Necronomicon

Science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp (who published a biography of Lovecraft in 1975) is said to have acquired an Arabic manuscript from Baghdad titled Al Azif. The British occultist Robert Turner, after researching in the British Museum Library, claimed that the Alkindi work was known to the magician John Dee (1527-1608), who had a copy in cipher manuscript. This book, known as Liber Logaeth, was recently examined by computer analysis, and so The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names has now been researched, edited, and published (Neville Spearman, U.K., 1978).

No doubt other recensions of The Necronomicon will be discovered in the course of time. It might seem inevitable that once The Necronomicon appeared, a group accepting it as a valid magic text would soon follow. In the 1980s there surfaced on campuses across the United States flyers from what was termed "the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu," drawing upon Lovecraft in a parody of the Evangelical Christian organization, Campus Crusade for Christ. While the organization appears to be based in satire, it nevertheless demonstrates the comprehensive nature of the mythology created by Lovecraft and the seriousness with which some of his readers have taken the idea of the old gods enunciated therein.