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....