Codex Menduri

3WW: Hibernation's End

2012-02-01T07:30:00.002-05:00

Three Word Wednesday.

Today’s words: Detach, Jolt, Surge

Saw a bit of a special report about frogs yesterday, which influenced today’s haiku.

Hibernation’s End
by J.M. Mendur

Spring - the rivers surge.
Jolted, the frogs detach from
the sheltering mud.

Farscape: Last Kiss

2012-01-30T09:23:00.002-05:00

I’ve written perhaps a dozen “Farscape” fan fics. Some of them are lost to time. This, I think, was one of my better ones.

TITLE: "Last Kiss"
DISCLAIMER AND OWNERSHIP NOTES: "Farscape" and its characters are owned by TPTB. I intend to reap no monetary reward for this fan fic. The story is mine - Copyright renewed 2009 by J.M. Mendur, except for the excerpts from the various episodes. *Those* are owned by TPTB. This story is a work of fiction.
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: "PK Tech Girl", "Nerve", "The Hidden Memory", "A Bug's Life"
BETA-READER: Thank you, Tamy. Any mistakes that remain are mine.

NOTES: This story, written in 2000, is the result of an offhand comment in a Yahoo Group. Someone said, "I don't think _anybody_ could write a Larraq/Gilina story." I don't know if it was intentional, but telling a writer that something can't be done is the perfect inducement to get the writer to do it. Nine years later, in spite of the changes that the series wrought with Peacekeeper society after I’d written about it, I’m still rather pleased with this one.

* * * * * * * * * *

"Last Kiss"

"Welcome to the Officers' Lounge, Captain Larraq," said Commander Javio. "What will you have?"

Gilina smiled. It couldn't be. There was, however, only one Captain Larraq who could possibly be on duty out here in the Uncharted Territories. It had been over a cycle since she'd seen him. To be able to surprise him, here, was too delicious. She remembered the days (and nights) they'd spent together. Maybe being assigned to this dren-hole of a base would have an up side. She'd have to wait until the Base Commander had left, though. She wanted to make sure she stayed out of *his* line of sight, even if only a fraction of the stories were true.

She heard Javio ask, "Does she give good ... value?"

Good value? That ... thing ... flirting with Lt. Heskon is *his*? She couldn't be. He wouldn't ... would he? No more stalling. Gilina turned. She froze for a moment, and then quickly turned around again. That's not Jorian Larraq. That's John Crichton. What's *he* doing here? Why is he posing as Jorian? What happened? Gilina took a long drink of Raszlak to calm herself. There will be time enough for questions later, she told herself. First, however, I have to make sure he doesn't get caught when he's genetically scanned. Posing as a Captain, he'll be quartered in the high security area. I'd better go.

Quickly and quietly, Gilina slipped out of the lounge.

* * *

"Stay here," Gilina continued. "I'll take the sample to the medical unit."

"No, no, no," John said. "I'm not gonna put you at risk."

"I won't be," Gilina said. "I can fake the work orders and the Med Techs won't ask any questions." She grinned. "We're used to secrecy."

"Still too dangerous," John said, putting out a hand to stop her. "I'll go."

"John," Gilina said, "you should stay hidden. Suppose somebody here knew the real Larraq."

Crichton slumped, admitting defeat, and Gilina left the room with the sample.

Gilina was careful to walk at the same pace as the other Techs in the hallway, but her mind was racing. *I* know the real Larraq, she thought. He's dead, isn't he, John? He must be, for you to have his ident-chip. But did *you* kill him, you and the other escaped prisoners? How? He was one of the best of us. Why is it ...?

She arrived at her quarters and her inner monologue took a back seat to her work. Quickly, she created the fake work order in the system, then created the copy on her own computer-pad. Indicating that she was the Tech assigned to obtain it. Finished, she headed toward the Base Medical Facility.

Why is it, she continued in her thoughts, that I am always brought together with men through death? Death ... then passion ... then loss .... Arriving at Base Medical, she presented the work order on her computer-pad to one of the Med Techs. They told her they would provide her with synthesized paraphoral tissue ... the latest thing ... one dose and some bed rest would lead to complete recovery. It would take half an arn.

"I'll wait," she told them. "Orders."

None of the Med Techs tried to engage her in conversation. PeaceKeepers tended to keep to their own level. Med Techs with Med Techs. Engineering Techs with Engineering Techs. Commandos with Commandos. But not always. Waiting, she had time to remember ....

* * *

Two cycles ago, on her homeworld. Gilina had finally been given an extended leave so she could visit her home. She arrived to find a strange man there, talking to her mother. "Gilina!" her mother cried. "I'm so glad you're home." Rushing forward, her mother hugged her tightly.

"What is it mother?" Gilina asked, sensing something wrong.

"I just received word. Your father."

Gilina stopped, waiting. She had always known this day would come. "How?" she finally asked.

"On a mission," the man said, stepping forward. "I can't tell you the details, but he died on duty, as a PeaceKeeper."

"Of course," said Gilina, who was fiercely proud of her father. "He is ...was ... the best."

"Forgive me," her mother said. "This is Commander Larraq. Commander,this is my daughter, Gilina."

"My father was a Captain," Gilina said. "Why did they send a commander?"

"I requested this," Larraq replied.

"Why?" Gilina asked, curious.

"Captain Gerrazko Renayz was my teacher and, as much as a superior officer *could* be, my friend. I felt I owed it to him."

"Come inside," Gilina's mother said. "My daughter is on leave, and you don't have to go back right away ... do you, Commander?"

"No, Mrs. Renayz. If Gilina doesn't object?"

"No. Of course not. I would like to hear more of my father, Commander Larraq."

"Please," he said, "call me Jorian."

A small smile appeared on her face. "Jorian," she agreed. "So you see," Gilina was saying two arns later, "you probably know my father better than I ever did."

"The military life," Larraq agreed. "It's the one part of it I do not look forward to, being apart from my family."

"So you're married?" Gilina's mother asked, a bit disappointed.

"No," Larraq laughed. "Not yet. Someday, I hope." He checked his chronometer. "And now, I'm afraid I *must* go."

"Gilina, walk the commander out, would you?"

"Mother," Gilina said quietly, in a warning tone.

Larraq laughed again and Gilina smiled in return. She decided that she liked his laugh. At the door, Gilina said, "Thank you ... for everything. This has been hard on my mother, although she'd never show it."

"She's strong," Larraq said, "as is her daughter."

Gilina blushed a little. She held out her hand. "Good bye, Jorian."

Larraq took her hand in both of his, then kissed it. "Perhaps I could come back another time?"

Gilina looked down, smiling. "I'm on leave for two weekens. After that...."

"Shh...." He caressed her long blonde hair. "Like the rising sun," he said, "we'll deal with each day when it gets here."

* * *

"I said your sample is here," the Med Tech repeated.

"What?" Gilina came back to herself to see the Med Tech holding out an injector containing the paraphoral tissue. "Oh, thank you," she said, taking the injector. As the door closed behind her, she took a deep breath. Too many memories.

She headed back to the room where John was waiting for her.

* * *

"I'd better get back to the ship. If I'm late, Aeryn dies."

"And I wouldn't even dream of stopping you," Gilina told him. She paused, then added, "We always seem to be saying good bye."

"Yeah," Crichton agreed. "You'd think we'd get better at it."

He looked as if he was about to say more, but Gilina said, "Go."

Crichton walked away, trying to reach his ship.

I don't understand, Gilina thought. I kissed him and he didn't even respond. Not like before ....

* * *

Half a cycle ago, aboard the remains of the Zelbinion. Aeryn Sun had just walked in on them as they were kissing, then walked away, obviously bothered by what she'd seen. John had gone after her.

Gilina thought to herself, why is she acting that way? From what John told me, she'd never shown any interest in him except when he annoyed her. Is it because of the Sebacean "racial purity" prohibitions? I'm not planning on bearing his children. It's just that ... it has been a while. And John is kind, and funny ... and a he's a Tech, like me. Here he comes again, tall and handsome. I could fall in love with him. "John, is everything all right?"

"Yeah, I think so. Aeryn and I just had to clear the air."

He seemed distracted. I wonder what they said to each other. "Clear the air?"

"Yeah. Clear the air. Make sure there were no misunderstandings."

"Oh," she said. "Maybe we'd better finish this." They went back to work.

* * *

I guess I *did* fall in love with him, Gilina mused. What *happened* to him in the last couple of monens? He's different. He actually reminds me of Jorian, now ... more of a warrior than a Tech like me ... more like Aeryn. That brought her up short. Aeryn? Is he in love with Aeryn Sun? And what will I do if he *is*?

* * *

"How will I know if it works?" Chiana asked.

"You won't get blown out of the sky," Gilina replied. She was becoming more annoyed with the gray-skinned alien every microt. "Gadget girl" indeed. If John didn't need her to do this ....

"Great," Chiana said. "Now, all I have to do is get to the Prowler."

"Well, I'll give you a diversion," Gilina offered. "How much of a head start do you think you'll need?"

"Give me four hundred microts."

When Chiana didn't move immediately, Gilina said, "Go!"

Chiana gave her a sort of half-smile and left.

Still in the systems access room, Gilina's thought tumbled around each other. He put Aeryn first. Why? Chiana says he's in love with me. But is he? I'm not so sure. I'm not sure he'll want me to go with him. He's been in the Aurora Chair. Sooner or later, they're going to find out that I helped him. I have to try to help him again. But how?

The four hundred microts were almost up. So far, the guards' sweeps had missed her. Gilina made the last few connections, counting down. "Five...four ... three ... two ... one." The Base alarms went off. There's your distraction, Chiana. I hope you make it. I owe Aeryn Sun my life and I would rather not have that debt unrepaid. Now, all I can do is try to figure out how to help John. And wait. I wonder what Jorian would do ....

* * *

One and a half cycles ago, on the Command Carrier Brabantian. Yet another assignment, Gilina thought. Yet another group of strangers that will question my abilities and skills until I come close to questioning them myself. Why is it that Captains of Command Carriers never trust the official records of their new crew members? "Engineering Tech Renayz," said the duty officer.

"Sir."

"Here's your berth assignment," he said.

"Yes, sir."

Gilina moved at a steady pace to her new "home" for the next cycle ... unless she got reassigned on some officer's whim. Seeing a group of Commandos coming down the corridor, she stood aside to allow them to pass, eyes lowered. She had learned the hard way on her last assignment that looking at some Commandos in the eyes was as good as a challenge to a fight. One of the Commandos stopped in front of her.

"Gilina?"

She looked up at the sound of his voice. "Jorian?"

"It *is* you. Well, this is a surprise." The other Commandos had continued on, leaving the two of them momentarily alone. Larraq picked her up and kissed her. "I've missed you, Sunshine," he whispered in her ear.

"I've missed you, too, Jorian. I didn't know you were assigned here."

He let her go when they heard footsteps approaching. They both knew the regulations about fraternizing in duty areas. "Go get settled in," he said. "I'm going out on patrol. When I get back, I'll find you."

Gilina nodded. She watched him as he went down the corridor after his crewmates. She knew he had been assigned a Marauder command, but Marauder crews got shifted around almost as much as Techs. Picking up her gear, which she had dropped into order to wrap her arms around Larraq, she headed for her new home with a lighter heart.

* * *

Gilina smiled at the memory. Jorian Larraq would act as a Commando acts. Figure out the best way to achieve your objective and then do it. She settled down to work. She had an idea.

* * *

Gilina lay on a bed on Moya, dying. I should've remembered that I'm *not* a Commando, she thought. She winced in pain. While the Delvian worked on her, her mind wandered ....

