What Is the Necronomicon?

The Necronomicon is a book of forbidden knowledge, written in Arabic around 730 AD by Abdul Alhazred of Sana'a under the title Al Azif, and carried since into Greek and Latin. This Archive holds one confirmed volume, a fifteenth-century Latin printing, under the same restriction as the rest of Special Collections. The Archive treats the wider history of the text as established, on the strength of correspondence, acquisition records and the testimony bound into several of the chronicles.

How it travelled

• Arabic original, circa 730. Lost since at least the time of the Latin translator.
• Greek, Constantinople, 950. Made by Theodorus Philetas, who is credited with the title Necronomicon. The Patriarch Michael ordered it burned in 1050; no confirmed copy survives.
• Latin, 1228. Made by Olaus Wormius, and the text every later printing descends from. Pope Gregory IX banned it, with the Greek, in 1232.
• Printings. A black-letter Latin printing from Germany in the fifteenth century, with copies on record at the British Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale and Widener Library at Harvard, and a Greek printing from Italy of which one fire-damaged copy is reported at the University of Buenos Aires.
• Miskatonic. The Latin copy in the Library at Arkham, which this Archive's own contributors have consulted, with permission and considerable trepidation.

Dr. John Dee began an English rendering and did not finish it, and the surviving fragments have never been reconciled.

What it contains

No two accounts of the contents agree in full. The contents list the Archive holds names six divisions, among them the old ones and their spawn beneath the waking world, the rite by which the sleeper in R'lyeh is called toward waking, geometries no sound mind should attempt to resolve, and the star-paths and the right alignment for what comes through. The lines of the list that this office can print are printed on the Necronomicon page; several are redacted.

Who has read it

The ledger of known readers runs to eleven names, and a good many of the fates are ugly. See the Dispatch on what became of them. For whether a copy can be consulted by a visitor, and the real publishing history behind the name, see the Dispatch on whether the book exists.