Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 5th August 2010: “The Cephalopod” (essay).

“There is no official writing assignment today, though you may report your opinion on any aspect of this essay [ on ] the Cephalopod from H+ Magazine.”

TASK TEN: 5th August 2010.

It is composed of ever-winding labyrinthine strands. It has a narrowly-focussed eye. It sometimes has a hard cover about its body. It is filled with black ink. Are we talking about the Cephalopoda, or a book? There seem to be certain odd parallels between the two. Possibly Lovecraft never noticed these parallels. But we know that he loved one and loathed the other…

“I can not tolerate seafood in any form, […] The very sight and smell of it nauseate me” — letter by Lovecraft.

“Rhode Island is almost as famous as Louisiana for sea-food. But all this doesn’t mean anything to my palate. From earliest infancy every sort of fish, mollusc, or crustacean has been like an emetic to me.” — letter by Lovecraft.

In what context did he come to loathe the Cephalopoda? New England was of course deeply connected with the the life of the sea, and one might guess at an early unfortunate childhood experience. Perhaps a visit to a harbour fish-market or fish-shop, in which the denizens were all-too fresh.

Did these sea creatures then invade the dreams of the young Lovecraft, and in larger versions? There would have been ample reason for this to happen, since New England abounds in myths and even eyewitness reports of Continue reading →

Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 4th August 2010: “The Necronomicon”.

“Your assignment today is […] to discuss some aspect of The Necronomicon, either in Lovecraft’s writing or in one of its other guises.”

TASK NINE: 4th August 2010.

A note on the origin and derivation of ‘Necronomicon’.

The origin of the name Necronomicon appears to have come to Lovecraft in a dream. Or so he wrote — but I suspect that Lovecraft may sometimes have intended certain parts of his letters to be read with a humorous eye, or expected that an off-handedly ironic manner would be inferred by the reader. He may even have used the vague “oh, it came to me in a dream” phrase as a convenient gentlemanly excuse to avoid writing an even longer letter than otherwise to yet another enquiring young fan — a fan who would not have appreciated a complex explication of the Latin or Greek origins of certain words. Or he may simply have forgotten how a certain fictional element first came into being.

George Wetzel suggests an inspiration in the title of the Astronomicon, a five-book astrological/astronomical poem by the Roman poet Manilius, whom Lovecraft quoted in an astronomy column of 1915.

This may well be the case. Alternatively his grandfather’s library may have contained the Poeticon Astronomicon, a star-atlas and anthology of Ancient Greek myths about the stars and constellations — a book possibly originally compiled by the writer Julius Hyginus in about the 1st century AD.

Or one could simply suggest that Lovecraft was working on a scrap of paper to get a suitable Latin name for an invented book of spells. He combined “Necromantic” (Latin: necromantia, meaning literally “dead divination”) with “icon”. He would thus have been aiming for something along the lines of “The Deathly Divination Images”. This would fit with his general elision of ‘seeing’ with ‘madness’/’death’ in his works.

But by combining the two he got “Necromanticon” — and then realised he had to remove “romantic” (Necromanticon). So he took out “mant”, and substituted “nom” (meaning in Latin ‘law/order’) from “astronomy”. Given the devotional/sculptural meaning inherent in “icon”, the Latin title of The Necronomicon would thus literally mean something like: ‘The Dead Law of Graven Images’.

In a late letter Lovecraft casually traces the — by-then-famous — name back from the Latin, to the even older ancient Greek…

“The name Necronomicon (nekros, corpse; nomos, law; eikon, image = An Image [or Picture] of the Law of the Dead) occurred to me in the course of a dream, although the etymology is perfectly sound.”

S.T. Joshi says of this derivation that Lovecraft was wrong about “icon” having a Greek root. But Joshi’s judgement appears to be based on the findings of modern linguistics. Lovecraft was right when judged by the scholarship of his own time, since the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica — used extensively by Lovecraft — clearly states that…

“The term icon comes from the Greek eikon, which means ‘image’.”

The dream explanation is not entirely at odds with the idea of Lovecraft puzzling it out on a scrap of paper. He may have got as far as “Necromanticon”, and then slept on the puzzle of how to remove the ‘romantic’ element.

Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 3rd August 2010: “Other media”.

“Your assignment today is to delineate your favourite modern writer, musician, or other artist whose work includes a true […] sense of ‘Otherness’.”

TASK EIGHT: 3rd August 2010.

Premable: I read everything worth reading in literary science-fiction and fantasy (pre-1985), plus the old Heavy Metal comics. But I no longer have the books, and my memory is hazy about all but the classics. In the last couple of years I’ve only read Charles Stross, Richard Calder, Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, and re-read Kipling and Tolkien. I’m now re-reading Lovecraft. I was never really into outright horror literature, other than Lovecraft, so I can’t really write about that side of the literary experience either.

I can suggest that Lovecraft enthusiasts might enjoy the surrealist New York poems of Lorca, written in the years 1929/30. His attitude to ‘the other’ in New York contrasts starkly with that of Lovecraft. The poems can be found in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Poet in New York. Similarly Ayn Rand’s atheist libertarian philosophy — as expressed in the monumental novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) — is certainly ‘other’ to the prevailing consensus, and still provokes irrationally visceral antagonistic responses. The novel may also interest Lovecraftians because it is deeply informed by the experience of New York in the 1930s. Rand’s writing and Continue reading →