* * *

Half a cycle ago, on the Zelbinion, waiting for Crais's Command Carrier. He's gone. He couldn't come with me. He ... he didn't want me to go with him. He said that his life was no way to live. Aeryn Sun was wrong, though. If John had asked, I *would* have gone with him. It's one thing to be forced into exile. It's another to choose exile in order to join another. Now, I am alone ... again ....

* * *

One point two cycles ago, aboard the Brabantian. Gilina waited for him in his quarters. The last several monens had been wonderful. As he had told her once before, they had dealt with each day as it arrived and tried not to worry about the future. But it was soon to be over. Gilina had gotten her orders today. In two weekens, she would be transferred to another Command Carrier, this one led by a Captain Crais. It was hard for her to focus on the moment, with the separation looming between them.

The door opened and Larraq came in. "Hi, Sunshine," he said, smiling.

A smile lit up Gilina's face. He had called her that the first time he had come back to see her, nearly a cycle ago. She decided to wait. She could tell him about her new assignment later. She kissed him and asked, "How was your patrol?"

The smile fled from Larraq's face and he paused before answering. "Eventful."

"Oh," Gilina responded, "Is it something you can talk about?"

"No. But it's changed things."

"Changed things? How?"

"I'm being given a special assignment. Unknown duration. Dangerous."

Gilina could feel it coming. Their two weekens had disappeared. "How dangerous?"

"High Command thinks it's important. I've been promoted to Captain, beginning with this mission. When I return, if I'm successful, I'll be given my own Command Carrier."

"Captain? That's wonderful news. I'm proud of you. I think my father would be proud, too." She paused and added, "When do you leave?"

Larraq sat down. "Tomorrow morning, I'll be given my final briefing. I launch with my crew immediately afterward."

"Then we have tonight, at least," Gilina said, coming to him.

Some time later, as they lay together, Larraq said, "I'm getting tired of having to leave you."

"Shh," Gilina replied. "There will be plenty of time to talk about that when you return. We'll find each other again. I'm sure of it."

"So am I, Sunshine. One way or another, I'll find you again." Larraq smiled.

Much later, they slept. The next morning, they kissed good-bye.

"I love you, Gilina Renayz," he said. Before she could reply, he was gone.

Later, she managed to get the duty of overhauling Prowler engines, so she was in the maintenance bay as the Commando crews headed for their Marauders. As if sensing her, Larraq turned his head and found his eyes locked with Gilina's.

"I love you," Gilina mouthed.

Larraq smiled, turned and entered the Marauder. A few microts later, he was gone.

* * *

Larraq couldn't help leaving, Gilina thought. He got a special assignment because he is ... was ... one of the best of us, and PeaceKeepers obey orders. John *could* have asked me to stay, but he *didn't*. Even on the Gammak Base, when he asked me to come with him, he wouldn't answer me when I asked him who he wanted to be with. Her thoughts became more jumbled as the pain grew worse. I have to know. Jorian said it. Why won't he? I love him, but is he the same person I loved? Would Jorian have been the same when he returned? The one they call Stark is doing something. He's ... oh ... that place ... it's so beautiful. If only I could share it with John ... with Jorian ... but I can't. Jorian is gone. And I don't want to die alone. John is here. I still have to know.

"John?"

"Yeah?" he asked, his eyes wet with unshed tears.

"Do you think, if things had been different, that you could have loved me?"

He smiled. "Yeah."

It's enough, Gilina thought to herself. It has to be. There's just one more thing.

"Kiss me one more time."

"Shh..."

"Kiss me."

John leaned over and kissed her, gently, one last time. The last kiss, Gilina thought as she faded. John's kiss is a kiss of goodbye, probably forever. Just like the last time we kissed, on the Zelbinion. Jorian's kiss was a kiss of promise. I guess neither of us will be able to keep that promise. I .........

* * *

BLACKNESS

* * *

LIGHT

* * *

Gilina looked around, awestruck. The pain was gone and she was actually *in* the beautiful place that Stark had given to her. Her grandmother was there, talking to her father. Even the friends who had died on the Zelbinion were there. And in front of them, there *he* stood, as tall and proud and handsome as ever.

Larraq held out his hand. "I've been waiting for you, Sunshine." Gilina smiled and ran to him.

The End.

Little Old Lady from Minnesota

2012-01-28T18:11:00.011-05:00

Something funny that I want to share, which I got from
this website:

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/what-are-you-so-afraid-of_01272012

(Click on the image to make the text more readable.)

No idea if it's real or not ... but it's FUNNY.

Exterminate the Unfashionable!

2012-01-27T08:10:00.003-05:00

Geek alert. If you're not a fan of "Doctor Who" you might not get this.

Today's Friday Photo is of two Daleks that were spotted at the science fiction convention Marcon last year. While the Doctor might approve, I have a feeling that this wasn't what Davros had in mind.

3WW: A Quiet Disruption

2012-01-25T09:49:00.001-05:00

Three Word Wednesday again. Today’s three words:
Bubble
Lumber
Wreck

This time, I managed what I think of as a real haiku – nature imagery, two contrasting images, and a sort-of Buddhist view of the cycles of the world. What do you think?

A Quiet Disruption
by J.M. Mendur

Spring wrecks Winter’s spell –
The bear lumbers from his den
when the streams bubble.

Forever Knight: Worms

2012-01-23T08:59:00.003-05:00

New feature: Fan Fiction Monday. Every Monday, I will post a piece of fan fiction that I've written (either an old one or something new). Yes, I know that fan fiction is a waste of time when I could be writing something original to sell on Amazon and Smashwords and all the rest, but sometimes I get inspired to write one of these ... and they're fun.

This week, an old "Forever Knight" fan fiction, featuring a major character (LaCroix) and a minor character (Feliks) and based on a story some years back about an internet worm. It's set in the third season and all the usual disclaimers apply (characters owned by others, no infringement intended, will gladly take it down if asked to do so by copyright holder, etc.).

Set sometime in the third season.

Worms

"What!?" LaCroix roared as his computer crashed and he lost everything in his database. All of his e-mail pen pal addresses. All of his program notes from past Nightcrawler broadcasts. And worst of all, all of his financial records for the Raven. He had *never* trusted these things before, but the ease with which they allowed him to contact other like-minded persons over the Internet had lulled him into a false sense of security.

That had now been shattered.

He composed himself and took a sip of the bloodwine, but it gave him no comfort. He picked up his phone and called a person he had not called in many years.

"Hello?"

"Feliks," LaCroix said. "I need a favor. No, two favors."

"Lucien," Feliks Twist replied in his cheery way. "As sociable as ever. And what can I do for you, my old friend?"

LaCroix calmed himself before speaking. Feliks had always irritated him with his constant upbeat, too-pleasant-for-words attitude. Nicholas and his angst were trying at times, but he thanked the God he didn't believe in that he had not been the one to bring Feliks across and be linked to him for all eternity. "My computer has . . . I believe the word is 'crashed'. I need you to recover my information, and find out how this happened."

LaCroix would have sworn that he could hear the computer-wizard vampire grinning at him over the phone. "Of course, Lucien. It's nearly dawn, but I shall be at the Raven shortly after dusk. Just don't touch anything else on your computer until I get there."

"I wouldn't dream of it, Feliks," LaCroix responded, dripping sarcasm. He didn't have to enjoy my discomfort so much, the old Roman thought. "Until nightfall, then," he concluded, hanging up.

* * *

Shortly after sunset, Felix Twist entered the Raven and went directly to LaCroix's office in the back, ignoring the decor. He had been there only once after Lucien took over and replaced Janette's style with his own. He preferred his flowers. As he entered the back room, he saw LaCroix glaring at his computer.

"Lucien," he said in greeting.

"Feliks," LaCroix replied. He rose and indicated the chair in front of the computer with a wave of
his hand.

Feliks nodded and sat down. "Okay, let's see what happened." He pulled out his own computer and a small box of disks. After turning on his own system, he typed a few commands into his own computer, then into LaCroix's. "There it is," he said with some interest.

When he did not continue, LaCroix said slowly "There . . . *what* . . . is?"

"Oh, sorry. I can get rather single-minded when I see a problem like this. It's a worm file. I'm afraid I won't be able to save all of your files, but it didn't get at everything. I'll save what I can."

"A worm?" LaCroix asked, one eyebrow arched.

"Like a virus, but different," Felix explained, or rather didn't explain, as he continued his typing. "It does similar things to computers if you don't have the right protections in place. This worm has been in the news for a few days, now. It's creator called it the Bloodsucker. Didn't you hear about it?"

"I rarely pay much attention to most of the things mortals do to each other." He paused then added "The Bloodsucker?"

"I think the worm's creator thought he was being funny. Ah, well, this will take a while."

"Can you tell who is responsible for this 'worm' in my computer?"

"Phillip Boulay."

"What?"

"You really should pay attention to the news, old boy. They arrested him today. He lives just outside of Toronto, actually. Like most of these computer criminal types, he wasn't as bright about covering his tracks as he was at creating this little monster." Feliks grinned and added "he was turned in by one of the 'friends' to whom he bragged about this stunt."

"How long will this take?"

"A few hours at least. Why?"

LaCroix put a bottle on the table next to Feliks and said "I am going out for a while. Help yourself to some refreshment while you work."

"Lucien, what are you going to . . . ." Feliks began. A whoosh of air and he knew LaCroix had gone. "Always in a hurry, that one," he said, shaking his head as he opened the bottle of bloodwine. "He'd never make a decent gardener."

* * *

Feliks had finished his work and was waiting for LaCroix to return so that he could instruct the old vampire on proper computer security. He had been watching the news. LaCroix walked in and, getting his own bottle, sat down, smiling in his usual enigmatic way.

Before he could ask what happened, Feliks looked up as the late news anchor came back on:

And on a final note, alleged creator of the Bloodsucker worm, Phillip Boulay has been admitted for psychiatric observation after he was discovered in his cell eating earthworms. When asked why he was eating them, all he could say was "He told me to." He could not or would not
clarify who this "he" was. One observer commented "It seems like justice to me."

Feliks glanced at LaCroix and thought to himself "At least the old boy has kept his sense of humor."

The End.

Indiana Love

2012-01-20T08:31:00.006-05:00

Today's photo was taken last Sunday at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. They have a fairly famous, large, outdoor sculpture by Robert Indiana, entitled "Love", for obvious reasons. According to the description, they recently restored it and are letting the weather age it naturally over the next few years back to its normal "variegated purplish brown patina with iridescent overtones". In other words, it's like I took its picture just after a radical haircut instead of waiting for its hair to grow out.

The hexagonal flares in the photo are due to the fact that there was a bit of wind and snow in the air and the sun was in front of the camera. They're snowflakes, out of focus. I think I like that effect and might try for it on purpose sometime. What do *you* think?

3WW: Watching the Madmen

2012-01-18T09:08:00.001-05:00

Today’s Three Word Wednesday listed the following three words:
downhill, freak, sliver

Sometimes, the words are difficult for haiku. This time, I focused on the fact that I am *not* a winter sports kind of person. This is not really a true haiku but close, I think.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Watching the Madmen
by J.M. Mendur

The downhill skiers
ride mountains on wood slivers –
The freaks of winter.

MLK Day

2012-01-16T08:11:00.000-05:00

On this, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m providing two links to YouTube.

The first is what is perhaps King’s greatest speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tchspyLEHaw&feature=related

The other is the speech Robert F. Kennedy gave to a crowd in Indianapolis on the night King was assassinated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zb9EjHXyJc&feature=related

Ife and Thaw

2012-01-15T21:38:00.004-05:00

Went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art today. Spent my time at two temporary special exhibits.

