Lovecraft and the Necronomicon: the story of a book that never existed
Abdul Alhazred, Olaus Wormius and Miskatonic University: how H.P. Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon and why so many readers believed it was real.
Among the grimoires most often mentioned in popular culture, only one has the peculiarity of never having existed. The Necronomicon was born in the imagination of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a writer from Providence, Rhode Island, who lived from 1890 to 1937. It first appeared in the story The Hound, written in 1922 and published in 1924 in the magazine Weird Tales, and then became a recurring element of his fiction.
A false scholarly history
In 1927 Lovecraft wrote a short text entitled History of the Necronomicon, published only after his death, in 1938. In it he relates that the book was composed around 730 in Damascus by Abdul Alhazred, the mad Arab poet, under the title Al Azif; that it was translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas and then into Latin by Olaus Wormius in 1228; and that religious authorities repeatedly ordered its destruction.
It is an invented chronology, but built with plausible names and dates. Olaus Wormius, for example, recalls Ole Worm, a Danish scholar who really existed, but who lived in the seventeenth century rather than the thirteenth. Lovecraft later acknowledged the anachronism but went on using the name. The Greek title, as he wrote, had come to him in a dream, and its etymology has been explained in different ways.
A game among writers
The Necronomicon worked as a shared secret. Lovecraft encouraged writer friends such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and August Derleth to cite it in their stories, while he in turn placed in his own tales the accursed books they had invented. An imaginary library of forbidden texts thus came into being, kept in fictional institutions such as Miskatonic University in Arkham.
To make the illusion more convincing, Lovecraft set his volumes alongside real works of the occult tradition and of demonology, naming them in the same list. Readers, finding them next to authentic titles, were led to think that the Necronomicon too was a rare but existing book, kept in a handful of libraries around the world.
The fake becomes legend
Even during Lovecraft's lifetime some readers wrote to libraries and booksellers trying to obtain the volume. After his death the myth grew. In the 1970s several editions appeared that were presented as authentic translations but were in fact modern compositions inspired by Mesopotamian sources or by contemporary occultism. None of them has any link to an ancient manuscript.
The case of the Necronomicon is a classic example of a literary fake, an invented work that acquires a life of its own outside fiction. In this it connects with a long tradition: from the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus to the Renaissance and seventeenth-century grimoires ascribed to King Solomon, many books of magic built their authority on legendary origins.
Cosmic horror
In Lovecraft's stories the Necronomicon is not a manual to be used, but a threat. Whoever reads it discovers that the universe is ruled by ancient entities indifferent to mankind, such as Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth, and often loses their reason. The forbidden book becomes the symbol of a knowledge that does not enlighten, but destroys those who seek it.
This vision, which critics call cosmic horror, has deeply influenced fantasy fiction, cinema and games. The Necronomicon thus remains one of the most successful cases of an imaginary book, proof of literature's power to create objects more alive than many real works, able to cross the decades and give rise to new legends.