THE NECRONOMICON BOOK OF THE DEAD OR ONGOING MASTERSTROKE OF DISINFORMATION!!
The NECRONOMICON, every ones heard of it, some have read it. Some say it’s an outright HOAX, others say that hoax or not--the magickal incantations, sigils, and rituals work.
I recently purchased and read the “sequel” DEAD NAMES The Dark History of the NECRONOMICON. And just like the original book the title page boldly reads simply SIMON as its author.
So who the hell is this SIMON? And why should anyway care?
It’s a matter of curiosity, but when I began researching it, I found that it was much more than that … a dark conspiracy began to unfold. But first let me tell you my first experience with the original SIMON version of the NECRONOMICON. Maybe you’d like to post your experiences with it.
A friend who was very well read and a philosophy grad student sat at his desk intensely absorbed in a book. When I asked him what was so interesting, he stiffened. His brow beetling, he said, “It’s a rare book that I’ve read about, but I thought it was just a myth.” He buried his nose back into the book and I took the hint.
At this time I’d never read any H.P. Lovecraft or much horror or speculative fiction at all. So I wasn’t familiar with the whole Lovecraftian mythos of Cthulhu and the ancient ones, and certainly had no idea what a grimoire was and never heard of Aleister Crowley or the Golden Dawn.
The Ancient One Cthulhu
(Here’s a link to a great article that shows Lovecraft’s possible sources for concocting the NECRONOMICON, which shows that Lovecraft did far more research than SIMON.
Link to web site of Lovecraft's sources like John Dee's works
The next day when I saw that he’d finished the book I pressed on.
I coaxed him into lending me the book. As he handed it to me, his voice grew dead serious, “Okay, Peter, but I’m saying right here and now that I’m not responsible for what happens to you if you read it!”
Puzzled and thinking he was putting me on, I laughed and said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He related a story of how the guy who’d loaned him the book came into a terrible bad streak of luck. His girl left him and he lost his job. Crashed his new car and ended up a wreck himself.
“A wreck?” I asked.
“The book can play with your mind …”
That night after work I locked myself in my bedroom, hopped into bed, and snuggled under the covers. Outside, a cold December wind soughed through the eaves. Intent on plowing headfirst into the book I’d poured a fresh cup of coffee that sat steaming on the bedside table. By the dim lamplight I read the NECRONOMICON’s introduction. It told of the Mad Arab of Damascus, Abdul Al hazred who summoned ancient Sumerian demons from the abyss. It warned the reader in a no-nonsense tone that reading this book had driven some into stark raving madness.
How much I read that night, I can’t really say. I only remember that for the next few days it was as though I was obsessed with the book, reading it throughout the day and late into the night. What I do remember is that oily, unclean feeling; like being somehow violated that I got from reading it. The same feeling you get when walking into some mob-connected sleazy strip joint, or the time I wondered absently into a sideshow freak attraction at a county fair. A moon-faced carnival barker, sweat dripping from his brow hawked at the lookie loos in the crowd who were fighting for a closer look at the plump fleshpots, tattooed belly dancers who slinked behind him on the stage. Once inside, I took one look at a pitifully deformed young man and my knees buckled, the lights went out, and I slumped to the floor. Overcome by the obscenity, the inhumanity.
In a word the book mad me feel sick. It conjured deeply hidden primal fears and conjured visions of haughty, taunting demons and windswept deserts where the howling wail of Jinn floated across the wasteland.
Now, years later and seeing how my friend set me up for the fall, I can sit back and laugh at my own naiveté. Lovecraft’s whole fiction behind the book was that it drove the reader mad. Writers call it the KING in YELLOW gambit, which refers to a similar story by Chambers about a book that brings madness. It’s been updated in film with The RING and other similar plots.
Okay, so back to SIMON and a writer named Peter Levenda. Ever heard of him?
Peter Levenda at book signing far left.
Lately he’s a regular on Coast to Coast and Whitley Strieber’s talk show DREAMLAND. He wrote a non-fiction called UNHOLY ALLIANCE with an intro by Norman Mailer no less, about Nazi occult history. Recently, he has series of books called SINISTER FORCES in which he claims to spill the beans on global illuminati-Freemason-Ordo Templi Orientis-black lodges that secretly control the world. Nothing new here except he hints that he has intelligence connections, and that now he’s a marked man for revealing these occult agendas.
