The other essays in the volume reinforce the idea to varying degrees, some by examining themes in Lovecrafts work, others by showing minor details of his biography, and others by simply speculating wildly about John Dee and Elizabethan manuscripts.įor those, therefore, with an interest in exploring the possible magical relevance of Lovecraft, this is an essential volume. At the time of writing, Wilson had just completed his mammoth study, The Occult, and was aware of the highly metaphorical and non-linear behavior of apparently supernatural phenomena, and he “gets” better than most the possibility of Lovecraft being an Initiate without necessarily having been “initiated.” Lovecraft worked with ideas that were also in the heads of folks like Arthur Machen and Aleister Crowley who professedly were Initiates, and tapped into some streams that resonate with the occult to this day, and Wilson demonstrates those spurious connections deftly. Of these, the most convincing is Wilson’s. Joshi, who insists that Lovecraft had no interest in real occult teachings, and was not initiated into any secret or occult order during his lifetime. These constitute a kind of anticipatory counter-argument to the strict materialism of Lovecraft biographer S.T. The more interesting essays are by Colin Wilson, L. In that sense, the book is a double hoax, because it pretends that 40 or so pages of its 183-page length constitute the 'meat' of its contents, when they are in fact the least relevant text. The purpose of this version seems to have been to give the 'occult' camp of Lovecraft scholars place to express their views through an anthology of non-fiction essays, which masquerade as 'prefaces' and 'appendixes' to a brief section of invented rituals and magical symbols.

The purpose behind the better-known and far less interesting 'Simon' version of The Necronomicon appears to have been to publish a work of none-too-subtle propaganda for the religion of Thelema, saving would-be Black Brothers from allying with the Abyss before it was too late.

All the books which have been published under the title of 'The Necronomicon' are deliberate hoaxes, and cannot be judged in terms of their authenticity, but rather in terms of why the authors have decided to perpetrate the hoax, and what value reading it has for people who are in on the hoax. The Necronomicon was a book invented by HP Lovecraft for his fantasy-horror stories, as a repository of evil lore that could be referenced whenever some human agent needed to know what ancient monstrosity threatened the world's sanity and existence. Let's get one thing straight at the outset.

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