Howard Philip Lovecraft

THE ORIGIN OF A SPOOF

By Colin Wilson

Ever since the publication of The Necronomicon in 1978, I have been receiving letters from readers who take it perfectly seriously, and who want further details about its magical procedures. I suppose that is a kind of compliment to its spurious air of authenticity. An even greater compliment was an indignant article by Gerald Suster, himself a serious student of magic, in a London 'underground' newspaper, denouncing the book as a cynical piece of commercial opportunism. The fact that he found it necessary to denounce such an obvious spoof indicates that we succeeded beyond my original expectations. In fact, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Latin will instantly recognise it for a fake, it is subtitled "The book of dead names", when the word"necronomicon" actually means the

book of dead laws.

In 1976 , I was aproached by an old friend from my Soho days, George Hay, who was at one time a leading disciple of L. Ron Hubbard. He had been asked by the publisher Neville Armstrong who runs Neville Spearman Limited to edit a spoof volume about the Necronomicon. He asked me if I would be willing to contribute an introduction. My first response was one of suspicion. No writer wants to have his name associated with a bad joke. So I asked to see the material he had collected. It was awful. The writers all seemed to have the idea that all they had to do was to imitate the basic Lovecraft formula. And this formula, as we all know is deceptively straightforward. The writer explains that he is cringing in a garret in Arkham or Innsmouth commiting his awful story to paper by the light of a guttering candle. Six months ago, in the library of Miskatonic University he came across an ancient manuscript written in mediaeval German. He ignored the advice of the doddery old librarian and proceeded to practise its magic spells in the hills behind Arkham. Even the violent death of the old librarian failed to deflect him from his foolishness. And now, too late he realises that he has unleashed the Thing on the inhabitants of Massachusetts. Even as he writes, he can hear an ominous creaking on the stairs as if an oversized elephant is trying to tiptoe on its hind feet, But even as the door creaks open, he continues to write: "I can hear its hoarse breathing, and smell its loathsome graveyard stench..Aaaaarg!

One of the chief contributors was a brilliant young computer expert, David Langford, who worked at an atomic energy establishment (and who has since written some excellent science fiction). He had the amusing idea of producing a lengthy computer analysis that was supposed to prove the real existence of the Necronomicon. And, in the usual way, the experts who worked on it were found slumped over their computers, their heads crushed to a horrible pulp, while strange reptilian footprints walked across the room, and vanished out of the open window. Most of the other stories followed roughly the same line. Now I had myself been responsible for a certain amount of Lovecraftian fiction. I will not go so far as to call it parody - and could see instantly what was wrong. Lovecraft himself enjoyed playing the scholary game, dragging in his references to the mad Arab Abdul El Hazzred or the insane German scholar Von Junzt. In my few ventures into the genre (The Mind Parasites, The Philosopher's Stone, The Return of the Lloigor, I had attempted to go one stage further, and make the various references sound still more authentic, draging in chunks ofarchaeology, anthropology, and demonological magical lore. It is a very easy game to play if you happen to have a turn in that direction. So obviously, the first thing to do was to find someone who really knew something about magic and persuade him to concoct a book that could have been a perfectly genuing magical manuscript. I turned to my friend Robert Turner, a one-time member of a Gerald Gardner witchcraft coven and the head of a contemporary magical order the Order of the Cubic Stone.

