Ed ited by ' GEORGE,

ion by COLIN WILSON

THE NECRONOMICON
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 Wee
NECRONOMICON

Introduction by
COLIN WILSON

With contributory material by

DR STANISLAUS HINTERSTOISSER
L SPRAGUE DE CAMP
CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING
ANGELA CARTER

Edated, by
GEORGE LH A Y.

Researched by
ROBERT TURNER and DAVID LANGFORD

one 0072
SKOOB BOOKS PUBLISHING
LONDON
First Published in Great Britain in 1978
by Neville Spearman (Jersey) Ltd. © Neville Spearman Ltd.
New Introduction © George Hay. 1992
Cover © Mark Lovell. 1992

Illustrations by Gavin Stamp and Robert Turner

Acknowledgement:
The folios from ADDITIONAL MS. 36674
and SLOANE MS. 3189 are reproduced
by permission of the British Library Board

Published in 1992 by
SKOOB BOOKS PUBLISHING LTD.
Skoob esoterica series
11a - 17 Sicilian Avenue
Southampton Row
London WC1A 2QH

Series editor: Christopher Johnson

All rights reserved

ISBN 1 871438 160

Printed in Malaysia by POLYGRAPHIC

 OR,

The booF of dead names. =

VVUitten by the Moor: E| Hazzared,

Done into Englifh by lohn

.@:
Dec, Doetor.

Imprinted at ANT VVERPIAE

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 DEDICALIGN

To my daughter, Alison Hay, this book is dedicated. It may give her a

lot to think about—but then, what is the use of a book that doesn’t? In
any event, it comes from me to her with the greatest affection.
George Hay,
Sudbury, 1 December 1977

Illustration on previous page:

Facsimile of the title page of what is thought to be the only English edition of
the
Necronomicon—contents largely illegible due to the ravages of time, worm and
decay. The translation is ascribed to John Dee, printed in Antwerp, 1571 (Mis-
katonic University Library).
 CONTENTS

Page
Editor’s Foreword 11
Introduction to The Necronomicon:
Colin Wilson 13
Letter from Dr. Stanislaus Hinterstoisser a.
The Necronomicon: A commentary by
Robert Turner 65
Deciphering John Dee’s Manuscript by
David Langford 81
Fragments from the Necronomicon, with an explanatory
Foreword by Robert Turner 103
Appendix A:
Young Man Lovecraft by L. Sprague de Camp 141
Appendix B:
Dreams of Dead Names by Christopher Frayling 147
Appendix C:
Lovecraft and Landscape by Angela Carter 171
Bibliography to ‘Fragments from the Necronomicon’
and ‘Commentary’ 182
 EDITOR’S FOREWORD
To the Second Edition

‘It is possible that this book will please both the credulous and the
hypercritical. In fact, it was not designed exclusively for either, but for
men and women of true balance — those who, as Krishnamurti says,
can see the false in the true and the true in the false.’

Thus I wrote in my introduction to the first edition of this book.

Today, my sentiments remain the same, but with the volume turned
up, so to speak, because the urgency has become greater.
In the forthcoming completion of The Necronomicon, The R’lyeh
Text, I have explained at greater length my reasons for making this
material available. They summate to this: that the Lovecraft Mythos
has a very practical application—what one might term a down-to-hell
application. For myself, there is no doubt about this. The practicality,
however, relates less to the nature of the Mythos — which the reader
will consider ‘true’ or ‘false’ according to his inclinations and
background — but to its relation to what Swedenborg called the
doctrine of uses. That is to say: having read this, what can we do with
it? A powerful message has been transmitted to us. Do we just leave it
on the doormat? If not, how do we use it?
As I know from my correspondence, the devout occultist will
‘follow the prescription’. Given his needs, he would be foolish not to.
Over and above this, however, there are other uses which, for me, are
far more important, uses which relate to Lovecraft’s intentions. Here I
am assuming that he was largely self-aware in the matter. There is, of
course, a school of thought which holds that he wrote to a large degree
out of his subconscious, and yet another which believes that he was
simply carrying out automatic dictation from those Dark Forces of
which he spoke. In the end, it matters not — the result, in any of these
cases, would be the same. It has been long ago said that science fiction
is, in effect, a distant-early-warning system: if so, H.P.Lovecraft was a
supreme exemplar. For what he was presenting to us was a metaphor
for the current and upcoming condition of Planet Earth. The Mythos
simply spelled out that condition.
The issue, then, boils down to our decision—our individual
decision — as to how we employ this metaphor. You can employ it
literally, and occupy yourself with spells and conjurations. You can
handle it lit.crit. fashion and discuss the influences of, for example
Lord Dunsany upon the author, or you can turn that around and
expound upon H.P.L.’s effect upon the current school of
horror-writers. Or — and this is my own position — you can consider
the whole thing in the light of politics and sociology. (I am tempted to
add theology also, but, with heroic self-restraint, I'll let that go.)
Whether, as the Fundamentalists would have us believe, the End Days
are upon us or not, the world, on the evidence given us, is going to hell
in a hand-cart. But what is the nature of that evidence? Are we to
accept it, just as presented to us by publishers and the media? Or
should we not look beyond these and ask ourselves just who is
selecting this material for us, and what are the motives concerned?
I can recall sitting in the flat of a TV producer, discussing this and
that in desultory fashion. Quite suddenly, he said to me: ‘Tell me,
don’t you ever have the feeling that you are just a pea in a great bowl
of pea soup?’ My assurance to the contrary seemed to take him aback.
Well, he was a nice chap and all that, but my summation of his
character would be that he was a purveyor of Chaos. And Chaos, as
we very well know, was one of Lovecraft’s obsessions.
Think about it.

George Hay
Hastings, March 6th, 1992
1

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 INTRODUCTION
by
COLIN WILSON

The late August Derleth, who was Lovecraft’s friend and publisher, told
me that he often received letters from readers who wanted to know if he
actually possessed a copy of Al Azif, or the Necronomicon, by the ‘mad
Arab Abdul Alhazred’, or if they could really consult a copy in the
library of Miskatonic University in Providence. He always had to make
the standard reply: that although many of the magical works mentioned
by Lovecraft actually exist, the Necronomicon is his own invention.
As we Sat in the library at Derleth’s home, Arkham House (just
outside Sauk City, Wisconsin), drinking an excellent bottle of
Californian red wine, I asked him whether he thought that Lovecraft
had based Al Azif on any known magical text. ‘Not magical,’ said
Derleth. ‘As far as I know, he got the idea from a Roman poem called
Astronomica—you know he was a keen astronomer.’
Ihadn’t known it; in fact, Iknew very little about Lovecraft outside
his works. It was not until 1975 that I found a reference to
Astronomica, by the Roman poet Manilius, in Sprague de Camp’s
biography of Lovecraft.
When I met Derleth, I was already collecting materials for a book
on the paranormal (later published as The Occult), and had plunged
in at the deep end, struggling to make sense of books like Francis
Barrett’s The Magus, A. E. Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic, and
Nicholas Remy’s Demonolatry. I found them difficult and confusing;
at the same time, I was struck by the similarity in tone of many
passages to Lovecraft’s ‘quotations’ from Al Azif and other works of
the left-hand path. This, for example, from Remy, on the subject of
children born as a result of intercourse with demons: ‘A harder
matter to understand is the horrid harsh hissing which such infants
utter instead of wailing, their headlong gait, and their manner of
searching into hidden places.... Here we must confess that the
Demons actively interfere, and . . . enter the mothers or their unborn
children and endue them with powers that are altogether super-
natural.’* This sounds like one of Lovecraft’s semi-human creatures
* Demonolatry (1595), translated by E. A. Ashwin, London 1930, p. 26.
13
from ‘the hills behind Arkham’. I had also been reading the works of
Aleister Crowley—collected by my friend Roger Staples of Michigan
University—and found the parallels so striking that I wondered if
Lovecraft and Crowley had been acquainted.
Derleth was positive that they had never met—in fact, he doubted
whether Lovecraft had ever heard of ‘the Geat Beast’. If he had,
Derleth seemed to think, he would have dismissed him as a charlatan
and a poseur. For, as strange as it sounds, Lovecraft’s ‘philosophy’
was scientific and materialistic. Although he loathed materialism in
the commercial sense—the American worship of money and suc-
cess—he took a strange pride in regarding himself as a descendant of
the rationalists of the eighteenth century. As a schoolboy, his hobbies
were chemistry and astronomy; as a teenager he even wrote a column
on astronomy for a local newspaper. The speculations of Professor
Lowell about the canals of Mars might have been expected to appeal
to the young Lovecraft; in fact, he dismissed them as products of
wishful thinking. He took the same attitude to spiritualism, writing in
a letter to Frank Belknap Long in February 1929: ‘One Word on the
silly attempt of spiritualists to argue that the non-solid . . . nature of
matter, as newly proved [by atomic physics] indicates the reality of
their mythical “‘soul matter” or “‘ectoplasm”’, and makes immortality
any less absurd a notion than it was before . . .’, then goes on to argue
that because matter consists of electrically charged particles, this still
doesn’t prove it to be spiritual in nature.
Lovecraft’s attitude, said Derleth, was altogether closer to that of
his contemporary Charles Fort, the man who took pride in collecting
press cuttings about inexplicable occurrences—like rains of live frogs;
like Fort, he felt that contemporary science is too narrow. In fact,
Lovecraft admired Fort’s Book of the Damned. But, as far as he knew,
Lovecraft and Fort never met or corresponded. (Sprague de Camp is
less certain about this; he feels it possible that Lovecraft was intro-
duced to Fort on one of his many visits to New York, or during the
period when he lived there.)
Derleth clearly knew more of the matter than I did; and so, reluc-
tantly, I gave up the idea—which I had hoped to introduce into The
Occult—that Lovecraft’s mythology was based on his acquaintance
with the western magical tradition. Yet I found myself thinking about
it again a couple of years later, when I read the English translation of
Le Matin des Magiciens by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. This
book is basically an elaboration of Fort’s argument that science is too
narrow-minded, and it draws its evidence from the literature of
UFO’s, paranormal research and fringe science. But the authors also
introduce an interesting theory that certain imaginative writers—like
Lovecraft and Arthur Machen—‘imagined’ things that they later
14
: discovered to be true. Machen wrote to his French translator, Toulet:
“When I was writing Pan and The White Powder I did not believe that
such strange things happened in real life, or could ever have hap-
pened. Since then, and quite recently, I have had certain experiences
in my own life which have entirely changed my point of view in these
matters. ... Henceforward I am quite convinced that nothing is
impossible on this Earth.’
Now this passage is of exceptional interest because it mentions the
two stories that Lovecraft most admired. In fact, The Novel of the
White Power seems to be almost pure Lovecraft. It is about a man who
accidentally doses himself with some strange substance that was once
used by witches for their transformations; by the end of the story he
has changed into ‘a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption
and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and
changing before our eyes. .. . And out of the midst of it shone two
burning points like eyes. . . .” (Lovecraft quotes it at length in Super-
natural Horror in Fiction.) According to Machen’s biographers Aidan
Reynolds and William V. Charlton, Toulet came to London to ‘hear
the mysteries from the adept’s own lips’; but he seems to have left no
record of what Machen told him.
Again, it is worth re-reading The Great God Pan in the light of
Machen’s admission. It is about a doctor of pantheist inclinations,
who feels that nature ts a veil that holds a marvellous world of
spiritual reality; he believes he has discovered the way to induce this
mystical vision by means of a brain operation. “The ancients °
... Called it seeing the god Pan.’ He performs the operation on a
girl; she becomes an idiot. The ‘vision of Pan’ turns out to be too awful
for human beings to bear. The idiot girl wanders on the mountains,
and has sexual intercourse with some strange creature; as a result, she
conceives a child who is beautiful and evil. . . What is remarkable
here is Machen’s transformation of Wordsworthian nature mysticism
into something far more sinister. It reminds us that the word panic
derives from Pan. Again, Machen seems to be suggesting to Toulet
that the underlying vision of The Great God Pan is truer than he
suspected when he wrote it.
It could well be that he was exaggerating, or simply telling lies to
impress his French admirer. Yet he was not known to be an untruthful
man. He takes the trouble to specify that ‘none of the experiences I
have had has any connection whatever with such impostures as
spiritualism’—which also seems to rule out the possibility that he had
seen a ghost.
Pauwels and Bergier are inclined to believe that the answer lies in
Machen’s membership of a magical order called the Golden Dawn,
founded by MacGregor Mathers. They may be partly correct. But the
iN)
ninth chapter of Machen’s biographical work Things Near and Far
describes certain experiences that took place before Machen joined
the Golden Dawn. In 1899, when he was living in Gray’s Inn, Machen
felt his inspiration drying up. He also began to have a series of
semi-hallucinatory experiences. One morning, walking up Roseberry
Avenue, he had a sensation of ‘walking on air’, as if the pavement had
become a cushion. One afternoon, the wall of his room shimmered,
distorted, and seemed about to vanish altogether; then suddenly it
became solid again. And this curious experience was the result of
some process that he declines to specify. All he will say is that he had
been in a state of deep depression, ‘a horror of soul’, when ‘a process
suggested itself to me, as having the possibility of relief, and without
crediting what I had heard of this process or indeed having any precise
knowledge of it or its results, I did what had to be done. . . . And here
we encounter a certain contradiction. In a later letter he states that
the process that suggested itself was hypnotism; but in Things Near
and Far he seems to deny this: ‘I couldn’t have hypnotized, or “‘mag-
netized”’ . . . or bedevilled myself into the obtained condition for the
good reason that I had never heard of it... .” What he probably
means is that the result he obtained was not some kind of self-
delusion, a waking dream. It was at this point that the wall seemed
about to vanish, and he experienced a sensation that ‘something, I
knew not what, was also being shaken to its foundations’. He was
afraid that he was close to death, but this passed, and he felt ‘a peace
of the spirit that was ineffable’, an ecstatic joy that lasted for several
days.
So, in fact, there was no vision of horror, of evil entities; only a
conviction that the material world had shown itself to be a veil over
deeper reality. He had said as much in his stories, but without deeply
believing it; now he felt that the supernatural vision of his early stories
was basically true. It was at this point that he joined the Golden
Dawn, and became acquainted with Yeats, Crowley and Mathers. If
this were an essay about Machen, rather than Lovecraft, I would go
on to quote Yeats’s long essay on magic, in which he describes certain
magical experiments performed by Mathers, and leaves no doubt that
Mathers possessed some strange secret of conjuring up visions. But
our business, at present, is with Lovecraft’s ‘magical’ origins. All that
need be said at this point is that the Golden Dawn taught the real
existence of other levels of reality, ‘other dimensions’, inhabited by
non-human entities.
My book The Occult appeared in 1971. In the following year, I was
asked to review a book called The Magical Revival by Kenneth Grant,
a disciple of Crowley, and head of a magical organization known as
the Ordo Templi Orientis. And here, in a chapter on ‘Barbarous
16
Names of Evocation’, I discovered a section on Lovecraft that sup-
ported the speculations I had put to Derleth in 1967. Grant remarks:
‘Lovecraft was unacquainted both with the name and the work of
Crowley, yet some of his fantasies reflect, however distortedly, the
salient themes of Crowley’s Cult. . . .. The Cult of Barbarous Names
dates back, according to Grant, ‘to the earliest phases of evolution
when the transformation from beast into man occurred’. He
explained that the potency of the ‘barbarous names’ ‘lies chiefly in the
fact that they are unintelligible to the conscious mind’, and therefore
‘are peculiarly adapted to the unsealing of subconsciousness’. And he
devotes a lengthy table to itemizing the similarities between Crow-
ley’s barbarous gods and those of Lovecraft. Crowley, he points out,
also had his sacred book, not Al Azif but Al vel Legis, the Book of the
Law. Crowley actually wrote this himself, in a semi-trance state, and
continued to believe firmly all his life that it had been dictated to him
by Aiwass, his guardian angel. Both Crowley and the Golden Dawn
often referred to the Great Old Ones—the name Lovecraft gives to
his race of gods. Lovecraft speaks of the Cold Waste, a realm
beyond our space and time; Crowley spoke of the Cold Waste
called Hadith. Lovecraft spoke of Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming
in R’lyeh, Crowley of the primal sleep of the Great Old Ones. And
Grant declares that Crowley’s Cult of Aiwass—or Aiwaz of
Akkad—‘can be traced...to a period that inspired the age-long
Draconian Tradition of Egypt, which lingered on into the dark dynas-
ties, the monuments of which were laid waste by the opponents of the
elder cult. These dynasties were blackened in order to annihilate all
traces of a supposedly evil cult... .’ All of which seems to suggest
that Lovecraft’s fiction was basically more factual than he supposed.
In a later book, Nightside of Eden, Grant goes even more closely
into the remarkable parallels between the Gnostic and Kabbalistic
tradition and Lovecraft’s mythology—a matter to which we shall
return later.
All this, then, deepened my conviction that, in spite of his bel-
ligerent rationalism, Lovecraft knew rather more about the magical
tradition than Derleth supposed. And in 1976, this conviction began
to take on more definite shape when I heard about the researches of
Robert Turner, the head of the magical Order of the Cubic Stone, and
himself a devotee of the works of Lovecraft.
But before I speak of the quest for the original Necronomicon, it
may be advisable to explain how I came to be involved in the Love-
craft story, then to look more closely at his personality.
I first came across the work of Lovecraft in the summer of 1959,
when I was staying with my wife at the farm of an old friend, Mark
Helfer. The setting was appropriate; the farm is not far from Corfe
17
Castle, where the young King Edward was murdered by his step-
mother in 978; the ruins are reputed to be haunted by a headless
woman, although no one is sure of her identity. Mark Helfer’s farm-
house is hundreds of years old, and the walls are several feet thick; as
a consequence, the place tends to be chilly. In our bedroom, I dis-
covered a copy of The Outsider and Others, bound in black, on pape:
so poor that it had turned yellow and brittle at the edges. The title
interested me, since my own first book had been The Outsider; I read
through most of it before I left the farm the following day. I was
impressed by Lovecraft’s originality; the ‘mood’ was as distinctive as
in Poe or Machen or M. R. James; but the writing struck me as
amateurish. Lovecraft lacked sensitivity to language.
That day, as we drove towards North Devon, I began talking to Joy
about Lovecraft, and about the whole tradition of tales of terror. It
was clear to me that Lovecraft was one of my ‘Outsiders —a romantic
who found the real world intolerable. In The Outsider I had delib-
erately avoided writing about fantasists, whose relation to the real
world is more or less negative, and concentrated on men like Dos-
toevsky, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Gurdjieff—all men who had an ink-
ling that something could be done about the triviality and futility of
human existence. Fantasists merely turn their back on reality and
hope it will go away; as a result, they never achieve the moral
greatness of a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Now, as a result of reading
Lovecraft, it struck me that the fantasies have also made their own
important contribution to this problem of the ‘triviality of every-
dayness’, and that it might be worth writing a sequel to The Outsider
on the subject. On that journey from Corfe Castle to North Devon, I
sketched out the whole of The Strength to Dream. The book began
with a study of Lovecraft, and he occupies a central place in its
argument.
In the following year I made my first trip to America under the
auspices of the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Washington. So
far, I'd found it difficult to get books and records from
America—since it necessitated paying for them in sterling—and now I
was determined to spend some of the proceeds from my lectures on
authors and composers that I’d coveted for a long time. As soon as I
landed in New York I went to the nearest bookshop, checked the
catalogue to see which volumes of Lovecraft were in print, and
ordered them all. An interview with me appeared in the New York
Times book section; August Derleth, who ran Arkham House Pub-
lishers, read it and wrote to me in Washington. He suggested we
should meet—which was impossible on that trip; but at least we
inaugurated a correspondence that went on until his death.
A few weeks later I found myself in Providence, Rhode Island; I
18
was scheduled to give lectures and seminars at Brown Uni-
versity—Lovecraft’s Miskatonic. When I heard that the library there
had a Lovecraft collection, I spent a whole day reading his un-
published letters and manuscripts.
The first thing that struck me forcibly was Lovecraft’s racism; he
fulminates vengefully against Jews, Negroes, Spaniards, Arabs,
Poles, and all the rest of the ‘scum’ that he encountered on New
York’s buses. At this fairly early stage in his career, Lovecraft was a
Nietzschean; he felt, as Nietzsche did, that the human race consists of
Masters and Slaves, and that there are consequently two completely
different moralities. It confirmed my feeling that the basic drive
behind Lovecraft’s work is a desire to escape the reality of everyday
life—in fact, to somehow get his revenge on this reality that disgusted
him so much. Both Sprague de Camp* and Lin Cartert have taken
issue with me on this point; so did Derleth. Yet Lovecraft himself
virtually says as much in one of his letters, dated 30 October 1929; he
writes: ‘Iam not the only one to see a really serious problem ahead for
the sensitive aesthete who would keep alive amidst the ruins of
traditional civilization. In fact, an attitude of alarm, pain, disgust,
retreat, and defensive strategy is so general among virtually all mod-
ern men of creative interests that I’m sometimes tempted to keep
quiet for fear my personal feeling may be mistaken for affected
imitativeness! God, man, look at the list... Ralph Adams Cram,
Joseph Wood Krutch, James Truslow Adams, John Crowe Ransom,
T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, etc.... Each has a different plan of
escape, yet each concedes the same thing to be escaped from... .’
Yet all this hardly amounts to a criticism of Lovecraft, any more
than it did of Eliot or Huxley. It seems a pity that they wanted to
escape; yet each held fast to his own values. I would certainly be the
last to condemn them. My own interest in Lovecraft stems from the
fact that I felt much as he did throughout my teens and early twenties;
I used to walk around London in a kind of paroxysm of loathing of
modern civilization. But I was aware that this attitude was nega-
tive—almost suicidal; and by the time I began The Outsider, at
twenty-three, I could see clearly that the problem was how to cease to
be on the defensive—how to create new values instead of merely
trying to preserve the old ones. In spite of which, I have nothing but
admiration for Lovecraft’s magnificent intransigence in the face of a
world he found futile and destructive.
My own method of ‘criticizing’ Lovecraft was to write three works
of fiction based on the Cthulhu mythos: The Mind Parasites, The
Philosopher’s Stone, and The Return of the Lloiggor. The first of these
* Lovecraft, A Biography.
+ Lovecraft, A Look Behind the Mythos.
19
was written at Derleth’s suggestion, and published by Arkham House
in 1966. Also at Derleth’s request, I wrote the short novel Return of
the Lloiggor, for inclusion in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. It was
originally intended to be no more than a short story; but I have never
found myself comfortable in this medium, which allows so little room
to develop ideas. Return of the Lloiggor made me clearly aware of
what had gone wrong with Lovecraft in the last five years or so of his
life. His creativity dried up; he repeatedly told his friends that he had
decided to stop writing. The reason is that the ‘Lovecraft story’ is
necessarily limited in scope. The basic pattern of most of the tales is
the same. The narrator begins by telling his audience that he has
recently made a terrible discovery that has almost unhinged his
reason. He has always been a balanced, normal person, with no belief
in the supernatural. But then he went to live in the Old House in
Arkham (or Dunwich, or Innsmouth). And now he has seen with his
own eyes. ... The atmosphere of the stories is claustrophobic, as it
was intended to be. You enter into Lovecraft’s world, as if walking
through a small doorway with a great stone door. But because this
world is so small and claustrophobic, there is no room for develop-
ment. By the time he was forty, Lovecraft had played every variation
in his theme; he had mined the vein until there was nothing left. The
philosopher Kierkegaard collapsed and died on the day he drew the
last of his money from the bank. It could be argued that Lovecraft
started to die when he realized he had mined the last grain of silver
from the lode... .
Does this notion sound slightly absurd—that a man should develop
cancer simply because he has ceased to use his imagination? Far from
being absurd, I believe it to be the essential key to Lovecraft’s life and
work. Once we have understood this key, and combined it with
Machen’s story of what happened on that afternoon in Gray’s Inn, I
think we shall be in a position to answer some of the basic questions
about the Necronomicon.
T.S. Eliot pointed out that, when examined with detachment, there
is a futile quality about human existence. ‘Birth, copulation and
death. . .’ And Lovecraft himself never tired of asserting that it is
our short-sightedness that enables us to preserve our peace of mind.
This is not shallow pessimism; it is an objective statement about
human existence. (And, I should add, I see no reason why it should
not be the foundation of an optimistic or religious philosophy.)
Human beings are like blinkered horses, trapped in a perpetually
trivial present moment. When a child cries over a broken toy, we say
he lacks perspective. But if we think about it detachedly, we see that
this applies to all of us. Art and science are so important because they
enable us to look at things from above, with a certain perspective. But
20
when the astronomer comes away from his telescope, he has to search
his pockets for the front door key. . . . Time grips us by the scruff of
the neck.
Oddly enough, most people seem to be able to accept this without
concern. Perhaps this is because most of them are kept busy by their
everyday problems. But even those without too many problems seem
to be able to accept this oddly futile quality without feeling that
something is wrong. An old lady on television recently—a survivor of
the Edwardian era—said that she could remember the time when
most gentlemen did nothing useful with their lives: the morning at the
club, the afternoon playing billiards and making calls; the evening
playing bridge. . . . To me, this sounds like a formula for insanity. To
most people, it sounds like an enviable and pleasant way of spending
one’s life.
The answer, I believe, is that a small percentage of human-
kind—about 5 per cent, to be precise—have a kind of inbuilt craving
for purpose. These are known as ‘the dominant 5 per cent’, and the
same figure seems to apply to animal groups. Why this should be so,
no one is quite certain. Lovecraft would probably have said that it is
purely biological; in order for a species to survive, a certain number
must possess a drive that will carry them beyond everyday necessities.
Otherwise, when they achieve a certain degree of comfort and stab-
ility, they would quickly degenerate. In fact, we know from history
that nations do become ‘soft’ when they can live in luxury; yet such
nations often go on to produce a great civilization. This is because
their ‘dominant 5 per cent’ possess a drive that is not eroded by
comfort. Such men possess, I repeat, an inner craving for purpose.
The odd result is that if they are deprived of purpose by the
circumstances of their lives, they become frustrated and suicidal. This
is the basic story of ‘outsiders’. Before they discover a purpose, they
may come close to insanity, suffering suicidal depressions. And the
sense of purpose may take the strangest forms, like George Fox,
the founder of Quakerism, walking through a town crying ‘Woe to the
bloody city of Litchfield’-—conduct that would nowadays land him in
the nearest lunatic asylum—or Lawrence of Arabia joining the RAF
as a private.
Please note that I am not claiming that the dominant 5 per cent are
all frustrated men of genius. They may be stupid, and their dominance
may only turn them into bullies. They may be dishonest, and it turns
them into crooks. They may be oversexed, and it turns them into
satyrs or nymphomaniacs (for there are just as many dominant
women as dominant men.) Every shop steward, every sergeant
major, every pop singer, every successful businessman, belongs to the
dominant 5 per cent, There is an interesting book to be written about
21
fairly minor ‘outsiders’ who were destroyed by a sense of futility, it
might include, for example, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, who
committed suicide with his mistress at Mayerling, and the rock singer
Elvis Presley, who died of a heart attack at forty-two. Both naturally
belonged to the dominant minority, and were deprived of self-
expression by an unusual set of circumstances: Rudolph by being the
son of the Emperor Franz Joseph, Presley by the immense success
that made him a prisoner in his own mansion.
And now turn to Sprague de Camp’s biography of Lovecraft—or
Derleth’s own H.P.L, A Memoir, and consider the career of the
‘recluse of Providence’. Providence is a pleasant enough place, with
its clapboard houses and tree-lined streets; but in 1890, when H.P.L.
was born, it must have been the most provincial of provincial towns.
Shaw once described the Dublin of his childhood as ‘that hell of
littleness’, but at least it was a capital city, full of actors, artists,
literary men. By comparison, Providence must have seemed as
remote as a village in the middle of Antartica. And what this means is
that from the time he could speak until the time he reached the age of
twenty-one, Lovecraft probably never met or talked to anyone whose
mind was not utterly commonplace. His father died insane when he
was eight—probably from syphilis. Howard himself was a nervous
and delicate only child, who was endlessly fussed over by his mother.
The relation could be called Proustian, and it is surprising that he
managed to avoid becoming homosexual.
Lovecraft was an obsessive reader; it might be said that he spent the
first twenty years of his life in a library. And here, I suppose, I can at
least claim the insight of similar circumstances, since I was also born
in a provincial town, and had ruined my eyes by the age of twelve by
reading ten hours a day. I can still clearly recall that odd sense of
disconnection from the real world, the feeling that life is a kind of
dream or illusion. For the juvenile mind that has been nurtured on
them, books seem to make real events somehow superfluous, as if
they are some kind of imitation of a more exciting reality. And
contact with the everyday world only produces resentment, Axel’s
feeling that living ought to be done by our servants.
But reality refuses to tolerate romantic dreamers; it seems to.take a
pleasure in shaking them until their teeth rattle. And this causes the
romantic’s world-rejection to turn into furious resentment. I suspect
that some of the nineteenth-century romantics committed suicide out
of resentment—a desire to ‘give God back his entrance ticket’. But
Lovecraft’s rejection was never as healthy as that of Nietzsche or
Dostoevsky. To shake your fist at God, like Byron’s Manfred,
requites a certain self-confidence that comes from sound physical
health and a conviction of superiority. But Lovecraft’s health was
22
poor, and he spent whole weeks in a state of ‘deadly fatigue and
lethargy’ in which ‘the very effort of sitting up is insupportable’. ‘I am
only about half alive—a large part of my strength is consumedin
sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I
am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something
which particularly interests me.’ Lovecraft not only lacked the con-
fidence that comes from health; he also lacked the confidence that
comes from social position and a good education. His health—and
perhaps his dislike of organized study—prevented him from going to
Brown University.
Worse still, there was a lack of anyone to admire among his con-
temporaries. America around 1910 was something of a cultural
desert. Who nowadays reads Ellen Glasgow or Edith Wharton or
William Dean Howells? Or even H. L. Mencken? In England there
was the generation of Shaw, Wells and Chesterton, which Lovecraft
predictably disliked. He preferred Poe, Arthur Machen and (later)
Lord Dunsany. But none of these three is really good enough to
imitate—Poe at his worst is embarrassingly bad, and even at his best is
verbose. And a young writer urgently needs someone to admire and
imitate, while he learns to create his own style. It is his way of escaping
the chrysalis of adolescence. Lovecraft imitated Poe, but he was a
good enough critic to know that the result was drearily bad. ‘St. John
is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that
I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the
same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy
sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-
annihilation.’ This atrocious piece of writing comes from a story
called The Hound. Moreover it is not, as one might suspect, a piece of
juvenilia; it was written in 1922, when Lovecraft was thirty-two. It
reveals that Lovecraft remained an awkward adolescent far longer
than most people. Artistically speaking, his problem was simple; he
had simply not succeeded in finding what T. S. Eliot calls an ‘objective
correlative’—a suitable plot and characters to embody the essence of
his feelings. A short story called Dagon—which Lin Carter calls
excellent—dates from his twenty-seventh year, and reveals his basic
problem. A shipwrecked sailor finds himself on a Pacific island that
seems to have been thrown up in some volcanic convulsion; it stinks
of dead fish, and is covered with black slime. After days of travelling
he finds a carved monolith with strange, fish-like creatures engraved
on it; and as he stands looking at it in the moonlight, some scaly
monster rises out of the sea and flings its enormous arms about the
monument. He goes mad—inevitably—and wakes up in a San Fran-
cisco hospital. But ‘when the moon is gibbous and waning . . . I see
the thing’. And even nowit is lumbering up the stairs. ‘It shall not find
pee)
me. God, that hand! The window! The window!’ The idea of a man
about to be eaten alive scribbling on a sheet of paper is absurd. The
essence of the tale lies in the scene of the man standing on the slimy
island, looking at the monument in the moonlight, and then seeing
something ‘vast, Polyphemus-like and loathesome’ rising out of the
sea. But, like an unskilful jeweller, he has set this vision in a poor and
cheap setting.
Which brings us to the interesting point: that many of his most
interesting ‘visions’ came from dreams. August Derleth has collected
together a fascinating volume of Lovecraft’s dreams—from his let-
ters—and the stories based on them.* And the letters make it clear
that, for some odd reason, Lovecraft had a nightmare every other
night of his life. He describes, for example, a dream in which he went
to a graveyard with his friend Samuel Loveman, and how they prised
up a slab from a sepulchre, and Loveman went down into an under-
ground chamber, leaving Lovecraft holding on to the other end of a
field telephone. Then Loveman sees something horrifying, and says
‘For god’s sake—it’s all up—Beat it...” And when Lovecraft calls
down the grave ‘Loveman, are you there?’, a guttural, hollow voice
calls up ‘You fool, Loveman is dead.’ The dream is ‘written up’ (and
spoiled with adjectives) in The Statement of Randolph Carter. (‘And
then there came to me the crowning horror of all—the unbelievable,
unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing . . .’.)
A psychologist might argue that Lovecraft’s subconscious mind
was actively providing him with materials for his writing. He was
living in a cultural backwater, corresponding with various writers of
pulp fiction who were even less sophisticated than he was, molly-
coddled by his mother or two aunts, and suffering from headaches
and listlessness. He must have felt infinitely far from the places he
would like to be—Greece, Italy, Egypt—and the writers he admired.
He recognized the gulf that existed between Weird Tales and the
work of the great European masters. Above all, he was beyond all
doubt a member of the dominant 5 per cent. He would have enjoyed
mixing with others like himself. If destiny had been kind to him he
would have been born with enough money to live in London or
Rome, and to mix with his intellectual equals. He would have felt at
home having dinner at the Café Royal with Ronald Firbank or
drinking wine on Capri with Norman Douglas. But he was the son of a
commercial traveller; not, like Henry James, the grandson of a
millionaire. (Even when his mother died, his capital amounted to less
than $20,000.) Whether he liked it or not, he was stuck in the dreary,
rather mediocre place he had been born in, the College Hill district of
Providence. And he admitted his sense of boredom and deprivation:
* Dreams and Fantasies, Arkham House, 1962.