The first exhibit was art from Ife (an area of the Yoruba people from Nigeria), mostly terra cotta and metal sculpture and masks. There were some interesting pieces ... and some interesting history on the little cards. Did you know that they practiced human sacrifice of foreigners? When they did, they gagged the victims so the victims couldn't utter curses against their killers. Some of the art featured those gagged individuals. Also, many pieces were nearly pure copper, which is much harder to work than alloys like bronze (apparently), testifying to the artists' great skill.

The second exhibit was art from the peoples of North America ... something called the Thaw Collection. The pieces in that exhibit which were most interesting to me were the ones with shamanic or socio-religious purposes, like the Tlingit shaman's rattle or the large Raven mask.

Unfortunately, neither exhibit permitted photographs and the pieces I liked best were not available on the postcards for sale. C'est la vie.

I did get some photos of other pieces on the grounds of the museum, which might find their way onto this blog some Friday.

Stay tuned.

Friday Photo: One Red Leaf

2012-01-13T09:03:00.004-05:00

Today's photo was taken in November of 2009. This was the only leaf left on this particular tree.

3WW: Hibernation

2012-01-11T10:10:00.005-05:00

I've decided to start up "Three Word Wednesday" haiku again.

Each Wednesday, http://www.threewordwednesday.com/ puts up three words as a creative writing prompt. My plan is to take those words and craft a haiku with them.

This week's words: Brutal, Sullen, Trust

Hibernation
by J.M. Mendur

A brutal winter,
sullen skies waiting to snow -
The bear trusts his den.

Feel free to leave comments.

The Power of Words

2012-01-10T21:41:00.009-05:00

Went to a free talk at a local library by Ray E. Boomhower, an Indiana author who wrote a book about Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary (back when Indiana's presidential primary actually meant something). The talk was interesting but what really brought it to life were the dozen or so photographs from that time, plus an audio recording of the famous speech RFK gave the night that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. That speech has been given partial credit for the fact that Indianapolis did not suffer the major riots that other large cities suffered that night. Did it deserve credit? Who knows? They were the right words at the right time.

What was really impressive to me is that the speech, with all of its poetry and hope and feeling, was *not* the product of speechwriters. RFK did it himself from some notes he scribbled on the back of an envelope. I forget, sometimes, that politicians used to be capable of more than looking good on camera and reciting their lines like understudies in dinner theater.

Which is too bad .... for all of us.

Writing Submission 2012 # 1

2012-01-08T16:10:00.004-05:00

Well, I guess I didn't have enough pain in my life. I went ahead and submitted a piece of flash fiction to an anthology ... first one for 2012. Now, I can wait for the reply with fear, dread and trepidation (which is basically fear and dread squared). For me, this is the hardest part ... waiting to find out if my story was good enough for my chosen market.
.
The story: Captain Smythe and the Demon Mutineer
The anthology: The Crimson Pact, Vol. 3
.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
.
In the meantime, classes start tomorrow. I'll probably try to find something new to write in those periods when my homework is done.

Winter Fountain

2012-01-06T10:41:00.008-05:00

Okay. First new feature of this blog. Friday Photos.

Each Friday, I will post something either from my own archives or something new from the week.

Today, one from the archive: a photograph of the fountain at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as taken one January from a fourth floor window. Note: the water is off. Is it still a fountain if there's no "fountaining"?

A New Chapter

2011-12-31T22:59:00.002-05:00

For the (three) people who've been reading this, you'll notice I've deleted all but my old Masters Thesis. I'm starting a new chapter in my life by returning to school so I've decided to restart this blog as well. What will I post here? I don't know. We'll see.

