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Necronomicon
(Avon Books, 1977)



I hardly know where to begin with this one. First, we should point out that American gothic horror author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) invented the Necronomicon in his writings. It is a grimoire written “the Mad Arab” whose name is given as Abdul Alhazred. The precise contents of the book are never divulged in the stories with the exception of two sentences or stanzas:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

And:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” or “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

The prime mover behind both the Necronomicon and Lovecraft’s writings is Cthulhu. In Lovecraft’s pantheon, the Great Old Ones (or just the Old Ones) were “gods” that came to earth long before any other life arose on the planet and lived here or used it for some purpose. It may have been a mining operation. A couple of Lovecraft’s stories deal with other races from the stars mining the earth for ore. The Old Ones did not own the earth, however. It was owned by another set of gods called the Elder Gods (sort of like the good guys). Cthulhu was the priest or high priest of the Old Ones. Does that mean Cthulhu is not of the same race as the Old Ones? We cannot be certain. Lovecraft isn’t clear on that. Cthulhu did not suffer the same fate as the Old Ones, however. Due to a war with the Elder Gods who wanted the Old Ones off the earth, the Old Ones were imprisoned in the earth within the polar openings or they withdrew within willingly depending on the story. Cthulhu, on the other hand, was imprisoned under the ocean in a sunken stone city called “R’lyeh” (the pronunciation varies from “Arl-yeh” to “Rel-yeh”) located at South Latitude 47 degrees and 9 minutes, West Longitude 126 degrees and 43 minutes. This city is made up of weird angles unknown to human experience (i.e. sharp corners behave as though obtuse). Cthulhu is said to be entombed there “dead but dreaming.” His minions among the human race, to whom Cthulhu communicates via his dreams, work to awaken him and open the polar openings so that the Old Ones may clear off the earth and continue with whatever operation they were carrying out before the Great War started. Cthulhu will be awakened, according to Lovecraft, “when the stars are right.” Cthulhu is something like the Japanese soldier living in total isolation on an island for three decades or more waiting for word to carry on with his mission.

Others in Lovecraft’s circle of writer friends were writing stories in the same vein and this became known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” The original printings appeared mainly in Weird Tales magazine and one of Lovecraft’s tales appeared in a cheap British horror anthology from that period. Although he dreamed of it, Lovecraft never saw a book of his stories published in his lifetime. None of his many stories that appeared in Weird Tales even earned him a cover’s illustration. After his death in 1937 from Bright’s Disease, two of Lovecraft’s protégés, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, founded Arkham House which is dedicated to publishing Lovecraft’s stories, letters, poetry, ghost revisions and other writers of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos continues to this day with new writers joining the old circle and new cycles of stories are published from time to time.



Arkham House logo.

To understand the Cthulhu Mythos, the stories I recommend the following stories in the order shown:

1. The Call of Cthulhu – The first of Lovecraft’s stories to mention Cthulhu.
2. The Mound – Which gives some insights and history of the Old Ones.
3. The Dunwich Horror – Which details how humans and the Old Ones can mate.
4. The Shadow Over Innsmouth – Details the lives of the Deep Ones and their relationship and plan for the human race.
5. At the Mountains of Madness – One should actually read Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” before reading this one. This story tells us how pre-human races inhabited Antarctica and reared great cities in the ancient past.

Concerning the last story, John Carpenter appeared to have borrowed liberally from the story to construct both the plot and imagery for his version of the 1982 movie The Thing. Any Lovecraft devotee knows that the horrible, tentacled, shape-shifting, ichor-spewing monstrosity depicted in the movie is none other than the beast Lovecraft refers to as a “shoggoth.”


Artist’s conception of a shoggoth. They were a slave race used by a pre- and non-human race to do heavy work because the creatures could be psychically molded into anything required to get the job done. The shoggoth race, however, overthrew their masters and became unstoppable.

