The Yellow Sign: Manuscripts, Codices, and Grimoires (Part 2)

In The Club Dumas
, and later on-screen in the film adaption The Ninth Gate, there’s an incredibly evolved narrative
playing with the idea of both fiction and magic as being the result of a game played out by book fetishists. The
novel is substantially more engaging than the film, as a whole sub-plot involving the internecine world of Dumas
fanatics obsessed about the possible emergence of a lost chapter of the Three Musketeers, and numerous references
blurring even this book’s alignment with real world plausibilities. Two interwoven yet unconnected plots are
maintained with an ear for wordplay that succeeds even in translation, whereas in the film by Polanski the
satanic overtones remain the centerpiece of the film.

The Ninth Gate is a fetish of the book in cinematic form. It is a film about the power of love, love for
oneself, a narcissism so intense that it infatuates Satan herself, who then proceeds to stalk the man of
her affections. The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte is
the most obvious influence for this particular plot point. However, the book Corso’s been sent to find, The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows, is a secondary text reprinting elements of a primary sourcebook, now lost, reputed to be powerful enough to summon the Devil. In the fictional world Aristide Torchia is reputed to be in posession of the apocryphal Delomelanicon written by the devil, but apparently this book may or may not have been actually authored by Giordano Bruno, if it is indeed a real book.

Furthermore, a name like Delomelanicon immediately places this text, mentioned as a source in the book and film above, in
the same conceptual space as the Necronomicon.

One edition cited was edited by H.P. Lovecraft and published in Providence,
Rhode Island, in 1934 (if you believe it badly enough). The Arabic title was Al Azif, the buzzing, or the noise of insects
which seems to correspond to Ars Goetia (Latin for “the Howling Art”) which is part of Lemegeton Clavicula Salamonis
(“the Lesser Key of Solomon”). In it, enciphered, is the howling the bornless make from the formless chaos. In this book you will learn of Azathoth, the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space whose minions fill the minds of those who dare seek out this entity with a flute-like piping noise.

Lovecraft was obviously anthropomorphizing scientific principles while struggling with the implication of an infinite cosmos, and the ‘lovecraftian mythos’ arose out of a interconnected web of creatives,
of whom H. P. Lovecraft was one of many. That he is remembered, while Lin Carter and Ramsey Campbell are regulated
to less visibility within the mythos reprint literature is somewhat disheartening. Lin Carter especially, who seems to have single-handedly
sketched out the scope of fan fiction years before Kirk
was groping Spock and Harry Potter was playing where’s my wand with Samwise Gamgee. Perhaps Bruno did write the Delomelanicon,
Lovecraft attributed the work to Dr. Dee and got the description confused with Liber Loageth, and ended up writing a kind of grimoiric
fan-fic of his own.

The best spoofs work because they are founded on truth, and the untruths are so deeply embedded one needs be an expert to winkle them out. It was a technique H. P. Lovecraft understood well, and he used it extensively to add verisimilitude to his fiction.

(Colin Low)

Of course, there’s a lot more going on than just a spoof, it took some real work by Howard Philips Lovecraft to synthesize the description of
the Necronomicon. Certainly, the idea of a pan-dimensional blind idiot god on the edge of all realities
should be this kind of inbred corn-fed babbling
omnivore consuming anything it touches and announced by the fluting of shoggoths when it breaks
on through to our side of the fourth dimension seems related to the gnostic demiurge Yaldaboath Saklas Samael (an eldritch name if ever I’ve heard one). Some of it, I suspect, came from the tales of the Codex Gigas, of Liber Laogeth, and the ongoing speculation (apparently widespread
in the New England area at the time) about what secrets might lurk in the manuscript that Wildred Voynich had brought with him from Europe.

In fact, the description of Wildred Voynich’s character throughout the book
The Voynich Manuscript
had me convinced that at least some of
Corso’s character was a modernization of Voynich’s suspect past and underhanded dealings to procure impossible texts. It seems easy to piece
together a link from the manuscript being deciphered by Professor Newbold in Pennsylvania with a creepy mouldering text in a Dunwich farmhouse.
Certainly a text described as an herbal filled with star charts and baths filled with green liquid filled with unknowable ciphers could
not have escaped the notice of Lovecraft and the circle of writers with whom he kept correspondence.

