imitation has accumulated around Lovecraft's imaginary book. It has acquired leather bindings, human skin, elaborate sigils, Sumerian incantations, demonologies, complete magical systems and several purported “authentic” editions. Writers after Lovecraft expanded its contents. Films turned it into a magical object. Games systematised it. Occult publishers discovered, perhaps inevitably, that there was money to be made from pretending it existed.

Very little of this has anything to do with H. P. Lovecraft.

The purpose here is therefore archaeological. Later accretions will be removed, however entertaining they may be, and the Necronomicon reconstructed solely from Lovecraft's own writings.

That restriction produces a rather more interesting book.

Lovecraft's Necronomicon certainly contains incantations and occult formulae. It deals with necromancy, strange cults and forms of existence which would ordinarily be called supernatural. But as Lovecraft's fiction develops, the book begins to do something unexpected.

Its claims start being independently corroborated.

Archaeology confirms some of them. Biology confirms others. Mathematics begins approaching the same territory from an entirely different direction. Explorers discover places resembling its supposed fantasies. Scientists encounter organisms it describes as monsters. Investigators stumble upon forms of consciousness for which its apparently occult language may represent a primitive description.

The Necronomicon consequently changes beneath the reader's hands. It begins as a grimoire. It ends looking disturbingly like science written before the necessary science existed.

IIBefore the Necronomicon: Abdul Alhazred

Lovecraft introduced the author before he introduced the book.

In “The Nameless City”, written in 1921, the narrator recalls the couplet attributed to “the mad Arab Alhazred” quoted above. There is no Necronomicon yet. Alhazred exists independently as the supposed author of an obscure and disturbing observation concerning death and enormous periods of time.

This tells us something about how the idea developed. The Necronomicon did not originate as a fully planned component of a fictional mythology. Lovecraft first invented an authority. The book subsequently formed around him.

The result was considerably more effective than designing an occult encyclopaedia from the beginning. Alhazred already seemed to possess a history before his history had been written.

IIIThe book appears

The Necronomicon itself first appears by name in “The Hound”, written in 1922.

Here it is recognisably a forbidden grimoire. Its contents concern a jade amulet connected with the corpse-eating cult of Leng, the souls of ghouls and certain relationships between those souls and the objects represented by the amulet.

The narrator and his companion consult Alhazred because the object they have stolen from a grave corresponds to something described in the book. The Necronomicon is therefore already functioning as a work of identification. It tells its readers what an otherwise inexplicable artefact is and associates that artefact with a body of occult history unavailable to conventional scholarship.

“The Festival” develops the idea. The book appears among genuine historical works of demonology and witchcraft. Lovecraft places the invented Olaus Wormius translation alongside real authors. The device is simple but extraordinarily effective: fictional bibliography is mixed with real bibliography until the boundary becomes difficult for the casual reader to see.

More importantly, “The Festival” associates the Necronomicon with rites performed beneath Kingsport and with doctrines concerning wizardly death, the persistence of something after bodily dissolution and grotesque transformations involving the grave.

At this early stage, the popular conception is approximately correct. The Necronomicon is a book of black magic, graves, ghouls, forbidden cults and the unquiet dead. But it will not remain merely that.

IVWhat exactly is the Necronomicon?

Lovecraft eventually supplied the book with a pseudo-bibliographical history in his short “History of the Necronomicon”, written in 1927.

The original work was called Al Azif. Lovecraft explains azif as an Arabic term for the nocturnal sound of insects which superstition identified with the voices of demons.

Its author was Abdul Alhazred, described as a mad poet from Sana'a in Yemen who flourished around AD 700. Alhazred travelled widely. He visited Babylon, investigated the subterranean mysteries of Memphis and spent ten years in the great southern Arabian desert.

He claimed to have seen Irem, the City of Pillars. More significantly, he claimed to have discovered beneath the ruins of a nameless desert city records concerning a race older than humanity.

