Al Azif The Cipher Manuscript Known as Necronomicon

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Al Azif : The Cipher Manuscript Known as Necronomicon


History:
Alhazred is said to have been a "half-crazed Arab" who worshipped the Lovecraftian entities Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. He is described as being from Sanaa in Yemen, and as visiting the ruins of Babylon, the "subterranean secrets" of Memphis and the Empty Quarter of Arabia (where he discovered the "nameless city" below Irem). In his last years, he lived in Damascus, where he wrote Al Azif before his sudden and mysterious death in 738.
In subsequent years, Lovecraft wrote, the Azif "gained considerable, though surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age." In 950, it was translated into Greek and given the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, a fictional scholar from Constantinople. This version "impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts" before being suppressed and burnt in 1050 by Patriarch Michael (an historical figure who died in 1059).
After this attempted suppression, the work was rarely heard of until it was translated from Greek into Latin by Olaus Wormius. Both the Latin and Greek text, the History relates, were banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232. A Greek edition was printed in Italy in the first half of the 16th century.
The Elizabethan magician John Dee (1527-c. 1609) translated the book — presumably into English — but Lovecraft wrote that this version was never printed and only fragments survive.
According to Lovecraft, the Arabic version of Al Azif had already disappeared by the time the Greek version was banned in 1050, though he cites a vague account of a secret copy appearing in San Francisco during the current [20th] century that later perished in fire. The Greek version, he writes, has not been reported "since the burning of a certain Salem man's library in 1692".

Some history is of course hearsay so we may never know the truth of the actual Necronomicon but the Al Azif is a close mirror.

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