From: Michelle Anderson (michelle@barrymenasherealtors.com)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 12:22:17 MDT
appears at first reading to be an account of the writing of the "real"
Necronomicon
"The Doom that Came to Chelsea "
<snip>
Herman had vigorously encouraged and supported the creation of the
Schlangekraft Necronomicon, edited by "Simon." No doubt he'd grown weary
of explaining to customers that H.P. Lovecraft's fabled forbidden tome
was a fiction, a plot device for great horror stories and nothing more.
He was savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones
to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for a
"genuine" Necronomicon could be huge-with the right packaging. In 1977,
the book made its debut in the window of Herman's little shop of horrors
in Chelsea. It generated a scene of its own, a scene bursting with mad,
unfocused creativity and slapstick mayhem.
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had just published their Illuminatus
trilogy, and interest in secret societies and occult lore was sweeping
through counterculture circuits. Grady McMurtry was attempting to
jumpstart the long-dormant OTO in California and had just succeeded in
having Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot deck published. Punks and
proto-goth/industrial types searched out obscure Satanic treatises and
rare tracts from the seemingly defunct Process Church of the Final
Judgement. Unrepentant hippies and uber-feminists found common ground in
the gentle, woodsy eco-cult of the wicca, available in enough variant
"traditions" to suit any palate with an appetite for sweets.
<snip>
Into this bubbling swamp of spiritual fecundity stepped Peter Levenda,
aka "Simon." Charming, soft-spoken and aloof, well-versed in all aspects
of occult theory and practice, he eased his way to the center of the
scene. The Necronomicon was a team effort. Herman provided the
sponsorship, while the design and layout were the work of Jim Wasserman
of the OTO, a raving cokehead from Jersey named Larry Barnes whose daddy
had the production facilities and a fellow who called himself Khem Set
Rising (who also designed the sigils). The text itself was Levenda's
creation, a synthesis of Sumerian and later Babylonian myths and texts
peppered with names of entities from H.P. Lovecraft's notorious and
enormously popular Cthulhu stories. Levenda seems to have drawn heavily
on the works of Samuel Noah Kramer for the Sumerian, and almost
certainly spent a great deal of time at the University of Pennsylvania
library researching the thing. Structurally, the text was modeled on the
wiccan Book of Shadows and the Goetia, a grimoire of doubtful
authenticity itself dating from the late Middle Ages.
<snip>
http://www.nypress.com/16/23/news&columns/feature.cfm
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