In his final years he lived in Damascus, where Al Azif was written. His death or disappearance is dated to AD 738. One tradition has him seized and devoured in broad daylight by an invisible creature before numerous witnesses.

Lovecraft also tells us that Alhazred was an indifferent Muslim who revered entities he called Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth.

One detail deserves particular emphasis. Alhazred does not merely collect received magical traditions. He travels. He explores ruins. He examines records. He investigates places. Some portion of the Necronomicon therefore purports to rest upon evidence.

VFrom Al Azif to the Necronomicon

Lovecraft gave his imaginary book the sort of textual transmission normally possessed by genuine works of antiquity.

Around AD 950, Al Azif was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople. Philetas gave it the title by which it subsequently became famous: Necronomicon. The Greek text attracted experimenters and was eventually suppressed.

In 1228 Olaus Wormius translated the work into Latin. Both the Greek and Latin versions were condemned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232. The Arabic original had apparently already disappeared by Wormius's time.

The Latin text was subsequently printed in at least two editions. Lovecraft specifies a fifteenth-century black-letter edition, probably German, and a seventeenth-century edition, probably Spanish. A printed Greek text was produced in Italy between approximately 1500 and 1550.

Dr John Dee later made an English translation, but it was never printed and survived only in fragments recovered from his manuscript.

This gives us an important textual fact. There is no single Necronomicon. There is an Arabic original which has disappeared, a Greek translation, a Latin translation of the Greek and an incomplete English translation produced from the surviving tradition.

Characters consulting the book in Lovecraft's twentieth century are therefore reading a text separated from Alhazred by centuries of translation, copying, printing and suppression.

VIA corrupt text

“The Dunwich Horror” makes textual corruption part of the plot.

Wilbur Whateley possesses a valuable but incomplete copy of John Dee's English translation. He travels to Miskatonic University because the university library possesses Olaus Wormius's Latin version in a seventeenth-century Spanish printing.

Wilbur needs a missing passage. Old Whateley has told him that a long chant required for opening the way to Yog-Sothoth occurs on page 751 of a “complete edition”. But Wilbur's Dee manuscript is defective.

He therefore does what a scholar faced with a defective manuscript would do. He collates texts.

Lovecraft tells us that Wilbur encounters discrepancies, duplications and ambiguities between the English and Latin versions. He must reconstruct the appropriate formula rather than simply read it from the page.

This is a wonderful detail because it introduces textual criticism into magic. The problem is no longer merely knowing the spell. The problem is establishing the text.

Was a word mistranslated? Did a copyist duplicate a line? Did Dee misunderstand Wormius? Was Wormius's Greek source already corrupt? Does a formula fail if the grammatical case is wrong?

Lovecraft never answers these questions, but the implication is deliciously unpleasant. There can be few more academically respectable forms of terror than discovering that the fate of the world may depend upon a variant reading.

VIIWhere are the surviving copies?

Lovecraft's “History” identifies several institutional copies.

A fifteenth-century Latin copy is kept under lock and key in the British Museum. A seventeenth-century Latin edition is preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Further seventeenth-century copies are held by Harvard's Widener Library, Miskatonic University in Arkham and the University of Buenos Aires. Dr Dee's English translation survives only fragmentarily.

The distribution is characteristic of Lovecraft. The Necronomicon is fantastically rare, but it is not wholly secret. It can be catalogued. It can be requested. It can be compared with other editions. It can be placed under library restriction.

The dangerous object at the centre of Lovecraft's universe is not necessarily sealed inside a cyclopean temple. Sometimes it is in Special Collections.

VIIIMiskatonic University and responsible librarianship

Miskatonic University's relationship with the book is particularly revealing.

The university preserves it rather than destroying it. Access is restricted, but scholars have read it. Professor Dyer has consulted it. Walter Gilman has obtained information from it. Henry Armitage knows it intimately. Danforth has read the Miskatonic copy completely, an achievement treated as exceptional even among those sufficiently fearless or foolish to approach the volume.

