I forget who said it, but I listened to a discussion of the Simon Necronomicon, and the gist of what they were saying was that, ok, what’s a real, authentic grimoire, historically speaking? Haven’t they mostly been guilty of lifting material from other sources? And they were saying that the shadiness of the book sort of jived with it being a truly 1970s NYC representation of a grimoire. Maybe one could look at the Satanic Bible in a similar light, the 1960s California take on one.
It’s out of my depth to judge the quality or validity of either, I’m just wondering if one can look at them as examples of how time and place leaves its mark.
love talking about this stuff. the Necronomicon is a really fascinating case study with some pretty heady implications around the whole idea of authorship. i've just been thinking about this in relation to another potential project i'm working on, so i'll have to keep myself from turning this into a firehose of explanation... i forget where exactly, but Alan Moore describes the Necronomicon as a book that wrote itself into being.
from a materialist perspective, it was originally "just" a plot device from a Lovecraft story; for some reason, people seized on the idea, and rumors started going around that it was based on a genuine artifact. so you get people assembling these "forgeries" (which is a weird way to think about it, if there was never a "genuine" artifact to be copied) based on what they imagined the real thing would look like. there were iterations built on further attempts to make the forgeries seem more genuine, and eventually, presto, there is a "real" Necronomicon, spun up from something that started out as "fake."
so the question becomes: who is the true author of the Necronomicon?
from a materialist perspective, you have to look at the forensic trail of forgeries, individual creators going back to Lovecraft himself, who never intended to make something that was "real".
from a phasmatopian perspective—allowing for some animist-adjacent theory of mind, plus ontological nondualism—then the book becomes its own author: it planted the seeds of its own conceptualization in the collective unconscious, and then used many different human mediums to attain its material form in our reality.
one could probably make a similar case for many of the important grimoires with dubious (from a material perspective) authorship; in that light, they become minor manifestations of a bigger phenomenon than we can ever fully understand.
I’ve heard it said that one can’t read or write in a dream. I don’t know how this could be proven, but I understand that some people use books or clocks as a reality check for lucid dreaming , in that if they try to read and the letters are all scrambled and illegible, they know they are dreaming. I’ve had a different experience, where I saw an amazing book in a dream, became too excited, and then started to wake up, to my frustration. But, I had the perception that I could read. I guess one could argue that it wasn’t really reading but only dreaming that I could, but then it gets silly to discuss whether the dream book was a real dream book or a fake dream book. Anyway, say for the sake of argument that one could read or write a book in a dream. Would that be a “real” book? What if you could only see it once, or if the contents changed?
I could imagine future historians describing how there wasn’t just one Necronomicon, but that it was a genre of magical books
Well, I guess Kenneth Grant saw it as HPL being guided from beyond his own mind, right? If grimoires are in fact hijacking humans to get themselves written, then I would wonder about a lot of human behaviors, and what guides them, and thinking about the way viruses can change host behavior.
Were there any legendary books used as plot elements before HPL’s Necronomicon? I can’t think of any offhand.
I forget who said it, but I listened to a discussion of the Simon Necronomicon, and the gist of what they were saying was that, ok, what’s a real, authentic grimoire, historically speaking? Haven’t they mostly been guilty of lifting material from other sources? And they were saying that the shadiness of the book sort of jived with it being a truly 1970s NYC representation of a grimoire. Maybe one could look at the Satanic Bible in a similar light, the 1960s California take on one.
It’s out of my depth to judge the quality or validity of either, I’m just wondering if one can look at them as examples of how time and place leaves its mark.
love talking about this stuff. the Necronomicon is a really fascinating case study with some pretty heady implications around the whole idea of authorship. i've just been thinking about this in relation to another potential project i'm working on, so i'll have to keep myself from turning this into a firehose of explanation... i forget where exactly, but Alan Moore describes the Necronomicon as a book that wrote itself into being.
from a materialist perspective, it was originally "just" a plot device from a Lovecraft story; for some reason, people seized on the idea, and rumors started going around that it was based on a genuine artifact. so you get people assembling these "forgeries" (which is a weird way to think about it, if there was never a "genuine" artifact to be copied) based on what they imagined the real thing would look like. there were iterations built on further attempts to make the forgeries seem more genuine, and eventually, presto, there is a "real" Necronomicon, spun up from something that started out as "fake."
so the question becomes: who is the true author of the Necronomicon?
from a materialist perspective, you have to look at the forensic trail of forgeries, individual creators going back to Lovecraft himself, who never intended to make something that was "real".
from a phasmatopian perspective—allowing for some animist-adjacent theory of mind, plus ontological nondualism—then the book becomes its own author: it planted the seeds of its own conceptualization in the collective unconscious, and then used many different human mediums to attain its material form in our reality.
one could probably make a similar case for many of the important grimoires with dubious (from a material perspective) authorship; in that light, they become minor manifestations of a bigger phenomenon than we can ever fully understand.
I’ve heard it said that one can’t read or write in a dream. I don’t know how this could be proven, but I understand that some people use books or clocks as a reality check for lucid dreaming , in that if they try to read and the letters are all scrambled and illegible, they know they are dreaming. I’ve had a different experience, where I saw an amazing book in a dream, became too excited, and then started to wake up, to my frustration. But, I had the perception that I could read. I guess one could argue that it wasn’t really reading but only dreaming that I could, but then it gets silly to discuss whether the dream book was a real dream book or a fake dream book. Anyway, say for the sake of argument that one could read or write a book in a dream. Would that be a “real” book? What if you could only see it once, or if the contents changed?
I could imagine future historians describing how there wasn’t just one Necronomicon, but that it was a genre of magical books
Well, I guess Kenneth Grant saw it as HPL being guided from beyond his own mind, right? If grimoires are in fact hijacking humans to get themselves written, then I would wonder about a lot of human behaviors, and what guides them, and thinking about the way viruses can change host behavior.
Were there any legendary books used as plot elements before HPL’s Necronomicon? I can’t think of any offhand.