Lovecraft's Necronomicon, Dr. John Dee, and the Picatrix - pontos fathom podcast ep02
Welcome to pontos fathom press second episode of the pontos fathom podcast - EP02 Lovecraft's Necronomicon, Dr. John Dee, and the Picatrix. What is the nature of fictitious books of black magic? How do they seem to attract the very things they purport to hold within their volume? In this episode we explore Lovecraft's Necronomicon, Borges Library of Babel and Tlon Uqbar, Dr. John Dee Angelic Script, and The Astrological Picatrix. Thanks for watching and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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welcome back everyone to pontus fathompress this is podcast number two lovecraft's necronomicon the pikatrix and dr john d i want to jump into the necronomicon sort of as a at first as an imaginary test text but then as sort of as it gets positioned in the mythos how it kind of overlaps with our topic last week which was notebooks and how there's that overlapped gray area between dreams and imagination and even remote viewing and and how lovecraft in projecting this book sort of has created a monster here like this is really it's so it's so iconic and it's it's it's such a meme let's call it even of the evil book right i mean we have it in evil dead and but at the same time there is some kind of weird pseudo scholarship involved in it and the fact that he calls out real figures through his imagination kind of lends itself towards towards researching those connections right in in in a way it's kind of like what moldenhauer's genealogy of cthulhu does by taking a text to cat food journals as a notebook and then to begin to posit lovecraft's position with historical with gnosticism and with religion so it's a similar track to that maybe to start out with.
before we go into the reading of lovecraft's necronomicon and then talking about dr dee and and the pikatricks i just wanted to share this concepts from borges the first one was this idea of the lab library of babel right as we know the tower of babel from the bible it's where the confusion of language was the punishment after a king is trying to build a tower to heaven and the work could not be permitted so to speak so in the in the library of babel borjes who's great at this type of stuff posits you know all of these details the universe which others call the library is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries with vast air shafts between surrounded by very low railings in any of the hexagons one can see interminably the upper and lower falls fault floors the distribution of the galleries is invariable and he goes on to show he describes the books the chambers that the books the library is unending i have traveled in my youth to libraries and have wandered and searched for a book perhaps the catalog of catalogs now that my eyes can hardly decipher what i write once i am dead there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing i say that the library is unending the library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons so then he kind of keeps going into the shape of the library the the books of the library the languages of the library and again he starts to get into undecipherable characters now this is i really want to talk about this that'll be the topic of our next of our next week's podcast secret undecipherable characters and i'll get back to that at the end i'll give you the preview of that but the other the other borja's classic is clone ukbar and orbus tertius i won't read from it but this is a great story in which there's an encyclopedia set and the author finds this encyclopedia set and you and if you remember the encyclopedia sets used to have the alphabetical range between the volumes so this you know volume 10 would would start with a certain thing and then and then he finds that there is a a passage that's between the two alphabet volumes so it draws his curiosity in and there ends up being all these entries in the in the book about a land that nobody knows about and yet there's all these details in that and then he starts to research it and it's one of those things that the more you start to research into this odd occurrence the more you find that there's been some is is reality shifted is this book from some other dimension and he throws doubt on all that we've known right so this kind of ties back to our topic last week by having an a mysterious book one starts to invoke something right there's an invocation there.
so maybe we can start with lovecraft's necronomicon it's a short there's a few references to the necronomicon throughout lovecraft's work but i wanted to i wanted to just take a look at the actual text of the necronomicon there is a great book i'll talk about that later because it's footnoted in the introduction to the pikatrix so let's just go through this short reading of the necronomicon the history of the necronomicon this story is often considered an essay but its content is entirely fictitious and it in indeed it was meant to be a hoax it can be regarded as a work of fiction lovecraft evidently wrote it in 1927 as he told clark ashton smith that he was drawing up some data on the celebrated and unmentionable necronomicon of the mad arab abdul al-hazrad now i've actually got ordered up the lovecraft letters on the way so those will be interesting to dig into i've never read his letters other than how i've seen them referenced in the in other in other books lovecraft added in one sentence referring to dr john d's translation of the necronomicon so this is interesting right he calls out dr john d by name okay original title al-azif in his last years al-hazrah dwelt in damascus where the necronomicon el azip was written and of his final death or just disappearance in 87 38 and then he goes on to say in 8950 the azif which had gained considerable those surreptitious circulation among the philosophers of the age was secretly translated into greek by theodorus philitus of constantinople under the title necronomicon for a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch michael after this it was only heard of furtively but in 1228 ola warmus made a latin translation in the late middle ages and the latin text was printed twice once in the 15th century black letter evidently in germany and once in the 17th century so again like borges he kind of pads all these details this is like that trick of writers even from poe and edgar rice burroughs right you have a or bram stoker's dracula right you're doing this writing which is you you you add all these details to make it seem like something something right and at the same time he comes in here and says wormies this time of periphery