24
 ‘Books are very feeble things. Neither you nor I, for all the classics we
have read, has even an hundredth of the joy of Greece and Rome
which comes to the millionaire whose yacht and car enable him to
linger indefinitely under Mediterranean skies...’ (14 February
1924). ‘Nothing ever happens! That is why, perhaps, my fancy goes
off to explore strange and terrible worlds. . . . My daily life is a sort of
contemptuous lethargy, devoid alike of virtues or vices. I am not of
the world, but an amused and sometimes disgusted spectator to it. I
detest the human race and its pretences and swinishness—to me life is
a fine art . . . although I believe the universe is an automatic, mean-
ingless chaos devoid of ultimate values . . .’ (3 February 1924). He is
trapped in a world he detests. He ought, perhaps, to move elsewhere,
but cannot overcome his lethargy. His one experience of living in
another city—New York—is so shattering that it finally destroys the
daydream of escaping from Providence. It seems astonishing that he
was not tempted to commit suicide—like his friend Robert Howard,
creator of Conan the Warrior. But he has one powerful ally—his
subconscious mind.
Which brings us back to Machen, and what happened on that
afternoon in 1899. Machen always refused to go into detail about the
experience; our only clue seems to be his two contradictory state-
ments about hypnosis. But this at least rules out the possibility that
Machen performed some kind of magical ritual—perhaps some invo-
cation of the devil. When he says that it was not hypnotism, he means
that it was not a dream or hallucination. Yet he tells his friend
Munson Havens: ‘I may tell you that the process which suggested
itself was Hypnotism; I can say no more. Save this: that Iam very sure
my process is not efficacious ex opere operato [by the eternal acts)’
Students of magic claim that their rituals are efficacious ex opere
operato; they work like switching on an electric light, not by self-
hypnosis.
All of which suggests that what Machen did was in some way to
attempt to gain contact with the deepest forces of his subconscious
mind. Yet even this explanation raises-just as many questions as it
answers, the most obvious being: why should the forces of the sub-
conscious provide revelations? Dreams, yes. Neuroses, yes. Even
delusions, hallucinations, paranoia. But not mystical insights.
According to Freud, of course, mystical insights are delusions; but
that is also begging the question, for Freud was ‘reducing’ mysticism
to some kind of wishful thinking. Machen states that what happened
was not wishful thinking or self-hypnosis. . . .
A tentative answer to this question was suggested by the psychical
researcher F. W. H. Myers in his remarkable work Human Per-
sonality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Myers has a chapter on
ig)
genius—on people who have displayed remarkable powers when very
young—particularly ‘calculating prodigies’, young children who can
do enormous calculations in their heads within seconds or minutes. In
an introduction to Myers’ book in 1961, Aldous Huxley dotted his i’s
and crossed his t’s, asking: ‘Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow
with a cellar? Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of
consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath?’
Freud, he points out, held the bungalow with basement view, but
cases of remarkable genius seem to suggest that man possesses a
‘super-consciousness’ as well as an ‘unconscious’ mind. And it is
equally alien to the everyday personality.
A few years ago, I found myself developing these insights of Myers
and Huxley. The immediate cause was a series of panic
attacks—brought on by overwork—which almost reduced me to a
nervous wreck, I have told the story at length in my book Mysteries, so
shall not repeat it here. All that need be said is that my struggles with
these nightly attacks of panic not only convinced me that Myers and
Huxley were right to believe that the personality has a ‘super-
conscious’ attic, but that the attic itself has many levels. In fact, it may
be more accurate to use the image of a tall block of flats rather than a
two-storey house. The same, I suspect, is true of the basement; the
unconscious has many levels.
I was particularly struck by the phenomenon known as multiple
personality. Under great stress, some people may ‘split’ into two or
more different people. They behave like independent entities, as if
the body is being ‘taken over’ by a series of souls. Myers had also
discussed this in his book. He speaks, for example, of the intriguing
case of Louis Vivé, a delinquent boy who was frightened by a viper at
fourteen, and began to suffer epileptic attacks and show hysterical
symptoms. Then he developed a thoroughly degenerate per-
sonality—drunken, quarrelsome and greedy. In hospital, suffering
from paralysis in one side, he delivered long harangues, abused the
doctors, and behaved with ‘monkey-like impudence’. He was given to
delivering speeches on left-wing politics and atheism.
The doctors experimented with ‘magnetism’, and discovered that
an application of steel would cause the paralysis to move to the left
side of his body. When this happened, his personality changed com-
pletely; he became sensible, modest and rational, and declined to talk
about religion or politics on the grounds that he knew nothing of
them. It seems as if the shock of the viper had somehow dissociated
the left and right hand sides of his brain and turned him into two
separate personalities.
In many cases of multiple personality, the patient splits into three
or more different persons. (In the recent ‘Sybil’ case, recounted by
26
Flora Rheta Schreiber, there were sixteen.) The interesting thing is
that the personalities often form a hierarchy, as if they were arranged
like a ladder; the higher ones know all about those below them. And
in many cases, the highest personality exhibits a control and maturity
beyond anything displayed by the patient in his (or her) actual life.
Moreover, the lower one looks down the ‘ladder’, the more childish
and limited the ‘personalities’ become; in the case of Doris Fischer,
which took place around the turn of the century, the lowest per-
sonality was little more than a recording machine, entirely without
vitality or ability to think.
The psychologist Pierre Janet made the interesting observation
that when people go into a state of permanent anxiety or depression,
they become ‘narrower’, as if trying to economize on vital energy.
Sometimes they become so narrow that they lose the sense of smell or
touch. The odd thing was that the ‘wider personality’ still remained,
and Janet discovered that he could often communicate with it in
whispers. For example, he could order an hysteric patient to raise her
arm in a whisper; she would obey. Then he would ask—in his normal
voice—why the patient had her arm in the air; the patient would be
startled and puzzled to see it.
I have suggested that we might conceive the ‘total personality’ as a
circle, like the full moon. But a person who developed this ‘whole
personality’ would be almost a god. Most of us remain far more
restricted. We are over-cautious and over-tense. Even the most vital
and ‘open’ personality is probably no more than a mere quarter of the
moon.
Now I repeat: the odd thing seems to be that in some sense, the
‘total’ personality does not have to be developed. It is already there,
like the curious ability of calculating prodigies. This, I agree, sounds
paradoxical; yet there is an enormous amount of evidence to suggest
that it is true. We ‘restrict’ ourselves. For example, someone may be
weak, nervous and sickly simply out of unability to ‘open up’, to relax
into the wider personality. Some crisis that forces a person to call
upon vital reserves may cause the sickliness to vanish overnight.
Wilhelm Reich was using a similar concept when he talked of
‘personality armour’, when a person develops certain characteristics
as a form of defence; they become trapped in the ‘armour’, mistaking
it for their ‘real selves’.

What we are suggesting, then, is that we possess a higher—or

wider—personality which may actually ‘know better’ than the limited
everyday self. é
This is, admittedly, a thoroughly unorthodox view of human
2a
personality, and one that Freudians will find impossible to entertain.
Jungians may find it less strange, because Jung accepted the notion of
a consciousness that transcends that of the individual—a racial uncon-
scious—and in doing so had moved towards the ‘full moon’ view of the
self.
At all events, it is easy enough to recognize that most people are
somehow ‘incomplete’-—that nervousness and mistrust have ‘fixed’
their personalities within certain limits, and that these limits are then
cemented and established by habit and laziness. Many rather quiet,
subdued people are potentially far more vital; but they have never
tried to explore their limits.
What Machen did, according to this theory, was to use some form
of self-hypnosis to call upon his ‘wider self’. And the wider self
signalled its existence by causing semi-magical phenomena. The re-
sult of this revelation was an overwhelming sense of relief and hap-
piness. Machen then attempted to obtain further revelations of this
wider being by joining the Order of the Golden Dawn. But he might
well have felt that what he learned there was not at all what he was
looking for. Machen was looking for further revelations of that ‘wider
self’. But the Golden Dawn was more concerned with what Jung
would later call the racial unconscious. Yeats expressed it when he
wrote in his autobiography: ‘I know now that revelation is from the
self, but from that age-long memoried self... and that genius is a
crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily
mind.’ Mathers taught that the ‘age-long memoried self’? can be
evoked through symbols; and that, moreover, the trained mind of the
magician could pass into other dimensions, other planes of being. The
magician should train his imagination until he can contemplate some
mental object as if it existed solidly in three dimensions; eventually,
he should even be able to ‘project’ it into the external world. When
this is accomplished, he should then contemplate a chosen sym-
bol—perhaps one of the five ‘tattwa’ symbols of earth, water, air, fire
and spirit—and then stare at a blank wall (or ceiling) so the symbol
transfers itself there as an after-image. He must then enlarge the
symbol to the size of a door, and pass through it. If he does this
successfully, he should find himself in a kind of dream landscape,
appropriate to the symbol. Yeats describes how, when he pressed a
fire symbol against his forehead, he had a vision of a desert with a
gigantic titan rising up from amidst ruins. The symbol itself, according
to Mathers, should do half the work.
It can be seen that, according to this philosophy, certain ‘dreams’
may not really be dreams at all, but visions of these ‘astral planes’. In
Jungian terms, the magician has caught a glimpse of some of the
‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’. Jung became convinced of
28
the existence of these archetypes—and of the collective uncon-
scious—when he found that many of his patients dreamed in
mythological symbols, although they had no knowledge of
mythology.
But although the concept of the collective unconscious, and that of
the ‘wider self’, are closely related, they should not be confused. What
we glimpse in moments of great intensity seems to be some wider
potential of our own individual personality. Lawrence found this
revelation in sexual ecstasy—the sense that the ‘self’ that takes over
for a moment in the act cf lovemaking is somehow truer than the
everyday self—and, by the same token, more real. Such a view obvi-
ously inverts our everyday standards; for how can we believe that the
‘T of which I am now conscious is less real than some hypothetical self
that I glimpse only in moments of ecstasy or orgasm?
According to this philosophy, the aim of personal evolution is to
evolve to the widest possible ‘self—the full moon. What happens
then can only be guessed. Our problem is to attempt to expand, to
become wider.
It is possible that the kind of disciplines advocated by the Golden
Dawn could produce this widening effect. On the other hand, honesty
compels us to admit that ‘magicians’ like Mathers and Crowley were
not remarkable for generosity of spirit or breadth of vision. On the
contrary, both were rather petty human beings, capable of behaving
like spoilt children. And this kind of pettiness is closely related to the
narrowness of Janet’s hysterical subjects. Accounts of Machen make
it clear that he was an altogether nicer person. It is therefore under-
standable if he felt that magical disciplines would bring him no nearer
to the revelation he experienced in Gray’s Inn. His attitude towards
the Golden Dawn soon became casual and light-hearted, and he
seems to have left it in 1901.

Now it is only necessary to look at a photograph of Lovecraft to see

that he spent his life in the grip of anxiety. In early photographs, the
mouth is small and taut; with the wire-rimmed glasses, he looks like
Queen Victoria telling her gentleman in waiting that she is not
amused. As far as I know, there is no photograph showing even the
ghost of a smile; he always looks tense and miserable, as if anxious to
get away from the photographer and rush to the lavatory. He was the
victim of a lifelong shyness and self-consciousness. His friends said
that he smiled when relaxed, but never laughed. He was awkward and
silent with strangers; it was only when he knew someone well that he
could ‘unwind’—when, apparently, he could be a delightful com-
panion. All his friendships were with people who were his intellectual
20
inferiors—although the reason may simply be that his limited social
life meant that he never met people who were his equals; at all events,
it obviously suited him to be the dominant one in his relationships, the
mentor and adviser. He used to jokingly refer to himself as
‘srandpa’—even with his aunts; there was a need to see himself as a
father figure. Lovecraft did his best to expand and develop; his chief
problem was his inability to unwind, and his view of himself as an
ineffectual invalid. But this was another of his self-imposed mis-
conceptions; friends noted that on holiday, he could walk—or werk-
—as well as anyone, and that he showed no sign of fatigue.
Sprague de Camp’s biography makes it clear that Lovecraft was
what Freud called an anal erotic—which means simply that he was
over-precise, punctilious, obsessed with detail. The surprising thing is
not so much that such a person should have created an important
body of writing, but that he should have become a writer at all.
But this is to ignore the most important thing about him: his basic
dominance and intelligence. Those who are astrologically inclined
may be interested to hear that Lovecraft was born on 20 August, and
was therefore a Leo, a sign associated with actors and those who love
the limelight. He was also on the cusp of Virgo, a sign whose natives
are noted for their obsessive tidiness and punctiliousness. One might
say that Lovecraft developed only his negative, Virgoan charac-
teristics, and never had a chance to realize his true potentialities as a
Leo. And this was only partly due to his shyness and invalidism. Far
more important was a deliberate, self-chosen attitude of ‘aristocratic
aloofness’, of distaste for the vulgarity of fame. It is instructive to recall
an anecdote about Poe, who in this respect closely resembled Love-
craft; it is recounted in Hervey Allen’s life of Poe, Jsrafel. Mrs. Grove
Nichols tells how she visited Poe, and he explained to her that he
wrote solely ‘to satisfy my taste and my love of art. Fame forms no
motive power with me.’ Poe then launched a lengthy attack on the
‘adulation of the mob’, and on writers who are small-minded enough
to want it. On her next visit, as they walked along the brow of a hill,
Poe told her that he had a ‘confession’ to make. ‘I said to you when
you were last here that I despised fame.’ ‘I remember.’ ‘It is false. I
love fame. I dote on it—I idolize it—I would drink to the very dregs
the glorious intoxication. I would have incense ascend in my honour
from every hamlet, from every town and city on this earth. Fame!
Glory! they are life-giving breath and living blood. No man lives
until he is famous! How bitterly I belied my nature . . . when I said
that I did not desire fame, that I despised it.’
Lovecraft, like Poe, always professed a high-minded attitude
towards fame; yet every other page of his ‘Collected Letters’ makes it
clear that he felt exactly as Poe did. He was a frustrated Leo. And the
30
real significance of this insight is the recognition that Lovecraft
remained always a ‘partial personality’, a man whose true nature
remained in eclipse. It is such people, as Janet observed again and
again, who become ‘possessed by devils’ or split into multiple
personalities.
And when we turn from Lovecraft’s letters to his fiction, we can see
why his true personality failed to emerge. As a stylist, he never
achieved anything like Poe’s distinction; he always sounds awkward
and amateurish. His knowledge of the real world was slight, and even
after the experience of marriage and living in New York, he retained
the mental attitudes of an adolescent. It is instructive to read the
Juvenilia printed by Derleth in The Shuttered Room. The stories
written at the age of six show an unusually bright and imaginative
child; it would have been a fair prediction that he was destined to
become a writer. But the first of the ‘adult’ tales, The Alchemist,
written when he was eighteen, hardly shows the development that
one might expect; it could have been written by a bright twelve-
year-old. ‘ “‘Fool!” he shrieked, ‘“‘Can you not guess my secret? Have
you no brain whereby you may recognize the will which has through
six centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon your house . . .? I tell
you it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my
revenge for 1AM CHARLES LE SORCIER!”’’ It seems as though
Lovecraft has been stunted intellectually as well as physically by his
‘years of deadly fatigue and lethargy’. And when we realize that he
was still writing the same kind of absurd and overstrained prose ten
years later, it might well seem that he lacks the resources to become
anything more than a clumsy amateur. Sprague de Camp describes
one story of 1919 as ‘a limp little fantasy’, and another as ‘an effective
if over-adjectived bit of grue’. It was in this year that Lovecraft
discovered the tales of Lord Dunsany, who in turn had been influ-
enced by the fantasies of the poet William Morris. For a while,
Lovecraft dropped his attempts to scare his readers into fits, and
experimented with a poetic ‘singing’ prose that is reminiscent of
Tolkien at his worst. ‘Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but
ever would the bearded man warn me to turn back to the happy shore
of Sona-Nyl.... And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no
more; and though many times since has the moon shone full and high
in the heavens, the White Ship from the South came never again.’ But
by his early thirties, he had returned to horror, and produced a few
effectual—if crude—stories like The Lurking Fear and The Music of
Erich Zann.
In 1924, Lovecraft married Sonia Greene—the lady seems to have
taken the initiative—and the couple lived in New York. The marriage
broke up after two years and Lovecraft returned to Providence. And
31
it was then, in 1927, that he finally began to produce the work by
which he will be remembered—stories like The Call of Cthulhu, The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror, The Colour Out
of Space. Students of the Cthulhu mythos will note that in The
Dunwich Horror, the alien entity is dispersed by means of magical
incantations from the Necronomicon. (In The Shunned House of
three years earlier the narrator had relied on some kind of scientific
apparatus to destroy the ‘entity’.) And from all the Cthulhu stories of
this period, one gains the impression that Lovecraft had been reading
up on the history and practice of magic.
The Colour Out of Space reveals the beginning of a new stage in
Lovecraft’s development. The desire to create pure horror is van-
ishing. The best stories of his later period are science fiction rather
than horror stories. They include The Whisperer in Darkness, At the
Mountains of Madness, and his final work The Shadow Out of Time.
All deal with the Fortean notion that beings from other galaxies—or
other dimensions—visited our planet millions of years ago, and that
the remains of their civilizations can still be found. . . . The Whisperer
in Darkness includes the disturbing suggestion that these aliens
extract human brains, place them in metal cylinders, and send them
out all over the universe; but even this notion is presented detachedly,
without the usual attempts to make the flesh creep. Lovecraft was
outgrowing horror; he now wants to evoke the immensity of the
universe, the mystery of time and space.

When I wrote The Strength to Dream in 1960, I was interested

simply in the qualities that Lovecraft shares with all other imaginative
writers: the desire to jar the reader into a deeper perception of reality.
Once we recognize this ‘common denominator’, we can see that there
is no fundamental difference in aim between Lovecraft and Heming-
way, between Theodore Dreiser and Jorge Luis Borges. Hemingway
uses a flat, colloquial language, but the aim is to lull the reader into a
sense of security, of acceptance. Once this has been achieved, the
message is harsh and frightening: death is the ultimate reality, most
human emotions are delusions, man is alone in an empty universe. All
imaginative writers start from the recognition that everyday con-
sciousness is trivial and limited; people only see what is in front of their
noses. The aim of the writer is to convey his own larger—and there-
fore truer—vision of reality. The melodramatic devices of William
Faulkner’s early novels—murder, rape, suicide, violence—seem
to have little in common with Lovecraft; but his aim is much the same:
to shock the reader like a slap in the face. The trouble with Lovecraft’s
early stories is that they give the game away long before the final
32
shock with their over-use of adjectives. Instead of lulling the reader
into a mood of acceptance, they arouse his suspicions. Only children
would find them terrifying; adults enjoy them with tongue-in-cheek.
This was the aspect of Lovecraft that concerned me in 1960—his
particular use of imagination. But I said very little about another aspect
that is equally important: his romanticism. Lovecraft was a romantic in
the old sense of the word—the sense that describes Keats or Shelley or
William Morris. It is true that he detested the modern world; but that is
only the negative aspect of his romanticism. Like all romantics, he was
more interested in a world whose existence he could clearly sense, yet
whose precise location escaped him; Keats would have called it the
world of beauty, Shelley the world of the ideal. I suspect that if Keats
had been born in Providence in 1890, he might well have written
macabre fiction instead of sensuous poetry; conversely, a Lovecraft
born in London a century earlier might well have written dream-like
poems full of imagery from Malory and Spenser.
What is even more important is to recognize precisely why roman-
tics dream of ‘other worlds’. The essence of romanticism is a mood of
relaxation which seems to open-up an inner world. We live in the
world of actuality like a horse in harness, and the driver keeps us alert
with flicks of the whip. And this means: that we are confined to the
physical world, trapped in the present.
The interesting thing about the moods of relaxation is that the mind
ceases to be confined to the present. The body becomes quiescent
while the mind travels. And our feelings cease to be tied on a short
rein. I can open an anthology of poetry and evoke a whole succession
of emotions, entering into each poem with the whole of my sensibility.
It is as if someone had given me a key to a world inside myself. In
short, as if someone had granted me a type of freedom almost
unknown to human beings.
This is the true positive ideal of the romantics; this strange free-
dom.
Yet is it accurate to describe it as freedom to descend inside
ourselves? If I am reading a volume of poetry, it would seem more
accurate to say that I am wandering in the world of the poems. I am
not exploring the external universe; but neither am I exploring my
own mind. This world of poetry—or ideas—is a kind of third world.
The philosopher Karl Popper was the first to point out that it has its
own independent existence. If some atomic catastrophe destroyed all
our libraries, and left only a handful of human beings suffering from
loss of memory, mankind would need thousands of years to achieve
their present cultural level. But if the libraries were all left intact, they
might do it within a few generations. This world that lies inside books
has its own kind of separate existence.
33
 But the ‘third world’ is also the gateway to our own authentic
inner-world; I may lay down the book, stare out of the window, and
daydream for hours. I may even sink into a state of such profound
inner peace that I experience a kind of mystical revelation—like the
hero of Lovecraft’s favourite Machen novel The Hill of Dreams.
(Significantly, this work, which Lovecraft regarded as Machen’s
finest, has no supernatural element.)
And now I think the reader will begin to see why I have devoted so
much space to discussing the romantic impulse. It is not simply a
matter of escapism, or even of ordinary self-development. It is an
exploration of an unknown realm of freedom. When I think of those
moods of delight that I experience when reading poetry or listening to
music, I can easily imagine a far greater degree of freedom: explo-
ration of new planes of being inside myself. The basic insight of
romanticism is that man is potentially a god, and that his evolution
depends on his ability to explore this new realm of inner freedom. We
may be mistaken to think of evolution in physical terms—of develop-
ment from the amoeba and the amphibian. Such development is
infinitely slow. But if Huxley’s ‘superconscious’ theory is correct,
then it seems possible that, in some sense, man is already a god. His
problem is to learn to explore the ‘hierarchy of selves’.
And what all this means, in turn, is that we may be mistaken to think
of Lovecraft merely as a writer of macabre fiction. He was a true
romantic ‘outsider’, and his work should be seen as an attempt at
personal evolution. Like all men of genius—for I think he undoubtedly
possessed a degree of genius—he searched instinctively for what he
needed. Miserable and out of place in the world of actuality, he made
attempts to induce states of inner-vision—as Machen did that after-
noon in Gray’s Inn. We have seen that Machen’s inner-forces
responded to the appeal and manifested their existence. The evidence
of the Cthulhu tales suggests that the same kind of thing happened to
Lovecraft. Why is it that the mythos has such a powerful appeal, when
Dunsany’s Pegana and Cabell’s Poictesme have been more or less
forgotten? It is because Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones somehow
strike a deeper chord; they seem to rise up from ‘that age-long
memoried self that Yeats believed could be contacted through symbols.
Now if Lovecraft had been a student of Gnosticism or Kabbalism
this would be fairly unsurprising. The Gnostics believed that the
world was created by a kind of demon, and that the universe is a
gigantic prison. Man’s problem is to reject this material universe and
struggle back towards God. The Gnostic tradition is closely related to
Jewish Merkabah (or throne) mysticism, in which the mystic strives to
reach the throne-chariot of God by passing through a series of
heavenly halls; each of these had its ‘guardian of the threshold’, and
34
the mystic had to combat these demons with various seals and sacred
names. The tradition of the Kabbala derives from both Gnosticism
and Merkabah mysticism. Its basis is the belief that when Adam
sinned, he fell from union with God, down through ten lower planes
of consciousness, into a state of total amnesia. His problem is to climb
back, through the nine realms above him, like Jack ascending the
beanstalk. But then, Kabbalism is more than a peculiar form of
Jewish mysticism; it could be regarded as the foundation of all west-
ern magic. These ‘other planes’ of existence are, for example, the
realms that the adepts of the Golden Dawn tried to explore by means
of symbol and ritual. They are the planes of our inner-being, and in
Mysteries I have pointed out how closely they seem to correspond to
the notion of a ‘ladder of selves’, as well as with Jung’s recognition of
the various levels of the unconscious.
The point that Kenneth Grant continues to make throughout the
books of his remarkable Typhonian Trilogy (The Magical Revival,
Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Cults of the Shadow) is that
Lovecraft can only be properly understood in the context of the whole
Mystery Tradition. In his book on Crowley, Grant speaks of Love-
craft’s ‘occult experiences, disguised as fiction’, and says that his
poetry reveals ‘the source of his visions . . . the intrusion of forces
completely in accord with the archetypes, symbols . . . that Crowley
brought through when in contact with a trans-mundane entity’. He is
particularly fascinated by Lovecraft’s concept of other dimensions
beyond our space-time, and the mighty beings who are guardians of
the threshold between our world and these other planes. And finally,
in his most comprehensive study of the ‘dark Mystery Tradition’,
Nightside of Eden, Grant refers again and again to Lovecraft, point-
ing out the similarities between Lovecraft’s mythos and the magical
traditions of East and West. And, speaking of the novelist Sax
Rohmer, who was once a member of the Golden Dawn, he writes:
‘Rohmer, like H. P. Lovecraft, had direct and conscious experience of
the inner planes, and both established contact with non-spatial
entities. Furthermore, both these writers recoiled... from actual
confrontation with entities that are easily recognizable as the envoys
of Choronzon-Shugal [the ‘guardian of the threshold’, whom Grant
seems to identify with Cthulhu]. The masks of these entities achieved
a quality of such compelling clarity that neither Rohmer nor Love-
craft were able to face what lay beneath. Yet the insurmountable
abhorrence inspired by such contacts hid magical potential, com-
pressed and explosive, that made both these writers masters in their
respective branches of creative occultism.’ He believes that Lovecraft
hesitated and turned back on the brink of this Abyss which lies
between the seventh and the eighth plane of existence, and as a
35
consequence ‘spent his life in a vain attempt to deny the potent
Entities that moved him’.
After mentioning that Lovecraft hints at the existence of entities
who ‘tread the deeps of space between the stars’, Grant goes on to
say: ‘Historically speaking, Dr. John Dee (1527-1608) was the first
to leave any detailed account of human traffic with denizens of the
dimensionless gap between universes.’ The mention of Dee’s name in
this context is interesting, not only because Lovecraft attributes to
Dee the only English translation of the Necronomicon, but also
because Dee is one of the few great magical adepts of the past who can
present us with some practical evidence of the existence of non-
human entities. Dee—who was Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer—was
himself devoid of ‘paranormal’ powers; but he worked with a number
of ‘scryers’ or seers (scryer is short for descryer—one who sees). The
most talented of these was one Edward Kelly, an Irishman who was
something of a rogue; nevertheless, he seems to have been what we
would nowadays call a medium. Through the mediumship of Kelly,
who probably gazed into a crystal or a glass of water, Dee held long
conversations with spirits, which he recorded in some thousands of
pages.
The interesting thing to note is that at this ttme—in the 1580s—no
one had ever heard of what we now call Spiritualism. This began in
the nineteenth century, when the house of the Fox family in New
York state was haunted by rapping noises, and the ‘spirit’ identified
himself as a murdered peddler. (Excavation more than half a century
later revealed a man’s skeleton and a peddler’s box just outside the
walls of the cellar.) Nowadays, it seems clear enough that Dee and
Kelly were doing what countless mediums have done since 1848
when the rappings were first heard. The entities who communicated
through Kelly did not identify themselves as spirits of the dead, but
as angels and various other spirits; but this may have had something
to do with Dee’s own expectations. For there can be no doubt what-
ever that, whether ‘spirits’ really exist or not, the human subconscious
mind plays an important part in mediumistic phenomena. I have
myself come to suspect that most ‘spirits’ are disembodied entities,
but that they are not what they claim to be; they could be the crooks
and con-men of the spirit world, or simply bored delinquents with
nothing better to do than play games with gullible humans.
Now Kelly was undoubtedly a rogue, and commonsense would
suggest that Dee’s experience with spirits should be regarded as
unproven. But there is one important piece of evidence in his favour.
The ‘spirits’ declared that they would provide a series of magical
invocations, or ‘keys’, in an ancient language called Enochian. The
Book of Enoch is an Apochryphal book of the Old Testament,
36
describing how angels had intercourse with the daughters of men, and
passed on to them the basic secrets of magic and occultism. In Dee’s
day it survived only in fragments, although the traveller Bruce was to
bring back a copy of the whole work from Abyssinia in 1773. It is, of
course, written in Hebrew, not ‘Enochian’. But Dee’s ‘spirits’ ident-
ified the language of the ‘keys’ as that of these angels of the Book of
Enoch. And the extraordinary thing is that Enochian is a language, with
its Own grammar and syntax. Crowley writes in his Autobiography
that ‘it is very much more sonorous, stately and impressive than even
Greek or Sanskrit, and the English translation, though in places diffi-
cult to understand, contains passages of... sustained sublimity’*
Admittedly, this kind of claim arouses a natural scepticism, since
Crowley obviously had reason to exaggerate. But the supporting
evidence is highly convincing. The basic Enochian texts amount to
nineteen ‘keys’, the longest being about 300 words; most amount to
about 100. A Dictionary of Enochian compiled by Leo Vincit
contains about 900 words. If we assume that Kelly invented this
language, then we must suppose that he first of all translated a series
of invocations into consistent Enochian, then memorized them all.
But there is far more to it than that. Dee had a series of tables,
consisting of 49 by 49 squares, most squares containing letters or
symbols. He would sit with these tables, or charts, spread in front of
him, as Kelly looked into the crystal or scrying stone. Kelly would
point with a rod to one or other of the charts, and say: ‘He (the angel)
points to column 6, row 31.’ Dee would then look it up and write
down the letter. So Kelly would have needed to know the location of
the letters and symbols on all charts. And the finally convincing point
is that the messages were ‘given’ backwards, because to pronounce
the words forwards would release certain forces, so when it was
written out, it then had to be reversed. Itis conceivable that Kelly was
clever enough to invent Enochian and memorize nineteen invoca-
tions in the language, but not that he could also have memorized such
an incredibly complicated code.
Enochian has been extensively studied by many historians of
magic—the latest being Stephen Skinner, who is engaged in writing a
book on it~and they confirm that it is a consistent language, with no
resemblance to any living language. As a consequence, ‘occultists’
regard the Enochian language as the most convincing proof of the real
existence of intelligent entities who exist independent of the
human mind. The alternative hypothesis is that the language is
a concoction from the subconscious minds of Dee and Kelly (no one
* Crowley prints the texts in full in The Equinox, Vol. 1; see also Regardie’s
Golden Dawn, Vol. 4, Book 9.
+ Regency Press, London 1977.
By
 has ever suggested that Dee himself invented it—his total honesty is
generally acknowledged). And itis true that we have no conception of
the complexities of the unconscious. There seems to be no doubt that
it causes ‘poltergeist phenomena’, and may be responsible for most
‘spirit messages’. But then, spirit messages are usually uncom-
plicated, often childish; Enochian is complex. We may surmise that it
was a product of Dee’s ‘superconscious’ mind (or Kelly’s); but this
hypothesis is no more or less logical than the supposition that the
language was dictated by ‘disembodied entities’.
All of which may-leave us unconvinced; but at least it enables us to
understand why Kenneth Grant—who was Crowley’s pupil—can feel
so certain that Lovecraft had some direct knowledge of ‘denizens of
the dimensionless gap between universes’. If Dee’s Enochian
_ language came from these entities—or from any kind of ‘spirit—then
itis a highly plausible supposition that Lovecraft’s strange mythology
came from the same source; and Grant has argued his point con-
vincingly in Night Side of Eden, which is concerned with the ‘dark
side’ of the tree of life. Fi
Let me dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Lovecraft was a romantic
‘world-rejector’; not just a dreamer, but a man driven by an intense
loathing of the ‘real world’ surrounding him. I believe that he habitu-
ally performed some operation similar to Machen’s ‘hypnosis—not
consciously, but, like Machen, out of despair and exhaustion. One of
the most important concepts in magic is that of the ‘true will’. Human
beings seldon want anything very deeply; when they do, they set in
motion a kind of will that is far more deep and powerful than the
everyday will. This is the ‘will’ that the magician attempts to direct. (A
man who wants something badly—say, a woman, or the downfall of an
enemy, may direct it quite unconsciously.) Lovecraft was not a man who
used his will a great deal; he was a lazy dreamer. But periodically he
must have experienced moods of anguish in which his total rejection of
the world around him produced the effect of awakening his ‘true will’.
It should be noted that in order to produce these effects, no
sustained concentration is necessary; only a particular kind of absorp-
tion. | can offer an example from my own experience. In 1968 I began
to write a book called The God of the Labyrinth. It was intended to be
about a literary quest; the hero, Gerard Sorme, was to engage in
research about an eighteenth-century Irish rake named Esmond
Donelly, reputedly the author of a noted pornographic work. When I
began it, it was my intention to write a literary detective story in the
manner of the Russian Irakly Andronikov. However, at a certain
point in the book, I realized that the plot was removing itself from my
hands. What was happening was that my hero was becoming increas-
ingly absorbed in his quest for Esmond, until the spirit of Esmond
38
begins to ‘take him over’. The off thing was that I also had a feeling
that Esmond was somehow taking me over too. I knew, of course, that
he was not a real person, that I had invented him; yet I had an odd
feeling that he was real, and was trying to communicate with me. I
had, of course, worked out his dates in detail—this was necessary
since he has various encounters with contemporaries like Rousseau
and Boswell, and I had to get the dates right. He was born in 1848,
and set out on the Grand Tour of Europe at the age of seventeen, in
1765. There is a point in the novel when the hero discovers that he is
being ‘taken over’ by Esmond; he is driving to Dublin (from the
West), and has a hallucinatory sense of travelling by coach—as if
setting out with Esmond on the Grand Tour. Driving into Dublin, he
seems to see the Chapelizod Road as it had been two centuries earlier.
He is about to turn right over Grattan Bridge, feeling certain that this
is his last opportunity to cross the river to Stephen’s Green; he has
forgotten that O’Connell Bridge had been built since 1765... .
At this point, it struck me that what I really wanted was some
account of what Dublin was like in the eighteenth century. This house
has thousands of books; I was sure there must be something among
them. I went and searched through the ‘travel’ section, and came
upon a book called Dublin Fragments by A. Peter (1928); it fell off
the shelf, and a map opened out at the back. I looked at it, and my hair
stood on end. It was a map of Dublin and Suburbs by J. Roque—I
have it in front of me as I write—and dedicated to George Putland Esq
and ‘corrected to this Time, 1765’. It gave me, of course, all the
information I needed... .
From then on until the end of the book I had an odd sense of
Esmond’s presence. But the coincidences continued after it was pub-
lished. I received a letter from the writer on magic, Francis King,
asking me how I had discovered so much information about the secret
society called The Cult of the Peacock. It was clear, he said, that this
was what I meant by the Sect of the Phoenix—the sexual society of
which Esmond finally becomes Grand Master. I had, it seems, pro-
vided an interesting clue by mentioning that Edward Sellon was also a
member. Sellon was an eighteenth-century rake and pornographer
who was, it seems, a member of the Cult of the Peacock. But
Francis King was convinced that he was one of the few people in
England who knew that Sellon had been a member of the Cult of the
Peacock, and he wanted to know where I had acquired my infor-
mation. I had to reply that I had invented it. The Sect of the Phoenix
was developed from a hint by Borges; Edward Sellon’s name appears
in Pisanus Fraxi’s Bibliography of Prohibited Books... .
All this was, I agree, probably coincidence. I can only say that, trom
the moment I began to have a sense of Esmond’s presence, I somehow
59
expected such coincidences; and many more occurred, most of which
I have now forgotten. I had a similar experience later when I was
writing The Occult, and would stumble upon vital pieces of infor-
mation at exactly the right moment; on one occasion, a book fell off
the shelf and opened itself at the page I was looking for. I am inclined
to believe that this kind of ‘synchronicity’ is engineered by the super-
conscious mind. When I began writing Mysteries, I was fairly sure that
the ‘coincidences’ would start again; and they did, as if on cue.
All this makes it easy for me to believe that, once Lovecraft had
become absorbed in his Cthulhu mythos, his ‘inventions’ took on a
life of their own, drawing their vitality from the collective uncon-
scious. And twenty-five years after his death, Pauwels and Bergier
presented their own evidence for the conclusion that human beings
were not the first intelligent creatures to walk the surface of this
earth—that earth may have received visitors from space thousands,
even millions, of years before man appeared. (Their theories were
popularized by the Swiss Erich von Daniken.) And in books with
titles like The UFO Menace and Why Are They Watching Us? experts
on Unidentified Flying Objects have advanced theories about the
‘aliens from space’ that sound remarkably like Lovecraft’s later
‘science fiction’ stories.
If, then, Kenneth Grant is correct in believing that Lovecraft’s
inventions were truer than he supposed, it would also help to explain
why his torments of self-division became more, not less, acute after
The Call of Cthulhu. He had become a receptacle of hidden know-
ledge—a kind of priest. Other voices than his own were speaking
through him. Grant argues that Lovecraft’s poetry shows that he was
aware of this—that he was playing with real occult knowledge, not
fantasy. But if that is so, the knowledge was intuitive rather than
conscious. Lovecraft continued to think of himself as a writer of weird
tales, a journeyman storyteller who supplemented his income by
revising hackwork by other writers. Crowley may have been a
thoroughly unsatisfactory character, but at least he regarded himself
as an emissary of unknown powers. He accepted his role of priest.
Lovecraft was a thoroughly unsatisfactory priest who lacked belief in
his ‘inventions’. He dropped some of his best work into drawers and
forgot about it; he told his friends that he had decided to give up
writing. In retrospect, we can see that he was a tragic case of self-
misunderstanding, of under-estimation of his own value. And the
beginning of the last act of the tragedy was the writing of his novel The
Shadow Out of Time—which some regard as his finest work. Here,
more clearly than ever before, he writes about beings who exist in
‘other dimensions’, about minds capable of reaching beyond the stars,
about a civilization millions of years older than that of man. The odd
40
thing is that Lovecraft continued to feel he was writing a horror story.
Most readers will find this incomprehensible. These remarkable
visions of the Great Old Ones are not horrifying; they are fascinating;
they galvanize the imagination. They arouse wonder, not fear. Yet
Lovecraft’s misunderstanding his own nature led him to write in the
same old style, as if telling the story in a hoarse whisper. Instead of
recognizing that the was on the threshold of a new development, he
probably assumed that his talents were waning. He stopped writing.
And some time in that same year, 1935, he developed cancer. It has
often been pointed out that cancer seems to be associated with
frustration. A doctor from the University-of Texas Medical School,
Augustin de la Pena, has even written a book suggesting that cancer is
caused by what he calls ‘information underload’, another name for
boredom. He is not denying that viral or chemical components may
play a part; but he also suggests that there is another element,
associated with the central nervous system. ‘Information overload’ on
the central nervous system—too much to attend to—inhibits cancer,
he believes, while depression and boredom can lead to rapidly spread-
ing cancers. ‘When the information deficit reaches some critical
value, the central nervous system sends a non-specific signal to most
somatic structure sites . . . indicating the need for novelty of infor-
mation; carcinogenesis [cancer] is the body’s mode of providing
“information novelty”... .’
Now in the physical sense, Lovecraft spent most of his life in a state
of ‘information underload’; but his imagination provided the
‘novelty’. From about 1930, he periodically assured his cor-
respondents that he was about to give up writing because he had no
more to say; yet he continued to force himself to make the effort. In
1935 he finally stopped writing, and the cancer began. He began The
Shadow Out of Time in November 1934 and finished it early in 1935.
We do not know precisely when the cancer first appeared, but
Sprague de Camp speaks of ‘February 1937, over two years since his
disfunction first appears’-—enough to suggest that there is a corre-
lation between the ending of the story and the beginning of the illness.
If Lovecraft had consulted a doctor within the first six months of his
illness, there would have been time to operate; but when cancer of the
colon was finally diagnosed in March 1937 it was too late; it had
spread throughout his trunk. He died five days after being admitted to
hospital.

