The other one i've seen sits on my High Priestess's bookshelf with all her other books, is old, leather bound, and smells funny. That's all I know about that one and that's all I WANT to know.

Yeah, I think the Necronomicon originated from some ancient text, and, like all acient text, was altered in the translations from one language and ideals to the next. I doubt there exists one unmodified passage in that book that is sold at Walden's and Barns and Noble's. I think we'd have a hard time reading and an impoosible task of correctly pronouncing the original cuniform. I like the book because of its historic, if not flawed, look back at our oldest recorded civiliation's beliefs. And I like to see if any of the mythology can be applied to science fiction.
Marduk destroys Tiamat and creates the Earth with the body. One way of looking at this is to see Taimat not as an evil creature, but as a first generation star, destroyed, by either natural causes or deliberate causes orchestrated by an intelligence. Our solar system forms from the remains.
If you remove the mystism from the book, it takes on a different light.

What is the Necronomicon?
The Necronomicon of Alhazred, (literally: "Book of Dead Names") is not, as is popularly believed, a grimoire, or sorcerer's spell-book. It was conceived as a history, and hence "a book of things now dead and gone". An alternative derivation of the word Necronomicon gives as its meaning "the book of the customs of the dead", but again this is consistent with the book's original conception as a history, not as a work of necromancy.
The author of the book shared with Madame Blavatsky a magpie-like tendency to garner and stitch together fact, rumour, speculation, and complete balderdash, and the result is a vast and almost unreadable compendium of near-nonsense which bears more than a superficial resemblance to Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.
In times past the book has been referred to guardedly as Al Azif , and also The Book of the Arab. Azif is a word the Arabs use to refer to nocturnal insects, but it is also a reference to the howling of demons. The Necronomicon was written in seven volumes, and runs to over 900 pages in the Latin edition.

Where and when was the Necronomicon written?
The Necronomicon was written in Damascus in 730 A.D. by Abdul Alhazred.

Who was Abdul Alhazred?
Little is known. What we do know about him is largely derived from the small amount of biographical information in the Necronomicon itself. He was born in Sanaa in the Yemen. We know that he travelled widely, from Alexandria to the Punjab, and was well read. He spent many years alone in the uninhabited wilderness to the south of Arabia. He had a flair for languages, and boasts on many occasions of his ability to read and translate manuscripts which defied lesser scholars. His research methodology however smacked more of Nostradamus than Herodotus.

What are the Old Ones?).
Alhazred is better compared with figures such as the Greek neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (410 - 485 A.D.). Proclus was completely at home in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and metaphysics, but was sufficiently well-versed in the magical techniques of theurgy to evoke Hekate to visible appearance. Proclus was also an initiate of Egyptian and Chaldean mystery religions. It is no accident that Alhazred was intimately familar with the works of Proclus.

What is the printing history of the Necronomicon?
No Arabic manuscript is known to exist. The author Idries Shah carried out a search in the libraries of Deobund in India, Al-Azhar in Egypt, and the Library of the Holy City of Mecca, without success. A Latin translation was made in 1487 (not in the 17th. century as Lovecraft maintains) by a Dominican priest Olaus Wormius. Wormius, a German by birth, was a secretary to the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada, and it is likely that the manuscript of the Necronomicon came into his possession during the persecution of Spanish Moors ("Moriscos") who had been converted to Catholicism under duress and did not exhibit the necessary level of enthusiasm for the doctrines of the Church.
It was an act of sheer folly for Wormius to translate and print the Necronomicon at that time and place. The book must have held an obsessive fascination for the man, because he was finally charged with heresy and burned after sending a copy of the book to Johann Tritheim, Abbot of Spanheim (better known as "Trithemius"). The accompanying letter contained a detailed and blasphemous interpretation of certain passages in the Book of Genesis. Virtually all the copies of Wormius's translation were seized and burned with him, although there is the inevitable suspicion that at least one copy must have found its way into the Vatican Library.
Almost one hundred years later, in 1586, a copy of Wormius's Latin translation surfaced in Prague. Dr. John Dee (left), the famous English magician, and his assistant Edward Kelly (below, right) were at the court of the Emperor Rudolph II to discuss plans for making alchemical gold, and Kelly bought the copy from the so-called "Black Rabbi", the Kabbalist and alchemist Jacob Eliezer, who had fled to Prague from Italy after accusations of necromancy. At that time Prague had become a magnet for magicians, alchemists and charlatans of every kind under the patronage of Rudolph, and it is hard to imagine a more likely place in Europe for a copy to surface.
The Necronomicon appears to have had a marked influence on Kelly, because the character of his scrying changed, and he produced an extraordinary communication which struck horror into the Dee household. Crowley interpeted this as an abortive first attempt of an extra-human entity to communicate the Thelemic Book of the Law. Kelly left Dee shortly afterwards. Dee translated the Necronomicon into English while warden of Christ's College, Manchester, but contrary to Lovecraft, this translation was never printed - the manuscript passed into the collection of the great collector Elias Ashmole, and hence to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Parts of the Necronomicon were translated into Hebrew (probably in 1664) and circulated in manuscript form, accompanied by an extensive commentary by Nathan of Gaza, mystical apologist for the pseudo-messiah Sabbatai Tzevi. This version was titled the Sepher ha-Sha'are ha-Daath, (the Book of the Gates of Knowledge). The story surrounding this version is so unusual that it is treated fully below.
There are many modern fakes masquerading as the Necronomicon. They can be recognised by a total lack of imagination or intelligence, qualities Alhazred possessed in abundance.

