The Necronomicon is closest documented translation of the original Enochian scripture, the Necronomicon Manuscript. The Necronomicon was first translated in Damascus in 730 A. D. by Abdul Alhazred. The Necronomicon, is not, as popularly believed, a grimoire, or sorceror’s spell-book; it was conceived as a history, and so “a book of things now dead and gone”. An alternative derivation of the word Necronomicon gives as its meaning “the book of the customs of the dead”, but again this is consistent with the book’s original conception as a history, not as a work of necromancy.
But the author shared with Madame Blavatsky, who has a magpie-like tendency to gather and stitch together fact, rumor, speculation, and complete balderdash, and the result is a vast and almost unreadable array of near-nonsense which bears more than a superficial resemblance to Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine”. In times past the book has been referred to as “Al Azif”, or “The Book of the Arab”. Azif is a word the Arabs use to refer to nocturnal insects, but it is also a reference to the howling of demons.
It was written in seven volumes, and s over 900 pages long in the Latin edition. Abdul Alhazred Little is known about Abdul Alhazred. What we do know about him is largely from the small amount of biographical information in the Necronomicon itself. He traveled widely, from Alexandria to the Punjab, and was well educated. He had a flair for languages, and boasts on many occasions of his ability to read and translate manuscripts which many lesser scholars could not translate.
Just as Nostradamus used ritual magic to see into the future, so Alhazred used similar techniques (and an incense composed of olibanum, storax, ictamnus, opium and hashish) to clarify the past, and it is this, combined with a lack of references, which resulted in the Necronomicon being dismissed as largely worthless by historians. He is often referred to as “the mad Arab”, and while he was certainly eccentric by modern standards, there is no evidence to support a claim of madness. He is better compared with figures such as the Greek philosopher Proclus (410-485 A. D. , who was completely at home in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and metaphysics, but was well educated in the magical techniques of heurgy to evoke Hekate to visible appearance; he was also a founder of Egyptian and Chaldean mystery religions. It is no accident that Alhazred was very familiar with the works of Proclus. What is The Necronomicon? Alhazred appears to have had access to many sources now lost, and events which are only hinted at in the “Book of Genesis” or the alleged “Book of Enoch”, or disguised as mythology in other sources, are explored in great detail.
Alhazred may have used magical techniques to clarify the past, but he also shared with 5th. century B. C. Greek writers such as Thucydides a critical mind and a willingness to explore the meanings of mythological and sacred stories. His speculations are remarkably modern, and this may account for his current popularity: he believed that many species besides the human race had inhabited the Earth, and that much knowledge was passed to mankind in encounters with being from other “spheres”.
He shared the belief that stars are like our sun, and have their own unseen planets with their own life forms, but elaborated this belief with a good deal of metaphysical speculation in which these beings were art of a cosmic hierarchy of spiritual evolution. He was also convinced that he had contacted these “Old Ones” using magical invocations, and warned of terrible powers waiting to return to re-claim the Earth – he interpreted this belief in the light of the Apocalypse of St.
John, but reversed the ending so that the Beast triumphs after a great war in which the earth is laid waste. What are the “Old Ones”? It is clear that Alhazred elaborated upon existing traditions of the “Old Ones”, and he did not invent these traditions. According to Alhazred, the Old Ones were beings from “beyond the spheres”, presumably the spheres of the planets, and in the astrology of that period this would imply the region of the fixed stars or beyond. They were superhuman and extrahuman.
They mated with humans and created monstrous offspring. They passed forbidden knowledge to humankind. They were forever seeking a channel into our plane of existence. This is virtually identical to the Jewish tradition of the Nephilim. The word literally means “the Fallen Ones” and is derived from the Hebrew verb root naphal, to fall. The story in Genesis is only a fragment of a larger tradition, another piece of which can be found in the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
According to this source, a group of angels sent to watch over the Earth saw the daughters of men and lusted after them. Unwilling to act individually, they swore an oath and bound themselves together, and two hundred of these “Watchers” descended to earth and took themselves wives. Their wives bore giant offspring. The giants turned against nature and began to “sin against birds and beasts and reptiles and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood”.
The fallen angels taught how to make weapons of war, and jewellery, and cosmetics, and enchantments, and astrology, and other secrets. These separate legends are elaborated in later Jewish sources such as the Talmud, which make it clear that Enoch and Genesis refer to the same tradition. The great flood of Genesis was a direct response to the evil caused by humankind’s commerce with fallen angels. Arab traditions hold that the Jinn or Djinn were a race of superhuman beings which existed before the creation of humankind. The Djinn were created from fire.
Some traditions make them a lesser race than human beings, but folk- tales invariably endowed them with unlimited magical powers, and the Djinn survive to this day as the genies of the Arabian Nights and Disney’s Aladdin. Even with this very basic introduction to the Necronomicon and the Enochian Scripture and religion, it can be easily stated that this is a “true” religion and not just another cult. It has factual basis on other major religions of the world, Judaism, Islam are just two examples. The Necronomicon was at one time a bible of sorts for the Enoch and should be once again.