Colin Low, quoted above, was the architect of the Necronomicon Anti-FAQ, and in his essay The Necronomicon and Ontological Pressure he raises
an interesting question:

For some reason a book called the Necronomicon written before H.P. Lovecraft would be much more interesting than a book called the Necronomicon written after H.P. Lovecraft, regardless of contents. The first one would be real and the second one would be a spoof. Suppose we could identify the important themes contained in Lovecraft’s fiction as really occurring in actuality, and created a grimoire based around these actually occurring themes. Would that be a spoof?

(Colin Low)

Obviously, Simon and Donald Tyson certainly gave it a shot… At least the plushy Necronomicon costs $100, price being the only thing that begins to legitimatize any mysical assumptions attached to the name ‘Necronomicon.’ Still, these half-hearted attempts pale in comparison to works like Codex Seraphinianus. Donald Tyson came out with an entire tarot deck based around the mythos and two works of.. uh.. well, fiction. Meanwhile, whomever ‘Simon’ is put out A book of Seals with a forward warning about using the book and a few associated texts. Now Avon has also published Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon and The
Gates of the Necronomicon, both supposedly by ‘Simon’ again.. I personally find these books curiosities more than anything, and while Tyson took a valiant stab in the right direction, the
feint came up short – a true spoof of the Necronomicon would need to include every reference Lovecraft and his crew used, while expounding in detail verbose
enough to drive a reader into a terrified, religious frenzy (think
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but rather than architecture the narrative was detailing creatures from H.R. Giger or Diabolus Rex‘s visions, accompanied by tables
and seals and strange stories with alchemical meaning.) $8 mass market paperbacks exist only because there is a market for them, and as if illustrating the post-modern trashdump of low-brow culture, the ‘Simon’ Necronomicon’s seals showed up on the costumes of wrestlers for the New World Order at one point. Thankfully, Joel Biroco in Kaos 14 published the following passage, shedding light on this particular Necronomicon:

George Hiram Derby, proprietor of Panpipes Magickal Marketplace, an occult trinkets store in Hollywood encapsulates the manner in which the Simon Necronomicon was “channelled”:



It was written in a New York apartment above a now defunct landmark occult shop known as the Magickal Childe. It was authored by Herman Slater (Simon) and Larry Barnes. The idea to write it came after a night of particularly heavy boozing (El Presidente Brandy). Barnes was in possession of Lovecraft’s manuscripts and the two would drunkenly research on a daily basis so the idea to write the book was inevitable. They researched Sumerian/Babylonian religion and creation myths at the NY city library for less than a week. The story line and everything else in the book was written over peals of drunken laughter. The manuscript’s final draft was presented less than two months after the idea drifted in through drunken fog. This was one of Horrible Herman Slater’s favorite stories right up until the day he died. I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded me sharing it. [Comment Dated 26/07/01 posted on alt.magick and alt.necronomicon]

(Joel Birocco, KAOS14.pdf pp 82-3)

In the end, all these Necronomicons come from the same space – the Picatrix
,
the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Codex Gigas, the Voynich Manuscript. They come from the legends that surrounded these ‘black books’ and the powers they supposedly transmitted. Yet when the book was finally found, and, upon reading, proved useless in fulfilling the desires of the searcher – the searcher looks again for the source text of the grimoire, perhaps reasoning that the translation was incorrect, perhaps the relevant illustrations are missing, perhaps the puzzle can still be teased apart if the pattern were clearer.

Ultimately, the ongoing discussion about the Necronomicon’s existence or lack thereof highlight the sheer resilience of this meme Lovecraft initiated, and with good cause. The fragments that Lovecraft has placed in his stories do sound like responses to rips in the fabric of space-time, penned in response to some pan-dimensional vision of reality, that has been translated through the lense of insanity from an arcane and ancient text. What Lovecraft did to culture with the following phrase may well outlast us all:

Nor is it to be thought … that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters,
or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones
are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they
walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate.
Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate.
Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones
broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have
trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as
They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can
none know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and
of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that
shape without sight or substance which is Them.

(H.P. Lovecraft – The Dunwich Horror)

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