The Necronomicon: Fiction, Myth, and Magick

The Necronomicon began as a fictional book invented by the American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and has since become one of the most peculiar and discussed texts in modern occultism, a real publication built on an invented history that practitioners nevertheless use for genuine magical work. The trajectory from literary device to working grimoire makes the Necronomicon a fascinating case study in how occult authority is constructed and how belief shapes magical efficacy.

Lovecraft introduced the Necronomicon in his 1924 short story “The Hound,” attributing it to a fictitious eighth-century Arab poet he called Abdul Alhazred. In subsequent stories he elaborated its history, described its contents obliquely, and cited it as a source for his fictional cosmology of ancient, indifferent cosmic entities he called the Great Old Ones. The book’s power within his fiction came precisely from never being seen in full; it was a repository of terrible knowledge glimpsed only in fragments.

History and origins

Lovecraft was meticulous about maintaining the Necronomicon as a fiction. He wrote letters explaining its invented etymology and warned correspondents against claiming the book was real. His friend August Derleth and other members of the Cthulhu Mythos writing circle amplified the fictional bibliography, adding their own invented citations, and the cumulative effect was a richly detailed false history that many readers, particularly those without easy access to library catalogs, took for fact.

The practical consequence was a stream of inquiries to bookshops, libraries, and universities throughout the mid-twentieth century asking for the Necronomicon. By the 1970s the book’s reputation as a suppressed or secret magical text was widespread enough that a genuine publishing opportunity existed.

The Simon Necronomicon appeared in 1977, published initially in a limited slip-cased edition by the Schlangekraft partnership and then in mass-market paperback by Avon Books, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The editor, known only as Simon, claimed to have obtained an authentic manuscript through Byzantine Greek Orthodox monks, a story that has not been verified. Internal textual analysis shows the book draws on published Assyriological scholarship available in the 1970s, particularly the work of Samuel Noah Kramer, combined with Lovecraftian entities recast as Sumerian divinities and a ritual framework influenced by the Golden Dawn tradition.

Several people have claimed authorship or editorship over the years, including Peter Levenda, though Levenda’s involvement has not been definitively established. The book’s deliberate mystification of its own origins is itself consistent with older grimoire tradition, in which anonymous or pseudonymous authorship was standard practice.

In practice

The Simon Necronomicon presents a structured initiatory system called Gate-Walking, in which the practitioner opens successive planetary gates associated with Sumerian deities, progressing from the Moon through to Saturn. Each gate requires specific ritual preparations, invocations in pseudo-Sumerian, and the creation of a personal seal. Practitioners report that the system produces genuine subjective experiences and spiritual results, regardless of whether one accepts its claimed historical basis.

From a Chaos magick perspective, the question of whether the Necronomicon is authentic is less important than whether it is effective, and a system with a large community of practitioners, established lore, and consistent results has a kind of functional authority independent of its origins. Austin Osman Spare’s concept of belief as a tool rather than a truth is useful here.

The book also circulates in popular culture as a marker of occult seriousness, appearing in horror films, metal music, and internet folklore in ways that have little to do with either Lovecraft’s fiction or the Simon ritual system. Practitioners sometimes find this cultural noise makes working with the text feel self-conscious.

The question of fictional grimoires

The Necronomicon’s trajectory illuminates a broader question in occult theory: what grants a magical text its authority? Traditional grimoires claimed divine or angelic origin; the Simon Necronomicon claimed ancient manuscript tradition; both claims are, at minimum, unverifiable, and the Simon claim appears to be false. Yet practitioners find the system works. This sits comfortably within frameworks that locate magical efficacy in consciousness, intention, and trained imagination rather than in the literal truth of a text’s claimed history.

The Necronomicon phenomenon also generated genuine creativity. Writers, artists, musicians, and game designers have built rich secondary worlds from Lovecraft’s entities, and some practitioners work deliberately within the Lovecraftian fictional universe as a magical tradition in its own right, following the Chaos magick principle that any sufficiently coherent symbolic system can serve as a lens for genuine practice.

Legacy

The Necronomicon’s cultural presence continues to grow. New editions, commentaries, and practice guides appear regularly, and internet communities dedicated to Gate-Walking practice are active and often rigorous. Lovecraft himself has become a contested figure in contemporary culture due to his documented racism and xenophobia, a context that some practitioners engage with directly when working with material from his mythos.

The text stands as evidence that the boundary between fiction and magical reality is permeable in practice, whatever one’s theoretical position on the matter.

In myth and popular culture

The Necronomicon’s fictional mythology created by Lovecraft has been developed into one of the most elaborate shared fictional universes in twentieth-century horror. Lovecraft’s correspondents and friends, including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and August Derleth, contributed citations and mentions of the Necronomicon in their own stories, building a cumulative false bibliographic record that convinced many readers it was real. This collaborative world-building exercise, conducted through letters and pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, prefigured the internet-age phenomenon of shared fictional mythology.

The Necronomicon permeates contemporary horror in ways that range from the central to the incidental. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films (1981 onward) use a fictional grimoire called the Necronomicon ex Mortis as the catalyst for supernatural horror, and this popularization reached an enormous audience. Subsequent horror films, video games including Call of Cthulhu, and tabletop roleplaying games including Dungeons and Dragons have incorporated Necronomicon imagery so thoroughly that the name itself functions as shorthand for a supremely dangerous occult text.

Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, the fictional cosmology within which the Necronomicon originated, has generated a vast secondary creative culture including literature, music, film, games, and visual art. Bands including Metallica, Black Sabbath, and The Darkest Part of the Forest have referenced or drawn on Lovecraftian imagery. The author Jorge Luis Borges, famously fond of invented books, cited the Necronomicon as though real in at least one essay, contributing to the bibliographic mythology surrounding it.

Myths and facts

The Necronomicon is surrounded by more deliberate mystification than almost any other text in occultism, and separating fact from invented legend requires care.

• The widespread belief that the Necronomicon predates Lovecraft and that he discovered or adapted a real ancient text is false. Lovecraft created the text from scratch in the 1920s and said so explicitly in letters to correspondents; he even wrote a mock history of the fictional book to elaborate his creation.
• The Simon Necronomicon is sometimes described as based on actual Sumerian religious texts. Its authors drew on published Assyriological scholarship available in the 1970s, but the resulting ritual system has very little correspondence to actual Sumerian religion; its Sumerian god-names and invocations are loosely adapted rather than authentically preserved.
• Many readers believe the Necronomicon is banned or suppressed by governments or religious authorities. No actual prohibition on the Simon Necronomicon or any related publication exists in any Western country; the text is freely available for purchase online and in bookshops.
• The claim that reading the Necronomicon causes madness is a trope from Lovecraft’s fiction. The stories were written to produce horror through the conceit that the knowledge they contained was too terrible to bear; no empirical evidence supports the idea that reading the Simon Necronomicon or any similar text causes psychiatric harm.
• Some practitioners maintain that the Simon Necronomicon’s Gate-Walking system produces reliable results because it is connected to authentic ancient Sumerian magic. The system was invented in the 1970s and has no verifiable ancient lineage; practitioners who report results are working within a modern ritual framework, which may be genuinely effective without being ancient.