Necronomicon - part 3 of 3

2009-10-11T14:57:00.000-04:00

THE LEGACY OF THE NECRONOMICON
Let me put it less ponderously and more positively: no modern-day writer of fantasy and horror fiction has had more lasting influence on the field than H.P. Lovecraft. ~ Robert Bloch
Joyce Carol Oates, in her introduction to a collection of Lovecraft's stories, noted that he "had an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction" (vii). One facet of that influence is his use of the literary motif of a book created out of whole cloth by the author, as exemplified by his Necronomicon. Many authors, both his contemporaries and those who followed, have either used the Necronomicon in their own fiction or have created their own forbidden books in the style of Lovecraft's archetypal tome. In fact, later in the introduction, Oates criticizes Lovecraft's use of the Necronomicon as "so frequently cited ... that the title becomes a sort of running joke" (xiii). In spite of this negative comment, she goes on to note that the critically praised writer Jorge Luis Borges was "drawn to Lovecraft and inspired to create his own library of mythical, cross-referenced and cabbalistic texts" (Oates xiii). There was something about Lovecraft's book that inspired his devotees to study it minutely, to explain the errors away, even to create their own versions of it. As a result, "Necronomicon" has grown beyond the confines of being just a title of a fictitious book and has entered pop culture, continuing to change and evolve.
The Sharing of Plot Devices among Lovecraft's Contemporaries
In his essay "Notes on an Entity," Robert Bloch stated that he and other contemporary writers "were profoundly influenced by the Lovecraft style, the Lovecraft concepts" (Discovering 4). He later said he eventually developed his own style but commented that in young writers' works he could detect Lovecraft's influence. S.T. Joshi says that Lovecraft "did indeed encourage the mutual borrowing [of Mythos elements] ... although he did so as a means of creating greater verisimilitude" (Joshi 141). Among the authors who used the Necronomicon in their stories while Lovecraft was alive, some of the most prominent were Clark Ashton Smith, who was perhaps more famous for his poetry and paintings; Robert E. Howard, best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian; and, of course, August Derleth, the man who kept Lovecraft's name alive and his fiction in print until people began to appreciate what he had accomplished. Each used the Necronomicon in their tales and each had their own fabricated tomes used by Lovecraft in his stories. Lovecraft's letters show that he thought the borrowing between authors wasn't just a way to increase the believability of the existence of these tomes, but fun for its own sake as well. In fact, Lovecraft even began to put his friends and their creations into his stories as well. The art of Clark Ashton Smith was referenced in "Pickman's Model" and Howard's Cimmeria was one of the places mentioned in "The Shadow Out of Time". Also in that tale, while the protagonist's body is possessed by an ancient intelligence of The Great Race, the Necronomicon was consulted among other books. Instead of using real books this time, however, Lovecraft mentions fictional books invented by contemporaries (his circle of correspondents) in the list of occult texts consulted. And as Lovecraft used their book titles in his stories, he welcomed it when others began using his Necronomicon in theirs. Some critics dislike this sharing of story elements because it further muddies the waters of interpretation by opening up the Necronomicon to use by everyone who came after Lovecraft. These later stories by writers who were often considered to be inferior to Lovecraft are considered by these critics to somehow cheapen the power of the Necronomicon. It should not be assumed, however, that Lovecraft had no sense of humor about his creations, to the critics' chagrin. Joshi notes that one of the ghostwriting/revision pieces that Lovecraft did is actually a self-parody. "Long before his talentless disciples and followers unwittingly reduced the 'Cthulhu Mythos' to absurdity, Lovecraft himself had consciously done so" (Joshi 199). It is doubtful, though, that Lovecraft could have imagined just how far his abhorred book would travel.
Heirs of the Necronomicon
Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has said that surface features in H.P. Lovecraft's stories have taken precedence with readers, critics and writers. The wide range of ways in which others have used the Necronomicon since Lovecraft's death seem to bear him out. Joshi notes that Lovecraft wrote very little of the Necronomicon (which we know, from "The Dunwich Horror," to be at least 751 pages in Latin) in his stories, but Lovecraft's successors' badly written quotations "have resulted in the watering down of the potentially powerful conception of a book of 'forbidden' knowledge" (Joshi 144). He further is of the opinion that the Mythos became a "travesty" (149) in part due to these subsequent additions. It's possible that Joshi oversimplified things here. He was speaking literarily, but it's possible that, had Derleth and other writers not used the Mythos in their tales, had not scribbled their poor versions of Necronomicon excerpts, then Lovecraft's tales might never have survived long enough to become known to later generations, and the Necronomicon might never have achieved the stature or, more accurately, the widespread notoriety it has today. As noted above, H.P. Lovecraft had a great deal of contact with his contemporaries, particularly artists and writers of strange tales, and it is likely that a sort of cross-pollination of ideas among them may have affected Lovecraft's own perceptions of his creation. However, it is necessary to differentiate between Lovecraft's own writings and those of other authors, as each used the Necronomicon in her or her own way.
In 1956, Lin Carter's essay and list of the fictional books used in the Cthulhu Mythos was published. The entry for the Necronomicon includes seventeen quotations. Of these, only three were actually written by Lovecraft. Lovecraft included so few of the Necronomicon's secrets in his own tales that these other writers felt compelled to start filling in the gaps. As the years passed, the Necronomicon became mentioned more and more frequently in the stories of Lovecraft's successors as his other created books, and those of his contemporaries, began to fade away. A sampling of these later tales reveals the Necronomicon as an instruction manual for those foolish enough to deal with the Great Old Ones, a simple demonology book, a book of ancient legends and a book that parasitically feeds on other books to restore itself. There was even one story in which the book that doesn't exist tries to create itself based on the beliefs of readers who wanted it to be real. Lovecraft left the door open when he created this book without detailing every stroke of Alhazred's pen and generations of storytellers stepped through that door into their own worlds, rewriting the book as they went.
Rewriting the Necronomicon
The Necronomicon has suffered the fate of many other books in that, once its creator died, those who remained proceeded to start changing it to suit their own ideas of what it "really" means. August Derleth is primary among these, being the main force behind the publishing of Lovecraft's tales and writing posthumous "collaborations" with Lovecraft based on little more than a stray sentence in Lovecraft's book of ideas. In addition to Derleth, fans and scholars of varying capability began to interpret and reinterpret anything that Lovecraft hadn't set down himself and some of the things that he had. There have been essays on what "Necronomicon" actually means in Greek and perceived errors in Lovecraft's "facts" about his book, including what Abdul Alhazred's correct name might have been since it's not considered to be a true Arab name. Even literary criticism has changed how the Necronomicon is perceived. With each essay and story, the Necronomicon changes.
August Derleth may be considered the inventor of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft wrote the tales with the gods, critters and invented books like the Necronomicon, but it was Derleth who did his best to systematize them. It was also Derleth who is now widely credited with coining the name "Cthulhu Mythos." Lovecraft tended to change any detail of his past stories to suit a present one, often contradicting his previous "facts" about some god or timeline. Derleth, after Lovecraft's death, tried to carve them in literary stone. The main shift from Lovecraft's vision to Derleth's was in the latter's Christian-based anthropocentric dualism. Derleth envisioned a set of evil Great Old Ones who are prevented from annihilating humanity by benevolent Elder Gods (and their tools, such as the Elder Sign). Derleth even used an alleged quote by Lovecraft, later refuted by scholars, that the Great Old Ones had practiced black magic and that this was the reason they had been exiled from Earth. To Derleth, who had believed the quote to be genuine, this meant "there exists in Lovecraft's concept a basic similarity to the Christian Mythos, specifically in regard to the expulsion of Satan from Eden and the power of evil" (Mythos vii). This, of course, centers the battle between good and evil on humanity, an interpretation with which the atheist and mechanistic materialist Lovecraft would not have concurred. Still, Derleth's ideas about the Mythos were, for many years, accepted as the true interpretation, and the Necronomicon became the holy book of the Mythos.
In their attempts to provide a continuing plausibility to the existence of the Necronomicon, authors and others have added their own spin on what Lovecraft wrote. Rather than accept what Lovecraft had created, with all its flaws, they chose to rewrite it by rationalizing the errors away, and changing the book in the process. The most common of these "errors" is the title itself. The title Necronomicon came to Lovecraft in a dream. Lovecraft provided two references in his letters and notes as to the meaning of the title, but never put these into a story, thereby leaving the matter open. One was a mention that the name was similar to the old book, Astronomicon. This would make some sense, given Lovecraft's lifelong interest in astronomy. The other was an attempt by Lovecraft to translate the dream title from Greek, eventually settling on The Icon (or Book) of the Law of the Dead. Ever since, fans and scholars have argued over the "true" translation of the title, producing no less than a half-dozen names and variants, each with its adherents, like some sort of religious schism.
The other most commonly cited "error" involves Lovecraft's perception of Arabs, which owes much to his childhood reading. Lovecraft obtained much of his knowledge about Arabs from the tales in the Arabian Nights. The copy he later owned was not a direct translation but an English translation by Andrew Lang of the French translation by Antoine Galland of the Arabic. Given the distance from original Arab material, it is not surprising that Lovecraft would get some of the details wrong. One point that people have brought up when reading the Necronomicon is the fact that "Abdul Alhazred" is not a real name for an Arab. In his preface to Al Azif (The Necronomicon), L. Sprague de Camp includes a footnote to explain the discrepancy, placing the blame for the incorrect name on the earliest translator of the Necronomicon, Philetas. He then suggests, "Its original form may have been Abdallah Zahr-ad-Din, or Servant-of-God Flower-of-the-Faith" (de Camp xi). Some books ignore the problem of the mad Arab's name entirely. The later paperback Necronomicon merely states that the name doesn't appear anywhere in the manuscript they used, although to maintain the illusion that this was the real book the editor notes, "after translation, we found ... some evidence that would suggest we did not possess the entire Work" (Simon xxxi).
To S.T. Joshi, the Mythos is a plot device, not the story or the philosophy behind it. The Necronomicon, therefore, is also "just" a plot device. Joshi admits the problem of keeping a term unclouded when discussing the Mythos. He said he'd coined the term Lovecraft Mythos to separate the writings of Lovecraft from the others who wrote in his milieu after his death; but then another editor used Lovecraft Mythos specifically for an anthology of stories by those very people Joshi was trying to keep separate. Everything that Lovecraft created is out there for people to play with, including the Necronomicon, and people will believe what they want to believe. Critics, though, are not immune to false logic. Publisher, author and critic Darrell Schweitzer, it seems, also falls into the Derleth trap of trying to link all of Lovecraft's tales together, as if he were writing one huge novel broken down into short stories, novelettes and novellas. Having reviewed Lovecraft's stories in the order they were written, he says by the time "At the Mountains of Madness" was written, "The Necronomicon becomes merely a collection of garbled legends about the prehuman past" (Dream-Quest 42). While the Necronomicon was certainly a key tool for expressing Lovecraft's vision and creating the necessary emotions in the reader, Lovecraft knew it was just a tool and cared more about the merits of each individual story than about trying to maintain consistency over his whole body of work, something that several critics apparently forgot. Some critics even help to keep the hoax alive, whether intentionally or not. In The H.P. Lovecraft Companion, Philip A. Shreffer actually wrote an addendum to Lovecraft's Necronomicon chronology referring to one of the published joke/hoax Necronomicons, saying, "Unfortunately, there has, to date, been no successful completion of a translation" (183).
The Published Necronomicon
Lovecraft bewailed the mass market of art that a capitalist democracy engendered, writing, "Literature and art lost most of their market; and writing ... became engulfed more and more in the domain of amusement enterprises" (Joshi 39-40). The Necronomicon is a coincidental example of just this sentiment. The original, in Lovecraft's stories, was never printed for the masses, only in small editions printed in the classical languages that only a more educated audience could read. Lovecraft, who wrote his tales primarily as an expression of his aesthetics, was writing for that same kind of audience and treated the Necronomicon with that same "for the elite only" attitude. In a cover letter to Weird Tales magazine, he noted, "I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects" (Lord 120). His weird tale successors are often considered to have produced bad and sometimes absurd tales with the Necronomicon in it, tales primarily intended for sale to the mass market. By writing for the masses, they'd lost the "genteel" edge Lovecraft had invested in his own tales. Finally, though, capitalism had the last laugh by producing not one but three versions of the Necronomicon for public consumption, one of them in an affordable English-language mass market paperback edition. It didn't matter that it contained not even a scrap of Lovecraft's own Necronomicon quotations, nor those of any other Mythos writer. It had the right title to attract buyers. People knew what it was.
Of the three known "versions" of the Necronomicon, the first is usually called the George Hay Necronomicon. The Church of Satan website goes into a little detail about this book, making sure that their readers know it's a fake. It refers to an essay by Colin Wilson, who wrote the introduction of this version, published in a fanzine called "Crypt of Cthulhu." The essay, according to the Church of Satan, "is a fascinating article and it details the genesis of this version, and the steps taken to make it seem plausible" (Gilmore). In the essay, Wilson went on to explain that he had to speak up because practitioners of magic were denouncing the spoof. The writers of that version had succeeded so well in their fakery that, like Lovecraft, they had to explain to overeager readers that it was pure fabrication.
One of the versions produced was Al Azif (The Necronomicon) "by" Abdul Alhazred. This one was produced initially as a joke but with a tongue-in-cheek verisimilitude that still gives it an air of reality. The book contains perhaps a dozen pages of text, in a script that roughly resembles Arabic. These pages are repeated over and over to fill out the length of the book, an obvious tip-off to its spoof nature, but the book's strength lies in its preface. Written by L. Sprague de Camp, who was known as an author of science fiction and of books detailing his research and explorations of ancient sites, the preface creates a preposterous but still vaguely believable story of how a Necronomicon codex in a near-extinct language came into the hands of an American publisher, and why that publisher had the book published "untranslated" rather than in English, leaving the translation of the obscure language to the readers. It even ends with a warning that the three Iraqi translators who disappeared while working on the codex might have accidentally spoken the words they were translating and something was invoked that destroyed them. "So, if any reader be so rash as to undertake the translation anew, let me urge that he have a care not to move his lips or mutter as he does so" (de Camp xi).
Four years later, in 1977, a Necronomicon edited by "Simon" was published. This was not a lampoon of the Lovecraft tome, but a book that purported to be a work similar in origin to the notorious Aleister Crowley's claims about his "Magick" in that its source was ancient Sumerian magical tradition. The fifty-page introductory section of the book goes to great lengths to show that even though Crowley and Lovecraft never met, they were thinking along similar lines, one with the occult and one in fiction. It uses Derleth's Christian ideas about the Mythos to connect the two, even though it is now known that Derleth invented the Christian parallels to suit his own philosophy. This book has nothing to do with Lovecraft aside from the phonetic similarity of a few names but, with the overly strained logic linking Lovecraft to Crowley, they gave it the name of Lovecraft's invented book. It has since gone though more than forty printings and spawned a spin-off, The Necronomicon Spellbook. Evidently, its primary magic was that it had the right name to boost sales.
A Name to Conjure With - The Necronomicon in Popular Culture
The Necronomicon has grown beyond the confines of a mere fictitious book to become a touchstone for a vast array of ideas and products. Most mentions still refer to Lovecraft or his creations but the name has also taken on new meanings from each of those new applications until the original book has started to become lost under the horde of imitations and tributes. The majority of references still have Lovecraft's book as their point of origin but some even refer to the subsequent mentions, with no idea as to the origin of the name. The name "Necronomicon" has begun to change in ways that even Lovecraft might never have imagined.
The name "Necronomicon" is still used mostly in the realm of Lovecraft and his imitators, and has been a unique and recognizable way to let fans of Lovecraft know that a particular thing is related to the author's work. A convention held every two years or so in Rhode Island calls itself the NecronomiCon and has featured horror fiction mostly by Lovecraft's protegees and by those the convention organizers think to be his successors. Chaosium, a publisher that specialized in a role-playing game based on Lovecraft's work, began putting out anthologies, one of which was titled Necronomicon and featured stories and essays about that book. A film was released bearing the title "Necronomicon: Book of the Dead," an anthology movie in which the stories were based, albeit loosely, on Lovecraft's stories.
The name Necronomicon has also been used by people who were inspired by Lovecraft's tales. Because of that inspiration, they chose Necronomicon to represent their work. The surrealist painter H.R. Giger is believed to have encountered Lovecraft's work for the first time when illustrating stories for a magazine called Cthulhu-News. Years later, when Giger had assembled his art into a book, he needed a title. According to one source, "When Giger was looking for a suitable title for his ominous paintings Sergius Golowin, a famous Swiss expert on myths, suggested to [sic] use Necronomicon" (giger). In addition to these, there is a German band called Necronomicon, a magazine of erotic horror called "Necronomicon," a trading card game called Necronomicon, and the list goes on.
Perhaps the surest sign that the Necronomicon has entered popular culture is the appearance of secondary references, when one person refers to the mention by another source of the Necronomicon, having no idea of the original source material. There is at least one case of this known, with more sure to follow. In the "Evil Dead" movies, "the Necronomicon Ex Mortis appears as an evil book of magic" (wikipedia). Author Neal Stephenson has admitted that his book Cryptonomicon got its title from his viewing of the "Evil Dead" movies, not from Lovecraft's stories. Stephenson has said that he hadn't known Lovecraft had invented the title until someone pointed it out to him. The Necronomicon, it seems, has moved out of Lovecraft's realm and into the realm of pop culture.
CONCLUSION
It is an unfortunate fact, of course, that these surface features have frequently taken precedence ... rather than the philosophy of which they are symbols or representatives.
~ S.T. Joshi
What makes the Necronomicon so popular when Unaussprechlichen Kulten and De Vermis Mysteriis and such have fallen by the wayside? Why has it kept is power? Why have people become fascinated by this one non-existent book more than by Lovecraft's philosophy, to the frustration of S.T. Joshi? Part of it may be because it was part of weird/horror fiction. Oates, in a backhanded acknowledgement of Lovecraft's posthumous success, says "Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not" (Tales xiii). The Necronomicon is certainly a product of genre fiction. Unlike the cousins that were created by his contemporaries, however, the Necronomicon became the archetype of its kind, reducing all others to shadows and pale imitations of it.
The key, perhaps, lies in Lovecraft's literary style and the way he created it, treating its background with a care and attention to detail that made it something more than just a prop, while still leaving largely unexplored the text itself. This is a book whose title came to him in a dream and which he tried to translate after the fact. This is a book that he said might run to over 900 pages in Latin, of which he quoted only a handful of paragraphs. This is a book he used as a tool to create an emotion in the reader without actually telling the reader why they should be afraid. It is this very vagueness that has given the Necronomicon an advantage and made it preeminent among its kind. The article on the Church of Satan's website says that "it would not surprise us if other forged Necronomicons will come into being. If any of them are significant, we'll include them on this page" (Gilmore). The phrasing here hints that there might be a real Necronomicon hiding out there. People have taken the title to refer to their music and their paintings. Writers and publishers have used the title without regard for Lovecraft's original vision (the reaction of the gentleman from Providence to a magazine of erotic horror using the title can only be guessed at) and sometimes without knowledge that he had created the title in the first place. What little Lovecraft did write about the Necronomicon has been researched, and criticized, and reinterpreted with information that Lovecraft never possessed. It has, perhaps, been more thoroughly investigated than most real books of the occult in the past fifty years.
S.T. Joshi said that Lovecraft's successors' badly written quotations "have resulted in the watering down of the potentially powerful conception of a book of 'forbidden' knowledge" (Subtler 144). For a purist who wants Lovecraft and his creations to remain unchanged forever, that might be a valid point; but Lovecraft himself left the door open to those later writers. In the end, the Necronomicon is really a blank book in which people write what they want to see. Some have written jokes. Some have painted pictures. Some have written something to give them a profit. Some have written their own hopes and dreams and fears into its pages, coming to believe in the reality of the book even when Lovecraft's own letters tell them that it was all make-believe. If Lovecraft had ever written his own version of the Necronomicon, people would not have been able to put their own desires into its pages. It would have been locked in stone, unchanging and quite possibly ignored as just another prop. Lovecraft, however, never wrote his own Necronomicon. He left it for his readers to imagine what lay in its pages, and subsequent generations have filled those pages with their own lives. Perhaps it is not so strange that people today still ask if the Necronomicon is real. Its effects certainly are.

