...Of Matters Related To The Dr. John Blaisedell Translation Of The
                              Necronomicon

                                by Fred Phillips

...I am beginning to dig my city once again... yesterday I walked up Broadway
from Canal St. after work, just looking at people and buildings.  I was
enjoying the poured-concrete imitations of cast-iron imitation pillar fronts of
Neo-Graeco-Roman-design office building entrances.  I made it over to the
Bowery, and up along 7th St. past McSoreley's Old Ale House, where St. Basil's
Eastern Orthodox Church bares its copper-green onion domes to the fading sun,
in a neighborhood where the kids playing ball will shout, "Hey, Ronnie -- shto
svamya gavareetz!"  I stopped in a little second-hand bookstore to pick up a
parcel of books I had paid for last Tuesday.  Nothing terribly exciting, just
the Niebelungenlied, Vasari's Lives of the Artists, Yama the Pit (the story of
a 19th century Russian whorehouse), by Alexander Kuprin, and an old Avon
Classics copy of the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred.

I couldn't believe it; everybody thinks it was just a joke or a literary
trademark of the 1930's American horror writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. 
Most people who are part of the 1930-ish horror literature revival call him
"HPL" -- you know, like RLS or GBS, and among a small but devoted following of
"Lovecraftians" he is quite as famous as Stevenson or Shaw.  He has been called
the Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century.  But the weirdest thing, man...  I
open the book and find that it's a translation by a Dr. John Blaisedell,
Professor of Islamic Literature at Cornell, and I start reading in Anglicized
transliteration of what appears to be one of Alhazred's incantations:  "Ya
melik imsha ti-pukul ge-yesuruh istahan yesemliq..."  It is supposed to be a
filthy corruption from the opening of one of the sacred Surahs of the
Mohammedan Bible, the Qu'uran, and there is all this controversy attached to
it.  You must understand that religious feeling among Muslims today approaches
the intensity of belief which existed in Europe during the Dark Ages, so much
so, in fact, that devout Muslims take for granted the Shahadar:  "Lailla ey
lala Allah..." there is no God but God -- "ey Mehomet Rasoul Allah..." and
Mohammed is the Prophet of God.  They accept this subconsciously as living
fact, and regard the Hegira, or the story of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca
to Yathrib on El-Kaswa, his favorite camel, as the pure, living gospel.  So
naturally, they will consider Abdul Alhazred, who invokes El Shaitan
repeatedly, the same way that Bishop Montague Summers, and all good Christian
theologians, consider someone like, for instance, Gilles de Rais, or Cornelius
Agrippa, or Dr. Faust -- not just as a sorcerer, but as an anti-Christ, or in
this case, an "anti-Allah" or devil-worshipper.  Three of Blaisdells's students
quit his course when they found out he was translating the Necronomicon.

The Necronomicon is the Arab version of the Egyptian and/or Tibetan Book of the
Dead.  (Literally, it means "Laws of the Dead," from the Greek "nekros," dead,
plus "nomos," law.)  A lot of people have erroneously been translating it as a
Greek-Latin hybrid word:  nekros, dead, plus nomen, name; hence, "Names of the
Dead."  This is wrong, according to Blaisedell, and according to Thomas E.
Lawrence (the T. E. Lawrence of Arabia) who found a copy of it when he entered
Deraa, and recognizing it, hid it instantly in his kit-bag, for fear that he
would be killed on the spot by his soldiers if they knew it to be in his
possession.  He was at that time a Mohammedan, having converted for political
and military purposes, and a subject to the religious laws of Islam, which had
placed such an interdict on the book, that if anyone was caught even looking at
it, he would have been obliged to show reason to what would be the Mohammedan
version of a Hebrew Council of Judges or a Christian Ecclesiastical Court, why
his eyes should not be put out for offending the sacred memory of the Prophet. 
Any connection whatsoever by a Mohammedan with the Necronomicon of Abdul
Alhazred is considered, even to this very day, as the most profane and horrible
heresy, and to touch it is, according to their theology, akin to announcing to
El Shaitan that you wish to strike a bargain with him; to actually open it is
sacrilege of the First Water, and to read from it is ordinarily punishable by
death...  Naturally, Lawrence could have made no mention of the book in his
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or run the real risk of enjeopardizing Britain's
foreign relations with the Mohammedan nations of the world whose oil, remember,
she needed for her Royal Navy to guard her merchant shipping trade lanes.  So
he brought it back to England with him, and secretly began translating it in
1921, six years before he changed his name to Shaw.  Remember, also, that
Lawrence was originally an archaelogist, and a discovery like the Necronomicon
would understandably have represented a unique prospect for cultural
investigation.

Some plans interfered with the work, and then he began piling up material for
his memoirs, the "Seven Pillars," and when Blaisedell paid him a visit in June,
1924, Lawrence sold him the book and the manuscript of the translation for five
hundred pounds, on condition that Blaisedell keep Lawrence's name out of it. 
So up until chapter V, which Blaisedell re-checked and found grammatically
accurate, what we actually have is a Lawrence translation, although Blaisedell
gets the credit for translating the remaining fifty-two chapters.  Avon
Classics paid through the nose to get their hands on it, and printed about
20,000 copies.  The first edition sold so poorly, however, that they
discontinued its publication and got stuck with a considerable deficit.  The
three students who quit Blaisedell's Islamic Lit. course at Cornell were the
children of the Egyptian ambassador, the Syrian Consul, and the daughter of the
chairman of a trade delegation from Trans-Jordan, and they managed to raise
quite a stink for 1933...  My copy is very much yellowed by age, being printed
on a particularly inferior grade of pulp crap, which sold at the time for 50
cents.  The date of publication is March, 1934, during which time Blaisedell
was still a member of the Cornell faculty, although he had already had
conferences with the Dean of the School of Humanities and a private talk with
the President of the University, Dr. Keegan.  Blaisedell is living on pension
now in his home town of Pockumtuck, N.Y.....

                                 [pp. 61 - 66, NO-EYED MONSTER #15, Spring 1969]

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