The institution therefore behaves neither like a monastery suppressing a heresy nor like a cult guarding a revelation. It behaves like a research library possessing hazardous material.

Wilbur Whateley is allowed to consult the book but is refused permission to remove it. Armitage initially considers allowing him to copy material before deciding that the consequences might be unacceptable.

This distinction is important. The Necronomicon is not treated as something that must cease to exist. It is treated as something which must be preserved carefully and read selectively.

One of humanity's principal defences against the outer darkness therefore turns out to be a librarian with sound access-control policies.

IXWhat does the Necronomicon actually contain?

No complete table of contents exists. Lovecraft never even comes close to supplying one. What can be reconstructed is instead a cluster of subjects mentioned in different stories. Taken together, these are considerably stranger than the contents of an ordinary magical grimoire.

Death, ghouls and posthumous existence

“The Hound” associates the book with ghouls, graves, occult amulets and the relation between particular objects and the souls of corpse-eating entities.

“The Festival” associates it with abnormal continuation after death and with transformations involving the body and grave.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward goes further. Joseph Curwen owns a Necronomicon disguised beneath another title. Correspondence between Curwen and Jedediah Orne specifically refers to the book's seventh division in the context of attempts to call up the dead.

Necromancy is therefore not a later invention imposed upon Lovecraft's book. It is genuinely part of it. But necromancy is only the beginning.

XCthulhu and hidden interpretation

In “The Call of Cthulhu”, the book acquires an entirely different scale.

Inspector Legrasse's investigation of the Louisiana cult eventually produces information from the aged cultist Castro. The cult's deepest secrets, Castro claims, have never been set down openly in any book.

The Necronomicon nevertheless contains material relevant to them. Its meanings are not necessarily explicit. Initiates are said to detect implications or double meanings which an ordinary reader might overlook.

The famous Alhazred couplet now becomes part of the Necronomicon tradition. Its apparent mystical paradox acquires a horrifyingly literal possibility. Entities of enormous antiquity may occupy conditions which do not map neatly onto ordinary human distinctions between life and death.

The book is no longer simply about the dead. It is about things for which death itself may be an inadequate category.

XIYog-Sothoth and the architecture of reality

“The Dunwich Horror” supplies the longest sustained glimpse of the Necronomicon's cosmology.

The passage read by Armitage concerns entities which existed before humanity and which do not inhabit ordinary space in the ordinary manner. Yog-Sothoth is associated with gates, with the meeting of spheres and with a condition in which past, present and future cease to be absolutely separate.

Human beings are not Earth's first masters. Nor, the text warns, will they necessarily be the last.

The beings described are not simply invisible ghosts. Their invisibility appears connected with the structure of reality itself. They exist between the spaces accessible to ordinary human perception and can cross boundaries under particular conditions.

The conceptual shift is profound. A traditional grimoire might tell its reader how to summon a spirit. The Necronomicon begins telling its reader something about why summoning is possible. The spell becomes an application of cosmology.

XIIThe Necronomicon meets mathematics

“The Dreams in the Witch House” makes the transition still clearer.

Walter Gilman studies advanced mathematics at Miskatonic University. His interests concern the properties of space and connections between known and unknown dimensions. He also studies New England witchcraft.

What fascinates him is the possibility that the two subjects are connected. Before university authorities restrict his access, Gilman obtains disturbing hints from the Necronomicon and other forbidden books which he attempts to correlate with his mathematical work.

The implication is extraordinary. Keziah Mason's seventeenth-century “witchcraft” may have represented an empirical or symbolic understanding of geometrical operations which twentieth-century mathematics is beginning to approach theoretically.

The old magical vocabulary and the new scientific vocabulary may be describing the same underlying structure.

Lovecraft has not explained magic by introducing science. He has done something more unsettling. He has suggested that what earlier cultures called magic may sometimes have been badly understood natural philosophy.

