The Necronomicon: Grimoire Simulacrum, PART III (of III!)

So, when we last left our intrepid hero, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "cosmic horror" author and creator of the Necronomicon ( a book he didn't actually write, but which only existed within his stories) he was at the center of a very unusual and post-modern conundrum.  

As with Rene Magritte's famously cheeky painting about the difference between symbols and what they symbolize, the Necronomicon became a sort of hall of mirrors in the 1970s, with various publishers rushing to capitalize on the public's unstoppable desire for "the real book," despite the fact that no such book existed.

Nonetheless, the concept of the Necronomicon is now deeply imbedded in the culture. Jon Stewart makes jokes about it, the Evil Dead trilogy of comedy/horror films (Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, & Army Of Darkness) made liberal use of it as a device, and Lovecraft himself finally has respectable looking Penguin editions of his work. How did this happen?

Let's turn back the clock a moment, in contrast to the "Simon Necronomicon" (which has almost nothing to do with Lovecraft and is essentially an eerie rehash of Sumerian mythology molded into the context of a modern "witches' spellbook") 1978 saw the release of another Necronomicon, this one edited by George Hay (creator of the Science Fiction Foundation) and co-written by philosopher and occultist Colin Wilson (author of The Outsider). This other Necronomicon actually attempted to recreate something like book to which Lovecraft referred in his stories, and included the few passages he actually "quoted," such as the famous couplet from The Nameless City (1921):

"That is not dead which can eternal lie

and after strange aeons even death may die"

Lovecraft's fiction exudes an atmosphere of forbidden knowledge, extracted and examined by a scientific and rationalist apparatus that cannot fully comprehend its terrible scope. 

Hay and Wilson, understanding this fully, gleefully slathered on an appropriately purple "back-story" to their Necronomicon: It was supposedly a computer-assisted cipher-translation of a hand-made copy of the infernal text itself, made in the late 1500s by none other than John Dee, astronomer, spy, mathematician, occultist and tutor/astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. 

All this makes for delightfully frightening fiction, because as the Blair Witch Project (1999) and the Paranormal Activity (2007- now) series have illustrated for the world of cinema, the stylistic trappings of factual reportage make for intensely powerful storytelling. In the case of cinema, this means the home video camera or security camera, which suggests realism to viewers by virtue of its low fidelity. In terms of Hay and Wilson's Necronomicon, it is the non-fiction essay style of an academic historian or art-historian that lends credence to their fictional back-story. 

Nobody understood this better than Lovecraft himself, who was (to the surprise of many of his fans) a fairly strict rational materialist, not to mention a canny writer with a good grasp of precisely what made his fiction effective. As a member of the United Amateur Press Association, he understood intuitively the power of journalistic and academic literary styles to convince readers of "truth," regardless of their actual content. 

In fact, the "unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad arab Abdul Al-Hazred" (as he calls it in The Festival, 1923) exercised such a powerful effect on his readers that requests trickled in during Lovecraft's lifetime to produce the noxious text itself. The man himself was characteristically insightful on the subject:

"As for bringing the Necronomicon into objective existence–I wish indeed I had the time and imagination to assist in such a project...but I'm afraid it's a rather large order–especially since the dreaded volume is supposed to run something like a thousand pages! I have 'quoted' from pages as high as 770 or thereabouts. Moreover, one can never produce anything even a tenth as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about. If anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it."

–H.P. Lovecraft, from a letter addressed to James Blish and William Miller, Jr.

And he's right. The Necronomicon you can buy or at least order in most bookstores is nowhere near as frightening as one imagines the "real" tome ought to be. Lovecraft plays the role of rare book collector to the hilt in this capacity, casually mentioning "Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation" and manufacturing a whole constellation of evil books to sit alongside the Necronomicon (all of which are, naturally, kept under lock and key in dusty and forbidding university libraries) such as the fantastically named "Demonolatreia of Remigius, printed in Lyons in 1595."

But Lovecraft's own rational materialism didn't stop famous occultist Kenneth Grant, longtime head of the highly influential Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis (and to many people, the true inheritor of his former teacher Aleister Crowley's legacy) from blurring the fact and fiction of the Necronomicon's identity even further. 