So many writers in Lovecraft’s circle were using this fictional grimoire in their own stories (and Lovecraft was using theirs) that he even created a fictional history of the Necronomicon saying that the book was written in Damascus by Abdul Alhazred (“a mad poet of Sann”) circa 730 A.D. under the title Al Azif, “azif” being the sound made by the demons in the night. Alhazred was said to have traveled to many a strange and forbidden place including a nameless ruin in the desert beneath which he discovered and even older ruins of a race older than humankind. Thereafter, he took to worshiping beings with such unlikely names as Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. Alhazred disappeared about 738 although some sources he was devoured horribly in broad daylight before many witnesses by some invisible monstrosity.

Not sure if Lovecraft based his history on that of The Picatrix which was also purported to have been written by a North African Arab in the 9th century. I don’t even know if Lovecraft had even heard of The Picatrix. He certainly could have—he was a well-read man—but I simply don’t know. A lot of things about Lovecraft’s writings are that way—striking resemblances to the real world but you can’t say if he knew about it or made an amazingly coincidental but independent assumption or if it was perhaps something else entirely.

In 950, the Azif was translated into Greek by one Theodorus Philetas in Constantinople. The book gained a degree of popularity until some unnamed “terrible” events transpired when “certain experimenters” attempted some ritual or conjuration or other from the book whereupon it was suppressed by the patriarch Michael and all known copies were burned. Not until 1228 was the dreaded, blasphemous tome heard from again when Olaus Wormius the Dane translated it into Latin. Pope Gregory IX then banished both the Latin and Greek versions in 1232. A new Latin translation, however, was printed in a black-letter edition in Germany in the 15th century and then in Spanish in the 17th century. A new Greek translation appeared in Italy sometime between 1500-1550 but which disappeared after a copy was seized in the home of a Salem man in 1692 during the witch-hunt. Dr. John Dee, Elizabeth’s court astrologer, translated the work into English but it was never published and now exists only in fragments. The Latin texts are now in the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Widener Library at Harvard, the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, MA (fictional) and the University of Buenos Aires. Certain other individuals are rumored to possess copies. Author Robert W. Chambers was said to have gotten his idea of The King in Yellow from the history and rumors of the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft sent out copies of this history to his fellow writers and protégés so that if they gave any historical details about the Necronomicon in any of their stories, the histories would be consistent and therefore lend a more authentic air to the mystique surrounding it. However, this is not to say that Lovecraft was attempting to pass the book off as real, he wasn’t. Whenever someone wrote to him asking if the book was real or where they might procure copies, he would write them back and tell them point-blank that there was no such book, he had simply made it up. But, as we shall see, the question today of whether the Necronomicon is real is largely irrelevant.

Although Lovecraft stated in his pseudo-history that Robert W. Chambers borrowed the idea for his King in Yellow series of short stories, the truth is that Lovecraft developed his idea of the Necronomicon from Chambers’ series. Lovecraft was quite a fan of Chambers and even got his idea of “the Deep Ones” who inhabit the decrepit Massachusetts seaport town of Innsmouth from Chambers’ short story, "The Harbormaster." Lovecraft also borrowed the Yellow Sign and the name of Hastur from Chambers for his own stories. (Chambers’ series is a great read and here is a link to one of my favorites stories from the series, "The Yellow Sign," Short Stories: The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers)

Lord Larehip

Necronomicon [cont.]

But where did Lovecraft get the name of “Necronomicon”? He claimed it came to him in a dream (Lovecraft claimed to have a nightmare every other night, some of which had haunted him from childhood to his death such as faceless but laughing black beings that pick him up and fly very fast over the countryside dangling him high in the air as Lovecraft screams in terror and they merely laugh in response).

If we take Lovecraft’s fictitious history seriously for a moment, we can perhaps get some clues. “Al Azif” can be variously translated as “The Screaming,” “The Howling,” “The Wailing,” “The Keening,” “The Moaning,” “The Whistling,” “The Shrieking,” “The Hissing” or “The Buzzing” signifying an inhuman sound made by a demon or the walking dead or a banshee. The title also refers to the strange, squealing, sibilant or gutteral voice that the necromancer assumes when addressing a demon inhabiting a risen corpse.