All of which brings me back to the present book, and how it came
about.
In 1967, L. Sprague de Camp, who was then working on his
41
biography of Lovecraft, went on a visit to India and the Middle East
with the science fiction novelist Alan Nourse; he was collecting
material for his book on Great Cities of the Ancient World. In
Baghdad he met a member of the Iraqi Directorate General of
Antiquities, with whom he had been corresponding, and spent some
time with him visiting archaeological sites. When this man learned of
Sprague de Camp’s projected biography of Lovecraft—whose works
are well known in the Middle East—he revealed that he was in
possession of a manuscript that might be of interest, written in an
ancient tongue related to Arabic. Understandably, Sprague’s first
impulse was to refuse; he is not an Arabic scholar, and felt he would
have no use for such a manuscript. Besides, it is against the law to
export manuscripts that could be classified as archaeological ma-
terial, and he was afraid the customs might confiscate it. Moreover,
the offical was vague about the work; all he seemed to be willing to
say was that it was a magical manuscript. The subject was dropped.
But shortly before Sprague left Baghdad, the official again raised the
matter, this time obliquely. They were eating a meal in a restaurant;
Sprague and Alan Nourse were two of a dozen guests seated outside
under a canvas awning. Sitting opposite them was a Palestinian pro-
fessor from the University at Beyrout; by an odd coincidence, he was
engaged in translating my Strength to Dream into Arabic. Sprague
mentioned that we were friends, and the talk turned to Lovecraft.
Sprague asked whether it would be accurate to translate Al Azif as
The Demonology. Lovecraft explains that the word is used by Arabs
to denote the nocturnal sound of insects, which were believed to be
the rustling of demons. The Palestinian said he had never heard of
such a thing. And at this point, the official from the Directorate of
Antiquities mentioned casually the the word derives from the ancient
Akkadian language, and that he had seen it at the head of a manu-
script in his office. Trying to control his excitement, Sprague asked if
he might see it, and the official agreed to bring it the next morning. It
proved to be written on brown parchment in black ink, and Sprague
was disappointed to find that he was not able to make out any of the
letters. The official said it was written in a language called Duriac, still
spoken by a few old people in the village of Duria, in the Kurdish part
of northern Iraq. When Sprague asked if the manuscript was for sale,
the official asked a price that was high but not unreasonable. Sprague
was fairly certain that he could, if necessary, resell the manuscript to
the antiquities section of the Philadelphia museum; so he bought it.
He apparently had no trouble getting it out of the country.
Back in America, he tried to get it translated, and met with frus-
tration. Experts said that it was in a language that resembled Persian,
but that much of it seemed to be gibberish. This encouraged Sprague,
42
who pointed out that the word gibberish is derived from the Arab
alchemist Geber, who was roughly contemporary with the legendary
Alhazred; but when Rheinhold Carter of the Metropolitan Museum
declared that he was certain the manuscript was a nineteenth-century
forgery, he became discouraged. In 1969, his interest revived again
when he received a letter from the official in Baghdad offering—in a
postscript—to buy back the manuscript for more than he had paid. He
expressed his willingness to discuss the matter, but received no reply.
Another Arab correspondent later told him that the official had been
jailed for embezzling government funds.
In 1973, Sprague decided to publish the manuscript in facsimile, and
it appeared under the imprint of the Owlswick Press, Philadelphia,
under the title of Al Azif, The Necronomicon. In an introduction,
Sprague told the true story of how he had acquired it, but then went
off into fiction, claiming that three Arabic scholars who had under-
taken to translate it had all disappeared, and that this was probably
because they muttered the words under their breath as they wrote
them down. In fact, his real reason for publishing the work was the
hope that some Arabic scholar might become interested in the mys-
tery.
itis at this point that Robert Turner enters the story. He is the
founder of a modern magical group called The Order of the Cubic
Stone, which operates in Wolverhampton. The Order produces a half
yearly magazine called The Monolith. An account of the Order can be
found in Francis King’s book Ritual Magic in England. Like myself
and Kenneth Grant, Robert Turner has long been convinced that the
Lovecraft mythos is not simply a romantic invention, but is based on
ancient magical tradition, ‘an archetypal pattern underlying and
unifying the seemingly unconnected mass of magical and mytholog-
ical data....’
Mr. Turner became convinced of the basic validity of magic for
much the same reasons that I did myself. An engineer by profession,
he admits that what led him to take an interest in magic and witchcraft
was a purely romantic impulse, a fascination with the mysterious and
unusual. But as he began to study magical traditions that came from
all over the world—and from civilizations of the remote past—he was
struck by their remarkable underlying consistency. If magic is really a
product of superstition and ignorance, you would expect the magical
beliefs of the Eskimoes and the Indians of Peru to have nothing in
common. In fact, there is an astonishing similarity, which has
repeatedly been pointed out by anthropologists, from Sir James
Frazer to Joseph Campbell (whose monumental work The Masks of
God is the best modern introduction to the subject). An American
Indian shaman (or witchdoctor) would have no difficulty whatever in
43
understanding the magical procedures of a colleague from New
Guineau or Latvia. Archaeological discoveries reveal that the magic
of ancient Babylon or Thebes was not very different from that of
Paracelsus or Cornelius Aggrippa. Of course, the language and the
symbols are different—just as the language of Egyptian mathematics
is different from that of the Romans or Arabs; yet the underlying
concepts show astonishing similarities, All this led Robert Turner to
feel that the basic laws of magic are as objectively valid as those of
physics. The chief difference is simply that physics is concerned with
the external world. Magic is concerned with the hidden world of the
human psyche, and its mysterious relation to the external universe.
Mr. Turner has explained something of his own conception of the
nature of magic in his commentary on the Necronomicon in the
present volume; so all that need be said here is that when he began to
read Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories, he experienced a strong conviction
that the mythos was not a creation of Lovecraft’s imagination; it was
grounded in the same magical tradition as the writing of Hermes
Trismegistos or John Dee. His first suspicion, he says, is that
Lovecraft was himself a practising adept, or at least a member of some
magical order. When he read Lovecraft’s letters, he was
astonished—and _ baffled—to discover that Lovecraft apparently
regarded all ‘occultism’ as a sign of feeble mindedness. Yet when he
reread the major works of the Cthulhu mythos—At the Mountains of
Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Shadow Out of Time,
The Dunwich Horror—he again experienced the sense of total con-
viction that Lovecraft knew more about magic than he had been
prepared to acknowledge to his correspondents.
It was at about this time—1972—that Kenneth Grant’s Magical
Revival appeared, and Mr. Turner was at first inclined to accept
Grant’s view—that this was a case of ‘unconscious insight’—as the
answer to the problem. In fact, he still remains convinced that Grant
was fundamentally correct. Yet he was still inclined to suspect that
Lovecraft’s knowledge of magical texts was greater than Grant
believed, and that it was based on certain works that would have been
easily accessible to Lovecraft, both in Providence and New York.
Robert Turner and I met through our mutual interest in ritual
magic. I was intrigued when he told me of his theory that Lovecraft’s
mythology was based on an ancient magical tradition—particularly
when he told me that he had found one of his leading clues in my own
book The Strength to Dream, in which I compare Lovecraft’s myth-
ology to Madame Blavatsky’s. I had noted that Madame Blavatsky
speaks of ‘cyclopean ruins and colossal stones’ in The Secret Doctrine
(vol. 2, p. 341). And The Secret Doctrine is supposed to be basically
an immense commentary on ‘the oldest manuscript in the world’, The
4a
Book of Dzyan; Madame Blavatsky claimed to possess the Book, on
‘a collection of palm leaves made impenetrable to water, fire and air
by some specific unknown process’. Like most non-theosophists, I
had always been inclined to take the view that The Book o fDzyan was
the invention of that wily old occultist. Yet many reputable people,
including the well-known Buddhist Christmas Humphreys, have
asserted their belief in its genuineness. One writer, Sri Madhava
Ashish, has devoted two books to analyzing the Stanzas of Dzyan on
the Assumption that they are precisely what Madame Blavatsky
claimed they were. I had to agree with Robert Turner that if The Book
of Dzyan was genuine, then it could well be the origin of the Nec-
ronomicon. Unfortunately, that still applies if it was Madame
Blavatsky’s own invention, for Lovecraft could have borrowed some
of his mythology from The Secret Doctrine.
It was at about this time that I heard from another friend, George
Hay, the chairman of the H. G. Wells Society, of which I am a
member. George Hay is an historian of science fiction, and he had
been asked by the publisher of the present volume to edit a series of
essays about Lovecraft and the Necronomicon. It would, of course,
treat the Necronomicon as Lovecraft’s own invention.* George asked
me if I would be willing to contribute an article. I told him about
Robert Turner’s Dzyan theory, and suggested he might ask Robert to
write about it. But by the time he approached Robert Turner, the
latter was already pursuing a new line of enquiry: that Lovecraft
might have had access to various mediaeval grimoires, like The Sword
of Moses, and that this could explain the sense of authenticity of his
references to magic. This, I must admit, struck me as unlikely; I felt
that Robert was perhaps allowing himself to be led astray by wishful
thinking. All the same, I agreed with George Hay that his views
deserved a hearing in the projected volume.
Yet our first major breakthrough came from a completely different
source. In the summer of 1976, I happened to mention our Lovecraft
project to my friend Dr. Carl Tausk, of the Vienna Technological
Institute. And Carl made me blink by remarking casually that he had
heard that Lovecraft’s father was an Egyptian Freemason. I asked
him where he had obtained his information, but he was vague; he said
he had overheard it during a late-night discussion after an academic
meeting. Since he had read little of Lovecraft, he had made no
attempt to learn more. But he thought he could remember who said it,
and promised to enquire for me when he returned to Vienna.
And now, at last, I began to feel that I might be on to something
important. I had just read Sprague de Camp’s biography of Lovecraft,
* Two of these essays, written before Robert Turner made his important dis-
coveries about the Necronomicon, are printed as an appendix.
45
and knew that almost nothing is known about Howard’s father,
Winfield Lovecraft, who died of syphilis when Howard wasa child. Of
English descent—he spoke with an English accent—Winfield
Lovecraft was known to acquaintances as ‘the pompous Englishman’.
At the age of thirty-five he married Susan Phillips, daughter of a
wealthy Providence businessman; at this time he was a salesman for
the Gorham Silver Company of Providence. Four years later, Winfield
Lovecraft went on a business trip to Chicago and began to show signs
of mental breakdown; he declared that the chambermaid had insulted
him and that his wife was being attacked in an upstairs room. He was
declared legally incompetent, and placed in a lunatic asylum, where he
died five years later. General paralysis of the insane, the final stage of
syphilis, takes about twenty years to manifest itself, by which time the
disease is long past the infectious stage; but it can still be passed on
genetically. Fortunately Howard seems to have been unaffected.
Now it would have been no matter for surprise to have discovered
that Winfield Lovecraft was a Freemason. ‘Modern’ Freemasonry
(which began in England about 1717), had reached Philadelphia as
early as 1730, and quickly spread to Boston, New York, Charleston,
Portsmouth and other towns. The American enthusiasm for the idea
of Fraternity ensured its adoption across the continent, and most
American cities now have their Grand Masonic Temples. While
European Freemasonry maintained the traditions of the secret
society, American Freemasonry became a respectable club to which
most leading businessmen were expected to belong. As one historian
has remarked, American Freemasonry abandoned the idea of selec-
tivity, and went in for the theory of numbers.
Since Winfield Lovecraft was a successful young businessman,
operating mainly in Boston, we might almost take it for granted that
he was a Freemason. But Egyptian Freemasonry is a totally different
matter. Most historians agree that Freemasonry originated in ancient
Egypt—the Masons were a ‘guild’ of temple architects and craftsmen.
But Egyptian Masonry was created—or revived—by the famous
magician and impostor, ‘Count’ Cagliostro round about the year
1778. Cagliostro was admitted to the Esperance Lodge of Free-
masons in April 1777 in London. He claims that soon after this, he
bought a manuscript containing an account of the original form of
Masonry as it had existed in Egypt. Thereupon, Cagliostro declared
himself to be an Egyptian Mason, and he carried his proselytizing all
over Europe; in Leipzig, after a Masonic banquet, Cagliostro told the
head of the lodge that if he did not adopt the Egyptian rite he would
‘feel the hand of God’. When the man committed suicide a few days
later, it was regarded as a fulfilment of Cagliostro’s prophecy, and
Egyptian Freemasonry was suddenly taken seriously. Even his most
46
sceptical biographers have no doubt that Cagliostro’s enthusiasm for
Egyptian Masonry was totally sincere.
For seven years, Cagliostro’s star was in the ascendant; then came
the affair of the diamond necklace, when Cagliostro’s friend Cardinal
Rohan became the dupe of a confidence trickster, the Countess de la
Motte Valois; Cagliostro was tried as an accomplice—which he was
not—and was acquitted. But his absurd behaviour at the trial, and his
preposterous ‘story of my life’ which he read aloud in court, made him
a laughing stock, and he was banished to London. He made the
mistake of going to Rome, was arrested as a Freemason, and died in
the papal dungeons in 1795. By then, the French revolution had
taken place, thousands of aristocrats had died in the terror, and
hundreds more had fled to America. Obviously, these included many
that Cagliostro had initiated into Egyptian Masonry.
Posterity has decided that Cagliostro was basically a fraud. Yet, as I
have pointed out in The Occult, he was also a ‘magician’ who pos-
sessed genuine powers. These included clairvoyance, prophecy and
healing—the latter very highly developed.
What was the difference between Egyptian Masonry and the usual
variety? Fortunately, there is no need to speculate; A. E. Waite has
described Egyptian Masonry at length in his New Encyclopedia of
Freemasonry (1923). As to the less esoteric form of Masonry into
which Cagliostro was first initiated in London, we have a description
of itin W. R. H. Trowbridge’s book on Cagliostro (1910). Cagliostro
was led into the presence of the other Brothers, and he was hoisted up
to the ceiling by means of a rope, to symbolize his utter reliance on the
will of heaven. Then he was blindfolded, handed a loaded pistol, and
ordered to blow his brains out. When he showed a natural hesitation,
he was ordered to take the oath, swearing to obey his superiors
without question. Once again the pistol—this time unloaded—was
handed to him, and Cagliostro placed it rather shakily against his
forehead and pulled the trigger. Another pistol was fired at the same
time and he was given a blow on the head. Then the bandage was
removed, and Cagliostro was declared a Mason.
Clearly, the rite of the Esperance Lodge was fairly uncomplicated,
not to say crude. Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite was a different matter. The
candidate had to be a Mason already. Before the ceremony, he was
left in a room with a picture of a pyramid, probably the Great Pyramid
of Cheops, upon which he had to meditate. Then after knocking seven
times, he was admitted to the foot of a throne, and a Master dressed in
white then delivered an extremely long discourse, under sixteen
headings, beginning with natural and supernatural philosophy, and
including a section on the foundation of Masonry by Solomon, and
the ‘use of Occult forces’.
47
 All this makes it clear that the difference between ordinary
Masonry and Egyptian Masonry was that ordinary Masonry
was—and still is—a straightforward variant of Christianity, while
Egyptian Masonry was based on Hermetic philosophy—that is, on
magic. Solomon was not only the builder of the Temple; he was alsoa
legendary magician, reputed to be the author of the famous
mediaeval grimoire The Key of Solomon. Moreover, the legendary
founder of magic, Hermes Trismegistos, came from Egypt, where he
was known as Thoth. The most celebrated body of magical and
mystical writings, the Corpus Hermeticum (including the famous
Emerald Tablet) was attributed to Thrice Great Hermes. (We now
know that most of the Corpus dates from the second century A.D.)
This is why Cagliostro firmly believed that his Egyptian Masonry
was superior to ordinary Masonry: because it went back to its origins
in magic and ‘occult philosophy’. The ordinary Mason is expected to
know his Bible; the Egyptian Mason was expected to know something
of astrology, alchemy, mystical philosophy and ritual magic. Cag-
liostro himself knew something—if not a great deal-—of all these. The
Masters were expected to know much more.
The century after Cagliostro’s death saw a remarkable revival of
the magical tradition; suddenly, magic was again a serious subject for
study. In France, it was given tremendous impetus by the writings of
Eliphaz Levi, particularly Transcendental Magic, which related the
Tarot cards to the Jewish Kabbalah. Macgregor Mathers, one of the
founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, translated
the Key of Solomon and the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage.
All kinds of strange Masonic sects sprang up in England; some of
them—like the Grand Lodge of Memphis and the Hermetic Order of
Egypt—obviously offshoots of Cagliostro’s Egyptian Masonry. Ken-
neth Mackenzie, an eccentric scholar who compiled The Royal
Masonic Cyclopedia, went to Paris to sit at the feet of Eliphaz Levi
and to learn from him about the Hermetic Order of Egypt.
In short, by the end of the nineteenth century, magic and Masonry
had become closely connected. And the man who, more than any
other, was responsible for their association was Cagliostro.
All of which explains my excitement when I heard the suggestion
that Lovecraft’s father was an Egyptian Freemason. If that was true,
then there was already ‘magic in the family’, so to speak. And
H.P.L.’s interest in it may have been originally stimulated by his
father. For Winfield Lovecraft was not under permanent restraint in
an institution after his original breakdown in Chicago. Sprague de
Camp makes it clear that he lived at home much of the time, being
admitted to hospital only during periods of hallucination. So during
the most formative period of his young life—between the ages of
48
three and eight—Howard must have seen a great deal of his father.
The lonely man, like the sickly child, spent much of his time confined
to the house. And no doubt the lonely man talked, in his rambling
way, of all kinds of things that had once interested him.
Carl Tausk did what he promised. He tracked down the. ac-.
quaintance who had made the comment about Lovecraft’s father. It
was a man he had known, on and off, for several years. Dr. Stanislaus
Hinterstoisser is the author of a history of monetary policy in the last
decade of the Austro—Hungarian empire. Born in Liegnitz, Silesia, on
23 August 1896, Dr. Hinterstoisser gained his doctorate in political
theory at the University of Dresden in 1925. Dr. Hinterstoisser lived
most of his adult life in Vienna. His wife, who was a niece of Von
Hindenburg, inherited a country estate at Mondsee, near Salzburg,
and the Hinterstoissers divided their time equally between there and
Vienna.
Following a nervous breakdown in 1933—partly due to his fears
about Hitler’s rise to power—Hinterstoisser became a patient of C. G.
Jung at Zurich, where he lived for two years. It was Jung who lent him
a book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena, by Thomas Jay Hud-
son; this is not, as it sounds, a book about the occult, but an attempt to
examine ‘the vast potential of man’s mind’, including dreams, hyp-
notism and telepathy. As a result of reading the book, Dr. Hin-
terstoisser became fascinated by this problem of the untapped poten-
tial of the human mind, and began to study the history of magic and
psychical phenomena. The result was his Prolegomena zu einer Ges-
chichte der Magie in three volumes, published in Vienna in 1943. The
entire edition was seized and destroyed by the Nazis, (although one
copy is known to have survived), and Dr. Hinterstoisser was only
saved from a concentration camp by the personal intervention of
Himmler.*
After the war, Hinterstoisser founded the Salzburg Institute for the
Study of Magic and Occult Phenomena. Understandably, Carl Tausk
was completely unaware of Hinterstoisser’s interest in such mat-
ters—as were most of his colleagues in Vienna. This was not because
Hinterstoisser made any secret of his interest in magic, but simply
because he regarded it as a hobby, a relaxation from his study of
economic history.
It turned out that Dr. Hinterstoisser knew of my work—he had
actually reviewed the German edition of The Outsider in the Pro-
ceedings of the Institute, and was an admirer of The Mind Parasites,
the first novel I wrote for Derleth in the Lovecraftian tradition. He
wrote to me, via Carl, telling me that he could not go into details
about the source of his knowledge about Lovecraft’s father, but that
* I am indebted for these details to Fr. Gertrud Hinterstoisser.

49
he could state categorically not only that Winfield Lovecraft was an
Egyptian Freemason, but that he possessed at least two magical
works, the famous Picatrix of Maslama ibn Ahma al-Magriti, also
known as pseudo-Magriti, and Godziher’s Book of the Essence of the
Soul.
At my request, Dr. Hinterstoisser wrote me a letter, which I had his
permission to quote in our book on Lovecraft. In fact, I have printed it
in full, with a few minor omissions. He writes as if we have had no
previous correspondence, but this is because I asked him to do so. In
this letter, he makes the highly controversial statement that Cag-
liostro ‘bequeathed to his followers certain manuscripts, including the
original Necronomicon’.
Now when Dr. Hinterstoisser first made this statement, in a letter
dated 4 August 1976, he took my breath away. I wrote back immedi-
ately asking him to elaborate. It was all intensely frustrating, because
Hinterstoisser’s English was no more than adequate, and his letter to
me had been translated by Carl Tausk. Carl was in Italy when I wrote
to Hinterstoisser, so it was two months before a reply reached me. In
it, Hinterstoisser states: ‘The Necronomicon is not a single work by
one man—Alhazred—but a compilation of magical material from
Akkadia, Babylonia, Persia and Israel, probably made by Alkindi
[Ya’kub ibn Ishak ibn Sabbah al-Kindi, who died about a.p. 850] It
claims to contain the remnants of a magical tradition pre-dating
mankind.’ He goes on to state that the section that later became
known as The Book of Secret Names is, in fact, the ninth chapter of the
second part of this work. From all this, assumed that the work we call
the Necronomicon was only a small part of a much larger work, and I
asked Hinterstoisser the title of the larger work. He was never clear
about this, although in his last letter to me (April 1977), he speaks of
the Kitab ma’ani al-nafs as ‘the grand compilation’. However, I
discover that this is simply the Arabic name for the Book of the
Essence of the Soul which he referred to in his first letter. Hin-
terstoisser’s death on 10 October 1977 prevented me from pressing
for a clearer explanation.
But he made it plain that the ‘total compilation’ is a comprehensive
treatise on magic, much of which is derived from the tablets from the
library of Assurbanipai. It seems to include an immense amount of
material that we would now consider scientific or philosophical (for
example, a long section on the nature of man), as well as chapters on
astrology, alchemy, colour-lore and the making of talismans. But
the ninth chapter of Part Two is entitled: ‘Of the History of the
Ancient Ones’, and this seeins fairly clearly to be the basis of the
Necronomicon.
In reply to my question, Hinterstoisser stated that he did not
50
possess a copy of the Necronomicon, but that he had seen a copy in
Boston. Again, I had no time to question him further; but it is worth
bearing in mind that Winfield Lovecraft’s business centred arouna
Boston, and that the city was one of the earliest sites of a Masonic
temple.
I print Hinterstoisser’s letter, dated Christmas Day 1976, with no
attempt at commentary. It contains many points that I would have
wished cleared up—for example, the identity of ‘Tall Cedar’, who
taught Winfield Lovecraft to read the Necronomicon (and why did he
have to be taught to read it?), and the strange business of Fouquier
Tinville who obtained it ‘not without torture’ from the followers of
Cagliostro.
Now all this would, I agree, be intolerably frustrating if it were all
we could discover about the Necronomicon. Fortunately, this is not
so. Hinterstoisser’s letter so fascinated Robert Turner that he was
stimulated to begin his investigations all over again, this time in the
British Museum. In his second letter to me, Hinterstoisser remarks
that a copy of Alkindi’s compilation was catalogued by the librarian
of King Rudolph II in Prague. Robert Turner recalled that Rudolph
II was the king with whom John Dee and Edward Kelly spent several
years in Prague. And, according to Lovecraft, John Dee translated
the Necronomicon. We had both assumed that this was Lovecraft’s
invention. But if Lovecraft’s father actually possessed some magical
books, including the ‘Secret Names’ chapter of Alkindi, and if Love-
craft later based his Chthulhu mythology on the Secret Names, then
nothing seems more likely than that the chapter in the possession of
Winfield Lovecraft was Dee’s translation of the Necronomicon,
copied by him during his time in Prague.
One of his earliest, and most exciting, discoveries was the letter to
John Dee concerning ‘the towne of donwiche’, partly submerged by
the sea. Dunwich (pronounced Dunnich) still exists in East Suffolk,
four miles south-west of Southwold, and Bartholemew’s Gazetteer
states that it was once the capital of East Anglia. Dee was fascinated
by the results of excavations at Dunwich, particularly by the discovery
of the huge stone casket shaped like a man. The parallels between
Lovecraft’s Dunwich and the Dunwich described in Jean Carter’s
Guide convinced Robert Turner that Lovecraft went to the trouble of
finding out a great deal about the English village.
Further study of Dee manuscripts in the British Museum led him to
the Liber Logaeth of Dee, a cipher manuscript. In his own con-
tribution to this volume, he tells how, with the help of the computer
expert David Langford, he proved beyond all doubt that this was the
encoded manuscript that Dee had copied in the library of Rudolph II.
David Langford has contributed a section describing exactly how he
=f
deciphered the code with the help of computers. Parts of it are beyond
my comprehension, but I think it important that this explanation
should be printed in full. This strikes me as one of the most remark-
able pieces of historical detective work since Champollion’s
decipherment of the Rosetta Stone.
Here, at last, then, we are able to present readers with a large part
of the forbidden chapter of Alkindi’s treatise on magic. At a later
date, it is proposed to print the whole text, together with a full
commentary. Robert Turner is also working at present on a detailed
comparison of Lovecraft’s Dunwich and the English village, which
will be included. The publisher of this book insists that what is
important is to offer the results of our researches, together with a
sampling of the Necronomicon, the preparation of the complete
edition may take several years.
I must warn that admirers of Lovecraft who are hoping to discover
terrible forbidden secrets will be disappointed. The material is excit-
ing enough to students of magic, but it will mean little to the average
reader. But then, the same is true of works like The Key of Solomon,
The Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, and the great classic
works on alchemy studied by Jung. It took Jung twenty years of study
to uncover the secrets of the alchemists (and even now I am far from
sure that his explanations are correct.)
On the other hand, students of magic may find these pages among
the most exciting they have ever investigated. The starting point of
most modern ‘magicians’ is the magic of the Golden Dawn; this, in
turn, was based on the Kabbalistic tradition, a basically Jewish trad-
ition of mysticism. There can be no doubt that the Secret Names is
based ona far older magical tradition that was already ancient when it
was recorded in Sumeria. It is true that by the time it reached John
Dee, it had been adulterated with Egyptian, Persian and Arabic
magic, and even with Gnosticism and Greek mysticism. Yet scholars
who have seen the text believe that it should be possible to remove the
accretions, layer by layer, like cleaning a picture, until the remains of
the original are revealed.
For readers who know little or nothing about magic, I would
suggest Georges Chevalier’s The Sacred Magician, A Ceremonial
Diary (Paladin Books, 1976) as a short and painless introduction to
The Necronomicon. It is simply the diary of a modern magician,
describing how he spent six months performing the magical Oper-
ation described by Abraha-Melin (or Abra-Melin) the Mage, and
what results he obtained. This should convince anyone that the
practice of magic is a long, tedious and extremely precise business.
Anyone who cares to repeat Georges Chevalier’s experience only has
to buy—or borrow from the library—a copy of MacGregor Mathers’

32
translation of Abra-Melin the Mage. (But he should be warned that,
once begun, the operation must be completed, or—according to magi-
cians—the consequences can be extremely unpleasant.) Aleister Crow-
ley has described in his Confessions how he performed the Operation
at his house by Loch Ness, and actually saw demonic entities parading
around the room. We may dismiss him as a liar; but all serious students
of magic would accept that the correct performance of the operation
should produce a result like this.
The Secret Names describes a similar Operation for summoning the
Old Ones. It is not printed in full here, although any student of magic
will find it easy enough to reconstruct from ihe sections offered in
these pages. I am unwilling, at this stage, to venture an opinion about
whether it would actually ‘work’. To begin with, it seems possible that
we no longer understand certain operations prescribed in the ritual.
And then, of course, there is always the possibility that the whole
thing is a rigmarole of superstitious nonsense, and that the ‘Old Ones’
never existed. Only one thing is quite certain: that once the ritual is
published in full, groups of ‘magicians’ all over the world will attempt
to summon Hastur, Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu. It should then
become clear fairly soon whether the Old Ones have any existence in
fact. For what it is worth, I venture the opinion that the really
important work on the Necronomicon will be carried out not by
magicians, but by followers of Carl Jung, who will regard it as a
document describing so-far unsuspected layers of the unconscious
mind.

It is, |agree, infuriating that there should be so many loose ends to

this story. Obviously, this will not always be so. Even now, I have
asked an expert researcher to find out all he can about Egyptian
Masonry in Boston in the late nineteenth century, and, if possible,
about Winfield Lovecraft’s involvement. There must undoubtedly be
records describing his initiation, and what grade he achieved. I am at
present in correspondence with a Czech scholar who will attempt to
trace the original compendium by Alkindi in the library of the half-
mad Emperor Rudolph II. He had been able to tell me that when Dee
and Kelly left Prague for Leipzig in May 1686, the papal nuncio
submitted a document to Rudolph accusing them of conjuring up
‘forbidden spirits’. Had Dee been trying out the ritual of the Secret
Names? Since the communist authorities frown on the whole idea of
‘occultism’, my correspondent will have to proceed with caution, so
his quest may possibly have less chance of success than that of my
American friend.
But what seems to me perfectly clear at this stage is not only that
3
Lovecraft learned about the chapter of Secret Names from his father,
but that the actual document actually passed into his hands. There are
far too many similarities between his Cthulhu mythos and the Dee
cipher manuscript to admit of any other explanation.
This again raises some interesting questions, to which my old friend
Sprague de Camp is at the moment seeking answers. How did How-
ard come into possession of the book? Since his father died when he
was eight, we can hardly suppose that Winfield Lovecraft handed it to
him. Besides, it would presumably have been the property of the
Boston Temple. It seems equally unlikely that Susie Lovecraft, How-
ard’s mother, carefully preserved it and handed it to her son when he
came of age. She was a typically puritanical daughter of New Eng-
land, and would probably have burned it. Besides, her husband’s
death from syphilis must have left a most unpleasant impression on
her; she probably regarded his masonic activities with horror,
associating them with his ‘sinful’ past. We must suppose that Winfield
Lovecraft’s papers lay untouched in his desk until his son, in his
tireless search for reading material, discovered the chapter of Secret
Names, and probably the two other works mentioned by Hin-
terstoisser.
And this in itself could explain a great deal about Lovecraft’s
development as a writer. He grew up with a father who was drifting
into total insanity, and who suffered from hallucinations. (This we
know from Sprague de Camp.) Surely some of those hallucinations
must have been of the entities he had read about in the Necronomicon
(to give the Secret Names its more familiar title)? And surely, in that
case, these names would become the bogey-men of Lovecraft’s child-
hood? When he eventually found the manuscript, he must surely have
felt his hair stirring on his head? Any modern child who treasures a
pornographic magazine under the mattress of his bed would under-
stand the sensation. This was truly ‘forbidden’, a secret he could never
share with his mother or aunts.
Why was the young Lovecraft so obsessed with astronomy? Was it
because he wondered whether the Old Ones really came from out
there? What is perfectly clear is that by the age of fifteen or so, he had
strongly reacted against the whole notion. He must have decided to
oa the bogeys of his childhood, to take his stand on reason and
ogic.
Then why, in that case, did he begin to write horror stories? A man
who 1s possessed by the ‘vision of science’ is more likely to write
science fiction—H. G. Wells is an obvious example. Yet from the
beginning, there was no doubt that this champion of reason and sanity
was obsessed by charnel houses and monsters and evil entities. And it
seems that, at a certain point, he decided that he might as well
54
exorcise the bogeys of his childhood by making use of them in his
fiction. It was probably a gesture of bravado, a cry of ‘I don’t believe
in you’. For there can be no doubt whatever that Lovecraft did not
believe in Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. His letters make it clear that he
remained a convinced rationalist for most of his adult life.
In a recent letter, Carl Tausk has made another interesting point.
When Lovecraft began to publish the Chulhu stories, there must have
been many Egyptian Masons who realized precisely what he was
doing. Surely they must have contacted him and pointed out that he
was publishing carefully preserved secrets? If so, then the develop-
ment of the Chulhu mythos in his stories was not simply a gesture of
emancipation from childhood bogeys; it was also a gesture of defiance
at the Egyptian Freemasons.
Any reader who wants to pursue these speculations further has
only to read Sprague de Camp’s biography, and Lovecraft’s own
letters, published in five volumes by Arkham House. Did he, as
Robert Turner is inclined to believe, become slowly convinced of the
reality of the Old Ones? Was he ‘possessed’ in the last years of his
life? Does this explain his lethargy, and the low temperature of his
body?
But I see no reason why I should end this introduction on a note of
occult speculation; I have no intention of trying to make the reader’s
flesh creep. Lovecraft spent his life trying to do precisely that, and
finally gave up in boredom. So let us summarize what we actually
know, and what we can deduce from reason. We know that the Secret
Names really existed (although we do not know whether Lovecraft
called it the Necronomicon, or whether this was the actual title of the
manuscript). We are pretty certain that Winfield Lovecraft possessed
a copy—either of the whole, or of fragments. We are inclined to
accept that this copy passed to Lovecraft, and became the basis of his
Cthulhu stories.
As far as literary history is concerned, this is all we need to know.
From our point of view, it makes not the slightest difference whether
Kenneth Grant was right, and the Old Ones really existed—(or
perhaps do exist). No doubt students of magic will feel that the
questions deserves to be pursued. No doubt there are many readers of
Lovecraft who take the opposite view, and regard with misgivings the
prospect of Great Cthulhu being roused from his long sleep in R’lyeh.
But the facts, as Mr. Gragrind said, are all that really concern us. And
I think that no one will disagree that, in this case, the facts are as
fascinating and extraordinary as anything in the Cthulhu mythos.