Grant (who died earlier this year) contributed to the snake eating its own tail that is the fact and fiction of the Necronomicon by suggesting that the reason for Necronomicon's enduring popularity is that it actually exists, though not in the form of any actual book. Grant claimed to have accessed fragments of the book in trance states designed to draw information from the "Akashic Records" a sort of psychic collective unconscious that certain mystics believe act as a repository for knowledge amassed by the human race over its millennia on earth. He believed that Lovecraft, who suffered from severe and bizarrely detailed nightmares throughout his lifetime, was a natural astral traveller who did not "invent" the Necronomicon, nor the horrific entities (the Outer Gods, the Old Ones, etc.) so much as stumble across them in the gnosis of lucid dream, and write about his experiences after.

Grant's claim is a twisted mirror image of the post-modernist's art-historian's point of view; that the Necronomicon exerts cultural influence because it is a powerfully crafted symbol of  an archetype deeply bedded in the human mind: the tome of forbidden and unhallowed knowledge, the anti-bible, a repository of knowledge that imperils the souls of anyone who reads it. 

But Grant takes a step beyond the strict Newtonian causality most academic (and thus atheistic or agnostic) cultural theorists espouse. He asserts that mental reality is reality itself, and that the Necronomicon's cultural power as a symbol makes it an objectively real phenomenon, which can be accessed via certain gnostic techniques. 

As in a hall of mirrors, or any other "observer-specific reality," (to borrow a phrase from particle physics) what is actually "there" depends on what sort of phenomena you decide to call "real." 

And, as Lovecraft himself might add, how you choose to describe it. 

"first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is"

-Zen aphorism

The Necronomicon: Grimoire Simulacrum, PART II

As is the often case with the dubious category of fame called "cult status," the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft achieved notoriety through a mixture of die-hard evangelism and light hearted pranksterism. The "unmentionable" Necronomicon, which was his most visceral fictional creation, grew in fame along with the stories in which it appeared, though it would eventually outstrip them all in its cultural impact. 

On one hand, writers like August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith championed Lovecraft's work, and his current status in the pantheon of American horror, alongside the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce is due in no small part to their efforts. 

But, part of the credit belongs to the lighthearted hoax perpetrators who met Lovecraft halfway between fiction and reality. As if to complement the Providencian innovative use of journalistic style, fans began to populate the real world with signs and signifiers from his body of work, blurring the joins between fiction and fact like graphic designers using Photoshop to slip a walking corpse into the background shadows of a mundane family portrait. Libraries in particular were a target. The Widener Library at Harvard University, one of the only five libraries, according to Lovecraft's fiction, to possess a copy of the proscribed and hideous text, was plagued by a long line of of false Necronomicon card-catalogue entries. Other libraries suffered similar practical jokery at the hands of Lovecraft fans. The University Library of Tromso, Norway similarly lists a Necronomicon (translated by a Petrus De Dacia) that is unsurprisingly "currently unavailable." 

In 1973, the veil thinned a little further: Owlswick Press issued a book, in an edition of 348 copies, which they called "The Necronomicon." It was written in an incomprehensible and clearly made up language, referred to as "Duriac," which resembled a sort of non-sense Arabic. 

But the dam really broke in 1977 with the publication of the so-called "Simon Necronomicon," named after the unknown "Simon" to whom it is attributed. This Necronomicon has almost nothing to do with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and is largely influenced by Sumerian mythology (even elaborating spells based on the "fifty names of Marduk.") The identity of "Simon," (clearly a reference to the wizard who was shamed and revealed as a fraud by Jesus in the Bible) is a controversy of its own. Among the likely lads are Anton Lavey, infamous founder, high priest, and organist extrordinaire of the Church Of Satan (not to mention being the man with the dubious distinction of having intellectually crossbred Aleister Crowley with Ayn Rand) James Wasserman, protege of Sam Weiser (the largest occult book publisher in the USA) and, bizarrely, Sandy Pearlman, manager of Blue Oyster Cult.

Yeah, that Blue Oyster Cult. And on that note, it's clearly time for bed. 

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW!

The Necronomicon: Grimoire Simulacrum

There is something cosmically appropriate about the fact that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, enfants terribles of Postmodernism, heaped praise on H.P. Lovecraft's "Through The Gates Of The Silver Key," and that Jorge Luis Borges, a brilliant author who actually earned respect in his own lifetime (perhaps an indicator that Argentina is closer to Europe than America) was also counted among Lovecraft's fans, even dedicating his story "There Are More Things" to the memory of the disturbed, anachronistic Rhode Islander. But not because Lovecraft necessarily presaged postmodernism or "magical realism" (though arguments could be made), no, the real reason is because his invention, The Necronomicon is the perfect simulacra of a magical grimoire.

