The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon

by Donald Tyson

  It was correct of the authorities and the churches to suppress the Necronomicon, Lovecraft wrote in his history of the book, because the reading of it leads to "terrible consequences" that he did not enumerate. Because of its universal suppression, few among the general public were aware of the book's existence prior to its inclusion in Lovecraft's fiction. An exception is the writer Robert W. Chambers, who based his apocryphal two-act play, The King in Yellow, on the effects caused by reading the Necronomicon. In Chambers' stories the mere reading of the second act of this play induces madness and despair, with fatal consequences.

  Without having a copy of the Necronomicon to read, it is impossible to know all of what is in it, since Lovecraft quoted only a few brief passages from the text. To judge by these quotations, it concerns the history and nature of the Old Ones, and of the other great beings and races that inhabited the Earth before the evolution of mankind, along with practical instructions on the art of necromancy, and on opening the gateway of Yog-Sothoth.

  (At the Mountains of Madness; The Dreams in the Witch House; The Diary of Alonzo Typer; Out of the Aeons; The Call of Cthulhu; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Dunwich Horror; The Festival; The Haunter of the Dark; The Horror in the Museum; The Hound; Medusa's Coil; The Shadow Out of Time; The Thing on the Doorstep; The Whisperer in Darkness; Through the Gates of the Silver Key; The Descendant; History of the Necronomicon)

  Two occult diaries in low Latin that cover the years from 1560 to 1580, written in a crabbed hand by Claes van der Heyl, the ancestor of Dirck van der Heyl, of the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York. They were found in 1935 by occultist Alonzo Typer, the first book in a carved chest in the attic of the abandoned and decaying old van der Heyl farmhouse, the second in a desk in a little locked room of that same house.

  A clasp of blackened silver held the first book closed. Between its yellowed pages was a loose leaf upon which was drawn the color image of a being described by Typer as "a monstrous creature resembling nothing so much as a squid, beaked and tentacled, with great yellow eyes, and with certain abominable approximations to the human form." It is referred to by Typer as the Ancient One, the Nameless One, and the Forgotten One who is Guardian of the Ancient Gateway.

  In the second diary, reference was made to the city of Yian-Ho, "that lost and hidden city wherein brood eon-old secrets, and of which dim memories older than the body lurk behind the minds of all men." The second diary was a key to understanding the contents of the first diary. From them, Typer learned the Chant that would evoke the Nameless One, but he was troubled that the Chant offered no means to control it.

  (The Diary of Alonzo Typer)

  A book kept by the priests of Nath, mentioned by the mystic and alchemist Rudolf Yergler, in his Chronicle of Nath. In the Old Book is the prophecy that one who can look upon the true shape of the shadow that came to the Earth from outside, and survive the ordeal, will have the power to send the shadow back from whence it came.

  (The Tree on the Hill)

  A terrible work of "ancient blasphemies" mention in the story The Green Meadow. Democritus was a Greek philosopher. There is nothing particularly blasphemous in his work, at least by modern standards, although it may have seemed so to his contemporaries.

  (The Green Meadow)

  An ancient record that recounts the discovery of fire by the green-skinned, frog-like race that descended from the moon to the land of Mnar, along with their gray stone city of Ib and a large lake of misty green water. Ib was destroyed by the human inhabitants of the city of Sarnath, built on the shore of the same lake not far from Ib.

  (The Doom That Came to Sarnath)

  An ancient Egyptian text that describes strange forms of life that existed when the world was young-forms that men would not consider living things.

  (The Green Meadow)

  A book by Justin Geoffrey, whom Lovecraft described as "the notorious Baudelairean poet." After paying a visit to the Black Stone of Hungry in 1926, he died screaming in a madhouse. This book and its author were created by Robert E. Howard for his 1931 story The Black Stone, and were mentioned by Lovecraft only once.

  (The Thing on the Doorstep)

  Also known as the Pnakotic Fragments, this document predates the human race. A copy of it was kept in the ancient city of Pnakotus, in what is now the Australian outback, where the Great Race of Yith that built the city fifty million years ago housed its main library. The first five chapters of the work detail the history of the Great Race. It is illustrated, and at least eight fragments exist in modern times, because the eighth is said to contain a long ritual. Tsathoggua is mentioned in the text. The work passed through ancient Lomar and Hyperborea, and various scribes added to its contents, until it fell into the hands of sinister human cults that worship and collaborate with the Great Race even to this day. The last copy of the work in the dreamlands resides at the city of Ulthar.

  A drawing in the part of the manuscripts that is too ancient for anyone to read depicts how the Other Gods set their seal upon the granite of the Earth in antediluvian times. They did so again at the request of the gods of Earth, who were angered by men living on a slope of the mountain Ngranek in the dreamlands. The Other Gods blasted it with fire, and now the mountain overlooks only "sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava ."