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 Letter from
Dr. Stanislaus Hinterstoisser
President of the Salzburg Institute for the Study
of Magic and Occult Phenomena, addressed to
Mr. Colin Wilson, and translated, with emen-
dations, by Dr. Carl Tausk

Franz-Kleingasse 315, Vienna 1190

Dear Sir,
Long acquaintance with your esteemed colleague (or should I say
co-worker?) Dr. Tausk, of the Vienna Technological Institute, plus a
fairly thorough knowledge of your extensive writings, have convinced
me that you are a fit and proper person to whom to entrust infor-
mation of peculiar weight and importance. As you are aware, I and -
my assistants have spent many years studying magical phenomena, in
the modern libraries of Europe, the United States, and Japan, as well
as in the old libraries and MSS. collections of Venice, Saragossa,
Oxford, and Kerman. And we have travelled much further in order
to interview practitioners of the occult arts—even into situations of
actual danger (vide the Proceedings of our Society, passim ).* I think,
without immodesty, I may compare myself to the great Arminius
Vambéry, a relation by marriage of my wife’s, whose travels in
Central Asia rival those of the Comte de Gobineau some years
earlier, and whose adoption of Bahaism as his religion astonishea his
contemporaries. His deep and thorough researches into the magical
traditions of the Orient are known only to some who can read Hun-
garian, since he wrote in the subject on that language in order that his
discoveries should not fall into the hands of irresponsible or immature
persons; nor have these MSS. ever been published or translated.
As is evident from my list of publications, I began as an historian
pure and simple, in association with Professor Dr. Lutz and Dr. Deak
of the University of Budapest, and was led into a study of the occult
* Vero ffentlichungen der Gesellschaft zur Untersuchung magischer und okkulter
Erscheinungen (Vienna, 1911-38, 1945-77).

auf
more or less by chance. But that is another story. Suffice it to state
that the more I studied magic, the more I became aware of its
far-reaching practical effects—of late, as I can only think, directed
against myself; or rather, I should say, released against myself, in a
manner (I trust I do not sound whimsical) remarkably similar to the
way in which your Mind Parasites attacked the perceptions of their
victims. Indeed, when I read the novel in question, I was over-
whelmed by its similarity to my own experiences and by the degree of
its correlation with known historical and psychological phenomena.
The relevance of this in relation to Lovecraft (that extraordinarily
unstylish writer, in the considered opinion of Dr. Williams) will
become apparent as I proceed.
Ihave read enough of H. P. Lovecraft’s work to realize that we are
dealing here with a relatively unsophisticated person, unlearned and
not too well acquainted with stylistic niceties (though I would not go
so far as Dr. Williams in condemning his style), who ventured indis-
creetly into areas of study and experience which should be reserved
for those properly equipped to cope with them—a person who man-
aged, perhaps on account of his innate telepathic capacity (of which,
at least, there can be no doubt) to make contact with forces far
beyond his power to control. These ultimately destroyed him.
Of course, it took time for me to be able to appreciate the impor-
tance, if not of Lovecraft himself, at least of the forces which he had
released. I was initially much too much put off by his inadequate grasp
of science, his mountains higher than the Himalayas situated, not on
the moon, but on the Antarctic continent—well enough surveyed
even at the time when he wrote, before the war. (I was in fact a
member of the expedition sent to Antarctica by the German govern-
ment of the time, about which there has been so much speculation.)
Also, it was not to be expected that so unsophisticated and relatively
uneducated a researcher could possibly conjure up significant results
by himself, unaided. However, just as a power-worker, controlling
complicated machinery, the construction of which in turn derives
from the accumulated experimental knowledge of several gen-
erations of technologists, is able, even by accident, to plunge a whole
city into darkness, or illuminate it, simply by pulling a lever, so a
person of Lovecraft’s stamp, drawing on the accumulated wisdom of
the ages (and we must remember that almost as much has been
forgotten as has been learned) may find that he possesses powers,
albeit imperfectly controlled, far beyond what might have been
expected of a being of his calibre. Not that I wish to pour scorn on
nim, whatever his shortcomings. How many ‘great men’, if their
success be properly analyzed, owe it more to their luck in happening
upon the well-springs of power, much as many persons have the
58
capacity to water-divine, without in any way understanding that they
are merely managing to turn on influence like electricity, without any
cleverness of their part being necessary. One has only to consider the
undoubted influence of the planets upon character and fate, now ably
documented by Professor Hans Eysenck and a score of others, to
realize to what extent we are creatures of our destiny, ‘rough-hew it
how we will’.
Research which I conducted on my visit to New England in March
1975 showed conclusively that Winfield Lovecraft was a member of
the Egyptian branch of the Freemasons, founded, or at least made
manifest, by ‘Alexander, Count Cagliostro’—the notorious impostor,
yes, but also the dangerous manipulator of hidden forces. In Prov-
idence, Rhode Island, that sleepy old city so much given to culture
and the things of the mind, I made inquiries which led me to the
present practitioners of Egyptian Masonry. As you are aware, they
retain a great deal of occult lore expressed in rituals explicable only by
initiates though shared to some extent, as mere rituals, by the prac-
titioners of ordinary Masonry. As you know, all masonic rituals are
more or less secret, but none so secret as those of the more recondite
sects—or, I might add, those of the higher degrees of otherwise
normal lodges. It is no secret that I have, during my long life, joined
several different masonic, magical, and sufistic sects, in order to
increase the volume of my information regarding their activities.
Needless to say, such activities, prompted by scientific curiosity
rather than reverence, and dedicated to the amassing of information
which, in theory at least, might be published, have made me a large
number of enemies. The sects involved were a varied collection, most
of them no more than semi-rotarian groups with some mumbo-jumbo
added, others really political conspiracies, all the more effective
because they operate from the shadows, and yet others with con-
siderable magical expertise, sometimes of a highly dangerous nature.
The Egyptian Masons fit into the last category, and have to some
extent influenced all other branches of Masonry with their pyramid
rituals (see above). In fact, many of their members, including Love-
craft’s father, have also been members of perfectly normal masonic
lodges, affiliated to the Grand lodge of London (like most American
lodges) and rightly asserted by no less an authority than Nesta
Webster to be wholly innocuous. However, the Egyptian Masons are
more closely involved with the Grand Orient Lodge of France, a less
innocuous organization, which was originally set up by Weishaupt’s
Illuminati, and which is closely associated with the Society of Jaco-
bins, to which every single leader of the French Revolution actually
belonged, and which today contains within its membership both
President Giscard D’Estaing and his soi-disant opponent M.
ay)
 e Bal-
Mitterand. One secret Illuminatus and Jacobin was Giusepp
samo, alias Cagliostro, who, like Rasputi n in Russian, played akey part
in the Revolution by discrediting the royal family (in the affair of Marie
ed
Antoinette and the diamond necklace) and was personally instruct
by Weishaupt himself—that J esuit-educated conspirator whose unpub-
lished papers contain, in addition to much else, the original draft of
what came to be known as the Communist Manifesto when it was
finally published in 1848. The interest of Cagliostro from our present
point of view lies in the fact that he bequeathed certain MSS. to his
followers of the Egyptian sect, including excerpts from the original
Necronomicon. It may seem strange that this almost anonymous per-
son, a humble native of Palermo, should have had so important a MS.
in his possession. It is not generally known that his direct ancestor
niade a lot of money impersonating the last (anachronistic) Crusader,
Sebastian of Portugal, who probably died fighting at the Battle of
Alcazar in 1578. (I say ‘probably’, since that is the accepted version,
but scientific honesty forces me to add that, on the evidence adduced
by his contemporary Father Texeira and others, it looks very much as
though the Sicilian claimant who appeared twenty years after his death
was in very truth the missing King.)
My own information (which I give with some trepidation, for fear
of revealing inadvertently how I obtained it) is that Lovecraft’s father
was taught to read those excerpts from the Necronomicon by none
other than Tall Cedar (the revelation of whose ‘real’ name would
even now involve yet more odium being piled upon my head than is
already the case). Tall Cedar, in turn, derived the holy text from The
Innermost Shrine, who had been given it by none other than Fouquier
Tinville, the Dzherzhinsky of the French Revolution, who obtained
it, not without the use of torture, from the followers of Cagliostro
himself. The Innermost Shrine, as you know, was of Mingrelian
origin, and was at least 140 years old when he died.
I will not weary you with a lengthy account of how I have traced
back the Necronomicon to the ancient world. You will recall my
Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte der Magie, all three volumes of
which were destroyed as soon as they appeared, although I under-
stand that Dr. Williams, as a member of our Society also has copies of
all three volumes in his possession. Suffice it to say that I have been
able to trace the line of magical contacts back from Cagliostro to
members of the Hassidic sect and their predecessors among the
Sephardim of Spain. However, there are indications that the Nec-
ronomicon was not fully appreciated among them, since not only did
the Hebrew communities have their own magical traditions going
back to the Cabbala, and ultimately deriving from the Hermetic
tradition of Egypt and Babylonian magic, but there were also many
60
influential rabbis who set their face against any magical mani-
festation, and had solid Talmudic authority for such an attitude. The
text of the Necronomicon, probably in a far fuller version than now
exists, reached them via the Arabs of Spain, and more than one of my
colleagues has drawn attention to the similarities between the Nec-
ronomicon and the Kitab-al-Ihud. However, there is no doubt that, in
common with so much else in Muslim culture, this magical MS. goes
back to the Persians, and the key name in this connection is that of
Dariush al-Gabr (the Unbeliever), a Zoroastrian of the ninth century
who wrote in both Arabic and Persian. It must have been in Persia
that the Necronomicon took on its present form, for the code in which
it is written is based in the idea of the Pahlavi script. You may not
know that this script was not only originally used for the Semitic
Aramaic language, but represented actual Aramaic words, in their
original word order, or an approximation to it, which then had to be
translated, read, and reconstructed into Persian all at the same time.
No wonder the phonology of Pahlavi had to be reconstructed on the
basis of phonological law by projecting Achaemenian sounds into
the future and Arabized New Persian sounds into the past! Only
the discovery of Ossetic texts (in the language of the Iranian Alans of
the Caucasus) has enabled us to confirm these projections. _
Of course, the Persian tradition, in its turn, links up with Baby-
lonian magic and the Hermetic tradition of the Egyptian priesthood
of Thoth. It is not possible at this point in time to trace exactly how the
Necronomicon was handed on, though many of the most likely names
are mentioned in my Prolegomena. What matters is that we are now
able to compare the statements of the ancients with those of the
Necronomicon itself. Plato, in the Timaeus, makes it clear that he
derived his information about Atlantis from the priesthood of Thoth,
who gave him a date for the destruction of that city and civilization
some nine thousand years before his time. Not only did the priests of
Thoth have written traditions (now, alas, only known to us in a few
hieroglyphic inscriptions plus some faulty MSS. in the cursive form),
they also drew upon Sumerian writings which considerably antedate
the Egyptian First Dynasty. My lead in this case came from Waddell’s
well-known studies, Makers of Civilisation, etc., in which he makes
use of analagous methods to elucidate Sanskrit, Celtic, and other
ancient sources in the light of his assumption of Sumerian antece-
dents. The method proved most successful, accompanied as it was by
a wealth of linguistic data, and I was able to build upon his researches
in making my partial translation of the Necronomicon. It was the fruit
of many years of ‘hard labour’, and now rests in a place protected not
only by the normal safeguards but also, believe it or not, by magic
rituals. I have seen too much of the efficacy of these to despise them
61
any longer. I will draw upon the text of my partial translation until my
death, after which I have made provision for it to be handed on to
persons who will respect the work and know how to preserve what is
valuable in it, while protecting themselves against its evil influences.
But much more remains to be translated, and much depends on how
much longer the Austrian government is prepared to fund our com-
puter programmes. The Necronomicon, as you know, is in code of a
particularly complicated kind, combining elements of difficult scripts
with the usual tricks of the code-builder’s trade. So you see, my
pre-war training on the Enigma machine came in useful after all. (1
am, as you know, inclined to be something of a ‘wag’.) And, strangely
enough, Dr. Williams’s war-time involvement in the radar pro-
gramme at Bletchley Park also came in extremely useful. How sad
that we could not have been co-operating from the beginning—in a
worthy cause, of course.
It was Dr. Williams, with his English education, who realized that
three very different writers had stumbled upon parts of the truth. The
first was the children’s writer Enid Nesbit, wife of the philandering
Fabian, John Bland. She began merely by trying to interest children in
her stories, but soon found that the best way was to write about magic.
She makes use of many of the usual props: a wishing carpet, an
amulet, and a fairy (albeit a strange one, furry with eyes on long
stalks), but she does so imaginatively. The carpet actually appears to
move, and goes rigid, as is the way with carpets in the Thousand and
One Nights. The wishes granted by the Psammead-fairy come true in
a way which is both ‘true to life’ and very disconcerting. But what
interested us most was the Amulet. This was only a half-amulet, with
the power to grow into an arch through which the children passed into
other times in search of the other half, which would make a complete
amulet and enable them to achieve their heart’s desire. In response to
a Word of Power, so close to the real one as to make me tremble, the
half-amulet grew into a great arch and the children passed through it.
This is the Way, and you have written of it. I can only treat such a
subject with the awe it deserves.
Another helpful writer was Tolkien, whose fantasies of Sauron and
the powers of darkness in Mordor came too close for comfort where
modern political developments are concerned. His allegory was a
veiled allusion to what has really been happening, and inevitably
aroused considerable resentment.
But most important was Lovecraft whose apparent obsessions
revealed almost too much of the terrible for our finite minds to be
able to comprehend or grapple with.
But enough of all these leads. To describe how we followed them up
would not, I think, be tedious, but there simply is not the time. I feel it.
62
 I must tell you, with a certain foreboding, that the mind parasites of
which you have written are in all truth existent, influential, and even,
under different guises, visible. To describe thern as evil, as I did when
Ifirst happened upon them in the course of my quest, is ridiculously
inadequate. It is like an ant calling an ant-eater evil. Better, it is like
ants calling a man wicked for treading on their anthill. For the mind
parasites are an aspect of what Lovecraft called the Great Old Ones,
and are only evilly disposed in so far as the great spaces of our inner
minds interest them as a sphere for exploitation (or rather, I should
say that the great collective subconscious that we share interests
them), whereas our petty everyday beings interest them no more than
would those of ants. It is our semi-eternal (dare I suggest ‘eternal’)
spirit that interests them. But it is tiring to be the plaything of forces
which are both elemental and aware. I am tired, as a kitten is tired of
being played with by relentless children. The headaches of which I
have had frequent cause to complain are becoming more and more
severe, and now I can only work for a couple of hours at a stretch.
There remains but horror where before there was only lucid curiosity.
I warn you, doubly warn you. You must be careful, bold but cir-
cumspect. The Way is inward. . . . Blessings, I will return to this when
I feel better,
With great esteem,
Dr. Stanislaus Hinterstoisser

Postscript by Dr. Carl Tausk .

As you know from my telegram, Dr. Hinterstoisser died shortly
after writing the above. Fortunately, I have the main body of his notes
and our partial translation of the Necronomicon.

63
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 The Necronomicon: a Commentary
by
ROBERT TURNER

I first became interested in the Necronomicon a little over five years ago
after my attention had been drawn to the subject via a chance encounter
with the strangely inspiring works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. It all
began when a friend passed on to me a copy of The Haunter ofthe Dark*
and from the first hurried reading I became fascinated with the possi-
bility that Lovecraft had based his enigmatic grimoire upon some
genuine magical text. During the following weeks I read through the
complete collection of Lovecraft’s writings, accumulating a file of
detailed notes relating to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. Gradually, I
became aware of a continuous thread running throughout the entire
structure, uniting the major mythological and magical concepts to form a
common whole. The grimoires of antiquity, New England witch lore, the
magic of the Orient and mediaeval Europe were all found to be pre-
valent features in Lovecraft’s arcanum, cleverly integrated and assem-
bled under-a single heading: “The Necronomicon’.
Lovecraft attributes the origin of the book to Abdul Alhazred, a
mad Arab poet of the Yemen held to have penned the work in the
year A.D. 950 at Damascus. From the original Arabic the Nec-
ronomicon is said to have passed through various translations, the
latest of which purporting to be seventeenth-century Spanish—an
English version being accredited’ to the celebrated Elizabethan
magician-philosopher Dr. John Dee (1527-1608).
Since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 several manuscripts claimed to be
the Necronomicon have come to light, by far the most promising of
these being that discovered by L. Sprague de Camp in northern Iraq.
‘De Camp’s codex unearthed in the tombs of Duria and written
entirely in the cryptic characters of ancient Duriac (an unusual form
of Syriac) has for some years been considered by many occultists to be
the true Necronomicon, and although recent research work carried

* The Haunter of the Dark and other tales of Horror, H. P. Lovecraft, Gollancz,
1966.
+ Published in facsimile under the title A/ Azif, with an introduction by L. Sprague
de Camp, Owlswick Press, Philadelphia, 1973.

65
out by Carl Tausk in Vienna has proved otherwise, the text (AL AZIF)
has been found to contain magical formulae and ancient lore relating
to a similar if not identical tradition.
For some time I searched in vain for a basic myth pattern which
reflected with a high degree of accuracy the concepts embodied in the
Cthulhu Mythos. I felt instinctively that the legends of some ancient
culture must hold the key to what I expected to be the true interpre-
tation of these perplexing mysteries. None seemed to fit the picture
entirely, they were all either lacking in detail, antiquity, or hopelessly
obscured by an impenetrable veil of indigenous racial symbolism. I
needed something closer to the source, a really ancient creation myth,
something primal and devoid of masking elaborations.
As usual the answer I had been seeking turned up indirectly in a
totally unsuspected manner. While reading Colin Wilson’s critical
essay of H. P. Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream* I came across a
reference to The Call of Cthulhu and the following comment: “. . . the
story seems to owe more to Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine
with its myths of Atlantis and Lemuria’. That was it! My mental
process ran something like this: Blavatsky=the Secret Doctrine=The
Book of Dzyan—the oldest book in the world. Blavatsky’s vast work,
The Secret Doctrine? is in fact by and large an expanded commentary
on the book of Dzyan which is in turn held to be a fragmentary extract
from the Mani Koumbourm, the great repository of sacred writings
and magical secrets attributed to the Dzugarians—a long vanished
race who once inhabited the mountain regions of northern Tibet. An
examination of the text revealed what I had been looking for, a series
of verse or ‘stanzas’ which tell in rather abstract, but nevertheless
pure terms, of how the earth was once possessed by strange chaotic
beings and incredible monsters said to have crossed the gulf from other
universes in incalculably ancient times. The stanzas go on to relate how
these ‘other’ entities were finally expelled from the manifested uni-
verse by the intervention of Forces allied to the cause of Order.
In several of his tales Lovecraft refers to the book of Dzyan and
segments such as: *... the Flames came. ... They slew the Forms
which were two and four-faced. They fought the Goat-Men, and the
Dog-Headed Men, and those with fishes bodies . . . [They] . . . took
huge she animals unto them. They begat them dumb races . . . Mon-
sters they bred. A race of crooked red-hair-covered monsters going
on all fours. . . . They built huge cities, of rare earths and metals. . . .
They cut Their own images, in Their size and likeness, and wor-
shipped them ... the first great waters came. They swallowed the
* The Strength to Dream, Colin Wilson, Gollancz, 1963.
+ The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky, 3 vols., The Theosophical Publishing
House, London 1928.

66
seven great islands, the serpents who re-descended, who made peace
with the Fifth who taught and instructed it . . .” (extracts from stanzas
2, 8, 11, 12)}-—will be seen to strike strong parallels with the myths that
surround the arrival of the Great Old Ones upon earth, their acts of
creation, battles with other primal forms and final alliance with the
Cthulhu Spawn. Stazas 11 and 12 hint at the ultimate expulsion of the
Great Old Ones by the Elder Gods: ‘All holy saved [the creatures
natural to the earth], the unholy destroyed [their forms being dis-
persed to the void]. The moon-coloured were gone for ever.’*
Therefore in The Book of Dzyan | felt that 1 had discovered a
somewhat fragmentary but none the less adequate mythological back-
drop to the Cthulhu mythos. A fundamental pattern relating closely to
the body of Elder Lore said to be recorded in the Necronomicon.
My next task was to consider the possible contents of Alhazred’s
infamous text. Although in the first instance the Arab’s book must be
considered as primarily nigromantic—being concerned with the evo-
cation of evil entities, chaos, darkness and disorder—certain redeeming
elements make their presence felt through the co-existence of formulae
devoted to the subjugation of demoniac powers. The latter would seem
to indicate an alignment with the traditional magical works that con-
stitute the Solomonic Cycle, and to these I turned my attention.
The original text of the Necronomicon—known as Al Azif—is said
to have been written in tenth-century Arabic. I therefore limited my
initial line of research to grimoires known to have existed at this
period in history. Three major magical treatises and their numerous
offshoots typify the brand of occultism current in Alhazred’s sup-
posed era: first we have the celebrated Kitab-al-Uhud,+ a mysterious
Arabic manuscript said to have been presented to King Solomon by
the Demon Asmodeus; secondly the early Arabic versions of the
notorious Key of Solomon—later to become a major influence in
European Renaissance magic. And thirdly, a most curious com-
pilation of Hebrew and Aramaic spells (containing marginal notes in
Arabic), The Sword of Moses.+ As an appropriate adjunct to the
Necronomicon the latter of these texts must be considered as most
fitting. The date of The Sword of Moses has not been positively
established, although we have proof of its existence in the early part
of the eleventh century as it is mentioned in correspondence between
certain would-be magicians who lived in the Tunisian city of
Kairouan, and Haya Gaon head of the great school in Babylon—who
* The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky, Vols. 1 and 2. See also: Man, the Measure
of All things, Sri Krishna Prem and Sri Madhava Ashish, Rider, 1969; Man Son of
Man, Sri Madhava Ashish, Rider, 1970.
+ See Oriental Magic’, Idries Shah, Rider, 1956.
+ The Sword of Moses, M. Gaster, Samuel Weiser, New York 1970.

67
died in 1037.* In the same context as The Sword of Moses Gaon refers
to two other books on sorcery—The Great and small Heavenly Halls
and The Lord of the Law: ‘full of such terrifying nemes and seals
which have had that dreaded effect upon the uncalled, and from the
use of which those before them had shrunk... .’
The well-known ‘black books’ entitled the Sixth and Seventh Books
of Moses** are mentioned by Lovecraft in his stories, and if one
considers the relationship between these works—based on corrupt
Latin versions of the Key of Solomon and certain little known
Hebrew texts—The Leyden Papyrus, +—an ancient Egyptian book of
magic said to be one with the Eighth Book of Moses—and The Sword
of Moses—held to contain the Ninth and Tenth Books? in the series,
a system of magic closely related to concept of the Necronomicon
powerfully emerges.
The contents of the mosaic sequence of grimoires deal almost
exclusively with evil magic. The following example extracted from The
Sword of Moses is typical of several death curses included in the texts:
‘I call thee, evil spirit, cruel spirit, merciless spirit. I call thee bad
spirit, who sittest in the cemetery and takes away healing from man.
Go and place a knot in NN’s head, in his eyes, in his mouth, in his
tongue, in his throat, in his windpipe; put poisonous water in his
belly. . . ..§ Other mystic formulas reveal how to blast mountains to
fragments, pass through fire without being burnt, cause blindness,
and converse with the dead. Magical seals, sigils and mystic characters
abound together with innumerable incantations composed almost
entirely of unknown, barely pronounceable words and names such as:
‘Kso’ppghiel, N’mosnikttiel and Skd Huzi’§§; dead names belonging
to a remote and totally extinct epoch time, reflected in the title
Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names.
In addition to the influence of ancient magical texts it is evident that
Lovecraft’s projection of the Necronomicon and related Mythos
stories owes much to the occult traditions of more recent times. I have
so far been unable to trace with any degree of certainty, the exact
nature of Lovecraft’s obvious link with modern Western Esotericism,
but it seems quite likely to have been established through com-
munication with the writers Algernon Blackwood and Arthur
Machen. Both Blackwood (1869-1951) and Machen (1863-1947)
* Ibid., p.15.
** Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, anonymous, printed in U.S.A.
‘ A i. Leyden Papyrus (entitled: The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and
Leiden).
+ The Mystery of the long lost 8th, 9th, & 10th., Books of Moses, H. Gamache,
Sheldon, U.S.A.
§ The Sword of Moses, M. Gaster, joy Syl.
§§ Ibid., p. 17.
68
were Initiates of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a magical
fraternity that flourished in England at the turn of the century) and
both were adept in the vein of occult knowledge so potently pic-
torialized by Lovecraft. Many of the barbaric evocations and names of
peculiar grammatical structure abounding throughout the Cthulhu
Mythos, can be traced to a similar source as those strange tongue-
twisting intonations known to occultists as Enochian: the backbone of
the Golden Dawn system of magic. The Enochian Calls (or Keys)
originate from the occult experiments of Dr. John Dee and his
principal scryer Sir Edward Kelly, and are set down in Dee’s vast
work: Liber Mysteriorum.* Dee’s forty-eightt magical incan-
tations—received mediumistically in the year 1584—are written in an
extraterrestrial language of complex grammatical structure, and it is
held that through their employment man may pass beyond the sphere
of physical limitations, summon forth spirits to do his bidding, and
learn all mysteries of time and space.
Lovecraft’s reference to Dr. John Dee’s English translation of the
Necronomicon in The Dunwich Horror suddenly assumed a new and
exciting importance in my researches when in the Harleian Collection
of British Museum MS. I discovered a letter written to Dee by an
unknown scholar (dated 1573) concerning: ‘[the] Towne of don-
wiche’—the old spelling of Dunwich+—partly submerged in the sea.§
The latter could be of course purely coincidental, but when one
considers the fact that Dee’s English translation of the Necronomicon
features only in The Dunwich Horror, and that the town of Dunwich
in England lies at almost the same distance from London as its
fictitious counterpart in north central Massachusetts does from New
London Connecticut—approximately 75 miles in each case—a defi-
nite pattern takes shape. Is the Dunwich of Lovecraft’s tale in fact a
reconstruction, a geographical replica of that town in England which
aroused the interest of the mysterious Dr. Dee? Was it Dee’s veiled
references to certain strange items found beneath the ruins of ancient
Dunwich that excited Lovecraft’s curiosity? Dunwich was in ancient
times called by the Romans Sito Magus—the place of the master—an
area rich in archaeological treasure. Dee’s papers further give account
of a mysterious sepulchre discovered in Dunwich upon the demoli-
tion of the half-ruined Church of Saint John. The grave contained
a huge stone casket curiously fashioned in the likeness of a man.

* See Sloane MSS. 3188 and Cotton Appendix XLVI (Parts 1 and 2), British
Museum Library, London.
+ Note: Sometimes an unnumbered call is added bringing the total to 49.
t The ancient capital of East Anglia, situated between Southwold and Sizwell in
the county of Suffolk.
§ See Harleian MS. 532, British Museum Library.
69
Within the hollow interior of the stone lay a strangely attired corpse,
which upon being touched crumpled at once to a fine powder.*
It is strange to note that even to this day the dead of ancient
Dunwich continue to be denied the peace of the grave as the sea’s
persistent ravages desecrate the town’s few remaining cemeteries.
Human skulls often fall from the cliff face into the waves sometimes
accompanied by a shower of whitened bones.7
Both Dee and Lovecraft held that elemental disturbances and
mysterious energy fields centred upon certain regions of the earth.
Dunwich seems to exist simultaneously on the planes of reality and
imagination, each aspect evoking a common ‘atmosphere’ of ‘other-
ness’ linking the minds of two men separated in time by the span of
over three centuries.
The more evidence I amassed, the more convinced I became that
Lovecraft had in fact studied transcripts of Dee’s various writings
along with texts of more general magical significance that may have
been transmitted to him by Blackwood or Machen during the early
part of the twentieth century, and that the Necronomicon related to
several interconnected texts rather than an individual work.
Parallel texts to many of the more important grimoires are to be
found in both the Library of Congress and the famous Brown Uni-
versity collection where Lovecraft may have studied while con-
structing his Cthulhu Mythos. But beyond his knowledge of extant
magical texts Lovecraft demonstrates something more, a definite
access to ‘Inner’ secrets is indicated, secrets that during his lifetime
remained unrevealed to all except a select band of high Initiates. In
his novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Lovecraft employs with
great effect the symbolism of Caput and Cauda Draconis—The Head
and Tail of the Luna Dragon—in combination with a formulae of
magical transformation remarkably similar in nature to an alchemic
rite performed by the Magicians of the Golden Dawn. Although
Lovecraft was not an Initiate in the strictest sense of the word, it is
obvious that he had gained the confidence of those who were, as the
previous example and the many others scattered throughout his
works serve to illustrate.
Kenneth Grant, head of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) and the
author of several books on the magical tradition also suggests that
Lovecraft had definite contact with the Western mystery schools and
argues that: ‘Lovecraft used fiction to project concepts of reality that
were, in his day, considered too fantastic for presentation in any other
medium.’+ Grant further implies that Lovecraft was never fully aware
* Ibid.
t See A Guide to Dunwich, Jean I. Carter.
+ Cults of the Shadow, Kenneth Grant, Muller.

70
of the alien forces that influenced his writings, and that he spent the
later part of his life vainly attempting to deny their existence. On the
whole I was inclined to agree with Kenneth Grant’s conception of the
Cthulhu Mythos, many of his ideas reflecting my own almost exactly.
The main difference between Grant’s views and mine lay in our
respective approaches to the Necronomicon itself, for although Grant
believes the Mythos to be valid from an occult standpoint he con-
siders the Necronomicon to be fictitious, a fabrication of Lovecraft’s
fertile imagination.
By his own admission Lovecraft reveals that many of the salient
features of the Cthulhu Mythos were transmitted to him through the
medium of dreams, recurrent dreams of amazing clarity and con-
tinuity. Many occultists believe that dreams of this nature are the
subconscious mind’s way of registering astral contacts.
The etheric fluid or Astral Light is held to be a semi-material
substance endowed with the quality of great plasticity; a natural
archive which surrounds the earth and retains within its structure the
imprint of every event, thought, word and action that has taken place
since the formation of the planet. Occult tradition claims that this
reservoir of information—known in the East as: the Akashic
Records—can be drawn upon at will by those who possess the neces-
sary psychic ability, and that it may be manipulated to provide
positive images through the application of the requisite mental
chemistry. Entity-images thus formed are deemed ‘Artificial
Elementals—thought-formed creatures ensouled with individual
identity and capable of indefinite existence within the space-time
continuum. Furthermore, once such a form has been created it is held
to provide an intersection point between planes through which any
related force may gain access to our particular segment of the Cos-
mos. Did Lovecraft thus populate the Astral Plane with the entities of
the Cthulhu Mythos via subconscious reference to the Akashic
Records and in so doing provide a ‘gateway’ through which the minds
of Outer Beings might re-manifest their influence? Occultists would
certainly maintain that if the Great Old Ones did in fact once walk the
earth, the Astral Light must retain a record of their history, and that
one who had chanced upon such an ethos could either consciously or
unconsciously, animate static astral forms through the process of
constant meditation. Once established astral entities of this nature
increase in power and vitality in direct proportion to the amount of
mental energy focused upon them, until they finally attain a stage of
development which enables a degree of self-motivated action to take
place. Like mass-hysteria in crowds, what begins as a trickle quickly
swells to a raging torrent.
In modern times the chief source of information regarding the
71
phenomenon of the Astral Light is to be found in the writings of the
famous French occultist Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-75), better
known by the pseudonym Eliphas Levi Zahed.
Levi refers to the Astral Light variously: ‘the OD of the Hebrew, the
Electro-magnetic ether, the universal glass of visions—it follows the
law of magnetic currents, is subject to fixation by a supreme projection
of will-power, is the first envelope of the soul, and the mirror of
imagination.’”* Levi further reveals that the Astral Light is the natural
habitat of ‘those fluidic larvae known in ancient theurgy under the
name of elementary Spirits’.t Occult Science maintains that if
unchecked, thought-formed astral entities are drawn by the life-force
of their creator like a needle to a magnet, drinking his spiritual energies
with unholy gusto until complete depletion of life-fluid takes place.
Was Lovecraft possessed by darkly animated shells seeking entrance
from the void? Psychic attack of this nature is first signalled by a
general state of mental hypersensitivity, followed by a strangely orien-
tated sense of awareness which increases as the victim unconsciously
aligns his mental process with those of his uninvited soul-mate. Glimpses
of alien worlds first revealed in sleep begin to manifest upon the
horizon of the waking mind, acute and peculiarly distorted forms of
auditory, and visionary expansion take place, leading to an ability to
comprehend sounds beyond the normal spectrum and a non-linear
sense of spacial geometry. All these elements are prevalent in Love-
craft’s makeup, and revealed in his writings in no uncertain terms.
In the Introduction of the present volume Colin Wilson refers to
the near permanent state of physical lethargy that attended Lovecraft
towards the end of his life; his mental tensions and over-powering
sense of oppression coupled with strange raptures of the spirit,
visions, dreams of impossible landscapes and incredible cities. In
short Lovecraft exhibited all the traditional symptoms of a soul
ensnared by the forces of evil.
It is well known that Lovecraft experienced great difficulty in
retaining bodily heat, particularly in later life when his hatred of even
seemingly moderate temperatures became obsessional. Another
symptom of demonic possession? I quote the words of Eliphas Levi:
‘Such Larve draw the vital heat of persons in good health and they
drain those who are weak rapidly. Hence comes the history of vam-
pires, things of terrific reality which have been substantiated from
time to time, as it is well known. This explains also why in the
neighbourhood of mediums, who are persons obsessed by larva one is
conscious of a cooling in the atmosphere.’+ Lovecraft was familiar
*“ The History of Magic, Eliphas Levi (Trans. A. E. Waite), Rider, 1963.
t Ibid., p. 104.
t Ibid., p. 106.
qa
with the works of Levi, but did a clear comprehension of the Master’s
words come too late? In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward* we read:
‘It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set down from
memory, nor as yet the authority had shown him in the forbidden
pages of Eliphas Levi; but its identity was unmistakable, and such
words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik sent a
shudder of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt so much
of cosmic abomination just around the corner.’ Why should the works
of a Christian Qabalist such as the venerable Eliphas Levi be termed
‘forbidden’ one might ask? Had Lovecraft indeed stumbled upon the
root of his nightmares and found ‘that which lay around the corner’
too much to bear, or even to himself, admit?
It is evident that an element of fear pervades Lovecraft’s later
writings, the final emergence of an ingrained horror of those he had so
powerfully evoked, and his inability to control the awakened forces
swiftly builds to an alarming crescendo. The terms ‘loathsome’,
‘shuddersome’, ‘forbidden’ and ‘hideous’ are employed with ever-
increasing frequency as the pattern of the Mythos nears completion.
In his final story—written in 1937, the year of his death—Lovecraft
recounts a cautionary tale of the returning plight of those who per-
sistently dabble in the necromantic arts. The burning of forbidden
books, the transfiguration of the sorcerer’s successor, possession of
one soul by another, all warning symbols which spell out the utter-
most peril of those who—intentionally or not—would tread the path
of darkness.
The pantheon of entities encountered in the Necronomicon must
by way of their very singularity present problems of interpretation
when viewed from an occult standpoint. Students of the Enochian
System will have no doubt met with similar difficulties when attempt-
ing to correlate Dee’s strange assembly of spirits with those given in
other extant magical texts. Like those of Dee’s system the entities said
to be tabulated in the Necronomicon can be considered exterior
to—yet after a certain manner, connected with—the time established
magical and qabalistic traditions.
When dealing with problematical etheric forces of this nature, I feel
that the best approach towards the construction of an intelligible
hierarchy is through a careful examination of the elemental cor-
respondences attributed to each individual potency. Once a table of
elemental relationships has been thus formulated, the system can be
further elaborated by the addition of associated astrological and
geographical references.

* The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, H. P. Lovecraft, Panther, 1963.

+ See The Evil Clergyman, H. P. Lovecraft, 1937.
q3
 In an attempt to classify the nature of the various forces named in
the present grimoire I tender the following compilation as an aid to
occult students:

THE GREAT OLD ONES

The Pantheon in order of presidency

AZATHOTH: The Primal Chaos dwelling at the centre of infinity;

formless and unknowable. The Prime Mover in Darkness; Tur-
moil, the Downbreaker of thought and form. The antithesis of
creation; the ultimately negative aspect of Elemental Fire,
astrologically referable to the archaic Leo, and in the terrestial
sphere to the Hidden South.
Yoc-SoTHoTH: The All-One, Co-regent of Azathoth; the vehicle of
Chaos. The Outer manifestation of the Primal Utterance. The Gate
of the Void, through which ‘Those Outside’ must enter. The Outer
active intelligence of He who shall ever remain locked in impen-
etrable darkness. The positive manifestation of Fire, in the fir-
mament marked by the Sign of the Lion, but more particularly by
the star known to the ancient Arabians as: Al Kalb al Asad, and to
the Romans as Cor Leonis—the Lion’s Heart—which resides
within the breast of the celestial beast. In the world His cardinal
station is that of the Immediate South.
NYARLATHOTEP: The Crawling Chaos, the Aether which mediates
between the diverse aspects of the Great Old Ones. The receptacle
of their combined Will. Their messenger and servant—capable of
existing in any shape or form, in any region of time and space.
Astrologically I refer Nyarlathotep to the Milky Way, that mystic
band of nebulus luminosity that stretches across the heavens at an
inclination of 63° to the celestial equator and indicates the rim of
our galaxy. The Ancient Akkadians attributed this stream of pallid
light to their Great Serpent Myth, the Polynesians called it the long,
blue cloud-eating shark; in India it was known as Nagavithi—the
Path of the Snake.
Hastur: The Voice of the Old Ones. The Avenger and Destroyer, the
Walker upon the Wind (the Wendigo of Red Indian Lore), He who
must not be named. In the sphere of the Elements Hastur is
assigned to Air—the Element of contention—and amidst the con-
stellations denoted by the Sign of Aquarius, an asterism held to rule
the Airy Trigon. Terrestially Hastur is assigned to the East.
CTHULHU: Lord of the Deep Ones, Initiator of Dreams. Cthulhu is
represented amongst the Elements by Water, and astrologically by
74
 the form of the Scorpion known to the Akkadians as Girtab—The
Seizer or Stinger, to which one must bow down. Geographically
Cthulhu is referred to the West—the place of death in Ancient
Egyptian religion.
SHUB-NIGGURATH: The Great Black Goat of the Woods with a
Thousand young. The Earthly manifestation of the Old Ones
Power. The God of the Witches Sabbat. The Elemental nature of
Shub-Niggurath is that of Earth, symbolized by the Sign of Taurus
in the heavens, and in the world by the Gate of the North Wind.