H.P Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound" has the distinction of being the first recorded reference to  the infernal Necronomicon, arguably the most well-known magical treatise in the world. The infamous passage refers to an amulet, which the narrator believes to have been mentioned in "the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly symbol of the corpse eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia." Little could Lovecraft have guessed that the sinister magical text he invented for the sake of fiction would become the most widely known magical text on the planet within a hundred years.

In 2011, a copy of "The Necronomicon" can be purchased, or at least ordered, from any major bookstore. It has been consistently in print since 1980, and its most popular incarnation, the so-called "Simon Necronomicon" (named for the mysterious "Simon," author of the introduction, who claims to have received the manuscript from an unnamed Greek Monk) has sold at least 800,000 copies, which certainly dwarfs the sales figures of authentic grimoires that somehow survived the fires of the medieval Inquisition, such as the Goetia, the Grand Grimoire, or the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh. 

 For starters, Lovecraft himself was an author far ahead of his time. 

Howard Phillips Lovecraft barely made a dime off his writings during his lifetime, though his influence today is astronomical. In the American tradition of supernatural horror, he picks up where Poe left off, modernizing the genre by introducing a journalistic style that deepened its naturalism and realism. Lovecraft gave to fiction what The Blair Witch Project gave to cinema: his innovation was to apply a journalistic literary style, which readers naturally associate with objective fact (something The Onion has exploited recently for the purpose of comedy rather than horror) to a style of fiction clearly, and terrifyingly beyond the pale of realism. 

Stephen King has called Lovecraft "the 20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." To Clive Barker, his work is "one of the cornerstones of modern horror." The Necronomicon, which is mentioned in a number of Lovecraft's stories, most notably in the seminal "Call Of Cthulu," has taken on a life of its own, popping up in a variety of locales on the culturescape.  

And how did an imaginary guide to demonology, mentioned in passing in obscure short stories written in the 20s and 30s by an author who barely eked out a living writing for pulp magazines aimed at alienated teenagers, become the best selling treatise on the occult of all time?

TO BE CONTINUED....

Goin Back To Kali

Saturday was not only a full moon, but it was also calli, or "house," the fifth day of the Aztec calendar. To the Mayans, who used a vaguely similar glyph for a different word (much like modern Chinese and Japanese use a similar written language to represent two very different spoken languages), saturday was the day called akbal, or "night."

Most days of the Aztec calendar have nearly identical Maya equivalents (day seven is the deer; mazatl  to the Aztec, manik to the Maya, or day eighteen, flint knife, tecpatl in Aztec, etznab in Maya)  but calli/akbal is one of the few that does not, on the surface, seem to be connect.

What could "house" and "night" have in common? In the Mesoamerican calendrical system, each of the twenty day signs is ruled by a certain deity, and "house," day five, is ruled by a god the Aztecs knew as Tepeyollotl, "the heart of the mountain." He was a jaguar-skinned earth god, who presided over caves and earthquakes and other cthonic manifestations of the hidden deeps.

To the Maya also, the jaguar represented that which is hidden by darkness: the sun was believed to venture into Xibalba, the underworld, at night, much like how Apollo's chariot entered Hades below the rim of the sea as day fell on ancient Greece. 

But unlike the Grecian sun, the Mayan sun transformed into a jaguar, and like the great nocturnal predator of the Latin-American isthmus, it spent the nighttime hunting in the underworld, and the spots of its coat were the stars of the heavens themselves.

So, calli is clearly the "house" of the underworld, or perhaps all six houses of Xibalba, where the Mayan hero twins were tested and survived the trials of the lords of death, as told in the creation myth of the Popol Vuh. 

With such a thoroughly cthonic pedigree, its hard not to connect calli with the (other!) Indian pantheon, specifically another "night" incarnate, the terrifying goddess Kali, destroyer of illusions, ten-armed mistress of death in the Hindu tradition. 

Could a tiny linguistic fragment that represented the mind-peeling fear and awe of night and death and darkness have travelled across 20,000 miles and 20,000 years from West Asia, over the land bridge, to finally come to a rest in the Yucatan? I'll leave that one to the linguists to figure out.

The White Road

The above image shows the Milky Way's galactic center in the night sky over Chile's Paranal Observatory; the laser light points to the exact galactic core. The Milky Way is the galaxy in which we are located; the band of light in the sky we call "the Milky Way" is just the center, the densest concentration of stars, of which our sun is just one of about 300 billion.