The next we hear of Al Azif is when the manuscript was translated into what would have been miniscule Greek by one Theodorus in Constantinople circa 945. For some reason, the title was rendered as “nekronomikon” (nekronomikon). The translation of this title is unclear. The roots of the title appear to be “nekros” or corpse, “nomos” or law and “eikon” or image (unlikely since eikon employs omega rather than omicron). Another root could be “nomikon” or “book of (the) law.” “Nekronom” could also be a conjoining of “nekro” and “onom” or “dead names.” Hence, possible translations are “Image of the Law of the Dead,” “Book of Dead Laws” or “Book of Dead Names.”

A general translation of the title then appears to be “Book of the Dead” although it is wholly unrelated to the Egyptian and Tibetan works bearing that same title. While the latter two are handbooks meant to instruct those of what to do upon entering the afterlife, Alhazred’s work is a manual of necromancy and spells for summoning demons from the Land Beyond, putting them in corpses of the recently departed (having been freshly disinterred) and then commanding them. Very often, information is demanded from the demon who must speak from the throat of a corpse resulting in shocking squeals, frightful cries, guttural howls and hellish ululations—hence the Arabic title of the work. So perhaps the fairest translation of Nekronomikon would be “Spellbook of Necromancy and Summonings.” We can surmise the title change from Arabic to Greek by supposing that the translator found the original title not suggestive enough of the contents for the non-Muslim reader.

In Elizabethan England, the famous magus and alchemist, Dr. John Dee, the queen’s personal astrologer, came in possession of the book and he and his assistant, Edward Kelly, used it to practice this form of necromancy. Supposedly, the information gained from questioning the demons in this manner provided them with the knowledge of skrying that led to their discovery of the Enochian system of magic. Where Dee obtained his copy and whatever happened to it are not known but it probably would have perished when a mob raided Dee’s home at Mortlake in 1583 or so, after he and Kelly had fled to Krakow, and destroyed his extensive library of esoterica.


Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly performing necromancy at night. What book is Dee holding? Some insist that it had to be the real Necronomicon. The frightful sounds that issue from the throat of the corpse are said to be daunting enough to wilt the stoutest of constitutions. Hence, Kelly’s fright.

The earliest Greek text may have existed in uncial format at one time. Uncial manuscripts are Greek texts written entirely in upper case with no spacing between words in the days before miniscule script existed. The original New Testament documents were Greek uncial texts. The confusion that arises over how to translate the title may derive from the fact that the scribes who created the Greek miniscule recension MSS could not agree on how to separate the uncial letters and thus each did so arbitrarily.

This would indicate that the original Greek translation occurred prior to the standard 945 year given. The uncial text would have had to come into existence no later than circa 800. This is likely the case since the Theodorus who is credited with the Greek translation is otherwise unknown to history. He may have been an invention of some past historian trying to account for where and when the Greek text was translated. That this occurred in Constantinople is very likely but occurred a century and a half earlier at least. This indicates two important facts: Al Azif was translated into uncial Greek within six decades after Alhazred’s death instead of in miniscule some fifteen centuries later as had been previously assumed and that we do not know by whom but must have been someone close to Alhazred—a trusted disciple. A later recension in miniscule may have been written in 945 and this may have been done by a scribe named Theodorus but we really have no idea who created the miniscule text(s) or exactly when although this could have occurred sometime between 835-950.

Al Azif was almost certainly written in codex form as was the uncial Greek translation and both were likely printed on papyrus. When the first parchment or paper versions appeared is not known. The translations that date circa the late 11th century to the early 12th century and are classified by paleologists as codex Vetusti, i.e. an MS written in mixed uncial and miniscule which was adopted about the mid-10th century.

Lord Larehip

Necronomicon [cont.]

The odd thing about the title is that in the discipline known as isopsephia where each Greek letter has a certain numerical value, Necronomicon adds up to 555 (N(50)+E(5)+K(20)+R(100)+O(70)+N(50)+O(70)+M(40)+I (10)+K(20)+O(70)+N(50)=555). Qabalistically, 555 is the number for darkness.

555 is found on the coffin of Hiram Abiff in Freemasonic art:







Strangely, when Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party or DAP that later became the Nazi Party, they were in the habit of putting a 5 in front of the member's actual number so that if you were the 20th person to join you were issued a membership card with your name and picture and the number 520 on it. Well, guess which numbered member Hitler was. That's right, #55 and on his DAP card is the number 555. Oddly, it is almost always the prefix used in telephone numbers on TV shows and movies.



