The Necronomicon Wars

Even in his own lifetime, H.P. Lovecraft got the occasional bit of fan mail from occultists either asking if his mythology of the Great Old Ones was real – or insisting that it was real. Over time, it seemed like the Necronomicon became the particular focus of this sort of inquiry – perhaps because of Lovecraft’s technique of listing it and other invented Mythos tomes alongside real books when using it in his stories.

Lovecraft gently let down all such inquirers. He’d also disappoint fans who knew it was fictional but thought it’d be wicked awesome if he’d write an actual Necronomicon, by pointing out that he’d already established in his stories that the damn thing was hundreds of pages long – and whilst he might be tempted to cook up some scraps, he really didn’t want to spend that long cranking out a tome of that length. Nonetheless, an appetite for the book remained.

After Lovecraft died, pranksters would slip references to it into library catalogues and the like, but the efforts of Arkham House to exert control over Lovecraft’s intellectual property (despite August Derleth’s rather weak claim to be Lovecraft’s literary executor, a role it’s now generally agreed that R.H. Barlow had a better claim to) may have dampened any efforts to turn the artifact into reality. Derleth’s death in 1971, however, made such fakery significantly more tempting.

The early 1970s also saw Kenneth Grant put out The Magical Revival, the first volume in his epic Typhonian Trilogies – a sprawling account of his further development of Aleister Crowley’s occult system of Thelema. This included an astonishing claim – that Lovecraft’s fiction wasn’t fiction, but was on some level communicating psychic truths that were not only compatible with Thelema but were actually important components of it in their own right.

This created the impetus for a bizarre new feature of the occult scene – a spate of purported Necronomicons, at least one of which would inspire readers to actually try out the magic described therein, and a raging conflict in the wider scene over whether these books a) were what they purported to be and b) had any legitimacy as grimoires. In short, the stage was set for a conflict in which shots are still fired to this day – the controversy I like to call the Necronomicon Wars.

Arthur Throws a Templar Tantrum

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Some incidents in history seem to attract more than their fair share of legends; for instance, whilst the Crusades in general constituted a massive and pervasive disruption in the histories of Europe and the Middle East alike, people seem to get especially fixated on the Knights Templar, a sect of Christian warrior-monks, and the so-called Assassins, the militant arm of the Nizari sect of Ismailis (the Ismailis themselves being a splinter sect of Shia Islam). The idea that these organisations concealed a secret doctrine that has been transmitted to subsequent secret societies is a godsend when it comes to speculative historical fantasy, or if you want to give your particular occult group a bit of extra gravitas, but it has resulted in the accretion of all sorts bits of questionable scholarship around the subject penned by authors at times more interested in pushing an ideology or promoting a legend than making a credible historical argument.

Take, as an example, The Templars and the Assassins: The Militia of Heaven by James Wasserman. Wasserman is a long-standing member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), an initiatory society primarily associated with Aleister Crowley and his Thelemite religious teachings. Wasserman assures the reader that he is going to start off by laying out the facts about the historical background to the Crusades and the development of Islam, and the recorded facts about the Assassins and the Templars, before providing his more opinionated conclusions. However, right out of the gate he ends up promoting a range of personal opinions that became evident to me even though I’m no professional historian myself.

For instance, Wasserman isn’t even able to finish the first chapter without making his particular political stance extremely clear – namely, that he’s a NRA-supporting hardline libertarian prone to spouting hard-right Republican talking points. He talks about “Statism” in a way which fairly clearly indicates his libertarian political outlook (if the citation of Atlas Shrugged as a useful reference on political conspiracies in the bibliography wasn’t enough of a giveaway), and he openly buys into the CFR-Bilderberg-Trilateral Commission conspiracy theories of the John Birch era. (I swear, 700 years from now when those institutions are long dead we’ll have secret societies claiming descent from them). He also seems to be not keen on democracy either, basically equating it with mob rule and lynchings – a position regularly taken by libertarians who resent the ability of a majority-supported government to place restrictions on them.