What is the content of the Necronomicon?
The book is best known for its antediluvian speculations. Alhazred appears to have had access to many sources now lost, and events which are only hinted at in Genesis or the apocryphal Book of Enoch, or disguised as mythology in other sources, are explored in great detail. Alhazred may have used dubious magical techniques to clarify the past, but he also shared with the 5th. century B.C. Greek writers such as Thucydides a critical mind, and a willingness to explore the meanings of mythological and sacred stories. His speculations are remarkably modern, and this may account for his current popularity. He believed that many species besides the human race had inhabited the Earth, and that much knowledge was passed to mankind in encounters with beings from "beyond the spheres" or from "other spheres". He shared with some Neoplatonists the belief that the stars are similar to our sun, and have their own unseen planets with their own lifeforms, but elaborated this belief with a good deal of metaphysical speculation in which these beings were part of a cosmic hierarchy of spiritual evolution. He was also convinced that he had contacted beings he called the "Old Ones" using magical invocations, and warned of terrible powers waiting to return to re-claim the Earth. He interpreted this belief (most surprisingly!) in the light of the Apocalypse of St. John, but reversed the ending so that the Beast triumphs after a great war in which the earth is laid waste.

What are the "Old Ones"?
It is abundantly clear that Alhazred elaborated upon existing traditions of the "Old Ones", and he did not invent these traditions. According to Alhazred, the Old Ones were beings from "beyond the spheres", presumably the spheres of the planets, and in the cosmography of that period this would imply the region of the fixed stars or beyond. They were superhuman and extrahuman. They mated with humans and begat monstrous offspring. They passed forbidden knowledge to humankind. They were forever seeking a channel into our plane of existence.

Where can the Necronomicon be found?
Nowhere with certainty, is the short and simple answer, and once more we must suspect Crowley in having a hand in this. In 1912 Crowley met Theodor Reuss, the head of the German Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O), and worked within that order for several years, until in 1922 Reuss resigned as head in Crowley's favour. Thus we have Crowley working in close contact for 10 years with the leader of a German masonic group. In the years from 1933-38 the few known copies of the Necronomicon simply disappeared; someone in the German government of Adolf Hitler took an interest in obscure occult literature and began to obtain copies by fair means or foul.
Dee's translation disappeared from the Bodleian following a break-in in the spring of 1934. The British Museum suffered several abortive burglaries, and the Wormius edition was deleted from the catalogue and removed to an underground repository in a converted slate mine in Wales (where the Crown Jewels were stored during the 1939-45 war). Other libraries lost their copies, and today there is no library with a genuine catalogue entry for the Necronomicon. The current whereabouts of copies of the Necronomicon is unknown, but there is a story of a large wartime cache of occult and magical documents in the mountainous Osterhorn area near Salzburg - this may be connected with the recurring story of a copy bound in the skin of concentration camp victims.

Now I have to go make a Sanity check.
uh-oh. Snake-eyes

If your copy of the Necronomicon starts displaying this sort of behavior, don't answer the door, don't split up into small groups to search the house to find the murderer, and if you're a nubile young female, don't choose this time to take a shower! Spray on a little cologne and wait until the body count stops rising, K?

--Baloo

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A lot of things sound crazy. Next thing you know they're elected to Congress.
--Cecil Adams
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

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WHO ARE YOU?

That makes my point! The Necronomicon didn't fly around and bite people in that one!

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My karma ran over your dogma.
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

If Cargile has a copy of this book, and stuff ain't blowin up, it can't be all bad.

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WHO ARE YOU?

When I raise Cthulu from the depths, the world will shudder mightly, as the media proclaims: ". . .looks as if he has dolphins trapped in the net as well. Wait. Yes folks! Doplhins are indeed trapped in the net with the sea monster Cthulu. Oh the humanity! I can't image a more ecological and inhumane act than not safeguarding against trapping helpless dolphins.

That's right Phil. Mr Cargile doesn't seem to upset about the dolphins.

Raising Cthulu from the depths was one thing, but this! What did dolphins every do to anyone!

I don't know. But it looks like the navy is sending a destroyer to end this actrocity.

Oh wait! Those are really porpoises!

Eh! Porpoises? Screw 'em."