XIIIThe Antarctic confirmation

At the Mountains of Madness represents perhaps the decisive stage in the transformation.

Professor William Dyer has read the Necronomicon. Consequently, the Antarctic landscape repeatedly reminds him of Alhazred's descriptions of Leng and of the book's traditions concerning ancient beings.

Then the expedition starts finding evidence.

The fossilised creatures discovered by Lake resemble beings previously known only through primal mythology and texts such as the Necronomicon. Dyer and Danforth subsequently discover the remains of an immense pre-human city. Its sculptures provide a history of Earth's deep past.

The civilisation responsible did not arise from humanity. It arrived from the stars when Earth was young. These beings possessed advanced scientific knowledge. They created terrestrial organisms and manufactured protoplasmic servant creatures capable of assuming different temporary forms.

Dyer recognises these entities. They are the shoggoths of Alhazred.

That moment changes the status of the Necronomicon fundamentally.

Alhazred had described something real.

He did not understand it correctly. He apparently believed terrestrial shoggoths existed only in drug-induced dreams, whereas the Antarctic records demonstrate their physical history on Earth. But the central object of his account was not imaginary.

The mad Arab possessed genuine information about artificial life created by a non-human civilisation hundreds of millions of years before his birth.

The grimoire has become a historical source.

XIVAlhazred was wrong

This deserves emphasis because it prevents a crude reading of the book.

The Necronomicon is not infallible. Alhazred can be mistaken. Indeed, At the Mountains of Madness proves that he was.

He knew of shoggoths, but he did not know their complete history. His information about their terrestrial existence was inaccurate. The Antarctic sculptures reveal far more than he possessed.

This makes the book more interesting rather than less.

The Necronomicon is not divine revelation. It is research.

Its author has sources, observations, rumours, ancient documents, dreams, cult traditions and perhaps direct experiences. Some are accurate. Some are incomplete. Some have been misunderstood. Then translators introduce further uncertainty.

Alhazred may misunderstand his source. Philetas may misunderstand Alhazred. Wormius may misunderstand Philetas. Dee may misunderstand Wormius. The twentieth-century reader inherits the entire chain.

This is not how scripture behaves. It is exactly how ancient knowledge behaves.

XVHow did Alhazred know any of this?

Lovecraft never gives us one answer.

“History of the Necronomicon” tells us that Alhazred explored ancient sites and claimed to have discovered records of a race older than mankind. That provides one source. Cultic traditions provide another. Dreams provide another.

At the Mountains of Madness specifically links Alhazred's knowledge of shoggoths with dreams experienced after consuming a certain alkaloidal herb. There may also have been direct encounters.

Nothing in Lovecraft requires Alhazred to have obtained his knowledge through supernatural revelation.

This allows a rather different picture of him to emerge. He may have been an eighth-century investigator who encountered evidence for which neither his language nor his civilisation possessed adequate conceptual machinery.

Imagine attempting to describe genetic engineering without biology. Or extra dimensions without modern mathematics. Or extraterrestrial civilisation without astronomy. Or a machine without the concept of machinery.

The result might sound very much like magic.

XVIThe Whisperer and pre-solar history

“The Whisperer in Darkness” confirms that the Necronomicon contains lore concerning entities and epochs extending beyond human history.

Wilmarth recognises symbols associated with the book and connects its traditions with things said to have existed before Earth and the inner planets reached their present condition. The book is also one of the sources naming Tsathoggua, alongside other ancient textual traditions.

Once again, the important point is not that Lovecraft is building a tidy pantheon. He is doing almost the opposite.

Different cultures and books have independently preserved fragments of information about entities which human beings subsequently interpreted as gods, demons or monsters. The terminology varies. The referents may be real.

XVIIConsciousness and identity

The Necronomicon also contains practical information concerning the mind.