But would the title be so cryptic and uncertain? As a Black Book being vigorously suppressed, it would have been given a cryptic title in those times. What’s remarkable is that a name with that much potential meaning to it would come to a man in a dream who did not speak Greek. That this man suffered from nightmares makes it that much more intriguing. One is tempted to wonder if perhaps someone or something was communicating things to Lovecraft as he slept. In fact, author/occultist Kenneth Grant believed precisely that and stated so in his book, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. Crowley and Lovecraft were, in fact contemporaries. While the evidence appears to indicate that both knew of the other’s existence, neither actually mentions the other in their personal correspondence with colleagues and so the knowledge each had of the other was minimal at best.

Now, today, there are many Necronomicons out there. I have a few of them. There is H. R. Giger’s art book, there are the Skoobs Books editions of the Necronomicon and The R’lyeh Text (both of which the publishers and authors admit to being a blatant put on). The one we are mainly concerned with here is the so called “Simonomicon” which is the Avon Books version supposedly either written or revealed by a defrocked monk known only as Simon. Simon attributes the work to “the Mad Arab” but does not mention any Abdul Alhazred. It is a book of ceremonial magic containing information I have not encountered in any other grimoire. The incantations contained therein are largely in what seems to be Sumerian (Ancient Babylonian) although some words appear to be from other languages. For instance, the word “zelig” is used which is German for “holy” but also “silly” or “crazy.”

The book is arranged such that the magician or wizard is required to leave his or her body behind and travel in the spirit or, as the New Agers would say, astrally. The book refers to it as “the Walking.” One must approach the seven gates of the zonei in succession. The first gate is that of Nanna (the moon), then Nebo (Mercury), Inanna (Venus), Shammash (the sun), Nergal (Mars), Marduk (Jupiter), and, finally, Ninib (Saturn). Each zonei has its own color, number, seal and metal as well as a specific step on “the ladder of lights.” Each zonei has a seal and the wizard must engrave it on a plate made of the metal that pertains to that zonei and do it at a time when that planet is exalted in the heavens so that its light falls upon it.

The wizard must have an altar with images of the zonei and offerings must be made and incense burnt in a brazier. The altar is enclosed in a magic circle which serves as a boundary line from outside forces. During the Walking, as the wizard advances up the Ladder of Lights, he must approach a gate wearing the seal of the zonei of that gate. There are all kinds of instructions about the position and phase of the moon when the Walking starts and it must be done in stages. The wizard approaches the first gate, utters the invocation and falls back to earth. This first gate would be that of Nanna. During the next Walking, one would approach the gate of Nebo and do the same but first passing through the gate of Nanna. One cannot pass a gate if a previous gate has not yet been opened, e.g. one cannot jump up to the gate of Ninib if any of the previous six gates have not been opened. The invocations must be spoken flawlessly. If a mistake is made, the gatekeeper slams the gate shut and the wizard falls back to earth. One cannot progress to the next gate until the current one has been opened and passed.

Before a Walking is attempted one must have protection or the idimmu (hungry scavenging demons) may devour ones unoccupied body. The magic circle affords protection but the appearance of those that wait outside are said to be so loathsome and blasphemous that the very sight of them is literally maddening and so one must also invoke the fire god and the Watcher. Of the fire god, little is said other than the proper invocation. Of the Watcher, much is written for a simple mistake will cost the magician his life. To summon the Watcher, one must have the Copper Dagger of Inanna, a sword and a bowl. The bowl must be engraved with three specific symbols with a stylus and filled in with dark ink. The proper sacrifice must be made in the bowl. One stabs the sword into the ground, raises the Copper Dagger of Inanna and recites the invocation of the Watcher. Everything MUST be performed perfectly else the Watcher itself will devour you. When the Watcher appears (always outside the circle), you must instruct it what it is to watch—specifically your body—and destroy anything that approaches too close to the Magic Circle, human or otherwise. The Watcher will do your bidding but does not care what it watches as long as the proper sacrifices have been made. Failure to do this is an instant death for the wizard. After falling back to earth, the wizard’s body revives and he then must strike the hilt of the sword with his left hand and recite: “BARRA MASS SSARATU! BARRA!” And the Watcher will depart. The wizard cannot leave the circle until he gives the Watcher leave or else the Watcher will devour him. Likewise, the sword must be firmly thrust into the earth during the Walking. If it should fall over of its own accord or the wizard should inadvertently touch it before the ceremony is ended, the Watcher will instantly depart and leave the wizard unguarded from the sight of those that wait without.