THE ELDER GODS

Although a number of benign beings are implied in the text of the

Necronomicon, only Nodens—Lord of the Great Abyss—is actually
referred to by name. The natural habitat of the Elder Gods is held to
be a region near the star Betelgeuze in the constellation of Orion. In
the great almanac of the Arab astronomers known as the Alfonsine
Tables—later translated by European authorities as Los Libros del
Saber de Astronomia—Betelgueze was rendered variously as: Al
Mankib—the Shoulder, Al Dhira—the arm, and Al Yad al
Yamna—the Right Hand (of the Giant). It is interesting to note that
Machen refers to Lord Nodens in his Great God Pan as a God with a
Silver Hand, echoing the last of these early Arabic designations.
The Elder Gods are revealed in ancient lore as the protectors of the
human race, and their relationship to humanity is further borne out
by their sign which is a form of Blazing Pentagram—The Elder Sign.
The Pentagram is revered by occultists as the Star of the Magi, the
symbol of Man the Microcosm, Divinity revealed in human form.
Magically, man is held to be a creature of four Elements—Fire, Air,
Water and Earth—balanced by the power of Spirit—the Fifth or
Hidden Element—symbolized by the five points of the Pentagram.
We may therefore deduce that the power of the Elder Sign over the
Great Old Ones lies in its relationship with a race of beings replete
with all five Universal Powers, as opposed to the mono-elemental
constitution of their aggressive opposites (the Old Ones).
In his book The Sirius Mystery * Robert Temple suggests that the
human race may have been introduced to the benefits of science and
civilization by beings from a planet in the system of the star Sirius.
Sirius resides in the constellation of Canis Major—the Great Dog—
and lies in close proximity (directionally, if not spacially) to the ‘Heel’
of Orion whose principal star is Betelgueze, the region of the fabled
Elder Gods. Can this theory and similar parallels reflected in so many
* The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, Sidgwick and Jackson.
rhe]
ancient myth patterns represent the emergence of dim racial
memories connected with man’s genesis? And were in fact the Elder
Gods Man’s mysterious spiritual progenitors?
This then represents my initial conception of the Necronomicon, a
book of spells and ancient lore existing primarily on a subjective level
yet paralleling several important mystical texts. A composite
grimoire which lies secretly entombed within the darkest recesses of
the human mind. An archetypal pattern underlying and unifying a
seemingly unconnected mass of magical and mythological data.
In this setting I let the matter rest, quite unprepared for the unpre-
cedented turn of events that were soon to radically alter my previous
conclusions on what must surely be the most controversial and enig-
matic of magical texts.
While collecting material for a book on the unpublished papers of
Dr. John Dee, I came across a cryptic sixteenth-century manuscript
known as Liber Logaeth, or The Book of Enoch.* The manuscript
consisted of 65 folios containing 101 exceedingly complex magic
squares, 96 of which comprised of 49 x 49 cells and 5 of 36 x 72
cells; the whole being embellished with the most confusing array of
letters (in the Latin alphabet) and numbers in a seemingly random
order. I was at a total loss just what to make of this particular Dee
manuscript, which bore the title Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et
Sanctus—the Sixth book of the Holy Mysteries.t The various refer-
ences to Liber Logaeth in published works stated that Dee employed
the book as a type of cross-index system enabling him to construct
another series of magic squares known as the Enochian Tablets. If
this was the case why the complexity? The sum total of letters in the
five Enochian Tablets being a mere 644, it therefore seemed absurd
that a grid system containing over 240,000 letters would be necessary
solely for their construction. No, there had to be some other answer.
Dee himself left very little information on his Sixth Holy Book apart
from saying that it contained ‘The Mysterie of our Creation, The Age
of many years, and the conclusion of the World’+ and that the first
page in the book signified chaos.
It occurred to me that the whole thing might have been written in
some type of Elizabethan code or cipher. If this was the case I felt that
it was not at all likely that I would be able to unravel anything of such
extraordinary complexity, without the help of an expert in cryp-
tography. I then remembered the success of Dr. Donald Laycock, an
* Sloane MSS. 3189, British Museum Library, London.
+ Also called Liber Mysteriorum (& Sancti) Parallelus Novalisque: The Sixth Book
of the Mysteries and the Parallel of the Sacred first fallow land.
t See A True and Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John
Dee and Some Spirits (Ed. Meric Casaubon, 1659), London.

76
Australian Philologist, who had employed a computer in an effort to
prove the validity of Dee’s Enochian Language. Laycock had
explained his elaborate computer concordance to me several years
ago after meeting for drinks in London’s Arts Theatre Club. The
current problem was however rather different to that solved by
Laycock as it involved an attempted decipherment of an unknown
code without a shred of concrete information for guidance.
I mentioned my plight in a letter to Colin Wilson who responded by
introducing me to a young computer expert named David Langford,
who enthusiastically offered his help in the matter. It soon became
clear that David Langford was entirely suited to the complex task to
hand, for not only had he access to one of the finest computers
available, but also a considerable knowledge of Elizabethan cipher
techniques—being a student of Baconian cryptography. I duly passed
over a photographic copy of Dee’s Liber Logaeth and impatiently
awaited any possible results.
As David Langford deals adequately with the intricacies of the
actual decipherment programme elsewhere in the present volume I
will move on immediately to the astonishing and totally unexpected
outcome of his work.
During the months in which the pages of Dee’s mysterious manu-
script were subjected to methodical and painstaking examination, a
voluminous mass of correspondence passed between David Langford
and myself, each piece of new information being analyzed in turn as
the unmistakable and incredible pattern slowly emerged. The manu-
script had indeed been written in cipher, a cipher of great com-
plexity, whoever had originally encoded the manuscript going to
unbelievable lengths to preserve the secret of its contents. The reasons
for such elaborate precautions were all too easy to ascertain, for the
assembled text, although untitled and somewhat disjointed, could be
nothing less than a contraction of the elusive Necronomicon. The
entity names, places and mythological concepts being almost iden-
tical to those given by Lovecraft.
The question was, how could Lovecraft’s description of the Nec-
ronomicon parallel our newly discovered text so closely? It was
inconceivable that an earlier decipherment of the Dee cryptogram
had been accomplished without the aid of modern cybernetics unless
by some exceedingly remote chance someone had stumbled upon
hidden keys to its interpretation. On the other hand Dee’s encoded
text could have been drawn from some earlier manuscript, a copy of
which somehow came into Lovecraft’s possession. Many problems
remain unsolved; if we had indeed uncovered certain fragments of the
true Necronomicon it was quite possible that the Arabic, Greek,
Latin and Spanish translations of the text mentioned by Lovecraft
Jed
had also existed. If so, what had been their fate? We feel that we may
never know all the answers and can do no more at present than submit
the fruits of our researches to the world at large in the hope that some
day others may supply the final pieces of the metaphysical jigsaw, and
complete the history of the cryptic Necronomicon.
In the myths of every race and clime we see the hallmarks of those
extracosmic denizens that populate the pages of the Necronomicon.
In the Himalayas the legend of the Abominable Snowman is by no
means dead, but continues to be resurrected by even the most prosaic
members of mountaineering expeditions. Do alien monsters from
earth’s pre-history still linger amidst silent peaks, hide beneath the
oceans and stride forth nightly in desolate places?
In the ancient Indian treatise known as the Rigveda, we read of
Dasyu and Dasa—The Dark Folk, the superhuman enemies of man-
kind who live underground, and of those strange prototypes from
pre-history described as giants—‘big as mountains’, demons, ‘like
trees walking’; the tiger-headed Rakshasas and the ugly Vaitikas
with one wing and one eye. Peruvian myth tells of the
Gvachines—Darklings, or rayless ones: the inhabitants of primeval
earth. Red Indian legend enshrines Camazotz—Lord of the Bats—a
hideous hybrid creature with leathery wings and serpents growing
from its face.
In 1686 Robert Plott records the appearance of globular lights in
the sky, showers of stones bearing linear markings, strange
windborne sounds that defy all attempts of rational explanation, and
the birth of a multiheaded child ‘of neither sex’.* More recently the
writings of the twentieth-century master of unexplained phenomena
Charles Fort inform us that: ‘devils have visited the earth’, and
continue to do so. During his lifetime Fort assembled over 40,000
notes on subjects ranging from non-meteoric black pebbles that fell
on Wolverhampton, England, in the year 1858,+ to accounts of
strange cities and ten-foot long winged creatures ‘waddling on
webbed feet’.¢
Is man in fact ‘the oldest or the last of earth’s masters’? Perhaps we
shall soon know the answers, for over the past few decades the earth
seems to have been repeatedly and increasingly invaded by mys-
terious interlopers. Sitings of the West Virginia Mothman—a brown
humanoid endowed with wings—continue to be reported; sea ser-
pents and monsters fill the oceans and lakes, UFO encounters have
become an almost everyday occurrence. What does it all mean? Has
humanity suddenly become the victim of illusion, hysteria and self-
* The Natural History of Staffordshire, Robert Plott, 1686.
t The Book of the Damned, C. Fort.
+ New Lands, C. Fort.

78
deception on a hitherto unprecented scale, or are we perhaps wit-
nessing a gradual return of those forces that once inspired.a mad Arab-
to sing beneath a gibbous Moon, a couplet strange and rare?

That which is not dead which can eternal lie,

and with strange aeons even death may die.

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 Deciphering John Dee’s Manuscript
by
DAVID LANGFORD

I have been asked to give some account of the computer analysis

which led to the translation of Dr. John Dee’s strange cipher, together
with some general background material about the methods used. My
original correspondence with Robert Turner was sparked off by the
researches of Dr. Donald Laycock, a philologist who used a computer
to check the validity of Dee’s occult language ‘Enochian’—that is, to
find whether it was merely based upon other languages, as Japanese is
borrowed from Chinese or English compounded from Anglo-Saxon,
Latin and so on. Dr. Laycock’s work has thrown new light upon the -
Enochian language.
The book is also known as Liber Logaeth: The Book of the Speech
of God and as Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus. It is divided into
101 Tables, mostly grids of 49 x 49 squares containing letters in the
Latin alphabet or Arabic numbers (see page 82 for an example).
There is also one blank grid of the same size, and five larger tables of
36 X 72 squares. All this is written down in the hand of Edward
Kelly, Dee’s principal assistant; he is said to have taken it down
at the dictation of spirits in 1583.
This is not a particularly encouraging start. History is, after all,
thickly littered with frauds and charlatans; and even Dee could not
entirely bring himself to trust Kelly, who was by all accounts a
slightly shifty character. Yet Dee was careful to preserve the Book of
Enoch,* and it survives to this day among his own manuscripts.
Another odd point is that no translation of the work was ever offered
either by Dee or by Kelly: there seems little point in constructing an
elaborate fraud without offering some explanation, without using the
results in some way. Thirdly, though some unsavoury shreds of repu-
tation have clung about his name, Dee was no fool but a trusted agent
of that day’s government—a secret agent, in fact, of Queen Elizabeth
herself. (One notes with interest that his personal ‘code name’ was
007.) It has been strongly argued—e.g. in John Dee by Richard
Deacon (London, 1968)—that Dee’s cabbalistic and astrological
* Sloane MS. 3189, British Museum Library.
81
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interests served more than one purpose, not only marking him as a
harmless mystic or crank (a highly useful cover story) but also con-
cealing in abstruse alphanumerology a variety of sophisticated cipher
systems. For example, his Table of the Aethyrs or mystic watch-
towers is set out in severe mathematical columns: Aethyr number
one, called LIL, has ‘governors’ who rejoice in the names OCCO-
DON, PASCOMB and VALGARS, respectively commanding 7209,
2360 and 5363 servitors. All thirty Aethyrs have three-letter names;
the three governors of each Aethyr have seven-letter names; the
number of servitors invariably runs to four figures. Cabbalistic
numerology may account for such regularities; but we know that Dee
was a highly practical man, and a mathematician (St. John’s, Cam-
bridge) whose secret work involved the use of ciphers. The Table of
the Aethyrs is very probably an enciphering and deciphering tool; it
could be used to generate any number of simple ciphers of the sort
where one substitutes for each letter of the message (e.g. X for A, Q
for B, J for C and so on would make the word CAB become JXQ in
cipher)}—or perhaps something more complex.
Once one has decided that Dee hid cipher-work amid his magical
writings, it seems that the Book of Enoch can hardly be anything else.
Its length implies a cipher message rather than the key to something.
The grid layout could easily be a means of avoiding the appearance of
a message—thus acting as a deterrent to the curious. The prospect of
being the first to break this cipher was naturally exciting: concealed in
those pages might be state secrets of Elizabeth I or, as Robert Turner
preferred to hope, the profoundest insights of Dee’s own occult
studies.
The challenge of the Book of Enoch was not as daunting as it may
sound. Modern computers eliminate much of the mechanical work
involved in cracking simpler ciphers, and I personally have some
experience in this field. It is also true that Dee’s relative obscur-
ity—and apparent position among occultists rather than cryp-
tographers—has diverted attention from this facet of his interests in
a time when every second or third scholar had a notion for a new and
ingenious cipher. Francis Bacon made the first and biggest splash (he
lived from 1561 to 1626, Dee from 1527 to 1608); if he had been
linked with the Book of Enoch work, we would expect Baconians to
have fallen upon the cipher with glad cries and shown the very first
sheet to contain encoded versions of both the Essay of Studies and
The Tempest.
An important work in the field of cryptography is Bacon’s own The
Advancement of Learning (London 1605) which details his ‘bilateral
alphabet’ cipher. The principle here is that any letter may be sym-
bolized by a combination of two letters only (or two numbers, or any
84
other symbols—foreshadowing the International Morse Code).
Bacon gives the following table:

A =aaaaa N = abbaa
B =aaaab O = abbab
C =aaaba P =abbba
D =aaabb Q =abbbb
E =aabaa R =baaaa
F =aabab S =baaab
G =aabba T =baaba
H =aabbb V =baabb
I =abaaa W = babaa
K =abaab X =babab
L =ababa Y =babba
M = ababb Z =babbb

The use of the small a and b is simply a mnemonic; in practice, the

difference is supposed to be conveyed by minute changes in typeface.
If a message is printed in a mixture of faces—which we can call
Typeface A and Typeface B—we decipher it by dividing the text into
groups of five letters, writing a below each letter in Typeface A and b
below each in Typeface B, and interpreting from Bacon’s table. (By
the way, the table omits J and U because in Bacon’s day these were
not written differently from I and V, respectively. To update the table
as it stands, insert J and V in their proper places and move up the
letters, adding the codes bbaaa and bbaab at the end, so these new
codes now stand for Y and Z.)
Here is the example Bacon gives himself, with the typefaces widely
different for the sake of clarity—Typeface A is normal type and B
italic. His enciphered message is ‘Stay ‘til Icome to you’; putting b for
each italic letter and a for the rest, we get aabab ababa babba bb.
Discarding the odd b’s from the end, and checking against Bacon’s
table, we can see that the real message is a terse imperative: Fly!
I find this form of cipher fascinating for its use of the binary system.
A science fiction writer (H. Beam Piper in his story Omnilingual)
once observed that the true universal Rosetta Stone is the periodic
table of the elements; any civilization reasonably far advanced in
science will be forced to classify the elements in this way and no other,
and a quick look at one of their textbooks will tell us at once the word
for each element. (With this linguistic toehold, the rest is merely a
matter of time.) And on a humbler level, there are mathematical
patterns so widespread that they crop up even where mathematics is
not the context. . . . The binary system, through its very simplicity, is
one which appears again and again.
85
 To count in binary, one uses only 0’s and 1’s. 0 is zero; 1 is one; two
is written 10, three 11, four 100, five 101 and so on. We can count in
five-digit binary numbers as follows . .

00000
00001
00010
00011
00100
00101

This is identical to Bacon’s letter-equivalents table, with the sub-

stitution of 0 for a and 1 for b. If we use six-digit binary numbers,
substitute a broken vertical bar for each zero and stand the result on
its side, we arrive at the sixty-four hexagrams of the J Ching, the
ancient Book of Changes used in Chinese divination.

This binary ordering of the hexagrams was discovered by Fu Hsi in

the eleventh century—a very respectable pedigree for the system, and
a great shock for the mathematician Liebniz, who invented the num-
erical binary system in the late seventeeth century.
Binary counting is universal, being the simplest positional sys-
tem—only two different symbols are needed. It is cumbersome, of
course—by the time you reach 2'* (32768) the binary equivalent is
1,000,000,000,000,000—but often surprisingly convenient. Using
each finger as one place of a 10-digit binary number—in the air for 0
and touching a table for 1, say—you can count to 1023 (binary
1111111111) on both hands, which is rather more than the usual
ten. ... The important use is in computers, where it would be incon-
venient and error-prone to maintain (say) ten different voltage levels
to represent numbers from 0 to 9. In binary, any given line need only
be ON or OFF—1 or 0.
This is the fundamental simplicity of computers: they are quite
86
literally gigantic adding machines. When two binary numbers are
added, the rule for each place is simply

and carry 1.

Subtraction is just as easy; multiplication and division are achieved

by repeated addition or subtraction; further calculations may be
made dependent on the results of these operations; and ultimately we
arrive at computers which, combining millions upon millions of such
simple operations, seem almost ‘intelligent-—though in fact they
slavishly follow a programme of actions fed into them by some mere
human. Coming down to specific cases, a computer can readily attack
a simple substitution cipher, using the sort of mechanistic approach
suggested by Edgar Allan Poe in The Gold Bug—or, less exhaustive
and less exhausting, by Conan Doyle in The Dancing Men (The
Return of Sherlock Holmes). This method should be fairly familiar;
one begins with a count of how many times each symbol occurs and
(assuming the cipher text to be long enough for the usual statistics of
the English language to apply) can then say with fair certainty that the
most frequently occurring will represent the letter e. In theory we
could go on to assign the six next most frequent symbols as being, in
order, tf, a, Oo, i, n ands; in practice, however, these letters come so
close in frequency that any given message not of interminable length
will contain enough statistical variation to confuse the issue
thoroughly. We can note that such symbols probably do not represent
rarer letters (q,j,x,z, for example, in descending order of frequency)
and likewise that infrequent symbols probably do not represente,t,a,
0,i,n,s ... Thenit’s time to look at individual words of the cipher: a
common three-letter word ending with ¢ is likely to be the, one-letter
words must be i or a, and so on.
(By the way, that order of letters may ring a bell with readers for
other reasons: ETAIONS.... The keyboards of typesetting
machines are laid out according to the commonness of the letters, so
that by reading down the first two columns you see etaoin shrdlu. This
mystic rune sometimes turns up in newspaper; typesetters test their
machines by running a finger down the columns, and the resulting
dummy type occasionally finds its way into print.)
But this simple approach can be confused by rigging the statistics of
a message. Here is a sinister threat which appeared in chapter 4 of
Ellery Queen’s The Origin of Evil (1951):

You believed me dead. Killed, murdered. For over a score of years I

87
 have looked for you—for you and for him. And now I have found
you. Can you guess my plan? You'll die. Quickly? No, very slowly.
And so pay me back for my long years of searching and dreaming
of revenge. Slow dying—unavoidable dying. For you and for him.
Slow and sure—dying in mind and body. And for each pace
forward a warning . . . a warning of special meaning for you—and
for him. Meanings for pondering and puzzling. Here is warning
number one.

Had this been enciphered, I’m afraid the simple frequency-analysis

would have broken down; the strange stilted sound of the prose
(adding, mind you, to its menace) results from the fact that the writer
is straining to avoid the second most frequent letter in English. The
passage contains not a single T.
One can go to even greater lengths along these lines. There is a
novel called Gadsby (E. V. Wright, Los Angeles 1939) which
throughout its length of 50,000 words does not once use e! The author
proudly proclaims in the introduction that the e type-bar was tied
down on his typewriter, to prevent even one from creeping in. “The
book,’ Wright noted, ‘may prove a valuable aid to school children in
English composition.” No doubt.
This form of trickery can be turned the other way, of course, as in
Lord Holland’s short Eve’s Legend (1824) in whiche is the only vowel
used. ‘Men were never perfect; yet the three brethren Veres were
ever esteemed, respected, revered, even when the rest, whether the
select few, whether the mere herd, were left neglected . . .. Etcetera.
The statistical approach to cryptanalysis is thus fraught with perils.
But the worst part of such work, in earlier times, was the unpleasant
realization that days, perhaps, of calculation had been misdirected;
with computer aid, the soul-destroying side of the work is much
reduced. One merely breathes a curse and amends the programming
slightly: the computer, idiotically obedient and unbelievably rapid
and accurate, will work through the whole problem as many times as
required, doing just as it is told.
Pll pause here to insert an example of the literally mechanical
approach to deciphering. For this purpose I loaded the computer with
a very simple (though lengthy) program called CRYPTAN-4, which
attacks a cipher entirely through statistics and the simple rela-
tionships of letters in Basic English. It has several weaknesses: the
input text must be already divided into words, and misprints or
misspellings in this cipher text will probably confuse utterly a machine
programmed with CRYPTAN-4. It is, however, a useful demon-
stration—and an introduction to the much more complex programs
available.
88
 For the input I chose a verse at random from the work of Swin-
burne:

Who has known all the evil before us,

Or the tyrannous secrets of time?
Though we match not the dead men that bore us
At a song, at a kiss, at a crime—
Though the heathen outface and outlive us,
And our lives and our longings are twain—
Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,
Our Lady of Pain.

A straightforward substitution cipher was used to produce from

this the words at the top of the computer printout which follows. This
is a reproduction of an actual machine output; the computer prints
out its decisions as it makes them, and continually updates its trans-
lation of the text. Full notes will follow after the computer print; for
now, I'll just explain that NE stands for ‘is not equal to’ so that the
meaning of the line A.NE.I J Q V is ‘I have decided that the letter A in
the cipher does not stand for any of the letters I, J, Q or V.’ Readers
may find it interesting to try to follow the logic behind each computer
decision; remembering that this simple program has a cor-
respondingly over-simplified view of English.

89
 WEJ FLP DIJwWI LGG QFC CUTG OCRYNC SP JN QFC QYNLIITJSP PCVNCQP JR QTHC QFJSAF we
HLQVE IJu QFC ECLE HCI QFLQ OJNC SP LOL PJIA LQ L OTPP LQ L VNTHC QFJISAF QFC F
CLUFCI JSQRLVC LIE JSQGTUC SP LIE JSN GTUCP LIE JSN GJIATIAP LNC QWLTE LF RJNATU
C SP JSN UTNQSCP RJNATUC SP JSN GLEY JR KLTI

- A.NEol
~ BeNE.E
- CeNE.I
- O.NE.E
- E.NE.I]
- F.NEeI
- GeNEoA XY Boa ae
~ HeNECE
- I.NEA
- JeNE.T
- KeNE.E
- LeNEeF VX. 2) BoC. DEG. HAMONL OO Rs Sa TeUa iW By,
- MeNEoE
sg Ne NEol
- OeNEoE
a PeNEeA 2 bP C IG Migr
- QeNE.I =x
- ReNE.T =z <
NN
- SeNE.F PH
ProOoOrPAKPO
COPOrPOHo
ROC AC
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 The sort of logic used by the machine can be shown by explaining
some of the first decisions. The initial A.NE.I J Q V is because A, in
the cipher, appears at the end of a word; English words do not end in
I,J, Qor V. (This is where the oversimplification comes in, of course:
had Swinburne’s Muse been inspired to sing of beriberi or the okapi,
the program would have made a false assumption.) In the next line,
B.NE. ET A OIN, the decision is that B is not any of the five most
common letters in English—this is because B does not appear once in
the cipher. There are reasons like this for every elimination; and after
this preliminary work the computer prints a table of the alphabet, so
far without a translation for any of the letters—though already it has
determined that the letters F, G, I and Q represent consonants (-1 in
brackets) and L a vowel (1 in brackets—0O means ‘don’t know’!) L
must be either I or A since it appears as a one-letter word. The next
table summarizes the findings so far; for example, the first line notes
that A has been eliminated from meaning I, J, Q, V or X. Then
follows a frequency table, listing the number of appearances of each
letter: from this the machine picks the most frequent (C) and assumes
that this represents E. ‘Associative scans’ become possible as soon as
one or more letters are known: for example, a two-letter word ending
in E must in simple English be BE, HE, ME, WE or possibly YE, and
the machine narrows things down accordingly.
E being known, the computer searches for a likely combination to
represent THE, and finds it. The analysis goes on remorselessly, as
reflected in the messages printed at each stage; the final tables show
an almost complete solution, lacking only four letters of the message
(no one could be expected to interpret the additional four letters
which do not even appear in the text). Note that in the final incom-
plete translation, the missing letters—B, P, V, Y—can instantly be
supplied by the context; the computer has saved us a fair amount of
work in going as far as it has, but it cannot fill in these last gaps from its
very limited information. It can be told simple, dogmatic rules—for
example, that a doubled letter in English will not be A, H, I, J, K, Q,
U, V, W, X or Y—but without a complete dictionary in its memory
bank and a way to understand the context in a message, it can see no
reason why the missing letter in E?IL should be V rather than B or P
or Y. In the end, the human mind is always needed.
As a preliminary to the whole business of computer analysis, the
100 tables of the Book of Enoch (omitting the blank one) were
loaded into computer storage—once transcribed on to the machine’s
magnetic discs, they were instantly accessible to the deciphering
programs. I began with the straightforward approach already
described, not with great hope of success since—if Dee had used no

oD
more subtlety than this—one would have expected the cipher to have
been broken long ago.
A grid of symbols may be read in various ways. The obvious
approach is to start at the top left-hand corner and read either across
the grid column by column, or down it row by row. Then, if this is
unsuccessful, the message may perhaps begin in one of the other
corners in a similar way; it may spiral into or out of the centre. It’s
easy to imagine arrangements of ever-increasing complexity, such as
a sequence of grid-squares connected by ‘knight-moves’ as in the
Knight’s Tour of chess (where a knight visits each square of the board
just once, in an unbroken sequence) or more devious tours traced out
by imaginery pieces of powers known only to the cipher-maker. Still
more cunning systems might involve moving from table to table—tak-
ing the first symbol of each table in order or reverse order, and then
the second symbol of each table... with all the myriad ways of
defining ‘first’ and ‘second’ just hinted at. The cipher might be filled
with dummy letters, with only every second or third or nth symbol
being part of the true message. . . . Moreover, several of the grids are
tilted to make a diamond rather than a square, suggesting a need for
diagonal reading in some cases, or in all.
Fortunately the sheer hard work of checking every possibility was
borne by the computer, which placidly tested every reading-sequence
I could imagine and applied the simple deciphering approach time
and time again. Without success.
When the whole weary business had been completed in English,
the process was repeated for other languages for which frequency-
tables and lists of keywords were available. The languages were
chosen with an eye to Dee’s own likely inclination—Latin, the
language of scholars in his day, coming before all others. French and
Spanish were tried as well, and likewise German. All this was trouble-
some enough; and tempers among the computer staff began to fray
when I realized that for completeness’s sake we should have to
construct our own frequency-tables, etc., for Dee’s own language
Enochian. Every extant passage of Enochian prose was typed into the
machine for letter-frequency, significant pairings and so on. It was a
depressing anticlimax when the Enochian analysis proved as barren
as any other.
So after some eight months’ work, I found my contribution to
human knowledge now amounted to the following: The Liber
Logaeth or Book of Enoch is not written in a simple substitution
cipher in any language known to John Dee.
The next step, the simple approach having been discarded, is to
analyze the text again—starting from square one—searching this time
for the use of a more sophisticated cipher which does not depend
96
solely on letter-by-letter encipherment. One of the most convenient
and sophisticated methods is the so-called Playfair cipher, which
depends upon pairings of letters.
Take, for example, the word NECRONOMICON. In the straight-
forward substitution cipher used earlier, this becomes ICV-
NJISJHTVJi—each of the three N’s being represented by a cor-
responding I. Using the Playfair method, the coded word is, for
example, QOLBAWLNKEAW. If someone suspected this of mean-
ing NECRONOMICON, a comparison would show that although the
second and third N’s are apparently represented by W, the first has
become Q. A cunning cryptanalyst, knowing this, would be able to
guess that a cipher based on letter-pairs was in operation, so the initial
NE became QO and both the later ON’s became AW. This does not
mean that we must write down a meaning for each of the 676 letter-
pairs possible in English; surprisingly, the enciphering and decipher-
ing can be accomplished using only a small table as below.

Here the ‘key word’ is LOVECRAFT, after which the other letters
of the alphabet follow in order. I and J are made to share a place so the
alphabet will fit into the square. The encipherment is rapid, depend-
ing on the relative position of letters in this small grid: here is how the
word NECRONOMICON was transcribed.
Imagine a rectangle with N and E at opposite corners. Referring to
the square, the other corners would be O and Q. Therefore NE
becomes QO (not OQ since the convention is to read in the same
vertical sense as the original letter—EN would be represented by OQ,
reading down the grid this time). CR becomes LB in the same way.
ON presents a problem since the letters fall in the same column: the
convention is to take the letter vertically below each, so that ON
yields AW. (For a pair in the same row, LE for example, we would
have taken the next to the right of each: OC.) And so on... . If we
had had an odd number of letters, the addition of an extra X or other
arbitrary letter will fill out the message; double letters cannot be
encoded as a pair and must be broken up by inserting such an extra
letter before encipherment.
With the key, the original message is restored by following
exactly the same procedure, except that for letters in the same row or
column we reverse the process, taking those to the left and above,
97
respectively. Additional letters, inserted for the reasons above, can
easily be removed on examination.
Without the key, the cryptanalyst has two choices. If he knows or
can guess at some of the subject matter of the message, he can
combine analysis with intuition and trial-and-error to reconstructa
key. This approach is very nicely demonstrated by Dorothy Sayers in
Chapter xxxviii of her novel Have His Carcase—Lord Peter Wimsey
would have had a great deal more difficulty had the evil-doer not
obligingly put an enciphered date and address at the top of his letter!
(By the way, I make no apologies for citing detective-stories as refer-
ences; they are much more readily available than the learned texts of
cryptanalysis, and usually expound their theses with a good deal more
lucidity.)
But if the cryptanalyst is working more or less in the dark, he is
forced back to the brute-force methods of statistical inference. Cast-
ing aside the tables of letter-frequency which previously gladdened
his days, he turns with a groan to the much longer tables which
describe the relative frequencies of pairs of letters—in English, in
Latin, in French, in Spanish, and so on down the weary list to
Enochian (where once again we must prepare our own tables).
A description of the full details of this work does not seem really
necessary. All the possible ways of reading the Book were once again
tried, just as they were tried before. The ultimate conclusion was that
the text was not in any form of letter-pair substitution cipher... .
It was with slightly less enthusiasm that I went on to consider ciphers
where a given letter of the message is represented by more than one
symbol in the cipher. (For example, Bacon’s method requires the
cipher to have five times as many letters as the plain text.) The total
length of the Book being only a little over 240,000 characters—on the
order of 40,000 words, perhaps, as compared with 60,000 for a typical
novel—we were naturally disappointed to think that this might reduce
to only a few thousand or a few hundred words of text.
This is as good a place as any to mention the difference between a
cipher and a code. Ina code we might quite reasonably expect a given
word to represent whole sentences of the original text, since a code is
based on arbitrary associations which must all be written down in the
code-book necessary for both encoding and decoding. Any concept
not allowed for in this book cannot be expressed in the code—usually,
when this occurs, the offending words must be spelt out letter by letter
in the cipher provided with the code-book for such occasions. In
general, a cipher is based on a simple principle, a short table or
formula; a code runs into as many volumes as its writer thinks neces-
sary to cover requirements. As a ciphered message, the words ICV-
NJIJHTVJI can be translated letter by letter to yield NEC-
98
 RONOMICON,; as a code message, it could mean whatever appeared
against that word in the alphabetic arrangement of the code book.
(This meaning might run to several sentences.) An error of one letter
would mean an error of one letter in a ciphered message; but with the
code it could completely reverse the meaning, directing the reader to
an entirely inappropriate code-book reference.
I thought it better to assume that Dee’s tables were not in code. For
one thing, no code-book has ever come to light, nor been hinted at;
for another, Dee’s inclinations and indeed the inclination of his day
was always to ciphers rather than to codes. It is a general principle
that a cipher may always be broken by analysis, though a code may be
recalcitrant: this principle is surely true of any cipher available in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As it happens, virtually
unbreakable ciphers now exist; they rely upon mathematical entities
called ‘one-way trapdoor functions’. A computer reduces the entire
message to a string of numbers and processes it in such a way that
without the right ‘key numbers’ for deciphering, the cipher cannot be
broken except through a machine-analysis which would literally take
years. Amazingly enough, even the knowledge of how to encipher
such a message gives no help in deciphering it! But I also allowed
myself the small assumption that John Dee, ahead of his time in many
ways though he may have been, did not have access to the refinements
of number theory nor to the advanced electronic computers required
for this ‘ultimate cipher’.
Of multiple-letter ciphers—those where one letter of message be-
comes several in the cipher text—I began by trying Bacon’s. Natur-
ally we assumed that Dee, if he used a cipher of this form, would not
follow Bacon’s table (reproduced earlier) slavishly but would con-
struct his own version. This meant that the simple statistical method
must be brought into play after the main text had been broken down
into those groups of five and thence, in some way, to equivalent
groups of a’s and b’s.
(There is nothing mystical about the number five in this con-
nection. It is merely that with two different symbols, there are 32
ways of making up a group of five: a number which is comfortably
larger than the number of letters in the alphabet, whether English,
Greek or Enochian. With a group of only four letters/symbols, there
are only 16 permutations and the entire alphabet cannot be ex-
pressed. The International Morse Code does admittedly express
every letter of the alphabet without using a combination of dots and
dashes having a greater length than four—but Morse effectively uses
three symbols! These are the dot, the dash and the pause; without the
necessary pauses between letters, Morse is indecipherable.)
With the Baconian method, the overwhelming question is of the
99
criterion to be used. Everything in the text must be assumed to
comprise a gigantic apparatus of misdirection—everything but the
single inconspicuous point which distinguishes the ‘a-letters’ from the
‘b-letters’. Bacon, as stated above, suggested minor difference in
typeface. Since the Book of Enoch is entirely handwritten, the
typeface would not differ, but there could be points of variation in the
script. The meaning of the vowels themselves could also be impor-
tant. For example, considering the text as a random assembly of
letters, the number of vowels is disproportionately large. Thus the
first, the obvious move was to consider the consonant/vowel dual-
ity—putting a for each consonant and b for each vowel, grouping the
letters in fives in the innumerable possible sequences already dis-
cussed, and seeing what the statistical approach might reveal for each
one. Animmediate difficulty was the identical representation of i and
j; is ani a consonant or a vowel? The computer was instructed to
consider both possibilities, which increased the length and cost of the
analysis still more. My grudging respect for Dee was increased when
absolutely nothing came of this work: the consonant/vowel duality
was rather an obvious one and certainly I had expected something
more subtle from him.
The next analysis was based on a topological notion: we classed a
letter asa if it incorporated a closed loop when written (e.g.b,0,p,q)
and b if it did not (e.g. c, r, s, t). This, again, led to instant
complications, since owing to the vagaries of Kelly’s writing many
letters vary in this respect. It was necessary first to perform
computer-runs based on the theoretical value of each letter, and then
(much more tedious) to input the actual value, so that for example the
letter d might be a or b depending on whether the loop was in fact
closed. .. . And again, after much frustrating effort, the deciphering
failed.
The difficulty with all this analysis was in knowing where to stop.
One might go on forever, tracing increasingly subtle variations in the
script .. . but I was convinced that the difference must be straight-
forward. Had it not been so, I am sure that Dee would have under-
taken the writing himself rather than entrusting it to the dubious
Kelly.
Up to this point, all work had been based upon photocopies of the
original MS. We now persuaded the British Museum (not without
difficulty) to allow ultra-violet and infra-red photography of the
sheets, together with microscopic examination in order to detect any
variation—in the ink, for example—which might perhaps have faded
with the passage of time, or failed to appear in the photocopies.
Nothing significant could be seen.
More differences were dreamt up and tried: letters could be earlier
100
or later in the alphabet, they could occupy odd or even positions in the
alphabet, they could, with some imagination, be considered as sloping
to the left or right.
Before going on to still more elaborate methods of deciphering, I
paused to consider the grid layout of the Book. Up to now I had
assumed that this was an aid to some unorthodox sequence in which
the characters of the MS. must have been written—since without a
grid, the initial drawing-out in such a case would have been much
more difficult. As a result of this layout, each letter of each table is
enclosed in its own little square. And sometimes . .
I looked again at the MS. sheets and a difference was plain. Some-
times the letter touches the square enclosing it; sometimes it does not.
A very simple criterion thus appeared. Any letter touching the
surrounding square is ana; any other, ab. The computer was fed with
details of this new distinction, and once again to sift through innum-
erable approaches to the problem—sequentially sorting, statistically
analysing, linguistically inferring.... And in due course, several
pages of the Book of Enoch were deciphered.
This proved to be more ‘the thin end of the wedge’ than an immedi-
ate burst of total revelation. The translation from groups of a’s and b’s
to plain text was consistently the same throughout the Book; how-
ever, the reading-sequence varied. In general, the cipher text had to
be read along an inward spiral, beginning at a different point on the
perimeter of each table; one table also included ‘magic squares’ of
numerals which did not form part of the cipher and thus had to be
ignored in text-analysis. The cleverness of Dee’s misdirection, now
responsible for wasting many thousands of pounds in computing
costs, could surely have frustrated any cryptoanalyst not armed with
modern facilities: the man is deserving of great respect.
A final pitfall arranged by Dee lay in the construction of the very
first table. As far as I can ascertain, it is the nonsense which the rest of
the manuscript pretends to be: were one to begin logically at page
one, the text might never yield to analysis. I was lucky in that my
statistical approach considered the text as a whole. Working without
machine assistance, I would eventually have found myself bogged
down on the first table . . . though Dee gave the game away when he
allowed himself the mysterious comment that this page of the holy
book represented ‘chaos’.
I admit to being startled by the computer translations as they first
appeared. Being mildly familiar with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, I
suspected a hoax perpetrated by the long-suffering computer staff, or
perhaps by Robert Turner himself. However, I understand that the
discovery is thought to be of considerable historical interest, and so
must remind readers that credit is also due to the computer staff and
101
to my wife Hazel, whose linguistic experience provided several val-
uable clues in sorting out the final transcription. She reminded us, for
example, of the ‘Hujfa Effect-—named after the King Hujfa who
so upset Egyptian chronology until he was discovered to be the
annotation of a copying scribe: hujfa meant gap in the manuscript.
Egyptian MSS. often contain such mysterious notes, a frequent one
being worms have eaten this part.
For the Book of Enoch proves to be not only incomplete (as might
have been guessed from the blank table waiting at the end of the
book); it is also fragmentary. Robert Turner has separated out those
sentences which form headings to sections, and derived other head-
ings from the text itself; he was also instrumental in completing such
occult names and references as were garbled in the transcription
(faded ink made several of the interpretations a little dubious;
moreover, Kelly made the occasional mistake). The intelligible
remnants amount to some 7,000 words.
The full details of the deciphering will be repeated at their proper
length in the report I am now preparing; this account is intended to be
of general interest and therefore does not delve deeply into technical
details. For this reason it is difficult to include a full discussion of the
‘magic squares’ of numerals included in the Book of Enoch; these
proved to contain ‘programmes’ for producing the diagrams which
are a necessary part of the book. From the Baconian Cipher example
given earlier, you will remember that the apparent text of a cipher can
convey a quite different meaning from the true message; it turns out
that although at face value the tables are meaningless, some of them
do incorporate patterns of letters which, when traced according to the
sequences given in the ‘magic squares’, generate the diagrams which
appear with the translated text.
As a mere cryptographer who with considerable assistance has
been fortunate enough to render Dee’s Liber Logaeth into English, it
is not for me to comment upon the strange implications which emerge
from the fragments. In any case, I should hardly know where to begin.