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
Primary
Lovecraft, H.P. "The Beating of Black Wings: Supernatural Horror in Literature and the
Fiction of Edgar Allen Poe." Literature of the Occult. Ed. Peter B. Messent.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the
Macabre. New York: Ballantine, 1963.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. New York: Ballantine, 1943.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death. New
York: Ballantine, 1995.
Lovecraft, H.P. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Ed. S.T. Joshi and
David E. Schultz. Athens: Ohio UP, 2000.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. New York: Ballantine, 1971.
Lovecraft, H.P. Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. S.T. Joshi. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1995.
Lovecraft, H.P. Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1997.
Lovecraft, H.P., et al. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1. Ed. August Derleth. New
York: Ballantine, 1969.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Tomb and Other Tales. New York: Ballantine, 1965.
Lovecraft, H.P. Waking Up Screaming: Haunting Tales of Terror. New York: Ballantine,
2003.
Secondary
akasha_knyghte. "Is It Real?" 25 March 2003. Online posting. Yahoo!Groups
Necronomicon-Research list. 12 October 2003. Availability: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Necronomicon-Research/message/117.
Aletti, Steffan B., et al. The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the
Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab. 2nd ed. Oakland: Chaosium, 2002.
Campbell, Joseph, ed. The Portable Arabian Nights. New York: Viking, 1952.
Cannon, Peter. H.P. Lovecraft. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.
Clore, Dan. The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page: Everything You Never Wanted To Know About The Necronomicon (Al Azif) Of The Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred But Weren't Afraid Enough To Know Better Than To Ask! http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm (12 October 2003).
de Camp, L. Sprague. Introduction. al-Hazred, Abdul. Al Azif (The Necronomicon).
Philadelphia: Owlswick, 1973.
Gilmore, Peter H. Necronomicon: Some Facts About a Fiction.
http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/FAQnecronomicon.html (12 October 2003).
Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Joshi, S.T. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft. 3rd ed.
Berkeley Heights: Wildside, 1996.
"Necronomicon." http://www.the-artfile.com/uk/artists/giger/necronomicon.htm (12 October
2003).
"Necronomicon: from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Necronomicon (12 October 2003).
Oates, Joyce Carol. Introduction. Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, vii-xvi,
Radison, Maxime. Europe and the Mystique of Islam. Trans. Roger Veinus. Seattle: U of
Washington P, 1987.
Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering H.P. Lovecraft. Holicong: Wildside, 2001.
Schweitzer, Darrell. The Dream-Quest of H.P. Lovecraft. San Bernardino: Borgo, 1978.
Shreffer, Philip A. The H.P. Lovecraft Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1977.
Simon. The Necronomicon. New York: Avon, 1977.
Wachsberger, Ken. Introduction. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious
Grounds. Margaret Bald. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Necronomicon - part 2 of 3