There are approximately about 170 billion galaxies in the universe, each with a number of stars comparable to our own.

Between seventy and eighty-five percent of the matter in the universe is a substance scientists call "dark matter," the characteristics and nature of which we do not understand very well at all. Nobody can actually find any dark matter, which makes it hard to study. Its existence is theoretical; a countermove to make up for the fact that the universe mysteriously contains far more mass than it ought to, given the number of observable stars and dust clouds and whatnot. Dark matter is thus a theorized invisible substance with mass, to make up for the numbers, which are drastically off.  80% off, to be exact. Something out there, at any rate, clearly weighs a fuck of a lot.

The above image is a shameless Public Enemy reference. Ahem. Dark Matter, to get even weirder, is thought to be a non-baryonic substance, which is to say, not composed of atoms. Additionally, it apparently has no electrical charge, and doesn't interact electromagnetically with matter. Some scientists theorize that most dark matter is actually extra-small black holes, just popping around through space, ripping tiny little holes through stars and generally not giving a rat's ass whether any of this makes sense to us folks down here on earth.

Are you confused yet? I know I am. Obviously there have been a lot of different people on this planet who've looked up into the brain-curdling vastness of the night sky, elbowed the person next to them, and said "I can tell you what THAT'S all about." Whether you buy it is up to you. Personally, I buy it. Sure, Dark Matter, universe doesn't weigh enough, yeah fine. But it sounds like a bunch of made up nonsense that doesn't jibe in any way with my observable experience of reality. Which makes it mythological. We've come to a point in scientific advancement where, it seems, all the simple, easily observed and provable stuff has already been figured out. But everything new we learn seems to be disassembling, brick by brick, that which we've observed and proven so far.

Just keep in mind Einstein told us that time is not absolute, and that the faster you move through space the slower time moves relative to you. Read that sentence again if you're not completely gobsmacked right now. So, with all that in mind, mythological explanations of reality begin to look less and less absurd every day.

The Maya, for example, called the Milky Way, in a fantastic bit of cross-cultural linguistic coincidence, the "White Road," and considered the Dark Rift, a great dust cloud which obscures numerous stars near the galactic core, to be the "Xibalba Be" or the road to the underworld, through which all souls would pass on their way to meet their fate. 

Anyway, scientific talk of non-atomic matter, microscopic granules of matter that weigh more than the sun, observer-specific reality, and time moving relative to the velocity of the observer has the effect of pushing the limits of even a receptive mind to skepticism. Not skepticism of science, mind you. I'm willing to believe that 80% of the universe is made of a substance that can't be measured, located, or determined to exist in any concrete way. Sure, reality is weird. I can accept that. But why, exactly, again, is it irrational to believe that after death each human soul must face the nightmarish tests of the houses of Xibalba? Or any other belief, for that matter? When the latest scientific research sounds like magical realist fiction, surely we're due for a revival of some very old time religion, as in paleolithic-era magical technologies. It's only a matter of time. 

Acceleration Towards What?

In 1965 Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, remarked that the number of transistors that can be cheaply placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. This phenomenon has kept up for fifty years and seems to show no signs of slowing, though some theoretical limit must exist. 

Author Ray Kurzweil has famously extrapolated on Moore's law, extending its purview to a broader stretch of computer technology, and proposing that a machine's calculations per second per thousand dollars spent on its construction also follows an exponential rate.

Kurzweil has written extensively about the logical end of this exponential curve, which he believes to be the creation of artificial "superintelligences" that will alter forever humanity's relationship to the universe in which it resides. Writer Vernor Vinge coined the phrase "Technological Singularity" to describe a tipping point in which artificial intelligences discover ways to build machines more intelligent than themselves, which leads to near-instantaneous leaps in technological sophistication as radical as the difference between the industrial and computer eras.

All of which naturally leads to speculation about just what the superintelligent machines will do with their increasingly obsolete and probably pesky hominid creators. This vein of robot-paranoia, which has been mined effectively in pop culture by films like 2001, A Space Odyssey and The Terminator, is interestingly absent from Kurzweil's strangely utopian vision of the post-singularity future, which, eerily, involves what he refers to as "spiritual machines." 

Before dismissing the man as a crank, it's important to note that his 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines predicted that by 1998 a computer would be programmed that could defeat the best chess players in the world. Kurzweil was proven right in May of 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue defeated world champion Gary Kasparov. 

