This article has been reprinted without permission from:
        
"Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 2nd Ed."


        Necronomicon, The

        A fabled grimoire or textbook of black magic for evoking demons,
supposedly compiled by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred"-in fact, an invention
of H.P. Lovecraft, writer of supernatural and fantasy fiction.  The name
"Abdul Alhazred" was adopted playfully by Lovecraft around the age of five,
after reading an edition of The Arabian Nigths, and was used in later life in
Lovecraft's fiction.  It may also contain a reference to the name "Hazard," an
old Rhode Island family.

        In 1936, Lovecraft wrote a pseudo-scholarly essay titled A History of
the Necronomicon, which claimed that its original title was Al Azif, deriving
from the word used by Arabs to designate nocturnal sound of insects resembling
the howling of demons.  There followed an account of various editions of the
Necronomicon from A.D. 730 onwards.  Lovecraft had claimed that there was a
copy of the work in the library of Miskatonic University, in Arkham (a city
invented by him in his fiction).  Lovecraft's essay was published in leaflet
form by Wilson H. Shephard, Alabama, 1938, and has since been reprinted.  The
Necronomicon was cited in various stories by Lovecraft, and gradually acquired
a spurious life of its own.  Someone inserted an index card for the book in the
files of Yale Library.  A New York bookseller could not resist inserting an
entry for a Latin edition in one of his sale catalogs.

        Eventually a group of writers and researchers headed by occult scholar
Colin Wilson solemnly presented The Necronomicon : The Book of Dead Names as a
newly discovered lost masterpiece of occult literature.  In an introduction to
this publication, Wilson suggested that Lovecraft's invention may have had some
substance in fact, perhaps revealed through Lovecraft's subconsious mind.  
Wilson told a story as fabulous as that of the origin of Golden Dawn cipher
manuscript, concerning a Dr. Stanislaus Hinterstoisser, president of the 
Salzburg Institute for the Study of Magic and Occult Phenomena, who claimed
that Lovecraft's father was an Egyptian Freemason, that he had seen a copy of
The Necronomicon in Boston, U.S. (where Lovecraft senior had worked), which was
a section of a book by Alkindi (died A.D. 850) known as The Book of the Essence
of the Soul.

        Science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp (who published an excellent
biography of Lovecraft in 1975) is said to have acquired an Arabic manuscript
from Baghdad titled Al Azif.  The British occultist Robert Turner, after
researching in the British Museum Library, claimed that the Alkindi work was
known to the famous magician John Dee (1527-1608) who had a copy in cipher
manuscript.  This book, known as Liber Logaeth, was recently examined by
computer analysis, and so The Necronomicon : The Book of Dead Names has now
been published, edited by George Hay, introduced by Colin Wilson, researched
by Robert Turner and David Langford (Neville Spearman, U.K., 1978; Corgi
paperback, 1980).

        No doubt other recensions of The Necronomicon will be discovered in
the course of time.  Meanwhile, librarians need no longer be embarressed by
requests for this elusive work.

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