The Book of the Dead

This post was jointly written by Dark Elf and Lady Caer Morganna and it is our first collaboration. We hope that you all enjoy it!

The following poem was one which I had written many, many years ago after I had read H.P. Lovecraft's, "The Necronomicon" (which I originally titled "The Mad Arab"). It is based merely on Lovecraft's story, but this is the first time I have ever published it.

The Book Of The Dead

In days of old, the story is said
of the testimony of Abl-Al Hazzred;
 The Three Seals of MASSHU
he claimed he possessed,
belonged to the prophets
or elder gods of rest

The seals were the symbols
he found brought him fear,
While sleeping one night;
unaware death was near
He saw priests in black robes
raise the seals from the ground;
While chanting, "Zi Azag!"
there was blood all around

These priests fed on death,
such as the souls slain in war
Now these were the likes
of nothing he'd ever seen before;
While running up a mountain
to escape these dark lords,
he fell to the ground;
Priests  still holding their swords

As he turned around
 to face what he'd feared,
Like ghosts in the night,
the priests disappeared!
All that remained
in the woods he could find,
were the robes which they wore
and a slim of some kind

He returned to the seals
which he'd found on the stone;
He realized at last
he was finally alone;
For the seals were the keys
which opened doors to the outside,
And once in these realms,
no one could hide

So on his death bed
he confessed what he knew,
of the rituals and summonings
of the dead he did view;
It's called the Necronomicon,
or Book of the Dead;
For it contains the testimony
of the mad man, Hazzred

~ by Lady Caer Morganna

Prehistory of the Necronomicon and Irem.

We can't know how and when it started for it is countless eons ago. We know only what ancient texts and scriptures that mention the city of Irem that it sank beneath the sand.

According to ancient historians the City of Irem or Ubar was somewhere in the Arabic peninsula just south of Egypt and was an enemy of the Pharaoh. Egypt is believed to be connected with the mythical age superpower of Atlantis. Maybe Irem was a colony of the other mythical age superpower of Lemuria. This could explain the enmity. Also, this hypothesis is made because R'lyeh should be somewhere in the Pacific being maybe the capital of Lemuria. Reports of sea monsters that live in the deep and have tentacles, the Old Deep Ones, in that mythology may refer to the known and existent giant squids.

According to the Biblical texts Ad, a descendant of Noah settled with his family in Irem. What they found there made them so evil that in many traditions the Adites are considered "demons" and not humans. Later, the prophet Eber - great-grand-father of Abraham - went to Irem to warn them that if they didn't give up their evil ways the god would destroy them. The ultimatum was ignored and Irem sank beneath the sand of the desert...


History of the Necronomicon

Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho’ surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetus 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. Patriarch Michael died under unknown and mysterious conditions and the first schism that divided the Christian Church happened at that time.

After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) a Latin translation was made later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice—once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. Spanish)—both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it.

Most probably there are English translations from the Latin text and some magickal orders have these original copies. Lovecraft must have mixed fiction and reality. I don't believe that what is sold in the open market is original. I know that it exists somewhere...

- Dark Elf

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die"

- H. P. Lovecraft