Okay so what’s the problem?
I think Art and Whitley are taking page from Lovecraft and his contemporaries, who agreed to place the bogus NECRONOMICON is each other's seperate stories to propel the myth surrounding the book.
And here's the real kicker!!
Peter Levenda is non other than the mysterious SIMON who penned the HOAX bestseller THE NECRONOMICON. It’s a matter of being honest with your readers, about not playing the ends against the middle. Now having researched the occult and having read tons of speculative fiction and having become a novelist, I immediately saw through the recent DEAD NAMES book. Just briefly, SIMON, or Levenda, gives a thinly veiled autobiographical account of how the NECRONOMICON came to be written and for page fill, tosses in Aleister Crowley, the witch wars of the 70’s and the whole “alternative life style”(they just called it gay back then of course) S&M drug counter-culture underground scene of the 70’s in New York and even throws in the Son of Sam and the Process Church(he managed to leave out the JFK assasination but alluded to it by summarizing the Illuminatus Trilogy).
What’s disturbing to me is that a self-proclaimed whistle-blower against dark occult forces and elite power merchants, by his own admission in DEAD NAMES, has been a rather egocentric con man his whole life, and is best known for concocting one of the most successful hoaxes in publishing history.* Note by con man I mean that “SIMON” describes in detail how he/Levenda and others became phony Eastern Orthodox priests to avoid the draft.
I don’t hold any personal grudge or animosity toward Levenda. He has a creative imagination is a fairly good writer …but…
Joseph Campbell would call Peter SIMON Levenda the master TRICKSTER, the MENTOR who turns out to be the DARK SIDE. "I'm your father, Luke!" or DARK FORCE who turns out to be the MENTOR. It's mind boggling.
I found this post from a blog on the web. It goes on forever but in summary, the moderator had just done a review of Levenda’s Sinister Forces and then stumbled onto the NECRONOMICON controversy. Right in the middle of the posting, to everyone’s surprise, Levenda pops in with an ole soft shoe, lawyer-speak explanation of his role in penning the NECRONOMICON.
If nothing else, it’s an excellent example of double-speak and finesse and bat guano served with a velvet glove on fine bone china.
Maybe the NECRONOMICON does really play games with your mind; however, I kinda think it’s more a case of smoke and mirrors.
I mean, gosh, if you can’t trust Art Bell and Whitley Strieber to vet the facts and not trump and go gaga-eyed over some TRICKSTER, then, golly, Virginia … maybe there ain’t no Santa Claus!!
The moderator’s reply follows and is spoken so well and so much more eloquently than I can muster so late in the night that I'll leave you gentlemen and ladies to have at it.
Here's the address for the origional blog posts: rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/simon-says.html - 219k
A CONFLICT OF INTEREST PETER LEVENDA AND THE
NECRONOMICON:
TAKEN FROM BLOGSPOT rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/simon-says.html - 219k
1:50 AM
Mr Levenda’s Posting:
Great post! It was called to my attention by Kris Millegan of Trine Day, and I had an amusing time reading through it and the associated comments.
Much of what you quoted has been around on the Net for awhile, of course, and is flawed in many ways but how would you know that? Things that appear on the Net have the ring of truth, whether or not they are, in fact, true: that's one of the dangers of this medium.
As for the Harms and Gonce book, it is not as well-researched and documented as it appears at first glance: a lot of their theory is based on anonymous sources who were not "there" at the time and who certainly did not know the players involved. The problem with the Harms and Gonce approach is that they began with an assumption that the book was a hoax and proceeded from there. Had they kept a more open mind they might have uncovered a great deal more information and done the literary and the occult worlds a tremendous service.
The story about the monks is not invented, by the way. It was covered in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other national newspapers at the time. Had the critics bothered to investigate further, they would have been shocked to discover amazing links between the monks and a whole host of nefarious activity -- including occult activity.
I never made a secret of my own involvement; I was interviewed by Tracy Twyman on the subject and was quite forthcoming.
The Necronomicon was published in 1977. My own work, Unholy Alliance, was first published in 1994, almost 20 years later, followed by Sinister Forces in 2005. My own work focuses on history, of course, but I also make no secret of the fact that I was personally involved in some of the events, particularly concerning weird monks and bishops. It's what gives my work its immediacy, I think (that it's not the result of solitary study in dusty libraries only, but also of field work, interviews, and direct experience). My own experience of the occult has led me to a neutral point of view on it: I do not automatically condemn occultism as evil, but I also don't embrace every form of it.
