The night opens on the hem of the abyss. The doors of hell are closed: To your risk it tries to them. To your callback something for answer to you will be aroused. This gift i leave the humanty: Here is the keys. It tries the lock; be satisfied. But listen to what Abdul Alhazred says: For first I have tried to them: and I am mad. (from the preface to the Necronomicon)
But which was the truth? Or better, which was the Lovecraft's opinion on the magical operating literature and on occultism, and how much there was of invented in the numerous «Cursed books» whose titles figure in his novellistic and in novellistic of his correspondents?
Let's Lovecraft himself tell it us, in letter sent to his correspondent Willis Conover, who asked him a series of questions on his library and on the effective consistency of the works attributed to wizards and sorcerers.
Regarding my books
For that it regards the «frightful and forbidden books» that I cited sometimes in my stories, I am forced to admit that the greater part of them is purely invented. Did not ever exsist a Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred, because I invented these names. Robert Bloch created the personage of Ludvig Prinn and his De Vermis Mysteriis, while The Book of Eibon is an invention of Clark Ashton Smith. At last, Robert E. Howard is the responsableof Friedrich von Juntz and his Unaussprechlichen Kulten...
As far as theCultes des Goules by Comte d'Erlette, is still an invention of Bloch. The name Comte d'Erlette, but, designates a real ancestor of August W. Derleth, who was a loyalist emigrated from France in 1792 and naturalized later in Germany with the German name of Derleth. His son, emigrating in Wisconsin in 1835, was the founder of the race of the Derleth in America...
As far as the serious books on the Hidden, Horroriìfic and on Supernatural, in all sincerity, they are not many. For this it si more amusing, for me to invent legendary works like the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon. That mass of superstitions and magical believes in which people believed indeed, and it came handed down till the Middle Ages from the centuries more Ancient, was nothing more than a sort of invocation and some elementary formulas in order to call the Demons and so on, some arid system of thought as much as the orthodox philosophies.
It regardes in reality of a mixture of purpooses and badly sorted oddities: magical reminescences of greco-roman mysteric cults, derivations from the Pythagorean thought (soaked of Indian sincretism), magical Egyptians believes, Babylonian, Jewish Persians, and Neoplatonism e Manicheism of the late Roman Empire.
Alexandrianan Jewish was probably most active maintaining them alive, and from here the preponderance of the Jewish kabbalah in this childish mixture. Also the Byzantines and the Arabs put some of their believes in this material, to which were last added the residual ones of the European popular superstitiones (Latin, German, Celtic) and horrorific elements of the Cults of Diana (responsible of the Sabba, of the Witches, etc.), which perpetuated the last, odd lots of the pre-Ariane cult of the worshippers of nature.
This muddle was unconnected and fragmentary, and never exsisted some particular book that supplied a diffused treatment. The so called «Watertight Volumes» by Ermete Trismegisto, are simply a serie of metaphysician remanins of Neoplatonism and of Filonc Giudaism of the third century.
Is only in modern age that we can find a serious attempt to collect and to codify the sincretic material. What the «wizards» and medieval and reinassance philosophes wrote, is manily flour of their bag mixed with the popular folklore of their times (cfr. Paracelso, etc...).
The first serious collection of ancient magical believes was that one of Franzis Barrett, The Magus, published around the 1805 and riprinted in 1896. Instead, the first material on the argument of true scientific inspiration was the work of the French eccentric Alphonse-Luis Constant (middle of the nineteenth century), who wrote under the pseudonym of Eliphas Levi.
An other compilation if this sort has been made by Arthur Edward Waite (still living, I think), who also has translated into English the books of Eliphas Levi. If you want to know how were the true «magical» rituals and the spells of the Ancient centuries and of the Middle Ages, you have to read, in particular Black Magic and History of Magic. Other material can be found in hte translations of Eliphas Levi made by Waite.
Exists also a story of the most popular Witchcraft, written by «Sax Rohmer» (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), whose title I do not remember. But, withouth doubt, you will find this material a lot disappointing. It is flat, childish, pompous and small convincing: is a mere collection of human naivetes and ingenuity of the last centuries. Whichever good writer of novellistic can invent «documents of ancient horror» that exceed in imaginative capacity whichever work on the Hidden that it is gushed from the popular fantasy.
The trash put in circulation by the teosophs, that it re-enters in the class of false treacheraus, in some points can however be interesting. It arranges some autheitic Hindu and Oriental rituals with sly stupidity drawn in banal way from wrong scientific concepts of the nineteenth century. Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria by Scott Elliot, and Esoteric Buddhism, by Sinnet, are somewhat fascinating books.
The pseudoscientific or semistupidity production, forms one class to part. Between this material (that is a good source of fantastic literature) emerge the myth of Atlantis diffused by Le Plongeon, Donnelly and Lewis Spence, the books on the «lost continent of Mu» by colonel Churchward, the mixtures by Charles Fort, etc... Some of these authors are a sort of authentic counterfeiters, while others are a sort of fanatics selfconvinced .