2009-10-11T14:55:00.000-04:00

LOVECRAFT'S DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF THE NECRONOMICON
It's more important to have verisimilitude in historical fiction
than to have actual accuracy. ~ Ellen Asher
The way H.P. Lovecraft used the Necronomicon reveals a lot about his opinions about storytelling and about his world. Some people have since criticized Lovecraft's work because of the frequency with which the Necronomicon appears but, at the time the stories were written, the numerous mentions were intentional. It is important to bear in mind that Lovecraft's readers at the time did not see all of his stories in one anthology. They read each story months or even years after the previous one. When viewed in that way, the numerous mentions of the book might be seen as more appropriate than excessive. Having seen how H.P. Lovecraft created the Necronomicon, his specific uses of the "abhorred" book can be evaluated, including how he developed it, story by story, layering detail upon detail, making the book more and more "real" with each tale. Through it, we may also trace the author's philosophical views and his views on weird fiction. This is because it soon becomes apparent that Lovecraft used the Necronomicon not just as a prop to note that any particular tale is a weird one, not just as an indication that the one who possesses it is a cut above (or below) the more common sort of occultist, but as a key tool to express himself through his stories.
Archetype of Weird Fiction
In his short autobiographical essay, "Some Notes on a Nonentity", Lovecraft wrote about weird fiction, "Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence"(Miscellaneous 563). Although he was known, on occasion, to write with the specific intent of getting paid, Lovecraft stated in his letters that he wrote not for the market that appealed to the masses but primarily as a means of aesthetic self-expression. Given this, the repeated appearance of the Necronomicon in his work leads one to suspect that the book was far more important to him than might be otherwise apparent. This aesthetic sense in his weird fiction is marked for him by imagination and by dread, preferably unexplainable. When writing, Lovecraft believed weird fiction also required "a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject" (Joshi 47). Lovecraft may have chuckled at the hoax of the Necronomicon, but serious and portentous are good words to describe the book itself. For Lovecraft, treating it in his stories as anything less than the most dreaded of books, written by someone who was not just a poet but a mad Arab poet, would be to debase his art. That sincerity of intent is what helped to elevate the Necronomicon while all of its imitators were seen for the pale copies they were. To Lovecraft, then, merely taking any known occult book to fuel his stories would quite possibly weaken the stories. By creating the Necronomicon, he was creating something that had never been seen before. This also played into another Lovecraft idea: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (Beating 67). Since the Necronomicon was totally unknown, because he had invented it, Lovecraft could surround it with the dread of the unknown so vital to creating the desired reaction in his readers.
Lovecraft's story "The Hound," written in 1922, marks the first literary appearance of the Necronomicon. As such, any study of the Necronomicon should pay careful attention to the way Lovecraft used it. The narrator speaks of the amulet from the old sorcerer's grave as unknown "to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know" but the narrator "recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon." The implication here, that those who have read the Necronomicon are neither sane nor balanced, creates a curiosity in Lovecraft's reader about this book. What could be so terrible that it would be forbidden and cause insanity? When the narrator and his companion read the Necronomicon to discover more about the amulet, the two, in spite of the fact that they rob graves for entertainment, are disturbed by what they read. With this reaction by the two characters, Lovecraft has set up this one tome as the pinnacle of its type, worse than anything the jaded ghouls could invent.
"The Dunwich Horror" is a story in which the Necronomicon plays a part as important as many of the story's characters. The Whateleys possessed a number of "great odorous books which [Old Whateley] had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes" (Tales 104). These books were to be the total of young Wilbur Whateley's schooling. That such "rotting ancient books and parts of books" (Tales 107) were to be the foundation of the boy's knowledge would, as per Lovecraft's style, mark him for a most unusual fate. Significantly, as Old Whateley is dying, he tells Wilbur to refer to the complete edition of the Necronomicon, implying that the abridged version of the book that they possessed was lacking important knowledge. He also indicates that imperfect knowledge is dangerous. In a way, Lovecraft unintentionally foreshadows his later reinterpretation of the Necronomicon and its meaning, but at this point it is still a matter of magic and religion.
In the essay "Literary Composition," Lovecraft talks about the careful choice of words. "Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential" (Miscellaneous 217). Lovecraft goes on to provide eight types of descriptions for objects, including its history and the feelings produced by the object in the observer. He nearly always refers to the Necronomicon with its history (it's "forbidden", it has an unusual publishing history) or with feelings (it is "dreaded," "abhorred," etc.). In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Lovecraft said "an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without ... a single false note" (Joshi 202). Lovecraft believed in choosing the right word to say what he meant. Darrell K. Schweitzer, in his short book The Dream Quest of H.P. Lovecraft notes that Lovecraft "wrote with great care, choosing each word painstakingly" (18). Schweitzer's opinion is that Lovecraft too often chose the wrong ones, but to Lovecraft they were the only ones that produced the necessary effect for the tale he was trying to create. Phrases such as "dreaded" and "mad Arab" are often used when describing the Necronomicon and Abdul Alhazred. Having found what, to him, were the right notes for describing his invented book and its author, he could no more change them than a concert pianist could rewrite Mozart. To try would be to create a different work altogether, so he limited himself to variations on a theme: dreaded, abhorred, etc. When several of Lovecraft's stories are read at one time, the repetition seems oppressive. Again, though, it's important to remember that the Necronomicon appears in stories written over a dozen years and Lovecraft never saw a collected anthology of his work.
In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" the Necronomicon's evil is established when Lovecraft at one point refers to "the forbidden books of the Arabs" (Case 41) as evil. Since the Necronomicon is often referred to as forbidden and since it was written by a mad Arab, Lovecraft here is making sure the reader understands that this is an evil book.
The fact that the Necronomicon was forbidden also plays into its prominence. As Michele de Montaigne said, "To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it." By calling the Necronomicon forbidden, Lovecraft enhanced its appeal. Although, as mentioned earlier, Lovecraft was aware of governmental censorship in his lifetime, his phrasing of the Necronomicon's suppression appears to include not just governmental but also, and perhaps especially, religious banning. The Index of the Vatican was known, if not the specific titles of the thousands of books that were on it. Lovecraft even went so far as to mention its suppression by one of the popes in his history of the Necronomicon that he shared with his friends, which of course got out to the fans. This raised its prestige yet again. After all, if the Vatican thought it was dangerous and suppressed it, then it must be really threatening. The way Lovecraft made the Necronomicon a banned book plays into a second aspect of the way Lovecraft developed it. By linking it to lists of banned books, he was also making it seem more like a real book than a simple fictitious plot device.
The Illusion of Reality and the Hoax
In the short novel "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" the Necronomicon is mentioned but it's important to note that although it is used in this tale, it is not the primary source of Joseph Curwen's evil knowledge. The Borellus book often mentioned is of more immediate use to Curwen. This, in its way, is a more subtle method of making the Necronomicon more real to the reader. By showing a limitation, Lovecraft adds to the image of its reality. After all, a book that had all the answers would not be believable. While this perhaps diminishes the stature of the Necronomicon, it also enhances the verisimilitude surrounding the invented book.
Adding to the verisimilitude is how Lovecraft first mentions it along with the names of nearly a dozen real works as part of Curwen's personal library of magical and alchemical texts. What's interesting here is that the Necronomicon, unlike the others, was hidden by being bound in a cover bearing a different title. When Curwen's visitor unexpectedly discovered the tome, he paled because "he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites" (Case 19) elsewhere in New England, these rites evidently involving the Necronomicon. The way Lovecraft provided so many genuine texts and then added his own as the worst of the lot served the two purposes of continuing to imply the reality of his fictional book and of hinting that the more easily found books do not reveal the true horrors that only the Necronomicon can reveal. It also continues the running motif that those who possess the Necronomicon are doomed to a fearsome end, as we later hear of Curwen's death, although whether by lynch mob or by something he called up, Lovecraft doesn't tell us.
In "The Dunwich Horror," Lovecraft includes a comment that copies of the Necronomicon exist in closed and locked collections at four internationally known libraries as well as at Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University. By doing this, Lovecraft teases the readers, saying that it's real but you still can't get to it because it's beyond the reach of any ordinary person. The named translators of the Necronomicon include two real historical figures, Olaus Wormius and Dr. John Dee, the latter a known occultist in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Because of the historical distance from such figures, even one so well documented as Dee, a small detail, such as a book that they translated, can be easily inserted into their biographies by Lovecraft. Most readers would be unable to refute such an insertion because it's nearly impossible to prove a negative. Also, it sounds entirely plausible that a monk and an occultist might have translated an old book during the course of their lives. Lovecraft even mentions a bit of its printing history, noting that a Latin version was printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. Because of the Necronomicon's place on so many lists of forbidden books, this too is something which cannot be proved one way or the other but which sounds plausible. Last, another bit of verisimilitude is added when the Necronomicon is mentioned in the same sentence with the "Daemonolatreia of Remigius in which [Wilbur Whateley] seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he had conjured up" (Tales 126). The Daemonolatreia, it turns out, actually exists. By mixing his fictional book with a real one, Lovecraft maintained the appearance that the Necronomicon really existed.
Although some have suggested that Lovecraft orchestrated the building of the Mythos, Joshi disagrees. There is good reason for this, since Lovecraft himself was never hesitant to change a previously published "fact" of the Mythos in order to suit a current story. Joshi quotes Lovecraft that "no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax" (Joshi 155). In his essay "Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction" Lovecraft commented on the building of a story by saying, "We should work as if we were staging a hoax and trying to get our extravagant lie accepted as a literal truth" (Miscellaneous 118).
Lovecraft's letters provide some insight into how he used the Necronomicon and why the verisimilitude with which he crafted the book's reputation may have led to its influence after his death. While it may be argued that Lovecraft never orchestrated a campaign to purposely make people think the Necronomicon was real, we do know that Lovecraft didn't take his creation too seriously by a letter that he wrote to Robert E. Howard in 1930, where he stated, "I think it is rather good fun to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude by wide citation" (Lord 207).
In "The Hound," Lovecraft wrote that the Necronomicon mentions a "corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia" (Lurking 94) and that the tome was written by a mad old Arab demonologist. Small details like this whet the curiosity of readers because, at the time the story was written, Arabia was a faraway, magical land known only to T.E. Lawrence, written of in the Arabian Nights, and caricatured by Rudolf Valentino in the movies. As for the more remote regions of Asia, it could be argued that Lovecraft's audience knew more about the Moon and Mars than about such terrestrial lands. By giving such realistic and unprovable details for the Necronomicon, Lovecraft begins the illusion of verisimilitude for his creation.
In 1923's "The Festival," the narrator has come back to Kingsport, the home of his ancestors, and he is alternately relaxed and uneasy by what he sees, chalking it all up to the queerness of his family's ancient traditions. While waiting for the festival, he sees a stack of old books, which he proceeds to name. It is not the first title he reads, or even the third, but the fourth which stops him. It's "worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered" (Tomb 21). Lovecraft is piling on the evidence in this passage, providing "proof" that the Necronomicon is a real book. Two of the three other books named are known books dealing with some aspect of the occult, while the title of the third came from an Ambrose Bierce story. The printing history of the two real books is accurate and so when Lovecraft mentions Wormius, a real person, as having translated the Necronomicon, Lovecraft is nodding to his readers, letting them think his invented book is a real one, too. He has effectively given the book a pedigree that is impossible to disprove, because it was forbidden, but which sounds right. The mention of the Necronomicon being forbidden also plays into the public's knowledge of books being banned. But if the book is so desirable then how could Lovecraft explain that no one can find a copy? The answer is twofold. Because it was banned, all that one needs to assume is that the authorities were successful in completely suppressing it locally but that it might somehow exist in private hands, like the one in the story. This was reinforced in the story itself when the narrator says that he had heard of it by reputation but had never seen a copy. Even in the story, it's a rare find.
Magic and False Religion
"Primarily, of course, men began to be religious and mystical because at intellect's dawn they knew no other way to explain the phenomena they saw around them" (Joshi 34). Lovecraft's views of people and their need for religion were incorporated into his tales by having people, usually degenerate, worship the alien Great Old Ones as gods, even though he did all but spell it out that they were merely advanced alien beings. Joshi speculated that the cults in the stories are Lovecraft's way of showing this belief to his readers. In "At the Mountains of Madness," Lovecraft even reveals that some of these ancient beings are simply creatures much like ourselves and misinterpreted by primitive man as gods. In an odd way, that belief might not be too far off in this story. If a god is that being which created humanity, then the ancient beings were, in fact, humanity's gods, as the explorers discover to their dismay.
Lovecraft took this idea of false religion, along with something ancient man had interpreted as magic, and used it to fuel his Necronomicon. In an essay, Lovecraft praised "that archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition and recurrent burthen" (Beating 75) used by Poe and, later, by Dunsany. Many of the quotes from the Necronomicon are written in that very style. But why use it at all? Fritz Leiber suggests, "As for the Necronomicon, it appears that Lovecraft used it as a back door or postern gate to realms of wonder and myth, the main approaches to which had been blocked off by his acceptance of the new universe of materialistic science." (Discovering 16). If that is the case, then it appears Lovecraft used that door a great deal.
The narrator's host in 1923's "The Festival" takes the Necronomicon to the festival. "At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when [the host] held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him" (Tomb 24). This use of ritual and respect to the book gives it a status as the holy book, or perhaps unholy book, of a religion "older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind" (Tomb 18).
The narrator of "The Festival," recuperating in the hospital after fleeing in terror by what was finally revealed to him, gains access to the Miskatonic University copy of the Necronomicon and re-reads the chapter he had read before, one which describes the Yule rite. The story then closes with a long quoted passage from the Necronomicon which hints that the deep places of the earth harbor things that should never have existed. Here, while Lovecraft uses the book to tie up the loose ends of the story, he is also allowing the story to give power to the book. He shows that the Necronomicon contains truth because the narrator just witnessed that truth. Logically, this is flawed but, within the confines of the story where the book is older than the events of the story, the book attains a level of truth that few occult texts can demonstrate.
The language of the quoted Necronomicon passage in "The Festival" is poetic, almost a chant, with a style close to some translations of the Bible in the way the language is used. Compare this passage from the Bible: "Let burning coals fall upon them; Let them be cast into the fire, into deep pits, that they rise up not again" (Psalm 140:10) and the Necronomicon passage in "The Festival": "happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes" (Tomb 27). With the repetition of words and the slightly archaic phrasing, the passage from the Necronomicon "sounds" correct, as if it really is a fragment of a religious text translated out of Latin into English. The Necronomicon thereby gains further stature in the minds of the story's readers, even though it never existed.
In 1926's "The Call of Cthulhu" Lovecraft details a religious cult that worships Old Ones who came from the stars. After giving the readers details of the cult, Lovecraft then writes, "there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange eons, even death may die" (Mythos 19).
Here, then we see a cult using the Necronomicon in worship. Yet there is nothing, really, of magic in this story. Cthulhu is not an unstoppable god but a colossal, otherworldly being which can be at least temporarily defeated. The cultists' religion, in fact, seems to have little bearing on Cthulhu's rise or fall.
In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", the Necronomicon is again mentioned in a letter to Joseph Curwen. This time we find it has at least seven "bookes" in it, in much the same way the Bible has "books," when Curwen's letter says "and have Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke" (Case 48). This parallel to a religious text increases the stature of the Necronomicon, raising it from an occult tome to a religious (if evil) text. This is further reinforced when we find that Curwen was apparently an actual devil-worshiper back in Salem. Instead of just telling the reader that the Necronomicon was a religious text, Lovecraft subtly added details like these, realizing perhaps that what the reader concludes on his/her own has far more impact than any exposition could have.
As to the contents of the Necronomicon, "The Dunwich Horror" notes that it contains "a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth" (Tales 112). It then goes on to provide an excerpt as translated by a professor of Miskatonic University. This excerpt speaks of the Old Ones with imagery that likens them to gods, immortal and biding their time until they can reclaim Earth from the humans who rule it now.
"The Whisperer in Darkness," written in 1930, contains several religious and pseudo-religious references to the Necronomicon. It refers to pre-history, "all about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth - the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles - which are hinted at in the Necronomicon" (Best, 142). Although many myths and religions begin with the entry of humans, there are some, like the Greeks, with stories about the gods before they got around to creating humanity. Just in case there was doubt that the Necronomicon really did refer to gods, this story also includes a positive reference when it mentions "Tsathoggua ... the amorphous, toad-like god-creature" (Best, 171). There is even a mention that was less obvious to the casual reader of Lovecraft's tales when it was published but which stands out to those who read his privately circulated "History of the Necronomicon." The voice of the alien in the story was a "buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the human words which it uttered" (Best, 147). This is noteworthy because the Arab title of the Necronomicon was Al-Azif. The literal translation of "al-azif" is "that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed to be the howling of daemons" (Aletti, 361). In one story, then, Lovecraft mentions or alludes to myth cycles, a god, and daemons. This would mark the height of the Necronomicon as a text of pure magic and religion. After this, Lovecraft would begin revealing that all of the gods and myths are false interpretations, not to be taken literally.
In the 1932 collaboration with E. Hoffman Price, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," it turns out that Lovecraft's alter ego Randolph Carter had read the Necronomicon, something not mentioned in the previous four tales in which he had appeared. The mysterious swami character telling the story says that "a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, had taken on significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the silver key" (Dream 364). A long quotation from the Necronomicon follows. By following the knowledge from the Necronomicon, Carter is able to continue his journey, past guardians and challenges until he finds what is essentially the heart of reality. The Necronomicon, however, still marks those who read it with a doom, like a Lovecraftian mark of Cain, and Carter eventually finds himself trapped in an alien body, trying vainly to figure out how to become human again. In this tale, the line between magic and technology is blurred more than usual, possibly a result of the input from Price. The aliens among whom Carter finds himself are technologically advanced, travelling to other planets by advanced means, not even needing ships. In spite of this, the body which Carter occupies is that of a "wizard" of that race. So, is the Necronomicon a book of magic or a book of observations of advanced technology, badly interpreted? This story clouds the issue.
"The Shadow Out of Time" in 1934 uses the Necronomicon almost desultorily, as something expected in his tales. It does, however, add a bit more to the mythological and religious ideas previously divulged. "In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested - a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race" (Tales 292). As religious texts may refer to other religions or forms of worship (the Koran referring to Judaism and Christianity, for example) so the Necronomicon mentions this cult while focusing on the Great Old Ones instead. It can be argued, though, that the main reason the Necronomicon is mentioned in this story is that, by this time, it was becoming familiar to Lovecraft's readers and they expected it of him, even if it didn't match his personal philosophy.
Atheistic Materialism
One aspect of Lovecraft's aesthetic for weird fiction changed late in his life. Earlier, he had stated "The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possible happen" (Joshi 49). As he wrote his later tales, he started to believe that the weird tale should use ideas that add to, rather than defy, what is known about the universe. This, says Joshi, is why his later tales were published in science fiction magazines rather than Weird Tales or its ilk. It also marked a turning point for the Necronomicon.
Lovecraft claimed in his letters to have a three-part nature, consisting of "(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. [sic] (b) Love of abstract truth and of scientific logic. [sic] (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent" (Joshi 13). In creating the Necronomicon, Lovecraft combined the first and the last of these and came up with something astonishing. When he later added (b) to the mix, it let the Necronomicon reflect his changing philosophy and he still remained true to who he was. The young Abdul Alhazred-that-was continued to rewrite the Necronomicon until his death.
"The Dreams in the Witch-House," written in 1932, is an attempt by Lovecraft to start reconciling some of his earlier ideas about weird fiction, i.e. magic and incantations, with his ideas about realistic weird fiction. Walter Gilman's professors at Miskatonic University "stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault in the university library" (Dream 325). They were too late. Gilman had already read the Necronomicon, among others. He was already doomed. Later, he found ways to link higher mathematics and weird geometry with ancient lore and magic. Lovecraft, already moving away from supernatural weird fiction and toward a weird science fiction without magic, was here rewriting the Necronomicon once again, explaining away its "magic" as merely a form of science that was too far above the readers' heads to be understood. Forty years later, Arthur C. Clarke expressed this in a more pithy form as Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Necronomicon - part 1 of 3

2009-10-11T14:51:00.000-04:00

Here is my Master's Thesis about the Necronomicon. Enjoy.