102
 Fragments from the Necronomicon
Deciphered from a unique Elizabethan cryptogram

by
DAVID LANGFORD

Reconstructed, with certain necessary additions and an

explanatory Foreword

by
ROBERT TURNER
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 FOREWORD

In the presentation of the following text I have strictly adhered to the

original subject order indicated in John Dee’s cryptogram. Where
section headings have been omitted I have tendered a representative
title relevant to the textual content of the involved section of manu-
script. Out of the eighteen individual segments which comprise the
MS. only four were in fact untitled, these I have rendered as follows:
OF DIVERSE SIGNS, YE VOICE OF HASTUR, OF KADATH YE UNKNOWN and TO
CALL FORTH YOG-SOTHOTH (sections IV, X, XIII and XIV, respec-
tively). My reasons for adopting these particular section headings will
be immediately apparent from a perusal of the relevant portions of
text.
In order to avoid the confusion which invariably arises when deal-
ing with manuscripts written before the standardization of spelling, I
have adopted a system which I feel faithfully retains the tone and
atmosphere of the original text while participating in the advantages
of modern English. Variation in spelling was also a prevalent factor in
the rendering of the various entity names; Yog-Sothoth being given
as: Yugsoggoth, Jogshothoth; Hastur as: Haystir, H’stre, Haaztvr;
Cthulhu as: Cethulhv, etc. etc. Therefore in the interests of con-
sistency and intelligibility I have, in all cases, adhered steadfastly to
the spellings recognized by modern students of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Where diagrams are given in the text they have been drawn from
one of four sources: first, from the laboriously complex descriptions
given in the cipher. Secondly, from a magic square system—inherent
in the cryptogram—based on a numerical key plate which gives the
necessary sequence of interconnecting lines employed to erect the
lineal figures given in the text. Thirdly, from several independent
magical works referred to in the cryptogram—The Clavicules of Sol-
omon and Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy
being chief amongst these. And fourthly, from a combination of the
above three methods.
The diagrams of the Stone Circle and the Signs to be given orig-
inate from the first source (see sections III and IV). The Alphabet
of Nug-Soth and the figure in Ye Formula of Dho-Hna (Ye Angle
Web), the Elder Sign and the Sigil of Koth are derived from the
second (see sections IX, XVIII and IV). From the third method the
characters of Mars and Saturn given in YE INCENSE OF ZKAUBA (Section
 Lawmoake gm 144, Lowy LAI Mat cfr. prs
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(Folio 21R): ‘Of the Work of Images, the Hours to Work in and the Colours of the
Planets’. British Museum, Additional MS. 36,674, sixteenth century.
 v

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(Folio 151R): The remaining fragment of a rare tract dealing with the magical
significance of certain stellar and planetary characters. The symbols of Aldebaran,
Leo, Caput Draconis, the Sun, Moon and Earth are clearly defined. British Museum,
Additional MS. 36,674, sixteenth century.
V) were obtained (c.f. Three Books of Occult Philosophy—Cornelius
Agrippa), and in like manner the symbols to be engraved upon The
Scimitar of Barzai (section VIIT) were drawn from a sixteenth-
century manuscript of the Key of Solomon (see Additional MS.
36,674, British Museum Library). All the other diagrams were con-
structed in accordance with the fourth method. For example: the
basic outline of the Circle of Evocation given in section XIV of the
text was taken from the magic squares system, drawing lines from
point to point as indicated. The Planetary and Zodiacal symbols
which occupy the angles of the octogram from descriptive text, and
the figures of the constellations, Aldebaran, Caput Algol, Cor Scorpii
and the Pleiades, from Cornelius Agrippa’s Second Book of Occult
Philosophy (pp. 320-3). The inscription on The Talisman of Yhe is
the word ORKA rendered in the Alphabet of Hichus the Diviner
taken—as the cryptogram instructs—from The Polygraphia of Abbot
Trithemius.
As Trithemius and Agrippa both employ symbolism drawn from
incredibly ancient sources, the references in the cipher to The Poly-
graphia and The Three Books of Occult Philosophy (both sixteenth-
century works) shed little light on the actual antiquity of the Nec-
ronomicon. Likewise many of the sigils and characters given in The
Key of Solomon are of unknown origin, and certainly pre-date the
earliest known versions of the work. All that can be said with any
certainty is that the existence of the Necronomicon implies the sur-
vival of a tradition that stretches far into the dim and distant past, just
ow far, we may never know.
Robert Turner

108
 Al Azif
Ye Booke of Ye Arab

That which is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange
aeons even death may die

Abdul Alhazred
A° 730 at Damascus
 A Table of Contents

OF YE OLD ONES AND THEIR SPAWN

OF YE TIMES AND YE SEASONS TO BE OBSERVED
TO RAISE UP YE STONES
OF DIVERSE SIGNS
TO COMPOUND YE INCENSE OF ZKAUBA
TO MAKE YE POWDER OF IBN GHAZI
YE UNCTION OF KHEPHNES YE EGYPTIAN
TO FASHION THE SCIMITAR OF BARZAI
YE ALPHABET OF NUG-SOTH
YE VOICE OF HASTUR
CONCERNING NYARLATHOTEP
OF LENG IN YE COLD WASTE
OF KADATH YE UNKNOWN
TO CALL FORTH YOG-SOTHOTH
TO CONJURE OF YE GLOBES
YE ADURATION OF GREAT CTHULHU
TO SUMMON SHUB-NIGGURATH YE BLACK
YE FORMULA OF DHO-HNA
 Of Ye Old Ones and their Spawn

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are and the Old Ones shall be.
From the dark stars They came ere Man was born, unseen and
loathsome They descended to primal Earth.
Beneath the oceans They brooded while ages past, till seas gave up
the land, whereupon They swarmed forth in Their multitudes and
darkness ruled the Earth.
At the frozen Poles They raised up mighty cities, and upon high
places the temples of Those whome nature owns not and the Gods
have cursed.
And the spawn of the Old Ones covered the Earth, and Their
children endureth throughout the ages. Ye shantaks of Leng are the
work of Their hands, the Ghasts who dwelleth in Zin’s primordial
vaults know Them as their Lords. They have fathered the Na-hag and
the Gaunts that ride the Night; Great Cthulhu is Their brother, the
shaggoths Their slaves. The Dholes do homage unto Them in the
nighted vale of Pnoth and Gugs sing Their praises beneath the peaks
of ancient Throk.
They have walked amidst the stars and They have walked the
Earth. The City of Irem in the great desert has known Them; Leng in
the Cold Waste has seen Their passing, the timeless citadel upon the
cloud-veiled heights of unknown Kadath beareth Their mark.
Wantonly the Old Ones trod the ways of darkness and Their
blasphemies were great upon the Earth; all creation bowed beneath
Their might and knew Them for Their wickedness.
And the Elder Lords opened Their eyes and beheld the abomin-
ations of Those that ravaged the Earth. In Their wrath They set Their
hand against the Old Ones, staying Them in the midst of Their
iniquity and casting Them forth from the Earth to the Void beyond
the planes where chaos reigns and form abideth not. And the Elder
Lords set Their seal upon the Gateway and the power of the Old Ones
prevailest not against its might.
Loathsome Cthulhu rose then from the deeps and raged with
exceeding great fury against Earths Guardians. And They bound his
venomous claws with potent spells and sealed him up within the City
of R’lyeh wherein beneath the waves he shall sleep death’s dream
until the end of the Aeon.
Beyond the Gate dwell now the Old Ones; not in the spaces known
unto men but in the angles betwixt them. Outside Earth’s plane They
linger and ever awaite the time of Their return; for the Earth has
known Them and shall know Them in time yet to come.
And the Old Ones hold foul and formless Azathoth for Their
Pit
Master and abide with Him in the black cavern at the centre of all
infinity, where he gnaws ravenously in ultimate chaos amid the mad
beating of hidden drums, the tuneless piping of hideous flutes and the
ceaseless bellowing of blind idiot gods that shamble and gesture
aimlessly for ever.
The soul of Azathoth dwelleth in Yog-sothoth and He shall beckon
unto the Old Ones when the stars mark the time of Their coming; for
Yog-sothoth is the Gate through which Those of the Void will re-
enter. Yog-sothoth knowest the mazes of time, for all time is one unto
Him. He knowest where the Old Ones came forth in time long past
and where They shall come forth again when the cycle returneth.
After day cometh night; man’s day shall pass, and They shall rule
where They once ruled. As foulness you shall know them and Their
accursedness shall stain the Earth.

112
 Of Ye Times and Ye Seasons to be Observed

Whenever thou would’st call forth Those from Outside, thou must
mark well the seasons and times in which the spheres do intersect and
the influences flow from the Void.
Thou must observe the cycle of the Moon, the movements of the
planets, the Sun’s course through the Zodiac and the rising of the
constellations.
Ye Ultimate Rites shall be performed only in the seasons proper to
them, these be: at Candlemas (on the second day of the second
month), at Beltane (on the Eve of May), at Lammas (on the first day
of the eight month), at Roodmas (on the fourteenth day of the ninth
month), and at Hallowmas (on November Eve).
Call out to dread Azathoth when the Sun is in the Sign of the Ram,
the Lion, or the Archer; the Moon decreasing and Mars and Saturn
conjoin.
Mighty Yog-Sothoth shall rise to ye incantations when Sol has
entered the fiery house of Leo and the hour of Lammas be upon ye.
Evoke ye terrible Hastur on Candlemas Night, when Sol is in
Aquarius and Mercury in trine.
Supplicate Great Cthulhu only at Hallowmas Eve when the Sun
abides within the House of the Scorpion and Orion riseth. When All
Hallows falls within the cycle of the new Moon the power shall be
strongest.
Conjure Shub-Niggurath when the Beltane fires glow upon the hills
and the Sun is in the Second House, repeating the Rites at Roodmas
when ye Black One appeareth.

113
 To Raise up Ye Stones

To form ye Gate through which They from ye Outer Void might

manifest thou must set up ye stones in ye elevenfold configuration.
First thou shalt raise up ye four cardinal stones and these shall mark
ye direction of ye four winds as they howleth through their seasons.
To ye North set ye the stone of Great Coldness that shall form ye
Gate of ye winter-wind engraving thereupon the sigil of the Earth-
Bull thus: %&
In ye South (at a space of five paces from ye stone of ye North),
thou shalt raise ye stone of fierce-heat, through which ye summer
winds bloweth and make upon ye stone ye mark of ye Lion-serpent
thus:
Ye stone of whirling-air shall be set in ye East where ye first
equinox riseth and shall be graven with ye sign of he that beareth ye
waters, thus so: WA
Ye Gate of Rushing Torrents thou cause to beat the west most
inner point (at a space of five paces from ye stone of ye East) where ye
sun dieth in ye evening and ye cycle of night returns. Blazon ye stone
with ye character of ye Scorpion whose tail reacheth unto the stars:

Set thou the seven stones of Those that wander ye heavens, without
ye inner four and through their diverse influences shall ye focus of
power be established.
In ye North beyond the stone of Great Coldness set ye first ye stone
of Saturn at a space of three paces. This being.done proceed thou
widdershins placing at like distances apart ye stones of Jupiter, Mer-
cury, Mars, Venus, Sol and Luna marking each with their rightful
signs.
At ye centre of the so completed configuration set ye the Altar of ye
Great Old Ones and seal it with ye symbol of Yog-Sothoth and ye
mighty Names of Azathoth, Cthulhu, Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and
Nyarlathotep.
And ye stones shall be ye Gates through which thou shalt call Them
forth from Outside man’s time and space.
Entreat ye of ye stones by night and when the Moon decreaseth in
her light, turning thy face to ye direction of Their coming, speaking ye
words and making ye gestures that bringeth forth ye Old Ones and
causeth Them to walk once more ye Earth.

114
Ye Seal of Yog-Sothoth

Septentric

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115
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 Of Diverse Signs

These most potent signs shail be so formed with thy left hand when
thou employeth them in ye Rites.
Ye first sign is that of Voor and in nature it be ye true symbol of ye
Old Ones. Make ye thus whenever thou wouldst supplicate Those
that ever waite beyond ye Threshold.
Ye second sign is that of KisH and it breaketh down all barriers and
openeth ye portals of ye Ultimate Planes.
In ye third place goeth ye Great Sign of KorH which sealeth ye
Gates and guardeth ye pathways.
Ye fourth sign is that of ye Elder Gods. It protecteth those who
would evoke ye powers by night, and banisheth ye forces of menace
and antagonism.
(Nota: Ye Elder Sign hath yet another form and when so enscribed
upon ye grey stone of Mnar it serveth to hold back ye power of Ye
Great Old Ones for all time.)

Ye Signs of Power

%¢ee
otgn

117
 Ye Elder Sign

When thou wisheth to seal up

ye Gates carve thou ye Great Sign
of ye Elder Gods upon ye stone of Mnar
and set it before ye portals.

118
 Ye Sigil of Koth
whenever thou wouldst engrave ye the Sign of Koth it shall be formed
thus:

119
 To Compound Ye Incense of Zkauba

In the day and hour of Mercury with the Moon in her increase, thou
shalt take equal parts of Myrrh, Civet, Storax, Wormwood,
Assafoetida, Galbanum and Musk, mix well together and reduce all
to the finest powder.
Place the so assembled elements in a vessel of green glass and seal
with a brazen stopper afore inscribed with the characters of Mars and
Saturn.
Elevate the vessel to the Four Winds and cry aloud the supreme
words of power thus:
e
To the North: ZUMUORSOBET, NouM, ZAVAXxo!
To the East: QUEHAI, ABAWO, NOQUETONAU!!
To the South: OASAU, WURAM, THEFOTOSON!
To the West: ZUORONAIFWETHO, MUGELTHOR, MUGELTHOR-Y
ZXE!

Cover the vessel with a cloth of black velvet and set aside.
For each of seven nights thou shalt bathe the vessel in Moonlight
for the space of one hour—keeping it concealed beneath the cloth
from cock-crow till sunset.
All this being accomplished the incense shall be ready for use and
possessed of such vertue that he that useth it with knowledge shall
have power to call forth and command the Infernal Legions.
Note: When employed in ye Ultimate Rites the incense may be
rendered more efficacious by the addition of one part powdered
mummy-Egypticus.
Employ the perfume of Zkauba in all ceremonies of ye ancient
Lore casting ye essences upon live charcoals of Yew or Oak. And
when ye spirits drawn near, the vaporous smoke shall enchant and
fascinate them, binding their powers to thy will.

The Characters of Mars:

Te {FZ LEAHY Fo%

The Characters of Saturn:

Bt OB Cety Ww FW
120
 To Make Ye Powder of Ibn Ghazi
THE MYSTIC POWDER OF MATERIALIZATION:

Take of ye dust of ye tomb—wherein ye body has lain for two

hundred years or more past—, three parts. Take of powdered
Amaranth, two parts; of ground Ivy leaf, one part, and of fine salt,
one part.
Compound all together in an open mortar in the day and hour of
Saturn.
Make over the thus assembled ingredients the Voorish sign, and
then seal up the powder within a leaden casket whereupon is graven
the sigil of Koth.

YE USING OF YE POWDER:

Whenever thou wisheth to observe the airial manifestation of the

spirits blow a pinch of ye powder in the direction of their coming,
either from the palm of thy hand or the blade of the Magic Bolyne.
Mark ye well that ye maketh ye Elder Sign at their appearance, lest
the tendrils of darkness enter thy soul.

121
 Ye Unction of Khephnes Ye Egyptian

Whosoever anointeth his head with the ointment of Khephnes shall in

sleep be granted true visions of time yet to come.
* * *

When ye Moon increaseth in her light place in an earthen crucible a

goodly quantity of oil of ye Lotus, sprinkle with one ounce powdered
mandragora and stir well with ye forked twig of ye wild thorn bush.
Having so done utter ye incantation of Yebsu (taken from diverse
lines in ye papyrus) thus:

I am the Lord of Spirits,

Oridimbai, Sonadir, Episghes,
I am Ubaste, Ptho born of Binui Sphe, Phas;
In the name of Auebothiabathabaithobeuee
Give power to my spell O Nasira Oapkis Shfe,
Give power Chons-in-Thebes-Nefer-hotep, Ophois,
Give power! O Bakaxikhekh!

Add to ye potion pinch of ye red earth, nine drops natron, four

drops balsam of Olibanum and one drop blood (from thy right hand).
Combine the whole with a like measure of the fat of the gosling and
place ye vessel upon ye fire. When all is rendered well and ye dark
vapours begin to rise, make ye the Elder Sign and remove from ye
flames.
When the unguent has cooled place it within an urn of ye finest
alabaster, which thou shalt keep in some secret place (known only
unto thyself) until thou shalt have need of it.

22
 To Fashion the Scimitar of Barzai

In the day and hour of Mars and when the moon increaseth, make
thou a scimitar of bronze with a hilt of fine ebony.
Upon one side of the blade thou shalt enscribe these characters:

The HOS 526) - sss AN LY

And upon the other side these:

MNoms7ftt bY
On the day and hour of Saturn the moon decreasing, light thou a
fire of Laurel and yew boughs and offering the blade to the flames
pronounce the five-fold conjuration thus:
HcoriAxosu, ZODCARNES, I powerfully call upon ye and stir ye up O
ye mighty spirits that dwelleth in the Great Abyss.
In the dread and potent name of AZATHOTH come ye forth and give
power unto this blade fashioned in accordance to ancient Lore.
By XENTHONO-ROHMATRU, I command you O AZIABELIS, by
YSEHYROROSETH, I call thee O ANTQUELIS, and in the Vast and Ter-
rible Name of DAMAMIACH that Crom-yha uttered and the mountains
shook I mightily compel ye forth O BARBUELIS, attend me! aid me!
give power unto my spell that this weapon that bearest the runes of
fire receiveth such vertue that it shall strike fear into the hearts of all
spirits that would disobey my commands, and thatit shall assist me to
form all manner of Circles, figures and mystic sigils necessary in the
operations of Magical Art.
In the Name of Great and Mighty Yoc-SoTrHoTH and in the invinc-
ible sign of Voor (give sign)

Give power!
Give power!
Give power!
* * *

When the flames turn blue it shall be a sure sign that the spirits obey
173
your demands whereupon thou shalt quench the blade in an afore
prepared mixture of brine and cock-gall.
Burn the incense of Zkauba as an offering to the spirits thou hast
called forth, then dismiss them to their abodes with these words:
In the Names of AZATHOTH and YOG-SOTHOTH, Their servant
NYARLATHOTEP and by the power of this sign (make ye the Elder Sign),
I discharge thee; go forth from this place in peace and return ye not
until I calleth thee. (Seal ye portals with the sign of Koth).
* * *

Wrap the scimitar in a cloth of black silk and set it aside until thou
wouldst make use of it; but mark ye well that no other shall lay his
hand upon the scimitar lest its vertue be forever lost.

124
 Ye Alphabet of Nug-Soth

VIuUuL>oO2

oe
AAAH AT
Loac<P Note: In ye writing of ye mystic runes of Nug-Soth
ye latin C serveth for ye K.

Ye characters of Nug hold ye key to ye planes, employ ye them in ye

talismanic art and in all ye sacred inscriptions.

25
 Ye Voice of Hastur
Hear ye the Voice of dread Hastur, hear the mournful sigh of the
vortex, the mad rushing of the Ultimate Wind that Swirls darkly
amongst the silent stars.
Hear ye Him that howls serpent-fanged amid the bowels of nether
earth; He whose ceaseless roaring ever fills the timeless skies of
hidden Leng.
His might teareth the forest and crusheth the city, but none shall
know the hand that smiteth and the soul that destroys, for faceless and
foul walketh the Accursed One, His form to men unknown.
Hear then His Voice in the dark hours, answer His call with thine
own; bow ye and pray at His passing, but speak not His name aloud.

126
 Concerning Nyarlathotep

I hear the Crawling Chaos that calls beyond the stars

And They created Nyarlathotep for Their messenger, and They

clothed Him with Chaos that His form might be ever hidden amidst
the stars.
Who shall know the mystery of Nyarlathotep? for He is the mask
and will of Those that were when time was not. He is priest of the
Ether, the Dweller in Air and hath many faces that none shall recall.
The waves freeze before Him; the Gods dread His call. In men’s
dreams He whispers, yet who knoweth His form?

127
 Of Leng in Ye Cold Waste

Who seeketh Northwards beyond the twilight land of Inquanok shall

find amidst the frozen waste the dark and mighty plateau of thrice-
forbidden Leng.
Know ye time-shunned Leng by the ever-burning evil-fires and ye
foul screeching of the scaly Shantak birds which ride the upper air; by
the howling of ye Na-hag who brood in nighted caverns and haunt
men’s dreams with strange madness, and by that grey stone temple
beneath the Night Gaunts lair, wherein is he who wears the Yellow
Mask and dwelleth all alone.
But beware O Man, beware, of Those who tread in Darkness the
ramparts of Kadath, for he that beholds Their mitred-heads shall
know the claws of doom.

128
 Of Kadath Ye Unknown

What man knoweth Kadath?

For who shall know of that
which ever abides in strange-time,
twix yesterday, today and the morrow.

Unknown amidst ye Cold Waste lieth the mountain of Kadath

where upon the hidden summit an Onyx Castle stands. Dark clouds
shroud the mighty peak that gleams’ neath ancient stars where silent
brood the titan towers and rear forbidden walls.
Curse-runes guard the nighted gate carved by forgotten hands, and
woe to he that dare pass within those dreadful doors.
Earth’s Gods revel, where Others once walked in mystic timeless
halls, which some have glimpst in sleeps dim vault through strange
and sightless eyes.

129
 To Call Forth Yog-Sothoth

For Yog-Sothoth is the Gate.

He knoweth where the Old Ones
came forth in times past and where
They shall come forth again when
the cycle returneth.

When thou would call forth Yog-Sothoth thou must waite until the
Sun is in the Fifth House with Saturn in trine. Then enter within the
stones and draw about thee the Circle of evocation tracing the figures
with the mystic scimitar of Barzai.
Circumambulate thrice widdershins and turning thy face to the
South intone the conjuration that openeth the Gate:

Ye Conjuration

O Thou that dwelleth in the darkness of the Outer Void, come forth
unto the Earth once more I entreat thee.
O Thou who abideth beyond the Spheres of Time, hear my sup-
plication.
(Make the sign of Caput Draconis)
O Thou who art the Gate and the Way come forth Thy servant
calleth Thee.
(Make the Sign of Kish)
BENATIR! CARARKAU! DEDOS! YOG-SOTHOTH! come forth! come
forth! I speak the words, I Break Thy bonds, the seal is cast aside, pass
through the Gate and enter the World I maketh Thy mighty Sign!
(Make the Sign of Voor)
Trace the pentagram of Fire and say the incantation that causeth
the Great One to manifest before the Gate:

Ye Incantation

Zyweso, wecato keoso, Xunewe-rurom Xeverator. Menhatoy,

Zywethorosto zuy, Zururogos Yog-Sothoth! Orary Ysgewot, homor
athanatos nywe zumquros, Ysechyroroseth Xoneozebethoos
Azathoth! Xono, Zuwezet, Quyhet kesos ysgeboth Nyarlathotep!;
zuy rumoy quano duzy Xeuerator, YSHETO, THYYM, quaowe
130
xeuerator phoe nagoo, Hastur! Hagathowos yachyros Gaba Sub-
Niggurath! meweth, xosoy Vzewoth!
(Make the sign of Cauda Draconis)
TALUBSI! ADULA! ULU! BAACHUR!
Come forth Yog-Sothoth! come forth!
* * *

And then he will come unto thee and bring His Globes and He will
give true answer to all you desire to know. And He shall reveal unto
you the secret of His seal by which you may gain favour in the sight of
the Old Ones when They once more walk the Earth.
* * %

And when His hour be past the curse of the Elder Lords shall be
upon Him and draw Him forth beyond the Gate where He shall abide
until He be summoned.

Ye Circle of Evocation
North,
 To Conjure of Ye Globes

Know ye that the Globes of Yog-Sothoth be thirteen in number, and

they be the powers of the Parasite-hoard which are His servitors and
doeth His bidding in ye world.
Call them forth whenever thou shall have need of anything and
they shall grant their powers unto ye when ye shall call them with the
incantations and make their sign.
His Globes have diverse names and appeareth in many forms.
The first is Gomory, who appeareth like a camel with a crown of
gold upon his head. He commandeth twenty-six legions of infernal
spirits and giveth the knowledge of all magical jewels and talismans.
The second spirit is ZAGAN, who appeareth like a great bull, or a
King terrible in aspect. Thirty-three legions bow before him and he
teacheth the mysteries of the sea.
The Third is called Sytry, who taketh the form ofa great Prince. He
hath sixty legions and telleth the secrets of time yet to come.
ELicor is the fourth spirit; he appeareth like a red man with a
crown of iron upon his head. He commandeth likewise sixty legions
and giveth the knowledge of victory in war, and telleth of strife to
come.
The fifth spirit is called DURSON and hath with him twenty-two
familiar demons and appeareth like a raven. He can reveal all occult
secrets and tell of past times.
The sixth is VUAL his form is of a dark cloud and he teacheth all
manner of ancient tongues.
The seventh is Scor, who appeareth like a white snake, he bringeth
money at your command.
ALGOR is the eighth spirit, he appeareth in the likeness of a fly. He
can tell of all secret things and granteth the favours of great Princes
and Kings.
The ninth is SEFON, He appeareth like a man with a green face and
hath the power to show where treasure is hidden.
Tenth is PaRtAs, he hath the form of a great vulture, and can tell ye
the vertues of herbs, stones, make ye invisible and restore sight which
is lost.
The eleventh spirit is GAMoR, and when he appeareth like a man
can marvellously enform ye of how to win favours of great persons
and can drive away any spirit that guardeth over treasure.
_ Twelfth is UMBRa, He appeareth like a giant; he can convey money
from place to place if thou bid him and bestow the love of any woman
that thou desirest.
The thirteenth spirit is ANABOTH who taketh the form of a yellow
132
toad. He hath the power to make thee marvellous cunning in
nigromancy, he can drive away any devil that would hinder ye and tell
of strange and hidden things.

* * *

When thou wouldst call up ye Globes thou must first make upon
the earth this sign:

And evoke of them thus:

EZPHARES, OLYARAM, IRION-ESYTION,
ERYONA, OREA, ORASYM, Mozim!
By these words and in the name of YOG-SOTHOTH who is thy master,
Ido most powerfully summon and call yeupO....N....That thou
mayest aid me in my hour of need.
Come forth I command ye by the sign of Power!
(Make the sign of Voor)
* * *

And then the spirit shall appear unto thee and grant thy requests.
But if he remaineth invisible to thine eye, blow the dust of Ibn
Ghazi and he will immediately take his proper form.
When thou wouldst banish what ye have called up eraze thou their
sign with the scimitar of Barzai and utter the words:
CALDULECH! DALMALEY! CADAT!
(and seal with the sign of Koth).
Nota: If on their appearance the spirits obstinately refuse to speak
cleave the air thrice with the scimitar and say: ADRICANOROM
Dumaso!
and their tongue shall be loosened and they will be compelled to give
true answer.

153
 Ye Adjuration of Great Cthulhu

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh Wgah’nagl fhtan.

* * *

A supplication to great Cthulhu for those who would have power

over his minions.
* * *

In the day and hour of the moon with sun in scorpio prepare thou a
waxen tablet and enscribe thereon the seals of Cthulhu and Dagon;
suffumigate with the incense of Zkauba and set aside.
On Hallowmas eve thou must travel to some lonely place where
high ground overlooks the ocean. Take up the tablet in thy right hand
and make of the sign of Kish with thy left. Recite the incantation
thrice and when the final. word of the third utterance dieth in the air
cast thou the tablet into the waves saying:
‘In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,
yet He shall rise and His kingdom shall cover the Earth.’
And He shall come unto you in sleep and show His sign with which
ye shall unlock the secrets of the deep.

* * *

Ye Incantation

O Thou that lieth dead but ever dreameth,

Hear, Thy servant calleth Thee.
Hear me O mighty Cthulhu!
Hear me Lord of Dreams!
In Thy tower at R’lyeh They have sealed ye,
but Dagon shall break Thy accursed bonds,
and Thy Kingdom shall rise once more.
The Deep Ones knoweth Thy secret Name,
The Hydra knoweth Thy Jair;
Give forth Thy sign that I may know
Thy will upon the Earth.
When death dies, Thy time shall be,
and Thou shalt sleep no more;
Grant me the power to still the waves,
that I may hear Thy Call.
134
 (At ye third repeating of ye incantation cast forth the Tablet into ye
waves saying):
In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, yet He shall
rise and His kingdom shall cover the Earth.

Ye Tablet of R’lyeh

135
 To Summon Shub-Niggurath Ye Black

Where the stones have been set up thou shalt call out to Shub-
Niggurath, and unto he that knoweth the signs and uttereth the words
all earthly pleasures shall be granted.
* * *

When the sun entereth the Sign of the Ram and the time of night is
upon ye turn thy face to the North wind and read the verse aloud:

Tah! SHUB-NIGGURATH!
Great Black Goat of the Woods,
I Call Thee forth!
(Kneel)
Answer the cry of thy servant
who knoweth the words of power!
(make the Voorish sign)
Rise up I say from thy slumbers
and come forth with a thousand more!
(make the sign of Kish)
I make the signs, I speak the words
that openeth the door!
Come forth I say, I turn the Key,
Now! walk the Earth once more!

Cast the perfumes upon the coals, trace the sigil of Blaesu and
pronounce the words of power:

hrtft>
ZARIATNATMIX, JANNA, ETITNAMUS,
HAyYRAS, FABELLERON, FUBENTRONTY,
BRAZO, TABRASOL, NISA,
VARF-SHUB-NIGGURATH! GABOTS MEMBROT!

And then the Black one shall come forth unto thee and the
thousand Horned Ones who howl shall rise up from the Earth. And
thou shalt hold before them the talisman of Yhe upon which they shall
bow to thy power and answer thy demands.
136
 The Talisman of Yhe

FA
* TRIN 2
Dt

When thou would banish those that you have called forth intone
the words: IMAS, WEGHAYMNKO, QUAHERS, XEWEFARAM
Which closeth the Gate, and seal with the sign of Koth.

{37
 Ye Formula of Dho-Hna

Whosoever performeth this Rite with

true understanding shall pass beyond ye
Gates of Creation and enter ye Ultimate
Abyss wherein dwelleth ye vapourous
Lord S’ngac who eternally pondereth ye
Mystery of Chaos.

Trace ye Angle-Web with ye Scimitar of Barzai and offer the mystic

suffumigations with the incense of Zkauba.
Enter ye Web by the Gate of the North and reciting the incantation
of Na (thus): ZAzAs, NASATANADA, ZAZAS ZAZAS, proceed to ye
South-most Pinnacle by the Path of Alpha whereupon make ye, ye
Sign of Kish, pronouncing the triple-Word of power thrice, (thus
so): OHODOS-ScIES-ZAMONI! proceed thence to ye Angle of the
North-East chanting the third verse of ye Fifth Psalm of Nyarla-
thotep—neglecting not to make the quintuple genuflection on passing
through ye curve locus—(thus):

The All-One dwelleth in Darkness,

At the centre of All dwelleth He that is the Darkness;
And that Darkness shall be eternal when all shall bow before the
Onyx Throne.