of the note the greek copy was printed in italy between 1500 and and has been reported since the burning of a certain salem man's library in 1692. now it existed in salem where there's witch trials so it's all this kind of inferences right and then here we are an english translation made by dr d was never printed and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript of the latin text now existing one fifteenth century is known to be the british museum under lock and key and while the other is in the bibliotheque nationale at paris and this is a great weird typo here a 17th century edition the widener library at harvard and at the library of miskatonic university in arkham and of course at the library of buenos aires numerous other copies exist secretly still a vega rumor credits the preservation of the 16th century greek text in the salem family of pikmin but if this is so preserved it vanished with the artist r.u pikmin who disappeared in 1926. the book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries and by all branches of organized ecclesiasticism reading leads to terrible consequences it was from rumors of this book of which relatively few of the general public know that r.w chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel the king in yellow so this is great also where lovecraft is calling out his fan fanboy status of chambers king and yellow and and and again another book a play that is non-existent right in the book in the in the in the king in yellow we have the idea of a play that is non-existent camilla you should ask stranger indeed casilda time it's indeed it's time we have all laid aside our disguise but you stranger i near wear no mask camilla terrified a side to casilda no mask no mask the king in yellow act one scene two wow okay so the call out from hp lovecraft does a shout out to rw chambers and the king in yellow here and but he also interestingly he calls out dr d right so now dr d we know is quite a character dr d was a man of many talents he was a true renaissance man in the court of queen elizabeth not only was he entrusted with political and military type secrets but he was also an astrologer alchemist and a scriber he had a black stone that he would scry and read from that and that's where dee developed the angelic script right so the the story goes that dr d and edward kelly would look into this polished obsidian stone and as they scribed into the stone they would ask the angels they had invocations this book has some of those invocations like this is a notebook also this john this one of these books here is source books of inaki and magic by joseph peterson you can see that john d would basically ask the angels as he scribed the mirror please show me some something and that's how he slowly pieced together these images and when the images came he would then translate the images into letters and that's how he pieced together inaki and script so it's it's quite it's quite an odd task for a person to be doing right and dr g was a very smart man so not sure what he was up to but here you see some of these these texts and again i'm going to talk about secret languages revealed in texts or in visions because jung even has an incident and we're going to talk about that that next week in the black books there's an incident where jung has a dream of some strange calligraphy so we'll go there next week but so interestingly enough though the there was a famous book in dr john d's time that was an astrological book and that was known as the pikatrix and here is a great hardcover edition by john michael greer and christopher warnock this is a an addition of the first an early astrological work dating back to the same times the 1200s even right so and and this is the book from which most most modern astrology kind of has its roots roots in from the pika tricks which is a real throwback to a time that it's very different than astrology that we think of because it was all talismanic it's a talismanic magic in which when one wants to do something or have some effect there's a number of different figures colors of garments sacrifices things to burn objects to put together to build this talisman and if one does it when the stars are right and this is interesting right when the stars are right meaning during a certain transition of planets a certain transit of planets during a certain sign the if the talisman can be made so the the pikatrix magic was all about telesmanic magic and it was tied to when the stars were right and i think that's a great lovecraft crossover now did lovecraft know about this not sure i mean i i can't wait to go into lovecraft's letters but i'll have to do some research on into that but one thing i know is i do know that lovecraft thought astrology was like a humbug or something like this right he just thought it was nonsense as a scientific thinker but i think unbeknownst to lovecraft could it be that he was projecting something did he read about it in a library i mean was it just something that he used as a device interesting right the introduction to this pkretrix has a small two-page section here called the pikatrix and the necronomicon that i'd like to read a little bit from because i think this is interesting so so again is there some possibility that it's the pika tricks that's the book that was the necronomicon it could be i am i want to go through what the authors of this book have to say about it so the importance of the wizard as a professional figure itself reflected early in literature and folklore in such figures as merlin the mage who played a merlin-esque role as a magical instructor to alexander the gate great oh sorry neck and nebus who played a merlin-esque role as a magical instructor to alexander the great in the medieval alexander legends the concept of the magical book containing all the occult secrets of the universe similarly similarly found its way into the popular culture of the age just as wizards passed in turn from medieval legend to modern fantasy fiction in turn the archetype of the secret book of occult lore found a new home in modern literature and produced a remarkable parallel to pika tricks itself in the 1923 short story the hound pulp author h.p lovecraft first mentioned an imaginary tome of darkest magic titled the necronomicon written by the equally fictional arab wizard abdul al-hazrad the necronomicon appeared frequently in lovecraft's story from then on along with equally imaginary tomes such as the panotic manuscripts and evolved at the core text of an imaginary religion of evil the cult of the great older ones terrifying beings from deep space who had ruled the earth in the prehistoric past and waited until the stars were