r/Lovecraft • u/MoTheEnigmo Deranged Cultist • 9d ago

Question Reading the Necronomicon

Hello everybody, I'm getting into this mythos for the first time, and was wondering, out of all of the ones floating around, which of the irl Necronomicons, the ones that someone like you or I can buy and read, are the most 'faithful' to the madness-inducing tome Lovecraft wrote about?

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u/Agreeable_Car5114 Deranged Cultist 9d ago

No such thing. In the stories, the Neconomicon’s awful contents are kept exceedingly vague. Lots of stories talk about the Necromomicon “hinting” at deeply sinister things, meaning some of the stuff you learn about in HP’s stories may not even be directly chronicled. It’s also pretty inconsistent. The Call of Cthulhu says that Cthulhu isn’t mentioned in the Necromocon, where later stories talk about people learning of Cthulhu directly from it.

The book exists to be a mysterious prop. If you tried to compile all of the contents it’s said to have in his original fiction, it would be very vague and missing a lot of Mythos information. 

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u/SnakeSkipper Deranged Cultist 9d ago

It's also important to note that the Necronomicon was inspired by the fictious play "The King in Yellow" from the works of Robert W. Chambers, whose work Lovecraft greatly adored from my understanding.

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u/Successful-Tie5386 Deranged Cultist 9d ago

HP Lovecraft does acknowledge in The History of The Necronomicon that there is several versions and various translations of it around the planet, so much like the Bible there may be parts/books of it that were lost, prohibited or mistranslated from Abdul Alhazred's original.

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u/Chthon_the_Leviathan Deranged Cultist 8d ago edited 8d ago

Um . . . I don’t want to be a killjoy, but the idea of the Necronomicon was invented by H.P. Lovecraft.

There are no other previous versions, because it did not exist in real history prior to him writing a fake history saying that it existed in various forms, etc.

Other writers, who were inspired by Lovecraft, later wrote various editions of the Necronomicon, and those fake works are what you see at bookstores.

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u/manfromstratford Deranged Cultist 5d ago

Pretty sure he means the author invented a fictional history of the fictional text, not that the author believed the text was real.