What is the Watcher? The Mad Arab states, “The Watcher comes from a race different from that of Men and yet different from that of the Gods…” Of its appearance, the Mad Arab writes: “…the Watcher sometimes appears as a great and fierce Dog, who prowls about the Gate or the Circle, frightening away the idimmu who forever lurk about the barriers, waiting for sacrifice. And the Watcher sometimes appears as a great and noble Spirit, holding aloft the Sword of Flames, and even the Elder Gods are awed thereby. And sometimes the Watcher appears as a Man in a Long Robe, shaven, with eyes that never lose their stare.”



In 1959, author C. B. Colby put out a book titled Strangely Enough which is a collection of yarns that deal mainly with weird or unexplained phenomena. Some of the stories have a basis in fact, some are clearly just legend. Nothing in the book can or should be taken as unassailable fact. They are just fun, little stories to read to pass the time. One story is called “The Man in the Golden Armor” and concerns a World War I battle that took place August 28, 1914 at some location Colby does not specify between the British and German armies. The Royal Field Artillery was attempting to defend a hill as a much larger force of German army bore down on them. The German cavalry charged up the hill when suddenly a luminous cloud appeared before them and when the light died away, they saw what Colby described as “…the figure of a tall man with yellow hair and golden armor, astride a white horse. The man’s uplifted arm held a mighty sword.” A wounded RFA soldier told an English nurse, Phyllis Campbell, that the apparition was so frightening and awesome that the German army turned and fled in a panic. Other men who had been nearby during the battle also told Campbell the same story. A month later, a German nurse in Potsdam wrote about German officers telling her that, while attempting to take a hill, the image of a huge man on a white horse appeared suddenly and scared their horses so badly that the animals turned and ran, ignoring all orders to stop. This sounds like a variation of the “Miracle of Mons” story that allegedly occurred August 24, 1914 where “angelic warriors” in the form of longbowmen appeared from a luminous cloud and helped a small army of British soldiers defeat a larger army of Germans. The story was made up by Scottish author, Arthur Machen (once a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). But the description Colby gives of the apparition sounds quite similar to the Watcher. Colby couldn’t have copied it from the Simonomicon but is it possible that the author of the Simonomicon borrowed it from Colby? Or is it just coincidence?

Lord Larehip

Necronomicon [cont.]

“The three grey carven signs” that one must engrave upon the bowl are:



The first symbol (ARRA) is that of our race and of the covenant between our race and the Elder Gods. The second symbol is the sign of the Elder Gods, our protectors. The third symbol is the sign of the Watcher. When all three signs are imposed over top one another, it looks thus:



And now for a bit of secret, ancient knowledge about the ARRA. This figure is known as a pentangle or pentacle. It is an exceedingly old figure and was used by the Pythagoreans who called it the pentagrammon or pentalpha because five upper case alphas (“A”) formed the figure. They also called it “health.” It is also called the “triple interwoven triangle.”



Pythagoras, however, has been said to have been a member of the Orphic cults and was a magician or, in Greek, “goetes.” And so the Satanic Baphomet may represent him—goetes (goat) and the pentalpha:


The name “Pythagoras” means “Pythias speaks.” Pythias is a name for Apollo. It is derived from Python, who guarded the Omphalos stone at Delphi. Python is always shown in art as a serpent. While Apollo is said to have slain Python and taken over Delphi as his own center, he is more properly a replacement of Python, a new Python. So Pythagoras is then Python speaking or the talking snake who appears in the Garden of Eden not to tempt Adam and Eve but to educate them, to open their eyes, to rebel against the domineering authority of “God.” Pythagoras also belonged to the Pelasgian people whom the Greeks referred to as “goat-men” (satyrs from where we get the word “Satan”) due to their prodigious sexual appetites. The Hebrew letters around the circle spell out “Leviathan” who is imaged as a serpent. Leviathan is a female and the equivalent of Tiamat in the Sumerian lore which plays such an important role in the Simonomicon. So Pythagoras really is the Christian devil—he is the goat and the serpent in one. In fact, the true joke of the bible is that Christ and Satan are the same person—Pythagoras. Christianity is the biggest joke religion of them all.