  (The Shadow Out of Time; The Other Gods; The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Whisperer in Darkness; The Diary of Alonzo Typer; Out of the Aeons)

  A Latin work on cryptography by the Abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516). The Polygraphiae, published in 1508, became the most popular work on ciphers and codes used during the Renaissance, and even down to modern times. The Cipher Manuscript that served as the basis for the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888 was composed using a system described in the Polygraphiae. Trithemius also wrote a Latin work titled Steganographia that was more obscure during the Renaissance than his Polygraphiae, because it was thought to be a grimoire for the summoning of spirits by magic, but it has since been demonstrated to be another work on cryptography disguised as a grimoire (although, in point of fact, it might equally be regarded as a grimoire disguised as a cryptographic text-Trithemius was the most accomplished magician of his age). Lovecraft would have done better to have referred to the much more mysterious Steganographia, rather than to the prosaic Polygraphiae, but he had almost no knowledge of these texts or their contents.

  (The Dunwich Horror)

  An Arabic book title designed to conceal the identity of a copy of Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon, which resided in the library of the necromancer Joseph Curwen. This was probably a Latin copy of the Necronomicon with a false cover, although it is tempting to wonder if the false Arabic title concealed an Arabic copy.

  Qanoon-e-Islam is an actual book in English published in London in 1832, the full title of which is: Qanoon-e-Islam, or the Customs of the Moosulmans of India; comprising a full and exact account of their various rites and ceremonies, from the moment of birth till the hour of death. It was written by Jaffur Shurreef, a Muslim of India, and translated into English by G. A. Herklots.

  (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  A Latin work by Pigafetta, based on the notes of the sailor Lopex. A copy described in The Picture in the House resided in an ancient farmhouse on a rural road not far outside Arkham. It was published at Frankfurt in 1598. Bound in leather, it had metal fittings and was illustrated with more than a dozen plate engravings by the brothers De Bry. The book was purchased in London by the Salem merchantman Ebenezer Holt, and traded to the unnaturally long-lived owner of the farmhouse in 1768. A lightning strike upon the house in November, 1896, destroyed this copy of the work along with its owner.

  This obscure book actually exists. According to S. T. Joshi, who wrote an essay on the topic titled "Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo" (Price, pp. 24-9), Lovecraft derived his references from the 1863 work Evidence As To Man's Place In Nature by Thomas M. Huxley. Figure 1 in Huxley's work shows the engraving by the De Bry br
others of palm trees from Regnum Congo, which is described in Lovecraft's story. The author of Regnum Congo was the Venetian writer Antonio Pigafetta (1491-1535). Pigafetta sailed with Magellan around the world, and wrote about his experiences in Relazione del Primo Viaggio Intorno Al Mondo (Report on the First Voyage Around the World), parts of which were published at Paris in 1525.

  The full Latin title of the book referred to by Lovecraft is: REGNUM CONGO: hoc est VERA DESCRIPTIO REGNI AFRICANI QUOD TAM AB INCOLIS QUAM LUSITANIS CONGUS APPELLATUR, per Philippum Pigafettam, olim ex Edoardo Lopez acroamatis lingua Italica excerpta, num Latio sermon donata ab August. Cassiod. Reinio. Iconibus et imaginibus rerum memorabilium quasi vivis, opera et industriaJoan. Theodori etJoan. Israelis de Bry, fratrum exornata. Francofurti, MDXCVIII.

  (The Picture in the House)

  R'lyehian is the language of the drowned city of R'lyeh, where dead Cthulhu waits dreaming in his stone house for the stars to once again come right in the heavens. The writing on the parchment that accompanied the silver key inherited by Randolph Carter was in this language, which the spawn of Cthulhu brought to Earth from space "countless ages ago." The text concerned the manner of traveling through time and space via dimensional portals while remaining in the body.

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

  This arcane text is mentioned by the dream explorer Randolph Carter as of little use to his purposes. Barzai the Wise, resident of the dream city of Ulthar, knew about them.

  (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Other Gods)

  A text consulted by the wizard Zkauba on the planet Yaddith, concerning what to do about persistent and troubling dreams of an alien being named Randolph Carter on a distant planet of the future known as Earth. The Tablets of Nhing may have had an oracular function similar to the texts of the I-Ching.

  (Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

  An alchemical tract by Roger Bacon written in Latin, that was published at Frankfurt in 1620. The same work had been published earlier in 1603 at Frankfurt under the title Rogeri Baconis angli de arte chymiae scripta (Thorndike, vol. 2, p. 680). The 1620 edition was in Joseph Curwen's library at Providence in 1746.

  (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  Traicte des chiffres, ou secretes manieres d'escrire by Blaise de Vigenere was published at Paris in 1586. He is best known for his innovation of the Vigenere Table, a method of letter substitution that uses a square of twenty-six alphabets, each written horizontally one above the other, each corresponding to a single letter. The sequence of letters in each row of the table is shifted one letter from the row above. Words could be keyed into this table in various ways to produce ciphers. There is an obvious correspondence between de Vigenere's Table and the Tables of Commutations (Right Table and Averse Table) of the Jewish Kabbalah. These tables were published in bk. 3, ch. 25 of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Henry Cornelius Agrippa (see Agrippa, pp. 541-2).

  (The Dunwich Horror)

  This is one of the essential texts of medieval alchemy. It was present among the books in the library of the necromancer Joseph Curwen, residing at Providence in 1746.