As for the OTO, they never liked me anyway!
As mentioned in the post, there will be a book coming out next year concerning the history of the Simon/Avon/Necronomicon that should set much of this argument and controversy to rest. This is not Sinister Forces Book Three, the Manson Secret, but a book by another author and another publisher. When I have more definite information, I will pass it on to your readers.
In the meantime, keep reading. We are at a moment of convergence when all of these bizarre events are found to be interconnected: from assassinations and occultism, to political scandals, intelligence operations, and secret societies. Who would have thought, for instance, that both George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine would be revealed as intimates of The Nine?
Continue to connect the dots, but make sure you have solid lines to do so!
Cheers,
Peter Levenda
MODERATOR'S REPPLY
Peter,
I appreciate your bothering to reply to my comments. Most wouldn't bother.
Here's what it comes down to for me, and I think you were tap dancing around this.
You were "involved" in the publishing of the Necronomicon. I'm still looking into all this but I have to say that I think that this "document" is fake. Where, for example, might the scans of this alleged manuscript be for other authorities to examine?
If the N. is fake, and you were involved...you know it's fake. And you aren't telling us about that. Since SF is about skullduggery in the occult world, this warrants an explanation. If you want to stick with: "The N. was real and I just helped translate" fine. Then it's up to us to figure out if we believe that. If I conclude that the N. is fake, and since it couldn't be fake without your knowledge, this tells me you have been involved in creating a hoaxed document in the occult world. This compromises your reliability as a researcher. I'm sorry, but it does.
But if it's real, then why on earth did you refer to it as merely a reference in fictional lovecraft stories? You did refer to it in SF...why not add a half a sentence saying that the actual manuscript for this document had been stolen by wandering bishops in 1972 and that you helped translate it for publication? Not even in the footnotes did you do this.
And you missed the point of Crowley. You were involved in the publication of the N. The intro to this document (penned by you? why make us wait for someone else's book to know EXACTLY your role?) spends a lot of time connecting it with Crowley, who is not only connected to the Nine via his discussion of Sirius, etc as I mentioned but to Parsons, Hubbard, etc. Surely there are "political machinations" in that occult milieu. So even if you want to dismiss that Crowley drank from the same well as the Nine (read: Puharich), you simply can't dismiss the political implications of Crowley 's occult network. Crowley , Hubbard and Parsons all have been linked to espionage and intelligence work. Yet, again, here is the Necronomicon, an ancient document, specifically linked by the "editor" to Crowley and aided in translation by you....but no mention in SF. (By the way, the whole Simon/Peter pseudonym seems a bit obvious.)
And yes, I know who the Nine are, but their "philosophy" was promoted by others BEFORE they started being "channeled" in '53. And you know this. In fact, that's the whole point. Puharich was well versed in this occult lore and, in my opinion, manipulated through hypnosis and other means, "channelers" to put that message out there again. And also, in my opinion, this was all done as part of an MKULTRA style operation. Puharich, like you,
"traveled in the worlds of the occultist, the spy, the military-industrial complex, etc"
That didn't comfort me about him, and I'm afraid that doesn't provide any reassurance about you. Perhaps in UA you provide more biographical explanation of how you found yourself in these circles. Or with wandering Bishops as a teenager.
I think that Jeff will take the position that there is much of historical value in your books. My position is that you are playing games. I think both are probably equally true.
If I can find any of your interviews online where you discuss the Necronomicon or how you came to hang out with spies and the Klan, I'll post them on our discussion board so you can have a fuller hearing.
12:32 AM
tim in san francisco said...
hey jeff,
fyi: michael aquino went to ucsb in the sixties and his wife lillith (sp?) frequented the same occult book store circles in new york as levenda (he may even have known her): synchronicities to your post.
12:32 AM
Dream's End said...
Whoever Simon is (and I think the links provided by Jeff make it clear that it is Peter) he can be heard in person on a tape you can download here:
http://www.necronomicon.sacred-magick.com/Nero.html
So clearly, from this tape, Simon not only believes the N. is real, but lectured on how to carry out the rituals. And, if you happen ever to have SPOKEN to Levenda...maybe you'll recognize the voice.
************************************************************************************************
Richard D. Weber aka Col. Sanders the Elder :-)