In “The Thing on the Doorstep”, Edward Derby claims that old Ephraim Waite discovered in the book a formula associated with the displacement of personality between bodies.

The phenomenon initially sounds like straightforward sorcery. But Lovecraft complicates this elsewhere.

“The Shadow out of Time” concerns a civilisation capable of projecting minds across enormous periods and exchanging consciousness with beings occupying other bodies. The altered Nathaniel Peaslee undertakes intensive researches in forbidden literature, including the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft does not state that the Great Race employs the same technique as Ephraim Waite. We should not manufacture a connection stronger than the text warrants.

But the conceptual parallel is unmistakable. Human occultism and non-human science both encounter the possibility that consciousness is not permanently fixed to one biological body.

Once again, a phenomenon apparently belonging to magic turns out to have analogues elsewhere in Lovecraft's natural universe.

XVIIIThe book's later appearances

By Lovecraft's later fiction the Necronomicon no longer needs extensive explanation.

Its reputation has been established. “The Haunter of the Dark” merely needs to tell us that Robert Blake has read a Latin version. The volume appears alongside other forbidden works in a collection preserving traditions and formulae reaching into ages before mankind.

Lovecraft can now use the title as intellectual shorthand. To say that a character has read the Necronomicon tells us something about the character's education, interests and proximity to dangerous knowledge.

The book has become part of the scholarly infrastructure of Lovecraft's universe.

XIXA grimoire becomes natural philosophy

We can now see the development clearly.

In “The Hound”, the Necronomicon looks like a work of demonology. In “The Festival”, it looks like a book of necromancy. In “The Call of Cthulhu”, it becomes a source concerning beings of cosmic antiquity. In “The Dunwich Horror”, it contains a theory, however archaically expressed, about dimensions, time, gates and entities beyond ordinary perception.

In “The Whisperer in Darkness”, its traditions extend beyond terrestrial history. In At the Mountains of Madness, biological and archaeological evidence confirms some of its apparently fabulous claims. In “The Dreams in the Witch House”, mathematics begins independently approaching territory described by occult tradition. In “The Thing on the Doorstep”, it contains procedures affecting identity and embodiment.

This does not mean Lovecraft secretly intended the Necronomicon as a scientific textbook. It means that the ontological distinction between “science” and “magic” becomes increasingly unstable within his fiction.

Science investigates reality. If Cthulhu exists, Cthulhu belongs to reality. If Yog-Sothoth exists, Yog-Sothoth belongs to reality. If a particular geometry allows movement between dimensions, that geometry belongs to reality.

Calling these things supernatural explains nothing. They are merely natural phenomena whose nature human beings have not understood.

XXAbdul Alhazred as premature scientist

Seen from this angle, Alhazred becomes rather more interesting than the conventional “mad sorcerer”.

He travelled. He investigated archaeological remains. He explored ruins. He collected traditions. He apparently found ancient records. He experimented with altered states of consciousness. He attempted to describe non-human beings. He recorded information concerning the deep history of Earth.

Some of his claims were subsequently confirmed. Others were corrected by later evidence.

That is surprisingly close to scholarship.

The difficulty is that Alhazred lived in the eighth century. He therefore lacked almost every intellectual tool necessary to interpret his discoveries.

An engineered protoplasmic organism becomes a monster. A non-human intelligence becomes a demon or god. Multidimensional geometry becomes sorcery. Extraterrestrial civilisation becomes antediluvian legend. A surviving technology becomes a ritual.

This suggests a distinctly Lovecraftian possibility.

Perhaps Alhazred was mad. But perhaps some of the things which made him mad were facts.

XXIThe Necronomicon as an encyclopaedia of forbidden reality

Without inventing a table of contents Lovecraft never supplied, the book's known subjects can be grouped approximately.

Pre-human history

The book preserves traditions concerning beings and civilisations which existed before humanity.

Forbidden geography

It refers to Leng and to places associated with primeval or non-human activity.