According to the Orphics, the pentacle is “pentemychos” or the five interwoven gates. They held that long before there was a universe there was Chaos. Chaos gave birth to five principles or some sort of beings. The Five Children of Chaos were then shut up inside the five interwoven gates of Pentemychos which brought into being the emergence of the ordered universe or “Kosmos” (which means ornament or decorative cover and is the root of the word “cosmetic”). Time, space, matter, natural law all emerged in Kosmos and defined it. The Greeks referred to the five interwoven gates as “Tartaros” which became the Christian Hell because various personages were confined there. Tartaros was guarded by the Harpies and Thyella (Whirlwind).

This knowledge is so ancient, we are not sure who all the Five Children of Chaos are. We know that one was called “Cthonie.” The resemblance between this ancient story and Lovecraft’s mythos of Cthulhu coming to earth while it was still in chaos and then being imprisoned as the earth became ordered is striking. Although he was a well-read man, the likelihood that Lovecraft knew of this ancient lore is practically nil. He wrote a huge amount of letters to his many various correspondents and, as far as I am aware, never mentioned this lore as being the basis for his own and, since he wrote about everything that was of interest to him, we can deduce that he was wholly unfamiliar with the Orphic lore.

Lord Larehip

Necronomicon [cont.]

Cthonie is known in the Orphic lore as “an abode of demons.” The word demon is derived from the Greek “daimon” which signifies super-human forces but can also signify a kind of muse or spirit of inspiration. The poet Hesiod (who gave us the story of Pandora’s box) wrote of daimons as men who, in death, gain a kind of power or energy (see my review of War in Heaven in this thread). The evil connotation of a demon is essentially a Christian invention. We should understand Cthonie as being full of super-human or incalculable powers. In terms of Cthulhu’s dreams, these would fall under daimon as a spirit of inspiration as it is one of these dreams that inspires the sculpture of Wilson in the story “The Call of Cthulhu”:


This species of spider was discovered in 1994 and was named by its discoverer Pimoa cthulhu.

The Mad Arab of the “Simonomicon” makes persistent use of the name “Kutulu” and both Crowley and Lovecraft, completely independent of one another it would seem, made use of the word “tulu.” Lovecraft referred to Tulu-metal as a kind of sacred magnetic stone once used as currency in his story “The Mound” (1929-30) while Crowley’s tulu is a word or phrase from his “moon language” that means “shall attain” or “that attained” or “who attained.” Oddly, in his Liber Stella e Rubeae, Crowley uses tulu in a ritual that he specifies should be performed upon “…a fair altar in the midst, extended upon a black stone.” One can only wonder what kind of stone Crowley meant. (For what it’s worth, the Tulu are also a Dravidian people of India who speak a language also called Tulu.) In his commentary on his Book of the Law, Crowley claims “CTHAH 666” is what the spirit Aiwass (whom he claims dictated the book to him) meant by “Abomination of Desolation” adding up to 718.
The Commentaries of AL: Chapter III

In “The Mound,” Tulu is also a god who brought the Tulu-stone to earth. He makes later reference in the story to “the squatting octopus-headed thing…called Tulu” and goes on to connect it to Cthulhu. The story is a wealth of information of the Old Ones. For example, they were half-ghost and did not age or reproduce but “flickered eternally between flesh and spirit.” However, they still needed to breathe so when they shut themselves inside the earth, great caverns from the surface provide them with air but every so often, a hapless straggler or intrepid explorer finds his way down one of these caverns and never returns. (The authorship of the story is attributed to Zealia Bishop, one of his many protégés, but it was a complete re-write by Lovecraft that ended up seeing print in abridged form but, as always, he gave all the credit to the protégé.)