Before I go any further, let me explain that, unlike Lovecraft I am by no means a sceptic about "the supernatural". I was always convinced for example, that poltergeist phenomena really occur, although I was inclined to believe that these are due to some unknown power of the unconscious mind. When, in the mid-1960s, I was commissioned by Random House to write a book about "the occult", I decided to accept because the idea sounded amusing, and because I had always been interested in the lunatic fringe of cosmology- from Hoerbiger and Velikovsky to Madam Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. (since that time Mr. Wilson was heard to be whispering into a friends ear that he has reconsidered what actually constitutes the lunatic fringe). But as I wrote The Occult, it slowly became clear to me that traditions about magic and "the spirit world" have an extraordinary similarity in all ages and all continents. It was astonishing to discover for example, that Eskimos shamans held almost precisely the same belief as the shamans of Siberia, those of Northern Japan and of African witch doctors and Red Indian medicine men. Even so, The Occult was basically "sceptical" in outlook- for example, I took it for granted that the kind of powers possessed by witches are basically nonharmful, and that the mediaeval witch persecutions were based upon the hysteria of the inquisitors. It was some years later that it struck me that I had accepted without question certain accounts of the magical power of African witch doctors (for example, to cause rain), yet had rejected completely the notion that the North Berwick witches could have caused the storm which almost drowned James VI of Scotland-and I held to this belief in spite of the fact that the witches had confessed to the attempt to sink the ship without being tortured. Later still, when writing a history of poltergeist phenomena, I slowly came to accept the view of Guy Playfair, that poltergeists are, in fact, "spirits" and not some unconscious power of the human mind-even though, by that time, I had discovered in the new science of split-brain physiology a possible explanation of the origin of the forces that can cause objects to fly around the room without anyone touching them. Now the problem of concocting a spoof Necronomicon was simply that Lovecraft himself remained a sceptic to the end of his life. If he had been a genuine student of magic or even of spiritualism- it might have been possible to concoct a story about a genuine magical work which he used as the basis of his fiction. The real problem, therefore, as to explain how a man who was known to be a sceptic could possible have made use of a genuine magical grimoire. Still, the problem presented no real difficulty to the author of a dozen or so novels- since a novelist is, by profession, an ingenious liar. The answer, I decided, lay in Lovecraft's father, Winfield Lovecraft, who died of syphilis when Howard was a child, and about whom very little is known. I claimed to have come upon evidence that Winfield Lovecraft was a Freemason-which, in America towards the end of the 19th century, as commonplace enough. But I went on to claim that Winfield Lovecraft had drifted into Egyptian Freemasonry, founded by the "magician" Cagliostro and that the Egyptian Freemasons studied various ancient volumes on transcendental magic, such as the Key of Solomon and the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. Next, I invented a German scholar named Stanislaus Hinterstoisser, the founder of the Salzburg Institute for the Study of Magic and Occult Phenomena. It was Hinterstoisser who had insisted that The Necronomicon was a real book and that it had been bequeathed by Cagliostro to his followers. Now it was a fairly straightforward matter of persuading some scholar to impersonate Hinterstoisser, and to write me a letter explaining how he had succeeded in tracking down the original Necronomicon which was translated in 1571 by Dr. John Dee, the English magician. It required a scholar who spoke fluent German, and I approached by friend Ellic Howe, the author of a classic study of the Order of the Golden Dawn. But Ellic felt that he had not enough material to go on. I turned to another friend, Dominic Purcell a professor of economics at the University of Vienna. Dominic wrote the "Hintersoisser letter." From then on it was plain sailing. The Necronomicon was actually identified as a magical compilation by a number of Arabs, including the celebrated alchemist Alkkindi. The manuscript was tracked down in the British Museum and the magical code was solved with the aid of a computer (this is where David Landford came in-and it was necessary for him to scrap his original essay and write a new one based on material provided by Robert Turner). My friend L. Sprague de Camp- the author of the standard biography of Lovecraft was persuaded to write a short essay about young Lovecraft, making no mention of the Hinterstroisser theory, but giving the volume that additional touch of authenticity. A couple of the original essays on Lovecraft were thrown in for good measure, and the thing was finally completed. I should mention that Gerald Suster's accusations about commercial opportunism were wide of the mark- I doubt whether the book has made most of its contributors more that about $500.00 each. But it gave its compilers a great deal of harmless pleasure. (seeing as how the effects upon ones unconscious mind can be generated by fact or fiction, the pleasures by the compilers may not be so harmless). And I am fairly sure that Lovecraft would have accepted it as a compliment.