Non-human intelligences

Its lore includes Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua and other entities which human beings variously interpret as gods, demons or monsters.

Artificial or anomalous life

It contains information concerning shoggoths.

Necromancy

It contains material relevant to raising or communicating with the dead and to abnormal forms of posthumous existence.

Consciousness

It contains at least one formula associated with transferring personality between bodies.

Dimensional phenomena

It discusses gates, spheres, beings outside familiar spatial categories and means by which boundaries may be crossed.

Cultic history

It preserves information connected with secret traditions and groups which possess fragments of much older knowledge.

Ritual operations

It contains chants, formulae, rites and practical procedures capable of producing observable effects.

Cosmology

Most fundamentally, it depicts humanity as one temporary inhabitant of a world and universe occupied by vastly older forms of life. That last subject unifies much of the rest.

XXIIWhat the Necronomicon is not

A Lovecraft-only reconstruction also allows several popular misconceptions to be discarded.

• There is no canonical human-skin binding.
• There is no canonical demonic face embossed upon the cover.
• There is no standard pentagram or canonical set of seals.
• There is no complete Lovecraftian hierarchy of demons.
• There is no Satanic theology.
• There are no “fifty names of Marduk”.
• There is no complete surviving Arabic edition.
• There is no authorised modern English translation.
• There is no single edition with a universally applicable pagination.
• There is no complete table of contents.
• There is no ritual system which Lovecraft's reader could reconstruct and practise.

And there is emphatically no reason within Lovecraft's own fiction to identify the book with any modern publication claiming to be the “real Necronomicon”. Those belong to the cultural afterlife of Lovecraft's invention. They are not evidence about the book he created.

XXIIIWhat does the Necronomicon look like?

Lovecraft tells us surprisingly little. This is another area in which later visual culture has filled an intentional vacuum.

There are manuscripts. There are printed editions. One Latin edition is in black-letter. Copies are old, rare and closely guarded. That is essentially all we require.

The canonical Necronomicon need not look theatrical.

Indeed, the most Lovecraftian version might look like a perfectly ordinary early printed book: worn leather, old paper, dense type and nothing on the binding suggesting that the contents concern the extinction of mankind.

The horror is not the cover. It is what competent readers discover inside.

XXIVIs the Necronomicon evil?

Lovecraft's characters routinely describe it as evil, accursed, hideous or blasphemous. Those descriptions tell us primarily about the characters.

The book itself is not obviously a moral agent. Nor is the universe it describes organised around human ideas of good and evil.

Cthulhu is not Satan. The Elder Things are not fallen angels. The Great Race is not a host of demons. Shoggoths are manufactured organisms. Yog-Sothoth cannot be usefully reduced to a Christian theological category.

Human beings may worship some of these entities. That does not make the entities gods in any philosophically interesting sense. A sufficiently primitive organism might worship a zoologist. The zoologist would not thereby become divine.

The Necronomicon is therefore “evil” principally from a human point of view. It contains knowledge dangerous to us. That is a different proposition.

XXVInformation as contamination

Why, then, is reading the book dangerous?

Lovecraft's “History” tells us simply that reading produces terrible consequences. The fiction provides several explanations.

Some knowledge is operational. A reader can perform things. Some knowledge attracts the reader towards dangerous places or beings. Some creates obsessions. Some destroys assumptions upon which ordinary human psychological stability depends.

And some allows otherwise disconnected evidence to be correlated.

This last function may be the most important.

Lovecraft's universe remains psychologically tolerable so long as its anomalies remain isolated. A strange fossil is merely a strange fossil. A witchcraft legend is merely folklore. An impossible dream is merely a dream. A cult is merely a collection of fanatics. An archaeological anomaly is merely an anomaly. An astronomical mystery is merely unexplained.

The Necronomicon says, in effect: these things are connected.

That is when the trouble starts.