Black stones from “out there” figure prominently into religion. Mircea Eliade referenced the kings of Malaya keeping a block of iron which was held as sacred likely due to the reverence that peoples around the world held for pure iron, which before the Iron Age, could only be found in meteorites. Just as the Tulu-metal was used as currency by the Indians of Mexico in Lovecraft’s story, Indians of the American Southwest and in Mexico did, in fact, use pieces of the huge meteorite that formed the enormous crater at Canyon Diablo in Arizona as currency in pre-Columbian times. The sacred stone at Delphi in Ancient Greece was believed by the Greeks to have been thrown to the earth by the Titan Kronos. In the Hebrew bible, Jacob sleeps by resting his head on a betyl stone and has a dream about a ladder or stairway (the Ladder of Lights?) leading from earth to heaven up to the very throne of God. The Hebrew word for meteorite is “betyl.” When Jacob awakes, he builds a temple around that stone.


Conical meteorites are considered the most valuable. Even today, meteorites fetch a lot of money. One woman’s $300 car was destroyed by a large one. A collector purchased the stone from her for $69,000. Another collector gave her $10,000 for the car.


Another type of venerated black stone isn’t actually a stone at all but glass. They are called tektites and no one is sure where they come from. Some scientists say tektites were earthly debris forced into space from various extra-terrestrial impacts and then fell back to earth. Other say tektites were ejected from the moon by violent volcanic activity. The only thing both sides agree on is that tektites fell through the atmosphere. Large samples are exceedingly rare although there exists one in excess of 50 lbs. They date from about 14 million years ago.

Lord Larehip

Of course, there is the black stone at the Kaaba in Mecca that the Muslims hold as sacred. It is called in their language “Hadschar al Aswad.” It is believed to be a meteor. According to legend, it was given to Abraham by the Angel Gabriel. It comes from a tradition far older than Islam and so venerated by Muslims that they say Mohammed himself inserted the stone into the corner of the Kaaba.


The Black Stone of the Kaaba in its silver frame.



The Black Stone is seen in the circular white spot near the base of the structure.

Mithra was said to be born from a stone fully grown. Here, he carries a torch and trowel. The rock is flint and the torch represents the spark that springs from it. The trowel links Mithra to Masonic secrets.

Mining is, of course, done underground and the word for infernal or underworld deities as “chthonic.” Alchemists placed great emphasis on the mining of ores and gems and considered it a sacred, esoteric trade. Mithraists met in underground temples. Today, we refer to anything secret, esoteric or non-commercial as “underground.” We generally think of secrets as being buried. Gems and ores simply represent those secrets from the hidden source or simply put—the occult.

Lovecraft’s mythos could simply be seen as a metaphor for the human consciousness: We know that our brain has evolved up from the earlier animals and that we do, in fact, have a reptilian brain that stretches back a good 500 million years. There must be a tremendous amount of knowledge and instinct stored in our brains no longer accessible to us at least in any conscious fashion but instead have been consigned to the basement, i.e. the subconscious or the collective unconscious. What terrible, dark secrets are lurking down there trying to signal to us? Jung called them archetypes—universal, archaic patterns and images buried in the murky depths of the collective unconscious that function as the psychic equivalent of instinct. They enter the conscious mind to be expressed in a certain fashion by cultures all over the globe (remember the unconscious is collective) such as the Mother, the Trickster, the Flood. But the conscious symbolism is based on a particular culture. For example, all of us can access the Trickster archetype but people of different cultures express it differently—the Sioux Indians called it Iktome the spider while the Norse saw it as Loki, etc. Oddly, in most cultures, the Trickster gives fire to man.

Another archetype is the Shadow which contains all our darkest desires as well as all our creative power. Its physical aspect finds form in our reptilian brain. Like a reptile, the Shadow cannot be tamed, cajoled, seduced or reasoned with. Ancient humanity learned to control it imperfectly through ritual and ceremonial magic. Without the rituals, humanity would have long ago destroyed itself and today it is still a struggle but we have somehow managed.