right again to resume their dominion by 1927 the necronomicon had become central enough to his cthulhu mythos stories that lovecraft wrote out a few pages on its supposed history to help him keep his facts straight and this is the part that we just read i won't have to go into all of this it does says he that theodorus philadelphus in 950 we titled that necronomicon lovecraft interpreted this as an image of the laws of death though this is not quite grammatical greek and a more accurate transition translation may be concerning the laws of death or perhaps the concerning the dead laws or i heard it pronounced the book of dead names before but we'll see so it's sort of a necromancy text if it's about dead names the laws of the dead could be necromantic also right so in 1228 the danish scholar olanus warmus supposedly translated into latin and the famous british occultist john d elizabeth first court astrologer made a manuscript english translation some centuries later from that point on the history discusses how different copies got to their places where they turned up in lovecraft's stories which we read in the when we read that but the last years of his life lovecraft was having to fend off requests by fans and fellow writers that he find the time to manufacture the necronomicon his work fell into obscurity for several decades after his death but it found a newly appreciative audience in the 1970s one necronomicon attempt we'll call it written by a group of new york occultists under the pen name simon appeared as a mass-market paper black in early 1980 and became wildly popular among those members of the occult community unfortunately no small number so so again like the necronomicon pikatrix was also first written in arabic translated into latin in the 13th century both books contained detailed instructions for rituals meant to call down unhuman powers from what we would now call outer space including malefic magical workings of terrific power perhaps this is great so so yeah the book that i was talking about earlier is daniel harn and john wisdom announces the necronomicon file i've had this book before and i it's it's it moved on i am getting a new copy of it because i think this will be a great book to study if you guys aren't familiar with this the necronomicon files by daniel harms is a great collection of every reference of the necronomicon it goes a bit into the occult side of things but then it also goes into the pop culture side of things so again like the references to evil dead or animes and all kinds of usage that necronomicon shows up in video games so you start to see how this one projection of lovecraft of a secret book really takes control of the imagination and then it starts to spawn again what is being spawned right what is this attention you know i think it's quite fascinating it says here finally they point out that love's craft knowledge of the occult was extremely limited and there is no evidence that he drew on anything but a few popular occult expose and constructing the dire rituals of his imaginary cult perhaps the safest generalization is that if pika tricks did not exist some would have had to invent it and this is exactly what lovecraft seems to have done okay so that's just a little note on pikatrix inside as perhaps a candidate for inspiring the necronomicon and maybe we'll wrap up with the idea of well what is what are we invoking here so i think one way to think about this is whenever we have a book that we can't know the limits of again back to borges he's got a great map the map that's the same size of the world and when you go to the edges the work hasn't been finished yet or it's starting to fade just where the ruins are of the ancient civilization so this idea that as as we point out something that does not exist like a a book of evil spells that raises demonic things suddenly it becomes an attractor to those kinds of things right and then suddenly we give this thing a name and again when i you know from our last week's lecture we talked about how notebooks of the imagination are very similar to notebooks of dreams or the visions of the religious visions right so there's a weird overlap again between imagination hallucination miracle and dream so what i'm trying to infer here a bit is when lovecraft dreams the necronomicon or imagines the necronomicon the one word i'd left out here is remote view it is there something that he was looking to and it could be a simple psychological question that he had heard about the pikatrix and some of the dates line up with this and dr john diaz is a scoundrel you know in history but again angelic script strange script in the pikatrix and and i think the topic of next week's lecture will be about secret scripts because even jung in his black books he had a dream of strange letters look at tolkien tolkien had created the elvish language right the pikatrix has symbols whether they're astrological or alchemical symbols jung talks about alchemical symbols i'm pointing here to young young talks about alchemical signals john d infers from his scribed vision in the show stone enochian script right and then even in psychoanalysis of relia there's a necronomicon fragment right the necronomicon fragment then those fragments are transliterated in the kind of catulu futagen kind of script but then their an attempt at translating them happens and this is where you start to say okay wait a minute you're translating the gibberish now this is we're really pushing something is at work here when we start to look at this kind of imagination this kind of projection right in in jung it was it was a dream of some kind of hieroglyphs right in john d it was a vision in scrying a stone lovecraft it was an act of imagination to come up with this text and with the pika tricks oops sorry with the pika tricks it was part of a talismanic ceremony that was linked to astrology and and alchemy so what do you guys think something interesting here with necronomicon the pikatrix dr john d let me have a co leave me a comment below if you're interested in anything we've talked about here leave a comment below if you like what we're doing check out the links below for my patreon that's one way to support us the other way to support us is the links for the psychoanalysis of irelia and genealogy of cthulhu on sale at an online book store near you maybe amazon can pick those up and support us looking forward to hearing from everyone in the comments and let's meet next week to talk about strange scripts that are transmitted through the imagination visions or some kind of initiation thanks a lot everyone and talk to you
soon take care bye bye
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