The Necronomicon is a fictional book appearing in the stories by horror novelist H. P. Lovecraft. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft's "The Nameless City".Among other things, the work contains an account of the Old Ones, their history, and the means for summoning them.
Other authors such as August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith also cited it in their works; Lovecraft approved, believing such common allusions built up "a background of evil verisimilitude." Many readers have believed it to be a real work, with booksellers and librarians receiving many requests for it; pranksters have listed it in rare book catalogues, and a student smuggled a card for it into the Yale University Library's card catalog.
Capitalizing on the notoriety of the fictional volume, real-life publishers have printed many books entitled Necronomicon since Lovecraft's death.
The Necronomicon of Alhazred, (literally: "Book of Dead Names") is not, as is popularly believed, a grimoire, or sorcerer's spell-book. It was conceived as a history, and hence "a book of things now dead and gone". An alternative derivation of the word Necronomicon gives as its meaning "the book of the customs of the dead", but again this is consistent with the book's original conception as a history, not as a work of necromancy.
The author of the book shared with Madame Blavatsky a magpie-like tendency to garner and stitch together fact, rumour, speculation, and complete balderdash, and the result is a vast and almost unreadable compendium of near-nonsense which bears more than a superficial resemblance to Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.
In times past the book has been referred to guardedly as Al Azif , and also The Book of the Arab. Azif is a word the Arabs use to refer to nocturnal insects, but it is also a reference to the howling of demons (Djinn). The Necronomicon was written in seven volumes, and runs to over 900 pages in the Latin edition.
Who was Abdul Alhazred?
Little is known. What we do know about him is largely derived from the small amount of biographical information in the Necronomicon itself. He was born in Sanaa in the Yemen. We know that he travelled widely, from Alexandria to the Punjab, and was well read. He spent many years alone in the uninhabited wilderness to the south of Arabia. He had a flair for languages, and boasts on many occasions of his ability to read and translate manuscripts which defied lesser scholars. His research methodology however smacked more of Nostradamus than Herodotus.
As Nostradamus himself puts it in Quatrains 1 & 2:
"Sitting alone at night in secret study;
it is placed on the brass tripod.
A slight flame comes out of the emptiness
and makes successful that which should
not be believed in vain.
The wand in the hand is placed
in the middle of the tripod's legs.
With water he sprinkles both the hem
of his garment and his foot.
A voice, fear; he trembles in his robes.
Divine splendour; the god sits nearby."
Just as Nostradamus used ceremonial magic to probe the future, so Alhazred used similar techniques (and an incense composed of olibanum, storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish) to clarify the past, and it is this, combined with a lack of references, which has resulted in the Necronomicon being dismissed as largely worthless by historians.
He is often referred to as "the mad Arab" or "the mad Poet", and while he was certainly eccentric by modern standards, there is no evidence to substantiate a claim of madness (other than his chronic inability to sustain a train of thought for more than a few paragraphs before leaping off at a tangent). It is interesting that the word for madness ("majnun") has an older meaning of "djinn possessed", the significance of which will become clear below (see What are the Old Ones?). Alhazred is better compared with figures such as the Greek neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (410 - 485 A.D.). Proclus was completely at home in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and metaphysics, but was sufficiently well-versed in the magical techniques of theurgy to evoke Hekate to visible appearance. Proclus was also an initiate of Egyptian and Chaldean mystery religions. It is no accident that Alhazred was intimately familar with the works of Proclus
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