Dreams are very important in Jungian psychology as they are in Lovecraft’s mythos. Both Lovecraft and Jung saw dreams as a form of communication. Jung saw dreams as communication from the collective unconscious while Lovecraft saw them as communication from Cthulhu. But then sunken R’lyeh could be a metaphor for the unconscious where everything is different from the everyday world if not the opposite of it and dead Cthulhu is the Shadow archetype lurking deep down there communicating to us in our dreams. He is the One that knows where all our skeletons are buried, so to speak, concerning our evolution and survival. The One whose truths would drive us mad.

The very opening paragraph of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” reads:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

In fact, Lovecraft prefaces his story with the following quote by British horror author Algernon Blackwood:

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”

From these two quotes we can see that while science-fiction often anticipated real science, horror fiction anticipated depth psychology (which has replaced ritual for most of humanity). Blackwood, as you may know, was also a member of the Victorian British magical society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to which Crowley also belonged. And so perhaps we get a glimpse into what these societies believed about human nature and the human consciousness concerning our ancient past. They know or believe they know who and what we really are.


Einstein explains his Special Theory of R’lyehtivity.

Other strange Lovecraftian coincidences:

Lovecraft said that R'lyeh is located at 47°9′S, 126°43′W in the southern Pacific Ocean.[4] August Derleth, however, placed R'lyeh at 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his own writings.[5] Both locations are close to the Pacific pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from any land. Derleth's coordinates place the city approximately 5100 nautical miles (5900 statute miles or 9500 kilometers), or about ten days journey for a fast ship, from Pohnpei (Ponape), an actual island of the area. Ponape also plays a part in the Cthulhu Mythos as the place where the "Ponape Scripture", a text describing Cthulhu, was found.

In summer 1997, the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s autonomous hydrophone array in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean repeatedly recorded a peculiar sound of a nature suggesting its biological origin. Yet, the sound’s amplitude was too large to be produced by any known animal species, and its source remains a mystery. According to NOAA, the readings yield a general location of the sound’s source “near 50° S 100° W”. The sound was given the name “Bloop”.

R'lyeh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An audio file of "Bloop" at this site:

Acoustics Monitoring Program - Icequakes (Bloop)

The NOAA now believes that Bloop is an icequake—part of an iceberg breaking off another. They provide an audio clip of Bloop and one of an icequake (their third clip has been disabled). Aside from the fact that the two clips sound really nothing alike (even though they tell us they do), I find it hard to believe that the NOAA never heard the sound of an iceberg breaking apart before 1997. Even stranger after insisting that Bloop had a biological origin. It's Cthulhu, damn you, man!

In "Shadow Over Innsmouth" which he wrote in 1931, Lovecraft mentions some kind of intelligent marine creatures in the South Seas that resembled fish that came up on land to talk with humans, give them knowledge and make deals with them. This was a couple of decades before two Frenchmen published a paper about the Dogon tribe of Timbuctu who have a secret society where they teach about a being called Nommo that came from Sirius and landed on earth and jumped into the ocean and swam around because he resembled a dolphin. Then he came up on land to talk to the humans and give them knowledge. The two Frenchmen lived with the tribe for years before being allowed to join the secret society. They first came in contact with the Dogon in 1931:

The Nommo are ancestral spirits (sometimes referred to as deities) worshipped by the Dogon tribe of Mali. The word Nommos is derived from a Dogon word meaning, "to make one drink," The Nommos are usually described as amphibious, hermaphroditic, fish-like creatures. Folk art depictions of the Nommos show creatures with humanoid upper torsos, legs/feet, and a fish-like lower torso and tail. The Nommos are also referred to as “Masters of the Water”, “the Monitors”, and "the Teachers”. Nommo can be a proper name of an individual, or can refer to the group of spirits as a whole. For purposes of this article “Nommo” refers to a specific individual and “Nommos” is used to reference the group of beings.

Nommo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Greek “Nomos” also means “law.”

Lord Larehip

This concludes my review of Black Books. I have others and you may also but I'm done here. Hope you found it informative and entertaining. If you didn't--f-uck you.