XXVIThe book as an engine of correlation

The Necronomicon performs the same intellectual function in Lovecraft's fictional world that comparison performs in science.

It permits cross-reference.

A scholar sees a symbol in Vermont and remembers one in Alhazred. An explorer reaches Antarctica and remembers Leng. A mathematician develops equations and recalls occult traditions. A biologist encounters an impossible organism and discovers that a supposedly mad Arab named it centuries earlier. An investigator encounters a cult and finds fragments of the same lore preserved in a forbidden text.

The book does not necessarily provide the complete explanation. It provides the connection.

This is why it fits so perfectly with the famous opening idea of “The Call of Cthulhu”: the danger lies in the human mind's ability to correlate its contents.

The Necronomicon is a machine for doing precisely that.

XXVIIThe cosmicist book

This is where the Necronomicon becomes most interesting from a cosmicist perspective.

Its deepest revelation is not that monsters exist. Monsters are parochial.

The deeper revelation is that human categories themselves may be parochial.

Life and death may not be exhaustive alternatives. Mind may not belong permanently to one body. Three-dimensional perception may reveal only a fraction of space. Linear time may describe human experience rather than reality in itself. Human civilisation may be an extremely recent episode in terrestrial history. Humanity may not be Earth's first intelligent species. Earth may not be biologically autonomous. Religion may preserve distorted memories of encounters with non-human entities. Magic may contain fragments of misunderstood natural knowledge.

And the universe may contain forms of intelligence to which the entire human species is no more significant than an obscure biological curiosity.

That is the real doctrine lurking behind the book.

Not devil worship.

Insignificance.

XXVIIIThe theological irrelevance of the Necronomicon

It is consequently a mistake to interpret the book primarily through Christian categories.

Later popular culture often turns forbidden occultism into a familiar moral drama: God against Satan, angels against demons, holy against unholy.

Lovecraft's universe is much less comforting.

Nothing in the Necronomicon suggests that humanity stands at the centre of a cosmic contest between Good and Evil.

The powers it describes do not need to hate us. Hatred would grant us importance.

The Elder Things possessed their own civilisation before human beings existed. The Great Race pursues its immense historical project across geological epochs. Cthulhu's cult concerns beings whose chronology dwarfs civilisation. Yog-Sothoth's relationship with space and time renders human history a local phenomenon.

The theological horror is therefore not that the book proves the Devil.

It is that it makes the Devil seem provincial.

XXIXA catastrophically premature scientific encyclopaedia

We can now propose a working definition.

The Necronomicon is an eighth-century attempt to compile information concerning aspects of reality for which eighth-century civilisation possessed no adequate conceptual framework.

It contains superstition because Alhazred was superstitious. It contains errors because Alhazred was fallible. It contains magical terminology because no better terminology was available. It contains rumours because reliable evidence was scarce. It contains ritual because some procedures had apparently been discovered empirically without their theoretical basis being understood. It contains mythology because mythology was one of the mechanisms by which extraordinarily ancient information survived.

And it contains truth.

Enough truth, at any rate, for twentieth-century investigators repeatedly to regret having read it.

Perhaps the best description of Lovecraft's Necronomicon, then, is not “book of black magic”.

It is a catastrophically premature scientific encyclopaedia.

XXXWhy Lovecraft never wrote it

The Necronomicon works because it is incomplete.

A complete version would necessarily become smaller.

Give it a table of contents and we discover what is not in it. Explain every entity and uncertainty disappears. Specify every ritual and cosmic horror becomes game mechanics. Draw every symbol and mystery becomes iconography.

Lovecraft instead gives us references. A passage here. A page number there. A damaged translation. A seventh book. A library shelf. A remembered quotation. An archaeological confirmation. A formula whose wording is uncertain.

The unseen book consequently expands to fill whatever space the story requires.

Its blank pages, from the reader's point of view, are where most of the horror resides.

XXXIThe Necronomicon and the limits of knowledge

The book ultimately embodies one of Lovecraft's most characteristic philosophical intuitions.

