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Ah, THAT Necronomicon - which is, of course, a fake. Justin Woodman has collected Necronomicons and has about 12 entirely different ones, but face it, Lovecraft just made it up.

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"Everything is false but there are degrees of falsity"

FraterUraeus wrote: › The author asks Lovecraft many important questions, one of which is the authenticity of the Necronomicon, which Lovecraft quickly, yet in some way sadly, tells the author that the book, its author, and its contents are purely fictional creations.

the_real_simon_iff wrote: ›
93!

Why should I believe what Lovecraft wrote to some author? As you should know from Applied Conspiracy Theory the denial of certain facts can be regarded as proof of authenticity of those facts.

FraterUraeus wrote: › 93, All!

As a Lovecraft fan myself, I must comment on this. For anyone who wants to continue believing that the Necronomicon, Cthulhu, etc. are in fact real in the sense that their reality stretches beyond the pages of a Lovecraft story, never ever read a book called 'Lovecraft At Last.' It is a collection of correspondences between the author of the book and Lovecraft in the late '30's. The author asks Lovecraft many important questions, one of which is the authenticity of the Necronomicon, which Lovecraft quickly, yet in some way sadly, tells the author that the book, its author, and its contents are purely fictional creations. Its nice to believe in fairy tales until you attempt to incorporate them into your reality, thats when things get dangerous and they start bringing out the straightjackets! Or...could that be...Cthulhu driving you to dwell in madness?!?!

93,

Fra. U.

Boris wrote: › The goetia is just as fake. Doesn`t mean it doesn`t work.

FraterUraeus wrote: ›

93,

Oh my! The only difference is the Goetia's calling forth of real spirits and the very real results that arise from doing this. The most one might get from a Cthulhu ritual is a head rush from getting too psyched up, and bragging rights for having actually performed the *cough* "ritual." Is it wrong to be partial to reality as opposed to fantasy? And let me say that I'm truly sorry, everyone. I don' t mean to sound so abrasive about this. I just wouldn't want anyone to (in my own pointless 2 cent opinion) waste their time with rituals created only to earn some author a quick buck from unsuspecting Lovecraftians.

93, All,

Fra. U.

Boris wrote: › I have a hard time seeing what makes the spirits of the goetia more real than the spirits of lovecrafts mythos. According to my experience and understanding the effect lies in the ritual and how it is performed, not in such a - frankly - ludicrous idea as the level of "reality" in the spirits one deals with.

Boris wrote: › Ofcourse if cthulu-workings simply doesn`t work as you claim they don`t then you have a point - I wouldn`t know since I`ve never performed one or cared about it, but I doubt from your tone that you have either. But dismissing a modern grimoire such as Simons Necronomicon on the basis that it wasn`t written by the mad arab Lovecraft wrote about is just as stupid as dismissing Goetia since it wasn`t really written by Solomon.

FraterUraeus wrote: › Perhaps the Committee On Catagorizing Books knows something you don't, as every copy of the Necronomicon I've seen has ended up in the Horror-Fiction section instead of New Age, etc, etc.

Uni_Verse wrote: › Something I like to keep in mind, is that when you write characters seem to take on a life of their own. Almost as if you are not writing about, but writing for the character, becoming a conduit of its essence.

Uni_Verse wrote: › Lovecraft was channeling something. Perhaps he wrote it off as just his 'imagination' because such creatures are frightening to behold. A defense mechanism, as they had become all too real for him.

Kenneth Grant wrote: › ... Like other accounts of unclassifiable phases of earth's history the Cthulhu Cult epitomises the subconsciousness and the forces outside terrestrial awareness. It may be said in passing that true creativity can occur only when these forces are invoked to flood with their light the magical network of the mind. For purposes of explanation the mind may be envisaged as divided into three rooms, the edifice which contains them being the only real or permanent principle. These rooms are:

1) Subconsciousness, the dream state;
2) Mundane consciousness, the waking state;
3) Transcendental consciousness, veiled in the non-initiate by the state of sleep.

The compartments are further conceived as being connected with the house that contains them, by a series of conduits or tunnels. The house represents trans-terrestrial consciousness. The invoked forces - Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, etc - are then understood, not as malignant or destructive entities but as the dynamic energies of consciousness, the functions of which are to blast away the delusion of separate existence (the rooms in our illustration).

scrivener11 wrote: › Take for instance the creation of a thought-form. It is not real until it is given form by our own minds, therefore we have to interact with it to make it real. Something Crowley said in Eight Lectures on Yoga comes to mind. " All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind. "

Kenneth Grant wrote: › Crowley remarked, in The Book of Thoth, that constant meditation on the symbolic contraries embodied in the imagery of the Atus will eventually engender a new faculty of consciousness that enables the individual mind to apprehend that which is beyond human logic and understanding. But it is necessary constantly to penetrate these spaces, first mentally and then etherially, before one can grasp the extremely tenuous and evanescent wraiths of the realities they contain. These considerations apply even more emphatically to the O.T.O.-Horus-Maat-Ipsos network, wherein the candidates for initiation enter totally new spaces. Not spaces which have, until that time, been sealed off or closed like long disused galleries thick with the dust of aeons, but spaces that do not exist before the Will formulates a resolve to enter them and to align the mind and the heart with the 93 Current.

Kenneth Grant wrote: › Crowley remarked, in The Book of Thoth, that constant meditation on the symbolic contraries embodied in the imagery of the Atus will eventually engender a new faculty of consciousness that enables the individual mind to apprehend that which is beyond human logic and understanding. But it is necessary constantly to penetrate these spaces, first mentally and then etherially, before one can grasp the extremely tenuous and evanescent wraiths of the realities they contain. These considerations apply even more emphatically to the O.T.O.-Horus-Maat-Ipsos network, wherein the candidates for initiation enter totally new spaces. Not spaces which have, until that time, been sealed off or closed like long disused galleries thick with the dust of aeons, but spaces that do not exist before the Will formulates a resolve to enter them and to align the mind and the heart with the 93 Current.

OKontrair wrote: › Did you notice a page reference that might help me trace the quotation?

przm28 wrote: › "In relation to the existing relation between Lovecraft's and Crowley's cults, we must point out an erroneous claim of Kenneth Grant (see The Magickal Revival). He states that Lovecraft did not know the works of Crowley; actually, Lovecraft's letters show exactly the opposite . . ."

Kenneth Grant wrote: › Lovecraft was unaquainted both with the name and the work of Crowley, yet some of his fantasies reflect, however distortedly, the salient themes of Crolwey's Cult.

Kenneth Grant wrote: › Here I should like to correct an error that crept into my book Aleister Crowley & the Hidden God. I there wrote that nowhere in Lovecraft's published or unpublished writings, including his numerous letters, did he give any sign either of having read or having heard of Aleister Crowley. At the time of writing the Hidden God, two volumes only of Lovecraft's Selected Letters had been published. In volume V., p. 120 there does occur a passing reference to Aleister Crowley . . . I had not at the time noticed the fact that Crowley is mentioned in a novel entitled The Dark Chember, by Leonard Cline, upon which Lovecraft comments in his article On the Supernatural in Literature.

FraterUraeus wrote: ›

93,

Oh my! The only difference is the Goetia's calling forth of real spirits
93, All,

Fra. U.