Pause at the Third Angle and make ye once more the Sign of Kish
speaking the words that clear the portal and stay the course of time:
ABYSSUS-DRACONISUS, ZEXOWE-AZATHOTH!) NRRGO, IAA! NYAR-
LATHOTEP!
Follow the Third Path to the Pinnacle of the West and there
perform the obeisances in silence (bow low thrice and give the gesture
of Voor). Turn and tread the Path of Transfiguration leading to ye
Ultimate Angle. Open up the Abyss Gate by the ninefold affirmation
(thus): ZENOXESE, PIoTH, OxAS ZAEGOS, MAvoc Nicorsus, BAYAR!
HEECHO! YOG-SOTHOTH! YOG-SOTHOTH! YOG-SOTHOTH!
A eae ye the Sigil of Transformation and step thou forth into ye
ulf.
 aes
Ye Sigil of Transformation

Ye Angle Web

Ye figure shall be orientated to ye magnetic poles of ye Earth.

139
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APPENDIX A
Pp. FAAVASS A,
 Young Man Lovecraft
by
L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP

On 20 May 1975, while driving with my wife to Cincinnati to lecture, I

stopped off to see the Rev. John T. Dunn, M.F., who knew H. P.
Lovecraft when Lovecraft was in his early twenties. Although a native
and long a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, Father Dunn is now
the chaplain emeritus of Mercy Hospital in Portsmouth, Ohio. He
was born on 2 January 1889, making him a year and a half older than
H.P.L. and now eighty-six years of age.
The hospital put us up overnight and treated us with great kindness
and hospitality. I talked with Father Dunn for a couple of hours on the
afternoon of 20 May and again for an hour at breakfast the next
morning. Much of the first interview was tape recorded.
Father Dunn told how he and seven or eight other students
attended a night class at a high school in the northern part of Pro-
vidence in 1914. They were working-class people in their twenties
with literary ambitions, who wanted an advanced course in English.
Dunn, then twenty-four, was earning his living as a plumber. He
and his colleagues heard of the amateur journalism movement. On
the suggestion of the amateur journalist Edward H. Cole of Boston,
they decided to form the Providence Amateur Press Club. The lead-
ing spirits were Victor Basinet and a Miss Miller, and Lovecraft was a
founding member.
Dunn found Lovecraft, at twenty-three, odd or even eccentric. At
gatherings, Lovecraft sat stiffly staring forward, except when he
turned his head towards someone who spoke to him. He spoke in a
low monotone.
‘He sat—he usually sat like that, looking straight ahead, see? Then
he’d answer a question, and go back again,’ said Father Dunn. ‘I can
see him now, as I told you before, and he looked straight ahead; and
he—ah—he didn’t—he didn’t emphasize things. He nodded some-
times to emphasize a word or an expression.’
‘I liked the fellow,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t have anything against
him at all, see? Only we did disagree; but I hope we disagreed like
gentlemen, see?’
143
 Their main source of friction was the Irish question. Dunn was of
Irish parentage, his mother having been born in Ireland in the year of
the Famine. Dunn was a Hibernophile and a Sinn Fein sympathizer.
Lovecraft was an extreme Anglophile.
‘He said I had no right to oppose British rule in Ireland; he said,
didn’t Pope—ah—what was the name, the fourth—Adrian the Fourth,
didn’t he give Ireland over to the British? And I told him no, see? But
he knew his history, see; he knew at least that part of his history.’
The one thing that Dunn disliked about Lovecraft was the latter’s
habit of calling Irishmen and Irish-Americans ‘Micks’. Lovecraft’s
notorious xenophobia and ethnic prejudices were then in full flower.
Lovecraft’s voice was high-pitched but not what one would call
shrill; Dunn said it was about like his own. Lovecraft had great
self-control, never losing his temper no matter how heated the argu-
ment. ‘He—ah—I never saw him show any temper, see? But when he
wrote, he wrote very vigorously; there’s no doubt about that,
see... ? And he never got excited like I would get excited.’
Not knowing Lovecraft’s real financial condition, Dunn, from the
fact that Lovecraft had no regular occupation, supposed that he had
enough income to live on indefinitely. Lovecraft, he said, did not talk
much and only rarely smiled or laughed. ‘He didn’t have any sense of
humour.’
Dunn’s friends considered Lovecraft ‘laughable’, never suspecting
that he would one day be famous. ‘Among ourselves, we kind of made
fun of him, not knowing his background.’ Now, said Dunn, he was
sorry for his lack of sympathy with H.P.L., whose handicaps he had
not been aware of. Dunn added that, if he had known that Lovecraft
would become an important literary figure, he would have paid closer
attention to him.
Another member of the Providence Amateur Press Club, living
next door to Dunn, had a sister named Sadie Henry. Once Miss
Henry, visiting at Dunn’s house, as a joke among the circle of friends,
telephoned Lovecraft and suggested that he take her out on a date.
Lovecraft said: ‘I’ll have to ask my mother,’ and nothing came of it.
In pursuit of his eighteenth-century fixation, Lovecraft once
dressed up in Colonial costume—or at least a three-cornered
hat—and, so clad, had a photograph of himself published in a Pro-
vidence newspaper. To run down and reproduce this picture would be
a worthy project for some Lovecraft enthusiast.
Dunn, being not only anti-British but also a conscientious objector,
refused to register for the draft in 1917 and turned himself in to the
US marshal. He spent the rest of the Kaiserian War in one prison or
another, ending at Fort Leavenworth. After the war, he attended a
seminary and took holy orders in the Catholic Church.
144
 Dunn also told us of how the noted Lovecraftian researcher R. A.
Kirsch (also known as ‘Everts’) ‘borrowed’ his letters from Lovecraft.
Dunn was still trying to get these letters back.
So here we have a picture of Lovecraft at the age of twenty-three to
twenty-six, when he was just beginning to come out of the shell into
which he had retreated in 1908, when an unclassified illness pre-
vented him from finishing high school. In the interim, he had been a
true ‘eccentric recluse’. He had done little but lounge around the
house and read, seldom stirring abroad or having contact with any
other human being except his dotty mother. He still gave a queer,
eccentric impression. But he was learning that he could get along with
fellow mortals—not perfectly, but to the point where they would
accord him at least an amused toleration.
At this time, however, in this solemn, snobbish, priggish, pitiful,
erudite misfit, there was little indication of the kindly, genial, warm-
hearted, charming, witty, tolerant, and in many other ways admirable
man into whom Lovecraft slowly and often painfully matured during
the next two decades.

145
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APPENDIX B
a YAGWASSA
 Dreams of Dead Names:
The Scholarship of Sleep
by
CHRISTOPHER FRA YLING

‘Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no

more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experi-
ences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are
still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character
permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and
disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of
mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated
from that life by an all but impassable barrier.’ This characteristic
opening paragraph to one of Lovecraft’s earliest published tales,
Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919), with its explicit rejection of Freu-
dianism, could well be appended to his entire output—from the
early, Poe-faced period, through the stories derived from Dunsany
(‘pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and ugliness of
diurnal reality’), to the fourteen fully-fledged tales of the Cthulhu
Mythos. Not for nothing was the second monumental anthology of
Lovecraftiana from Arkham House given the title of the 1919 story.
Dreams which impinge on the consciousness of lecturers in languages,
political economy, at Miskatonic University, or of Catskill Mountain
hicks. Dreams of inviting ancestral tombs, of mist-shrouded, legend-
haunted Arkham, of ‘an unspoiled, ancestral New England without
the foreigners and factory-smoke, bill-boards and concrete roads, of
the sections which modernity has touched’, ‘nightmares of the most
hideous description, peopled with things ...’, nightmares lovingly
transcribed ‘before I fully awaked’. When Weird Tales ran out of
Lovecraft material, two years after his death, they published as ‘a
brief posthumous tale’ a long, uncorrected excerpt from one of his
letters describing such a nightmare, and titled it The Wicked
Clergyman. Nearly all the personal relationships that mattered to
Lovecraft were established, and developed, through the medium of
correspondence, and his letters (sometimes longer than his published
tales), when they are not concerned with asserting at length that
149
Lovecraft would have preferred to have been born a patrician in
ancient Rome, a ‘predatory rover of the blood of Hengist and Horsa’,
a landed gentleman in eighteenth-century England (‘Nothing must
disturb my undiluted Englishry—God Save the King!’), or, at the
least, of ‘pure’ New English descent (which, in his terms, he wasn’t),
frequently contain obsessively detailed accounts of dreams and
nightmares. Posthumous ‘collaborations’ have been based on them.
Lovecraft’s dream-landscape, and his dream-life, may have been
exceptionally autarchic (only comparable in ‘intensity’, as Lovecraft
acknowledged, with the ‘true mysticism’ of Arthur Machen, but
owing much detail to the theosophical Strange Stories of Bulwer
Lytton), yet the phenomenon of dream-based tales of supernatural
horror did have distinguished precedents. Horace Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto, ‘destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the
literature of the weird’, was derived from a nightmare and written at
great speed while the memory was still fresh. Gothick neophytes, of
the type satirized in Northanger Abbey, tried to emulate Walpole’s
success by stimulating nightmares of their own: they ate bad food,
thought nasty thoughts, read as many worm-ridden books as they
could find. But they soon discovered that nightmares in vacuo, created
‘by numbers’, were not really frightening at alt—plenty of romance,
not much agony save perhaps indigestion. By contrast, the two great
horror sub-genres of the nineteenth century (on which Lovecraft
himself based some non-Mythos tales such as Herbert West:
Reanimator, 1921-—2)—the Frankenstein theme, and the story of the
aristocratic hero-villain who is also a card-carrying Vampyre—
resulted from genuine sado-erotic nightmares experienced by
members of the Byron-Shelley ménage in summer 1816, this time
stimulated by too much laudanum, bad vibrations among the two
poets, their mistresses and Dr. Polidori, and over-exposure to
Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise. Later in the century, during the
Gothic revival, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the original,
full-length version) was the product of a series of tuberculoid
nightmares, while Bram Stoker started to write Dracula after
eating to much crab salad the night before, with the usual dire con-
sequences.
Lovecraft was critical of all these authors: Horace Walpole was a
‘very sprightly and worldly Englishman’ for whom mystery was ‘a
dilettante’s diversion’; the Radcliffe school was ‘fair game for the
parodist’, its works based on ‘erroneous geography and history’; Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein was ‘somewhat tinged by moral didacticism’;
Robert Louis Stevenson had ‘an atrocious tendency towards jaunty
mannerisms’, and his works tended to ‘specialise in events rather than
atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impression-
150
istic imagination’, thus appearing to Lovecraft ‘a diluted product’
compared with ‘the sheer artistic nightmare’; and in Bram Stoker’s
novels, ‘poor technique sadly impairs their net effect’. But Lovecraft’s
dreams, and the life and fiction he based on them, had few points of
comparison with these mainstream writers of Gothick fantasies. His
nightmares were certainly not stimulated by over-rich food and high
living: since he was so keen to preserve his public self-image as
aristocrat, scholar, antiquarian, and above all, amateur—a gentle-
man not a player—he made no effort to appease ‘mammon-guided
editors’ by resubmitting rejected stories, or converting his illegible
scrawl into typescript, preferring instead (with pride) to ‘get by on as
little as $1.75 a week by purchasing beans or spaghetti in cans or
crackers in boxes’. Most of his time was spent ghost-writing, or
completely revising other people’s stories (often originally based on
his own ideas): that way, he need not be publicly associated with the
dirty deed. Nor were his dreams stimulated by hallucinogens, and bad
vibrations in the company of sensitive competitors: Lovecraft’s
regard for Poe did not extend to a desire for experiments with opium,
or to concern (at any level) with unorthodox sexual adventures, and
he never had a sustained or stable enough relationship with like-
minded writers for it to go sour. His nightmares were not self-
induced, to prop up his flagging imagination for publication pur-
poses: in fact, when editors rejected his dream-based stories, he
always had the lingering suspicion that they had made the right
decision (perhaps his dreams were not for public consumption after
all), and, just as the cosmic events described in At The Mountains of
Madness (which will ‘mean to biology what Einstein has meant to
mathematics and physics’) are only reported in the Arkham
Advertiser, in ‘an official bulletin of Miskatonic University’, so
Lovecraft was equally happy publishing his work in amateur fanzines
(if at all) as he was having them accepted by Farnsworth Wright, the
unpredictable editor of Weird Tales. Shortly after having his first story
accepted by that magazine, he wrote ‘I am well-nigh resolv’d to write
no more tales, but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not
stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dreams for the
boarish publick.’ In 1924, before the Wright régime, Lovecraft (then
thirty-four years old) had been offered the editorship of Weird
Tales—a rare example of recognition (outside the ‘circle’) in his own
lifetime: but he had refused, using his public self-image as an excuse.
‘This I can hardly contemplate without a shiver—think of the tragedy
of such a move (to Chicago) for an aged antiquarian just settled down
in enjoyment of the reliques of New Amsterdam!’ On both occasions,
when he was poised on the brink of success, Lovecraft retreated into
eighteenth-century ‘antiquarianism’, expressing his feelings in
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archaic Gothick prose. He did not need rich food, drugs, late-night
story sessions, visits to ruins and faraway places in order to keep the
production line moving. Until the age of thirty, Lovecraft had never
spent a night away from the company of his doting aunts. All he
needed to do was to wake up in the morning. He would then draw all
the curtains, turn on the lights, and pretend he was working through
the night.
Freudians, Jonesians and Jungians could obviously have a field day
with Lovecraft’s nightmare, just as they did (and do) with Fuseli’s.
Lovecraft professed to despise Freud’s ‘puerile symbolism’, perhaps
because he was frightened of facing up to it. And with reason. Of the
two women who play the most significant roles in Lovecraft’s tales,
one is a vampiric housewife (The Thing On the Doorstep), while the
other is ‘a somewhat deformed unattractive albino woman of 35’ (The
Dunwich Horror). Recurring motifs in the dream landscape of
Cthulhu include (chosen at random) dense undergrowth, gaping
entrances to caves, distended tails and faces which are ‘mere white
cones tapering to one blood-red tentacle’, not to mention (as Love-
craft usually does) those many ‘unmentionable’, blasphemous things
which ‘ought to make any mana Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long
enough to tell what he has seen’. Many who encounter these things
(‘their effect was one of suggestion rather than of revelation’), do not
keep sane long enough. Others return to the faculty at Miskatonic, to
be treated in future as ‘unpleasantly erudite folklorists’ and (pre-
sumably) as frustrated Dantes. Jungians might consider as central
themes in the Cthulhu dream-mythos Lovecraft’s oft-expressed view
that human consciousness (fortunately) lives on ‘a placid island of
ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity’ (key motifs illustrating
this theme might include the Dark, the Cataclysms, the Awe-
Inspiring Animals, the Incomprehensible Languages), and his var-
ious versions of ‘The Fall’ (expulsion of Milton’s Satan from Eden, or
expulsion from uterine heaven to terrestrial abyss, key motifs perhaps
including the fascination with Dunsany’s ‘unreverberate blackness of
the abyss’, and with crawling, creeping, falling or sliding into the
Underworld Sea, Cave or nameless ‘Unclean Froth’). Specific icons
might prove equally juicy objects of study: again at random, books
and museums (memories), octopoid creatures (possessive mother),
man-eating monsters (the insatiable hunger of the infant), and gigan-
tic things (adults as seen by children). Unlike Frankenstein’s Crea-
ture, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, Stevenson’s outward manifestation of
‘The Beast in Man’, and Stoker’s Dracula, Lovecraft’s bug-eyed
monsters, representatives of the Elder Gods, can never be destroyed.
At best, they can be temporarily subdued, or repressed. They are
always there, on the Outside, waiting. In this rejection of the
{53
traditional morality-play universe of the horror story lies one of the
keys, perhaps, to Lovecraft’s enduring appeal.
But Lovecraft preferred to interpret his dreams and nightmares in
dramaturgical terms, as the product of a rejection of the role which,
he felt, was being foisted on him by contemporary society: his
dream-roles were to be found in eighteenth-century literature, and it
was appropriate to express them in archaic Gothick prose. Because of
this, he wrote in March 1929, ‘my writing soon became distorted—
till at length I wrote only as a means of re-creating around me
the atmosphere of my 18th century favourites . .. everything suc-
cumbed to my one intense purpose of thinking and dreaming myself
back into that world of periwigs and long s’s which for some odd
reason seemed to me the normal world. Thus was formed a habit of
imitativeness which I can never wholly shake off. Even when I break
away, it is generally only through imitating something else! There are
my “Poe” pieces and my “‘Dunsany”’ pieces—but alas, where are my
Lovecraft pieces?’ When he articulated his distaste for ‘beady-eyed,
rat-faced Asiatics’, or ‘gnarled old Levites’, he was, he claimed,
simply showing how much he disliked what immigrants had done to
the old quarters of New England which he loved so much. His wife,
presumably, was not at first personally guilty of this. But when his
wife offered to buy a large house in Providence, to put up the
Lovecraft ménage, and to use part of the house for ‘a business venture
of my own’ (to cover expenses), she was ‘gently but firmly informed’
by his two doting aunts that ‘neither they nor Howard could afford to
have Howard’s wife work for a living in Providence’. It was simply not
done. So the marriage broke up. Lovecraft’s succession of dream-
worlds (patrician in ancient Rome, Viking warrior, eighteenth-
century English landed gentleman, New England aristocrat, the
Cthulhu Mythos) can be interpreted in similar terms, as his letters are
intended to make abundantly clear. Although Lovecraft liked to put
over the image of ‘scholar-antiquarian’, these dream-worlds were not
based on extensive reading, poring over primary historical sources.
He often experienced them in situ, his réveries stimulated by roman-
tic ‘impressions’ of the environment: ‘Jamestown is one of the most
powerful imaginative stimuli I have ever received. To stand upon the
soil where Elizabethan gentlemen-adventurers first broke ground for
the settlement of the western world is to experience a thrill that
nothing else can give.’ When he wrote a story in collaboration with
someone who had actually made a close study of the Occult (Through
the Gates of the Silver Key, with E. Hoffman Price), the result was
overloaded with esoteric detail about Oriental mysticism and
Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, and is virtually impossible to fol-
low. Lovecraft never studied the occult in depth—which is perhaps
154
why he imagined the ‘source books’ would leave such a profound
impression on him if he did. The best stories of the Cthulhu Mythos
are raw transcriptions of dreams.
Lovecraft was well aware of the pitfalls of writing in an over-
emphatic style, indulging in needless pedantry, and overdoing the
adjectives, where horror fiction was concerned. In his essay on
Supernatural Horror in Literature, and his Notes on the Writing of
Weird Fiction, he stressed that such trappings of theatricality were to
be avoided: ‘remove all possible superfluities—words, sentences,
paragraphs, and whole episodes or elements’; ‘touches of selective,
associative detail’ were all that was required; ‘avoid bald catalogues
of incredible happenings, which can have no substance of meaning
apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism’; ‘in relation to
the central wonder, the characters should show the same over-
whelming emotion which similar characters would show toward such
a wonder in real life’. At first sight, Lovecraft seems to have dis-
obeyed all these rules: his stories abound in Gothick solecisms,
descriptions which simply reveal the limited stock of adjectives at
Lovecraft’s disposal, rather than involving the reader in what is going
on, attempts to bludgeon the reader into accepting that objects or
incidents are frightening, or awe-inspiring, by a barrage of adjectives
describing such emotions. The only contemporary author in the genre
who over-wrote to the same extent was Sax Rohmer—but that was
probably because he had served his apprenticeship as a writer in the
Music Hall, concocting pompous patter—songs for George Robey
and Little Tich. Lovecraft reckoned that the reader should not be
encouraged to stand aside from ‘the air of awe and impressiveness’
which the author was attempting to ‘weave’. ‘One cannot, except in
immature pulp charlatan-fiction present an account of impossible,
improbable or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace nar-
rative of objective acts.’ But, faced with Lovecraft’s over-ripe prose,
the reader’s first response is to stand aside, especially since his
dénouements are invariabiy set in several lines of italics!
‘That shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the
ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of
nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of
all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no
lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable un-
lighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating
of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.” *
Lovecraft seems to have been unaware that he was flagrantly
disobeying his own critical tenets. He clearly thought he was ‘weaving
an air of awe and impressiveness, corresponding to what the reader
* The entry of Azathoth in The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadah.

155
WEST
ELEVATION
Scale: 4? feet

PROPOSED LIBRAR
MISKATONIC VNIVE
ROY ARKTIAM eae W.VAN BUREN DENKER & EUGENE K.SCHWARTZ
WON eee ; ARCHITECTS: SALEM:1906

Original design for the new Library for the Miskatonic University, 1906, by W. Van
Buren Denker and E. K. Schwartz, architects, Salem, Mass. As executed (Cram
Collection, Massachusetts Association of Architects).
should feel’ and ‘painting a vivid picture of a certain type of human
mood’. This is one of the central problems for those trying to under-
stand Lovecraft’s dream world. One explanation might be that
Lovecraft’s tales are the product of an enviably well-adjusted mind:
well-adjusted, that is, to his own curiously autarchic universe. He was
responding as anyone else would in similar circumstances. Since the
tales have no point of contact with the world outside the window, and
since Lovecraft himself was part of the world he had created, he
could, with logic, universalize his own responses and claim that this
was ‘what the reader should feel’. Even the archaic, Gothick way in
which these feelings are expressed. He was not bludgeoning the
reader: he was simply letting him know what it was like. Alter-
natively, if Lovecraft was trying to adjust to society (and there is not
much evidence for this, as we have seen in his response to the two
major choices of his life—the offer of editorship, and his marriage),
then his tales become a bizarre form of recidivist fiction (escaping
from one prison to become a voluntary patient in another), and his
prose part of the same process (distancing himself from the horrifying
world of his dreams). There is, of course, a third alternative, one that
has often been suggested, which short-circuits the problem: that
Lovecraft was ‘an atrocious writer’.
Lovecraft’s writing creates impressions (and, perhaps, encourages
the reader to develop and extend the invented mythology—as evi-
denced by the many writers who have contributed tales to the
Cthulhu Mythos since Lovecraft’s death). His survey of Supernatural
Horror in Literature had much the same effect: Lovecraft’s talent is
not for dense criticism or analysis, but rather for presenting a drama-
tic impression of the stories he has chosen, often more spectacular
than the stories themselves. The tales of the Cthulhu Mythos are
usually concerned with a series of ‘moods’, corresponding to the
narrator’s gradual awakening: elitism, anxiety, inquisitiveness,
understanding, terror; these ‘moods’ often being externalized by
descriptions of all the sense-impressions in turn—sound, stench, sight,
then touch. The conclusion to the narrative invariably precedes the
horrifying climax, which is evoked in the grand manner. In the early
stories, the narrator is a scholar and antiquarian who belongs to a
recognizable university or institution. Later, he will become an
instructor at Miskatonic University, Arkham. Finally, he becomes
Lovecraft as he would like to see himself—‘an elderly eccentric of
Providence, Rhode Island named Ward Phillips’. “Where are my
Lovecraft pieces?’ he had asked in 1929. The answer came in the last
five years of his life: in the talent he had for re-creating the moods,
impressions and climaxes of his dreams, towards the end not even
bothering to attribute them to anyone else.
157
 But it is the internal structure of scholarly references contained in
the tales, as much as the tales themselves, that has continued to
fascinate Lovecraft readers. His most successful Cthulhu stories take
the form of random reports of weird events, which gradually build up
into a coherent account with the aid of certain ‘forbidden books’.
These reports provide the backdrop: the stories seldom associate the
narrator directly with the cosmic events going on around him; they
are more concerned with one man’s reception and impression of the
apparently random happenings with which he has a one-off re-
lationship. Lovecraft’s narrators are loners: for obvious reasons,
they are seldom involved in human relationships. Lovecraft took care
to create this impression of authenticity: he refers to interviews,
newspaper cuttings, letters transcribed in full, photographs, phono-
graph recordings and wireless messages. In this, his tales resemble
more traditional horror stories (such as Dracula) which were alleged
to be based on diaries, newspaper reports or recordings: they also
prefigure Orson Welles’ celebrated radio account of the landing of
the Martians at Grover’s Mill Farm, New Jersey (The War of the
Worlds, 1938). Welles used on-the-spot reportage, interviews with a
Princeton astronomer, radio messages, official broadcasts: he based
the radio report of the actual landing on a recording of the CBS
correspondent’s attempts to cover the recent Hindenberg airship
disaster without vomiting over the microphone. Lovecraft’s best
stories are constructed in a similar way: in The Whisperer in Darkness,
he used the very recent discovery of the planet Pluto as an excuse to
add the planet Yuggoth to his own mythology. But in his case, the
attempts to suggest authenticity are superimposed on an entirely
fictional setting, as are the ‘scholarly references’. The elaborate
names which Lovecraft used, when they are not borrowed from
Bierce, Dunsany and Chambers, often represent a curious means of
establishing, and developing, relationships with other writers in the
field whom Lovecraft admired—in ways which parallel his use of the
‘antiquarian-scholar’ image in his correspondence. The ‘frightful
Tsathoggua’ first appeared in the work of Clark Ashton Smith:
Lovecraft refers to this ‘amorphous, toad-like god-creature’, and
associates it with ‘the Atlantean-high-priest Klarkash Ton’. One of
his ‘forbidden books’ is ‘the Comte D’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules’—a
reference to his friend August Derleth. Robert Bloch (a young
member of the ‘circle’) decided to write a pastiche Lovecraft story in
1935 (The Shambler from the Stars) in which the ‘mystic dreamer
from New England’ himself comes to a sticky end, in the teeth of a
vampiric thing, after glancing at the dreaded Necronomicon (‘rats had
gnawed the leather, rats which perchance had a ghastlier food for
common fare’). Lovecraft returned the compliment by doing in
158
‘Robert Blake’, in his last Cthulhu story The Haunter of the Dark.
Robert Bloch also wrote of ‘the grotesque Black Rites of mystic
Luveh-Keraphf’. In-jokes of this type seem to have appealed very
much to Lovecraft, and his letters are full of them. These, plus his
image as ‘antiquarian’, represented strategies which he adopted in
order to come to terms with one of his worlds. The attempts to estab-
lish authenticity, and the internal structure of scholarly references,
not only made his tales more engaging, but also made them access-
ible to the few friends he had.
Perhaps the most striking example of Lovecraft’s ‘scholarship’ is his
use of ‘forbidden books’. Books that provide enigmatic keys to the
Universe of the Elder Gods; books the mere ownership, or opening of
which render the reader especially susceptible; books which may put
suggestions in peoples’ minds; books whose illustrations obsess, and,
ultimately, vampirize the reader—to become hand-tinted with his
blood. Lovecraft was no scholar, as we have seen. But the footnotes to
his dreams provided a bridge with a recognizable world with which
Lovecraft insisted on being associated. Largely self-educated, he
invariably placed his Mythos tales in a university setting. His Super-
natural Horror in Literature reveals the extent to which Lovecraft was
impressed by writers in the genre who were also reputable scholars:
M.R. James, a favourite author, was an ‘antiquary of note, and
recognized authority on mediaeval manuscripts and cathedral history’;
Dunsany’s ‘point of view was the most truly cosmic of any held in the
literature of any period...this author draws with tremendous
effectiveness on nearly every body of myth and legend within the circle
of European culture’; Arthur Machen, another favourite, was ‘a
general man of letters’, author of ‘refreshing essays, vivid autobio-
graphical volumes, fresh and spirited translations’. Lovecraft could
never hope to emulate the scholarship of these men—his mythologies
come from far simpler sources. He thought his amateur profession of
‘antiquarian-scholar’ demanded respect nonetheless. And in any case,
association with a University would probably have ‘tainted’ him... .
From M. R. James, Lovecraft borrowed the University settings for
most of his Cthulhu stories; from Dunsany the notion of an ‘invented
mythology’ and the ‘lonely swamp land’ environment; from Machen
the atmosphere of a legend-haunted heritage (New England folklore
standing in for Celtic background). One of the reasons why Lovecraft
is so avidly collected today, is the fact that his mythology is so
manageable. Readers can follow accretions to the Mythos from story
to story, rapidly becoming expert enough in its lore to know more
than the narrator of any individual story. To read. the Cthulhu tales
(fourteen in all) is to gain a complete insight into this dream land-
scape. In a sense, Lovecraft’s attitude to the kind of ‘scholarship’ on
159
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 which study of the Occult should be based, resembles that of Mon-
tague Summers, the Magus who currently presides over the world of
horror anthologies. Of course, Summers was a scholar of sorts—when
he did not have to compete on level terms with academic editors and
bibliographers, and when his readers were not likely to scrutinize the
dubious sources on which many of his comments were based. Beyond
that, the parallels are striking. In his writings on the Occult, Summers
operated mainly in the limited edition market; Lovecraft was happy
publishing in fanzines. Summers was drawn to the theatre and ritual of
the Weird; so, to an extent, was Lovecraft. Both seem to have despised
the Horror Film: Summers professed to be ‘no votary of the cinemato-
graph’, Lovecraft categorized vampire films as ‘exploitation’, and
many of his comments on ‘puerile romances’ (in the theoretical
writings) seem to be pitched at the cinema. It was just Lovecraft’s luck
that when Hollywood got round to filming The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward, they played safe commercially and retitled it Edgar Allen Poe’s
The Haunted Palace. Montague Summers thought that an archaic,
Gothick form of English prose was the most appropriate in which to
couch his surveys of the Occult. Just so Lovecraft.
‘It is, perhaps, no matter for surprise that under that quintessence
of verjuice and venom . . . whose loathsome slime fouled Caledonia
from north to south and ate like a putrid sore through to the very
heart of her children, an intenser gloom, a deeper despair, fell upon
the unhappy land.’
Lovecraft on some nameless Cthulhoid horror? In fact, Summers
on John Knox in The Geography of Witchcraft (1927).
“‘Whereon mine host, little minded to be made a meal of, in a sad
fright bolted rous through the door, which he took care to double lock
and bar behind him, leaving his cloak to shift for itself. So the budge
nims the togeman, and Prince Prig is off on his way to see more of the
world. Moral: we must not believe everything we hear.’
A quote from one of Lovecraft’s ‘forbidden books’? In fact, Sum-
mers on The Werewolf (1933). I defy anyone to make sense of that
passage, even in context.
Summers was not averse to ‘heightening’ certain passages (in his
own inimitable style), when he was supposed to be translating. And
he seems to have been blissfully unaware of the sexual implications of
the stories he was studying, stressing instead the most weird and
macabre elements. Lovecraft was also a guns before buttock man.
Both shared a certain ‘humourless’ quality in presentation.
Of course, there was nothing new about referring to ‘forbidden
books’ in horror fiction. Sax Rohmer had done so in his Oriental
mysteries, referring to The Book of Thoth and The Book of the Dead.
Dennis Wheatley was shortly to do so, with his incantations from The
161
Book of Set. But in these cases, the ‘forbidden books’ were used as an
authoritative arsenal of reference for ‘those sciences which no uni-
versity today can teach’ (Rohmer), as a ‘weapon’ for the expert, and
to provide a kind of potentous sense of ‘authenticity’. Tolkien’s
Preface to The Lord of the Rings is intended to outline the ‘sources’ on
which the saga is based, but the ‘sources’ play no part in the actual
story—a fusion of Antlantean, Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Wagnerian
mythologies as well as a celebration of contemporary suburban life.
Lovecraft’s ‘forbidden books’ serve a different purpose, as we have
seen—they are footnotes to dreams, and part of the dream-landscape
itself. They are not genuine sources around which legends have
developed. Nor are they part of a ‘preface’ to a ‘text’. They represent
the scholarship of sleep.
Perhaps the best way of looking at the relationship between Love-
craft’s reading and knowledge, his dreams, and his stories, is to study
his one attempt to convert someone else’s experience into a Weird
Tale. This occurred in 1924, when Lovecraft was asked to ghost-write
a piece on Houdini’s experiences during a trip to the Pyramids.
Houdini had told a story to the editor of Weird Tales, about how he
was thrown into an ancient subterranean temple at Gizeh by two
Arab guides, and left to get out ‘as best he might’. The editor thought
it might make a successful tale, and asked Lovecraft to ‘put this into
vivid narrative form’. It turned out to be Lovecraft’s greatest com-
mercial success so far, and he was offered the editorship of Weird
Tales on the strength of it. The atmosphere of the piece, he seems to
have gleaned from Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch Queen, a book
he admired (he was later to adapt the title, and use it for several
Cthulhu Tales) he found in Baedeker’s guide to Egypt and the Sudan.
The rest he imagined as he went along. Escapology scarcely features
at all. “What I saw—or thought I saw,’ he begins, ‘certainly did not
take place; but is rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent
readings in Egyptology, and of the speculations anent this theme
which my environment naturally prompted.’ The introductory scene
of Houdini’s arrival in Cairo is intended to create a series of such
‘imaginative stimuli’: the ‘prosaic subway’ is compared with ‘the
Arabian nights atmosphere’ of the street; in Cairo, ‘the Bagdad of
Harun-al-Rashid seemed to live again’; ‘guided by our Baedekers’
the party makes for ‘Old Cairo—it is itself a story-book and a
dream—labyrinth of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic sec-
rets . . .’ (there follows a long sentence, with fifteen more such adjec-
tives); in the distance, ‘the cryptic yellow Nile’, and ‘the menacing
sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with
older arcana’; then the first glimpse of the Sphinx: ‘the smile of the
Sphinx vaguely displeased us; and made us wonder about the legends
162
of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading
down, down to depths none might dare hint at—depths connected
with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having
a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods
in the ancient Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it was I asked myself an
idle question whose hideous significance was not to appear for many
an hour.’ (The question, which is answered during the horrific climax
to the story, is ‘what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx
originally carven to represent?’ There follow three pages describing
the pyramids, and some of the legends associated with them; three
lines quoted from Thomas Moore (Imprisoned With The Pharaohs
also Owes something to The Epicurean); and a hint of Houdini’s
growing suspicions: ‘I thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide
looked like an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling
Sphinx . . . and wondered.’ The central section of the story deals with
Houdini’s fall into the Pyramid, and the hallucinations he experiences
while he is ‘diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous
lower vacua....’ ‘Behind it all, I saw the ineffable malignity of
primordial necromancy, black and amorphous.’ ‘God! If only I had
not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the
foundation of all darkness and terror.’ ‘Perhaps the most leeringly
blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain perverse
products of decadent priestcraft—composite mummies made by the
artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals
in imitation of the elder gods.’ And so, in the final part of the story, it
comes to pass. ... The hideous five-headed monster of the climax
belches himself into the story with ‘a fiendish and ululant corpse-
gurgle or death-rattle’. Houdini then discovers to his cost what it was
the Sphinx was carved to represent, although the five-headed mons-
ter he sees is only its merest forepaw.
Despite occasional lapses, which indicate inexperience at this type
of writing (Lovecraft mentions about half way through the story ‘a
memory of stark hideousness which nothing else in my life—save one
thing which came after—can parallel’; he has to send himself up, in
order to explain why Houdini seems to be fainting so much, ‘lapses
whose succession reminded me at the time of nothing more than the
crude cinema melodramas of that period’; and even given Lovecraft’s
penchant for hyperbole, the italicized Hippopotami should not have
human heads and carry torches ...is going a bit far), Imprisoned
With The Pharaohs is exciting, and Weird Tales (as well as Houdini)
was well pleased with it. It is an interesting piece, both from the point
of view of Lovecraft’s technique as a writer, and his use of ‘authentic’
detail: in the early sections, readers could share Houdini’s
163
 a %
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oe