The science and technology community, as in most things, is divided on the issue. Mitch Kapor of the Lotus Development Corporation sees Kurzweil's view as "fundamentally...driven by a religious impulse"

and Gordon Moore himself has publicly distanced himself from the man who made his "law" famous. Of course this may prove nothing more than that certain secularists are disturbed by predictions with apocalyptic overtones, and that some people are incapable of following even their own ideas through to their logical conclusions. Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems has agreed with Kurzweil's predictions for rates of technological advancement, though he sees the future of Artifical Intelligence and Nanotechnology in a far more dystopian light than Kurzweil. 

What can't be denied is that it took nearly half a million years for world human population to reach 1 billion. That was in the 1800s. The next billion only took 122 years. The next 5 billion took less than 100 years. 

If technology follows a pattern of growth anything like what population is demonstrating, the future may be distressingly unlike the present, in ways impossible to imagine. 

Human Sacrifice and Other Delights

You don't have to be an intellectual who reads Adorno or even a rocket scientist to know that motherfuckers have been killing eachother in the rudest ways for millenia and saying to themselves "I'm just doing what God wants me to do" to feel better about it, in terms of their delicate consciences. 

 When Mel Gibson put out "Apocalypto" in 2006 he went out of his way to inform the X-tian West that the subjugated people of our continent were horrible savages who practiced the evils of human sacrifice before we enlightened them with God's only true religion. In fact, in narrative terms, it's only the arrival of the Spanish ships that spares our hero from certain doom at the hands of his fellow Indians who only wish to destroy him.

The white god pulls the strings and retells the story, canceling historical facts which are either aesthetically or politically unappealing to him.

Quetzalcoatl (the 10th century Maya king, not the god depicted above for whom he was named ) actually outlawed human sacrifice, echoing ahimsa, the Hindu/Buddhist concept on non-violence which includes vegetarianism and refraining from human or animal sacrifice. Quetzalcoatl was said to have disappeared over the waves on a raft of snakes, brokenhearted and defeated...but where did he go?

If he tried to run from men murdering one another with the name of God on their lips, he couldn't have gotten too fucking far. The end of human sacrifice in Maya culture was not the end of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica, though it was a step towards the empathy Christians at least preached, if not actually practiced. The Aztecs (not the Maya, Mel) spilled oceans of blood as their little world came to an end at the hands of Iberian gold prospectors. But was their crime any more foul than others before or after?

For the sake of argument, let us take the white god at his word for a moment.  Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, has claimed that the 1487 rededication of the pyramid of Tenochtitlan ( aka Mexico fucking city, guero) claimed the lives of 80,000 ritually sacrificed victims. Let's just say that this factually questionable claim, which is just about the most severe condemnation of "Aztec savagery" extant in modern academic literature IS TRUE. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that it really happened, that the Aztecs were murdering that many people for the gods, what about the civilized world?

The firebombing of Tokyo, to just pick a name out of the hat, which was engineered specifically to take advantage of the city's wood architecture, killed between 100,000 and 1 million Japanese in March of 1945. Between 100,000 and 1 million Japanese dead. The white American and colonized Hawaiian death toll at Pearl Harbor was 2,403. That's an increased death toll of 25 to 1. An undoubtedly brutally vengeful mathematical ratio. But America most certainly had God on our side in WWII, didn't we? Harry Truman referred to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "weapon(s) in the arsenal of righteousness." If murder of noncombatants in the name of righteousness is not "human sacrifice" then the words "human sacrifice" have no meaning whatsoever.

Imagine your obnoxious corny parents saying to you: "Oh sure, if your friends jumped of a bridge, would you do it too?" Ok, well let's be real for just a moment: If god told you to kill someone, would you do it? That's a William Blake painting, btw. You should check him out. 

On the topic of things that you don't understand and are scary as fuck, which is to say, the concept of God sanctioning murder and destruction, William Blake wrote "Tyger, Tyger" in 1794, some 200 years before it became the first poem that 6 or 7 year old little me ever read out loud of his own volition. "Tyger, Tyger" asks whether "he who made the lamb" could even create something so terrible and deadly as the tiger in question.  Which begs the question, if the gore-drenched Aztec priests at Tenochtitlan were, as the horrified Christians claimed, in fact offering souls to the Dark Lord, in whose name was the "arsenal of righteousness" loosed upon half a million civilians in Tokyo? Jehovah? Or Moloch? Or Beelzebub? 

  I challenge you right now, in front of God, to read the poem out loud to yourself and tell me it sucks:

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?