From: lizi@soda.berkeley.edu (Cosma Shalizi)
Newsgroups: alt.necromicon
Subject: Re: NECRONOMICON : - Help: a FAQ from an interested party.
Date: 13 Nov 1992 21:37:30 GMT
Organization: Campus Crusade for Cthulhu (Berkeley Tentacle)
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu

In article <mcdonghj.721651512@unix2.tcd.ie> mcdonghj@unix2.tcd.ie (Nascent Virion.....) writes:
>I've heard an awful lot about this Necronomicon and have been trying to find 
>out what it is exactly. OK I've heard on the news group that HP Lovecraft
>(The Master) wrote it, but what's it about?? I'm having trouble finding it. 
>ALT.Vampires are talking about it.
>Fields of the Nephilim fans are quoting from it...
>Could someone (without flaming) please giz a hand??
>Is it related to HR Gigers Necronomicon??
>-John Mc Donagh

   Altogether now, gang, slowly and carefully,
THERE IS NO - NO!!!! - NECRONOMICON.
   H. P. Lovecraft made up the Necronomicon in - if memory serves - 1922, as
a piece of background detail for the story "The Nameless City." He attributed
it to a certain "mad Arab" named "Abdul Alhazred" - which had been the name
he used in his make-believe when he was a kid drunk on the _1001 Nights_.
Alhazred, needless to say, did not exist. HPL used the _Necronomicon_ in
many subsequent stories, and some of his friends - e.g., Robert Howard and
Clark Ashton Smith - also made references to it. Some of them went so far
as to "quote" from it, and HPL wrote a "history" of the book. These are
all, like Randolph Carter, Great Cthulhu and Sherlock Holmes, fictions.
Certainly HPL never wrote a complete manuscript for the _Nec_ - he was an
atheistic materialist with no overt superstitious beliefs. (He was a
racist, but that's not quite the same thing.) The sum of all passages
"quoted" from the Nec. by HPL wouldn't be more than a page or three.
   The fact that the book does not, in any meanigful sense, has not prevented
people from selling it. A number of these - such as the one put out by the
Owlswick Press, with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp, for instance -
is a practical joke of sorts. Others, like the one from Avon, are simply
bits of trash designed to make money off the ignorant, gullible and/or
simply stupid, and thus morally on a level with Danielle Steel or L. Ron
Hubbard. H R Giger's book is, if I'm thinking of the right one, simply
artwork, with only the name lifted from Lovecraft. I'm not terribly surprised
that alt.vampyres is all agog about the Nec - the level of critical intellect
displayed there has never been terribly high; I pulled out after the "Quantum
Mechanics says everything is subjective, so if you believe in vampires they
exist for you" post appeared. Who, or what, are the Fans of the Nephilim?
Nephilim = the "giants in the earth in those days," yes?
   And to reiterate my long-standing (well, maybe a week now) offer: If
anyone finds me a reference to the Necronomicon before 1920, much less an
actual copy that pre-dates Howard Philips Lovecraft, I will, in full view
of the Net, eat my "Biohazard Warning" t-shirt.

	Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
	In Real Life: lizi@soda.berkeley.edu or lizi@ocf. et cetera
	larval physicist
	VP, Campus Crusade for Cthulhu (Berkeley Tentacle)
	who really ought to be studying for the GRE...
-- 
"What's the use of being an American citizen if I can't swear when I
damn well want to?" - My mother, while waiting in line in Heathrow
Newsgroups: alt.necromicon,alt.horror.cthulhu