Knowledge is not necessarily consoling.

There is no guarantee that a more accurate understanding of reality will make human beings happier. There is no guarantee that truth will validate human importance. There is no guarantee that the universe has been structured for creatures like us to understand comfortably.

The Necronomicon offers knowledge without reassurance.

Indeed, the more accurate it proves to be, the worse matters become.

If it were simply nonsense, there would be no horror. If Alhazred were merely mad, there would be no problem. If the shoggoths were fantasies, the Antarctic expedition could return home.

The terror lies precisely in partial verification.

Enough of the book is wrong to remain obscure.

Enough of it is right to be dangerous.

XXXIIChronology of the Necronomicon in Lovecraft's own fiction

The pattern supports the developmental interpretation offered above: early explicit occultism gradually becomes integrated with Lovecraft's later cosmic and quasi-scientific fiction.

XXXIIILovecraft revisions and collaborations

For methodological clarity, several additional appearances should be distinguished from Lovecraft's independently authored fiction.

Lovecraft introduced or used the Necronomicon while revising or collaborating upon works including “The Last Test”, “Medusa's Coil”, “The Horror in the Museum”, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, “Out of the Aeons” and “The Diary of Alonzo Typer”.

These texts may legitimately be studied when examining the wider development of Lovecraft's invented bibliography, but they have not been necessary to establish the principal reconstruction offered here.

This is especially useful because collaboration can otherwise lead to an artificial idea of “canon”. Lovecraft himself was not constructing a modern franchise bible. He borrowed from friends, allowed friends to borrow from him, revised other people's stories and delighted in creating the impression of a shared background of forbidden scholarship.

The borders were intentionally porous.

XXXIVLovecraft versus the later Mythos

One should therefore distinguish three very different things.

Lovecraft's Necronomicon is the fragmentary work reconstructed above.

The wider literary Necronomicon includes additions by Lovecraft's contemporaries and successors, who supplied further passages, entities, rituals and bibliographical details.

The occult Necronomicon tradition consists of books published in the real world while pretending, with varying degrees of seriousness, to descend from Alhazred's fictional original.

Only the first concerns us here.

This distinction is particularly important because later Mythos fiction tended to systematise what Lovecraft deliberately left unstable.

Entities became pantheons. Relationships became genealogies. Cosmic forces acquired moral alignments. Books acquired fixed contents. Rituals acquired rules.

Lovecraft's universe is generally less tidy.

And therefore considerably stranger.

XXXVConclusion: the book that tells us we do not matter

The Necronomicon is famous as the archetypal forbidden book.

That description is correct but incomplete.

It is forbidden because it contains dangerous operations. It is forbidden because readers become obsessed. It is forbidden because some of the beings it discusses are catastrophically hazardous.

But above all it is forbidden because it contains information.

Information about the history of Earth before humanity. Information about life which did not originate with us. Information about dimensions our senses do not perceive. Information about consciousness behaving in ways our ordinary categories cannot accommodate. Information about civilisations which regard human history as a fleeting episode. Information suggesting that what our ancestors called gods and demons may represent their inadequate attempts to classify things which simply exist.

That is why the Necronomicon belongs so completely to Lovecraft's cosmicism.

It does not offer forbidden knowledge because knowledge is sinful.

It offers forbidden knowledge because reality may be psychologically uninhabitable when understood too clearly.

Alhazred looked further than most human beings. He travelled through deserts, descended into ruins, consulted ancient records and assembled fragments of an older history.

He misunderstood much of it. He was almost certainly mad.

Those facts ought to be reassuring.

Lovecraft's final and considerably nastier joke is that they are not.

Because Professor Dyer can take Alhazred to Antarctica.

He can compare the old madman's ravings with the rocks.

He can examine the fossils.

He can walk through the ruins.

And he can discover that the Necronomicon was wrong only in the details.