THE REALITY OF THE NECRONOMICON -
AN EXPLORATION OF H.P. LOVECRAFT'S IMAGINARY BOOK

COMPLETED 10 DECEMBER 2003

INTRODUCTION
What can one say about the fabulous Necronomicon that has
not already been said? Much in every way! Because nothing
has been said. ~ Robert M. Price

"I'm just curious about whether or not the Necronomicon is real. I've read in some places it's just a work of fiction, in other places it's real" (akasha_knyghte). This inquiry was posted on an Internet mailing list in March of 2003. The Necronomicon was created eighty years ago by H.P. Lovecraft as a prop for his weird fiction. Why, then, do people today still ask if it's real? What was it about Lovecraft's creation that so captured the minds of later readers and spawned a plethora of namesakes, from an art book to the name of a band in Germany to no less than three published books which, with varying seriousness, purport to be the "real" Necronomicon? All of this is the result of a literary device created by a man who got the title from a dream.
Examining the Necronomicon requires examining something of the life of H.P. Lovecraft to see which factors helped create the dreaded tome. Most important is that fact that Lovecraft was a lifelong bibliophile. For him, books were the oases of knowledge in a chaotic world and he gave his characters both the thirst to understand and the books to quench their thirst long before he envisioned the Necronomicon itself. In fact, several of his stories contain what might be termed forerunners of the Necronomicon, but Lovecraft was still searching for the characteristics of his keystone book. One such characteristic was found in the news, the banning of books. The Necronomicon would be the ultimate banned book. Other characteristics were taken from his childhood fancies. It would be written by an Arab, but not just any Arab. The name he chose for the author of the Necronomicon was the name he bore as a child when, after reading The Arabian Nights, he had told his family he was an Arab. Upon discarding this Arab persona as a child, Lovecraft became enamored of Greco-Roman mythology which would later give the Necronomicon its Greek name. All of the factors were in place.
Once the factors that led to the creation of the Necronomicon have been made apparent, an examination of the way Lovecraft used the Necronomicon in his stories can provide insight into what the author thought about it during his life. Lovecraft was very careful in the crafting of many of his stories. It is clear that Lovecraft was trying to create what would be the preeminent occult tome. One of the ways in which he worked at this was in the illusion of reality that he constructed for the Necronomicon. He tried to make the history of the Necronomicon as realistic as possible, with an attention to detail that turned the fictitious book from an obvious fraud into a believable hoax. Lovecraft eventually imbued the Necronomicon with his own philosophies, even when they conflicted with the stories he was telling. While the early stories that mentioned the Necronomicon dealt with it as a book of magic and mythology, later stories revealed that the magic in it is just another form of science, the religions founded by it are false, and the universe is revealed to be the atheistic, mechanistic, materialistic place that Lovecraft believed it to be.
The Necronomicon's evolving nature didn't end with Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft's contemporaries and successors took his ideas, including the Necronomicon, and began to use them for their own stories. This changed the ways in which the Necronomicon was perceived and subsequently rewritten by others. These range from August Derleth's attempt to turn the Necronomicon into an actual holy book of a dualistic religion analogous with Christianity to the attempts by later writers to explain away the "mistakes" of Lovecraft's "facts" about the Necronomicon (in much the same way the Baker Street Irregulars society tries to reconcile the facts in Sherlock Holmes stories with known history). Later, sensing money to be made from name recognition, publishers put out various books called Necronomicon and others began using the name for things at best peripherally related to Lovecraft's stories. The book that never existed took on a life of its own, in ways that its creator never imagined.

THE CREATION OF THE NECRONOMICON
Humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown.
~ H.P. Lovecraft