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Ba FRtg SD idat

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pie
out
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GMS (976,
*. . . chiselled avenues to the black inner world of whose existence
we had not known
before but which we were now eager to traverse ...’,
H. P. Lovecraft, At the
Mountains of Madness.
impressions of Cairo (perhaps remembering their own childhood
books); this makes the appearance of sinister ‘associative details’ all
the more frightening, and softens them up for the final horror.
Throughout the story, Lovecraft insists that it could have been a
figment of Houdini’s imagination (too much reading of ‘forbidden
books’): but on the other hand. ...
Characteristically, Lovecraft stresses the impression that ‘readings
in Egyptology’ had on Houdini’s imagination. In terms of ‘reduc-
tionist’ explanations, that is as far as he will go. (He would not, for
example, have been amused to learn that the ‘curse of Tutankhamun’
was in fact the result of over-exposure to bat dung.) Lovecraft’s most
celebrated ‘forbidden book’—the Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred—was itself based on a childhood memory about the
Arabian Nights. ‘By the time I was five,’ he recalled in 1924, ‘I was
crazy about the Arabian Nights. . . . 1formed a juvenile collection of
Oriental pottery and objets d’art, announcing myself as a devout
Mohammedan and assuming the pseudonym of “‘Abdul Alhazred”’.)
‘Al-hazred’ may have been chosen in reference to the Hazard family,
part of Lovecraft’s ancestry: puns like that appealed to him all his life.
From these childish origins, the Necronomicon became the ‘for-
bidden book’, the ‘worm-riddled tome’ from which scholarly refer-
ences to the Cthulhu Mythos could be drawn at will. The book is not
exclusively associated with the Mythos: it it mentioned (together with
references to Miskatonic Country) in several early stories. And in a
sense, it is misleading to isolate the Cthulhu Tales from the rest of
Lovecraft’s oeuvre: the first fully-fledged Tale, for example (The Call
of Cthulhu), is a rewrite of Lovecraft’s earliest published story
(Dagon, 1917). Nevertheless, it is as the ‘scholarly’ foundation for the
Mythos that the Necronomicon has become the most celebrated of
Lovecraft’s contributions to the horror genre.
Lovecraft characteristically provided a History and Chronology of
this ‘forbidden book’—a type of pseudo-bibliography. Originally
called Al Azif, the Necronomicon was written inc. 130 at Damascus,
by ‘a mad poet of Sana, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished
during the period of the Ommiade Caliphs’. It was translated into
Greek as the Necronomicon, the book of Dead Names, in A.D. 950,
by Theodorus Philatelas. In A.D. 1050, it was “burnt by Patriarch
Michael’, but was translated from Greek into Latin by Olaus Wor-
miusin A.D. 1228. Both Latin and Greek editions were suppressed by
Pope Gregory IX, in 1232. A ‘Black Letter’ edition was printed in
Germany, around 1440, and the Greek text was printed in Italy,
between 1500 and 1550. In The Dunwich Horror, we learn that an
English translation exists, made by Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan
165
Magus and Cosmographer: this presumably dates from 1560-1 608,
and explains why the oft-quoted couplet

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die’

is so very reminiscent of John Donne. A Spanish translation of the

Latin text was made in 1600. From two Lovecraft fragments, written
in 1926 and 1934, we learn something about the present availability
of the Necronomicon. In the first (The Descendant), a young student
of the Occult is told by ‘a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street’ that
‘only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of
the priests and lawgivers against it and that all of them were locked up
with frightened care by custodians who had ventured to begin a
reading of the hateful black letter’. Nevertheless, the student man-
ages to track a copy down ‘at a Jew’s shop in the squalid precincts of
Clare Market’ (the Latin text, with diagrams, bound in “oulky leather,
with brass clasp’): as he buys it (at a knock-down price), he notices
that the ‘gnarled old Levite’ is chuckling disturbingly—whether
because he is a ‘Levite’ or because he knows, is not made clear. In the
second fragment (The Book), a copy is found ‘in a dimly lighted place
near the black, oily river where the mists always swirl’. ‘No printing-
press, but the hand of some half-crazed monk, had traced these
ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity’ (perhaps a
reference to the 1228 edition). The narrator is foolish enough to
chant aloud an incantation from the ‘forbidden book’ . . . with the
usual horrifying results.
The Necronomicon makes its first appearance in The Nameless City
(1921), where the Donnian couplet is quoted, and where the author
(unnamed) is identified as a ‘mad Arab’, a ‘mad poet’. In The Hound
(1922), Abdul Alhazred is named. The Festival (1923) introduces us
to ‘Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation’, and tells us some-
thing of the Necronomicon’s contents: it contains ‘a thought and a
legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness’, plays a part in a
‘hideous ritual’, and is clearly written in an allusive, allegorical style:
‘For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not
from his charnal clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws;
till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of
the earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. . .’
The narrator cross-checks with ‘the carefully sheltered copy from the
library of Miskatonic University’. In The Call of Cthulhu (1926), the
Donnian couplet is echoed in the strange ritual incantation ‘Ph’nglui
mglw’nafn Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fntagn’—which, roughly trans-
lated, (admittedly by a ‘mongrel half caste’), means ‘In his house at
166
R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’. The Necronomicon is men-
tioned side by side with Frazier’s Golden Bough, and Murray’s
Witch- Cult in Western Europe, and we are told that it contains ‘double
meanings . . . which the initiated might read as they chose’. The Case
of Charles Dexter Ward (1927-8) tells us of another copy in a private
collection, this time in the wrong binding ‘a fine volume con-
spicuously labelled as the Qanoon-é-Islam’). From The Dunwich
Horror (1928), we gather that ‘a few’ copies, in various translations,
have been preserved in university libraries, including Miskatonic. The
Whisperer in Darkness (1930) distinguishes the contents of the Nec-
ronomicon from ‘the fantastic lore of lurking “little people’? made
popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen’, tells of
‘the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth...
which are hinted at in the Necronomicon’, mentions ‘worlds of elder,
outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only
guessed in the vaguest way’, and describes ‘the monstrous nuclear
chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully
cloaked under the name of Azathoth’. In At the Mountains of Madness
(1931), as each new empirical discovery is announced, it is under-
pinned by a recapitulary reference to the Necronomicon: this helps us
(and the narrator) to place these random discoveries in the overall
context of the Mythos. Thus, the first sight of the antarctic wastes
reminds the narrator of ‘strange and disturbing descriptions of the
evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Nec-
ronomicon . . . I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into
that monstrous book at the college library’. A wireless message to
base camp suggests that ‘Arrangement (of fossils) reminds one of.
certain monsters of primal! myth, especially fabled Elder Things in
Necronomicon.’ The next discovery prompts the narrator to refer
again to the ‘evilly famed plateau of Leng’, to regret that ‘I had ever
read the abhorred Necronomicon’ (perhaps it has made him im-
pressionable), and to add that he had talked with ‘that unpleasantly
erudite folklorist Wilmarth’ (the narrator of the previous Cthulhu
story, The Whisperer) before he set out. The final discoveries are
again introduced by a reappraisal of what we have heard about the
‘forbidden book’ so far, plus references to ‘myths which things like
the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about’, ‘viscous masses which
were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about (in pro-
se?) as the ‘“Shogguths” in his frightful Necronomicon, though even
that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the
dreams of those who had chewed a certain aikaloidal herb’, and ‘the
fabled nightmare plateau which even the mad author of the Nec-
ronomicon was reluctant to discuss’. The conclusion to Madness,
which is cleverly presented as a discussion between Danforth, ‘a great
167
reader of bizarre material who had talked a good ceal of Poe’, who is
‘one of the few who have ever gone completely through that worm-
riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the
College Library’, and the narrator, tries to balance the impressions that
forbidden book must have made on the protagonists (‘he did not hint at
any of these specific horrors until after his memory had had a chance to
draw on his bygone reading’) against the actual scientific discoveries. It
is a technique Lovecraft first used in his Houdini piece, but by now he
was presenting his ‘open’ endings with much more sophistication.
There was always the chance that the ‘mad Arab’ had been right, when
he ‘nervously tried to swear that none of these beings had been bred on
this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had even conceived
them’. In Dreams of the Witch House (1932), this theme recurs, as
Gilman is stopped by the University authorities from ‘consulting the
dubious old books’ too late, for ‘Gilman already had some terrible
hints from the dreaded Necronomicon ...to correlate with his ab-
stract formulae’: ‘he had seen the name Azathoth in the Nec-
ronomicon and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for descrip-
tion’; things which had been ‘guardedly quoted’ in that book nearly
convince Gilman that he is being over-impressionable (‘he decided he
had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the
Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth’). Through the
Gates of the Silver Key (1932) tells us that ‘a whole chapter of the
forbidden Necronomicon’ is of use to Randolph Carter when he is
trying to place the designs graven on the silver key in context: Carter
remembers what the mad Arab ‘had vaguely and disconcertingly
adumbrated’ concerning The Guide, and quotes a whole paragraph
about the ‘shapes of darkness that seize and bind’. The Necronomicon
also tells him what ‘obeisances’ to make, in the presence of The
Shape. And in The Shadow Out of Time (1934), the ‘secondary
personality’ of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee is strangely drawn to
‘hideous books of forbidden lore’ (the Necronomicon among them):
during his amnesiac period, Peaslee reads the ‘forbidden book’ makes
marginal notations, and is even responsible for ‘ostensible corrections
in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly inhuman’ (this is
especially strange, as he ‘was ignorant of three of the languages
involved’). The Necronomicon proves useful, however, since it
enables Peaslee to recognize the Cthulhu cult when he sees it: ‘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.’
Clearly, there are various ways into the Necronomicon. It can be
read for interest, before setting out on a scientific expedition, at
Miskatonic University Library. Copies in private collections can be
168
consulted by those already interested in the Occult. If an individual is
‘taken over’ by the Elder Gods, then his ‘secondary personality’ is
likely to be drawn to the ‘forbidden book’, and he will read it with
understanding. The vision required for comprehending Alhazred’s
allusive prose can also be artificially stimulated by chewing on ‘a
certain alkaloidal herb’ (Lovecraft stresses the connections between
this fact and the writings of Edgar Allen Poe). What of those who
have read the book? They tend to be associated in some way with
Miskatonic University: Wilmarth is a literary instructor, with an
amateur interest in folklore; of the members of the Mountains ex-
pedition, the biologist, the geologist, and the engineer have consulted
the book, but only the graduate student has read it from cover to
cover; Gilman is a specialist in Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum
physics, again with an amateur interest in folklore; Peaslee is an
instructor in Political Economy (he passes out during a lecture on
‘present tendencies of economics’), with no interest in the Occult
until he is ‘taken over’. A select few, who do not have the benefit of
Senior Common Room discussions at Miskatonic about the mad
Arab’s masterpiece, also know all about the book: Akeley once
specialized in Mathematics and Astronomy at Vermont, but is now an
amateur folklorist; he assumes that Wilmarth will have a working
knowledge of the Necronomicon (‘I suppose you know ali about the
fearful myths ...’) and after he is ‘taken over’, is much given to
delivering casual show-stoppers such as ‘Do you know that Einstein is
wrong?’; Charles Dexter Ward has an amateur interest in genealogy;
and, of course, ‘an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island
named Ward Phillips’ can be consulted over difficult passages in the
book. Copies are kept at Miskatonic and ‘a few’ other university
libraries (under lock and key); they are likely to turn up in private
collections of ‘forbidden books’, owned by recluses; and, if you are
very lucky, you will track one down to a murky second-hand book-
shop in the region of Clare Market. It is, perhaps, not so fantastically
‘rare’ as Lovecraft made out. If you do find a copy (assuming it is not
hiding under a false cover), you will rapidly discover that it is written
in a vague, allusive style, which ‘suggests’, ‘hints’, ‘vaguely and dis-
concertingly adumbrates’, ‘guesses’, ‘guardedly quotes’, ‘mercifully
cloaks’, has ‘double meanings’, ‘affrightedly hints’, and gives general
‘impressions’. Unless you are an ‘initiate’, the ‘diagrams’ are not
likely to help you. And you might have a language problem. As a last
resort, you could try ‘a certain alkaloidal herb’. However, if the fuzz
don’t get you, the Elder Gods certainly wiil. Better to consult an
‘elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island”. no
The language with which Lovecraft described the Necronomicon in
a sense epitomizes his presentation of the dream-landscape of
169
Cthulhu. The ‘forbidden book’ is invariably associated with the key
words ‘Elder’, ‘Outer’, ‘Initiate’, ‘Vagueness’, ‘Impressions’, ‘Crazy’,
‘Mad’. Antiquity, Elitism, the ‘Circle’, Moods, Dreams, Madness.
The Scholarship of Sleep mirrors both the structure of the stories, and
the Dreams on which they were based.
‘I have found myself an inhabitant of this terrible dream-world!
That first night gave way to dawn, and I wandered aimlessly over the
lonely swamp lands. When night came, I still wandered, hoping for
awakening. . . . It has been the same each day. Night takes me always
to that place of horror. I have tried not moving, with the coming of
nightfall, but I must walk in my slumber, for always I awaken with the
thing of dread howling before me in the pale moonlight, and I turn
and flee madly.
‘God! when will I awaken?’*
But the dream which Lovecraft recalled all his life—‘the nightmare
of nightmares’ he called it, ‘the most realistically and horrible I have
experienced since the age of ten, whose stark hideousness and ghastly
oppressiveness I could but feebly mirror in my written phantasy’, one
which he wrote down ‘before I fully awakened’—was rather different.
It concerned Nyarlathotep, the devil-god of Lovecraft’s Mythos. Only
in his dream, Nyarlathotep was not a devil-god at all. He was a
charlatan, a spectacular travelling showman, a quack scientist. Love-
craft’s relationship with him—in the dream—resembles that between
Mario and the magician Cipolla, in Thomas Mann’s short story Mario
and the Magician.
‘Nyarlathotep was a kind of itinerant showman or lecturer who
held forth in publick halls and aroused widespread fear and discussion
with his exhibitions. These exhibitions consisted of two parts—first, a
horrible, possibly prophetic cinema reel; and later some extra-
ordinary experiments with some scientific and electrical
apparatus... . Nyarlathotep was already in,Providence; and he was
the cause of the shocking fear which brooded over all the people. . . .’
This image haunted Lovecraft for the rest of his life. He tried on
various occasions to exorcise it by writing a story. But he never
succeeded. It remained, for him, ‘the nightmare of nightmares’, and
he could never understand why.
* The Thing in the Moonlight, 1934, uncompleted.

170
APPENDIX C
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 Lovecraft and Landscape
by
ANGELA CARTER

Since Lovecraft’s geography is that of dream, it has the uncanny

precision of dream. We know far more about the book of his world
than we ever could know of the real world precisely because Love-
craft himself invented it all and knows all there is to know about it.
The abhorrent plateau of Leng; the haunted forests of New England;
witch-haunted Arkham; the cities of dream or of nightmare or of
dream subtly modulating into nightmare, whose blue-prints were
drawn up without the aid of Euclidian geometry—any competent
map-maker could chart the world of H. P. Lovecraft in microscopic
detail. But, not quite—Lovecraft moves at ease in an assemblage of
picturesque constructions in space and time, yet, since these land-
scapes are primarily the projection of, or models of, states of mind,
they take on a special kind of ambiguity.
The very precision with which Lovecraft notes the structure of rock
formations, the age and type of a windowframe, the dimensions of a
hallucinatory plaza, is the excessive precision of paranoia. The
twisted shapes of the trees in the woods above Arkham are ema-
nations of the menace they evoke—menace, anguish, perturbation,
dread. The cities themselves, whether those of old New England or
those that lie beyond the gates of dream, present the dreadful enigma
of a maze, always labyrinthine and always, the Minotaur at the heart
of this labyrinth, lies the unspeakable in some form or else in some
especially vile state of formlessness—the unspeakable, a nameless
and unnameable fear.
Lovecraft’s is an expressionist landscape of imminent dread; his
very world is inimical to man. But these landscapes, although man is
never at home in them, can sicken and die, as aman does. Worse, they
can go mad. Even the stars above them are rendered in human terms.
‘Still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault,
winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey
some message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to
convey.’
There is a generalized dread everywhere in Lovecraft’s landscapes;
173
there’s also a specific, regional horror which he places in localities
already filled with echoes of antique paranoia, the New England of
the early colonists, or, occasionally, in the Catskill Mountains in
upstate New York, a far wilder region given its literary credentials as
a supernatural place by Rip Van Winkle’s lengthy nap there.
Lovecraft’s New England derives in part from literary sources,
also; if the ghost of Poe stalks through his Boston, then there’s a lot of
Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself born in Salem of the witch trials) in
those gambrel-roofed colonial towns and, especially, in the woods
above Arkham—those same woods, tangled, obscure, in which the
protagonists of The Scarlet Letter made their assignations with the
emissaries of Satan. This is the scenery of virgin America that Love-
craft refers to in his essay, On Supernatural Horror in Literature, the
‘vast and gloomy virgin forest in whose perpetual twilight all terrors
might well lurk’.
The woods above Arkham, very typical of the haunted forest
fairy-tale, are inhabited by an inbred and genetically suspect breed
whose ancestors frequently fled the witch-trials of seventeenth-
century Massachusetts, where phantoms are frequently those of the
Indians most cruelly dispossessed by the newcomers to the strange
land. This is primordial forest where time past dominates time pre-
sent and will remain unmodified by the future; man has no business
here and, if he makes it his business to visit, it will be the worse for
him. Lovecraft speaks of the ‘inherent weirdness of the American
heritage’; in these infernal forestscapes, he touches something very
deep in the consciousness of those first settlers. He’s touched a hidden
vein of archaic paranoia. The woods above Arkham are an exact
image of the fear of the unknown country which lay outside the
hastily-erected fences of the first settlers, the land they came to
subdue but which, for the moment, showed no signs whatsoever of
submission.
There’s legendary fear of forests, the panic fear which Pan himself
inspired in those who entered his domain. The Roman soldiery,
fearless in the face of every enemy, were overcome with stark terror
by their first sight of the untrodden forests of Germany. It is a
reasonable fear in the face of massive evidence of a tumultuous form
of life which is not human, the world of giant vegetables.
‘West of Arkham, the woods rise wild and there are valleys with
deep woods where no axe has ever cut.’ Here flow brooks that have
never caught the sun; the tumbled stones of abandoned farmhouses
suggest how unwelcome a visitor man was when, in his hubris, he
thought he might come to live here and how precipitate, how
ignominious was his departure. This is the home of the Black Goat of
the Woods with a Thousand Young, these ‘solid, luxuriant masses of
174
forest among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental sprites
might well lurk’ (The Whisperer in Darkness).
The moment it is blasted by a meteorite, this landscape throws off
any lingering aspect of superficial benevolence. Now the grass is
greyish and withered, vines have fallen from the walls of a decaying
farm in ‘brittle wreckage’ and ‘great bare trees claw up at the grey
November sky with studied malevolence’ (The Colour Out of Space).
This anthropomorphized terrain exudes poisons; the cultivated land
has turned into a blasted heath, is in the process, in fact, of trans-
forming itself into a version of the utterly barren and benighted
plateau of Leng in Lovecraft’s mythology. A landscape based, in
however a stylized way, on real forms is becoming pure invention, or
else a sinister prefiguration of a landscape devastated by a more
explicable blast than that of those oddly coloured globes that came
from the sky. This is the landscape of post-nuclear despoliation.
Mircea Eliade says: ‘The forest is a symbol which contains death.’
Man is excluded from the forest, where beings and objects, plants
and animals, mingle and blend their forms. In the woods above
Arkham, in the deep forests of Massachusetts and Vermont, may be
found those caverns which lead to the home of the unnameable and the
black stones graven with curious hieroglyphs that will invoke the
Elder Beings Lovecraft subsumes to the witch-folklore of New Eng-
land. Here, also, live on, horned phantoms in the green dark, the
mythologies of the Indians who originally lived here in perfect har-
mony with the forests we only fear because we do not know. Man is
excluded from the forest but the Indians are not because they are not
human; perhaps they lived here as angels before the Europeans came
but now some Luciferan fall has converted them to beings of dark-
ness. Similarly, the witch-tribe from Salem/Arkham can find a home
in woods which are not forests before creation, the abode of inno-
cence, but forests after the Fall, realms devised by a demented nature
whose instinctual life has extinguished reason.
The Narangasset Indians are often evoked by Lovecraft as servants
to the eighteenth-century savants and necromancers whose descen-
dants are forced to carry such vile hereditaries of damnation with
them into the age of the internal combustion engine. The Indians
themselves exist in the twentieth century as ghosts or as place names,
the names of rivers... the Miskatonic, the Pawtuxet. Yet their
absence itself suggests the presence of death. The Pawtuxet is a long
river ‘which winds through many settled regions abounding in
graveyards’ (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). The very absence of
the Indians from their own forests embodies the estrangement of the
alien country. Darkly Satanic, they are in league with Satan himself
who is, himself, no more than a metaphor for the Elder Beings or, the
175
unnameable. They are not men, but part of the landscape, beings
of the same substance as the twisted and malign trees, as the rampant
foliage which might, at any moment, sprout carnivorous flowers.
Evil is part of the structure of ‘those ancient and cryptically brood-
ing hills’, ‘the wild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed
Arkham’. But the black magic of those hills is not that of the Sabbath,
however often Lovecraft refers to Cotton Mather; those carven
archways in the forest depths (c.f. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
are ‘the gates certain audacious and abhorred men have blasted
through titan walls between the world and the absolute outside’
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key). The antique savants used
cabbalistic methods to escape from time, into the nether realm of the
Cthulhu mythology; the forest holds these secrets in its vegetable
maze.
For the forest is a kind of maze. But it is a sentient one; it has a
‘hideous soul’ (The Tomb). The forest is a ravenous and multiform
being capable of passions, which expresses itself in the movement of
the branches, unexpected, causeless, and in the stirrings of a wind that
moves the leaves but which we ourselves cannot feel upon our faces.
Lovecraft’s townscapes are also mazes. A maze is an architectonic
structure, apparently aimless in intention, and of a pattern so complex
that, once inside, it it impossible or very difficult, to escape. Some
antique labyrinths may have been designed as traps for demons; once
the malign creatures had been enticed inside, they’d be trapped as
effectively as a djinni in a bottle. More significantly as regards Love-
craft’s weird mazes, Waldemar Fenn suggests some prehistoric laby-
rinths should be interpreted as images of the apparent motions of
astral bodies. There is an illustration in De Groene Leeuw by Goosse
van Wreeswyk (Amsterdam, 1672) which depicts the sanctuary of the
alchemists’ stone, encircled by the orbits of the planets as walls,
suggesting in this way a cosmic labyrinth; since a maze is a positive
emblem of existential anguish, the presentation of innumerable
choices only one of which is, or can possibly be, the right choice, the
labyrinthine cities, towns and catacombs in Lovecraft, transposed toa
cosmic scale, suggest the possibility of eternal and infinite panic.
The maze is the symbol of interiority, of inwardness, of the tor-
mented journey towards the centre of the unconscious, the core of the
dark. In this darkness, blindness is enlightenment: ‘The nethermost
caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see’, Lovecraft quotes
from the Necronomicon of the mad Arab. A very early story of
Lovecraft’s begins: ‘I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast
and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave’ (The Beast in the
Cave). There is no maze without a minotaur as its central secret. One
must lose oneself in order to find oneself; forest, maze and huddled
176
slums of a great city all serve the same function, landscapes of con-
crete perplexity in which, oldest and most potent of fears, one may
lose one’s very self. The maze is the way in; outside, in the light of day,
in the senior common room of Miskatonic University, say, there is
nothing to fear. ‘
The description of the city of Providence, Rhode Island, in The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward, offers a specific declension of out-
wardness, of the safe public world, and a descent downwards, into the
dangerous maze. The young Ward lives in a great Georgian mansion,
built in the age of reason, on top of a hill, in the clear untainted air of
public being, an externalized and hence safe landscape. The United
States, politically the child of the French Enlightenment with its
conviction in the inherent virtue of man, created, in Providence, the
architecture of enlightenment itself, of classical rational proportions,
a city that would be free of the ghosts of the past who lurk in the
cluttered corners of European cities. But Ward’s Providence, which,
from the windows of his rambling home, has the look of one of
Lovecraft’s lovely cities of dream with its ‘clustered spires, domes,
roofs’, is confined largely to the summit of the hill. Descend lower.
Leave the public city, the abode of outwardness. Put behind you the
‘exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775, luxurious with its matchless
Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and cupolas hovering by’. Go
down the little ancient lanes, ‘spectral in their many peaked arch-
aism’, descend to the ‘riot of incandescent decay’ of the waterfront,
with its rotting wharves, its polyglot vice and squalor. As in an
engraving by Piranesi, the lucid lines of Palladian architecture turn,
by a process of progressive paranoia, into the maze of unknowing
and anguish. Red Hook, in Brooklyn, ‘is a maze of antique squalor
near the ancient waterfront’, ‘a tangle of material and spiritual pu-
trescence’, where, as in Providence, the presence of the ocean, the
begetter of monsters, the ‘abysmal abode’, home of Dagon and
Lovecraft’s weird amphibians, suggests the horror of formlessness.
New York undergoes the same declension in He. Seen by a new-
comer for the first time from a bridge at sunset, the city looks like
Eldorado, a fabled city of dream with ‘its incredible peaks and
pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist’. But
closer aquaintance with it reveals a city which is ‘quite dead, its
sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer
inanimate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life’. The
necromancer, the ‘he’ of the title, takes the narrator backwards in
time to an innocent city of the colonial past and then reveals to him, in
a magic mirror, the city of the future. ;
‘I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and
beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious
197
pyramids flung savagely to the moon and devil-lights burning from
un-numbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial gal-
leries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly
in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered
kettle-drums. . .’ '
The dream Eldorado has turned into one of the nightmare cities of
black rock that also lie beyond the walls of sleep. The narrator
escapes from the necromancer’s house, which was the heart of a
maze, the central space in which the ghastly secret was preserved. ‘I
never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths.’ He will go
home to an innocent New England, up whose lanes ‘fragrant sea-
winds sweep at evening’. However, considering the significance of the
ocean in Lovecraft’s mythology, this innocence is illusory; at any
moment, it may be invaded by the formless denizens of the deep.
(Don’t the bearded and finny Gnorri build ‘singular labyrinths in the
sea below the town of Ilek-Vad’? (Through the Gates of the Silver
Key).)
Innocent New England, whose farmland Lovecraft occasionally
invokes as an emblematic rusticity, is, however, the abode of demons.
Arkham, with its tangle of unpaved and musty-smelling lanes, ‘the
changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham with its clustering gam-
brel roofs that sway and swag over attics where witches hid from the
King’s men’, is in itself a labyrinth. The secret this labyrinth contains is
the spectre of human sacrifice and cannibalism, which appears to
have haunted Lovecraft to an unusual degree.
In the house in Arkham where once a witch lived, the student
Gilman, dreams of an infernal city, one of ‘outlandish peaks, bal-
anced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs posed on pin-
nacles’—all glittering in the blistering glare from a polychromatic sky.
The maze pattern is transposed from the slums of Arkham and
becomes the blueprint for Lovecraft’s wholly imaginary cities, with
their names that look like typing errors. Ilek-Vad, R’lyeh, Sarnath,
Ulthar, Thalarion, ‘that fascinating and repellent city ... where
only daemons and mad things that are no longer men walk’.
Flesh is not the substance of which the beings who inhabit these places
are composed.
When we glimpse the majestic sky-lines of these cities, we know we
have left far behind us the terrors rooted in the real world of forest
and slum and waterfront. The architecture is absolutely non-
functional and often represents a confusion of styles—Gothic arches,
Renaissance doorways, Aztec pyramids, Moorish domes—that
suggest a wholesale ransacking of all the cities that ever existed, or
might ever have existed.
Sometimes this uninhabitable architecture resembles those towns
178
of mist and lace drawn by Pau. <lee; ‘the walls of Sarnath were of
glazed brick and chalcedony, ach having its walled garden and
crystal lakelet’ (The Doom Tha Came to Sarnath). Others have the
metaphysical sonorisity of the ¢ :rspectives of de Chirico, like Atlan-
tis, the city beneath the sea, in [he Temple: ‘an extended and elab-
orate array of ruined edifices’ mostly of marble, ‘untarnished and
inviolate in the endless night a id silence of an ocean chasm’. These
are cities to be seen, not to be lived in.
These dream cities often begin as visions of loveliness executed
with all the kitsch hyperbole at Lovecraft’s disposal; but the dream
will soon turn sour, the paranoid complexity of the colonnades (which
Max Ernst would probably have called ‘phallustrades’), the alleys, the
ramps, the turrets, begins to distill its own darkness. The hal-
lucination turns into delirium. The terraces crumble; the foundations
fall away; we perceive the residue of nightmare as we sense the
imminence of catastrophe. There’s a lurking disquiet in the very
peristyles. We are forced to recall how very, very few dreams are
actually totally pleasurable.
There is a sound that always accompanies the transformation of
these landscapes from dream to dread; it is the piping of flutes.
Lovecraft’s own neurasthenia, as sensitive to sounds, textures and
temperature as that of Roderick Usher himself, utilizes this piping
sound again and again, as the prelude to a crisis of the imagination
that will bring the formless beings from their caves or change a quiet
New England mansion into a place of terror. Gilman, the student, in
The Dreams in the Witch-House, identifies the source of this sound as
‘the throne of chaos where thin flutes pipe mindlessly’.
The sound of flutes herald the approach to the door of the inner
world in The Festival. In the antarctic mountains, the rocks them-
selves emit a thin, high, piping due to the way the wind blows through
them; they are a set of stone pan pipes. “Through the desolate sum-
mits swept raging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind
whose cadences, sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and
half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range,
and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me
disquieting and even dimly terrible’ (At the Mountains of Madness).
This piping sound, whether of flutes, or the wind, or bull-frogs, is
always the prelude to terror. Itis disquietingly similar to the atrocious
high, held violin note in Smetana’s autobiographical string quartet,
My Life, which he uses to illustrate the thin, agonizing sound which
heralded to him his own deafness.
Lovecraft’s Antarctica is the most truly terrible of all his land-
scapes. This bieak realm of ice and death, the place where came ‘both
mist and snow’ to the Ancient Mariner, is at once a heightened
179
version of the real Antarctic; and a vision of the abhorrent plateau of
Leng, the roof of the world; and the labyrinthine city of the Elder
Beings. It is a symphone structure of landscaping. According to de
Quincy, Coleridge, before starting The Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner, has planned ‘a poem on delirium, confounding its own
dream scenery with external things and connected with the imagery of
high latitudes’. To some similar plan, Lovecraft brought his own
fears; he had a horror of, and an allergy to, any temperature lower
than twenty degrees and, frequently, in later life, below thirty
degrees.
If there is too much life in the convulsive forest, then there is none
at all in the land of mist and snow. The mist mirages of ‘the great
unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death’ transform
the icebergs into ‘battlements of unimagineable cosmic castles’,
places of perpetual exile. The whiteness of the snow is the infinite
blankness of true mystery; the discovery of a range of mountains in
the subcontinent reveals to the explorers ‘a gateway to a forbidden
world of untrodden wonder’. Under a cryptic sky, the landscape itself
becomes a vast cryptogram which, once it is unravelled, reveals to
man his insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things.
In the spectacle of the mountain peaks, ‘there was a persistent,
pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation’. They
look like a mandala. They form the entry into an oracular cavern. ‘It
was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful
gateway into forbidden spheres of dream and complex gulfs of remote
time, space and ultradimensionality’; these are the mountains of stark
dementia, whose farther slopes look out over some accursed, ultimate
abyss. (The sexual element in Lovecraft’s imagery need hardly be
stressed.)
This is the landscape of abandonment, of desolation, of death. This
is the gateway to the plateau of Leng, a metaphor for utter bar-
renness; and here, once again, we find a maze, a labyrinth of ‘geomet-
rically eurythmic stone masses’ built in ‘fiendish violation of natural
law’. No human hand helped chisel the stones of this vast, derelict
city. Once again, its architecture features towers and interconnecting
bridges; Lovecraft must have admired the futurist architecture in
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
This ultimate stone puzzle is ‘a complex tangle of twisted lanes and
alleys, all of them deep canyons and some little better than tunnels
because of the overhanging masonry of overarching bridges’. The
entire city composes the elaborate hiding place of a world, or anti-
world of dark secrets; the ghastly minotaur at its heart is a complete
and hitherto unknown pre-history of this planet, in which man has no
place at all.
180
 The architecture is of ‘endless variety, preternatural massiveness
and utterly alien exoticism’, featuring cones, terraces, broken col-
umns, and a recurring five-pointed star motif, with its qabbalistic
overtones. And this city, with its monuments and murals, is utterly
dead. ‘In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which
had reigned at least five hundred thousand years.’
The narrator, and his companion, Danforth, now the only survivors
of the team of explorers who set out, with such hubris, from the
rational world of Miskatonic University, go into the labyrinth itself.
Like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, they mark their path with
dropped pieces of paper until at last they arrive at a monumental
gateway—‘chiselled avenues to the black inner world of whose exis-
tence we had not known before but which we were now eager to
traverse’. The labyrinth has brought them to the gateway to a perfect
darkness, to a steeply descending shaft which will bring them to the
brink of a great abyss. The only fauna in these regions are blind,
albino penguins, foetal-like beings. This is the authentic landscape of
interiority, of the archetypal Inner Place, the womb. The intra-
uterine imagery is made all the more startling by the presence, in this
gulf, of the ruined remains of an immense tower. In this landscape of
devastated sterility, they find concrete evidence of a life which is not
human life—the corpse of their fellow-explorer, Gedney, and one of
the team’s husky dogs, preserved with great care, as if they were
laboratory specimens. As, indeed, for the Elder Ones who inhabit
these regions of interiority, the black pit beneath the mountains of
madness, they are; interesting examples of an unknown form of
being.
This elementary fear of non-being shapes the paranoid perspec-
tives of Lovecraft’s landscapes.

181
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

to fragments from the Necronomicon and

Commentary

Manuscripts
Magical Treatises by Caius, Forman, Dee and Kelly; British
Museum, Add. MS. 36,674, sixteenth century.
Invocation of Spirits, British Museum, Sloane 3702, seventeenth
century.
Tractatus Magici et Astrologici, British Museum, Sloane 3821.
Schema Magicum, British Museum, Sloane 430, fourteenth century.
De Maleficiis, British Museum, Sloane 3529, sixteenth century.

Printed Works
Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, Three Books of Occult Philosophy
(trans. James French), London 1651.
Paracelsus, The Archidoxes of Magic (trans. Robert Turner),
London 1656.
Magiae Albae et Nigurae Citatio Generalis, Rome 1501.
Scot, Reginald, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584.
Murrey, M. A., The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, London 1921.
Barrett, Francis, The Magus, London 1801.
Frazer, James, The Golden Bough, London, Macmillan and Co.
Ltd., 1963.
The Leyden Papyrus, ed. F. L. Griffith and H. Thompsen, Dover
Publications Inc., New York, 1974.
Al Azif (The Necronomicon) by Abdul Alhazred. Owlswick Press,
Philadelphia. 1973.
H. P. Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine (3 Vols.) The Theosophical
Publishing House Ltd, London. 1928.
Charles Fort: The Book of the Damned, Abacus. Sphere Books Ltd.
1973.
Charles Fort: New Lands, Sphere Books Ltd. 1974.

182
John A. Keel: Strange Creatures From Time & Space, Neville
Spearman. _
Spence Lewis: The Myths of Mexico & Peru, Harrap & Co. 1913.
Mackenzie, Donald A.:\Indian Myth & Legend, Gresham Pub-
lishing Co.
eee Roslyn! Myths, & Legends of the South Seas, Hamlyn.

Plott, Robert: The Natural History of Staffordshire, 1686.

Other Sources Consulted -

Fragments from: Tables Cabalistiques Magiques, by Cid-Ali-Baal
Zoroatre, 1674; The Aboknazar Codex; Clavicula Salomins of
Zekerboni & Aboqnazar; The Polygraphia of Trithemius; The
Order of the Cubic Stone Archives, Wolverhampton. Also The
Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft, various editions.

183
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 The Necronomicon gazes backwards into the abyss aetime to
the remnant of a potent and perilous magical inheritance,
emanating from a past pre-human in its unfathomable antiquity.
Who or what were the lawful entities then wrestling for the
possession of our planet? Why did they need to battle through
_ the depths of space to reach the earth? And, after their appar
ent departure, what is their legacy to us?
The creation of The Necronomicon is usually Peete to
H.P. Lovecraft, but research has brought to light some unex-.
pected and disconcerting suggestions that seem to lead in another
direction. Not the least of these is a link across the centuries ©
between Lovecraft and the mysterious Elizabethan magus, -
John Dee. It become only too clear that Lovecraft should be -
regarded not so much as the inventor of The Necronomicon,
but rather its hapless discoverer.

The R'Lyeh Text, which completes this Necronomicon with

newly deciphered material, is now available.

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