  A. E. Waite translated it from Latin into English in 1896, but Curwen would have owned the Latin text. Waite remarked in his preface: "The Turba Philosophorum is indisputably the most ancient extant treatise on Alchemy in the Latin tongue, but it was not, so far as can be ascertained, originally written in Latin; the compiler or editor, for in many respects it can scarcely be regarded as an original composition, wrote either in Hebrew or Arabic" (Waite, p. i).

  (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  This magazine of supernatural horror published the story The Attic Window in its January, 1922, issue. The story was written by the narrator of Lovecraft's The Unnamable, Randolph Carter, who is a thinly veiled representation of Lovecraft himself.

  (The Unnamable)

  A book of natural history by Morryster, which from its spelling may perhaps be dated to the sixteenth century. Lovecraft derived his passing reference to this apocryphal work in his story The Festival from an 1891 story by Ambrose Bierce titled The Man and the Snake, in which Bierce quoted a passage from Morryster. Morryster is also an entry in the unabridged edition of Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary (though not in the more popular abridged 1911 edition), where Bierce has written "Morryster, see Tree." Under the entry for "Tree" Bierce quoted a passage from Trauvells in ye Easte by Morryster. These works by Morryster do not exist.

  (The Festival)

  A book by the English woman Margaret A. Murray, published in 1925, that sets forth the startling claim that the men and women executed for the practice of witchcraft in Europe during the witch-persecution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not deluded individuals, but were members of the remnant of a secret pagan religion that worshipped Diana, goddess of the Moon. At first greeted with great acclaim, the book quickly fell out of favor, and suffered intense criticism that destroyed its author's reputation as a serious scholar and anthropologist-undeservedly, as the book is well researched, despite its daring and unconventional conclusions.

  Concerning Murray's book, the protagonist of Lovecraft's story The Horror at Red Hook, police detective Thomas F. Malone, observed:

  He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.

  There is no presumption in Murray's book that the pagan cult of witches surviving in rural parts of Europe had its origins in "Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults" as Lovecraft suggested. Murray believed that the Dianic cult, as she called it, was the "ancient religion of Western Europe" (Murray, p. 12). This speculation was added by Lovecraft himself-that not only is witchcraft the survival of a pagan cult of goddess worship, but that its roots go back further than ancient Rome, and are more remote than the Mediterranean Basin.

  Lovecraft identified the cultists as Yezidis, devil worshippers of Kurdistan, and the goddess of this fertility cult as Lilith, demon-queen of Hell who has her roots in ancient Sumer. To further bridge the gap between Lilith and the witches, he quoted an ancient Greek incantation to the goddess of witches, Hecate, but omitted the name of the goddess from the incantation so that it would apply to Lilith. This connection between Hecate and Lilith is not so far-fetched as might first appear. The two have many qualities in common. Both are associated with the Moon, the dead, woman's mysteries, and with the sacrifice of children. Hecate and Lilith were explicitly linked by Lovecraft in his description of a vast cavern beneath the earth:

  "Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater."

  (The Horror at Red Hook)

  An opium dreamer found this document in the dream city of Zakarion. It is filled with the thoughts of the dream-sages of that city, who have never been born into mortal bodies in the waking world. They wrote much about the world of dreams, including lore concerning a golden valley with a sacred grove and temples, and a high, vine-covered stone wall having a small bronze gate. Beyond the gate, some of the dream-sages wrote there were wonders, but others warned that through it lay only disappointment.

  (Ex Oblivione)

  The Zobnarian Fathers are the authors of wisdom texts that were held in the city of Olathoe, in the lost northern land of Lomar.

  (Polaris)

  This mammoth collection of Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah is the central work
of the Kabbalah, a Jewish system of mysticism and magic. Sefer ha-Zohar was written in Spain between the years 1280-6 by Moses de Leon (died 1305). Lovecraft mentions it in passing with other esoteric books in the library of Joseph Curwen, calling it "the cabbalistic Zohar."

  (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

  The Key to the Ninth Gate

  Sun passes through Leo: August 10-September 16

  Constellation is represented by a male lion.

  Right Pillar: Regulus (Greek: Prince, or Little King). Also know as Cor Leonis (Latin: Heart of the Lion). Arabic name: galb al-'asad-Heart of the Lion. Astronomical designation: Alpha Leonis. Astrological nature: Jupiter-Mars. Influence: generosity, nobility, leadership. Magnitude: 1.3-multiple star system. Color: white. Sun crosses: August 22. Location: the breast of the lion. Comments: this is one of the four Persian royal stars, and was associated by the ancient Persians with the summer solstice.

  Left Pillar: Zosma (Greek: The Girdle). Arabic name: at thahr al-'asad-The Lion's Back. Astronomical designation: Beta Leonis. Astrological nature: Saturn-Venus. Influence: melancholy, regret, despair, disgrace, danger from poison. Magnitude: 2.6-multiple star system. Color: white. Sun crosses: September 9. Location: the rump of the lion. Comments: The Saturn influence brings out the worst qualities of Venus.