The Necronomicon first appeared in 1923, when H.P. Lovecraft was thirty-three years old. In these thirty-three years, Lovecraft encountered many ideas and events which would one day be combined to form his "abhorred" book, the title of which came to him in a dream. The Necronomicon brought together Lovecraft's childhood fascination with Arabs and with classical Greco-Roman myths. It reflected his belief in the importance of original ideas in weird tales and his love of books. It also incorporated certain events happening in the world at that time, particularly the increased attention given to the banning of books.
About Books
H.P. Lovecraft grew up with a love of books that lasted throughout his life. He evidently learned to read at a very young age and spent many years being schooled at home. His home had so many books that all of the very old books had been put in the attic. The young Lovecraft found these fascinating. When he failed to finish high school, he was able to keep expanding his knowledge of the world around him and topics of interest primarily through his reading. When his finances became too strained to allow the purchase of books, he remarks in a letter his joy at discovering the public library's usefulness.
In one of Lovecraft's first published stories, 1917's "The Tomb," we are introduced to a narrator who by the second paragraph has told us "I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little known books" (Tomb 7). This narrator, through either supernatural agency or sheer coincidence, has the same name and appearance as an ancient relative whose coffin was never used. Even from this early tale, Lovecraft has begun weaving the idea that those with access to such books are marked with unusual fates.
If there is one key moment that reveals Lovecraft's relationship to books, though, it was when he was in his early teens. Family setbacks, including the loss of his grandfather and the subsequent loss of the family fortune and the selling of his childhood home, had left the young Lovecraft contemplating suicide, according to a later letter. He recalled that "Much of the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived and studied longer" (Joshi 18). He believed that books could deliver the answers of the universe. It should not be so surprising, then, to note that Lovecraft ended up using books, including fictional ones like the Necronomicon, to deliver the answers to his characters.
The answers, however, are not always reassuring. In fact, they often have the opposite effect. In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" Lovecraft had one character speak a line which might sum up his growing ideas about the value of the answers. "How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!" (Dream 22). Lovecraft may indeed have taken this reliance on books for knowledge too far. In that 1919 story Lovecraft, who had learned most, if not all, of his mythological knowledge from books, denies even an oral tradition to debased backwoods people. The psychiatrists studying the allegedly insane Joe Slater can't understand how the degenerate inmate could speak of such gorgeous imagery from his dreams since he couldn't read or write and "had never heard a legend or fairy-tale" (Dream 18). It would seem that the standardization of fairy tales into books by Grimm, Lang and others in the previous century had changed even the perception of those tales by Lovecraft. For him, the only source of stories was books and he carried this idea into his own stories. It also revealed a certain classist snobbery in Lovecraft which, along with his racist views, would follow his stories throughout his career.
Although Lovecraft often used knowledge and wisdom as interchangeable terms, he came to recognize that this is not always the case. The keeper of the lighthouse in 1919's "The White Ship" was well read. In the keeper's own words, "And I have read more of these things, and of many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young and filled with wonder" (Lurking 41). The books, however, never taught him to accept happiness when he finds it. Like many Lovecraft characters, he keeps seeking after something more. In this case, it's a fabled land of the gods. Like many of Lovecraft's characters, he loses everything in his quest, finding himself back at his lighthouse, never again to know the happiness of Sona-Nyl. Books, Lovecraft realized, can grant knowledge but not wisdom.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who do not believe what is written in books, even when they should. 1920's "Arthur Jermyn" mentions an ancestor of the title character who had written a much-ridiculed book, Observation on the Several Parts of Africa. To Arthur's eventual dismay, he finds out that the fantastic "speculations" of his forebear are, in fact, the literal truth.
"The Moon Bog," written a year later, adds support to the concept that the old books contain truth. The Book of Invaders, a sort of Irish pre-history, lends credence to the indigenous residents' claims that the draining of the local bog would draw down a terrible curse. The narrator's friend disbelieves the "idle tales" and is seized by supernatural forces, along with all of the outsiders he had brought in to work for him. The Book of Invaders is a real book and its real warnings serve notice to the reader that they should listen to what is in the books Lovecraft mentions in his tales. By the time the Necronomicon is introduced, this lesson has been well established.
The narrator of the 1921 story "The Nameless City" is an unusual man, like many Lovecraftian protagonists. He notes that during various parts of his journey into the city, he quotes Alhazred and other "fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore" (Dream 59). The Necronomicon had not yet been invented, but the narrator still encounters things that drive him to the brink of sanity.
In 1921's "The Outsider" H.P. Lovecraft refines two of his ideas about books into forms that would become integral to the Necronomicon. The first idea is that old books are a potential source of insanity. The narrator of the story muses, "Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books" (Tales 1). The narrator takes no comfort from his books. Books are not without value however. Lovecraft's second idea is that books are also the source of knowledge otherwise hidden. "From such books I learned all that I know" (Tales 2). This refinement of his earlier idea that people who were degenerate and illiterate lacked any appreciation for artistic things essentially locked away the secrets of the universe so that only literate, educated men could obtain them. Lovecraft revisited both of these when he eventually created the Necronomicon, an ancient book which was translated from Arabic into only three languages, Latin, Greek and English. This book, which only an English speaker or a student of classical languages could read, revealed knowledge or forbidden things to its readers, things that could drive men to madness.
As he got older, Lovecraft seemed to become aware that books could not contain all knowledge. In the 1922 story, "Hypnos," one line notes that in spite of books of ageless secrets, there are things which can never be described "for want of symbols or suggestions in any language" (Dream 87). A year later, in a rather tongue-in-cheek tale called "The Unnameable," the author and his friend discuss whether or not some things can be rightly called unnameable. By the end of that tale, the author's friend is convinced, as Lovecraft intended to convince his readers, that language does have its limits.
Still, the remnant of Lovecraft's belief in the importance of the written word remained. In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," written in 1927, it's important to note the way the title character acquires his information: entirely through the writing of others. Whether Lovecraft ignored oral histories on purpose in this case or just never gave them a thought, the spoken word seems to have been only a minor source of true information, relegated to gossip mongering and rumors calculated to destroy. For Lovecraft, spoken information seemed to lack the perceived purity of the written word, and despite all efforts to eradicate Curwen's name in Providence, the written word survived to tell Charles Dexter Ward all about his ancestor ... too much, as the case turned out.
Early Stories with Books
Lovecraft's fascination with books as vessels for all knowledge carries through into many of his stories, including ones in which the Necronomicon is never mentioned. Often, the books are not the kind generally available at the local bookstore but, rather, dark tomes passed from collector to collector over centuries. Additionally, the possession of such books becomes a foreshadowing of the unusual nature of their owner.
In his writing of weird fiction, Lovecraft has often shown his interest in the written word for providing atmosphere to his weird tales. One of his earliest surviving stories, "The Alchemist," encapsulates several of the techniques that he would use often in his later tales. It contains a library of ancient tomes which remain unnamed, possibly because Lovecraft had not yet created his own titles. It also refers to "that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages" (Tomb 154). This is notable because the Necronomicon survived only in a Latin translation and a later, fragmentary English version.
In one early published tale, "Polaris," Lovecraft mentions what appears to be his first fictional ancient book, the Pnakotic Manuscripts. They contained the lore of an ancient land called Lomar but, to the narrator's chagrin, not enough to keep him from falling under the doom of the Pole Star and betraying his people to the invading Inutos by falling asleep. Even in this early tale, the idea that knowledge of ancient lore won't necessarily save the reader can be seen in Lovecraft's work.
In a 1921 piece entitled "Ex Oblivione" there is a dreamer who seeks a dream country from which he need never return. In dreams, he finds "a yellowed papyrus filled with the thoughts of dream sages ... who were too wise ever to be born in the waking world" (Dream 72). This papyrus leads the dreamer to a drug which opens the gate to oblivion, an oblivion the dreamer happily embraces. This story contains the idea that the wise have left their wisdom in books for people to read, even if those books lie in dreams. Later, the Necronomicon would be shown to contain great wisdom which includes the calling up and banishing of strange beings. The tale also contains the idea that books can lead a person into oblivion. In some of Lovecraft's later stories, the mere mention of the Necronomicon would be enough to foreshadow the utter destruction of those who possessed it.
The heroic cop of "The Horror at Red Hook" was an educated man and had read Witch Cult in Western Europe. This marked him as a cut above the usual policeman. It also marked him, in Lovecraft's style, with an unusual fate. He doesn't die, but his nerves are shattered by what he eventually finds out. Death, and worse, are saved for Suydam, the villain of the piece, who had "curious tomes imported from London and Paris" (Tomb 76). Where Malone the cop had read an occult book but maintained his life, Suydam the occultist embraced the cults and the dark mysteries he found, joined with the cultists in their rituals and their criminal enterprises, and was destroyed by them.
In the 1926 short story "Cool Air" the narrator trembles at the "unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes" (Waking 5) possessed by his neighbor Dr. Munoz who, it turns out, had died eighteen years earlier.
The Banned Book
Certain events of the time might have had an effect on H.P. Lovecraft and his writing. While working on stories, Lovecraft was known to revise parts of them if some new fact was produced to contradict what he had written. This has been confirmed through information in his letters and in the dates of various drafts of certain tales. Fritz Leiber, in his essay "A Literary Copernicus," lists several of Lovecraft's stories with the real events that obviously inspired them, from local flooding to the discovery of Pluto. Richard L. Tierney discovered that Lovecraft used an actual earthquake for a key event in "The Call of Cthulhu." An obvious candidate for study in the creation of the Necronomicon is the way books were being banned at the time. This appears to have been a key ingredient of the Necronomicon, which is often noted as being suppressed or forbidden.
In the introduction to Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds, Ken Wachsberger says, "Even today, school boards, local governments, religious fanatics and moral crusaders attempt to restrict our freedom to read" (viii). The banning of books seems to have been part of the American mindset in the period during which the bulk of Lovecraft's work was written. In addition to government attempts to suppress books, the Roman Catholic Church was well known for its lists of forbidden books. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was first published in the mid-1500s. The Index, as it was called, went through forty-one revisions. The last one was published in 1948, contained over four thousand titles, and was not abolished until 1966, well after Lovecraft's lifetime. It is not inconceivable that this sort of religious censorship could have suppressed the Necronomicon as thoroughly as it seems to have done in the stories. As Robert M. Price said in an essay, "Early church fathers had tried to destroy all copies of heretical gospels and Gnostic treatises. They were so successful that only in the present century have hidden copies of some of these texts been discovered" (457). That Lovecraft was aware of at least the government attempts to ban books in the early 1920s is proven by his 1923 essay entitled "The Omnipresent Philistine." That essay, which was written as a response to a call for censorship, mentions two of the targets of book banning at the time, Ulysses and Jurgen. It's interesting to note, however, that Lovecraft opposed the banning of books not because he favored pornography, but because he didn't trust the artistic taste of the censors and feared they would ban the books that showed artistic value and would keep the ones that were "clean" but aesthetically barren.
Forerunners
It was as early as 1919 that Lovecraft was toying with certain ideas which would later become the Necronomicon. Two entries for 1919 in his "Commonplace Book" include notes from the Encyclopedia Britannica about Arabia and the idea of a "Book or MS. too horrible to read" (Miscellaneous 90). In that year's "The Statement of Randolph Carter", the doomed Warren is said to possess a vast "collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects" (Dream 31), most of them in Arabic. This story, four years before the first mention of the Necronomicon and based on a dream, also has one ancient, "fiend-inspired" (Dream 31) book in an unknown tongue which Warren had somehow translated. Although this book cannot be the Necronomicon since Lovecraft hadn't invented it yet, the elements were starting to coalesce. It has the idea that Arabs had written such rare books. Even the phrase Lovecraft used, "fiend-inspired," foreshadows the Arabic title of the book, Al-Azif, which in translation is the buzzing sound of insects thought to be the howling of daemons. Of course, as the only man to have read this particular book and followed its course of action, Warren is doomed.
In 1921, in "The Other Gods" Barzai the Wise is "a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of earth, and familiar with the Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar" (Dream 66). Like many Lovecraft characters who study too much of the ancient and occult, he knows much and therefore dares much and ends up destroyed for his presumption. In a way, the Pnakotic Manuscripts are a sort of prehistoric Necronomicon. Because of their ancient origin, however, they were unsuitable for Lovecraft's tales in modern settings. It would be a few more years before he finally invented the Necronomicon. There were still details that Lovecraft needed to work out. One such detail was the author of what would be the most monstrous of all books.
From "The Music of Erich Zann" comes a possible precursor to the mad Arab who authored the Necronomicon. In this 1921 story, the title character attempts to write out "a full account of all the marvels and terrors which beset him" (Tales 11). Before the narrator could read this account, it was borne away by a strange wind from the limitless space outside the window. This idea of a man who had seen some truth about the universe and wrote it down must have struck a chord with Lovecraft, because his very next story introduced that mad Arab poet who would soon be credited with the authorship of the Necronomicon.
Arabian Influence
It is not known with certainty which version of the Arabian Nights Lovecraft read when he was five years old. In his own letters, Lovecraft referred to the Andrew Lang version, but as that was not published until he was eight years old, that cannot be the right one. (Lovecraft owned a copy of Lang, given to him by his mother at Christmas in 1898, which was probably the source of his error). The guess of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi and others is that his family had the version published by Edward William Lane. This version is considered by Robert Irwin to have a "grandiose and mock-biblical" (24) use of language (which does sound a bit like Lovecraft, especially in his Necronomicon excerpts) and was edited for an anticipated readership of children and other polite people. The merits of this guess are that the book would have been easily available to Lovecraft's family (as opposed to some other versions, such as Burton's, which would have risked seizure as obscene) and that the similarity of names (Lane/Lang) could easily have been confused by Lovecraft many years later. In any case, it is generally accepted that he did read a copy of the Arabian Nights at age 5 and declared himself to be an Arab. One of his relatives suggested an Arab-sounding name, Abdul Alhazred, and Lovecraft accepted that name as his own.
Concerning the Arab/Muslim world, Maxime Radison comments that after the first translation of the Arabian Nights in the early 1700s, the Muslim world was seen "as an essentially exotic, picturesque world where fantastic genies could, at their whim, do good or evil" (44). In the century preceding Lovecraft's birth, the East of the Arabs was crumbling, taken by European nations as colonies or subjects. Egypt and Arabia were English possessions, something that the Anglophile Lovecraft would have accepted as a matter of course. In his mind, the silks and colors from his childhood Arab fantasies remained, but they became mixed with a darker tint of horror and, it must be noted, racism.
"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, introduces some of Lovecraft's views about Arabs quite vividly. The narrator, Houdini, has been visiting Egypt. Twice in the tale, Houdini mentions that he had been reading Egyptology and that it has affected his perceptions. Evidently, even great illusionists should beware delving too deeply into ancient things. In Lovecraft's tale, though, Egypt is equated with Arabs almost completely. Although he was reading about Egypt, Houdini refers to the Arabian Nights, with which Lovecraft was more familiar. The "detestable vapor pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the genie from the fisherman's jar in the Eastern tale" (Tomb 49) mentions a specific passage from one of the Arabian Nights tales, about a genie who instead of granting wishes was going to torment the fisherman. (Unlike Lovecraft's protagonists, the fisherman tricked the genie back into his bottle and survived.) Close on the heels of that reference to the Arabian story, Houdini then comments, "The East ... truly, this dark cradle of civilization was ever the wellspring of horrors and marvels unspeakable" (Tomb 49). It should be no wonder, then, that Lovecraft's ultimate in his list of fictional books came from the pen of an Arab.
It must be noted, however, that Lovecraft was not completely enamored of the Arabs. In "The Horror at Red Hook," which is admittedly one of his most manifestly racist stories, an Arab makes a cameo appearance. He is "the leader of the visiting mariners ... with a hatefully negroid mouth" (Tomb 84). This illustrates the dual nature of Lovecraft's views on Arabs. On one hand, they are artists and makers of fine tales, but they are also not Nordic and therefore, to Lovecraft's eyes, degenerate. The Arab in the story had negroid features but was still the leader of the seamen. Abdul Alhazred was a poet and yet wrote the most abhorred book ever written, to which Lovecraft always gave the Greek name instead of the Arabic one. Abdul Alhazred was Lovecraft's childhood alter ego, yet Lovecraft wrote that he had died horribly, devoured by an invisible daemon in the middle of the street before horrified onlookers.
It was in the 1923 story "The Nameless City" that Abdul Alhazred made the jump from childhood alter ego to character of weird fiction, although Lovecraft had not yet attributed authorship of the Necronomicon to him. In a way, Alhazred shared more than just his name with Lovecraft. Only recently convinced that his poetry would never be widely accepted, because it wasn't very good, Lovecraft gave poetry to Alhazred, quoting two lines that would later be incorporated into the Necronomicon:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die" (Dream 55).
Alhazred was also noted for dreaming of the title city. For Lovecraft, who wrote stories based on dreams, such as "The Statement of Randolph Carter," and whose characters were often people who dreamed of fantastic things, the connection he felt to his namesake character becomes even stronger. It would come as no surprise when, soon after, Lovecraft chose to make the mad Arab poet Abdul Alhazred the author of what would become perhaps the most often mentioned single component of his tales in the next fifteen years, the Necronomicon.
Greco-Roman Influence
Lovecraft claimed that Dunsany was his inspiration for an artificial pantheon, but from age six to eight, the young Lovecraft was a practicing pagan who believed in the ancient Greco-Roman gods and their woodland servants. This pagan pantheon was already a part of Lovecraft's life and it is entirely possible that Dunsany's influence, rather than inspiring a whole new pantheon, led Lovecraft to change his remembered classical pantheon into a horrific one. Despite the fact that it was written by an Arab, it is the Greek name, Necronomicon, that Lovecraft dreamed and later set down into his stories. What the name means is a matter of some conjecture since there is no direct translation in any of Lovecraft's stories, if indeed he ever finally decided on one translation. It is assumed by many, though, that it was an extrapolation from an actual Greek title, "Astronomicon" and that Lovecraft tried to translate it and to explain it after he woke up.
In his essay, "Genesis of the Cthulhu Mythos," George Wetzel tries to tie the Necronomicon more securely to Greek influence by saying that it was "a descriptive geography of the curiously commingled dream world and otherworld of the dead" (Discovering 57) and then noting that the Greek gods of Sleep and Death are twins. This seems to be a bit of a stretch, since Wetzel comments on the two gods appearing on sepulchral monuments rather than in the stories the young Lovecraft might have read.
While other examples of Greek influence on Lovecraft provided by Wetzel range from the obvious (the story "Hypnos" has a Greek god's name for the title) to the incidental (he quotes from Lovecraft's wife's biography of Lovecraft, saying that when she visited him, they always went to a Greek restaurant at least once), his only other attempt to link the Necronomicon to Greek influence is strained, at best. He tries to link a 1927 collaborative story to the 1922 first appearance of the invented book. Wetzel says "The Green Meadow," a collaboration with Winifred V. Jackson, is set in Greece in 2 B.C. and contains the antecedent of the Necronomicon because it mentions an old papyrus which resembles information told in the Necronomicon. Wetzel did not give any commentary by Lovecraft himself to support such a link. In fact, Wetzel says only one paragraph later that the true source of the Necronomicon information was Egyptian, which goes against his own contention that the influence was Greek.
It appears that while some parts of Greek culture may have had an influence on Lovecraft's Necronomicon, as evidenced by the use of its Greek name throughout his stories, the actual Greek influence seems to be minimal. It is an Arab book with a Greek title.

END OF PART 1